Inventing Ireland (18 page)

Synge's life became in Yeats's interpretation a demonstration of the fact that confident self-possession was the polar opposite of self-assertion, which invariably arose from uneasiness. Thinking perhaps of the Negative Capability of Keats, of his ability to allow character to pass into intellectual production, Yeats submitted that the act of appreciation of any great thing was an act of self-conquest, such attention being very close to prayer. In that context, his famous injunction to Synge to express a life that has never found expression may be taken as referring to Synge's own experience rather than that of the islanders (whose lives, after all, had been most fully expressed in Gaelic literature and lore).
Style
in Yeats's system was the
antiself,
the opposite which turned out on inspection to be the secret double: Synge achieved on
Aran what Wilde achieved in England, a language which was the opposite of all that he had known and heard in childhood and in youth.

The Wildean style had been adopted as a gross assumption, a mask. Yeats agreed: virtue, to be active, must be an endless theatrical playing with such masks, for the self evoked by style was external, something encountered as coming from without, which only later led the discovery of an answering self within. He castigated those rudimentary souls who lacked this sense of the theatrical. The provincial's inability to imagine a second self, to play instinctively before a mirror, to formulate an awareness of how he must appear to others, was a failure of the republican imagination, for which
style
was always a conscious relation between a past and a putative self.
Edward Dowden, the Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, was just such a provincial, unable to shape a metropolitan but none the less Irish style, for he employed on himself the received categories of English thought. Failing in self-conquest, he became an easy prey to cultural conquest by others and so he refused to trust his own nature while writing on Shakespeare. Contrasted with him, a true artist like Synge was uninfluenced by the opinion of inferiors, an authentic self-begetting Irishman.
¹⁵

Whenever Yeats raised the question of style, it was as if he saw in it the promise of an antidote to
Anglicization. "The difficulties of modern Irish literature from the loose, romantic legendary stories of Standish O'Grady to James Joyce and Synge had been in the formation of a style".
¹⁶
Douglas Hyde's ordinary English style was "without charm"; his
Hiberno-English, on the other hand, was the coming of a new power into literature. "England had turned from style",
¹⁷
and it was style, therefore, which allowed one "to look into the lion's face (as it were) with unquivering eyelash".
¹⁸
But England once upon a time had known style, in the "heroic self-possession" of
Hamlet, who could teach a nervous Irish youth how to play magnificently with hostile minds. In imitation of his hero, the young Yeats made model speeches as a training for the world rather than because he had anything to say: expression once again preceding concept in his development. It was his awareness of this rather strange sequencing which led to one of his autobiography's most famous aphorisms: "It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is". First, there was a cadence, or perhaps an image; later, a sense of its inner content – and that became the trajectory of
Autobiographies,
the bringing into being of a real man who might finally be found to lie behind the style which evoked him: "I must go on that there may be a man behind the lines already written".
¹⁹

This version of identity is a cornerstone of Protestantism. "The love of God for every human soul is infinite, for every human soul is unique",
²⁰
wrote Yeats in
Anima Mundi
; and so the individual must justify God's love by perfecting its object. Near the close of his autobiography, he explained that style was the slayer of the old, derived self and the enabler of self-conquest. His authority for this was the Protestant service for the Burial of the Dead:

A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self the opposite of all that he has named "himself".
²¹

Polonius's ideal of truthfulness to oneself was cited by the poet as an example of bogus romantic sincerity: against it, he posited a Wildean notion of personality, intensified over many multiplications, until it achieved a fragmentary but real authenticity. "Men rise on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things", the tide of a youthful essay, turned out for all its didactic banality to be a truer Protestantism:
²²
the Keatsian and Wildean self, though conceived as a theatrical search for
an enabling style, became the surest basis for intelligent self-scrutiny. Style rather than sincerity was the important thing, since style bespoke authenticity. For Yeats, therefore, there was no final conflict between morality and style. In his view, the only morality was style, for in the crisis of creation it was this which caused a person to fuse with the opposite, buried self. A great writer would thus be one who became his own ideal reader, an effect increasingly achieved by Yeats within the major poems composed after he had begun to work on his autobiography.

Colonialism is rendered in that autobiography as a tyranny of books over life; and so the nervous youth begins with borrowed styles, in the manner of Hamlet or
Byron or Shelley, and his father fears that he will turn into another Dowden. "You do not talk like a poet, but like a man of letters", he is told.
²³
Yet when the son offers his elders a bookish idea – that you only know a landscape when you see it at night – he is warmly praised. It is all rather confusing – as confusing as the young woman who simulates an emotion most convincingly when she feels least implicated in it. The world seems subjugated by a literature which has preceded this young man to every experience of it: if he falls in love with
Florence Farr, the actress, she disparages his courtship by saying that she had seen just his action in the theatre and so it must be "unreal". Realist art has corroded authentic life: so Yeats
pert
is forever scolding his son for talking for effect, for being theatrical, for sounding like a book. Yet the romanticism of John Butler Yeats is ultimately found to be inadequate, since it is based on the ideal of a unitary self.

The terror of a book-ridden culture is most present to him who would be the pioneer of a national poetic and not just an innovator. Whitman had tried in 1850s America to write as if he were Adam and mere were no such a thing as a book, but his oppressive awareness of
literary conventions was never more apparent than in his swaggering indifference to them. Yeats faced a similar problem:

Lacking sufficient recognized precedent, I must needs find some reason for all that I did. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born; and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that there was no help for it seeing that my country was not bom at all.
²⁴

Here he is trying to invent Ireland
ex nihilo,
or at least to recreate a flawed ancestor along more reassuring lines. The nation will be defined
by its assumed style, by its successful fusion with an Image which will be the opposite of what it has been deemed to be.

Such a struggle is tragic in its exactions, demanding that one daily recreate all that environment and circumstances snatch away: however, it enables Ireland to challenge England and to transcend the slot-rolling antithesis between the two peoples. Nationalism and
Unionism are but one another's headache; those who insist that art must be either English or Irish are boring; but a nation having defined itself by passing through opposites, may see those opposites acquire sex and engender. When this happens, an end will come to that restless arraignment of the English Other and to the consequent purging of heresy within: instead there will emerge a self-creating Ireland produced by nothing but its own desire. Though offered primarily as the fusion of a great man with his Image, Yeats's account of this moment has implications for Anglo-Irish relations and for the liberated person who may yet be their outcome:

The two halves of their nature are so completely joined that they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire whatever happens, being at the same time predestinate and free, creations very self. We gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not at a work of art, but at the recreation of the man through the art, the birth of a new species of man.
²⁵

The project of inventing a unitary Ireland is the attempt to achieve at a political level a reconciliation of opposed qualities which must first be fused in the self. In other words, personal liberation must precede national recovery, being in fact its very condition. His father's idea of uniting Catholic imagination with Protestant efficiency must have seemed to Yeats a wily appropriation
for Ireland alone
of the Arnoldian theory of Irish creativity "completing" English pragmatism in a unified British personality. Here, again, a potentially insulting cliché is retrieved by Yeats in a subtle and subversive fashion, to underwrite the very separatist claim which Arnold sought to deny.

Yeats's new species of Irishman is not so much the creator of the Image as its outcome: and the liberated people are not the inventors of personal style but its inferred content. That content is necessarily a throwback to a premodern culture common to England and Ireland before relations went sour, a people's culture in which "all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer, would accept a common design", and in which literature "though made by many minds, would seem the work of one mind".
²⁶
The paradox is again Whitmanian: perfect freedom
of individual expression is possible in a code whose values are nonetheless communal. Deleuze and Guattari find such a paradox underlying all minor literatures:

Because collective national consciousness is often inactive in external life and always in the process of breakdown, literature finds itself charged with the role of collective enunciation. Especially if a writer is on the margins, this allows him all the more scope to explore the community conscious-ncss.
²⁷

The songs of Douglas Hyde were sung by the common people: Yeats was massively moved by this and desired to achieve a folkloristic impersonality in his ballads, an utterance which, though personal, would seem communal, possible only to one who thinks like a wise man but speaks like the common people. He would ultimately seek that utterance in
Unity of Culture:

Is there a nationwide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting on one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he cast. Was not a nation, as distinct from a crowd of chance-comers, bound together by this interchange among streams or shadows; that Unity of Image which I sought in national literature being but an originating symbol?
²⁸

Yet these speculations leave the poet repeatedly in intellectual solitude, with the realization that Unity of Culture might only be achieved by exceptionally gifted persons. Style, again, would be their redemption, that solitary self-absorbed consciousness, glimpsed in the late poem
"Long-Legged Fly", which creates its own environment. Style so understood is a war on the chancy and casual, on mere character or circumstance, "as some Herodiade of our theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle".
²⁹
As clothes express more of the self than a naked body, so the rearrangement of experience, in a style deliberately adopted, offers "escape from the hot-faced bargainers and the money-changers"
³⁰
of a crass, commercial society. Style may be a mask but, because chosen, it is truer than any face. The flaw in a provincial Irish youth is his refusal of style, his disinclination to displace the given environment with something deliberated: "A young man in Ireland meets only crude, impersonal things, things that make him like others ... He never seeks to make rooms charming, for instance . . ."
³¹

What most moved Yeats about Wilde was the sense of his all-white rooms in London as the dramatized play of a consciousness, a style. This fascination persisted in subsequent Irish writers: Synge sought to be the first great artist of the bilingual style; Beckett insisted that it was the shape rather than the content of the sentence that counted; and Joyce left that traditional division open to question with his claim that in
Ulysses
the style was the subject. To all of them, style was potentially redemptive, charged with the power to lift the fallen material of the given world to a new place of consciousness. Yet there was a price to pay; and Yeats would wonder in more than one poem if this early elevation of form over matter had been advisable. Useful it had undeniably been as a ploy with which to kick-start a national poetic; but what if the style never found its subject, what if the singer born lacked a theme, what if it was only (as Beckett bitterly joked) a bow-tie worn over a throat-cancer? The price was discharged most painfully by Joyce, whose
Ulysses
is a compendium of styles no one of which seeds into flower. Whitman's own obsession with masturbation may be rooted in a similar desperation: the uncertainty behind the excessiveness of tone testified to a fear of unfruitfulness.

To write a deliberately new style, whether Hiberno-English or Whitmanian
slang, was to seize power for new voices in literature: and the pretence of the national poet is that he or she is not constructed by previous literary modes. Synge wrote as if he were Adam and this the first day of creation: so did Whitman and so, at times, did Yeats. Their problem was that the worlds which they created existed only as linguistic constructs and solely for the duration of the text. Each artist had, strictly speaking, no subjective self preceding the book as predicate; and so the text had no time other than that of its enunciation. Yeats gave his own rueful account of how he could only set up a secondary or interior personality "created out of the tradition of myself" and "alas only possible to me in my writings".
³²
Since there were no clear protocols for a national poet, Yeats and Whitman were compelled to charm an
audience into being by the very tone of their own voices, assuming a people in order to prove that they were really there. It followed that the role which they imagined for themselves had to be announced and then demonstrated in the very act of writing.