Yeats and Revisionism: A Half Century of the Dancer and the Dance

Yeats and Revisionism

Yeats and Revisionism

A Half-Century of the Dancer and the Dance

By Daniel T. O’Hara

Anthem Press

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To

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Dancer and Dance: Yeats’s Romantic Modernism and Critical Revisionism

1. The Irony of Tradition in W.B. Yeats’s Autobiography: Dialectical Hermeneutics Beyond the New Criticism

2. The Specialty of Self-Victimization: On Antithetical Revisionism

3. Yeats in Theory: Blackmur, Bloom, De Man and Hartman

4. The Divisions of Yeats Studies Continued

5. Modernism’s Global Identity: On the Dogmatic Imagination in Yeats, Freud and Beyond

6. Yeats with Lacan: Toward the Real Modernism

7. The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions and Recent Lacanian Studies

8. And All the Ceremonies to Come: Of High Modernism, Visionary Violence and Post-Marxism

Afterword: The Reader in Yeats

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

All these essays originally were published before but have been selected and submitted to revision for purposes of this book. I thank the editors and publishers of these publications for permission to republish, albeit in a different format, materials originally appearing therein.

Dancer and Dance: Romantic Modernism and Critical Theory. Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 85, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2002): 361–80.

The Irony of Tradition and W. B. Yeats’s Autobiography: An Essay in Dialectical Hermeneutics, boundary 2 5, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 679–710.

The Specialty of Self-Victimization in Recent Yeats Studies, Contemporary Literature 27, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 285–89.

"Yeats in Theory." In Post-structuralist Readings of English Poetry, eds. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris, 58–80 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

The Divisions of Yeats Studies, Journal of Modern Literature 24, nos. 3/4, (Summer 2001): 511–19.

Modernism’s Global Identity: On the Dogmatic Imagination in Yeats, Freud, and Beyond. Journal of Modern Literature 25, nos. 3/4 (Summer 2002): 1–13.

Yeats With Lacan. Journal of Modern Literature 26, nos. 3/4 (2003): 128–35.

The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions, and Recent Lacanian Studies. boundary 2 29, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 87–108.

"And Of All the Ceremonies to Come: Of High Modernism and Visionary Violence." boundary 2 38, no. 3 (August 2011): 147–64.

Preface

The essays, review-essays and brief reviews collected here were written over the last half-century and published in various leading publications of their moment. In relationship to Yeats, they trace the dance of contemporary theory-inflected criticism—its practices and personalities (including my own) over that period. For different reasons of space (both of this book and of each short individual piece) a few of them have been dropped. But their significances are either already evident in other longer pieces or are captured throughout in revision.

The major theme of the book is exemplified by Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. It is one of four poems he wrote on Major Robert Gregory, the only son of Lady Gregory, Irish poet, dramatist, folklorist and Yeats’s long-time patron. The other three poems include Shepherd and Goatherd; In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, an elegy aspiring to overtop Milton’s Lycidas; and Reprisals, which was first published posthumously, as much about the seemingly endless troubles of Ireland due to British rule and its aftermath, as about a bitter remembrance of Gregory’s loss. As it is in the public domain, here is Irish Airman entire:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.¹

What Yeats identifies in his later work of poetry and visionary imaginings on the tragic human condition (especially in modernity) as death-in-life and life-in-death, is herein dramatized. The sublime moment of singular, individualizing feeling—A lonely impulse of delight—is the dance of death, as Holbein, Strindberg and Freud might envision as represented in their works. All conditions—national, local, global, gender, sexual, medical or what-have-you—pale before what Yeats, as in most of his middle and later poems, puts front and center on the stage of this remarkable poem. This is that lonely impulse of delight, a motivating feeling that chooses activation in a work—flying into battle and oblivion, revising a poem into exhaustion and perfection, a systematic revisionary reading of a precursor’s text—that engenders forms of violence or at least a living amidst such violence, but too often a final, fatal violence, a Gnostic nihilism. The rest of life before or after, as Yeats ventriloquizes this official flying Ace Gregory as articulating, as he plunges downward to earth in his last air battle in World War I (WW I), is a waste of breath. The balance of these final lines achieves a simple perfection that enact in their performance the beauty and terror of such death: In balance with this life, this death. Despite the poem’s visionary clarity, uncertainty still surrounds whether this event was heroic tragedy, a case of friendly fire or simply sheer accident.²

Yeats’ critics in the second half of the twentieth century and into the present moment have sought to reinscribe this lonely impulse of delight in the variety of critical theoretical dances traced in this book, however costumed or personified their chosen dancer may be, as here the impetuous self-destructive Anglo-Irish scion of a legendary clan: I balanced all, brought all to mind. This celebrated young gentleman, or any figure whose mask is closer to the Yeatsian facial lineaments, demonstrate the expense of the creative spirit in whatever guise it appears.

What can ground Yeats or his readers, given such a bleak prospect? Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931 may hold a clue in its second and third stanzas:

Upon the border of that lake’s a wood

Now all dry sticks under a wintry sun,

And in a copse of beeches there I stood,

For Nature’s pulled her tragic buskin on

And all the rant’s a mirror of my mood:

At sudden thunder of the mounting swan

I turned about and looked where branches break

The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.

Another emblem there! That stormy white

But seems a concentration of the sky;

And, like the soul, it sails into the sight

And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;

And is so lovely that it sets to right

What knowledge or its lack had set awry,

So arrogantly pure, a child might think

It can be murdered with a spot of ink.³

The poem throughout sounds like an elegy for its subject, Lady Gregory and her estate and woods. But as the poem’s awkward dating underscores (another published version has 1932), Yeats’ great friend and patron is not yet dead. Her death will occur in April 1932. So, the poem must be a prophetic elegy, and as such, not only for her and all she represents to Yeats and Irish history, but also for Yeats himself, as the final stanza declares:

We were the last romantics—chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;

Whatever’s written in what poets name

The book of the people; whatever most can bless

The mind of man or elevate a rhyme;

But all is changed, that high horse riderless,

Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.⁴

Yeats’ complicated argument is that knowledge, present or absent, does not do what a traditional sublime beauty shared among friends can do: bless / The mind of man or elevate a rhyme. Hauntingly, another of Yeats’ mysterious swans, which will climb the air or share in the cold companionable stream, drifts upon a darkening flood. We readers share in such inspiriting drifting.⁵

Notes

1 W. B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Forsees His Death, Poets.org, accessed March 15, 2022, https://poets.org/poem/irish-airman-foresees-his-death.

2 Mark Allen, McQueen Calvert, Catherine Overend and Newton Jennings, Facing the Reality of Death: A Critical Analysis of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, Washington and Lee University, accessed March 15, 2022, http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group1/index.htm.

3 W. B. Yeats, Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931, Poetry.com, added May 13, 2011, https://www.poetry.com/poem/39307/coole-park-and-ballylee,1931.

4 Ibid.

5 See Jahan Ramazani, Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 237–45.

Introduction: Dancer and Dance: Yeats’s Romantic Modernism and Critical Revisionism

It would be facile to claim, as my title may appear to do, that the momentous transformation in literary studies that Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image and Jean-Michael Rabaté’s The Future of Theory permit us to reflect critically upon comes down to a mere shift in point of view. More must be involved than a change from a focus on the individual author suffering in isolation to produce his or her radiant work of beauty with an uncanny life all its own, to an investigation of the sublime spectacle of all the minute processes, however identified and analyzed, by which any subject is formed (and deformed) as it deposits its traces in the real or virtual archives of the present moment. Nonetheless, for purposes of initial clarification at least, I think it is accurate to say that a general shift of this sort, from placing the critical perspective on the dancer (so to speak) to placing it on the dance (a shift from aesthetic product to social process), has indeed occurred in the 45 years between the original publication of Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image in 1957 and Jean-Michel Rabaté’s The Future of Theory in 2002. Ironically or not, the imagery of dancer and dance, so central to Kermode’s study (even more so than that of the tree, the obvious symbol of Romantic organicism), does reappear in Rabaté’s book, as we shall see, at a crucial moment in its argument.

But before opening my own argument, I want to present the most famous passage celebrating the vision of dancer and dance in modernist literature, the concluding stanza of W. B. Yeats’s magisterial meditation on the complex interchanges between life and art, Among School Children:

Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomed,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?¹

Now is not the occasion to do a complete reading of this visionary scene of dancer and dance, although some interesting unanswered questions about it could be raised: Where do dancer and tree suddenly come from, their having made no earlier appearance in the poem at all? Is Salome (aka Herodias) warping into the classroom scene where the poem is set from Oscar Wilde’s decadent or Mallarmé’s Symboliste dramatic masterpieces? Is the druidic Tree of Life popping up now between the desks right in the aisle where Yeats, the Irish senator and unofficial inspector of schools, is standing to witness one of the schoolgirls perform a traditional dance in his honor? Or has the coldly violent masked dancer figure of his own late plays, carrying in her arms the geometrical symbol representing John the Baptist’s severed head, come already into his prophetic field of vision? Whatever the answers to my questions may be, I am now offering this classic modernist scene of dancer and dance here (first) in order to orient the reader to the stakes involved in what, after Kermode’s critical understanding, I am calling Romantic modernism’s investment in the organic ideal of aesthetic unity. For here in this poem’s final scene is the long-sought-for imaginative fusion, while the magical artistic performance lasts, of person and pattern, flesh and form (among life’s other antinomies). In this moment of epiphany there arises the shining appearance of a perfected unity of being, an ironic, even paradoxical poise of style that feels like an entire world in itself. According to Kermode’s justly celebrated Romantic Image, this kind of momentary vision of eternity in time (embodied in the dancer symbol) haunts the monumental achievements of literary modernism. Now that this necessary prelude has been given, I can usefully open my commentary on Kermode’s classic of modernist criticism with the central paragraph in his epilogue written for the 2001 edition:

Modern academic criticism is, as I’ve already remarked, so abundant that it would not be easy to provide a general account of how attitudes to the themes discussed in Romantic Image, and the ways they are talked about, have changed. Over the past thirty or forty years, criticism, as expounded, for instance, in the eighth volume of Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, has concerned itself for the most part with varieties of structuralism and post-structuralism, with hermeneutics and phenomenology and speech-act theory. Traditional criticism has been subjected to what a contributor to that volume describes as a relentless destabilization induced by various kinds of structural analysis.²

Kermode continues by singling out what has happened to the notion of organic unity as his prime example of this process of relentless destabilization of traditional criticism. This aesthetic assumption, so essential to Romantic [and modernist] thought, is transformed, Kermode says apropos of the contemporary scene, into something more like an assumption that works of literature possess [nothing more than] internal regularities.³ Kermode’s book, of course, had been the first to show that the Romantic notion of organic unity generally informs the aesthetic and critical practices of literary modernism, often despite a few major figures’ contrary claims (such as those of T. S. Eliot). He now goes on to say that when that Romantic aesthetic assumption is treated as, at most, a unity of devices (rather than an imaginative organism), it is then transformed into its opposite, a purely conventional mechanism, something quite like a machine, which is for the Romantics the antithesis of the organism.⁴ In the contemporary perspective of critical theory, therefore, literary modernism can now appear merely as the bad conscience of Romantic organic aesthetics. Given such a view, Kermode ruefully confesses, his literary history of the Romantic organic assumption, as embodied in the figure of the seductively impassive female dancer, must seem old fashioned. Romantic Image traces the history of this figure from Coleridge (in particular) and the German Romantics, through Pater, the English aesthetes and decadents and the French Symbolists, to Yeats, Pound and the other modernist masters.

Today, Kermode laments a bit, it can only appear as productive of quaint formulae unable to trouble the mind of the modern academic critic.⁵ According to the Romantic model, the isolated individual talent courts and suffers alike his outcast status so as to produce as the ideal object of his work of genius, the Romantic Image, which has its own uncanny dancer-like vitality. However, the informed academic professional now knows this as merely the aesthetic ideology of Romantic modernism writ large. It is in fact for such a good professional now no more than the result of the processes of textual, sexual and cultural mystification, which hosts of deconstructive, feminist and cultural studies critics have debunked long ago. To put it in shorthand form, all the old dancers have already been dissolved into their choreographies of the dance and dutifully deposited in the increasingly digital archives under the rubric of The Last Western Delusion (Dead White Male).

As Kermode wryly summarizes all such institutional developments, university teachers […] are [today] passionate about theory but not about poetry.⁶ Simply to recognize this sea-change in critical sensibility as I have just done, however, is not in any way to prevent the foundational paradox of the Romantic Image and of Romantic Modernism from self-destructing in Kermode’s text right before the reader’s eyes. The Romantic Image, as uncannily embodied in the figure of the dancer, is deathly (and always potentially deadly) in her praise of life. It occupies an ideal mental space that is projected, at some pains to the author, by the highly wrought and polished symbolic structures of the text. Here is just one sample of this paradox exploding under the pressure of Kermode’s own critical scrutiny, taken practically at random, from the middle of the book. After noting the vitality of the Romantic image, Kermode also notes that:

The Image has nothing to do with organic life, though it may appear to have; its purity of outline is possible in a sphere far removed from that in which humanity constantly obtrudes its preoccupations […] and on this point of the paradox of making a dead face stand for what is most vital in art.⁷

As this critical reader will attest, Kermode has no explanations to give, only more assertions of the paradox to offer. The impassive face of the female dancer in her free-form dancing has as its model, as Kermode himself mentions when he treats Pater and the aesthetes and decadents, not so much the traditional masks of religious rites and ghost-theaters from folk and heroic cultures around the world, as, more literally, the face of the dead woman. In this rather ghastly light, the dancer figure assumes the status of the quintessential model for the femme fatale type. Such decadent origins of Romantic agony, as it haunts innumerable modernist masterworks, does indeed express a paradox but one that requires explanation. Kermode’s repeated invocations throughout the book to his authoritative source, Mario Praz’s classic literary history of the topic, The Romantic Agony, cannot now suffice. But Kermode declines to pursue further what he terms the other side of the Romantic Image, either its coarsening sensational popularizations in detective fiction and film noir, or their diverse pathological dimensions in authorial and audience psychology. This is not to say that he fails to note them, in passing, throughout the book. He does discuss briefly here (and at greater but purely scholarly depth in a long article for a theater journal at the time) the fashionable rage for Loie Fuller’s and Jane Avril’s dancing and the personally self-destructive aspects of the artist’s quest for the Romantic Image. This fatal dimension of the Romantic Image is what Yeats in Ego Dominus Tuus identifies as the bitter portion in the world of his tragic generation of poete maudits, which consists solely in dissipation and despair.⁸ But Kermode does not explain why this must be the case, nor does he follow up. Neither matters of class nor issues of pathology are delved into: Bad form, you know, in 1957. The major difference between his time and ours thereby makes its appearance in this genteel gesture of refusal, a gesture that itself is now always refused. Neither the conceptual contradiction ambiguously expressed in the ironic paradox of the dead face of the femme fatale standing for what is most vital in art, nor the social and cultural causes for the formation of that contradiction are any longer permitted by contemporary criticism to withstand analysis. Whether one turns to Paul de Man’s deconstruction of the organic aesthetic model for the literary text, or to feminist and New Historicist critiques and contextual placements of the ideology of the Romantic Image, the contemporary critic appears to be progressively unable to suspend disbelief long enough to take with all imaginative seriousness, whether rhetorically or literally, Yeats’s famous, tragically playful question at the end of Among School Children, that one I cited at the beginning of this essay, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (221).

Consequently, the Romantic Image of the female dancer with a death mask for a face whirling away in an increasingly frenzied vortex of the dance can no longer serve as a paradigm for the ideal organic unity to which every text is assured to aspire. Moreover, this loss of the Romantic Image as textual paradigm of formal unity has not been replaced by any other general model