Discuss AntiHeroism In The Plays Of Sean

Discuss Anti-Heroism In The Plays Of Sean O.Casey Essay, Research Paper

In O.Casey.s Dublin Trilogy, the playwright attacks

the weight of dead heroes which manacled contemporary Ireland to a violent past

and self-destructive dream. The space between pretension and failing, rhetoric

and reality, abstraction and suffering is carefully exposed as O.Casey departs

from the stereotypes of the Irish stage to evolve a fresh realist idiom of

tenement drama. His characters indulge in their own detached fantasies . create

sanctuaries of inaction around themselves . and O.Casey strips away the fiction

to reveal a earthy, vulnerable, often farcical hollowness inside. In doing so,

he also strips the dream of Romantic Ireland away from the brutality and

oppressed poverty that accompanied the birth of the Irish Free State. This

dialectic is part of a larger critique in which the rhetoric of heroism is

shown up to be a fa.ade for an inability to act, a form of impotency. Finally,

O.Casey relates this specifically male failing and elevates the female

characters to an anti-heroic status embodying an Ireland with many failings,

but real courage and an honesty that shames the hypocrisy of the heroic cult.It is a neat

irony that Davoren, the writer in The

Shadow of a Gunman, ascribes to an imaginative ideal of poetry, embodying

all the shallow clich.s of Romanticism (romantic love, nature, beauty as truth,

the tragic muse and so forth.) Yet he ends up (in his courting of the na.ve and

resolutely uncultured Minnie, for example) as a mock-heroic character in the

best traditions of Augustan satire, unaware of his overblown foolishness. Both

literary and literal senses of .mock-heroic. undercut Davoren.s two images:

that of the poet in communion with the muse and as a dangerous revolutionary on

the run. As we find out, he is actually a second-rate pseudo-Shelley and, of

course,. a mere .shadow of a gunman..[1]This pattern,

where the heroic pretensions of a character are revealed to have a comic or

satirical core is recurrent within O.Casey, and is thoroughly analysed by

Krause. [2]This

movement is interlocked with a larger one between image and reality, where

pretensions are ridiculed and often levelled by the concrete intrusion of the

outer world.s violence and suffering. For example, Capt. Boyle lives an illusion

similar to that of Davoren: he builds around him the myth of a seafaring past

which is in fact limited to a single trip on a collier. Boyle is arrogant

enough to even place his heroism above that of the gunmen: .When I was a

sailor, I was always resigned to meet with a watery grave; an. if they want to

be soldiers, well there.s no use o. them squealin. when they meet a soldier.s

fate..[3]

O.Casey cleverly undercuts this by interrupting Boyle.s most expansive

panegyric on his ocean-ranging spirit with the insistent call of a

coal-merchant. In a comic vein, the Captain can be played with heavy comedy .

for example, when he reverses opinion and defends the Church at the prospect of

taking on bourgeois airs. More tragically, in the wake of his son.s shooting,

the oblivious Boyle is drunken and incoherent with his roguish mate, Joxer.A similar clash

between heroic and comic, image and truth, is seen in the other two plays.

Davoren.s fantasies have already been mentioned, and both his literary

pretension and Shields. piety can be played comically. There is a mock-heroic

tone to the heavy-handed and letter of Grigson.s (to the Irish Republicans) and

an exposure of his true cowardice when he ingratiates himself to the raiding

auxiliaries. A similar capitulation that underscores hollow rhetorical

posturing comes in the following sequence:Seumas . There.s a great comfort in religion; it makes a man strong in

time of trouble an. brave in time of danger. No man need be afraid with a crowd

of angels round him; thanks to God for His Holy religion! Davoren You.re welcome to your angels; philosophy is mine; philosophy that

makes the coward strong.The volley of

shots that follows this exchange, as well as their fear at finding the bombs,

vindicate O.Casey.s critique of their pretensions. The Plough and The Stars sees the characters at least partially

live up to their boasting, some of them taking to the streets in the Easter

Rising, but they still fall far short. Clitheroe.s vanity is noted when the

audience learns he left the revolutionaries because he didn.t get a promotion.

The Young Covey.s Socialist ideals, whilst sometimes providing an accurate

attack on the shortcomings of the Rising, are pared down to a comic motif as he

quotes from his single Socialist textbook. The general myth surrounding 1916 is

deflated by O.Casey as he contrasts the supposed solidarity of Dublin with the

squabbling and petty rivalries of the tenement block. The tenement dwellers,

despite their superficial adherence to

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