Another one by Ishiguro: this time his Whitbread-prize-winning novel of 1986, An Artist of the Floating World. The novel, set in the 1950s, tells the story of Masuji Ono, a Japanese painter. During the Second World War he has broken away from his traditional artistic training to become a propagandist for the Japanese war machine: now he finds that he and his art are increasingly met with hostility.
The ‘floating world’ of the title derives from the Japanese ukiyo. This was originally a Buddhist term signifying impermanence, but was later applied to the night-time subculture of courtesans, music and drink – the ‘floating world’ - that flourished during the Edo period (1600-1868). Ukiyo-e, or ‘floating-world-pictures’, was the art that depicted this subculture.
Ono, by repudiating the artistic ‘floating world’ and suffering the disastrous consequences of his involvement with militarism, ironically enters another ‘floating world’ which has resonances of the original Buddhist one: adrift, friendless, his once-solid reputation destroyed, the certainties he has lived by are now revealed to be as impermanent as smoke.
If Plato could be put into a time machine and brought to the twenty-first century, he would find many things to surprise him. Electricity, votes for women, competitive hot-dog eating — and the title of his most famous work, the Republic. For a start, he would not understand it: it's Latin, not Greek. And if someone translated it for him, he would probably be rather astonished to find it attached to his book.
The book was titled in Greek Politeia, which referred to the polis, or city-state, and can be rendered ‘the state’, ‘affairs of the state’ or, more broadly, ‘the life of the people’. Foreign translations give some idea of how far the title of the Republic has strayed from its origins: it is Der Staat in German, De Staat in Dutch, Stat in Slovak, Ustava (‘Constitution’) in Czech and Valsts (‘the State’) in Latvian. The book was intended as a manual on the good governance of a particular type of Greek political unit. It explored the political models on offer at the time, rejected all of them, and came to one, single, surprising conclusion.
Of the available models, timarchy was judged to be the best of a bad bunch. This was the system currently prevailing in Sparta, in which a small class of landed warriors lived amidst a slave-population, the helots, subduing them by means of military dictatorship and athletics. Oligarchy, the next most desirable, was government by a wealthy minority of unelected bureaucrat-politicians. The next was democracy, in which there was government by popular demagogues. The lowest of all, tyranny, was a state in which one terribly unhappy man, ‘surrounded by boyfriends and girlfriends’, enacted the destruction of the state through his own personal moral degradation.
Socrates/Plato, having demolished the opposition, then described his ideal state. This was an entirely theoretical polity, one ruled by ‘Guardians’, or specially-trained philosopher-rulers. The Guardians, unelected and set apart from the rest of the population (the Workers) from birth, would be bred eugenically by means of ‘marriage festivals’ (in fact state-sponsored orgies, since marriage was not their main purpose, but acts of intercourse by the fittest individuals). They would receive philosophical training for fifty years before being allowed to emerge and govern. A sub-set of the Guardians were the Auxiliaries, who would exist to keep order and prosecute wars. In order to keep the Workers loyal, a founding myth (sometimes translated as a ‘noble lie’) would be deliberately fabricated, ‘the Myth of Er’.
The title of the Republic, then, is rather strange: Plato’s ideal state is about as far away from representative republican democracy as it is possible to get. The reason lies essentially in the very great swathes of time that have elapsed since it was first translated. In its first Latin translation the title was Respublica, a word similar in meaning to Plato’s Politeia, and signifying ‘public matters’ or ‘matters of state’. Our modern word ’republic’, meaning democratic government shorn of unelected bodies, evolved from the term respublica, and its evolution in meaning twisted the meaning of Plato’s title. The Republic used to be a good translation, but evolved into a mistranslation.
Consulted: Plato: The Republic (translation, introduction and notes by HDP Lee, Penguin, 1955)
Nathanael West’s harrowing novel of life in 1930s New York is about a young man who poses as the female writer of an agony column. The pivotal moment in its creation occurred in 1929, while West was working as an assistant manager at the Kenmore Hall Hotel on East 23rd Street, New York. One night in March, West’s friend, the satirist SJ Perelman, dropped by and asked West if he would care to come along to Siegel’s, a restaurant in Greenwich Village, where he was going to meet a friend who wrote an agony column for the Brooklyn Eagle under the name of ‘Susan Chester’. ‘Susan’ had said that she had some readers’ letters that Perelman might be able to use as comic material. West agreed, and they all read the letters over dinner. It soon became clear that the letters were not really suitable for Perelman: they were full of tragic tales of unwanted pregnancies, hopeless love, tubercular husbands and dead children, and were signed with pseudonyms such as ‘Despairing’, ‘Down-hearted wife’ or ‘Broad Shoulders’. But they were a revelation to West. Deeply moved by the simplicity of the appeals for help, he took the bundle of letters back to the hotel with him and for the next few weeks studied them. He read aloud them to friends, who reported that, uncharacteristically, he seemed to be experiencing strong empathy with these toilers: he was, one reported, ‘terribly...hurt by them.’
At the same time West received a promotion. In 1930 he moved from the Kenmore Hall Hotel to the position of full manager at the Sutton Club Hotel on East 56th Street. His friends now referred to him as ‘PN West, the great writer and bordello-keeper’ (the ‘P’ was for ‘Pep’, West’s nickname). In his capacity as manager he was free to allocate any of the empty rooms gratis to friends, many of whom happened to be struggling writers. As time went by the Sutton was occupied by, among others, the Perelmans, Edmund Wilson, Lillian Hellmann, James T Farrell, Dashiell Hammett and Erskine Caldwell. The hotel underwent a transformation into a nexus of 1930s literary talent. West’s position as manager meant that he had full control of the hotel’s mail, and he and Lillian Hellmann began to entertain themselves by steaming open the letters of the guests. They found that the clientele led lives richer in grotesquerie and self-destructiveness even than the correspondents of the Brooklyn Eagle. Ex-movie extras were selling themselves to any takers, male or female; suicides were planned and executed, one person leaping from the hotel terrace through the glass ceiling of the dining room while dinner was in progress.
The two influences fused. West took the ‘Susan Chester’ lonely hearts letters and combined them with his secret knowledge of the inhabitants of the Sutton, and between 1930 and 1932 produced Miss Lonelyhearts. It is generally considered his finest work. Miss Lonelyhearts went beyond the practised cynicism of Dorothy Parker, Perelman and West’s other literary friends of the 1930s into an area of quite terrifying human degradation.
It is interesting to think that it would have never happened had it not been for the rather pernicious habit of reading other people’s letters.
Consulted: Martin, Jay: Nathanael West (Secker and Warburg, 1971)
Never Let Me Go is a dystopian novel which follows the lives of a group of young people who have been cloned and raised as organ donors. They all seem curiously reconciled to their fate, and the book's tone is one of moody resignation, as if it were all happening to a Portishead soundtrack.
And music is rather important to the title. Ishiguro revealed in an interview in 2005 that Never Let Me Go was originally the title of a completely different, earlier book he had written (or part-written), one about a group of struggling song-writers.
This is a surprisingly common titling strategy: readers of this blog might remember that TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom was the title of an earlier book about seven Middle-Eastern cities, but was transferred to his magnum opus about battling in sand. Sometimes a title is so good that you can’t just bin it because it's of no real relevance. Consider The Postman Always Rings Twice – utterly irrelevant to a book in which there is no postman and no ring, either single or dual: but James M Cain obviously just couldn’t Let It Go.
Perhaps as a back-formation, Ishiguro did insert the phrase ‘Never Let Me Go’ into the book: ‘Never Let Me Go’ is the title of a song that the narrator, Kathy H., sings to keep her spirits up. As another character ('Madame') points out, the phrase expresses how the new world the cloned organ-donor is entering is likely to be less forgiving than the old world of their student days, and that Kathy is unconsciously wishing that the old world 'never let her go'.
There is another way, however, in which the title is illuminating. For Ishiguro the theme of song-writing has personal significance. In his early career he tried to make it as a singer-songwriter, wrote and performed dozens of songs, made demo tapes and negotiated with A&R men, before finally giving it all up in the late ‘70s to write books. ‘I think I got through my intense adolescent autobiographical phase in my songwriting,’ Ishiguro said in another interview. ‘By the time I came to write short stories, I'd managed to pare things right down.’
The New Testament comprises the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline epistles, various other epistles, and the Book of Revelation. They were gathered together in a long process beginning at some point a few decades after Jesus’s death, when the first of these documents was written (the early epistles of Paul) and solidifying into a canon similar to one we would recognize today at some point in the fourth century AD.
Like so many other good things, the term ‘the New Testament’ comes from Tertullian. The fiery theologian wrote in his Against Marcion (c.AD 208):
For it is certain that the whole aim at which he has strenuously laboured even in the drawing up of his Antitheses, centres in this, that he may establish a diversity between the Old and the New Testaments, so that his own Christ may be separate from the Creator, as belonging to this rival god, and as alien from the law and the prophets.
Tertullian was writing in Latin, and so his original phrase was ‘novum testamentum’: this was influenced ultimately by the Hebrew of Jeremiah where a related phrase was used to describe a ‘new covenant’ with God. The key development here - which Tertullian helped to bring about, along with other 2nd/3rd-century writers - was to make the shift from thinking about the new testament/covenant as a divine-human pact, to seeing it as a concrete collection of canonical books.
Consulted: Stevenson, J., ed: A New Eusebius, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to AD 337 (1957)
Poe’s parents, David and Elizabeth Poe, were both professional actors. Two of their friends, Noble Luke Usher and Harriet L’Estrange Usher, a husband and wife team, founded the Montreal Theatre in 1808, and appeared on stage with the Poes in the early 1800s. Edgar Allan Poe undoubtedly named his story about the ‘House of Usher’ – and its fall – after them. But why would Poe name a horror story after some friends of his parents? The answer may be linked to Poe’s preoccupation with premature death. The Ushers both died young, in 1814, in their twenties. Poe’s mother had also died young, aged 24, in 1811 (as Poe’s wife was to die young, also aged 24, in 1847). In the story, the twins Roderick and Madeline Usher die young, and their ‘House’ - their family line - is destroyed, the physical building dramatically collapsing into a brooding tarn (a mountain lake) at the end of the tale.
It seems likely that the choice of name in the title reflected Poe’s horror at something he knew well: the extinction of young life and the pain of being left behind.
Consulted: Silverman, Kenneth: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1992)
There is no character called Oleanna in Oleanna, nor is the name ever mentioned. There are only two people in Mamet’s play: John, an American college professor, and Carol, his student. The action deals with an accusation of rape — which may or may not be justified — brought by Carol against John, and the threat to John’s career that results.
The title is in fact a remarkably obscure allusion to a nineteenth-century Utopian community in Pennsylvania called Oleana (one ‘n’), after its Norwegian founder, Ole Bull (1810-80), a famous violinist, and his mother Anna (Ole + Anna = Oleana).
Ole Bull was ranked second only to Paganini in the nineteenth century’s pantheon of violin virtuosi. After a triumphant concert tour of the USA in 1852 Bull decided to leave a permanent mark on the Continent by purchasing 11,000 acres of land in Potter County, Pennsylvania, as a settlement for Norwegian immigrants.
Bull’s fiefdom had four main settlements: Oleana, New Bergen, New Norway and New Valhalla. Pioneers flooded in, attracted by the prospect of free land, but it soon became clear that most of the 11,000 acres, located in a narrow valley between thickly forested hills, were completely unsuitable for farming. The community failed. By the mid-1850s the colonists had either returned to their old homes or sought new homes elsewhere in the USA.
The debacle inspired a satirical folk-song called ‘Oleanna’, originally composed in Norwegian and later recorded in a translation by Pete Seeger, as follows:
Oh to be in Oleanna, That's where I'd like to be Than to be in Norway And bear the chains of slavery.
Little roasted piggies Rush around the city streets Inquiring so politely If a slice of ham you'd like to eat.
Beer as sweet as Muncheners Springs from the ground and flows away The cows all like to milk themselves And the hens lay eggs ten times a day.
Mamet included the first verse of this song as the epigraph to the printed version of his play.
The most immediate connection is to do with land. In Oleanna John spends much of the time on the phone to his wife or his lawyer talking about the purchase of a new house, while Carol, mute and waiting, listens. Both John and Ole Bull’s plans are eventually blighted by legal restrictions on the purchase of land. But John’s failure to negotiate the sale of land, and Ole Bull’s failure to pioneer a new Utopia, are paralleled, in the play, by another failure: the failure of the Utopian project of university education. John admits to Carol in a careless moment that he regards the whole university system as flawed and worthless, and that he is willing to break the rules and give her an ‘A’ grade, even though her work has been poor. He has the power to do it, and so why not? ‘We won’t tell anybody,’ he says. Carol is shocked, puzzled, and finally outraged at the failure of the university system to supply what she has a right to expect: legitimate instruction, value for money. She berates John rather as a Norwegian colonist might have addressed Ole Bull — she has no ‘security’; as in the song, she is a ‘slave’:
CAROL...But to the aspirations of your students. Of hardworking students, who come here, who slave to come here — you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school — you mock us. [...] CAROL...But we worked to get to this school [...] To gain admittance here. To pursue that same degree of security you pursue. We, who, who are, at any moment, in danger of being deprived of it.
One might bear in mind that Glengarry Glen Ross, Mamet’s play of 1984, is about real estate agents who swindle members of the public by selling worthless parcels of land, and Mamet himself worked briefly for a real estate company in the 1960s. Oleanna, it seems, picks up where Glengarry Glen Ross left off, exploring the inability of capitalism to ensure ethical social behaviour and the ever-present danger of getting royally ripped off. In both Oleanna and Glengarry Glen Ross there are dangerous people willing to bend the rules for their own ends. This is the meaning of Oleanna as a title: in the USA of David Mamet, the dream of security and social mobility through education and hard work is just another fantasy exploited by the unscrupulous to trap the gullible.
Consulted: http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/olebull/page1.asp?secid=31 Bigsby, Christopher: The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.’ — Lolita
Lolita is one of those novels in which the protagonist-narrator is so coruscatingly brilliant that we are ready to forgive him almost anything. Twelve-year olds? Well, she did seduce him. And she’d already had that boy at summer camp. For prose this dazzling, this ardent, this clever...tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner...
But plagiarism?
This is the most recent charge against Nabokov’s notorious book, explored notably in Michael Maar’s The Two Lolitas (2005). The facts are these. In 1916 a German journalist, Heinz von Eschwege, writing under the name of Heinz von Lichberg, published a collection of stories called The Accursed Gioconda. Buried about half-way through the collection was a little story — only twelve pages long — called ‘Lolita’. It is a ghost story in a sub-Poe vein, perhaps with a dash of Thomas Mann thrown in. The narrator, a student living in Southern Germany, stays at a hotel and meets the daughter of the household, Lolita, a young girl (he does not say how young, but ‘by our northern standards she was terribly young‘), and is smitten by an unholy lust. One night his dirty young man’s dreams come true:
Lolita sat on my balcony and sang softly, as she often did. But this time she came to me with halting steps on the landing, the guitar discarded precipitously onto the floor. And while her eyes sought out the image of the flickering moon in the water, like a pleading child she flung her trembling little arms around my neck, leaned her head on my chest, and began sobbing. There were tears in her eyes, but her sweet mouth was laughing. The miracle had happened. ‘You are so strong,' she whispered.
After a few weeks of passion (no details are given) the student discovers that Lolita has died in the night. Lolita’s father, who takes the news quite phlegmatically, reveals to the student that her death is the result of a family curse.
The story is short, silly and uninvolving. The book as a whole did not sell particularly well. But the similarities with Nabokov’s Lolita seem too many to discount. In Nabokov’s novel, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, who recounts his ‘Confession of a White Widowed Male’ while in prison for murder, tells how, having recently arrived in the USA from France, he stays at a small boarding-house in a small town and is smitten with unholy lust for the landlady’s 12-year-old daughter, Lolita. He marries Lolita’s mother, Charlotte Haze, who dies conveniently in a car accident leaving him free to ‘look after’ Lolita. Finally Lolita dies (a few weeks after giving birth, though not to his child) and he kills her lover, Quilty.
The main similarities of plot and construction, then, are these: both have a first person narrator who turns up at a boarding-house; Lolita in both cases is the daughter of the house; she ‘seduces’ him; sex and death are presented as different aspects of the same violence, or as cause and effect; and finally the book/story’s title is ‘Lolita’.
Of course, Nabokov would probably not have read those twelve pages in an obscure, untranslated book by a minor German writer, published when he (Nabokov) was 17 and still living in Russia. Or would he? Nabokov left Russia with his family in 1919, and after three years studying at Cambridge, settled in Berlin in 1922. He remained there for fifteen years — until 1937 — married there, had a son, wrote several novels, and made his pre-Lolita reputation. These were fifteen years in which von Lichberg was a fellow Berliner, even living in the same part of Berlin. The book was still in the shops, and Nabokov spoke German quite adequately. Lichberg, meanwhile, was becoming quite prominent as a public figure. He was one of the commentators in a well-known German newsreel of 1933, on the occasion of the torchlight parade celebrating Hitler’s accession to the Reichs-Chancellorship. After serving in the military police of the Abwehr in Poland during the Second World War, von Lichberg retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and died in 1951.
What can we make of the similarities between the two stories? Coincidence? Theft? Unconscious borrowing? Or deliberate quotation? This last of the four possible options is perhaps the most convincing. Nabokov was certainly not above sly references, nor a stranger to obscure ones. One of the subtlest involves the quotation given above: ‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did.’ These are among the opening words of the novel Lolita, in which Humbert explains that his thirst for nymphets is an amatory hangover from his childhood, when he had loved, although never to the point of consummation, a girl called Annabel Leigh:
She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion [...] But that mimosa grove — the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since — until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.
But ‘Annabel Lee’ is the heroine of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe (whose own child-bride was 14 when he married her):
I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea; But we loved with a love that was more than love I and my Annabel Lee.
So Lolita did have a precursor, one whom ‘he loved, one summer.’ But it was a literary precursor. Replace the word ‘loved’ with the word ‘read’ (not such a gigantic shift for Nabokov, for whom the pleasure of the text was the most exquisite of all) and we get, possibly, a truer reflection of the state of affairs. Nabokov’s nymphets were literary nymphets. ‘Annabel Leigh’ had her true origins in a work of the imagination. Was the inclusion of this ‘certain initial girl-child’ Nabokov’s way of telling us that the same was true of her sister Lolita, and that lurking behind Lolita was a Nazi called Heinz von Lichberg?
Consulted: Karlinsky, Simon, ed.: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940-1971 (Harper and Row, 1979) Maar, Michael: The Two Lolitas (Verso, 2005)
Ever wondered why Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is obsessed with happenings in Spain and Italy? The answer lies substantially with one man: William Painter. In 1566 he published The Palace of Pleasure, a collection of translations into English of tales from the Decameron, the Heptameron, Bandello’s Novelle, and others. The book led to a flood of interest in gory goings-on at foreign courts - giving Shakespeare the plot for All’s Well That Ends Well and other works - and supplied Webster with the idea for The Duchess of Malfi.
The Duchess, however, was a real flesh-and-blood woman. Her name was Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi. Married at 12 in 1490, her husband died young, and she secretly married a servant, Antonio Bologna. Over the next couple of years she bore him two children. By the time of her third pregnancy, her brothers, who wanted power for themselves, got wind of the scandal, and in 1510, the lovers, with the two children and the new baby, decided to flee. The Duchess and her two youngest children didn’t get very far: they were soon captured, brought back to Amalfi and imprisoned. Antonio escaped with the eldest son but was murdered in Milan. The Duchess then disappeared from history. Her first son, from her first marriage, became ruler of Amalfi in her place.
Thus ends the melancholy tale of the doomed Duchess. The story was picked up by Bandello in his Novelle, and, mediated through the French of François de Belleforest, was subsequently rendered into English by William Painter, to the delight of English audiences and playwrights.
Webster was thus handed his title by history. The transformation from ‘d’Amalfi’ to ‘of Malfi’ is easy to see. ‘La Duchessa d’Amalfi’ in Italian became ‘La Duchesse d’Amalfi’ in the French of Belleforest: ‘d’Amalfi’ was mistaken for ‘de Malfi’, and translated into English as ‘of Malfi’.
Consulted: Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi (Dover, 1999) Boklund, Gunnar: The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, Characters (Harvard University Press, 1962)
The plot of The Playboy of the Western World is as follows (as summarized by an unsympathetic reviewer in the Dublin Freeman’s Journal of February 2 1907):
A broken-down, evil-looking tramp enters a low public-house on the coast of Mayo, and after some inquiry admits to those gathered there that he has murdered his father. The doubting, mistrustful attitude of his hearers at once changes into one of awe and admiration. He is installed as pot-boy at the request of the publican’s daughter, and is left in charge of the shebeen by the father.
In the second act we are shown the countryside flocking to pay homage to the man who, in the language of the dramatist, has ‘killed his da’. The women are depicted wooing with no trace of modesty this delightful type of strong, passionate man. Pegeen-Mike, the publican’s daughter, jilts her timid betrothed for him. Ultimately, however, the supposed murdered parent turns up, and recognises his son, whose popularity then declines as a natural consequence.
The play is thus a story of Irish peasant life. The ‘playboy’ — slang of the day for a champion or sportsman — is a poor farmer, Christy Mahon, who boasts that he has killed his father by striking him with a ‘loy’ (a spade). The ‘Western World’ is the rugged and backward west of Ireland.
During the composition of the play Synge made several attempts at a title — among them The Fool of Farnham, The Murderer (A Farce) and Murder Will Out, or, The Fool of the Family — before arriving at his final choice. The very different title The Playboy of the Western World was of great significance to the reception of the play and his own career. The reasons were largely political.
In 1907, in the period before the creation of the Irish Free State, the whole of the island of Ireland was still under the control of the British parliament. The nationalist movement was flexing its muscles — it was the period immediately before the Easter Rising of 1916. The Dublin Abbey Theatre, home of the ‘National Theatre’ of Ireland, was a forum for debate on the meaning of Irishness and the practicability of home rule. Founded in 1904 as an offshoot of the Irish Literary Theatre, the Abbey had staged plays by WB Yeats, JM Synge, Lady Gregory, Æ, Oliver St John Gogarty and Thomas MacDonagh. It was seen as key to the Irish Literary Revival.
In this context, when The Playboy, with its low characters, disturbing violence and glorification of parricide, received its première at the Abbey in February 1907, it was seen in some quarters as a treacherous attack on Irishness itself, and particularly on the ordinary Catholic peasantry of the rural West. What happened next has come to be known as ‘the Playboy riots’. The Irish Independent described events on opening night as the play approached its second act:
The act went on, but not a soul in the place heard a word, so great was the din created by the folk in the gallery.
The latter sang songs, hissed, called the policemen names, denounced the players, invited the author to a free fight, and before the act was over the curtain went down amidst terrific hissing and boohing. There were again cries for the author, but he did not come forward; and Mr. Fay, coming to the footlights, said something which was not audible, and the curtain went down again amidst cheers.
At this juncture Lady Gregory and the author of the play entered the auditorium, and there were again cries for the author’s speech. Mr. Synge, who took his seat near the orchestra, when asked by a reporter if he would say anything, replied that he was suffering from influenza, and could not speak; and owing to the rigorous cries of the audience he was obliged to leave the auditorium.
The final act was then proceeded with, but no one in the house heard a word of it owing to the din created by the audience, many of whom cried ’Sinn Fein’; ‘Sinn Fein Amhain’ and ‘Kill the Author’.
The audience was in no doubt that ‘the Western World’ referred specifically to the Western counties of Ireland. As the Evening Mail reported, during the disturbances ‘...someone called out “That’s not Western life”. At the close of this act a burly young fellow in the front of the pit started to sing in lusty tones, “The Men of the West”, and the chorus was taken up by those around him.’ Letters in the newspapers in subsequent days included comments such as the following, from ‘A Western Girl’: ‘I am well acquainted with the conditions of life in the West, and not only does this play not truly represent these conditions, but it portrays the people of that part of Ireland as a coarse, besotted race, without one gleam of genuine humour or one sparkle of virtue…’
It is difficult to see the use of ‘Western’ in the title as anything other than a piece of deliberate provocation by Synge. It raised the stakes significantly, pointing a finger straight at the salt-of-the-earth stereotype of rural Ireland which was so dear to the heart of the growing nationalist movement.
As in many later controversies, the play was attacked by people who had obviously never seen it. One reviewer spoke of ‘a vile and inhuman story told in the foulest language we have ever listened to from a public platform’. Apart from a couple of ‘bloodies’ there is in fact nothing offensive in the language of the play, and the sexual content is muted even by 1907 standards. But perhaps the reviewer had been unable to hear the actors. During every performance the audience had drowned out the dialogue. Unrest only died down when the play was taken off, after one week. The riots spelled the end of Synge’s career in Ireland: the Abbey Theatre decided not to risk staging his next play, The Tinker’s Wedding, his last completed work. He died in 1909.
The Playboy of the Western World therefore has some interesting resonances. It is not difficult to think of recent works where the title alone has been enough to damn them. Neither are calls for authors to be killed very uncommon. Synge, by crafting such an incendiary play, with such an incendiary title, knew he was playing with fire. Like others that came after him, he probably didn’t realize how badly he’d be burned.
Consulted: Benson, Eugene: JM Synge (Macmillan, 1982) Kilroy, James: The ‘Playboy’ Riots (Dolmen, 1971)
Another one by Ishiguro: this time his Whitbread-prize-winning novel of 1986, An Artist of the Floating World. The novel, set in the 1950s, tells the story of Masuji Ono, a Japanese painter. During the Second World War he has broken away from his traditional artistic training to become a propagandist for the Japanese war machine: now he finds that he and his art are increasingly met with hostility.
‘Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.’
