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Responses to The Playboy of the Western World (1907), by J. M. Synge
 Some Thoughts on Synge's Chicken Breasts
觸摸《西方世界的花花公子》
Relationships between the Playboy and its audiences
1) Some Thoughts on Synge's Chicken Breasts
王芮思
In this essay, I attempt to answer the following question: “At Christy's first encounter with the Mayo girls in Act II of The Playboy of the Western World, each girl presents a little gift for him. One of the girls, Nelly, brings Christy a ‘little laying pullet' and asks him to ‘feel the fat of that breast;' and Christy, in return, ‘feels it with the back of his hand.' Here, what does the ‘chicken breast' symbolize? How does this sensual and seductive exchange tell about the dynamics between Christy and the girls? How can this act be understood in nationalistic terms?” I will focus my discussion on the section from the beginning of Act II up to the entrance of Widow Quin, nicknamed “the pullet section.” By a close reading of the pullet section, I would like to show how a sexual metaphor can inform our understanding of the play in both dramatic and political terms.
The pullet section is revealing in erotic terms. Its plots and imageries approximate fetishism and foreplay, which usually take place before a sexual climax. Such erotic arrangement delivers both the characters and the audience to a state of excitement early in the show, which would then facilitates the ultimate dramatic climax, if not frustration, at the end of the play. Here, examples abound in displaying the plot's gentle glide from mental and verbal arousal to physical one. On the level of mental and verbal arousal, “boots” are used by both Christy and the Mayo girls as fetish that summons their erotic fantasy in others. Christy envisions his life as Pegeen's pot-boy (if not pet toy) while he shines her boots; and Sara Tansey indulges herself and her gal pals in an imaginary journey with the patricide in Christy's boots. Both parties are given great pleasure and expectation by a common object that comes in pair. Such oblique sexual imageries gain bold lucidity as the Mayo girls try to impress Christy with their tasty treats, which brings the plot to the level of physical arousal. Sara's brace of eggs (not one or three, but two), Susan's pat of butter, Nelly's bursting Chicken breasts showcase Christy with female erogenous parts. In this sense, Honor seems less provocative with her cut of cake, but only to suit the spirit of her name. Christy, on the other hand, does not stop at eyeballing the treats; he goes further to “feel” the size and fat of them. The raw display of psychological and physical foreplay in the pullet section frames the play within a （hetero）sexual metaphor, which could then aid a political reading of the play.
The heterosexual metaphor in the pullet section articulates the relationship between a heroic national figure and its adherents in political context. Whereas the hero, symbolized by Christy, is characterized as singular and masculine, and thus penetrative with his legend and ideology; his followers, typified by the Mayo girls, is feminine and plural, and thus receptive and susceptible to the hero's “talk.” Such heterosexual dynamics between the hero and its crowds would seem desirable and beneficial to the formation of national identity, but Christy's fabricated past serves to frustrate this heroic narrative. Hence the play itself can be taken as an example of patriotism or nationalism being muddled by mob mentality, underscored by the villagers' blind trust in a self-fashioned hero.
The looking-glass held behind Christy back may impart the playwright's genuine idea of nationalism that is so painstakingly sought after during the first production of the play. Here I would like to draw on Lacan's idea of the mirror stage. In Lacanian terms, as a child recognizes himself in his own mirror reflection, he forms a subjectivity, or identity, out of misrecognition. The child finds this misrecognition pleasing because it promises a release from the anxiety of dependency and lack of skill. But at the same time, he is alienated from himself for his assertion of an erroneous identity. In the pullet section, Christy's enjoyment in his own mirror image, saying “[d]idn't I know rightly I was handsome,” makes explicit the process of misrecognition in the “hero” himself. The same process is undergone by the Mayo villagers as they mistake Christy for someone incredible. The ingenuity of this reflective prop is achieved as the audience recognize themselves in the mirror image at Christy's back. This said, the Irish people are undergoing the same paradoxical process of misrecognition. In order for an Irish national identity to be erected, the espousal of an （anti-）hero seems inevitable. Understood in this sense, J. M. Synge does think ahead of his time by pinpointing the dilemma of nationalism, or does he? And Yeats' setting up of The Playboy as the monument of Irish people's discard of national stereotyping for “the eternal quest of truth” seems heartfelt—provided that the Irish people manage to recognize their own foolishness in the dramatic display of foolishness.
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2） 觸摸《西方世界的花花公子》：讀芮思寫的《辛格的雞胸肉的幾點想法》
潘建維
在《西方世界的花花公子》劇中裡，瑪優（Mayo）這個西方世界對於外來者克里斯第（Christy）的異國風情嚮往，藉由少女們禮物相贈一景簡單卻明白的表現出其好客表現，卻在你對角色身體碰觸物品所產生的體感經驗中，拆解出流動於其中的個人情慾以其國族建構。
心裡意識的潛伏，卻在身體有意識的觸碰中，明白地表示出劇中女性對於外來男性的渴望，也表示出男主角克里斯第不確定的個人認同中，已經認同的個人情慾表現。我喜歡你於此的文字表現，文字敘述雖然常被認為形於物之上，你的文字敘述卻讓文字本身觸摸劇中常被忽略的道具，帶出文字表現的另一種可能性。
而在愛爾蘭的國族建構卻擺盪於這種許多女性期待單一英雄的心裡，藉由你評論對於克里斯第背後那一面照不出事實的鏡子，觀看和被觀看的同時都一再指出國族構建中許多矛盾，也是劇作家辛格（J.M. Synge）文本中所透露出的歷史記憶。
觸碰那塊政治立場還沒被確立的雞胸肉，成為閱讀整齣劇另一種思考模式。你的文字提醒了讀者如我，眼睛觀看的同時，也是一種觸摸行為。而辛格卻希望讀者碰觸屬與愛爾蘭集體歷史記憶中，屬於遙遠地區直接且不含蓄的英雄追尋。
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3) Relationships between the Playboy and its audiences
陳珮瑄
According to Paige Reynolds' “The First Playboy,” some scholars believe that when the audiences watched Playboy, their “conflation of reality and representation” was the main cause of the riot. Then we have to ask what the relationship between the play and its audience is. Apparently, the audiences view life in Mayo as a representation of their real life. And Synge's precise depiction of rural peasant life is unbearable for the Irish audience, whose notion of the Irishman is everything but indecent, dirty, voluptuous, and fickle. C. L. Innes' in his “Naked Truth, Fine Clothes and fine Phrases in Synge's Playboy of the Western World” points out the other linkage: the parallel between Singe and Christy. Both of them tell a story, but their listeners' rejection of the play and the story is their final outcome. Besides these two connections, there is another parallel, which links strongly the play's content with the audiences and the Irish contemporary society.
Some of Innes' observations in “Naked Truth” help clarify this link, especially his three different attitudes towards the poetical and the romantic. Here Pegeen and the villagers are “unable to poeticize the familiar and merely human.” In other words, they can only create their romance from something outside their lives or something far away. Differently, Christy transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar. He changes himself according to other people's perception toward him such as Mahon's and Pegeen's. But in the play's end, because Mahon exposes the truth and turn Christy into a lier, Christy recognizes that “‘his romancing lifetime' must include the real.” After contrasting Pegeen with Christy, Innes makes a conclusion that “For Pegeen and the girls, the romantic and the real belong to different worlds which cannot be reconciled, while for Mahon and the Widow Quin, the romantic simply does not exist.” Thus here we see three different attitudes toward the romantic: Christy's reality-basing story, Pegeen and other girls' far-away sensation, and Mahon and the Widow Quin's totally denying of the poetic. These three attitudes are quite similar to Irish people's perspectives toward the art outside the play, which is the construction of Irishman's respectable, honorable image.
These perspectives are manifest in W. B. Yeat's “The Controversy over The Playboy of the Western World” and Joseph Holloway's journal, which can be categorized by their reactions to Synge's play – supportive and opposing. To Yeats, Playboy serves as a successful attack on the “tyranny and violence” of the nationalist conformity that the Young Ireland demands among every Irishman. Playboy thus is a profession of writers' freedom in creating their works, and the evidence of the emergence of “a new thought, a new opinion, that we had long needed.”However, from Holloway's point of view, Playboy is a disgrace of all Irishmen, which doesn't picture truthful peasant life but only shows “a morbid, unhealthy mind ever seeking on the dunghill of life for the nastiness that lies concealed there.” The police and Yeat's dispersing playgoers who shows their distaste of the play and interrupt it seems to Holloway a irony to Yeat's cry of A Free Theater.
These two attitudes towards the play, together with Synge's profession of his notion toward drama in his “Preface to The Playboy of the Western World” that “On the stage, one must have reality, and one must have joy,” separately coincides with the English Ireland, the Irish Ireland, and Synge's different attitudes toward the constructed image of Irishman. The English Irishman such as Yeats is like old Mahon and the Widow Quin, who does not believe that the romantic ever exist. Thus extreme Nationalist movement sometimes is oppression to him, for it requires people to act according to certain modes in order to show how they love Ireland. So he supports Synge's play for it simply “express[es] a life that has never found expression,” instead of conforming to the standard image of Irishman. In contrast, the Irish Irishman such as Holloway is like Pegeen and the girls, who search for the romantic but fail to reconcile it with the real. This explains why they are so sad when Christy is no longer a hero to them. The Irish-Irish hopes to see a grand story fulfilled and expect a hero to lead them to achieve it. So when Parnell's scandal burst out, which means he does not the hero figure in the grand story anymore, he lost people's love. Like those riot audiences, Holloway is seeking a grand story and pure Irishness in which every Irishman is decent and respectable. But he also fails to notice the gap between what he wants to live like and what his life really is.
Synge, however, is quite different from these two types. He is quite like Christy, and he recognize that any romantic must base on the reality. His play best demonstrates what he wants to say. By collecting stories and phrases in rural Irish, he provides his audiences a joy based on reality. Also, he wants to remind them, both the Anglo-Irish and the Irish-Irish, that the romantic can exist, but it must be constructed according to the reality. The ideal image of Irishmen is needed, but it must be redressed by their true, actual image.
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