Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  A Vision is a Celtic constitution not solely for Ireland but for all the world, after the rough beast has come again. Initiated in 1917 to help defeat the forces of materialism, it was aimed in particular at the Marxists, whom Yeats saw as sponsors of the hated industrial revolution. The book is his counter-Renaissance myth, launched at a time when Ireland was "living in the explosion" after 1916, a period which saw the decline of deference, the organization of urban labour and of rural Soviets, and the spread of James Connolly's pamphlets among young activists. The Irish Times editorials of 1918–19 repeatedly stressed fears that the country was turning communist: and so did Yeats. The language in which he voiced this concern proved conclusively that, when the chips were down, he spoke neither for the noble nor the beggarman, but for the emergent middle class. He feared that the national coalition of "peasant proprietors and capitalists" would be split in two by the attempt "to create a dictatorship of labour". In April 1919, he wrote:

  What I want is that Ireland be kept from giving itself (under the influence of its lunatic faculty of going against everything which it believes England to affirm) to Marxian revolution or to Marxian definitions of value in any form. I consider the Marxian criterion of values as in this age the spear-head of materialism and leading to inevitable murder. From that criterion follows the well-known phrase: "Can the bourgeois be innocent?"11

  A Vision is not, thereby, an encyclopedia fascista, as certain radical poets of the 1930s would subsequently claim. A self-confessed fiction rather than a degenerate myth, it is saved by its own scepticism. Moreover, it is impeccably "liberal" in its anxiety to tackle its Marxist opponents on their stronger rather than weaker points: their roots in Bruno, Hegel and Kant. The notion behind the system of gyres – that every power necessarily creates its own opposition – comes from Bruno and Hegel, as well as sounding a somewhat bizarre echo of Marx's theory of class conflict. Bruno, of course, had added that such opposition was the prelude to a final reunion, which in the Marxist scheme took the form of a classless society. The latter idea Yeats could never endorse: but his view that "every movement in feeling or thought, prepares in the dark by its own increasing identity and confidence, its own execution", closely echoes Marx's description of a capitalism which nourishes the seeds of its own destruction. Indeed, Yeats's confidence in the human capacity to predict the shape of the future – a confidence shared with Marxists – might leave him open to the charge of sponsoring a dreary determinism. He saw history as endless repetition: Marxists saw it as a straight line.

  Yeats also resembled the Marxists in his certainty that, although the basic plot of history had been written, a person was free to improvise what freedom and dignity he or she could. Engels, after all, had defined freedom as the conscious recognition of necessity; and so did Yeats. In Explorations he added: "History is necessity until it takes fire in someone's head and becomes freedom or virtue".12 The fire is not Promethean or Marxian however: it does not remake the world so much as burn up the tragic protagonist's relation to it. The Yeatsian soul is free, but free only to disappear into a higher element: "I found myself upon the third antinomy of Immanuel Kant; thesis: freedom; antithesis: necessity; but I restate it. Every action of man declares the soul's ultimate, particular freedom, and the soul's disappearance in God; declares that reality is a congeries of beings and a single being . . ."13 The marriage-bed is Yeats's symbol of the attempt at a solved antinomy, the epitome of the sexual near-miss: "it were more than the symbol could a man there lose and keep his identity, but he falls asleep".14

  The freedom which A Vision allows is that offered by the Musicians to Deirdre in Yeats's play: the freedom to live out the fore-ordained plot on her own chosen terms with her own improvised lines, and to give that plot one or two forward shoves:

  . . . The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot. He must discover or reveal a being which only exists with extreme effort. . . But this is antithetical man.

  . . . For primary man I go to the Commedia dell' Arte in its decline. The Will is weak and cannot create a role, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted pattern, traditional clown or pantaloon . . . and substitutes a motive of service for that of self-expression. Instead of the created Mask he has an imitative Mask, and when he recognizes this, his Mask may become the historical norm, or an image of mankind.15

  The clown of "The Cap and Bells" had been castrated, because he was a mere entertainer rather than an exponent of self-expression: he was like Wilde or Shaw when at their weakest, embodying the norms of Primary England. Their masks were then external, worn as part of a game played with society, in the attempt to establish what others thought of their performance: but for Yeats the true mask was something internal, chosen in the deeps of the mind, a revelation to himself of his Antithetical Irish being far more than a manifestation of it to others.

  The universal history of politics and art is rendered in A Vision in terms of the original Anglo-Irish antithesis, yet its paradoxical hope is to transcend those terms. It does this, in a partial and conditional way, by admitting the interpenetration of one by another in all vital natures. Without this interpenetration, the balance of forces known as life is impossible. It can be no coincidence that the heroism of Yeats's Anglo-Irish precursors is described, in the decade after A Vision, as the quest of those who sought to transcend those binaries and evolve a "Third Way".

  Edmund Burke was a telling example, for he confronted Yeats with two irreconcilable theories – the absolute efficiency of the state versus the absolute freedom of the individual. The first, if taken to extreme, led to tyranny; and the second, likewise, to anarchy. Burke, therefore, refused to see politics solely in terms either of the state or the individual, and he attempted to reconcile the conflict by inventing the modern idea of the nation.16 Yeats's essays invoke this tradition, insisting that the Irish nation must steer a middle course between drab statism and piratical individualism, aligning itself with neither. Such strictures would hardly feature in the encyclopaedia of a fascist.

  Moreover, Burke believed that Locke and his theory of sense-perception ignored the historical dimension, the way in which communities were held together by tradition. By submitting all to the test of reason, Locke had ignored the play of historic forces which had helped to shape things. History was more than a succession of self-interested men; and so Yeats supplied a history of Man, viewed from a near-anthropological standpoint, as Swift, Goldsmith and Berkeley had seen him. These, said Yeats, "found in England the opposite that stung their thought into expression and made it lucid". Berkeley's famous claim that "we Irish do not hold with this" was a denial of the world of Locke and Newton. "That was the birth of the national intellect and it caused the defeat in Berkeley's secret society of English materialism, the Irish Salamis".17

  What had outraged Berkeley was Locke's repudiation of the primary qualities of weight, mass and so on, as properties objectively belonging to things. Locke held that they were mere sensations produced in us by the physical characteristics of things. His assertion that there was "nothing like" the ideas of secondary qualities (colour, taste and so on) "existing in the bodies themselves" dismayed Berkeley, since it seemed to exclude any room for poetry. Berkeley believed that things exist only in so far as we perceive them. Yeats went further to assert that each man or woman creates a purely personal world, as against Locke who claimed that, under standard conditions, each person would see "the same thing".18 To Yeats, Blake's well-publicized attacks on the empirical Locke set the republican poet in well-chosen Celtic company, along with Scotland's David Hume. Yeats was delighted to endorse this revolt by the Celtic fringe. His Berkeley was the man who argued against Locke in his Treatise on Human Knowledge (1710) that communication was not the only object of language, but also "the raising of some passion ... the putt
ing of the mind in some particular disposition". Burke in his Enquiry also suggested that poetry "does not depend for its effect on the raising of sensible images", for its habit is "to affect by sympathy rather than by imitation".19

  In the decade following Irish independence, Yeats in his writings aligns himself with these thinkers and argues for innate ideas (birds nesting; girls looking in a certain way at passing boys) rather than the tabula rasa. As far as he is concerned, Locke's distinction between primary and secondary ideas took away the world and gave people excrement instead. Berkeley, on the other hand, restored the world, with his demonstration that all qualities of shape, as well as of colour, depend on the perceiver:

  Fragments

  I.

  Locke sank into a swoon;

  The Garden died;

  God took the spinning jenny

  Out of his side.

  II.

  Where got I that truth?

  Out of a medium's mouth,

  Out of nothing it came,

  Out of the forest loam,

  Out of the dark night where lay

  The crowns of Nineveh.20

  If expression precedes conceptualization, that is because Nineveh did not exist until the poets first created it with their sighing. Yeats had written in "The Symbolism of Poetry": "I doubt indeed if the crude circumstance of the world, which seems to create all our emotions, does more than reflect, as in multiplying mirrors, the emotions that have come to solitary men in moments of poetical contemplation".21 The fear voiced in the poem is of the uniformity and massification of English society, whose members were all (according to Blake) "inter-measurable", or (in Yeats's elaboration) "chopped and measured like a piece of cheese".

  To these members of his eighteenth-century pantheon, Yeats added Goldsmith (for his delight in the concrete details of everyday life), Swift (for his love of the Hounynhyms and his hatred of machines), and Burke (for his image of the state as a slow-maturing tree). He was particularly struck by Burke's idea that the radical Jacobins, lacking a vision of evil, oppressed mankind by their excessively high expectations which left "little mercy for the imperfect". No matter how great the energy of the reformer, opined Yeats, a still greater was required to face with equanimity the unreformed and irresponsible elements of life. Deriding communism as just the latest "Santa Claus" of the radical movement, he asserted a preference for a politics of tragic resignation, which meant resignation to all that was flawed and finally unreformable in the human psyche. "We begin to live when we conceive of life as a tragedy".22

  Yeats's rather Augustan desire to balance the claims of individual and state, of freedom and necessity, led him to embrace Walt Whitman, the great reconciler of self and mass. Accordingly, he placed this poetic founder in Phase 6 of A Vision:

  ... he used his Body of Fate (his interest in crowds, in casual loves and affections, in all summary human experience) to clear intellect of antithetical emotions (always insincere from Phase 1 to Phase 8), and haunted and hunted by the now involuntary Mask, created an image of vague, half-civiiized man, all his thought and impulse a product of democratic bonhomie, of schools, of colleges, of public discussion. Abstraction had been born, but it remained the abstraction of a community, of a tradition, a synthesis starting, not as with Phase 19, 20 and 21 with logical deduction from an observed fact, but from the whole experience of the individual or of the community: "I have such and such a feeling. I have such and such a belief . . .23

  A question remains about all this: how convincing is Yeats's Third Way? How real is his transcendence of the binaries of freedom and necessity at that weird moment when the latter takes fire as the former in the human head? Yeats did not see the world as a thing to be remade, but as an object of contemplation, conceived not for the purpose of reformation so much as revelation. Since that revelation could hardly be enacted socially, it must first of all be internalized within the self.

  Mechanistic philosophy had reduced the mind to the quicksilver at the back of the mirror: however, said Yeats, the internalizer of the quest-romance must turn lamp, becoming in this contemplative moment "predestinate and free, creation's very self". The critic T. R. Whitaker has construed this phase of Yeats's thought: "in such phrases, he reformulated that alchemical shattering of the objective mirror and distilling of the luminous drop of gold which had concerned him since the time of his apocalyptic romances, and which properly symbolized both the artist's transcendence of the cyclical world and his imaginative growth within the world".24 A parallel enactment in Act Three of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World has Christy Mahon abandoning the mirror of realism as the sign of human vanity and learning to illuminate his roadway by a self-generated inner light. Public opinion of what a man is will never disclose the true self, being rather a distorting mirror. Yeats finds this out for himself in "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" when, speaking of "the finished man among his enemies", he asks

  How in the name of Heaven can he escape

  That defiling and disfigured shape

  The mirror of malicious eyes

  Casts upon his eyes until at last

  He thinks that shape must be his shape?25

  The only answer known to Yeats was that of Mohini Chatterjee, who "taught that all we perceive exists in the external world – this is a stream which is out of human control, and we but a mirror, and our deliverance consists in turning the mirror away so that it reflects nothing".26 Mirror-historians can only chronicle a world of accumulated facts; but in "Dove or Swan?" Yeats reanimates history as a force taking fire as symbolic pattern in the human head. Such a moment follows an act of attention or contemplation elsewhere described by Yeats as a form of self-conquest: his stylistic version of revolution. Style was his Third Way beyond action and contemplation; artistic living his Third Way transcending freedom and necessity; metaphor his way of holding in a single moment reality and justice. If Part One of A Vision – like the opening half of "Easter 1916" – devoted itself to an account of the metaphorizing imagination, then Part Two, like the second half of the poem, represented a relentless demetaphorization.

  This answers one of the stock objections to A Vision: how can such an abstract system come from so noted a hater of abstraction? But there is a still further complaint that is often made: if each value is cancelled by a counter-value, are we not left with a self-destructive, nugatory scepticism? In actual practice, the opposed values are not exactly balanced, since the system is so manipulated as to favour the antithetical Celtic over the primary English elements:

  A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical. The approaching antithetical influx and that particular antithetical dispensation for which the intellectual has begun will reach its complete systematization at that moment when, as I have already shown, the Great Year comes to its intellectual climax.27

  Nor do the opposed values cancel one another out, since they remain vibrating in a sort of dynamic equilibrium, which itself constitutes a Third Way, more vital for the nonce than either between which it arises. The history of the Anglo-Irish is telescoped into these following sentences from A Vision:

  When I look in history for the conflict or union of antithetical and primary, I seem to discover that conflict or union of races stated by Petrie and Schneider as universal law. A people who have lived apart and so acquired unity of custom and purity of breed unite with some other people through migration, immigration or conquest. A race (the new antithetical) emerges that is neither the one nor the other, and often after somewhere about 500 years it produces, or so it seems, its particular culture or civilization. This culture lives only in certain victorious classes; then comes a period of revolution (phase 22) terminated by a civilization of policemen, schoolmasters, manufacturers, philanthropists, a second soon exhausted blossoming of the race . . .28
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  Far from offering a deconstructive nihilism, A Vision envisages Ireland as an imagined community. It also allows that the fiction is forever self-interrogating, a capacity all the more crucial at a time when many apologists for the Irish Free State suffer from single vision and from Newton's sleep.

  Nineteen

  James Joyce and Mythic Realism

  Joyce's Ulysses is often treated as a definitive account of the mind of modern Europe in 1922, the year of its publication: but, for that very reason, it is also a recognition that Europe of itself was nothing without its colonial holdings. Ulysses is one of the first major literary utterances in the modern period by an artist who spoke for a newly-liberated people. The former provost of Trinity College Dublin, J. P. Mahaffy, clearly sensed Joyce's disruptive power when he lamented that his publications proved beyond doubt that "it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of the island, for the corner-boys who spit into the Liffey".1 That use of the word aborigines captures a central truth about James Joyce: outcast from Ireland, scornful of Britain, and uneasy about the humanism of a Europe to which he could never fully surrender, he became instead a nomad, a world author.

  Virtually alone among the great post-colonial writers, he did not head for the imperial city or for the lush landscapes of the parent country: for him, there would be no Naipaulian "enigma of arrival", no pained discovery that the culture to which he had been assimilated lacked, after all, a centre. He took this as understood from the start and cut himself adrift from all cosy moorings: it was his strange destiny to be a central figure in world literature, and yet somehow tangential to the cultural life of both Ireland and England. Though he jokingly saw himself as the most recent of the Wild Geese – those Irish rebels who sought training in the armies of Catholic Europe after 1691 in hopes of returning to expel the occupier – he was, in truth, a sort of migratory gastarbeiter from a peripheral country with a chronically depressed economy.