Yeats and Modernism

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Yeats and Modernism

• Presentation by Dr John McDonagh
• to
• META _at_ Limerick EC January 2007

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Features of Modernist Literature

• Formal experimentation and innovation (stream of
  consciousness style, for example)
• Concentration on style rather than content, or
  language rather than narrative - authors
  consciously adopt features of a stylistic genre
  rather than a narrative genre
• A concern with the expression of the conscious
  mind, particularly the subconscious

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Max Ernst
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A 1930s table lamp
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Cantilever 1920s armchair
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Virginia Woolf, Cambridge, 1924

• On or about December 1910 human nature changed
• Coincided with the first London exhibition of
  paintings by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso and
  Matisse. Impressionism appeared to be on the wane.

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• the radical disruption of linear flow of
  narrative
• the frustration of conventional expectations
  concerning unity and coherence of plot and
  character and the cause and effect development
  thereof
• the deployment of ironic and ambiguous
  juxtapositions to call into question the moral
  and philosophical meaning of literary action

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• Joyce, according to Kiberd, attempted a
  meaningful modernity which was more open to the
  full range of voices in Ireland than any
  nationalism

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Significant dates?

• Chekovs short stories appeared in 1909
• Dostoyevskys novels were translated at the same
  time
• Freud had laid the foundations of psycoanalysis
  in Vienna while Jung had already lectured in the
  United States in 1909
• The common thread here is the foregrounding of
  the human being, the individual sensibility, the
  individual reaction, moving away from the great
  shaping force of environment

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William James (1909)

• Every definite image in the mind is steeped and
  dyed in the free water that flows round it. The
  significance, the value of the image is all in
  this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts
  it.
• Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped
  up in bitsIt is nothing jointed it flowsLet us
  call it a stream of thought, of consciousness, or
  of subjective life.

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• William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 - January 28,
  1939)
• Born in Dublin, and educated in London and
  Dublin. While studying at the School of Art in
  Dublin he developed an interest in mystic
  religion and the supernatural.
• He helped to found the Irish Literary Society,
  and with the help of Lady Gregory and others,
  co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre (later the
  Irish National Theatre Society) in 1899.
• Yeats received the 1923 Nobel Prize in
  literature

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Modernism?

• From the outside.
• Modernism is shaped by various, identifiable and
  over-lapping streams

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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
1. PSYCHOLOGY

• Austrian pioneer of psychoanalysis
• Based on a notion of the unconscious,an area of
  experience which is part of the mind but beyond
  consciousness
• Linked with the idea of repression, a process
  whereby traumatic events, conflicts, unadmitted
  desires etc. are forced out of the conscious mind
  and into the unconscious

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• The screen memory is a trivial or inconsequential
  memory whose function ids to obliterate a more
  painful or troublesome one
• This screening can be often seen in literary
  texts where meaning can be derived from the very
  non-presence of an action or character (The Dead)

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Dreams

• Real events and images are transformed into dream
  images by our subconscious mind
• Displacement occurs when a person or event is
  represented by another which is in some way
  linked to it, perhaps symbolically
• Dreams are very literary in that abstract ideas
  and feelings are converted into concrete images
• Dreams communicate obliquely and subtly, much as
  literature avoids open statement and communicates
  meanings through embodiments of time, space and
  persons.

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2. Theology

• Soren Kirkegaard (1813-55)
• He is known as the "father of existentialism
• Stressed the loneliness of self
• The individual is the category through which
  this age, all history, the human race as a whole
  must pass

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3. Philosophy

• Frederick Nietzche (1844-1900)
• Subversive challenger
• Life itself is essential assimilation, injury,
  violation of the foreign and the weakerand not
  because it is moral or immoral in any sense but
  because it is alive, and because life simple is
  the will to power

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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)
4. Semiotics

• Course on General Linguistics (1913)
• Seminal text in the development of structuralist
  thinking
• Critical distinction between langage, la langue
  and la parole.

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Saussure

• Meanings attributed to words are purely arbitrary
  - meanings are maintained by convention only
• Words have no intrinsic meaning and are, in
  fact, unmotivated signs.
• The meanings of words are relational. No word
  can be defined in isolation from other words -
  the syntagmatic chain.

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The Tower

• A collection first published in 1928
• A collection of previously published but
  uncollectd poems written in the 1920s
• Ballylee Castle, 3 miles from Gort, Co.Galway
• Bought by Yeats in 1917, the year he married
  George Hyde Lees
• The same year he proposed to Iseult, Mauds
  daughter

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From The Tower

• Sailing to Byzantium
• Among School Children

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Sailing to Byzantium
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• A poem written in the autumn of 1926 and
  published in The Tower

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Byzantium (Constantinople - Istanbul)

• Yeats said that he was trying to write about the
  state of his soul
• The poem depicts life as a crowded, rushed
  headlong fall into near chaos, characterised by
  only three common events - conception, birth and
  death
• Note the awkward line -Those dying generations-
  inserted into the middle of a line celebrating
  the fecundity and fertility of life
• All beauty (except art!) appears to have a price

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• In 1907, Yeats visited the church of Saint
  Apollinare Nuova in Ravenna, Italy
• These memories were aroused by a visit to a
  church in Sicily in 1924 which actually inspired
  the poem
• Everything temporal in the poem is tatty, worn
  out or hurtling towards its eventual demise
• An aged man is but a paltry thing In 1924,
  Yeats was sixty and quite ill
• Singing is a by word for praising that which is
  immortal about humanity, but note that crucially
  there is no singing school

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St. Appolinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy
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Monumental stuff!

• Twice Yeats refers to monuments of unaging
  intellect and of its own magnificence
• Are these monuments entirely personal in choice
  or are there certain forms which lend themselves
  towards eternal appreciation?
• To a large degree, these monuments function on a
  symbolic level
• Stanza three captures the horrors of ageing - the
  body is merely a dying animal
• Yeatsmosaic cheats this process, so why cant a
  person seek such immortality

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• Yeats appeals directly to the sages in the
  mosaic to be the singing-masters of my soul,
  despite previously claiming that there is no
  singing school
• As with the Romantics, he advocates studying of
  the self, in much the same way as Wordsworth
  advocated deep contemplation as the route to
  self-awareness and indeed revelation
• The bird is perhaps taken from the Hans Christian
  Anderson tale called The Emperors Nightingale
• An edition was printed in the early 20th cen.
  With a cover illustrating the emperor and his
  court listening to an artificial bird

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hammered gold and gold enamelling
The further explanation of this symbol formed the
basis of the poem Byzantium, written in 1930
and published in The Winding Stair in 1933.
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• That country is a declaratory rejection of
  contemporary Ireland and the values it stood for
• Yeats looks to ancient Greece for artistic
  inspiration
• Death is not portrayed as an end but as a state
  out of nature
• Indeed, perhaps this is not death at all but a
  desire to escape the frenzy of existence
• To go out of nature one must transcend the
  natural by whatever means available
  (contemplative, spiritual, narcotic, etc.)

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• The poem also indicates Yeats inherent class
  obsession
• Emperors, Lords and Ladies are compared to
  mackerel-crowded seas
• Art is timeless, because his bird will sing of
  what is past, or passing, or to come - the
  artist is a conduit
• There is an intrinsic link, therefore, between
  space and time, epitomised by symbolic references

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I am sailing.

• The poem equally emphasises the journey and the
  destination
• Therefore, to travel hopefully is often better
  than arriving!
• The heart is sick with desire yet it knows
  not what it is
• Indicative of the eternal quest of the romantic

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The artiface of eternity

• Art provides the release from the consuming
  reality of everyday existence
• Indeed, life is so hectic that clear
  self-perception and moments of self-revelation
  are rare
• What is being advocated is the ability of art to
  transcend the temporal
• Hindu notion of reincarnation?

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Karma

• The sum total of all actions will either be
  rewarded or punished in the next life when after
  death your soul will leave your body and
  transmigrate from you into the spirit of a plant,
  and animal or a human or even ...

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Among School Children

• topic for poemSchool children and the thought
  that life will waste them, perhaps that no
  possible life can fulfill our dreams or even
  their teachers hope. Bring in the old thought
  that life prepares for what never happens.
• The long schoolroom is based in St.Otterans
  Montessori School in Waterford, visited by Yeats
  in February, 1926

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• Yet another reference to Maud - stanza 4
• In reference to stanza 6, Yeats wrote it means
  that even the greatest men are owls, scarecrows,
  by the time their fame has come.
• Last line a reference to Platos myth of the cave

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The Allegory of the Cave
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• Men pass their whole lives in a cave, prevented
  by chains from moving their necks or legs .
  Behind them pass people on a raised platform
  holding up wooden and stone objects, plant,
  animals, etc. Over and behind them, a flame
  burns. The shadows thrown by the images are all
  that the cave-dwellers can see. For them this
  world of shadows is reality. If any of them were
  to turn to look at the light, they would suffer
  pain due to the chains and be unable to stand
  the brightness of the light. However, if dragged
  out of the cave towards sunlight, the cave
  dweller would be indignant and blinded by the
  light. Only by degrees would he become accustomed
  to the light of this upper world.

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• At first he would only recognise shadows, then
  reflections in water and finally, things
  themselves. Then he would see the stars, the
  moon, and finally the Sun, the source of the
  light. If he ever returned to the cave and
  attempt to free the others, he would suffer
  ridicule and probable death.

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Therefore

• Unphilosophical man at the mercy of his sense
  impressions is like a prisoner in a cave who
  mistakes shadows on the wall for reality
• Consequently, symbols are a key tool in the
  establishment of a personal poetic vision

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W.B. Yeats - The Symbolism of Poetry (1900)

• Yeats contemplated the concept of imaginative
  representation through the use of symbols
• All sounds, all colours, all forms, either
  because of their preordained energies or because
  of long association, evoke indefinable and yet
  precise emotions (p.32)