Yeats The Poet

The Measures of Difference

Edward Larrissy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317866657
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

This work addresses Yeats's "antinomies", seeing their origin and structure in his divided Anglo-Irish inheritance and examining the notion of measure. It then explores how this relates to freemasonry, Celticism and Orientalism and looks at the Blakean esoteric language of contrariety and outline which provided Yeats with the vocabulary of self-understanding.

1

INTRODUCTION: MATTER AND METHODOLOGY

This book seeks to examine the interaction between Yeats’s divided Anglo-Irish inheritance and his aes-thetic. The latter comprises the central questions of his poetry, for it would be no more misleading than most generalisations to say that art is his subject. That Yeats’s aesthetic exhibits his characteristic doubleness is well known, and the fact has been the subject of a valuable recent book.¹ But I hope that I shall be able to shed fresh light on this topic by considering it with the aid of concepts of difference derived from contemporary literary theory (including deconstruction) and through an investigation of some key elements in his divided Anglo-Irish identity. By this I do not refer only or chiefly to Yeats’s sense of the value of Georgian Ireland and ‘the people of Burke and of Grattan’, but rather to certain institutions and attitudes of the Anglo-Irish in the nineteenth century, especially as these bear on Celticism. It is not a new thought that Yeats considered himself fitted by birth – better fitted than his Catholic social inferiors – to be the purveyor and translator of an exotic Celtic quality and an ancient wisdom, through the medium of poetic norms he perhaps understandably thought of as largely ‘English’ in character, or at least categoris-able in relation to the norms of the English tradition. I realise that this is a formulation which will not please everybody; but I hope that I can show that in his early work Yeats thinks of ‘measure’ in relation (though not exclusively) to an English, modern or cosmopolitan mode; an affinity with the ‘immeasurable’, by contrast, he sees as ancient and Celtic. I mean ‘English’ to go with ‘modern’ here, for Seamus Deane has reminded us that for Yeats, the special quality of the Irish was maintained to the degree that ‘they had remained loyal to those old beliefs and that old eloquence which had formerly characterized the seventeenth-century English’.² These sentiments are distant cousins of ‘dissociation of sensibility’, and they imply that ‘The Curse of Cromwell’ descended on both islands. W. J. McCormack reminds us of this fact when he prints a version of ‘A General Introduction for my Work’ in which Yeats quotes a stanza from the ‘Cromwell’ poem, which is full of echoes from the Gaelic, as a testimony to the Irish bitterness he feels towards England. But Yeats goes on, in a typi-cal reversion on his first thought:

Then I remind myself that though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.³

I shall not attempt to convey here the subtlety of McCormack’s commentary, but simply observe that the Cromwellian malady came from England and, despite appearances, did most lasting damage there. Yeats was conscious that alienation had infected the modern English poets from whom he had learnt, and that implied self-conscious ‘measure’. The ancient Irish poets had managed a measure less self-conscious because in touch with the ‘unmeasured’ (‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’). By the time he came to write ‘The Statues’ this attitude and this use of terms had changed, of course, in ways which are themselves worth noting. But my starting-point and point of reference will be Yeats’s early conviction that the Anglo-Irish poet could mediate felicitously between Celtic qualities, which might on their own be too dishevelled and wandering, and English or modern ones which might become so measured as to be merely mechanical. But complexity attends these matters and conditions my use of terms, so I should like to take this opportunity of outlining in advance ‘what is most difficult’.

I DIFFERENCE

I have already declared both an indebtedness to deconstruction and an interest in Yeats’s cultural identity: both of these areas of concern lead to the word ‘difference’. Many would regard this as a strange marriage. Yet such an overlap is not uncommon in this late age of theory. Nevertheless, one can almost hear that useful old jest: What is the difference between difference and différance, and what difference does it make? Certainly the overlap can create confusion, for both interpreter and reader. As Michèle Barrett remarks, with respect to the use of the word in feminist criticism, it is surprising ‘what can be fitted into this capacious hold-all of a concept’ and not always clear what is ‘the meaning of the term in different contexts’.⁴ She goes on to abstract from this confusion what she takes to be intelligible usages in feminist criticism: (1) sexual difference; (2) difference in Saussurean linguistics and methodologies derived from them, including deconstruction; and (3) the recognition, or experience, of sexual difference.⁵ She has also a further and unrelated worry, and this is simply that de-construction is unable or unwilling to offer adequate accounts of the relationship between power and discourse.⁶ In broad terms., the following chapters offer accounts of, and relationships between, cultural difference and différance. I hope that the awareness of culture here offered is sufficiently sensitive to relationships of power.

The foregoing paragraphs assume what is frequently and understandably assumed: that the Anglo-Irish identity is self-consciously divided and alienated, and that Yeats’s quest for Unity of Being has to be seen as conditioned by this fact even as it seeks to overcome the malady. ‘Difference’ in my title, therefore, draws on the way in which this word may refer to problems of identity; but it does so with reference to the cultural forms amidst which Yeats lived. Yet I do mean the word to comprise also those phenomena of language and signification that Derrida denotes by the word différance – deferral and differentiality – and I do find some of the terms in which he discusses these phenomena useful in my own analyses. As in my book on Blake, then, I find that a divided inheritance brings with it divided discourses and may entail an acute self-consciousness about the way in which language and form lead away from unity even as they struggle to encompass it.⁷ And as in that book, I find a number of specifically Derridean concepts, such as that of the hymen, illuminating in analysing certain images (‘the red-rose bordered hem’ and ‘the broken wall’ in Yeats) which are the sites for an exploration of ambivalence about the sign: an ambivalence that recognises difference and deferral even as it attributes plenitude of meaning. Crazy Jane’s assertion that ‘nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent’, which represents some of Yeats’s most daring thinking, can fruitfully be seen in the same light.

In analysing such images I am following at least two tendencies which have for long been leading away from the old orthodoxy of practical criticism: one is the Yale-deconstructionist tendency to interrogate images and, of course, words and phrases, in terms of fields within the poem which tend either more towards unity or more towards the subversion of unity and to correlate their findings with thematic elements which tend in either of these two direc-tions. The other tendency is the cultural critic’s readiness to include what used to be thought of as ‘external’ to the poem. In any case, Yeats’s poetry has a strong propositional content, even when some of the propositions he makes disagree with others in the same volume. It is not possible to prescind what Yeats thought he was asserting at any one time from questions about form and imagery. But in this respect he only illustrates a more or less general condition of texts, and thus of criticism. As Theodor Wolpers says, writing in a recent collection called The Return of Thematic Criticism:

Of course, the relation between motifs and themes and their mutual contributions to the total ‘meaning’ of a work may be very complex. But as with all aesthetic phenomena, abstraction and concretion are only two sides of the same coin. Every motif can be turned into a theme or given thematic dimensions if emphasized and generalized appropriately. And each abstract theme can be made a motif if adequately particularized.⁸

Nevertheless, it would be vicious to ignore or relegate the striking formal and linguistic exemplifications of différance in Yeats’s work. These have been the subject of some ground-breaking recent studies. Hazard Adams, in The Book of Yeats’s Poems, builds on and differs from Hugh Kenner’s contention that Yeats was trying to write ‘The Sacred Book of the Arts’.⁹ Like Kenner, Adams notes the careful placing of poems within books and the self-consciousness about the juxtaposition of consecutive books. But Adams emphasises the dynamic, divided and shiftingly antithetical character of Yeats’s Book.¹⁰ In the same spirit, the following pages will advert to Yeats’s ambivalence about the Book and to some of the textual effects of that ambivalence.

Among these effects one may note in particular the construction of a book as a series of deferrals and quotations which veers away from some lost original plenitude. Warwick Gould, starting from the recognition that the first version of A Vision uses framing devices suggested by the Arabian Nights, reaches the conclusion that A Vision, considered as a project encompassing the two versions, is ‘a series of provisional statements’.¹¹ Although my book is chiefly concerned with the poetry, it will be necessary to consider Yeats’s occult writings. In any case, the character of the latter provides a suggestive analogy with, and a strong reminder of the nature of, some of the poems. For these also evince a self-reflexive interest in writing. A case in point: Stan Smith has done for Yeats what Paul de Man did for Shelley in terms of ‘the structure of forgetting’.¹² In ‘The Tower’ Smith finds ‘double forgetting’, a ‘curtailing of the fiction in the course of its repetition’ and ‘perpetual unfinishedness of the narrated subject’.¹³

One of the ways in which Yeats’s books differ from the image of the Sacred Book is in their foregrounding of conflict, of contrary ideas and attitudes, of ‘antinomies’: we move from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, where the soul copes with the decay of the body by clapping its hands and preparing to turn into a mechanical bird, to the next poem, ‘The Tower’, where the speaker cries out in anguish and desperation against the process of ageing. We move from one truth to its ‘counter-truth’. Yeats takes from Blake, and from the occult and alchemical tradition, the notion of ‘contraries’, and with it the idea, to be found in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that ‘Without contraries is no progression’.¹⁴ An energetic investment in contrary positions, all the while adopting, in his mature phase, a strong poetic voice, is in some ways a curious enterprise. Yeats might say, with Dr Jekyll, in a novel that attracted the attention of Madame Blavatsky, ‘I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in deadly earnest.’¹⁵ As a principle of writing, this offers a limited analogy with aspects of postmodernism: Ashbery’s voices, for instance, often sententious and authoritative, but detached from notions of objective truth. This view of Yeats makes me sympathetic to the work of Joseph Adams, who closely analyses the syntax of the poems, finding in them the cultivation of an undecidability which belongs to the realm of difference.¹⁶ Yet, as David Pierce astutely remarks, ‘The idea of endless play … needs further attention, for it is not absolutely certain that this leads to “difference”: it could be incorporated into a Platonic theory or into Yeats’s belief that he needed to hammer his thoughts into unity.’¹⁷ I would put it the other way round, though: it is not certain that ‘difference’ leads to ‘endless’ play. For my sad part, I am not sure what ‘endless’ play would look like. I am quite certain that Yeats does not resemble it. ‘Limited difference’ may sound like a banal joke, but the phrase has a certain usefulness. And ‘measured difference’ will be a term I shall use on occasion, and which I hope to be able to invest with a particular sense. But to put it in general terms, Yeats adopts contrary positions, but they are chosen from a finite and closely related series derived from his Anglo-Irish inheritance and the aesthetic debates which, for him, were intertwined with it.

Nevertheless, Adams makes a good practical point about the behaviour of syntax in a number of Yeats’s poems: that is to say, he gives a detailed account of the way contraries are at work even within individual poems (let alone as between poem and poem) underneath the superficial effect of unity provided by the strong voice. A similar thought has been expressed, with non-technical trenchancy, by Robin Skelton in his book Celtic Contraries:

Yeats deliberately played literary and anti-literary, rhetorical and vulgar, ways of speech off against one another. The result was often a poem that seemed to be spoken by a man who was at once an aristocrat and a peasant, a high priest and the man next door, a man, in other words, capable of many viewpoints, many perspectives.¹⁸

I offer below some parallel observations, especially about parts of The Green Helmet volume. At the same time, I think that the energy Yeats invests in procuring the effect of the strong voice is itself worthy of study and comment. Such an approach is not at all at odds with that of Adams and others, who find ‘difference’ within the poems. The strong voice is one of Yeats’s gestures at unity, a unity attempted out of what defeats unity. That strength is given priority over logic or coherence. As R. B. Kershner says, reading Yeats is like listening to ‘a speaker who uses the artifices of rhetoric … in ways that continually frustrate a reader’s desire for syntactic logic’.¹⁹ This is the effect that Adams refers to as The Masks of Syntax. Variety of registers and rhetorical force: it is a combination most obviously to be found, among Yeats’s forebears, in Byron, whom I assume to be a very important influence.

But despite all these thoughts about différance it will already, perhaps, be clear, from my initial remarks about cultural history, that I must be chary of referring to my account as deconstruction-ist. This is not because of the element of historical description in it as such: in my opinion those who think Derrida implacably rules out every activity under this heading have misunderstood Derrida. The point is partly that too much weight is here given to reconstructing Yeats’s texts as historical phenomena. But it is also that at least in his later poetry Yeats is, in a sense, writing about aspects of deconstruction. He is still taking up firm positions of various kinds, but he seems already to be aware of some of the possibilities addressed by Derrida. I would venture that this is scarcely surprising: Derrida is a post-Romantic philosopher in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, some of whose more adventurous de-constructions are performed on (or guided by?) Mallarmé. These facts seem to me to help to explain why deconstruction has expended so much energy on Romantic and post-Romantic texts. In any case, Yeats prevents the critic everywhere; and this is true even in the case of his notorious political contradictions – which is not ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Matter and Methodology
• Part One: The Matrix
• Part Two: The Measure
• Part Three: Cracked Masonry
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index