In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety & lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore & anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy & his other major dramas. Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, ” If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Irel&, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two.” Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country`s uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture & spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships
- between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness & savagely unpredictable moods, & Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.