the island and the arts || this is not a green wave: issues of representation in jack b....

Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies

This Is Not a Green Wave: Issues of Representation in Jack B. Yeats's Play "In Sand"Author(s): Ondřej PilnýSource: Nordic Irish Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, The Island and the Arts (2012), pp. 153-159Published by: Dalarna University Centre for Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41702627 .

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This Is Not a Green Wave: Issues of Representation in Jack B. Yeats's Play In Sand

Ondřej Pilný

In Sand , the most memorable last play by painter Jack B. Yeats, involves representation not only as an aesthetic issue, but also as a prominent theme. Similarly to the artist's late paintings, it indicates a resilient link to specific reality while leaving the spectator to ponder the exact nature of that link, and indeed of the reality itself. The play was first produced by Jack MacGowran at the Abbey Experimental Theatre in 1949; however, it was most likely finished already in 1943, together with its prologue entitled The Green Wave} This brief introductory dialogue was regrettably excluded from the first production; it involves two elderly men - an artist (figure) and a materialist - who are discussing a painting in the former's rooftop flat. Their conversation over the picture foregrounds the question of representation, and should clearly serve to focus the perspective of the audience as regards the play that they are about to see. As soon as the painting is brought forward from the shadow, the materialist guest inquires:

2nd ELDERLY MAN What is it? 1 ST ELDERLY MAN It is a wave. 2nd ELDERLY MAN I know that, but what sort of a wave? 1 ST ELDERLY MAN A green wave - well - a rather green wave. 2nd ELDERLY MAN What does it mean? 1 ST ELDERLY MAN I think it means just to be a wave. 2nd ELDERLY MAN I like things to mean something, and I like to know what they mean, and I like to know it at once. After all, time is important, the most important thing we know of, and why waste it in trying to find out what something means, when if it stated its meaning clearly itself we would know at once. 1st ELDERLY MAN If that wave could speak it might say, 'I'm an Irish wave and the Irish are generally supposed to answer questions by asking questions,' and the wave might ask you what was the meaning of yourself!2

Given the explicit reference to Ireland, together with numerous other moments that may be read as alluding to the country of Yeats's birth, and



Nordic Irish Studies

the fact that the prologue is ostentatiously set in Dublin, In Sand has been consistently interpreted in a specific political key, one largely focused on how the play represents Ireland and how it relates, broadly speaking, to its politics. What has significantly contributed to this tendency has been the perception of Jack Yeats as a national painter, current at least since Thomas MacGreevy hailed him as one in his 1945 critical study. MacGreevy also highlighted what he saw as the painter's republicanism and his disillusionment with the Irish Free State, and despite the fact that their mutual friend Samuel Beckett patently did not share this view, it came to dominate most of the subsequent critical work on Yeats' s painting and literary works.3 The relation of In Sand to Irish politics has thus been stressed by Nora McGuinness, and followed by John W. Purser who sees the play as expressive of the support of Irish neutrality in World War II. He claims, somewhat enigmatically, that 'the image that ties the Prologue and the play together is that of the Irish wave (green for Ireland, not blue) breaking on the sands of the world'. His further assertion that the play 'offers a vision of the old values of Ireland spreading across the world in a message of economic and political healing' then lamentably combines a flight of fancy ('economic and political healing?') and the proliferation of a cultural stereotype ('the old values of Ireland').4

In a recent article, Ian R. Walsh has offered a contrasting perspective, arguing that 'Yeats's experimental dramaturgy in its movement away from mimetic representation resists the homogenizing tendencies of nationalist artistic endeavour as pursued by Irish drama from the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre and the subsequent National Theatre Society onwards'.5 Walsh's observation is most valuable in the way it places Jack Yeats in the context of Irish theatre, and is quite sensitive in speaking of a 'movement away from mimetic representation' rather than indicating that his drama strives to abolish mimesis altogether. Walsh's comments on Yeats the playwright in fact form a close parallel to David Lloyd's analysis of representation in his painting; arguing again in the broad context of the politics of Irish identity, Lloyd pertinently states that 'Yeats's painting defies every effort to reduce it to figurative translucence, whether in the form of the translucence of the symbol that informs a nationalist aesthetic or in that of a classical [i.e. representational] painting'.6 In the same way as with Walsh's argument, it is important to note that Lloyd does not claim that mimesis is abolished in Yeats's canvasses: rather, that they cannot be reduced to their mimetic dimension. In other words, when looking at a painting, we witness 'the unstable oscillation between the emergence of the figure and the foregrounding of the medium that dissolves even as it reveals'.7

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Issues of Representation in Jack B. Yeats's Play In Sand

These appear to be mostly plausible readings of the politics of Jack Yeats's work in an Irish context; even the claim that Yeats's paintings, plays and novels are expressive of a dissident republican attitude may merit further consideration. The present set of remarks, however, intends to focus on another, related level of meaning of Yeats's final play In Sand , one that would probably come out as the stronger of the two in a contemporary production of the play for an international audience. What I would like to argue is that In Sand pivots around the notion of representation simultaneously in more universal terms, and consequently offers images that are to be viewed as pertaining to human beings regardless of their homeland.

To begin with, there is a plain sense in which the green wave of the picture is not a green wave at all of course. Writing about the famously provocative painting by René Magritte, Ceci n'est pas une pipe , Michel Foucault observes:

My God, how simpleminded! The statement [that this is not a pipe] is perfectly true, since it is quite apparent that the drawing representing the pipe is not the pipe itself. And yet there is a convention of language: What is this drawing? Why, it is a calf, a square, a flower. An old custom not without basis, because the entire function of so scholarly, so academic a drawing is to elicit recognition, to allow the object it represents to appear without hesitation or equivocation.8

Foucault's essay will be largely of limited relevance to our subject, since the aesthetic of Magritte and that of Jack Yeats are worlds apart. Nevertheless, a few observations will still be germane: the point of mimetic - in the sense of realistic - depiction is indeed 'to elicit recognition' of the object represented, or in other words, to use resemblance in order to provide affirmation.9 Now, it is evident that the painting presented to the materialist guest in the prologue to In Sand fails in terms of resemblance, otherwise it would hardly solicit the basic question ('What is it?'). Moreover, the lack of affirmation provided to its viewer results not only in his annoyance ('Why waste time?'), but also in a significant degree of anxiety. At the end of the scene, the owner of the painting states: 'But I see it's beginning to worry you again, so next time, before you come, I'll get some artistic friend of mine to paint some buttercups and daisies on the side of my green wave and turn it into a green hill-side, and then it won't worry you any more',10 and proceeds to provide consolation in the form of a whiskey.

'Only thought resembles. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it', Magritte wrote to Foucault;

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subsequently, Foucault highlights that resemblance in representational painting requires language, since thought must be embodied in linguistic signs - i.e., this is really how the painting 'speaks'.11 However, when dealing with a painting that reduces its representational element (while, nonetheless, not moving through complete abolition of its link with reality towards the production of simulacra, as in the case of Magritte or Andy Warhol), such as that of the Green Wave, what is required in addition to language - and apart from an experience of the represented reality - is imagination. Imagination plays indeed a seminal role in the prologue to In Sand : although the materialist guest insists that the sea 'is just a stretch of water' to him and that he objects 'to having any sort of Art shoved down [his] throat',12 his interlocutor brings him in Socratic fashion to demonstrate that even he as a self-proclaimed literal-minded person is not devoid of imagination - he instigates him to think of people as works of art, and appreciate the way the world changes when perceived from a different perspective, that of his rooftop window.13 Finally, and most importantly, the anxiety caused to this 'man-in-the-streeť by the image of the green wave must be attributed to his imagination: it is what the imagination brings up that disturbs him when he looks at the wave, most likely thoughts of the oblivious power of the ocean, of an endless cycle featuring ups and downs, and significantly, of transience and death. While the cause of disquiet is not mentioned aloud, it is apparent, as these thoughts are developed as central themes and motifs in the play that follows.

Using Samuel Beckett's term, Ian R. Walsh describes In Sand as presenting 'stages of an image' instead of a consistent plot. For Walsh, this image is that of the sentence 'Tony we have the good thought for you still' being written in the sand and washed away by the tide. Plausible as it may seem, the identification of the image is yet reductive, as we shall see further.14 The play surely resonates with a curious tension between its essentially linear development in terms of chronology (it starts at the time of Alice's childhood and ends shortly after her death of old age) and its eschewal of a central narrative line. The mixture of theatrical styles employed in the individual scenes is truly anarchic (in line with Robin Skelton's view of Yeats's dramatic art).15 The play opens with what is almost Ibsenite naturalism, as apparent in the set, costume and dialogue in Tony Larcson's death scene, complete with mild symbolic elements (a bookcase, items of John Oldgrove's costume). Gradually, however, naturalism gives way to lengthy monologues of characters like the Old Sailor delivered on the backdrop of a minimalist set, which are succeeded by the puppetry of the Visitor and the Governor of the tropical island plotting their little dictatorship in a toy world, wearing items worthy of the

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pantomime or, for that matter, theatre of the absurd.16 Ultimately, the closing gesture of the play returns to the metatheatrics of its prologue, with all characters 'gazing down at the tide's edge, mov[ing] slowly backwards towards the front of the stage',17 as if they were a group of spectators leaving an image that they have been watching.

The scenes are linked by a variety of means: through the presence of individual characters and/or the stories of their lives (most prominently Alice, the Old Sailor, the Visitor and the Governor), simple motifs like a kiss or the sailing in a boat, or even inconsequential objects as the Governor's white topl. Moreover, there is an important structural link in the way couples of characters hand over to each other, from the two elderly men in the prologue to Larcson and Oldcastle, the Mayor and his several counterparts, Alice and Maurice, the Visitor and the Old Sailor, and the Visitor and the Governor.

Walsh's assertion of the centrality of the writing in the sand may be reductive in its exclusivity; nevertheless, the motif does crucially run through the entire play. What is more, it bears a vital ethical message: 'Tony we have the good thought for you still' commemorates an ordinary individual life, as it does a small act of generosity; it is a tribute to a slightly eccentric predecessor who enjoyed a 'lark'. It urges to be constantly iterated, despite the fact that it inevitably ends up being washed away by the tide: witness the variety of individuals who, as if out of some inner compulsion, take a stick and write in the sand, notwithstanding the fact that they may treat the inscription as a mere lucky charm.18 By way of returning to my initial summary of interpretations of Jack Yeats as an emphatically Irish artist, it is interesting to note Tony Larcson's specification of his wish: the inscription is to be written by a little girl who must be from the town, as must be her parents.

19 While the name of the town (or the country) is never mentioned, the importance attributed not only to the presumed innocence of the person who is to write the message, but also to the firm grounding of the act in the local may provide a leeway into Yeats's views on the roots of art. My suggestion is that these features would be at least of the same value in this venture as any moments in the political machinations of the Visitor and the Governor that might be read as a satirical reference to Irish politics.

Returning to the present context, however, it should be noted that the writing in the sand is prominently juxtaposed in the play to the writing on the wall. 'We're fancy free, nothing to stop us except misfortune - other people's misfortune - or our own. We can keep moving like the finger on the wall but we don't write anything on the wall - only on the sand of the sea-shore', happy Maurice assures his beloved young wife - only to learn

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that he has lost all his riches and consequently suffers an early death.20 An essential affirmation of humanity that it is, the writing in the sand thus turns out to be simultaneously a 'Mene, mene...' of the Book of Daniel, a memento of death and judgment. Death indeed prominently features in every scene of the play, and so does the ubiquitous sea and its shore that provides the setting. These principle interlinking images remind one of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. . .

Shakespeare's thoughts on human transience in the face of the ocean find a conspicuous parallel in Yeats' s play. The opening metaphor of the sonnet finds an explicit elaboration as early as in Act I, Scene 2, in which the Mayor speaks about 'the hours which keep coming towards [men in their full health] like waves of the sea, some with crests of glistening foam on them and some dark as blood, no two waves alike'.21 In fact, the entire play with its successive sketches of human lives is like a sea, waves coming one after another, making 'towards the pebbled shore' and dying, the iterative moment highlighted by repetitions of images and motifs, although always in slightly different contexts: 'no two waves alike'. The power inherent in the depths of the image is potentially overwhelming, which brings us back to the anxiety of the materialist visitor in the face of the Green Wave, and the tentative reasons that we have suggested for it. At the same time, the ambiguity of Yeats's final play remains considerable: same as his distinctive paintings, it will not be reduced to simple figurative translucence (to transpose David Lloyd's comment somewhat). On the surface, it will crucially chime with the central words of Samuel Beckett's Cascando : 'An image, like any other'.22 But then, that apparent voicing of resignation is really an invitation for the imagination to act, frustrating as it might seem.

Notes and References

1 John W. Purser, The Literary Works of Jack B. Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991) 19-21,24.

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2 Robin Skelton, ed., The Collected Plays of Jack B. Yeats (Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971) 330.

3 Thomas MacGreevy, Jack B. Yeats. An Appreciation and an Interpretation (Dublin: Victor Waddington, 1945). For a comparative study of Beckett's and MacGreevy's Jack Yeats, see David Lloyd, 'Republics of Difference. Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett', Field Day Review 1 (2005): 43-69.

4 Purser 104, 5. Purser elaborates on and partially qualifies the reading of Jack Yeats as a nationalist as offered in Guinness's PhD thesis, 'The Creative Universe of Jack B. Yeats' (University of California, 1984), published subsequently as The Literary Universe of Jack B. Yeats (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992).

5 Ian R. Walsh, 'The Failure of Representation in Jack B. Yeats's The Green Wave and In Sand' Irish University Review 39.1 (2009): 32.

6 Lloyd 62. 7 Lloyd 43. 8 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe , trans, and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983) 19-20. 9 Foucault 53. 10 Skelton 332. 1 1 Foucault 46-47, 53, 57. 12 Skelton 330, 331. 13 Skelton 331-2. 14 Walsh 38. 1 5 Robin Skelton, Introduction to The Collected Plays of Jack B. Yeats 1 1 . 16 Cf. Act II, Sc. 2: The new Governor 'is wearing white topi, tussaud silk short

jacket with three silver stars on left breast, pale blue shirt, turned down collar with black bow tie. Yellow cord riding breeches and high tropical boots. He has a revolver in holster and is leaning on a dark brown silver-mounted walking stick' (360).

17 Skelton 376. 18 Walsh uses the word 'talisman', following Marilyn Gaddis Rose. Walsh 38. 19 Skelton 336, 344. 20 Skelton 349-50, 358. 21 Skelton 341. 22 Samuel Beckett, Cascando , The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber,

1986) 303.

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