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1/ IMAGINATIVE NATIONALISM OR AESTHETICISING
THE IRISH NATION
Was it a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of
chance comers, bound together by this interchange
among streams or shadows; the Unity of Image,
which I sought in national literature, being but an
originating symbol?
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies.
In sharp contrast to his early celebration of distant and imaginary
Arcadia stands Yeats’s subsequent consciousness of the politics of
aesthetic nationalism. The Wanderings of Oisin is the turning point. His
romanticisation of Irish proximity—that is, culture, politics and
geography—should be interpreted as such. In so doing Yeats places his
poetic text right in the centre of the political mainstream of the postFamine Ireland.1 His text, in other words, swerves from the rhetoric of
pastoral universalism into that of immediate localism. Irish mythology,
landscape and peasantry, henceforth, became central issues from which
the Yeatsian poetic text would never detach itself. More than ever now
Yeats is conscious of the symbiotic inter-relatedness between literature
and nationalism, narration and nation—in short, between poetics and
politics. After liberating his poetic image from the straitjacket of
pastoral narcissism, he now grounds it in the broader yet still limited
and limiting rhetoric of nationalism, if not localism. Yeats’s assertion
that “there is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality
1
K. T. Hoppen, Ireland Since 1800 : Conflict and Conformity (London: Longman,
1989). Hoppen rightly states that “the quarter century after the Famine was in fact a
time in which a complicated mélange of developments sustained a species of politics
in which the local, the immediate, and the everyday provided important contexts for
interactions and interventions” (111).
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without […] literature”2 quite distinctly adumbrates the poet’s
definition of nation, nationalism and culture.
Yet it is important to point out that this politics is not as much
shown in the poetry as it is articulated in the prose. Yeats’s literary
politics is rather articulated in a prolific production of essays, mostly
collected in Ideas of Good and Evil. Most of the essays define
fundamental notions on which his “aesthetic nationalism” is grounded,
that is to say, poetry, Ireland, fine arts, symbolism (as a new mode of
expression), occultism, and so forth. In brief, these essays investigate
the inter-relatedness between poetry (and arts in general) and the
nation. This politics of aesthetics is advocated not only in his
theoretical prose, but also manifests itself quite evidently in his verse,
yet mostly in an indirect way. In the poems collected in The Rose, The
Wind among the Reeds, and In the Seven Woods, which are
supposedly concerned with subjective experience, love and occult
meditation, these poems nevertheless internalise an important political
dimension in them. Most of these poems operate within the politics of
cartographic resistance and cultural self-valorisation. The subjective,
in other words, becomes inextricable from the national—geographical
or cultural. In poems like “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Man
Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” and many
other poems, the quest, apart from the fact it is personal, is also
cartographic, oriented towards rediscovering and revalorising Irish
culture and landscape. “The Secret Rose,” perhaps, represents the
most interesting ambiguous, or rather polysemous, poem in these
collections where the subjective (amorous), the occult and the national
are conflated together into one single symbol the “Rose.” The end of
the poem is the most disorienting and yet totalising part of it:
…I, too, await
The hour of thy great wind of love and hate.
When shall the stars be blown about the sky,
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
2
Yeats, Letters to the New Island, edited with an introduction by Horace Reynolds
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970), pp. 103-4.
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Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
(The Poems, 70, hereinafter referred to as P)3
Yeats’s conception of cultural nationalism stems from a synthesis
of Germanic (Romantic) and Italian (Mazzinian) ideation and
idealisation of the nation. The idea of the nation, rationalised by the
philosophes,4 romanticised and spiritualised by the Germans,5 and
All quotes of Yeats’s poetry from now onward are taken from The Poems, edited
by Richard J.Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983).
4
See how the nation is first of all defined as an essentially rational and civic entity by
the philosophes. The Enlightenment tradition, as voiced by Rousseau, Voltaire and
Montesquieu, and later carried on by the French historians Michelet and Renan, insists
on the individual’s freedom vis-à-vis the state, and sees the relation between
individuals in a given nation/state as essentially a social contract, which guarantees
general consensus and mutual understanding. The enterprise is upheld later by
Habermas in his call for the completion of the unfinished project of modernity after its
disruption with the rise of the fascist state, and also against the threat of the
postmodern condition.
5
The German Romantics dealt with the idea of the nation from within the philosophy
of the subject, as well as the philosophy of totality, wherein organic wholeness,
mystical messianism and spiritual purism are exalted and idealised. In Nationalism,
Elie Kedourie inculpates German Romanticism for the rise of aggressive nationalism
by the turn of the twentieth century. He incriminates all of Herder, Fichte, Schelling,
Müller, Schleiermacher, and most of all, Kant. Herder develops the notion of the
“folk-soul” (Volkgeist). Fichte exalts Germanness and pushes further the philosophy of
autonomy. To apply Schelling’s thinking of “individuals as phantoms, [as] merely
imaginary apparitions” to politics, Kedourie warns, “is to travel a very long way from
natural rights and utility.” Müller thinks that the state is “the intimate association of all
physical and spiritual needs, of the whole nation into a great, energetic, infinitely
active and living whole.” Schleiermacher pushes the doctrine of the subject into its
“highest goal,” into ultimate perfection, that is, into its Narcissistic predicament—i.e.
Death: “May it be my highest goal to be able to wish to die.” These words strangely
foreshadow Hitler’s last words of the sort of mission accomplie while Berlin was being
razed by the Allied Forces. The political experience in the fascist state is lived like a
mystical experience. Kedourie condemns Kant on the grounds of his notions of
“autonomy” and “self-determination” and their relation to the idea of the nation. He
argues that the Kantian relation between autonomy and freedom ineluctably calls for
the political “brutality” of the notion of self-determination. For its sake, Kedourie goes
on arguing, Kant is prepared to subordinate “all the other benefits of social-life; selfgovernment is better than good-government.” He then concludes that “the autonomous
man is a stern activist, a perpetually tormented soul. A politics fashioned in his image
is a politics where struggle per se is a necessary feature.” Gellner rejects Kedourie’s
3
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idealised and “messianicised” by Mazzini,6 was a relatively recent
phenomenon by Yeats’s time. It started in the eighteenth-century and
reached its most dramatic articulation in nineteenth-century Europe,
with the disintegration of the Ottoman and Habsburg (Austria-Hungary)
Empires, and the unification and emergence of Germany and Italy as
ambitious powers. Such an Italo-romantic ideation of the nation,
messianic and triumphalist, as it were, had undoubtedly seeped into the
Yeatsian text via O’Leary and Thomas Davis.7 O’Leary “belonged to
the romantic conception of Irish Nationality,” and Davis “had been
pierced through by the idealism of Mazzini.”8 In fact, Davis’s Young
Ireland movement owes its name to Mazzini’s Giovine Italia. Yeats’s
charges against Kant. He insists on the universalist foundation of the Kantian
philosophy. What Kant seeks, according to him, is the universal in Man and not “the
mystique of the idiosyncratic culture.” Hannah Arendt also inculpates German
Romanticism insofar as it had to a great extent participated in forging modern
“cynicism.” “This inherent cynicism of romantic personality-worship has made
possible certain modern attitudes among intellectuals. They were fairly well
represented by Mussolini, one of the last heirs of this movement.” This cynicism, she
argues, inheres the romantic “idolisation” of the “arbitrariness” of “personality.” For
more discussion of this issue, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1951); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass:
Basil Blackwell, 1960); and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1983).
6
Mazzini sees that the Italian nation has on its shoulder some messianic mission not
only for the Italian people but also for humanity. The idea has been fashioned after
Napoleonic messianism. “Today a third mission is drawing for our Italy as much
vaster than the missions of old as the Italian people, the free and united country, will
be greater and more powerful than Caesar or the Popes” (qtd in Kohn, Nationalism:
Its Meaning and History, p. 41). Yet such a romanticisation, although it is innocent,
as it may be, in the Mazzinian doctrine, found good resonance later in Italian
Fascism, whereby Mussolini presents the fascist movement, not only as an Italian
one, but also as a universal one pushing towards a “new age.” Italy will be the
precursor as it has been twice in history, with the Roman Empire and the
Renaissance. Notice how Mussolini’s words strikingly reverberate those of Mazzini:
“Today with a fully tranquil conscience, I say to you, that the twentieth century will
be the century of Fascism, the century of Italian power, the century during which
Italy will become for the third time the leader of mankind” (Kohn, p. 80).
7
D. G. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Routledge, 1991). Boyce argues that
“Davis’s own conversion to nationalism seems to have been a quasi-religious
experience. His political beliefs were utilitarian; but he fell under the influence of
German romanticism, and his reaction against his early beliefs bore all the enthusiasm
of the convert” (155).
8
Yeats, Essays & introductions (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1961), p. 246.
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prioritisation of cultural resistance for national self-determination
reverberates much of Davis’s reaction against the culture of
utilitarianism, money and philistinism, a culture he directly associates
with England. M.H. Thuente sees, for instance, an ideological parallel
between Yeats’s compilation of Irish folktales in Fairy and Folk Tales
of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892) and the
Grimms’ narrativisation of German folklore in Household Tales.9 Such
an Italo-Germanic conception of the nation may account for Yeats’s
gradual political “masculinising” of the concept as his text gradually
drifted into High Modernism. This gradual yet significant shift shows
the poet’s move from thematising Ireland as a passively imagined
cultural community (Kulturnation) to an active political state
(Staatnation).10
Yeats’s impulse for cultural antiquarianism is no doubt governed
by nationalist consciousness. It is closely related to his conception of
nation-ness and “imaginative nationalism.” His textualising of Irish
myths, say, tales of bewitching “Aislings” and of noble heroes and
poets, should be interpreted as the poet’s own counter-reading of the
denigrating and stereotype-ridden colonial representation of Irish
character and culture.11 Yeats’s call for rewriting Irish cultural history,
9
M. H. Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980).
These are Friedrich Meinecke’s concepts quoted in Anthony. B. Smith, National
Identity (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 8.
11
The following reductive images proliferated and propagandised by the English
imagination are only a few examples. For a more comprehensive investigation of
this idea see L. P. Curtis, Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish
Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, CT: The Conference on British Studies
at the University of Bridgeport, 1968), or his Apes and Angels: The Irishman in
Victorian Caricature (Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Insitutte Press, 1977).
Consider for instance Disraeli’s letter to The Times in 1836:
10
The Irish hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our
civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our
decorous liberty, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent,
uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English
character. Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alteration of
clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an
unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.
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as well as his plea for a speleological exploration of the Great Memory
of Ireland, represent aesthetic strategies whose aim is to cancel out
metropolitan reductive readings of Irish subject and culture. By
underscoring and idealising Irish supernaturalism and occultism, Yeats
seems overdetermined to spiritualise Ireland, and hence demarcate it
from metropolitan space. He, in other words, invests Irish actuality with
a spiritual power that England has sold to the devil of utilitarian
materialism and “cold” rationalism. In celebrating Ireland’s agrarian
“backwardness” and folklore spiritism, the laughing-stock of
metropolitan caricature and literature, Yeats not only reinforces his antiEnglish, anti-colonial, stance but also elaborates and radicalises further
his anti-Enlightenment, anti-modernity, position. Yeats’s antiEnlightenment, timidly articulated in his early “The Song of the Happy
Shepherd,” is now further consolidated as it now becomes more directly
associated with a hard-core utilitarian coloniser—England. The
aversion is doubly exacerbated. Not only does England become
paradigmatic of the philosophical, political and economic bankruptcy of
the “the filthy modern tide,” but more significantly, is transmuted into a
remarkable counterpoint valorising Ireland’s success in circumventing
such a tide—i.e. capital bourgeoisie. England becomes Ireland’s selfmagnifying mirror. Colonial self-aggrandisement in peripheral space is
now reversed. “Every virtue of the Celt was matched by a vice of the
British bourgeois; everything the philistine middle classes of England
needed, the Celt could supply.”12 If Ireland had succeeded in not
Or the more shocking statement of the novelist and historian Charles Kingsley in
1860:
I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred
miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I
believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but that
they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged
under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees
is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but
their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.
Quoted in G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce
and O’Casey (London: Crown Helm, and New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979),
pp. 16-17.
12
Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980
(London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 25. Deane argues that the nineteenth-century
Celtic studies, exemplified perfectly by Renan’s and Arnold’s investigations of Irish
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succumbing to materialism and industrial modernisation, it then
succeeded because it had valued “ancient wisdom” and agrarianism
over “the despotism of facts,” to quote Arnold’s famous etiquette about
the Celts.13 The “flood-gates of materialism,” Yeats complacently states
in “Nationality and Literature,” are yet not fully open in Ireland. The
rejection then gains in more vehemence. It amounts to a “passion of
hatred”: “to transmute the anti-English passion into a passion of hatred
against the vulgarity and materialism whereon England has founded her
worst life and the whole life that she sends us, has always been a dream
of mine.”14 Whether Ireland deliberately chose to be so or simply was
reduced by colonial power to such a pre-modern half-industrial status
calls for another debate that falls outside the subject of the present
chapter.
Interestingly, Yeats’s idea of the nation considerably overlaps
with that of Ernest Renan as elaborated in his well-known lectureessay: “What is a Nation?” The comparison is neither fortuitous, nor is
it without some relevance to our investigation of Yeats’s imagination
of the Irish community. It is rather insightful to confront both views,
and see where Yeats and Renan converge and where they diverge.
Historically speaking, the juxtaposition is also interesting insofar as
both men elaborated their idea of the nation almost during the same
period (that is, by the late nineteenth century), a period of extreme
importance in the development, and specifically, the theoretical
transformation of nationalism.15 It is useful to quote Renan at some
length so as to demonstrate the many conceptual affinities between
Renan and Yeats:
literature, advanced the Celt as an idealised form of subjectivity that was still
organically attached to wild nature, and thus “could cure anxious Europe of the woes
inherent in Progress.” The idea is not only metropolitan, but is also greatly
sponsored and endorsed by the romantic imagination of the Revivalists. This,
however, shows the paradox and contradiction in which Irish Revivalism found
itself trapped. Nowhere is this contradiction better shown than in Yeats’s response to
such a portrayal of the Celtic subject in his “The Celtic Element in Literature.”
13
Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (New York:
Dutton, 1916), p. 82.
14
Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1980 [1955]), pp. 431-32.
15
See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
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A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things,
which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or
spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the
present. One is the possession in common of a rich
legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent,
the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the
value of the heritage that one has received in an
undivided form [...] The nation, like the individual, is
the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice
and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the
most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what
we are. A heroic past, great men, glory, this is the
social capital upon which one bases a national idea.16
Renan’s “spiritualisation” of the nation, his emphasis on the
continuity between past and present, on the inter-relatedness between
History and identity, his valuation of cultural unity (“the heritage that
one receives in an undivided form”), his heroicisation of national
archetypes (“heroic past and great men”)—all these ideas form an
ideological repertoire where the Yeatsian conception of the nation
finds its substance and assertions. Yet in spite of these striking
similarities, the Yeatsian and Renanian conceptions nevertheless
fundamentally diverge as far as the idea of national “unity” is
concerned. Where Renan departs from unity to account for national
diversity, Yeats, at this stage of political consciousness, goes the other
way round. Rather, he excessively values the notion of “Unity of
Culture,” the political articulation of his “Unity of Being,” at the
expense of national diversity. Unity is overvalued because it is,
according to Yeats, a transcendental and totalising power, a unifying
force, by means of which national heterogeneity is erased, occluded
and homogenised. This makes it fall square with the romanticised idea
of an “imagined community” that is based on “homogeneity” and
“empty time”—that is, on immemoriality, continuity and totality.17
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha
(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19.
17
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
16
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Yeats’s notion of “unity,” one must add, always operates within the
political economy of value-inflation. His hatred of “heterogeneity”
would gain more intensity and vehemence when it became directed
against a whole age—i.e. modernity. This poetics/politics of hate
accompanied his verse until the end.18
Yeats’s and Renan’s reverse conception of national “unity” is no
doubt determined by the territorial and historical antithesis they found
themselves in. Yeats’s cultural and national organicism is determined
by the historical moment, a moment during which Ireland needed
national unity rather than diversity to emancipate itself from
colonialism. Yet, as I have argued above, Yeats’s conception and
overvaluation of “unity” is something of a structural consistency
rather than of conjunctural contingency. It became the poet’s lifelong
alternative to modern social and subjective fragmentation. A
conception determined by colonisation, and further exacerbated by the
modernist predicament. Renan’s emphasis on a nation’s cultural and
ethnic plurality, however, may be interpreted as an unavowed support
and a tacit legitimation of French expansionism—in other words,
France’s annexation of other different geographical and cultural
territories at that time.19 Although Renan claims that “a nation never
In A General Introduction for my Work (1937), Yeats confesses: “When I stand
upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light and notice that discordant architecture, all
those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague
hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there
are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred rises; in four or five or
in less generations this hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of
rule of kindred […] All I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred” (Essays
& Introductions 526). Needless to say the passage is crypto-fascist.
19
Interesting is the politico-historical context in which Renan elaborated his
definition of the nation. The definition is proffered concurrently with the French
scramble for the Maghreb. Renan’s so-called Humanist elaboration of the idea of the
nation, however, should not hide its oblique ideological intent, an intent that not
only fails to dissociate itself from the rhetoric of colonial ideology, but also proves
supportive of this very ideology. His idea of the nation is indisputably mired in
Eurocentrism. More perplexing and perturbing even is the position of Michelet, a
staunch and fervent apologist for the Humanism called for by the French Revolution
and Enlightenment (“the symbol of man is man,” he says). While exalting the
bravura of the female-other in Africa, Michelet fails to question the legitimacy of
such a presence in the racial-other’s space: “The mind of this woman, whom you
believe to be entirely occupied with the household duties, is wandering in Algeria,
18
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has any real interest in annexing or holding on to a country against its
will,” and that “the wish of nations is the sole legitimate criterion, the
one to which one must always return,” he yet surprisingly evades the
question of French forcible annexation of North Africa.
Renan sees “ethnographic mixture” as a founding principle of
national identity.20 His idea, steeped in Liberal Humanism, as it were,
should be handled, however, with a great deal of reserve. Yeats, on the
other hand, is imperturbably convinced that unity and not diversity,
singularity rather than plurality, must make up the essence of a nation.
Renan departs from homogeneity to demonstrate and validate a
nation’s heterogeneity; whereas Yeats prioritises national unity,
organic wholeness, to account for a well-consolidated national
identity: “Though leaves are many, the root is one,” Yeats says in
“The Coming of Wisdom with Time.” Renan would certainly read
Yeats’s line inside out: “Though the root is one, the leaves are many.”
Frenchness does not exclude pluri-Frenchness. The difference is not of
mere structural reversal; it is much more categorical and problematic
than that. It is in essence about emphasis and prioritisation—and thus
hierarchisation—of the foundational principles of the nation/state.
While Renan’s conception of the nation admits malleable and openended national boundaries, boundaries “made and unmade” subject to
“daily plebiscite,” Yeats’s argument for rigid national frontiers should
be understood as part of his early politics of national distantiation,
differentiation and closure. Such a politics, according to Yeats, would
allow Ireland to celebrate behind fortified walls its own literary
singularity, its own cultural “insularity.” This politics of boundary
closure is beautifully rendered in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” The
metaphorical power of the poem stems from the island’s symbolic
name “Innisfree,” in which there is association of “Innis,” the Irish
word for “island,” with freedom.
sharing all the privations and marches of our young soldiers in Africa, and suffering
and fighting with them.” (Qtd in Kohn 100)
20
“France is [at once] Celtic, Iberic, and Germanic. Germany is Germanic, Celtic
and Slav. Italy is the country where the ethnographic argument is most confounded.
Gauls, Etruscans, Pelasgians, and Greeks, not to mention many other elements,
intersect in an indecipherable mixture” (Renan 14).
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Yeats’s idea of national freedom, one must repeat, is closely
associated with his idea of cultural insulation, “looking within the
borders.” By thematising Irishness, Yeats argues that Ireland would
rediscover its national identity, its own cultural specificity—that is, its
own difference from other cultures; such a political and cultural selfconsciousness constitutes a crucial phase in the process of
decolonisation. Yeats’s call for the nationalisation of artistic production
is made clear in his essay “Ireland and the Arts”:
The Greeks looked within their borders, and we, like
them, have a history fuller than any modern history of
imaginative events [...] I would have our writers and
craftsmen of many kinds master this history and these
legends [...] I admit, though in this I am moved by
some touch of fanaticism, that even when I see an old
subject written of or painted in a new way, I am yet
jealous for Cuchulain, and for Baile and Aillinn, and
for those grey mountains that still are lacking their
celebration.21
Yeats holds that the power that binds up a nation together is what
he has variously called, sometimes in mystical parlance and other times
in political terms, “Unity of Being,” “Unity of Culture,” “Unity of
Image,” Anima Mundi or Spiritus Mundi, or simply the Great Memory:
Is there a nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind
passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams
acting and reacting upon one another, no matter how
distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A man walked,
as it were, casting a shadow, or how many shadows he
cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd
of chance comers, bound together by this interchange
among streams or shadows; the Unity of Image, which
21
Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 205-9.
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I sought in national literature, being but an originating
symbol?22
In this early stage of anti-colonialism, Yeats goes so far in
shading differentness as to obliterate his own cultural and ethnic
binarity, that is, the very singularity of his own identity. In other
words, he so organically identifies with the politics of cultural
organicism that he occludes his own Anglo-Irishness. Yet it is
interesting to remark here that this early conscious self-obliteration,
say, self-negation, stands in sharp contrast to his later rhetoric of
ethnic self-aggrandisement. His later hyperbolic exaltation of AngloIrishness was, one must note, the result of political disillusionment
and marginalisation under the nascent Irish Free State.
Yeats finds Ireland’s “spiritual” and “romantic” intellect in the
vast and rich repertoire of its collective memory. This memory is
preserved against amnesia in the living culture of its peasantry.
Yeats’s cultural antiquarianism gave rise to a wide range of texts.
These texts vary from poetic and dramatic re-writings of Irish
mythologies to anthological cataloguing of fairy and folk tales. These
are mostly collected, with the immense help of Lady Gregory, in the
heart of Irish rural tranquillity. Although neither the objective nor the
scope of this research allows to survey the totality of Yeats’s works
wherein he textualises Irish geography and folklore tradition,23 it is
would suffice to refer to a few texts which best articulate this
thematic, and therefore political, shift from Yeats’s early pastoral
poetry to “Imaginative Nationalism,” as he calls it. First, Yeats’s
prosaic compilation of this legendary heritage culminated in the
publication of three major anthologies, Fairy and Folk Tales of the
Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and The Celtic
Twilight (1893). Second, Kathleen ni Houlihan represents the poet’s
most explicitly political dramatic re-inscription of this cultural
memory. Third, Yeats’s poetic aestheticisation of Irish mythical and
22
Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 263.
For further discussion of this point, see M. H. Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish
Folklore.
23
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legendary subject matters embarked him on an inexhaustible reserve
of “imaginative impulse,” a reserve that would unfailingly serve him
until the end of his poetic career. Ironically, even in a poem such as
“The Circus Animals’ Desertion” where the poet complains about a
thematic penury and expresses a disenchantment with “old themes,”
these very same old themes stand as the very raison d’être of the
poem, as foundational themes. Yeats’s worn-out themes are in the
final analysis generative. They still serve as unfailing “imaginative
impulses.” This destablising yet generative thematic penury reminds
us of Mallarmé’s obsession with poetic impuissance.24
My point is that Yeats’s aesthetic politics is articulated not
merely in the act of problematising the colonial yoke between Ireland
and England, but rather more significantly, it is voiced in the very act
of aestheticising—and thus revalorising—Irish geography, mythology
and culture. The act is not so much contestatory as it is self-laudatory
(self-ness should be understood here as both selfhood and nationselfhood: does this not ring like Mussolini’s definition of nationalism
as sacro egoismo?). Quite rare are the poems that allude to the
colonial yoke; these are especially manifest at Yeats’s early stage of
political allegorisation, particularly in The Island of Statues, The Two
Titans and The Wanderings of Oisin. The poems celebrating Irish
geography and mystical spiritism, however, abound in The Rose, The
Wind Among the Reeds and In the Seven Woods. Yet one must
pinpoint here that Yeats’s disenchantment with the rhetoric of allegory
and his subsequent move to what I call the politics of symbolism
marks a concurrent ideological metamorphosis. This metamorphosis,
however, does not by any means represent a radical shift in the poet’s
ideological history. It is rather a further radicalisation of an already
existent ideological configuration. Yeats’s shift into symbolism should
not be read as a response to a poetic whim due to mere aesthetic
playfulness. It rather answers a conscious disenchantment with a
certain mode of expression and a search for a new structure of
24
See namely his poem “Brise Marine”:
La chaire est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.
O nuits! ni la clarté déserte de ma lampe
Sur le vide papier que la blancheur défend...
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expression. Precisely because it emanates from this overdetermined
quest for a new mode of expression that this shift should be analyzed
more closely, more contrapuntally.
Yeats’s “imaginative nationalism” is closely connected with his
idea of cultural archaeology. The aim of this politics of cultural
archaeology is to excavate the “ancient wisdom” embedded in the socalled unadulterated oral memory of Irish peasantry. This memory is then
immortalised in poems. Though Yeats “naturally dislike[s] print and
paper” because he associates them with England’s utilitarian ethos, he
nonetheless finds it crucial, if not urgent, to textualise Irish orality. The
enterprise is of a medical emergency—that is, to immune Ireland against
cultural “Alzheimerism.” Inasmuch as Yeats associates textuality with
the English culture, namely journalism, he innocents Irish orality from
this capitalist mass and massive print-culture. Yeats’s manoeuvre of
association and disassociation, his political economy of demotion and
promotion, deflation and inflation is definitely as much animated by an
entrenched sense of cultural nationalism as by a strong aversion for
cultural vulgum pecus. His conception of aesthetic apprehension was
always defined as an esoteric enterprise, as a cliquesque thing. This
grounds the poet in a paradox, in an already confused and contradictory
conception of the idea of the nation and nationalism. Print-culture, as
much Anderson argues, is determinant in the dissemination of nationalist
consciousness because it creates what he calls “homogeneity” and
“empty-time spaces” which are fundamental notions for the reification of
the “imagined community.” Such a proliferation of literature/texts is a
crucial phase in the process of nationalist consciousness. The
development of print-as-commodity, Benedict Anderson argues, is the
key to the generation of wholly new ideas of “simultaneity,” that is to
say, the creation of what might be called “national unisonance”—the
nation singing in one voice. He also insightfully shows that “the
convergence of capitalism and print-technology on the fatal diversity of
human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined
community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern
nation.”25 Douglas Hyde’s call for de-Anglicising Ireland and reviving
25
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 49.
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Gaelic is a case in point.26 Without such a prolific production of national
literature Ireland would have hardly reached such a high state of
nationalist consciousness by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The number of newspapers defining themselves as “national”
or “nationalist” went up from 1 in 1871 through 13 in 1881 to 33 in
1891.27 Tom Nairn also insists that the relation between nationalism and
populism is symbiotic and inter-dependent. Because it works through
“differentia,” he says, nationalism is “invariably populist” and that “the
middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into
history; and the invitation-cards had to be written in a language they
understood.”28 Yeats’s enthusiasm for aesthetic nationalism and his
simultaneous aversion for vulgum pecus grounds his text in contradiction,
in some kind of a hazy ideation of the nation and nationalism, at least at
this stage of political consciousness. His aversion would take over in the
subsequent stage, namely, after The Playboy of the Western World
incident in 1907. This incident, along with political disappointment,
made the poet swerve more decidedly towards aesthetic and political
elitism.29 Victor Hugo’s belief in the quasi-alchemical transformative
Hyde’s rhetoric of racial purism is rendered in filial terms: “we are our father’s
sons.” The traumatic intervention of colonialism has disrupted this filial continuity
which seemingly reaches back to an immemorial past, “to the era of Cuchulain and
of Ossian.” The idea is also voiced by Yeats. Hyde goes on celebrating Irish racial
purity, and insists on the cultivation of “everything that is most racial, most
smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most Irish, because in spite of the little admixture
of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is and will ever remain Celtic at
the core.” The history of Northern Ireland has challenged this view. The issue is not
as simple as Hyde thinks. Eric Hobsbawm argues in Nation and Nationalism that “in
spite of Emmet and Wolfe Tone, the majority community in the six counties of
Ulster refused to see themselves as “Irish” in the manner of the bulk of the
inhabitants of the twenty-six counties—even of the small Protestant minority south
of the border. The assumption that a single Irish nation existed within a single
Ireland, or rather that all inhabitants of the island shared the aspiration of a single,
united and independent Fenian Ireland, proved mistaken, and while, for fifty years
after the establishment of the Irish Free State, Fenians and their sympathisers could
dismiss the division of the country as a British imperial plot and Ulster Unionists as
misguided dupes led by British agents, the past twenty years have made it clear that
the roots of a divided Ireland are not to be found in London” (135).
27
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 105.
28
Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London: NLB,
77), p. 340.
29
In “On Those That Hated ‘The Playboy of the Western World,’ 1907,” Yeats’s
disappointment with, and attack on, the “crowd” is rendered in the form of sexual
26
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powers of theatre in nation-building proved a complete failure in Catholic
Ireland.
Yeats’s politics of aesthetic nationalism is meant to accentuate
and exacerbate the boundaries of Irish singularity. Such a decolonising
stance, where culture and geography are put together at the centre of the
struggle, has been cogently analysed by Edward Said in Culture and
Imperialism. “One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance,” Said
argues, “was to reclaim, rename, and reinhabit the land. And with that
came a whole set of further assertions, recoveries, and identifications,
all of them quite literally grounded on this poetically projected base.”30
Yeats’s poems dealing with re-mapping national landscape and cultural
heritage abound. Notice, for instance, “The Man Who Dreamed of
Faeryland.” The poem not only charts the poet’s rehearsal of what will
become his symbolic system, but is also an exploration and celebration
of Irish locales. Baudelaire’s flâneur, in the poem, is now placed, not in
the Parisian urban landscape, but in the heart of Irish rurality:
He stood among a crowd at Drumahair...
He wandered by the sands of Lissadell...
He mused beside the well of Scanavan...
He slept under the hill of Lugnagall.
(P 43-44)
debasement. The crowd is emasculated of all imaginative and creative power, and is
presented as a mere bunch of hysterical “eunuchs.” This rhetoric of sensualisation
(and of sexual debasement) of course calls for further investigation, which Marjorie
Howes does quite penetratingly in Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1996). The poem runs as follows:
Once, when midnight smote the air,
Eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon great Juan riding by:
Even like these to rail and sweat
Staring upon this sinewy thigh.
(P 111)
30
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), p. 273.
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“The Hosting of the Sidhe” is another case in point:
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
(P 55)
It is clear that parallel to cultural archaeology accrues the decoloniser’s interest in the primacy of the geography in the struggle for
national self-determination.31 The impetus is “cartographic,” whereby
the anti-imperialist imagination, as a result of colonialism’s violation of
the national geography, finds it necessary “to seek out, to map, to
invent, or to discover a third nature, not pristine and pre-historical but
deriving from the deprivations of the present.”32 Yeats’s celebration of
Irish geography (e.g., Sligo, the Galway Plains and Innisfree and many
other locales, as mentioned before) is undoubtedly spurred by the same
politics of cartography. Yet it is wrong to assume that his imagined
geography, his “third nature,” is not pristine and not pre-historical, as
Edward Said presumes. Yeats’s geography has definitely a close
relation with the “deprivations of the present,” yet it is nonetheless
textualised and poeticised as an essentially pristine geography, as some
kind of a prelapsarian uterine space—in short, as a Utopian space.
Yeats’s predicament, I think, stems from his failure to rid himself of the
early rhetoric of pastoral while imagining and narrating Ireland. His
narratives of Ireland are still incrusted with residues of pastoral
See Edward Said: “If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of
anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism after all is
an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is
explored, chartered, and finally brought under control [...] Because of the presence of
the colonising outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination”
(Culture and Imperialism 271). See also Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The
Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986).
32
Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 272.
31
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romanticism, if not sentimentalism. His Ireland is presented as his new
pastoral insula sacra wherein worldly tension is allowed no space. It is
more of a utopian world than what it actually was at that time—in short,
more of an idea than fact. In Yeats, Ireland and Island transcend their
own homophony, and become interchangeable synonyms. Homophony
is converted into synonymy. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is transformed
into something of an Irish version of Thoreau’s Walden:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the
cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
(P 39)
Written in London, the poem embodies something of an exilic
romanticisation of Ireland, something of a “monochromatic”
idealisation of the “homeland,” to put it in Rushdie’s phraseology. Yet
this does not exclude the fact that Yeats’s contouring of the Man/Nature
relation in the poem somewhat still operates within his early political
economy of inflation, of overvaluing pastoral unity. Yet though the
poem occludes political tension and advances Irish space as uterine and
utopian, it nonetheless articulates a substantial change in the poet’s
early conception and thematisation of the notion of unity. The shift is
from an aesthetic idea of “unity” to a more political theorisation of the
concept. Though the poem reiterates the same poetics of exaltation of
pastoral unity, the same Thoreauistic overvaluation of nature, this time
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this unity is yet defined differently at the level of geography, aesthetics
and politics. This time it is reterritorialised in Irish landscape. It is
appropriated, nationalised. It is revalorised as a purely national
experience, an experience that is lived concretely—not virtually—in the
heart of Irish space.
According to Yeats, the relation between nation and narration,
poet and people, is symbiotic and didactic. The poet needs a people
from whose cultural memory he can cast afresh his poetic and aesthetic
archetypes, and to which he can announce his poetic/prophetic
revelations, and hence refine and upgrade its aesthetic as well as
political models. Yeats asserts that “the poet must always prefer the
community where the perfected minds express the people, to a
community that is vainly seeking to copy the perfected minds.”33 The
difference is of course antithetical since it respectively juxtaposes
Ireland against England, the organic against the fragmented, and the
rural against the urban.
Narrating the nation, or nationalising the narratorial act, does not
only serve Ireland with a cultural and historical individuality, distancing
it from a proximate, if not overlapping England, but also provides the
nation with new aesthetic symbols and new cultural and mythohistorical archetypes. Thanks to this new mythos the nation is elevated
from “mob” to “people.” Such is the power of Art. Theatre has,
according to Yeats, this quasi-alchemical power to transform dissonant
individuals into a consonant people, anarchic “crowds” to an organic
“community.” Where “people” is always an epithet for Ireland, “mob”
is most often associated with England. Yeats’s Manichean mob/people
binary opposition serves as a paradigm under which other oppositions
such as rural/urban, organic/inorganic, unity/fragmentedness, are
classified. In stark opposition to English urbanism, for instance, Yeats
pictures the Galway Plains as the Irish locus classicus of prelapsarian
unity, where people and poet are bound up together in an organic
community, and where past and present form an undisrupted
continuum. Notice that concurrent to Yeats’s sanitisation of the relation
33
Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 214.
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between poet and people in Ireland runs his satanisation of the very
same relation in England:
There is still in truth upon these great level plains a
people, a community bound together by imaginative
possessions, by stories and poems which have grown
out of its own life, and by a past of great passions
which can still waken the heart to imaginative action
[...] Does not the greatest poetry always require a
people to listen to? England or any other country
which takes its tunes from the great cities and gets its
taste from schools and not from old custom may have
a mob, but it cannot have a people.34
Yeats’s judgement is intransigent and assertive. England—
coloniser, moderniser and liberal democracy—becomes the target par
excellence for his hatred, the epitome of all that he rejected in modern
capitalism with the charge of inauthenticity, philistinism and
mercantilism.
Yeats’s politics of aesthetic nationalism, or “imaginative
nationalism,” is inextricable from his idea of authenticity. Not only
does exploring Irish mythical and spiritual heritage empower the
young Irish ephebe with an authentic voice, which would shield him
from metropolitan competitors, but would also enhance the nation’s
own authenticity by highlighting the cultural and historical contours of
its own differentness. Nationalism works through differentia, Nairn
argues. In the same way as Celticism protects the Irish artist from the
Swimburns, Rossettis and Brownings of England, it immunises the
nation against dissolution and disintegration into a powerful adjacent
England. Yeats’s plea for Gaelicising artistic production is a call for
decolonising the signifier as well as the mind. Conor Cruise O’Brien
has a completely different interpretation of this call. He asserts that it
34
Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 213.
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is essentially opportunistic, cunningly self-serving.35 The argument,
though quite attractive, is of course debatable. Elizabeth Cullingford
painstakingly debunks this assumption in Yeats, Ireland and Fascism.
To go back to our point, we can assume that though corrosive and
self-defeating in the long run to Yeats, this call nonetheless mobilised,
one must remark, a sweeping cultural movement in Ireland, the Irish
Renaissance, a movement that inexorably pushed forward towards
independence.
Yeats’s politics of nationalism as such is ineluctably selfdefeating. The poet’s recourse to historicising the so-called Irish
organic past and culture resulted in shutting him out of this history. The
cultural and historical hyphenation of his own identity is exacerbated
and discredited during the process.36 In other words, Yeats emphasis on
re-reading Ireland’s mythical and historical archives had ineluctably led
to the marginalisation of Anglo-Irishness on the grounds of historical,
ethnic and cultural inauthenticity—that is, “non-belongingness.” This
marginalisation is further enhanced by exposing Anglo-Irish
collaborationism with metropolitan power, namely during the Penal
Laws.
Yeats’s politics of nationalism is also self-corrosive. The poet’s
hankering after an essentialised identity had sealed him off in an
ideological cul-de-sac. His politics of “imaginative nationalism” is
governed by the same quest for “unity” which is characteristic of his
early pastoral poetry. Though the quest is now given a more overt
political articulation, it nonetheless deep down reiterates the same
early rhetoric of pastoral organicism. It is a different inscription of the
poet’s overall quest for essentialism, be it occultist (“Unity of Being”),
or aesthetic (“Unity of Image”), or political (“Unity of Culture”).
Yeats reminds us that arts are “to lead us back upon our journey by
filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things.”37
It is clear the project is essentialist, purist. Such an essentialist quest
Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W. B.
Yeats” in N. Jeffares and K. W. G. Cross, eds., In Excited Reverie: A Centenary
Tribute to William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 (London: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 207-77.
36
For further investigation of this idea, see Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of
Yeats, Eliot and Pound (London: Cambridge UP, 1991).
37
Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 193.
35
31
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can be animated only by the rhetoric of elegy, that is, by the politics of
conservative, if not reactionary, nostalgia. It is evident that Yeats’s
idea of organic essentialism operates in consonance with the general
ideological structure of modernism. The idea is first advanced by the
Romantics, and then is further radicalised, politicised, by the
modernists.
Behind this politics of nostalgia Yeats seeks to “re-establish the
old, confident, joyous world.”38 This early elegiac tone, one must
note, is found at work in Yeats’s subsequent political verse. The line
“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone” in “September 1913,” for
instance, strikingly resonates the exordium of the pastoral “The Song
of the Happy Shepherd”:
The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy.
(P 7)
Structural, rather than circumstantial, constitutive and not
conjunctural, is Yeats’s poetics of elegy. It permeates his text from the
beginning to the end. Such a poetics is quintessentially governed by the
metaphysics of a lost community; that is, by a sense of loss of a
prelapsarian “ancient” unity. This feeling is further accentuated by the
colonial re-mapping—and therefore disfiguration—of local culture and
geography. This makes the poet place the present and its deprivations in
sharp contradiction with a prefallen state, a state that is imagined as
pristine, “joyous” and communally organic. Yet what is important to
notice is that Yeats’s poetics of elegy or, better still, politics of
nostalgia, transcends mere national consciousness and becomes an
articulation of a broader consciousness, grounding itself within the
general fin-de-siècle existential malaise vis-à-vis modernity’s euphoria
over material and technological progress. The Yeatsian text, as Michael
North has aptly shown, works within that “‛general’ [...] aesthetic
modernism [which] could be defined by its antagonism to the other
38
Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 249.
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elements of modernity: rationalism, material progress, liberal
democracy.”39 Yeats’s modernism, in this sense, is a reaction against
modernity’s “filthy tide.” Even more, the Yeatsian text reflects par
excellence the modern paradox. It exacerbates the schizophrenic
disruption within modernity’s psyche, if we may say so. The Yeatsian
text, in other words, marvellously demonstrates modernity’s
psychology of bipolarity; that is, a psychology caught up between
euphoria and dysphoria, elation and depression. Notice modernity’s
exaltation over its material progress and modernism’s de-idealisation
and demonisation of this progress. The signifying yoke between the
signified and the signifier is disrupted. Far from being complacent of,
and accomplice to, this progress, modernism debunked modernity with
the charge of cultural alienation, social atomisation and political
disunity. The “body,” healthy and athletic, the “family,” organic and
traditional, the “tree,” deeply rooted in the soil (all these are strikingly
Yeats’s most celebrated and recurrent symbols)—all these become
dominant metaphors in the rhetoric of modernism(s). Italian Futurism is
an aberrant exception.40 Luddism had become by now old history. It is
overcome by the irreversible metastatic growth of the machine. Italian
Futurism records the shift from the Luddite destructive and fanatic hate
of the machine to a violent adoration of it. Whether nostalgic or
proleptic (the case of Futurism), whether the stance is of contemptuous
rejection or of hysterical adoption, the modernist discourse records the
modern subject’s malaise and disorientation vis-à-vis the machine. To
put
it
differently,
anxiety
erupts
into
the
relation
subjectivity/objectivity. The subject is overwhelmed by the increasing
growth of technological artificiality. “Authenticity” is put at stake, and
39
North, The Political Aesthetic, pp. 1-2.
The tone of Italian Futurism, voiced by Filippo Marinetti in the Futurist Manifesto,
is definitely not elegiac. It is rather hysterically celebratory of the machine with its
perfect forms and breathtaking velocity. The “car” becomes Marinetti’s symbol of the
vertiginous pleasure engendered by modern technological paraphernalia. In brief, it
becomes a celebrated fetish that is closely related to what might be called the erotics of
self-annihilation. Car speed engenders dizzying pleasure and yet risks one’s life. The
pleasure of course derives from this risk-taking, from this flirtation with death.
Paradoxically enough, the artificial machine expresses more genuinely the subject’s
most hidden desires and drives. The irony is: nothing better authenticates
“authenticity” than “artificiality.” Romanticism is reversed. With the Futurists, the
Muse is stripped of her flowery diadem, and wears a metal helmet.
40
33
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becomes the centre d’animation of the modern debates about
subjectivity. The experience will become of hysterical order in the
postmodern condition, if we bank of course on Fredric Jameson’s
claim. Such a relational dysfunction and disruption is endemic to
industrial and late capitalism. The list of anti-modern modernists is
long: Yeats, Eliot, Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Lewis Whydham,
Nietzsche, Barrès, Maurras, to name but a few, can be advanced as its
most virulent opponents.
34