The Wild West Show: Ireland in the 1930s

Abstract

The West of Ireland has played a dignified if supporting role in modern
Irish culture. Writers and painters such as Synge, Jack B. Yeats, Sean Keating, Paul
Henry, and the Blasket Islanders helped define the (French-inspired) perception of
the West as if not sacred then special.In the 1930s, the West was given another
make-over under the impetus partly of documentary realism and partly of an interest
in a disappearing lifestyle. There was still an appetite for doing something with that
western alternative lifestyle, of recuperating its folds for posterity (as with the
foundation of the Irish Folklore Commission in 1935), of memorialising its passing
(as with the accounts by the last generation of Blasket Islanders), or of using it to
make a comment about modernity (as with the Canadian director Robert Flaherty’s
documentary film Man of Aran). Man of Aran (1934) is at the centre of several
overlapping discourses – visual anthropology, ethnology, documentary film making,
Grierson and the 1930s, the ethics of documentarists, and Flaherty’s career as a
film maker. Surprisingly, analysis of the film’s place in modern Irish culture has
been attended to less frequently, and the critical probing has tended to come from
elsewhere. In the Irish context, Man of Aran belongs not so much with Wordworthian
Synge but to a body of work that includes most notably Darrell Figgis’s novel Children
of Earth (1918) where there is a combination of the forceful naturalism of Zola with
Hardy’s sense of place. Synge’s work lives in its language, a language which has a
life of its own, conscious of its beauty as well as its fascination for others. In Man of
Aran there is almost no dialogue and only occasionally do we hear snatches of
conversation. In many ways the most telling Irish critique of Man of Aran remains
Denis Johnston’s little-known, satiric play Storm Song (1935). Equally, in terms of
visual culture, the contemporary cartoons which appeared in Dublin Opinion should
not be overlooked. These provide not only a running satire on the popularisation of
the West but also another filter for viewing this body of work, a filter which, given
the demise of the West, now seems in many respects closer to the emerging truth.