Chapter 5 - Unresolved Temporalities

Summary

Chapter 5 is concerned with the ways in which Synge’s plays engage with and interrogate the temporal disjunctions of Edwardian Ireland. It highlights the specifically performative means to which Synge has recourse and implicitly contrasts the plays with the ethnographic dimension of his prose record in The Aran Islands. The chapter explores the moments of disrupted linearity in plays such as Riders to the Sea, The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows and highlights the ways in which they give theatrical expression to the sense of temporal disjunction, which modernity fostered and which Edwardian Ireland’s colonial situation accentuated. Even though the narratives of Synge’s plays follow a linear pattern and, in that sense, appear to endorse the conception of chronology and time upheld by a dominant modernity, they also leave room for other, alternative temporalities to be explored. Through discordant bodily movements, linearity and its corollary, progress, can be questioned; alternative sequencing can be envisaged and different rhythms allowed to unfold concurrently. Now and again vignettes erupt in Synge’s plays which disrupt the linear flow of time and open up the possibility of other temporal configurations.