Ambiguous Reverberations of Realism in Yeats*
1)Hyungseob Lee
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Abstract: From its beginning, the Abbey theatre thrived on the tension between its two ideals that were difficult to reconcile: its desire for poetic beauty and its need for representational veracity. It is well-known that Yeats had a strong aversion to naturalism (a disenchanted analytical version of realism popular in his time), equating it with the art form for the self-complacent and morally bankrupt middle classes. In this, he was not only aesthetically motivated but driven by a political and cultural agenda: to restore the lofty cultural tradition of Protestant Ascendancy amid the rampant materialism of Catholic middle classes and peasants. Nevertheless, Yeats knew naturalism was a force he could not simply conjure away. His life-long experiment with dramatic form and language largely amounts to his often arduous negotiations with realism/naturalism. This paper takes a broadly historical approach, focusing on several episodes that highlight Yeats’s ambiguous relationship with dramatic realism, including his attitude toward the middle classes, his defence of Synge, his evaluation of Ibsen, and his idea of poetic drama and national theatre.
The paper also offers a critical analysis of some of his finest plays whose success was predicated on the ironic negation of his vision of poetic drama.
Key words: realism/naturalism, Yeats, Synge, Ibsen, the Irish National Theatre Author: Hyungseob Lee is Associate Professor, RICH, Hanyang University.
E-mail: [email protected]
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제목: 예이츠 희곡에 나타나는 사실주의의 반향 연구
우리말 요약: 이 논문은 사실주의 연극과 예이츠의 관계를 다층적으로 분석하고 조명 한다. 그 시작부터 아일랜드 국립극장은 시적 아름다움과 재현의 충실이라는 상충되는 미학적 가치를 구현하려고 했고, 두 이상 사이에 존재하는 긴장과 모순은 아이러니컬 하게도 애비극장의 발전에 원동력을 제공했다. 예이츠는 사실주의 및 자연주의적 연극 에 대해 일관되게 부정적 입장을 취해왔지만 동시에 사실주의의 힘을 간과할 수 없음 을 잘 알고 있었다. 평생에 걸친 예이츠의 다양한 극적 실험은 바로 사실주의와의 대
* This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2015S1A5A8017857).
치, 협상 및 변형적 수용의 과정으로 볼 수 있다. 이러한 관점에서 본 논문은 예이츠 의 변화하는 연극관을 추적한다. 이를 위해 예이츠의 다양한 비평, 시론, 에세이 등을 바탕으로 중산층과 사실주의, 예이츠와 입센의 관계, 예이츠의 싱 옹호, 국립극장과 시 극의 관계 등을 논의하고 예이츠의 주요 극작품 속에 숨겨져 있는 사실주의적 기법과 요소를 발굴, 포착함으로써 예이츠와 사실주의의 관계를 재조명한다.
주제어: 사실주의/자연주의, 예이츠, 싱, 입센, 아일랜드국립극단 저자: 이형섭은 한양대학교 비교역사문화연구소 부교수이다.
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I
“H
omer makes us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers”—thus said Alexander Pope. In his Preface to his own translation of The Iliad of Homer, Pope elaborates on the greatness of Homer in these words:It is to the strength of this amazing invention we are to attribute that unequalled fire and rapture which is so forcible in Homer, that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads him. What he writes is of the most animated nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in action. If a council be called, or a battle fought, you are not coldly informed of what was said or done as from a third person; the reader is hurried out of himself by the force of the poet’s imagination, and turns in one place to a hearer, in another to a spectator. (4)
The supreme art of the Homeric poems lies in their ability to create an imaginary theatre in which the reader is magically transported onto the site of heroic tales. In Homer, diegetic narrative is combined with mimetic action to produce the maximum visual effect, bringing epic tales before the reader’s eyes (Aristotle called this enargeia in chapter 24 of his Poetics). The epic is already an incipient form of poetic drama as it is organized by third-person narrative broken up by first-person speech. It also begins with the magical invocation to the Muse for poetic inspiration, and features the hero whose
long arduous journey is often identified with that of a people or nation. In the end, the Homeric epic cultivates our most valuable human faculty—
imagination.
Yeats would have fully shared Pope’s enthusiasm over the Homeric poems. The national theatre Yeats envisioned was a consecrated space in which the poetic speech would stir up the auditory and visual sense of the audience, enabling them to share deeply spiritual experiences. Furthermore, the Irish national theatre would serve as a public forum for creating a unified national consciousness among the Irish people, who had been deeply frustrated by the incompetent Irish politics that reached its nadir with the Parnell fiasco. Wagner’s Bayreuth was not far from the back of Yeats’s mind.
“The future is with naturalism”—Emile Zola prophesied in Naturalism in the Theatre (1881) the coming of a radically new dramatic form that would prove “there is more poetry in the little apartment of a bourgeois than in all the empty, worm-eaten palaces of history” (qtd. in Grene, Home 1). In a giddy vertigo of modernity’s self-renewal, Zola’s prophesy was already a reality as Ibsen’s Ghosts was published in the same year, with A Doll’s House already two-years-old. Within four years, the French symbolist movement would publish its manifesto in Le Figaro. As J. L. Styan points out, “each of the great nineteenth-century naturalists, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and Chekhov, chose a more symbolic expression at the very time when he had apparently succeeded in being rigorously realistic” (2).
In the year of 1892, Shaw saw the first-ever staging of his play in London and Yeats gave a copyright performance of his first play. Widowers’
Houses and The Countess Cathleen are radically different in time, location, and the nature of language they employed. Set in contemporary London, Shaw’s play concerns the landlords of slum properties and, with his verbal pyrotechnics already at hand, introduces the first of Shaw’s New Women—a recurring feature of his later plays. Yeats set his verse drama in an
unidentified famine era, centering on an aristocratic woman from Irish folklore who sells her soul to the devil so that she can save her tenants from starvation and from damnation for having sold their own souls.
It is true that in aesthetic temperament and moral inclination, Yeats was never suited to the cold-blooded and disenchanted anatomical perspective of naturalism. His aversion to naturalism is evident in a long series of wide-ranging experimentations with dramatic form and language as well as in many essays and reviews. In these writings, we can detect a focal point of Yeats’s theatrical reform: his linkage of realism/naturalism with the middle classes via materialism. To Yeats’s chagrin, the Abbey was quickly taken over by rampant stage realism which, in his view, only catered to the crass materialism and vulgar taste of commercial classes.
The collusion of a literary mode with a particular social class is hardly a tenable proposition. The French symbolist movement with which Yeats had a strong affinity was itself attacked from all sides as a cryptic expression of bourgeois decadence and impotence. In 1896, Yeats (with Arthur Symons) attended the first and only performance in Paris of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi,
“an anti-realist satire which none the less parodied Symbolist techniques as well” (Foster 173). The poet was appalled by the blatant impiety of the play but found its sheer theatrical force revelatory: “After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God” (Collected Works III 266). Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God in The Gay Science in 1882. Fourteen years later, Yeats saw the birth of “the Savage God.”
In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, practically all literary and artistic movements were critical of the self-complacent middle classes. However, the feelings of animosity and contempt Yeats held against the middle classes were rather unexpected and out of the blue. Bemused by
the change in his appearance and attitude after he returned from a five-month lecture tour in America during 1903-4, George Moore described an occasion on which Yeats gave his speech urging guests to make donations for the Lane exhibition in Dublin in these words:
As soon as the applause died away Yeats, who had lately returned to us from the States with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat, rose to speak. We were surprised at the change in his appearance, and could hardly believe our ears when, instead of talking to us as he used to do about the old stories come down from generation to generation, he began to thunder like Ben Tillett himself against the middle classes, stamping his feet, working himself into a great passion, and all because the middle classes did not dip their hands into their pockets and give Lane the money he wanted for his exhibition, It is impossible to imagine the hatred which came into his voice when he spoke the words “the middle classes”;
one would have thought that he was speaking against a personal foe, but there are millions in the middle classes! And we looked around asking each other with our eyes where on earth our Willie Yeats had picked up such extraordinary ideas. . . . And we asked ourselves why Willie Yeats should feel himself called upon to denounce the class to which he himself belonged essentially. (Pethica 325)
Notwithstanding Moore’s vividly satirical description of Yeats awkwardly launching into a long diatribe, it was a common practice in Yeats’s time to target the middle classes as the constituency of moral complacency and unbridled materialism; we do not have to mention further than his compatriots, Wilde, Shaw and O’Casey, to see that. What distinguishes Yeats’s vilification is that his moral outrage was not expressed on behalf of the oppressed and marginalized majority of capitalist society—the workers, tenant farmers and itinerant laborers. For Moore, Yeats’s was an unwarranted act of self-abnegation; for Yeats, it was an expression of his innate aristocratic nature. He would later assume the role of the spiritual heir to the
long distinguished yet dying breed of Protestant Ascendancy, casting a cold eye democracy and its unruly masses. As Patrick Kavanagh wrote many years later in “Yeats,” his (in)famous poetic outburst in a Chicago conference on Yeats: “Yes, Yeats, it was damn easy for you, protected / By the middle classes and the Big houses, / To talk about the sixty-year-old public protected / Man sheltered by the dim Victorian Muses” (260).
What caused Yeats’s sudden self-refashioning is not clear. Yeats was devastated by Maud Gonne’s marriage with Major John McBride in 1903, which made him unable to write a single poem for almost five years. The poet was not so much saddened by the unrequited love as enraged by what he perceived to be an act of betrayal. Desperately in need of repairing his impaired masculinity, Yeats consumed himself in “the day’s war with every knave and dolt” as he later recalled in the 1910 poem “The Fascination with What’s Difficult” (Pethica 37-38). His engagement in “Theatre business, management of men,” together with the successful lecture tours in America, toughened him up. Also, his day-to-day dealings with the theatre business (involving writers, actors, staff members, benefactors, the press and theatre-goers) must have given him practical reasons for upholding a theoretically tenuous position that equates realism/naturalism with the theatrical embodiment of bourgeois consciousness. Ultimately, we can only surmise that deep down in Yeats’s fragile psyche may have been found a struggle between the self-loathing and the self-aggrandizement of an insecure middle-class man.
However, Yeats’s complex relationship with realism cannot simply be explained away in terms of his personal taste or psychological makeup alone;
he lived multitudinous lives (a poet-dramatist, manager-director of national theatre, occultist, leader of the cultural movement, philosopher-politician and hopeless lover) and his response to realism was multifaceted and often contradictory.
II
Yeats’s critical understanding of realism is not as unequivocal as it may seem at first hand. His attitude toward Ibsen, the greatest and most influential dramatic realist of Yeats’s time, was profoundly ambivalent. Yeats instantly recognized in Ibsen a kindred spirit, finding the essence of Ibsenism (not to be confused with Shavian “quintessence of Ibsen”) in its trenchant criticism of the oppressive banality of middle class lives. At the same time, Yeats was troubled by Ibsen’s social issue-based dramatic structure and his prosaic language that smacked of an attempt of creating a drab replica of lifeless lives. Full of praise for Ghosts and The Wild Duck, Yeats decided to ignore the interpenetration and convergence of the literal and the symbolic in Ibsen’s drama, instead making his repeated plea for “hieratic, lofty drama where words mattered, not action” (Foster 208).
However, it is not difficult to detect Ibsen’s influence in early Yeatsian drama. In The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) which was his first play to reach the public stage, we find more than a “faint echo of Ibsen” (Foster 140). Written in verse and using elements of Irish folklore, the play is nevertheless firmly rooted in the real world as it is set in the kitchen of Maurteen Bruin’s house in the Barony of Kilmacowen in the County of Sligo. Yeats uses this quotidian space as a battlefield between faith and fancy. Mary Bruin is torn between her responsibility as a young housewife and her longing to escape from the ephemeral world of pain and suffering, deciding in the end to be lured away by a faery child into the enchanted land of heart’s desire. The Ibsenian theme of a rebellious woman in the domestic confinement is clearly present in Yeats’s play, and although she makes a different choice, Mary’s agony is redolent of Nora in A Doll’s House.
After a disastrous fortnight run with another play (Todhunter’s A Comedy
of Sighs) at the Avenue Theatre, The Land of Heart’s Desire was used as the curtain-raiser to Shaw’s Arms and the Man in the same house. Set during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War, Shaw’s play is a brilliant comedy, its parodic battlefield all-encompassing: a powerful indictment of romantic heroism and absurd bellicosity rising and spreading all over Europe. It is a big exciting comedy, European in theme and scope while Yeats’s play is a little tragic fantasy that takes place in a remote corner of provincial Ireland. The Land of Heart’s Desire was simply passed over as all attention was given to Shaw’s
“detonating parody.” In Foster’s pithy words, “the night belonged to Shaw, not Yeats” (141). Given Yeats’s strapping sense of rivalry and envy, the success of Shaw’s play with his own as a humble opener on that particular evening must have been a disgraceful experience for the poet. It is safe to say that Yeats’s personal experiences with and feelings toward Shaw the
“English Ibsenite” played a significant role in his growing rejection of realism.
Yeats’s ambivalence toward Ibsen and realism can also be found in his public handling of the pandemonium created by the plays of his protégé, J.
M. Synge. Synge became the Abbey’s unwitting resident provocateur with a series of plays he wrote for Ireland’s fledgling national theatre. The Ibsenian resources were more readily available for Synge than Yeats, as the younger writer possibly read Ibsen in William Archer’s English translations but more likely encountered the work of the Norwegian playwright in German translations while staying in Germany in the early 1890s: his diary entries name Ibsen’s plays in German. Ibsen’s influence among Synge’s Irish contemporaries was wide and far-reaching. In addition to Joyce and Shaw (whose Ibsenian affinities need not be told again), Edward Martyn and George Moore were all advocates of Ibsen. As W. J. Mc Cormack, Synge’s biographer, tells us, “it would have been more surprising if Synge had not been affected by Ibsen’s work” (161).
Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen was first performed on October 8, 1903, along with Yeats’s fervently nationalistic Cathleen ni Houlihan. While Yeats transformed the apparently domestic setting of a peasant family house into the springboard for national aspirations, Synge used a similar domestic space to create a bleak picture of contemporary Ireland. In the Shadow of the Glen tells the story of a morbidly pathetic old man who feigns death to test the fidelity of his young wife. In both plays, the young protagonist leaves home, but their departures are radically different in nature: Michael Gillane’s embarkation in Yeats’s play is a symbolic act of heroic sacrifice, whereas Nora Burke’s departure with the tramp into the dark stormy Wicklow wilderness emblematizes the Irish woman’s act of immorality. Synge uses the trope of “the stranger in the house” (Grene, Politics 51-76) only to subvert it:
in place of the poor old woman (Sean-Bhean Bhocht) who inspires a young man to fight for the noble cause of national liberation, Synge’s play features a despicable tinker who lures a distressed, young married woman out into the unknown territory. For Arthur Griffith, the founder of the nationalist weekly newspaper United Irishman and later of Sinn Féin, Synge’s portrayal of the abominable Nora was a malicious lie because Irish women were “the most virtuous in the world,” and Synge was culpable for creating “a foul echo from degenerate Greece” (Hogan and Kilroy 12). Pointing to Synge’s (and the Irish National Theatre’s) “Ibsenite corruption,” The United Irishman wrote: “Some of our friends, I fear, now tour Connemara and see—Scandinavia” (qtd. in Foster 297).
Yeats immediately came to Synge’s defense. In “The Irish National Theatre and Three Sorts of Ignorance,” an essay published in the United Irishman, Yeats identifies three forces of “obscurantism,” an ignorant opposition to the freedom of imagination that he finds in the intellectual, religious and political milieu of contemporary Ireland. He goes on to say:
Everyone who knows the country-places intimately, that Irish countrywomen do sometimes grow weary of their husbands and take a lover. I heard one very touching tale only this summer. Everyone who knows Irish music knows that “The Red-Haired Man’s Wife” is sung of an Irish woman, and I do not think anybody could gather folk-tales along the Galway coast without coming on the ancient folk-tale . . . which Mr Synge has softened in his play. (Collected Works X 99)
Synge’s play that Yeats refers to is, of course, In the Shadow of the Glen.
Far from fabricating or exaggerating the moral impropriety of the Irish woman, Synge in his opinion moderated it. On another occasion of defending Synge’s play from Griffith’s vitriolic attack, Yeats wrote that it was the artist’s right to “show life, instead of the desire which every political party would substitute for life” (qtd. in Foster 297). Yeats sets up here a binary of life and desire, prioritizing the reality of lived life over the fantasy of unlived desire. It is an ironic choice, especially considering the thematic nature of his own The Land of Heart’s Desire. At the same time, he bestows the highest honor on the freedom of imagination.
Yeats seems to have enjoyed all the hullabaloo created by Synge’s play as the great occasion for the Abbey’s publicity stunt, sending a telegram to Lady Gregory soon after he left the theatre which read: “Enthusiastic audience no trouble whatever” (qtd. in Morash 125). After a rather muted reception of Synge’s next play, The Well of the Saints (1905), Yeats’s wily
“campaign of baiting pious nationalism” (Foster 360) reached its apex with Synge’s next play, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Unlike Lady Gregory who hated the play, Yeats immediately recognized its unique achievement: Synge’s masterpiece convinced him of the distinct possibility to unite the poetic urge and the dramatic impulse within the realistic framework with the aid of the language of common medium. Synge himself stated his artistic agenda in his Preface to The Playboy: “On the stage one must have
reality, and one must have joy” (53-54) and “In writing The Playboy of the Western World, as in my other plays, I have used one or two words, that I have not heard among the country people of Ireland, or spoken in my own nursery before I could read the newspapers” (53).
The story of the “Playboy Riots” has been often told with visceral excitement, although the best account, that by Chris Morash, gives a less sensational and more protracted picture of it (130-38). Yeats shrewdly decided, as the curtain-raiser to The Playboy, to drop his own The Pot of Broth and replace it with Riders to the Sea, the one play by Synge that had been received with reverence across the political divide. Yeats’s decision was designed not only to mitigate much dreaded reaction from Griffith’s Sinn Féiners but more significantly to confound them by presenting them with the two widely divergent plays by the same author. The accusation of immorality and mendacity that had been directed at In the Shadow of the Glen was repeated by the nationalists, this time on a much fiercer note due to the Irish women’s sexual attraction to the patricidal hero and the female protagonist’s violent torture of him in The Playboy. Upon returning from London, Yeats gave interviews and wrote letters to defend The Playboy. Instead of placating the majority feeling that was clearly against the play, he intentionally aggravated the situation by provocatively presenting himself, at a public meeting he arranged, with nationalist credentials as “President of the Wolfe Tone Commemoration Committee of Great Britain” and “the author of Cathleen ni Houlihan” (Foster 364).
Yeats’s prolonged feud with Irish nationalists was marked by day-to-day contingencies as much as their different cultural and political views. In his defense of Synge, he used the language of representational veracity mainly to counterattack his opponents whose invective was couched in terms of fabrication and mendacity. Yet, we should not overlook the extent to which Yeats considered his dramatic enterprise as central to his cultural and political
commitment. His Nobel lecture was entitled “The Irish Dramatic Movement,”
and Yeats believed it was his dramatic contribution more than his poetic art that gave him worldwide recognition: “Perhaps the English committees would never have sent you my name if I had written no plays, no dramatic criticism, if my lyric poetry had not a quality of speech practised upon the stage” (Collected Works III 410). In the lecture, he goes on to weave a historical narrative that presents his dramatic project as a necessary alternative to the failed Parnellite politics toward national liberation:
The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation. (Collected Works III 410)
Yeats remained convinced that in the absence of centripetal national politics after the Parnell fiasco, culture was the only viable force of national unity in Ireland. He further believed that his dramatic project would serve the purpose better than any other forces. However, culture in Yeats’s Ireland “has been a force that has worked against the evolution of a homogeneous society and in so doing has been an agent of anarchy rather than of unity” (Lyons 2). As history’s irony has it, the cultural politics engineered by Yeats proved to be more a divisive force than a unifying one.
III
Yeats’s vision of a national theatre was, from its inception, fraught with many difficulties, ambiguities and contradictions. The historically and culturally distinct experiences of Attic tragedy, Wagner’s Bayreuth and Ibsen’s
Norwegian theatre adumbrated his conception. Despite his qualms with the Norwegian playwright’s realism, Yeats referred to Ibsen and his effort to establish a national theatre in Bergen repeatedly. In a report on the meeting of the Irish Literary Society in London in 1899, Yeats is quoted as saying:
“The theatre of Scandinavia was the nearest approach to an ideal theatre in modern Europe. It was the only theatre whose plays were at once literary and popular” (Pierce 50). In a 1902 essay called “The Freedom of the Theatre”
published in the United Irishman, we also find Yeats mentioning Ibsen: “We are interested in religion and in private morals and personal emotion, and so it is precisely out of the rushing journey of the soul through these things that Ibsen and Wagner get the tumult that is drama” (Collected Works X 93).
Yeats wanted to emulate Ibsen’s Norwegian theatre precisely because it was a national theatre where the noble artistry of dramatic literature was acknowledged by the public as the embodiment of their own desires and aspirations.
When Yeats claimed in his 1899 article “The Irish Literary Theatre” that
“all literature and all art is national” (Pethica 268), he seems to have meant that all great art and literature is great by its artistic merit (which for Yeats is universal and transcendent) and should be nationally recognized as such. It was as if Yeats believed that the world-historical moment in which Ibsen’s realism and his aspiration for a national theatre had necessarily come together would repeat itself in Ireland; only this time, Ibsen’s realism should be replaced by his more visionary poetic drama that would suit the Celtic temperament better. In the Irish national theatre, nation and art would converge, and the freedom of imagination and national consciousness would feed off each other. Yeats envisioned his theatre to be the consecrated site of national drama on which artistic freedom and political ideals would be miraculously consummated.
Reflecting on the two vicissitudinous decades of the Irish National
Theatre, Yeats wrote an open letter to Lady Gregory in 1919 called “A People’s Theatre.” In it, Yeats argues that “We have been the first to create a true ‘People’s Theatre,’ and we have succeeded because it is not an exploration of local color, or of a limited form of drama possessing a temporary novelty, but the first doing of something for which the world is ripe, something that will be done all over the world and done more and more perfectly.” However, the Abbey’s audience quickly shunned away from the visionary challenge of poetic drama and turned increasingly to the cruder art of mimetic realism, the dramatic form that Yeats from the outset of his theatrical venture wanted to steer clear of: “the making articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the world, its own dignity, but all objective with the objectivity of the office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the street, of mechanism and of politics.” Yeats goes on to bemoan the untrammelled flourish of vulgar realism at the Abbey, seeing it as the betrayal of his vision of poetic drama: “Yet we did not set out to create this sort of theatre, and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat” (Collected Works VIII 128).
Embittered yet unrelenting, Yeats declares his desire “to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society where admission is by favour and never to many.” This “unpopular theatre” would require “an audience of fifty, a room worthy of it (some great dining-room or drawing-room), half a dozen young men and women who can dance and speak verse or play drum and flute and zither” (Collected Works VIII 131).
Thus Yeats began with a “People’s Theatre,” saw it putrefying into a
“Popular Theatre,” and decided to fight it with an “Unpopular Theatre.”
Yeats’s final reflection on the long tumultuous relationship his drama had with the Abbey is punctuated by bittersweet resignation: “my audience was for comedy, for Synge, for Lady Gregory, for O’Casey, not for me”
(Collected Works II 24).
Yeats persisted in his conviction that drama is less an art of imitation than creation, and that it is not so much an art of illusion and representation as one of allusion and suggestion. In this respect, the winters Yeats spent with Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage in Sussex in 1913-16 were crucial since it was there that Yeats was introduced by Pound to the Noh plays. Yeats believed he found a way out of his creative impasse in the Japanese form: a theatre that combines the verbal and non-verbal languages to transcend the limitations of both the realistic and symbolist drama. Using masks, music and dance that keep the onstage movement to a minimum and prevent the vagaries of the actor, the static, ritualized Noh drama provided Yeats with a theatrical form imbued with a heightened sense of spiritual intensity and linguistic concentration. As Anthony Roche writes, “With the introduction of the Noh, Yeats severed his always tenuous links with naturalism” (46).
Yeats’s antipathy with naturalism was ontologically rooted as much as it stemmed from stylistic difference. In “Certain Noble Plays of Japan” (1916), Yeats spells out the platform for his hieratic noble drama by setting it against the popular theatre. “Realism,” Yeats writes, “is created for the common people, and was always their peculiar delight, and it is the delight today of all those whose minds, educated alone by schoolmasters and newspapers, are without the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety” (Collected Works IV 167).
It was the unimaginative proximity between the quotidian world and its stage representation that Yeats found most disconcerting in realistic and naturalistic plays. As Ronald Gaskell argues, “Central to the naturalistic vision is the belief that nature, the material world in which we change and die, is the real world and that there is no other” (24). Flanked at either end by birth and death, the world of human experiences is only actual when they are materially and physically attested to and emanate from “the palpable activity of everyday life” (Evans 83). From Yeats’s point of view, the naturalistic
vision robs dramatic art of a whole dimension of experience, which is about recovering “the memory of beauty and emotional subtlety.” It is absolutely necessary that “All imaginative art remains at a distance and this distance, once chosen, must be firmly held against a pushing world” (Collected Works IV 165). The delight of the common people with realism mirrors the triumph of this pushing world over the imagination’s fragile hold on the distance.
Yeats’s aversion to naturalism meant that social verisimilitude on which the early Abbey’s success pivoted was far from his artistic agenda.
Naturalism invests most heavily in place and language, and it was these two dramatic properties on which Yeats launched his frontal attack. On-stage action should be minimized and dramatic speech eschewed in order that the audience’s easy recognition of and passive identification with what happens on the stage can be preempted. If dramatic space is not a shabby replica of the social world outside the theatre, what is it then? Dramatic space in Yeats is both constrictive and expansive.1) It is constrictive in the sense that physical movement and stage mobility are reduced to the point of being almost static. It is expansive, however, because it not only presents places of the mythic past but more importantly creates a sense of emplacement, that is, a sense of place in its coming into being. The Yeatsian space is neither a referent of the social world nor a self-contained metatheatrical arena. It is often realized in the in-between, liminal space of transition or transmutation such as dawn and twilight. The sense of distance, in the actor’s gesture and movement as well as in time and space, is a central dramaturgical device for Yeats. His poetic drama is about conjuring other, spiritual worlds beyond the quotidian, which is flat and drab by turns, and “to sink his imagination below the level of character in order to reach and disclose the deeper structures of human emotion” (Gaskell 55).
Equally important for Yeats’s drama is that the poetic language and diction must be united in the actor’s speech to create an atmosphere of
transcendental otherness in which the essence of being is alluded and approximated as closely as possible. Therein comes the need to control, suppress or do away with the actor’s body. Yeats probably wanted something improbable here, as unlikely as a national theatre that puts artistic freedom and aesthetic values above all else. The physical body (with its voice and gesture) is an indispensable medium for the actualization of poetic drama.
However, embodiment is always already an impure, contaminated state of being, and it is made worse by the actors, who are instinctively larger, busier and noisier than life. Yeats’s use of masks, songs and dance, and old men (who are naturally less mobile than young people) all suggests the severity of the predicament with which Yeats’s poetic drama was afflicted in practice.
Tempted to take up on Gordon Craig’s idea of replacing the actor with the marionette, Yeats seriously considered maiming the body of the actor: “The barrels, I thought, might be on castors, so that I could shove them about with a pole when the action required it” (Explorations 86-87)—not as outrageous now as it may have seemed then, when we remember Nagg and Nell. As Martin Puchner maintains, “Yeats’s ambivalence about theatricality and, in particular, about actors is nowhere as clear as in this proposal for creating a truly literary and purely poetic theater whose action would reside solely in the movement of voices: a theater of voices on castors” (122). In Yeats’s vision of poetic drama, the body is condemned to the perpetual return to purgatory, where it is most alive when most damned, and where it is most expressive when least mobile.
IV
The overriding motif that governs Yeats’s poetic drama is “the shock of encountering a transcendent reality or the tension between the demands of
that reality and the claims of the world we live in every day” (Gaskell 51).
As Yeats was increasingly alienated from the Abbey’s mainstream drama promoting its “PQ” (peasant quality) and conservative realism, the delicate balance between the quotidian and the transcendent in his drama was progressively deteriorated. Yeats tended to sacrifice character: his plays are populated by the characters moulded in a half-symbolic way—Fool, Blind Man, Beggar, Old Man, Queen, Swineherd, and so on. These characters display a very restricted range of emotion, and the spiritual intensity that Yeats pursues fail to emanate from their complex emotions and/or their specific circumstances. It is almost as though the spiritual intensity in Yeats’s drama was something not to be reached but to be abruptly imposed. Thus, the Yeatsian ending often feels affected and forced: at the end of Cathleen ni Houlihan, “the ‘message’ overcomes theatrical feasibility” and The Words upon the Window-Pane (1930), the one play by Yeats which in its contemporaneous time and setting comes closest to naturalistic drama, is marred by the ending whose outlandish awkwardness “reaches absurdly gauche proportions” (Evans 126).
Cathleen ni Houlihan was one of Yeats’s rare theatrical successes, and he was surprised by the intense popularity with which the play was received.
However, the play’s triumph rested on the specific historical circumstance and the specific audience, the fact that ironically contradicts the Yeatsian view of poetic drama as timeless and borderless. The Words upon the Window-Pane has been grouped with another play by T. R. Henn under the heading of
“Ireland and the eighteenth-century tradition.” That other play is Purgatory, a late and indisputable masterpiece. As I have written somewhere else, it is a play that “exemplifies an economy of drama in which the tragic vision is developed and enveloped with verbal precision and dramatic sure-footedness”
(Lee 118). The play features a pair of characters (a boy and an old man) and a pair of objects (a ruined house and a bare tree) whose vaguely symbolic
infusion is overshadowed by their undeniable physical presence. Whatever interpretative point the play may allow itself for (and there are many), it is the naturalistic act (of the old man stabbing his son three times to death with the same knife he had used to murder his father) that creates the focal point of the play’s horror: “He stabs the Boy . . . He stabs again and again. The window grows dark” (Collected Works II 543). The dramatic effect of the old man’s stabbing act pivots on its sheer physicality: the stabbing is less a symbolic act than a physical one, and the spectator is expected to experience it as such. Yeats “naturalizes” his play by inserting naturalistic action into stage directions: “They struggle for the bag. In the struggle it drops, scattering the money. The old man staggers but does not fall. They stand looking at each other” (Collected Works II 542); “He[the Old Man] cleans the knife and begins to pick up money” (Collected Works II 544). The knife and the bag of money are there to see: if they were invisible, the dramatic climax would lose its credulity and the tragic tenor of the play would be robbed of its credibility. These stage directions are less intended for symbolic augmentation than they are written to be acted out naturalistically with physical precision: their purpose is not to induce cerebral reflection but to create visceral excitement.
Yeats’s poetic drama was designed to open up a whole new dimension of human existence and experience. His resistance of the “pushing world,” that colonizing power of rampant materialism and positivist perception, was translated into his aversion to realism and naturalism which he believed to be the art form for the self-complacent and spiritually bankrupt middle classes.
However, his most successful plays, such as Cathleen ni Houlihan and Purgatory, were the ironic outcome of the betrayal of his poetic vision.
Going back to the very beginning of this paper and considering Pope’s claim that “Homer makes us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers” again, Yeats the dramatist leaves us readers better than he makes us hearers.
Notes
1) In their book Mapping Irish Theatre, Chris Morash and Shaun Richards use the concepts of
“restrictive space” and “expansive space” as the two poles of the spatial spectrum within which Irish theatre has negotiated its dramatic space (19-26). Informed by Morash and Richards, my own formulation is nonetheless different from theirs mainly in that I employ the “constrictive”
and “expansive” spaces to understand the specifically Yeatsian spatial imagination.
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Manuscript peer-review process:
receipt acknowledged: 3 Mar. 2018.
peer-reviewed: 19 Mar. 2018.
revision received: 16 Apr. 2018.
publication approved: 23 Apr. 2018.
