‘A Black Knot’

Abstract

This chapter develops the tensions inherent in Synge’s early works towards an understanding of his formal innovation, asserting the ‘time pressure’ of his one-act plays as a dimension of his response to modernity. Synge’s drafts for various articles, particularly ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, and an article on social change in Wicklow, combine with his notes on Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory to show a writer deeply conscious of modernization and literature’s responsiveness to modernity. Contributing to and drawing on new work on the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernism, this chapter shows that the structures and plots and Synge’s one-act plays Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen are rooted in a battle of temporalities. By comparing the timescales of Synge’s one-act plays to those of his Revivalist contemporaries, this chapter shows that his reading in sociology, philosophy, and evolutionary science, alongside his experiences in the modernizing ‘Congested Districts’ of Ireland, fundamentally affected his literary output. Fractured communal relations are figured as fractures in the time frames of the drama, and the overlapping of temporalities and levels of modernization find their correlatives in the constant and unresolved competition for dominance from any one conception of time. These plays, far from being isolated from the concerns of modernization, or from reverting to a solely romanticized vision of the peasantry, in fact register a sense of formal instability as a result of their fraught and multiple conceptions of time and space.