Chapter 6 - Creative Failures

Summary

Chapter 6 focusses primarily on Synge’s interest in the productive potential of the counterfactual. By embracing what modernity regards as failure ‒ social outcasts, for instance ‒ or as illogical ‒ a community welcoming a man who says he killed his father ‒ Synge’s plays challenge the dominant ideas of rationality that underpin modernity’s overarching frame. By ending on the exclusion of the characters that stand for other, non-rational, non-productive modes of being and knowing and by presenting the death of the cultural formation they represent as impending, the narratives of plays such as The Well of the Saints and The Shadow of the Glen highlight the depleting effects of the suppression or annihilation of these alternate epistemologies. Contrary to such narratives, however, the performance practices that are embedded within the plays advocate for the coexistence of a diversity of modes of vision and of knowledge. Embodied behaviour, which is at the heart of the theatrical performance, functions itself as an alternative epistemology. Through the shift of epistemology which they encourage, Synge’s plays celebrate the wonderful, utopian possibilities and alternatives to a capitalist modernity that performance opens up.