Yeats’s Poetics of Excess or “Re-Stating” Ernest Renan’s and Matthew Arnold’s Celticism.

Rached KHALIFA Title: Yeats’s Poetics of Excess or “Re-Stating” Ernest Renan’s and Matthew Arnold’s Celticism. Literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times. W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Element in Literature. Like most colonized lands in the nineteenth century, Ireland became an “indefatigable industry” for philologists, as McCormack puts it (219). Like the Orient, it was transformed into a “philological laboratory” where things Celtic were subjected to “scientific” scrutiny. Here Celticism chimes with Orientalism. Both academic specializations, as Edward Said and McCormack argue, should not “blind us to the specific ideological and historic origins and affiliations of the discipline” (Said Orientalism; qtd in McCormack 220). This means that the disciplines did collaborate with the dominant ideology of the time, be it directly or indirectly. They were not only disciplines created by imperialism but connived with its strategies of mapping and categorizing the racial other, as Said and McCormack insist. Yet unlike the Orient Ireland represents a peculiar case for European Celtic scholarship, be it literary or ethnographic. It is, first of all, an organic extension of European geography, culture, history, and race. The Celticists, however, over-determinedly underscore Irish insularity and marginality. Their argument, best exemplified by Renan and Arnold, underlines the fact that Ireland had sealed itself off Western culture in such a hermetic manner that it was virtually impossible for it to reintegrate the Western world. Ireland is thus the black sheep of the Western herd. Or rather, as Declan Kiberd says, the “unconscious” of Europe that yokes innocence to savagery, desire to brutality.1 Ambiguous images of Irish subjectivity have therefore been proffered throughout history. The Irish are “savages” and worth starving to death for Spenser in A View of the Present State of Ireland; superstitious and “essentially feminine” for Renan; “sensual” and “sentimental” for Arnold; and Mazzini, the father of Italian and European nationalism, denies Ireland a national character, and thus self-determination. Yeats’ poetry and prose rebuts these reductive epithets. It is part of the poet’s “decolonizing” project, as Said argues in Culture 1 Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). See particularly his chapter “Ireland— England’s Unconscious?” pp. 29-32. 1 and Imperialism.2 His essay The Celtic Element in Literature perhaps represents best his response to Renan’s and Mathew’s stereotypes about Ireland and the Celtic other in general. In it the poet debunks their reductive representation of Irish character and literature by theorizing the Irish sublime as something unique in the Western tradition. What has been advanced as marginality is recouped as originality by the poet. I shall expand on Yeats’s strategies of resistance to Celticist reductionism later on. Renan’s essay The Poetry of the Celtic Races (1859) is most influential in the area. The study became canonical in Celtic philological and ethnographic scholarship. Matthew Arnold’s essay On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), for instance, refers to it as an authoritative text in the discipline; and so does Yeats. But while Arnold adopts most of its theses, Yeats refutes them altogether. Renan claims that “philology is the exact science of mental objects” and that “it is to the sciences of humanity what physics and chemistry are to the philosophic sciences of bodies” (qtd in Said Orientalism 132-3). In the name of scientific rigour and liberal humanism, Renan, as Said argues, places himself right “there at the centre, inhaling the perfume of everything, judging, comparing, combining, inducing—in this way [he] shall arrive at the very system of things” (Orientalism 132). Getting into the “essence” of cultural systems is what fuels his Celtic studies, as well as his Orientalism. Yet his investigations prove to be more prescriptive than descriptive, more driven by essentialism than scientific relativism. Yet Ireland, as I have mentioned earlier, represents a very complex case in modern European history. Although geographically, culturally and historically part and parcel of Europe, Celtic studies have systematically presented Ireland as a peripheral culture, standing on the outskirts of (if not outside) Western civilization. It has thus been dislodged from European history and culture and turned into a philological and ethnographic curiosity, into a laboratory. In so doing, Ireland is orientalised—a paradigm, we shall see, Yeats exploits to great effects in his elaboration of “imaginative nationalism.” So like Semites, who are seen as “degenerate” in Renan’s ethnography, the Celtics are described as “essentially […] superstitious” and “feminine.” McCormack argues that “sex, nationhood, and race” coalesce in Renan’s sexual politics about the Celts (223). In the following passage, Renan underscores his sexual politics: If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to individuals, we should have to say without hesitance that the Celtic race, especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton branch, is an essentially feminine race (8). Renan’s rhetoric of racial politics found a sympathetic ear in Arnold’s Celtic studies. The Celts and the Orientals are put together in the same basket. The Celts and the Orientals share analogous histories and identities. Both races, according to Renan, are prone to subjection. Ireland and the Orient are penetrable territories. Renan could have added See Edward Said “Yeats and Decolonization” in Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), pp. 265-87. 2 2 Africa to his paradigm. His sexual metaphor hinges on the opposition between penetrating races versus penetrable ones. If the colonial powers are “masculine,” then the colonized races are essentially feminine and prone to penetrability. The sexual epithet is commonplace in colonial literature. Colonial encounters are most often described in coital metaphors. When we read The Poetry of the Celtic Races we sense that something of a narcissistic selfcomplacency suffuses the text. This self-complacency is articulated in a subtle way. Renan’s argument reads as follows: if colonial invasions have failed to have access into the deep recesses of Irish character, he then, thanks to scientific rigour, succeeds where colonialism has failed, not through territorial invasion, but through deciphering Irish secrecy, through opening inroads into the dark lands of the Celt’s subconscious mind. Ethnographic construction does not always rhyme with constructiveness, as Said warns. In Orientalism he argues that it is a “sign of imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a confirmation of the dominating culture and its ‘naturalisation’” (145). And as such, Renan’s “philological laboratory,” Said goes on to say, “is the actual locale of his European ethnocentric hegemony” (146). Ironically, although European, Ireland did not escape the hegemony of this Euro-centric perception. Renan places it on the periphery of Western civilisation. It is marginalised culturally, racially, and even geographically. The Celtic races are “concentrated on the very confines of the world, in the midst of rocks and mountains” and in “some obscure islands and peninsulas.” This physical insularity, Renan claims, has resulted in cultural insularity. The Celtic races have developed a culture and a psychology of “inward timidity.” Their introverted nature, Renan insinuates, casts them geographically in remote places and chronologically “behind the time.” The Celtic subject, Renan asserts, “has worn itself out in resistance to its time, and in the defence of desperate causes.” Celtic subjectivity, in other words, is not mature enough to develop a sense of temporality. The Celt is too anachronistic to cultivate a sense of contemporaneity and history. Celtic scholarship of this kind, McCormack points out, “serves not only to impose a certain identity on the Irish who are seen entirely outside history and outside any rudimentary sociology, it also serves to legitimise the activities of British industrial capitalism in the world” (228). Renan’s most outrageous descriptions are the ones that encapsulate the Celts in totalizing cartouches. Foucault calls these “discursive formations.” For instance, the Celts, for Renan, are “endowed with little initiative, too much inclined to look upon themselves as minors and in tutelage, they are quick to believe in destiny and resign themselves to it” (7). Renan’s description then slips again into the rhetoric of sexual politics. The Celtic races are eroticised and feminised: The infinite delicacy of feeling which characterises the Celtic race is closely allied to its need of concentration. Natures that are little capable of expansion are nearly always those that feel most deeply, for the deeper the feeling, the less it tends to express itself. Thence we have that charming shamefastness, that veiled and exquisite sobriety [...] The apparent reserve of the Celtic peoples is 3 due to this inward timidity [...] the Celtic race is an essentially feminine race [...] No other has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of the woman, or been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxication, a madness, a vertigo (8). Much of the “vertigo” and “intoxication” is rather Renan’s own excitement over the subject. If Renan describes the Celts as “essentially feminine,” then Arnold dubs them “sentimental,” “gay,” and “full of fanfaronade” (33). His so-called “objective” studies of the Celts came to reinforce some of Renan’s views. Arnold reinforces further Renan’s stereotype of infantile irresponsibility when he asserts that the Celts are “always ready to react against the despotism of facts” (33). Of course this statement is not adventitious, especially if it is seen within its historical context. Arnold’s Celticism, McCormack insists, “is British through and through in its priorities and in its objective function,” and hence it is “but a modernised synthesis of imperialist and sectarian tactics” (224-7). This statement might sound harsh, but the relationship between scholarship and politics, knowledge and power, is not always innocent or innocuous, namely in the Irish context. One here recalls Spenser’s View on the Present State of Ireland in which he devices a scheme to crush Irish resistance by starving the land. Yeats’s response to this genocidal scheme quarries in the rhetoric of political pathology. Spenser is as “sick” as the politics he defends: Like an hysterical patient [Spenser] drew a complicated web of inhuman logic out of the bowels of an insufficient premise—there was no right, no law, but that of Elizabeth, and all that opposed her opposed themselves to God, to civilization, and to all inherited wisdom and courtesy, and should be put to death (Essays 361). Arnold would not envisage “death” to the Irish, but his concern with Irish indomitability is steeped in English scholarship on the Ireland. Irish indomitability is not seen as resistance to colonial hegemony, but rather as a “defect” intrinsic to Irish character. This approach is as much blinding as self-blinding. His epithets “motiveless,” “passionate” and “sentimental,” seen as “essential” properties of Celtic subjectivity, should thus be examined in light of the historical, ideological and scholarly context in which they were produced. It cannot be more ironical than to know that Arnold had never had a firsthand experience of Ireland itself. He nonetheless dubs it “semi-insane” and incapable of harnessing the “eternal conditions” of “high success” and “civilisation.” Like the Orient for many Orientalists, images of Irishness had been funnelled down to him through a long tradition of textual reproductions of self-same images about Ireland and the Irish. Spenser and Renan are canonical figures in this tradition. Arnold’s conditions for high success and civilization are “balance,” “measure,” and “patience.” His conclusion about Celtic genius is cutting. The Celt “has accomplished nothing” because “he never has steadiness, patience, sanity enough to comply with the 4 conditions under which alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and emotions” (82). The Celts are somewhat struck by Dionysian unpredictability and tempestuousness. In other words, they lack Apollonian discipline, what Arnold calls “the architectonic,” that is, “a firm conception of the facts of human life” (34). For this reason, the Celts are unable to accomplish great works of art in painting, sculpture and music. Even poetry, a domain Arnold concedes to the Celts earlier in the essay, is quickly denied to them: “In poetry [...] the Celt has shown genius, indeed splendid genius, but even here his faults have clung to him, and hindered him from producing great works, such as other nations with genius for poetry—the Greeks, say, or the Italians—have produced” (83, emphasis added). Like a guillotine, Arnold’s “but” cuts off his inaugural eulogy from his final dictum. Reducing Irish genius to mere impetuous aesthetic outbursts is unquestionably rash, totalising, and definitely outrageous. Declan Kiberd cogently argues that Arnold himself has “showed remarkably little patience for the steady [and] deep-searching survey” of the Celtic artistic tradition (31). Yeats’s response to Arnold is articulated in the following lines from “The Statues”: When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, What stalked through the Post Office? What intellect, What calculation, number, measurement, replied? We Irish, born into that ancient sect But thrown upon this filthy modern tide And by its formless, spawning, fury wrecked, Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace The lineaments of a plummet-measured face. Here Yeats returns Irish genius to Pythagoras’s philosophy of proportions. Jeffares reads the poem through Yeats’s insistence that “art must again accept the Greek proportions,” and sees Pearse—one of the architects of Easter Rising 1916—as “summoning intellectual and aesthetic forces into being, as well as those skills of measuring and numbering, so that the Irish return to the Pythagorean philosophy” (496). Yet I would like to add that Yeats’s response to Arnold in this poem stands in stark contradistinction with his arguments articulated in his essay The Celtic Element in Literature. While in the poem he discredits Arnold on the basis that Irish literature affiliates with Pythagorean “calculation” and “measurement,” in the essay he paradoxically recuperates Arnold’s epithet of Irish “excessiveness” (that is, lack of a sense of proportion) in order to transform it into a self-valorising quality. Similarly, in the poem “Under Ben Bulben” he transvalues Arnold’s idea that the Irish imagination is an “indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact” into “indomitable Irishry.” While Arnold insinuates that the Irish have no sense of history, insofar as they voice an inherent hostility towards modernity and modernisation, Yeats rather uses the description in a nationalistic sense, that is, it refers to Irish resistance and indomitability to colonial hegemony. Yeats is not unaware of the correlation between scholarship and political power. His rebuttal of Renan’s and Arnold’s Celtic studies is spelt out in The Celtic Element in Literature (1897). Here the stakes are much higher than the poet’s mere euphemistic “re-statement” of their theses, as he puts it. Yeats’s consciousness of the power relations inherent in 5 ethnography permeates his essay. The enterprise, Yeats warns, is vital for the nation, for if “we do not [resist Renan’s and Arnold’s arguments] we may go mad some day, and the enemy root up our rose-garden and plant a cabbage-garden instead” (Essays 174). Yeats’s teleology is twofold. First, it seeks to reverse the process of misrepresentation set in motion by Renan. The second is to halt the process of transmogrification of the Irish “rose-garden” into a “cabbage” field. The transmogrification in Yeats’s symbolism of course signals a shift from the realm of aestheticism to crude utilitarianism. The latter of course refers to England. If “cabbage” culture, so to speak, has irreparably infested England, then Ireland must resist it and celebrate the enchanting “rose,” Yeats’s multifarious symbol, before it is too late. The Irish nation must shield itself from the English “cabbage” culture by exploring its pristine landscapes, its spiritual culture, and ancient traditions. Yeats catalogues Renan’s statements at the beginning of his essay. His strategy is to respond to them from within Renan’s discourse itself and see where they “are helpful and where they are hurtful” (Essays 174). The approach could be compared to the Achaeans’ Trojan horse. It is meant to subvert the system from within. But Yeats’s strategy is more complex than it appears. It might be more accurately described as “cannibalism,” insofar as it seeks to unravel the authentic from the stereotypical, the valorising from the debasing, in Renan’s and Arnold’s discourses on Celtic literature and identity. In so doing he transvalues some of the stereotypes into self-laudatory qualities. That this strategy ensnares itself in the same rhetoric of essentialism and reductionism is a question treated by Marjorie Howes.3 This debate falls outside the scope of this paper. Against the stereotypes of Irish fatalism and self-defeatism proffered by Arnold, Yeats argues that the Celt’s indomitable “reaction to the despotism of fact” is nothing but man’s primordial ecstasy before subliminal Nature. In so arguing Yeats not only refutes Arnold’s allegations and misrepresentations but territorialises the Irish sublime at the heart of the universal human experience of Nature, at the aesthetic, psychological and ontological levels. Irish landscapes, Yeats continues to argue, are the locus classicus of unseen powers with which the self can engage both poetically and ontologically. They are perfect “desolate places,” loca sola, in the Swedenborgian sense. 4 Yeats’s response to Arnold runs as follows: I do not think [Arnold] understood that our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainly of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s mind (Essays 176). Here Yeats presents the Irish sublime as a form of liberation from the nets of temporality and spatiality. The Irish surrender to Nature is voiced by the Celtic mythical hero in the 3 For further knowledge on this issue, see Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4 For more information on Swedenborg’s influence on Yeats, see his essay titled “Swedenborg, Mediums, Desolate Places” in Explorations (London: Macmillan, 1962). 6 following passage. Despite his invincibility, the hero gives himself up to the waves. Heroes and lovers are overcome only by the power of Nature. And yet, paradoxically, in their surrender is inscribed their immortality. The Irish are conquered only by “unbounded and immortal things,” Yeats underscores: Cuchulain in the Irish folk-tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone had the strength to overcome him. The lover in the Irish folk-song bids his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find them in the heart of the woods (Essays 179). This is a mixture of Irish mythology, heroism and pastoralism. For Yeats, Irish Nature is a locus for both the sublime and the beautiful. If Cuchulain’s warring on the waves suggests subliminal awe and fascination, the lover’s resort to the woods represents a beautiful pastoral scene where death has no place. The quest is in the end to obliterate selfhood into Nature in mystical fashion. The poem “Into the Twilight” expresses best this invitation to a mystical experience lived in the heart of local natural loci. Here the Irish subject is presented as a homo mysticus par excellence: Your mother Eire is always young, Dew ever shining and twilight grey; ....................................................... Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will. Irish literature, Yeats underscores, explores the “unseen world.” It is in essence mystical as well as subliminal. The “Rose” (a symbol of Rosicrucian mysticism and Irish nationalism) articulates best this quest for mystical experience as well as self-sacrifice for the nation, as the following lines clearly show: Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours. In the essay Yeats deploys a two-fold strategy. Not only does he universalise Irish literature but presents it as the saviour of European literature from aesthetic decay. From the status of marginality, as seen in Renan and Arnold, now Yeats re-places Celtic literature at the centre of European tradition: “of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe […] the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again brought ‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe” (Essays 185). 7 Yeats’s poetics of “excess” reflects a politics of excess. Its aim is to debunk Arnold’s “emotive excess” and “sentimentalism” attributed to Celtic literature and character. Yeats’s celebration of “excess” articulates a three-fold politics. First, it exalts Irish steadfastness in aesthetic creation. Second, it points to Europe’s indebtedness to Irish literature. And finally, it underlines Irish particularism, not so much as a form of isolation from universal literature, but rather as a powerful metonymic expression of the eternal human existential crisis. Irish particularity, Yeats underscores, is inextricable from universality. Irish folklore, for instance, he maintains, records “that ‘melancholy a man knows when he is face to face’ with Nature, and thinks ‘he hears her communing with him about’ the mournfulness of being born and of dying” with his “great thirst unslaked” (Essays 182). Yeats’s “re-statement” of Arnold’s misunderstanding of Irish “natural magic” operates within the same logic. He shows how this “natural magic” is but the “ancient religion” of the world. This argument places the Irish sublime not only at the centre of Irish literature but also in past immemorial. These manoeuvres are fundamental in the process of substantiating the “imagined community,” Benedict argues.5 The idea of the nation is founded on a strict balance between particularism and universalism. It rests on a fine equilibrium between two processes: universalising the particular and particularising the universal. This is essential in the definition of the modern nation-state. The nation is a universal concept insofar as it shares with the other nations their consciousness of their differentness as particular identities, as separate nationalities. National particularism is what gives the nation its universalism. Nations are similar through difference. Likewise, Yeats’ idea of the nation embosses cultural and communal particularism. The nation owes its cohesion and coherence to the symbols and images it culls from its “Great Memory,” what he calls “Unity of Being”: Nations, races, and individuals men are unified by an image, or a bundle of related images” (Autobiographies 194). These images are “bound together by this interchange among streams or shadows; the Unity of Image, which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol?” (Autobiographies 263). This definition of the nation pits Yeats against the philosophes. While the Enlightenment defines the nation-state as a civil community governed by a social contract, Yeats sees it essentially as something of a mystico-aesthetic body. If the former acknowledges cultural heterogeneity, the latter prioritises unity over diversity. Aestheticizing national politics inexorably culminates in fascism, Benjamin warns (234). Yeats’s rejection of Renan an Arnold, we have seen, revolves on the notion of the sublime as expressed in literature. His purpose is to pit the Irish sublime against the European tradition. The juxtaposition is of course Manichean in Yeats. If Irish literature still works within ancient traditions, then modern European literature, because steeped “in the Greek way,” as Arnold is happy to point out, has dwindled to a mere “chronicle of circumstance,” to “passionless fantasies and passionless meditations.” Yeats even shrugs off Shakespeare and Keats as far as the sublime is concerned. According to him, 5 For further discussion of this idea, see Anderson Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 8 [They] looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten the ancient religion (Essays 178). This implies their art belongs more fittingly to the beautiful than to the sublime. Yeats’s conclusion is no doubt harsh and unfair, at least as far as Shakespeare is concerned. The modern sublime, Yeats argues, has been emptied of “passion.” Subliminal ecstasy has been deadened by rational modernity. Modern experience of Nature amounts to no more than a “pleasant” feeling. The sublime, in other words, dwindles to the beautiful. The ancient bond between man and nature has been demystified by modern mechanical philosophy. “Descartes, Locke and Newton took away the world and gave us its excrement instead,” Yeats deplores (Explorations 325). Modernity has disenchanted the world, as Max Weber states. Yeats’s crisis originates from his relentless quest to reenchant it again. Following Berkeley’s principle of esse est percipi Yeats places Being in the apprehending mind: And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream, That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme. The sublime is mind-centred. It is inseparable from consciousness, however subliminal the phenomenon can be. The sublime is in fact caused by the subject’s failure to apprehend a given phenomenon. A sublime context is conjured up when the mind fails and the subject goes through a near-death experience. The feeling is of pain, but not without pleasure, as Burke states. Burke sums it up cogently as an experience of “delightful horror.”6 Yeats’s oxymoron “tragic joy” bears close resemblance to Burke’s phrase. It is “delightful horror” in versus. Indeed, this oxymoron, Ramazani argues, places Yeats right at the heart of the Romantic tradition. He goes on to assert that Yeats’s sublime is “explicitly a staged confrontation with death” (110). And this is the most powerful expression of subliminal feeling for Burke. The poem “Lapis Lazuli,” for instance, transforms the experience of sublime death into “gaiety.” Here death is aestheticized. It is emptied of both temporality and historicity. 6 Further discussion of the sublime, see Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry in Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Penguin, 1998). 9 In Yeats’s view, history, that is, the rise and fall of civilisations, acquires its full meaning only if it is construed as an aesthetic experience, that is to say, as “tragedy wrought to its utmost,” in Shakespearean fashion. Here history is aestheticized, and the aesthetic historicized. The world is transformed not only into a Shakespearean “stage” but also into a subliminal “vision” of the workings of historical destruction and construction, building and un-building: All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia… Tragedy wrought to its utmost… All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay. “Lapis Lazuli” is a political radicalisation of the aesthetics of death articulated in an earlier poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.” In this poem, Yeats refutes Renan’s and Arnold’s misrepresentation of Celtic subjectivity. Here the sublime is nationalised, so to speak. The “soldier, scholar, [and ] horseman” Robert Gregory, dubbed “all life’s epitome” in another poem, is presented as the epitome of Irish subliminal ecstasy before death. The hero is an “Irish” airman, Yeats underscores in the title. Armed with Castiglione’s sprezzatura,7 the hero plays his tragic play to the fullest. Robert Gregory meets his fate “somewhere among the clouds,” above the physical world. He becomes larger than life and temporality. He is a “character isolated by a deed/to engross the present and dominate the memory.” Here Yeats provides us with a paradigm wherein fiction no longer follows reality, but rather it is the opposite. The relationship is reversed. Robert Gregory is “Hamletised,” so to speak, insomuch as Hamlet, the dramatis persona, is historicised in the figure of Major Gregory. In mystical death, selfhood morphs into pure consciousness. The physical “I” is transmuted into a mystical moment, into an “impulse of delight,” as the following poem shows. Physicality is temporalized. The memento mori becomes the zero-degree of Time, an imperturbable moment of stasis in historical and quotidian flux. It is worthwhile to quote the entire poem, “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death”: I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor Law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds; 7 Sprezzatura has been translated into “recklessness” in English, which is not an accurate translation. “Effortlessness” conveys better the Italian meaning. Yeats was greatly influenced by Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. 10 A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. The poem celebrates as much Major Robert Gregory as its own power for aestheticizing subliminal death. The process of transubstantiation is the same, be it tragic or poetic, Yeats intimates. If the sublime transforms selfhood into consciousness, then poetry transforms experience into artefact. Both experiences transmute flesh into spirit, into an idea that “has nothing to do with action or desire,” as Yeats states in Autobiographies: Does not all art come when a nature [...] exhausts personal emotion in action or desire so completely that something impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, suddenly starts into place, something which is unforeseen, as completely organised, even as unique, as the images that pass before the mind between sleeping and waking? (222). Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” foregrounds this idea. It is an aesthetic transubstantiation of an experience of self-transfiguration into impersonality. Major Robert Gregory is transformed into an idea which is itself transformed into an immortal aesthetic work. We have seen earlier how the sublime, for Burke, signals the failure of cognitive apprehension. Schopenhauer corroborates his theory by insisting that: The sense of the sublime arises through the consciousness of the vanishing nothingness of our own body in the presence of a vastness which, from another point of view, itself exists only in our idea, and of which we are as knowing subject, the supporter. Thus here as everywhere it arises from the contrast between the insignificance and dependence of ourselves as individuals, as phenomena of will, and the consciousness of ourselves as pure subject of knowing (465-6). Jürgen Habermas returns this will to self-destructiveness to Kantian and Romantic subjectivism and solipsism. He suggests that the crisis can be overcome “only when the paradigm of self-consciousness, of the relation-to-self of a subject knowing and acting in isolation is replaced by the paradigm of mutual understanding” (310). Despite his disagreement with Habermas, Jean-François Lyotard more or less shares his view on the origins of the sublime. He asserts that it takes place when 11 The imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. We have the Idea of the world, but we do not have the capacity to show an example of it. We have the Idea of the simple, but we cannot illustrate it with a sensible object which could be a case of it. We can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to “make visible” this absolute greatness or power appears to us painfully inadequate. Those are Ideas of which no presentation is possible (78). The sublime originates from a discrepancy between perception and apprehension, conception and representation. When ideation clashes with reality a crisis arises. For Habermas, this happens because the mind is trapped in solipsism and fails to understand and represent the world rationally. The idea is of course originally Burkean. That we are incapable of cognizing the phenomenon engenders the sublime experience: “It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little” (105). In The Celtic Element in Literature Yeats wants to demarcate the Irish sublime. He exalts it as Irish exceptionalism in modern Europe. It is the mark of Irish genius against modern creative “penury.” It is vivifying. The Irish arts are eulogised in the following passage in response to Arnold’s denigration of Celtic genius: Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the ideal man of genius? Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a vision (Essays 184). Yet be it “tragic” or apocalyptic, Yeats’s sublime expresses the same crisis involving the mind’s apprehension, or better still, misapprehension of Nature. It is about the apocalyptic “thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild melancholy.” Excess of emotions, for him, is much needed for the stultified modern imagination. He asserts that “excess is the vivifying spirit of finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive” (Essays 184). Ironically, what is criticised in Renan and Arnold is now recouped, reclaimed and idealised. Yeats presents his poetics of excess as the only project capable of rescuing modern European literature from aesthetic sclerosis: 12 Literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe […] the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the mainstream of European literature. It has again and again brought ‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe (Essays 184). Yeats’s paradigm most often leads to self-obliteration. The poem “Sailing to Byzantium” expresses best this desire for self-transubstantiation. In it the persona wills selftransmutation into “the artifice of eternity”: O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the go mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, Perne in the holy gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Ramazani warns against this kind of quests, insofar as the search for apocalyptic union with “inorganic matter,” or the Unknown, is in potentia dangerous. To put it differently, it might slip too easily into an apology of irrationality and aggressive politics (129). Apocalyptic sublime might result in romanticising concepts such as war, destruction and self-annihilation. “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war,” Benjamin exhorts (234). Marinetti’s celebration of war and pyromania as “healthy” and “hygienic” is a case in point. Yeats also celebrates war. In “war, “violence” and selfsacrifice the tragic hero completes “his partial mind,” as these lines from “Under Ben Bulben” intimate: You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard ‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’ Know that when all words are said And a man is fighting mad, Something drops from eyes long blind He completes his partial mind, For an instant stands at ease, Laughs aloud, his heart at peace, Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate Know his work or choose his mate. 13 Much of Yeats’s violence targets colonialism. It is his violent reaction against colonial physical and cultural violence. Yet what should be noted here is that Yeats directs his violence as much against colonialism as against “the filthy modern tide,” that is, modernity and its ethos. His celebration of Irish literature and culture is as much steeped in his philosophy of aesthetic nationalism as in his hatred of modernity and modernisation. He proposes “the Celtic movement” not only as a counter-project to the colonial politics of acculturation but also as a panacea to modern rationalism and materialism. The project is messianic: ‘The Celtic movement’, as I understand it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can measure of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as ready as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail for new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism of the nineteenth century […] the Irish legends […] have so much of a new beauty that they may well give the opening century its most memorable symbols (187). Yeats’s celebration of Celtic culture borders on nativism. Yet celebration of national culture and history under colonisation is essential for national liberation, Edward Said insists. It becomes nativism and ethnocentrism when it is carried on with the same vehemence after independence. After national liberation, Said argues, the nation must focus on issues of national development to achieve autonomy and liberation from world imperialism. In “Yeats and Decolonisation,” he includes the poet in this politics of national and world liberation. His inclusion is valid to a certain extent. But what Said fails to see is that Yeats’s project of de-colonisation is in the final analysis inextricable from his rather more ambitious project, which is to reverse the course of history, that is to say, to unwind the process of modernisation. Colonialism and modernity have the same meaning in Yeast’s symbolic system insofar as England incarnates both. Their synonymy lies at the heart of Yeats’s modernist predicament. He is a poet who was compelled to write against the historical moment—i.e. modernity—in which he happened to be. 14 Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays. London: J. M. Dent; New York: Dutton, 1916. Benedict, Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, 1973. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Penguin, 1998. Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Translated by George Bull. London: Penguin, 1967. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Translated by Fredrick Schopenhauer, Arthur. Selections from The World as Will and Idea. Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, in A Hofstarter and R. Kuhns, eds.. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. 446-95. Howes, Marjorie. Yeats’s Nations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jeffares, A, N.. A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1979. Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Lyotard, J. F.. The Postmodern Condition. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, forwarded by F. Jameson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. McCormack W. J.. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Ramazani, Rajan. Yeats and the Poetry of Death. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1990. Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Essays. Translated and with introduction by William Hutchinnson. London: Walter Scott, 1896. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 15 —Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Yeats, W. B. The Poems. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983. —Explorations. London: Macmillan, 1962. —Essays & Introductions. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1961. —Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1980. 16