Paper No. 2: John Synge, the Blasket Writers, & the Waning of Traditional Ireland

The main goal of this assignment is to gain insights into the ways of life of the Gaelic-speakers of the far west in the early 20th century. They were the people most remote from the main national events of the time. They were also most idealized, both by the Anglo-Irish writers of the Irish Renaissance and by nationalist social thought during the first half of the 20^th century. In many mind, they came to represent the truly Irish people at their purest. Our readings provide views of their way of life by two Irish writers. One is John Synge, an English-speaking Protestant from Dublin and a prominent member of the literary movement called "the Irish Renaissance."  A renaissance of what?  Of nothing if not of traditional Ireland.

In The Aran Islands, John Millington Synge introduced the educate urban world of Dublin, Ireland, and Britain to these people and their ways of life.  This book fixed the image of them for all others who took interest in the Ireland that was passing, its isolation destroyed, its traditional economies disrupted, and its language and lore continuing the diminutions that had begun in the late 18^th century.  Their world was becoming the price of the integration of Ireland into the United Kingdom and into Europe, the price, in a way, of the saving of Ireland from the catastrophe of the Great Famine.  Synge, who understood these things, also believed, and many others with him (Yeats!), that these people and their way of life embodied a deep past that was supremely Irish, natural, and good.  Their fate is a symbol of the coming of the modern world as human tragedy.

The “Blasket Writers” thus entered a house which already awaited them.  Their voices seemed to respond to the deep desire of the Irish Renaissance to seize and hold onto an esthetically and morally valuable past, also to the long of the revolutionary nationalist to create a new version of an Ireland as distinct in language and culture as it would be, they believed, in government and economy.

Peig Sayers (1873-1958), Tomás O Crohan (1856-1937), and Maurice O’Sullivan (1904-50), were Gaelic-speaking Catholics who lived out their lives on or within sight of the Blasket islands, which lie off the Kerry coast.  They were all born into a western Ireland that was climbing out of the catastrophe of the Great Famine, when the English language was accelerating its triumphant sweep through the West.  Their world in the Blaskets was a small, deeply integrated world, deeply traditional world, increasingly confronted by and becoming ever more dependent on the forces that were tearing down their isolation.  The Blasket writers are more important than their personalities or their individual stories, for their autobiographical writings were adopted for use in the schools.  These texts became representative texts for the teaching of truly life under a government of independent Ireland dedicated to restoring Gaelic as the language of the Irish people.

The Blasket Writers’ sensibilities were rooted in a way of life not much different from the one Synge had discovered in the Aran Islands off Galway.  They present images and sensibilities of roughly the same world, but from times a bit or quite a bit later, and quite different perspective:  different cultures, different languages, different religions.

In this assignment you will work with Synge and with your chosen Blasket writer[1] to understand that world and the changes it was undergoing in the lifetime of your author.  Synge provides you with a benchmark, a picture of the Gaelic-speaking island world written when O Crohan was coming to adulthood and Sayers was a child.  Put them into conversation with one another, paying attention to both emphases and silences, that is, topics on which one writer dwells and the other is entirely or nearly silent.  You can also consult Lawrence Taylor’s Occasions of Faith for good insights into traditional religion and its meaning for everyday life.

The best order in which to read the authors, perhaps, is first Synge and then the Blasket author of your choice. Note, however, that the chief source for your paper is your chosen Blasket author, not Synge, who is there merely to hell you understand what your informant tells you.  Here are some possible themes to follow through the texts, looking for similarities, contrasts, and differences of opinion or emphasis. A good paper for this assignment will undertake at least three of these themes.

1)         CULTURE & ENVIRONMENT: the shaping of culture by nature; the fit between the islanders’ way of life and the natural environment.

2)         ISOLATION & COMMUNICATION: people's knowledge of and interest in events beyond the immediate horizon of their known world;

3)         RELIGION & CULTURE: religious practices; beliefs and folkloric practices; the centrality or marginality of religion to their lives; role of the church.

4)         ADAPTATIONS: changes in the way of life of the western Gaelic-speakers because of the influence or penetration of the outside world OR migration between the worlds.

5)         LANGUAGE: role of the Gaelic (Irish) language in their lives; attitude toward English; signs and influences of the Gaelic revival (including reading in Irish).

6)         PROPERTY: Roles in their lives of property ownership and rents.

7)         POLITICS: awareness of the English presence in Ireland, both as the power of the British state and as the social position of the Anglo-Irish landlords; presence or absence of national feeling.

8)         CIVILIZATION: the writers' attitudes) toward modern civilization's impact on their ancestral way of life.