Symbolism and Absurdity: Ever Existing Elements of · PDF fileSymbolism and Absurdity: Ever...

Symbolism and Absurdity: Ever Existing Elements of Irish Drama

Dr. Sheeba Azhar Department of English

University of Dammam Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

& Dr. Syed Abid Ali

Department of English University of Dammam

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Each lives his life Each dies his death As trees and flowers

So do men. Grow in a pre-ordained

And fated form A form Created in unfolding And in its own destruction

Still created.......” Symbolism is a widespread cult in ancient and modern art, religion and letters. At first

it started in France and later on followed by the other English and Irish authors. The object of the movement in the first place, was to put a premium on the sensations and emotions of the individual, a sort of ultra romanticism, arbitrary and private, quite in contrast with Dante’s logical and definite symbolism. At first the movement was only confined to poetry of an esoteric kind; but gradually it spread into drama.

Symbolism besides being a necessity of art and literature is the supreme necessity of the human soul itself. “The mind,” as George Santayana suggests, “is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, and redundant. Its visions are its own offsprings, hatched in the warmth of some favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these visions are scattered; but the ideal world, they pictured may someday be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired...” 1

In the present paper we will examine how the Irish dramatists invent, revive and resurrect symbols in their plays in varying intensities.

Introduction

A symbolism that is arbitrary and mechanical cannot but produce ineffectual puppets, or mouthpiece devoid of truth and substance. According to Storm Jameson 2 symbolism in drama cannot be treated apart from symbolism in art. Dramatic symbolism, according to her, has two forms:

1-When men alive and real, happen to be embodiments of eternal types of humanity, e.g. in Greek tragedy.

2-When the natural world is regarded as a symbol of an inner spiritual reality, e.g. Emile Verhaeren.

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An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165

Vol. IV. Issue III June 2013

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The arbitrary symbolism is further differentiated as:

1-When the writer believes in the arbitrary forms that he has created e.g. Blake. This, she considers, the arbitrary symbolism at its best.

2- When the writer does not believe in the arbitrary forms that he has created, e.g. Maeterlinck and Strindberg. This is the arbitrary symbolism at its lowest.

Strom Jameson considers W.B. Yeats to be in the last stage of symbolic imbecility and spots J.M. Synge as a Romantic Symbolist in fantasy and exotic charm of language, ascribing to him, the catholic faith of a realist. But some critics do not agree with this opinion.

Symbolism in Irish Drama

It is in the Irish drama that we can best see the strength and weakness of the case for Symbolism. It is at once a reaction against the over-intellectualisation of the European Theatre in the hands of Ibsen and Shaw and a positive return to nature in dramatic construction, language and setting. As a result of this, the Irish Drama becomes sometimes too tenuous and thin blooded, centring around single situations and single characters ,- sustained sometimes, by the awakened national consciousness; sometimes, by the old Irish legends and the weird and haunting Celtic spirit, so conducive to the growth and development of Irish symbolism. In fact, the whole Irish methodology is singularly adapted to the Symbolist treatment; it is “flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times” without much, as A. R. Read 3 suggests, “Literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or a passionless fantasies and passionless meditations.” In fact W.B.Yeats, an Anglo Irishman, who with the help of Lady Gregory, founded the Irish national Theatre in 1901, found in Irish mythology “so much of a new beauty ,that it may well give the opening century its most memorable symbols.” The native folk-lore, history and mythology provide Yeats the subject matter. Both the French and English Symbolists, with their romantic predilections, influenced Yeats in the treatment of his handy material. The figures of Irish drama, though blurred in contours, are intensely suggestive. It’s fairy-like and yet so realistic background may not be paralleled in European drama, except in the Russian drama; but then, the symbolism evidenced in Irish drama is not touched by the Russian sense of bitterness and brooding fatalism. Irish symbolism seems to have an organic living structure, taking its spontaneous origin in the first fine rapture of Yeats’s poems, reaching maturity in the dramas of Synge and Martyn; and entering into senile decay later, in the half satirical and half allegorical dramas of Sean’O Casey.

In fact the note of Celtic symbolism is mixed in all Teutonic literature from the Arthurian Legends or Romances to writers like Blake and Shelley. The Irish renaissance gets its distinctive character because it happens to synchronise with the Irish National Movement. Irish Theatres signify an intense revolt and a welcome escape from the forces of materialism and rationalism on the stage. The movement of reaction is due to a widespread spirit of dissatisfaction with the archaeological, spectacular methods of the past.

Synge’s contribution to Irish symbolism

Irish dramatists were not men of theatre, but as Wm. Archer points out: “The history of Irish understanding shows how a little seed of sacrifice, sown in the fertile ground, may bring forth an almost miraculous harvest.” 4 Yeats was scarcely a born dramatist, and Synge,





though a real man of genius, is chiefly remembered for his beautiful English based on the speech of the peasant girls of the Aran Islands.

According to Chandler, Synge excels all other Irish dramatists in comedy, folk-history and Tragedy. “The measure of his excellence is the measure of the excellence of the whole movement.” It is the French influence that inspires the comedy of Synge and his later disciples.

“Synge’s dramatic appeal is far greater than that of Yeats. Though he wrote his plays in the simple unsophisticated peasant speech, his drama can safely be called “poetic”. Synge has created a sort of drama which Morgan justly compares to the Shakespearean. Like Synge, Masefield, too, reproduces the coarsest feature of the country life but Masefield’s imagination is rich enough to create in this sordid environment, the morally idealistic figure of man. Such moral idealism common to old Symbolic writers like Dante, Spenser and Shakespeare was however, beyond Synge. He was responsible to create a new expression, i.e., an Anglo-Irish dialect, which in its simplicity and power of suggestiveness, remains a unique achievement, even to this day. His one act tragedy; “Riders to the Sea” (1904) is a technical masterpiece of the Modern Theatre. The sea becomes a felicitous symbol of destruction for a whole family, i.e., that of Maurya, a tragic heroine after the Greek model, whose last son simply succumbs to its devilish force. Her husband, husband’s father, and five sons, all perish one after the other in the waves. Maurya feels that a similar fate awaits her sixth son; and she is right. The dead body of her last offering to the sea does not evoke any emotion on her part. She becomes stoically inclined, and says:

“They are all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me........it’s a great rest I’ll have now, and it is time surely.”

Fable, emotion, and dramatic visualisation are three pivots on which the play revolves. There is a happy blend of realism and symbolism, when Maurya is by the vision of dead Michael “riding a gray pony and there was Michael upon it-with fine clothes on him and new shoes on his feet.”

This vision symbolized, for the already bereft mother, the doom also of her sixth child.

Drama as Synge put it must be ‘like a symphony- beautiful creation, which is an end in itself and proves nothing.’ This play fulfils the above demand remarkably well.

The playboy of the western world (1907) is full of variety of characters and the humour is large hearted. Thorndike calls Christy the hero, the Spirit of Drama, ‘swaying the fancies of women, swelling in its own soul, making reality in romantic words and passions’; we would prefer to call him a symbol of Oedipus complex.

In the Shadow of the Glen (1908) criticised the morality of the Irish, peasant women, whom as A. S. Morgan says “the nationalist Ireland preserved as sacrosanct in a case of rose-tinted glass.” 5 This play is a typically Syngesque combination of realism and symbolism. Nora is the heroine transcending all realistic criticism. As W.A. Boyd suggests:

“She is a symbol of a vigorous young woman mated for reasons of property with an old man, the wheezing, the like of a sick sheep.”6

The language used has a flow, a rhythm, and a cadence; it calls up one picture after another:





“We’ll be going now, I’m telling you, and the time you’ll be feeling the cold, and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glen, you’ll not be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in this place, making yourself old with looking on each day, and it passing you by.”

The symbolism is enhanced by the rhythm of speech and folk-metaphor, which is direct and simple, almost biblical.

Lady Gregory

She is basically a writer of One-act comedies and farces but she used the Kiltartan dialect just as Synge used the peasant speech of the Aran Islands. But her characters are nothing short of vague symbols, - in as much as in her plays, a 12th century Irishman resembles a 20th century Irishman.

Turning to another species of Irish drama, the plays of Allegory and philosophy and mysticism: that takes time out of space and time.”7 Lady Gregory has contributed an apologue: ‘The Deliverer’ wherein is described the career of Parnell, the leader of a thankless people, symbolized as the Moses of the Old Testament. In this play, ancient Hebrew speaks the language of modern Hibernians; the diction of the piece coupled with religious allusions like Shrovetide, Christmas, lend it an atmosphere of the old Miracle plays. The other play under this category is Lady Gregory’s ‘The Travelling Man’. Here, as in the previous play, symbolism is quite explicit. The Travelling Man is Christ himself, who enters in the guise of a tattered Tramp and is spurned by old lady, who had earlier promised to extend Him a right royal welcome. She tempers realism with symbolism in the manner of Barrie.

Yeats and the modern poetic drama

W. B. Yeats’ tendency to a vague and mystic longing was accentuated by his direct contact with the English Symbolists and indirect contact with French Occultist. We are compelled to speak of Yeats as a poet, because he brought back the poetic drama to the stage , in fact, the first dramatic verse since Jacobean age that was really related to human impulse and was not a mere theatre-decoration.

The modern poetic drama, however, differs from pseudo- Tudor drama, in not being as lofty and ornamental in the design, and also in being more popular. Of course, the subjects are, more or less, borrowed from the previous works of art—all sorts of legends, sagas and ancient traditions.....maidens and moonlight, angels and devils, lions and lambs, doves and nightingales. Poetic drama originates from contemporary folk forms.

Chandler places the bulk of Yeats’s work under the title of; “Plays of Allegory and Mysticism”. Yeats’s “The Land of Heart’s Desire” (1894) can well be compared to Hauptmann’s “Sunken Bell”, Barrie’s “Peter Pan”, and Maeterlinck’s “Blue Bird” as a poetical fantasy. It symbolises the opposition between the dull materialism of human existence and the world of fairyland, and the nostalgia of the human soul. The lure of this land of enchantment for Mary is emphasized in the play by the whispering of the wind through the tree and the sound of waters lapping on the lake shore.

Mary: I would take the world

And break it into pieces in my hands,

To see you smile watching it crumble away.





Whereas such fascination on the part of characters retards the progress of thought in the field of dramatic creation; it gains a step further on the road to atmosphere. We need hardly add that here, as elsewhere, in Yeats, the world has been broken into pieces, but the pieces have not been re-integrated into a whole. The Shadowy Waters (1900), suffers from the same weakness as “The Land of Heart’s Desire” more words are insufficient to express the thoughts and feelings of characters; choice is again had to lyrical symbols. This play is clearly a symbolic play with an under-tone of idealism. Yeats introduces here the magic harpist, the sailors, the doctors, the restless craving woman. The king who cares a tuppence for gold and fame, symbolizes the author’s own creed in the following lines:

“All would be well

Could we but give us wholly to the dreams.”

The Countess Cathleen (1892) is an Irish rendering of a legend of Faust family, and his finest symbolic play. The Countess in this play sells her soul for bread to the demons, to rescue the starving people, even at the cost of her own damnation; but she is fortunately reclaimed by Divine Pity, because.......” the light of lights-Looks always on the motive , not the deed.”

This play heralded another play: “Cathleen of Haulihan” (1903), in which a young boy, Michael Gillane about to be married, comes under the spell of personified Ireland or a symbol of rejuvenated Ireland, in the shape of an old crone, and despite the protestations of his fiancée, goes out to meet her. But later, it transpires that the old woman has transformed herself into a young girl....and she had the walk of a queen” Chandler calls this allegory at its best. The symbolism has a realistic background of contemporary Ireland.

The King’s Threshold (1903) is a dramatic fable in verse to symbolize the struggle between poetry and iron materialism.

According to Nicoll 8 the symbolic and poetic drama has developed towards:

1. The Supernatural and Fairy world 2. Historical themes 3. Poetic treatment of real life.

Yeats mainly contributed to the first species. Yeats wanted to eschew both the crude realism of Ibsen and the forced primitivism of the Pre-Raphaelites; -- he wanted plays “that would be remote, spiritual and ideal”; he believed: “that our memories are a part of one greater memory, the memory of nature herself and that this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.9

This symbolism is different from French symbolism which marks symbols as an intellectual force. Yeats’s symbolism was entirely personal; above all, it was different from the concepts prevailing in the independent Theatre of London, which was the predecessor of the First Irish Literary Theatre (18990. “Where there is Nothing” is a happy blend of realism and symbolism, a typical Irish mixture. Yeats has tried to symbolize the futility of religious anarchism.

As far as flaws are concerned Yeats’s symbols do not deepen the suggestive atmosphere of the play, nor do they add to its dramatic effectiveness.

The next Irish dramatist that we must consider is Lord Dunsany. Dunsany himself makes out a case for the Romantic as against the classical drama:-





“Something must be wrong with the age whose drama deserts Romance. Romance is inseparable from life; that all we need to obtain Romantic drama is for the dramatist to find any age and any country where life is not too thickly veiled and cloaked with puzzles and conventions,- in fact to find a people that is not in the agonies of self consciousness .”

Symbolism is best presented in Lord Dunsany’s play “The Gods of The Mountain” (1911). Camillo Pallizzi says:

“Dunsany’s mind is chiefly occupied with fatality, chance, the relativity of human destinies, the inconsistency of the conventional and moral laws, the predomination of men born powerful and predestined to command and the absurdity of human effort to give established, convenient forms to the perpetual and tragic flow of destiny and life.”10

Dunsany did not look to the Irish peasantry; but he created a hierarchy of Gods, whom he enveloped in the glowing colours of the mysterious East and permitted in complete freedom to control the destinies of their fantastic cosmos.”11

Edward Martyn (1895-1924) is one of the early symbolists, and one of the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre. Andrew B. Malone points out the symbolic contribution of his plays: “Martyn did in Ireland the same propagandist work for Ibsen and Ibsanism that Bernard Shaw did in England, but in his plays it was the Ibsen of The Wild Duck and The Lady from the Sea, rather than the Ibsen of The Doll’s House that he followed.” 12

In fact, Martyn’s The Heather Field, and Maeve are the supreme examples of Ibsenesque symbolism, in which the Irish national Theatre establishes contact with the Scandinavian. Martyn was an inspiring pioneer, but as compared to Yeats and Synge, made little substantial symbolic contribution to the Irish theatre. But there is one thing to his credit, that with his Ibsensque blend of realism and symbolism, he brought the Irish dramatic effort on the literary screen.

In Lennox Robinson’s “The Lost Leader” (1918), there are some traces of symbolism. Charles Stewart Parnell is brought back to life and symbolized as a hero. The Parnell legend gives a symbolic motif to the whole play and secures a willing suspension of disbelief, which is essential for the purpose of the symbolic dramatist; coupled with a symbolic motif, the play displays a subtle sense of architectonics, a thing very rare in the whole range of Irish drama.

In this tradition we can add St. John Greer Ervine’s (1833) play “John Forgusan” (1915) as another example of Irish symbolism. Ervine’s approach in this play is instinctive and emotional and raises the figure of John to the level of a positive symbol of the faith that fortifies human beings in times of adversity.

Sean O’ Casey (b.1884) has been noted by J.W. Cunliffe13 as the greatest Irish discovery, since the war, not merely of the Abbey Theatre, but the European drama. In O’Casey Irish symbolism reaches its last phase –of decay. Sean O’ Casey’s play, “Within the Gates” (1933) shows however, a negative expressionism, in which shadowy figures, not types are represented. In his plays there is comedy and pathos, combined and life is pitched against eternity, which is symbolized by processions of weird shadows passing into void.

Importance of Irish drama from the point of symbolism-

Irish drama has a tragic and a national bias, with a fascination for the supernatural, fairy and folklore, legends and the present Irish questions- altogether, peculiarly suited to a symbolist treatment. Irish Symbolism, is inspired in the first instance, by the French influence





of Mallarme; and then by the Norwegian influence of Ibsen (as found in Marytn). Symbolism in Irish drama became diffuse and blurred in the native Celtic atmosphere and as such,it has affinities with the Russian and the Japanese theatre. The characters lose positive substance and become superannuated into lifeless symbols. At first, as in Synge and Marytn, and, to a certain extent, in Lord Dunsany, the symbolism is pervasive, subtle and organic; but then in the latter-day writers like Lennox Robinson and Sean O’ Casey, it becomes rarefied, thin and local.

Irish dramatists are not so well up in comedy; almost every Irish play reverts to tragedy,-failing that, to pathos. Irish drama has a strong tendency to Dream Play, based as it is on a translated subjectivism and in “within the gates” and “The Land of Heart’s Desire” we see through the eyes of characters in the play (a kind of play within the play); this tendency gives further impetus to Expressionistic symbolism and fantasy, which know no logic of the dramatic structure. In some cases, this poetic and expressionistic symbolism interferes with the theatrical effectiveness of the Irish plays; as in “The Land of Heart’s Desire” and at other times, it conduces to the suspension of disbelief and a tenseness of situation and atmosphere as in “A Night at An Inn” and “The Lost Leader”.

Irish background provides a suitable context for the introduction of the supernatural element in the Irish plays. Let us put the whole of Irish dramatic efforts to best on one of E. A. Poe’s words: “I know for example, that indefiniteness is an element of the true music (of poetry) I mean, of the true musical expression......... A suggestive indefiniteness of vague and therefore of spiritual effect.” 14

Tested on this negative dictum, the bulk of the works of Yeats, Synge and Martyn would come readily up to this mark and establish a genuine symbolic claim. But we also see in the Irish drama, just as we see in Poe’s poems and short stories-

“The medley of images; the deliberately mixed metaphors; the combination of passion and wit, - of the grand and the prosaic manner; the bold amalgamation of material with spiritual.....” 15

And here Irish drama comes nearer the English notion of fantasy,- a thing which is traceable from the Shakespearean times, through the romantic poetry to the modern drama of Barrie and Masefield. The Irish drama as a whole strays farther away from the highly technical code of Mallarme’s symbolism. To Mallarme, symbolism was, ultra-romanticism:

“It was the tendency of symbolism, - the second swing of the pendulum away from a mechanistic view of nature and from a social conception of man,- to make poetry even more a matter of the sensations and emotions of the individuals”16

Conclusion

We find that much of the Irish drama fails to discard its realistic trappings. Further the types of symbols used by the Irish dramatists, are not fixed as the “cross”, and star and stripes”. They are not as organic, logical and definite as the symbols in Dante’s “Divine Comedia”. These conventional symbols are worn threadbare by the Irish dramatist; they remain at best ‘theatrical’; but do not become dynamic, and real. Various typical Irish themes come under the guise of symbols-fixed Irish morality, sympathy for lost leaders and patricides, fairy world and angels, tragedy –of- Ireland, a reverence for ancient Ireland, queer superstitions; but all these are regressive symbols. The symbols in order to be original and progressive must be chosen to reflect the pattern of the dramatist’s own ideas in their special





context, tone and colour. The bulk of Irish dramatic activity remains, no more and no less, than a tragic attempt at poetic symbolism, despite the simplicity of its structure and language.

Works Cited:

1. Little Essays; L. P. Smith; Constable: 1934, p.31 2. Modern Drama in Europe: p.198 3. Main Currents of Modern Literature 4. The Old Drama and the New: New York: 1929 p.369 5. Tendencies in Modern Drama 6. E. A. Boyd, Contemporary Drama of Ireland. 7. Chandler, p.235 8. A. Nicoll, Film and Theatre, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1936 9. Yeats’s Essays, p.33 10. Cmillo Pellizzi, English Drama, p.187 11. Irish Drama, p.249 12. Andrew 13. Modern English Playwrights, Columbia 14. Quoted by Edmond Wilson in his Axel’s Castle, p.10-26 15. Ibid, p.14 16. Ibid, p.14





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