THE OSCHOLARS
March 2003
‘AND I, MAY I SAY NOTHING?’
A monthly page of essays, articles and authors’ responses to reviews.
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Desmond Traynor: Modes of Subversion in Wilde's The Importance of Being
Earnest and Synge's The Playboy of The Western World
On first consideration, the idea of writing about Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest and Synge's The Playboy of the Western
World in the same essay, comparing and contrasting them, especially
under the rubric suggested in the title of this essay, seems bizarre. It
is not my intention here to construct a general theory and then by a
process of deduction make all particular instances agree; rather, I
intend only to hint at any conclusions which may be offered by a
process
of
induction
from
particular
instances.
When
we
systematise we generalise, and generalisation is a fool's game (he
said, making a generalisation). The contrivances of comparing and
contrasting any two artists, any two bodies of work, any two works of
art, is just that - a contrivance: a handy academic and critical
shorthand which is ultimately arbitrary.
I do not intend to argue
here that Wilde and Synge have always been soul brothers, and no
one else has ever noticed it before. My basis for examining their two
plays in tandem is my conviction that each represents a radical
subversion of bourgeois discourse and the bourgeois morality of the
time, and I want to discover the methods each playwright uses to do
this. If we tumble on coincidences along the way, all the better. If
not, no harm done. The framework used here is that of discussing
both plays under several specific headings, and then an attempt at a
general summing up.
Firstly, I'd like to look at the two plays by considering the attack they
each represent on form in drama. The Importance of Being Earnest
was first performed in 1895. It appears to be so well-made,so highlywrought, so earnest in fact in its observation of the conventions of
comic drama, that its form could not disrupt audience expectations
in the least.
As one of Wilde's most serious admirers, Jorge Luis
Borges, has said: 'His work is so harmonious that it may seem
inevitable and even trite.' (1) The musical metaphor is echoed in W.
H. Auden's remark that The Importance is the '...only pure verbal
opera in English'.
However, I would argue that by appearing so
perfect and finished and well-rounded, the play actually mocks the
conventions of its form, by drawing attention to them. It is rather
like a building such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris, whose pipes
and scaffolding, which could be hidden, and with most buildings
usually are, are left exposed to remind us of the artificiality of the
structure.
This would make The Importance one of the first
precursors of the postmodern concern with form as meaning, rather
than transparent medium. The artifice declares itself, rather than
covering up as part of real life.
Another postmodern characteristic of The Importance is its lack of
differentiation between high culture and popular culture (definitions
and the relative value of which are, of course, changing all the time,
with the given historical context). As Katherine Worth has observed:
Besides melodrama, farce and burlesque were the
reigning forms in the nineteenth-century theatre.
Wilde was very much aware of the possibilities in
these forms for modern subversiveness: 'Delightful
work may be produced under burlesque and
farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the
artist in England is allowed very great freedom.' (2)
In this way, Wilde made The Importance a farcical English version of
the popular French boulevard melodrama. (3) In short, rather than
see The Importance as a stereotypically well-structured comedy, it is
perhaps just as valid to concur with Hesketh Pearson, who remarked
that: 'One cannot call it perfect of its kind, because there is no kind.'
Wilde's feeling about comedy was part of his philosophy of opposites.
'Never be afraid that by raising a laugh you destroy tragedy', he wrote
to Marie Prescott, the American actress who was to play Vera in The
Nihilists, '...on the contrary, you intensify it.'
Tragedy has an
optimistic side, paradoxically affirming the dignity of the human
being, while comedy takes a more pessimistic view of things,
entailing as it does a strong, offended sense of the ridiculousness of
the human being, and the futility of human endeavour.
That brings us to Synge's tragi-comedy, The Playboy of the Western
World, first performed in 1907.
Synge's method of disrupting
expectation through form works in the opposite way from Wilde's.
Wilde wrote a comedy that is so much a COMEDY that we are, as
argued above, over-conscious of the form, and this subverted what
was then theusual theatrical experience. Synge wrote a play which
is not easily definable as either comedy or tragedy, and this is his
method of subverting the then standard theatrical experience. The
influence of Chekhov can be seen on both Wilde and Synge in this
regard, both dramatists making their own use of different facets of
Chekhov's work. Chekhov's way of orchestrating conversation can
be seen in Wilde, while his disintegration of the categories of comedy
and tragedy is obvious in Synge.
Next I want to turn to the use of language in both plays. It can be
argued that the language in The Importance is standard English, and
Synge himself wrote in the preface to The Playboy that: 'I have used
one or two words only that I have not heard among the country
people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read
the newspapers.'(4) It is my contention, however, that the language
of neither play is realistic, but is equally artificial in both.
Much
debate has raged among linguists as to the veracity or lack thereof of
Synge's Hiberno-English, and many quotations could be used to
support a conclusion on either side. I have no wish to get into deep
water in a field (to mix metaphors) in which I am not a specialist.
But the argument of L. A. G. Strong encapsulates succinctly perhaps
the most balanced view that can be taken of this problem:
The language of Synge's plays is not the language
of the peasants, insomuch that no peasant talks
consistently as Synge's characters talk; it is the
language of the peasants, in that it contains no
word or phrase a peasant did not actually use. (5)
It hardly matters whether the dialogue he used was an accurate and
realistic transcription of actual dialects then in use. Its suitability
and expressiveness are what recommend it. He claimed his language
was faithful to peasant speech, but while it may have reflected reality
it also supplanted it.
The same is true of Wilde's language.
Standard English may be what all dialects of English are measured
against, but it is itself an abstraction, existing only in the world of
Platonic ideals (and BBC Radio 3 announcers' received pronunciation
accents, and Daily Telegraph columns, themselves pretty near
partaking in the world of Platonic ideals also).
No speaker of
standard English speaks in such a consistently epigrammatic style
as Wilde's characters. Both Wildeand Synge, like many other great
writers, invented their own language, and language in its turn is the
hero of both these plays. One rusethey both use is that of absurd
antithesis, the expectations aroused bythe first part of a sentence, or
a question, punctured and deflated bythe second half of the
sentence, or the reply. For example:
ALGERNON: I have a business appointment that I
am anxious...to miss! (6)
GWENDOLEN: This suspense is terrible. I hope it
will last. (Importance, 414)
SARA: And asking your pardon, is it you's the man
killed his father?
CHRISTY: I am, god help me!
SARA: Then my thousand welcomes to you.
(Playboy, 130)
CHRISTY: We're alike so.
PEGEEN: I never killed my father. (Playboy, 122)
PEGEEN: And to think it's me is talking sweetly,
Christy Mahon, and I the Fright of seven
townlands for my biting tongue. (Playboy, 156)
One point of difference between the two playwrights' use of language
is the possible limitations of Synge's Hiberno-English.
'It is not
available,' concluded T. S. Eliot, 'except for plays set among that
same people.' (7) Wilde's subversive discourse may be all the more
subversive because it insinuates itself with a wider audience more
easily. This is a point I will return to later.
So the language in both plays could be described as a fantastical
exaggeration of a realistic starting-point, which is appropriate to
storylines where wild improbabilities are accepted as matters of fact.
It is these improbabilities that I now want to discuss.
Just as the individualistic use of language is all the more
disconcerting to the audience because of its basis in reality, so the
ghastly improbabilities are all the more disconcerting to us when we
discover that we have so readily accepted them ourselves as reality
during the play, taking our cue from the rest of the cast on stage.
The conventions of melodramatic reactions to shocking events are
deliberately undercut by an air of imperturbability. Thus each play,
when looked at objectively, can be classed as high fantasy,but when
experienced subjectively, seems quite normal. Both plays contain a
double killing, and a double
resurrection, and because the
characters on stage have little hesitation in affirming them, so the
audience affirms them too. Both plays privilege lies (or fictions) over
any complacent truths, and Jack Worthing's 'Gwendolen, it is a
terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has
been speaking nothing but the truth' (Importance, 418) finds its
counterpart in Christy Mahon's '...you're after making a mighty man
of me this day by the power of a lie...' (Playboy, 162) Part of Shawn
Keogh's make-up as an object of derision is attributable to his
'...middling faculties to coin a lie...' (Playboy, 138)
In one play a
name is more important than the person it signifies; in the other the
naming of a deed is more important than its actuality. This collapse
of the distinction between fantasy and reality, lies and truth, this
reversal of value systems, is a deeply subversive element in both
plays.
A more obvious subversive quality in both plays is their sustained
attack on the bourgeois conception of marriage, as the stuff of plays
and life, and to a lesser extent, on organised religion. This starts on
the first page of the text of The Importance, and is developed
throughout. When Lane tells Algernon that: 'I have often observed
that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate
brand', Algy replies: 'Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as
that?' (Importance, 357) When Jack tells Algernon he has come up
to town to propose to Gwendolen the riposte is: 'I thought you had
come up for pleasure?...I call tha tbusiness.'
(Importance, 359)
Algy's quips continue:
Divorces are made in Heaven. (Importance, 359)
The amount of women in London who flirt with
their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It
looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean
linen in public. (Importance, 362)
In married life three is company and two is none.
(Importance, 363)
Of Lady Harbury, whose husband is recently deceased:
I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.
(Importance, 364)
Gwendolen assures Jack that:
men often propose for practice,... (Importance,
367)
and when Lady Bracknell objects to their marriage, says that:
although she may prevent us from becoming man
and wife, and I may marry someone else, and
marry often, nothing that she can possibly do can
alter my eternal devotion to you. (Importance, 373)
We have Chasuble and Miss Prism's discussion on the subject, and
then later Cecily's imagined engagement which she broke off, since:
'It would hardly have been a really serious engagement if it hadn't
been broken off at least once.' (Importance, 395) Most tellingly, there
is Lady Bracknell's marked change of tone on discovering that Cecily
has a fortune of a hundred and thirty thousand pounds in the
Funds, and her sudden desire to see Cecily and Algernon married as
soon as possible. When she says:
Dear child, of course you know that Algernon has
nothing but his debts to depend upon. But I do
not approve of mercenary marriages.
When I
married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any
kind.
But I never dreamed for a moment of
allowing that to stand in my way.
(Importance,
409)
she reveals herself as a parvenu. Lady Bracknell also privileges the
male interest in the marriage market over that of the female, an
essential characteristic of the Victorian grande-dame. (Her attitude
to her own daughter Gwendolen's destiny is of course different, as
shown by her reluctance to join her to a man 'whose origin was a
terminus'. (Importance, 408) But Gwendolen is in training to be her
mother's daughter: a woman who manipulates men in order that she
may manipulate other women.) All of these examples show Wilde
making fun of the trivial, conventionalised way love is treated, and
the serious, mercenary way marriage is treated in the society he
wrote about. They also demonstrate the elements of cover-up and
exposure, the comedy demystifying marriage to show its ruthless
economic basis.
Respectable marriage is also at the low end of the scale in Synge. He
already made clear where his sympathies lay when he represented a
young woman finding herself trapped in a loveless marriage in In the
Shadow of the Glen. He attacks marriage in The Playboy through the
figure of Shawn Keogh who, when Pegeen says: 'you're making
mighty certain, Shawneen, that I'll wed you now', replies with: 'Aren't
we after making a good bargain...',again showing marriage as a
financial arrangement devoid of love. (Playboy, 110) Marriage must
be a sham, since it privileges the likes of Shawn over the likes of
Christy, in spite of the fact that, as Widow Quin says: 'It's true all
girls are fond of courage and do hatethe like of you.' (Playboy, 139)
Shawn's subservience to Fr Reilly gives us the anti-clerical
dimension in the play. Christy has no qualms about staying with
Pegeen while her father is at Kate Cassidy's wake, but Shawn is:
'...afeard of Fr. Reilly; and what at all would theHoly Father and the
Cardinals of Rome be saying if they heard I did that like of that?'
(Playboy, 113) Pegeen's attitude is clear:'Go on, then, to Fr. Reilly,
and let him put you in the holy brotherhoods, and leave that lad to
me.'
(Playboy, 120)
An institution which favours Shawn over
Christy must be corrupt.
The anti-clericalism is more muted in
Wilde, and directed at an Anglican clergyman, but when the
unmarried Chasuble speaks of 'A case of twins that occurred recently
in one of the outlying cottages on you own estate. Poor Jenkins the
carter, a most hard-working man' (Importance, 382), he displays the
narrow-mindedness and lack of understanding of the blinkered and
pompous celibate. His values of thrift and hard work extend into the
domain of procreation also.
It remains to examine to what extent the subversive elements in the
plays outlined above represent a thoroughgoing policy in Wilde and
Synge. The image of Wilde as apolitical dandy must by now surely
be untenable, especially in the light of Richard Ellmann's excellent
critical biography.
While in Louisville, during a lecture tour of
America, he insisted, 'Yes, I am a thorough republican.
No other
form of government is so favourable to the growth of art.' (8) One has
only to glance at 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' (9) for proof, if
any were needed, of his social conscience and commitment.
The
essay begins in a seemingly frivolous manner by declaring: 'The chief
advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is,
undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that
sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of
things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.' Yet the argument
is sound: altruism and charity are politically inexpedient, getting in
the way of the only real solution to social ills, which would be 'to try
and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be
impossible.' The essay continues in the same vein, opining '...charity
creates a multitude of sins', and '...the people who do the most harm
are the people who try to do most good.' Neither should we forget
that Wilde's first play was about a revolutionary movement.
The politics expressed in 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' is
evident everywhere in The Importance. Algernon is an anti-bourgeois
figure: cucumbers could not be got '...even for ready money'
(Importance, 364), and he tears up his bills. Lady Bracknell, as a
pillar of the establishment, is pleased that education in England
'...produces no effect whatsoever', since 'If it did, it would prove a
serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of
violence in Grosvenor Square'. (Importance, 368)
She inquires did
Jack's father '...rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?' (Importance,
369) Jack's being a foundling displays '...a contempt for the ordinary
decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the
French Revolution'(Importance, 369), a revolution discussed in 'The
Soul of Man Under Socialism' to illustrate the inevitability of change.
On hearing of Bunbury's demise she says:
Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage?
I
was notaware that Mr Bunbury was interested in
social legislation. If so, he iswell punished for his
morbidity. (Importance, 408)
Just as interested as Lady Bracknell in maintaining the present
social order are Miss Prism and Chasuble. Prism tells Cecily to omit
the chapter on the Fall of the Rupee in her Political Economy, since:
'It is somewhat too sensational. Even these metallic problems have
their melodramatic side.' (Importance, 377), and Chasuble has
delivered a sermon'...on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of
Discontent Among the Upper Orders.' (Importance, 381)
The
subversive quality of the form and language of the play represent a
direct challenge to bourgeois practices of writing, in much the same
way as the revolutionary force in Joyce's practice of writing, by its
refusal to conform to expectations, as Colin McCabe argues. (10) The
strategy in the past of playing The Importance strictly for laughs is
rather like that of pretending that Gulliver's Travels (after a little
bowdlerisation) is a children's book: a bourgeois ploy to sterilise the
radical thought and possible impact of the work.
D. E. S. Maxwell tells us that the phrase '...the idiocy of rural life'
was underlined by Synge in his copy of Marx's Das Kapital, showing
if nothing else that he had read the book. (11)
In The Playboy
Christy is the anti-bourgeois figure, offering Pegeen an alternative to
the drabness of her role as a church-sanctioned object of exchange
between her father and her prospective husband.
The ultimate
tragedy of the play is that Pegeen finally succumbs to bourgeois
morality when she puts the rope over Christy's head, and she
colludes with Shawn Keogh by burning Christy with a lighted sod.
Her bad faith, her lack of faith in the liberating power of imagination,
and her recognition of '...a great gap between a gallous story and a
dirty deed' (Playboy, 165) result in her down fall, and are the reasons
for her abandonment at the end. Words are not, and do not have to
be, things, a notion which the villagers fail to recognise, because it
frightens them. Again, form and language perform the same function
here as in The Importance. Thomas Kilroy has written that Synge
represents:
a radical, anarchic spirit...one which invokes the
kind of aesthetic values that inform the best of
modern writing. I try to describe this sensibility as
private, intensely preoccupied with the nature of
human
freedom...radically
subversive
of
the
established morality of middle class society. (12)
That is what I have tried to demonstrate here.
To conclude, I will briefly compare the overall achievement of one
dramatist with the other.
Just as Kilroy characterises Synge's
sensibility as private, it is possible to call Wilde's public. In that oftquoted remark to André Gide, Wilde said that he had put his genius
into his life, and only his talent into his writings. Perhaps Synge put
his genius into his writings, and that is why it was his play which
gave offence while it was Wilde's life which gave offence, and also
why Synge's life was so dull and Wilde's so full of incident. However,
this is not to denigrate The Importance as a safer play.
Indeed,
perhaps Wilde partakes more of the heroic than Synge, since it could
be argued that his objectives were bolder, his risks greater, and
consequently he had to be more careful and circumspect. He was
acutely conscious of himself as an Irishman in England, and in a
letter of 1893 wrote to Shaw: 'England is the land of intellectual fog,
but you have done much to clear the air: we are both Celtic, and Ilike
to think we are friends.' (13) The very gifts he used to charm the
class which for a time accepted and feted him made him an object of
suspicion: as Irishman, aesthete, homosexual, and above all,
perhaps, as wit and artist, he was an outsider among the English. It
is tempting to imagine Wilde as a Trojan horse in English society,
and The Importance as a time bomb which, while not provoking riots
on first performance, would go off much later.
As the character
Brigitte says, in Niall Quinn's eponymously-titled short story from
his criminally neglected collection Voyovic and Other Stories, during
an argument in a London pub:
Violet, you sow, your kind taught even the AngloIrish to despise you. You. Your kind. Even Wilde
ridiculed your sham of manners, Shaw scorned
you - Behan threw your own shit in your faces and
you lapped it all up like demented imbeciles. (14)
Synge limited himself to some extent, by using the Irish peasant
backdrop
and,
as
Eliot
wrote,
the
Hiberno-English
dialect.
Nevertheless, the influence of both playwrights has been immense.
There are echoes of Synge's The Well of the Saints in Beckett's
Waiting for Godot. Riders to the Sea was worked into a version by
Brecht called Señora Carrar's Rifles, which he followed with Mother
Courage where the debt is no less clear. Synge was also always a
touchstone for Lorca. Wilde is echoed in the work of Joe Orton and
Tom Stoppard, to name only two. While a postmodern reading of The
Importance and a Marxist reading of The Playboy may seem quixotic
in their redundancy, given what we now know about the fates and
limitations of those æsthetic and socio-economic theories, perhaps
these critical frameworks only became problematic and played-out
when they were adopted by second-order, unoriginal minds.
All
innovators need followers to secure a reputation, but to what extent
are they then responsible for the blind devotion or wilful distortions
of their acolytes? Many ideas work much better in theory than in
practice, and maybe it is only hegemonic ubiquity in the practical
sphere which inspires a reaction against them in the theoretical one.
At any rate, both The Importance and The Playboy can be read as
existential quests of self-identity, a thoroughly modern, indeed
timeless, preoccupation.
The words 'absurd' and 'nonsense' recur
frequently in The Importance, part of the mechanism of that time
bomb which was to explode later in the theatre of the absurd.
Meanwhile The Playboy heralded a century in which we were to hear
more than a little about sons trying, and succeeding or failing, to kill
their fathers.
So there are similarities and differences, and I am not about to
decide which should be given the greater weight. In the Preface to
The Tinker's Wedding Synge wrote: 'The drama, like the symphony,
does not teach or prove anything.' (15) Where have we heard this
before?
No artist desires to prove anything.
Even things
that are true can be proved. (16)
In both, art is seen as autonomous but as having social obligations.
And art for art's sake is the most socially subversive and artistically
enabling credo and modus operandi of all.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borges, Jorge Luis. Other Inquisitions 1937-1952.
London: Souvenir Press, 1973.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1987.
Harmon, Maurice, ed. J M Synge: the Centenary
Papers 1971. Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1971.
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1995.
McCabe, Colin. James Joyce and the Revolution of
the Word. London: Macmillan, 1978.
Maxwell, D. E. S. A Critical History of Modern Irish
Drama 1891-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
Quinn, Niall. Voyovic and Other Stories. Dublin:
Wolfhound, 1980.
Roche, Anthony. Contemporary Irish Drama.
Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994.
Strong, L. A. G. John Millington Synge. London:
Allen and Unwin, 1941.
Synge, J. M. Plays, Poems and Prose. London:
Dent and Sons, 1941.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London:
Dent and Sons, 1930.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest.
London: Helicon, 1971.
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde,
Centenary Edition. London: Harper Collins, 1999.
Worth, Katherine. Oscar Wilde. London:
Macmillan, 1983.
NOTES
1. Jorge Luis Borges, 'About Oscar Wilde.' In Other Inquisitions 1937-1952
(London: Souvenir Press, 1973),172.
2. Katharine Worth. Oscar Wilde (London: Macmillan Modern Dramatists), 20.
The inlaid quotation is from Wilde.
3. Another, much earlier instance of what I am suggesting here would be
Shakespeare's use of the numerous revenge tragedies which were popular in
Elizabethan England in the writing of Hamlet.
4. John Millington Synge. The Playboy of the Western World, in Plays, Poems
and Prose (London: Everyman Classics),107. All future references to this work
will be documented parenthetically, using the abbreviation Playboy.
L. A. G. Strong. John Millington Synge (London: Allen and Unwin, 1941), 81-82.
6. Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest, in Collins Complete Works of
Oscar Wilde, Centenary Edition (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 379. All future
references to this work will be documented parenthetically, using the
abbreviation Importance.
7. T. S. Eliot. On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber), 77.
8. Richard Ellmann. Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 186; also
Declan Kiberd. Inventing Ireland(London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 46.
9. Oscar Wilde. 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism.' In The Complete Works of
Oscar Wilde, Centenary Edition (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 1174.
10. Colin McCabe. James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London:
Macmillan, 1978), e.g. 4: 'Joyce's texts, however, refuse the subject any
dominant position from which language could be tallied with experience.
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are concerned not with representing experience
through language but with experiencing language through a destruction of
representation.'; and 160: 'Joyce's politics were largely determined by attitudes
to sexuality. Central to his commitment to socialism was his ferocious
opposition to the institution of marriage, bourgeois society's sanctified disavowal
of the reality of desire'.
11. D. E. S. Maxwell. A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama, 1891-1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 66.
12. Thomas Kilroy, from an article published in Th Irish Times, 21/4/71, quoted
in Maxwell, 20.
13. Quoted in Worth, op. cit., 20.
14. Niall Quinn. Voyovic and Other Stories(Dublin: Wolfhound, 1980) 156.
15. Synge, op.cit., 33.
16. Oscar Wilde. The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Everyman
Classics, 1976), 1.
This article first appeared in Alumnus, the academic journal of the Graduate
Students' Union of University of Dublin, Trinity College, 1999-2000, and won
the Alumnus Award. It is here republished by kind permission of the author.
™ Desmond Traynor writes 'I live in Dublin, have studied in
University College, Dublin and Trinity College, Dublin, and
am a writer/literary journalist.'
©Desmond Traynor 2000
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