"W. B. Yeats: Theorizing the Irish Nation" in Yeats and Postcolonialism, edited by Deborah Fleming

11/02/2015 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). 11 11/02/2015 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. 12 11/02/2015 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 13 11/02/2015 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. 14 11/02/2015 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. 15 11/02/2015 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 16 11/02/2015 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). 17 11/02/2015 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 18 11/02/2015 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 19 11/02/2015 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). 20 11/02/2015 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. 21 11/02/2015 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 22 11/02/2015 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... 23 11/02/2015 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. 24 11/02/2015 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 25 11/02/2015 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. 26 11/02/2015 “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 27 11/02/2015 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 28 11/02/2015 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. 29 11/02/2015 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. 30 11/02/2015 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 11/02/2015 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. 32 11/02/2015 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 11/02/2015 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