“An Initiated Mystic”: Modernization and Occultism in Synge’s The Aran Islands

Abstract

“An Initiated Mystic”:Modernization and Occultism in Synge’s The Aran Islands Seán Hewitt In December 1897, having returned from Paris to Dublin, John Millington Synge underwent an operation for the removal of a swollen gland in his neck, the first sign of the disease that would kill him a little more than a decade later. At the time, he was still pursuing Cherrie Matheson, who had already turned down two of his marriage proposals, partly if not wholly due to Synge’s abandonment of Protestantism. In a recollection written in 1924 and published in the Irish Statesman, Matheson (who was by this time married and using the name C. H. Houghton) remembered a peculiar incident from the day of the operation. She tells us, Somewhere about this time he had an operation on his throat and looked very delicate. I saw him not long after, and he said to me: “I tried to send you a telepathic message just before I went under ether. Did you get it?” I had not. He looked disappointed and sad.1 In anecdotal accounts, we find many instances of Synge affecting telepathy and phantasms in those he knew and loved.2 However, Cherrie Matheson’s is the only account of Synge that suggests that he actively attempted to communicate telepathically. As such, her report asks us to take more seriously the question of Synge’s own engagement with occult phenomena. Occultism and theosophy have most usually been seen as a passing phase in Synge’s development as a writer. Recent criticism has provided us with readings of Synge as a primitivist, an anthropologist, an ethnographer; Synge the occultist, however, has never been granted credence.3 Yet Synge’s engagement with the [End Page 58] occult had a profound impact on his writing, and was internalized into his approach as a way of reconciling his own contradictory reactions of the ongoing modernization of the West of Ireland, which he saw not only in terms of cultural and economic changes, but also as a conflict between spirituality and scientific rationalism. When Synge first arrived on the Aran Islands in 1898, the Islanders were already engaging with the commercial economy of the mainland, and in The Aran Islands Synge repeatedly expresses a concern that the inhabitants are becoming increasingly distant from “the real spirit” of their home.4 The islands had played host to a number of eminent visitors, including folklorists, linguists, antiquarians, and ethnographers, and the Islanders had by this time developed a self-conscious awareness of their own cultural status, especially with regard to nationalist movements. However, from the year 1891 onward, the islands were also subject to another influence that was neither touristic nor scholarly in its purpose. The Congested Districts Board for Ireland (CDB), established with the purpose of developing the western seaboard in order to avoid the distress that had occurred throughout the nineteenth century, had already begun to carry out infrastructural development on the Aran Islands before Synge’s arrival. The mode of life on the islands was changing irreversibly. In visiting the islands, Synge came into contact for the first time with a world in transition, and this encounter came at the same time as he was beginning his progression as a writer from the romantic and symbolist modes into proto-modernism. The processes of systematic modernization are, for Synge, the extension of capitalist thought, but they are also one side of a tension that underlies all of Synge’s literary works: the tension between the “old” and the “new,” between competing worlds. In his first encounter with a transitioning community, Synge uses the language of occultism as a method of dramatizing the tension between two cultural and geographical temporalities—first for the Islanders, and second, for Synge himself. The Aran Islands is, in many ways, an extension of the principal concerns of Synge’s early foray into the Symbolist mode in such prose works as “Under Ether” (1897), which gives readers a key not only to understanding Synge’s use of occultist theory, but also an indication of how Synge developed this theory as a reaction to his engagement with socialist thinkers, particularly William Morris. In Synge...