Religion and Aesthetic Experience in Joyce and Yeats

T. Balinisteanu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137434777
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art can be seen as a form of religious experience.

Part I

The Creative Process and Social Action

1

Yeats and Art as a Form of Religious Experience

For W. B. Yeats, the transfiguration of the mundane into the sacred in one’s vision can be achieved not only through participating in religious ritual, but also through poetry and other forms of art. In the poet’s words addressed to Gordon Craig on 23 May 1910, concerning the revision process of the verse version of the play, The Hour-Glass, first published in The Mask in Florence, Italy, in April 1913, one finds a representative expression of the poet’s understanding of epiphanic revelation as made possible through poetics as much as through religious experience: ‘I conceive of the play as a ritual. It must not give all to the first hearing any more than the Latin ritual of the Church does, so long as the ultimate goal is the people’ (Clark and Clark, 2001, p. 869). A few years earlier, writing to Frank Fay in January 1904 about The Shadowy Waters, first published as a dramatic poem in The North American Review in May 1900, and On Baile’s Strand, first published in In the Seven Woods (1903), Yeats described the former text in words that might be used to describe epiphanic revelation: ‘The whole picture as it were moves together – sky and sea and cloud are as it were actors. It is almost religious, it is more a ritual than a human story’ (Clark and Clark, 2001, pp. 864–5, p. 848). As late as July 1929, writing to Thomas Sturge Moore in excitement during the rehearsals of Fighting the Waves (first published in 1934), which is a ballet version of The Only Jealousy of Emer (first published in 1919), excitement provoked by the opportunity of using the masks made by the Dutch sculptor Hildo Van Krop, Yeats reasserted that: ‘I always feel that my work is not drama but the ritual of a lost faith’ (Clark and Clark, 2001, p. 899).

For Yeats, the aesthetic use of myth in the creation of art texts enables access to a sacred realm wherein profane reality is transfigured aesthetically. The aesthetic use of myth and subsequent aesthetic transfiguration of the mundane relies on the experiences of love and passion, and in turn sets out love and instils passion, providing through these an impetus to creative labour and social action. In a note concerning the 1917 play version of The Cat and the Moon, Yeats wrote, in reference to Giambattista Vico’s philosophy, that:

Myth is not, as Vico perhaps thought, a rudimentary form superseded by reflection. Belief is the spring of all action; we assent to the conclusions of reflection but believe what myth presents; belief is love, and the concrete alone is loved; nor is it true that myth has no purpose but to bring round some discovery of a principle or a fact. The saint may touch through myth the utmost reach of human faculty and pass not to reflection but to unity with the source of his being. (Yeats, 2001, pp. 698–9)

Here, Yeats’s understanding of the power of myth to mobilise belief resonates with Sorel’s. Sorel’s view is more inclusive in that for him everything is art: the discovery of a principle or a fact is governed by a myth’s poetics, and so one passes to reflection always guided by an aesthetics. Like Yeats, Sorel read Vico extensively and elaborated upon his theory of cyclic history in ‘Étude sur Vico’, published in the October 1896 issue of Le Devenir social, which Sorel had edited in 1895 (Sorel, 1896, pp. 785–817; Stanley, 1981, p. 16). Sorel developed from Vico the idea that the twentieth century represents the final stage of a historical cycle dominated by sophistries and barbaric because of that (Horowitz, 2010, pp. 92–4). Yet Sorel agreed with Vico that myth emerged from primitive men’s efforts to make sense of the relations between experiences and observed phenomena (Gianinazzi, 2006, p. 129). However, for Sorel, that sense-making effort always has an aesthetic dimension. The creative labour of Sorel’s artist-artisan is born from that effort:

il nous apprend à chercher l’origine de nos constructions métaphysiques dans les constructions plus ou moins empiriques de la vie sociale, de même que nous trouvons l’origine de nos thèses scientifiques dans les observations faites dans les arts par les techniciens. [it teaches that we should look for the origin of our metaphysical constructs in the more or less empirical constructs of social life, in the same way we find the origin of our scientific theses in the observations made by technicians in the arts.] (Sorel, 1896, p. 801, my translation)

At the same time, for Sorel, that sense-making effort and its manifestation in creative labour is a process in which one returns to the source of one’s being, a process Sorel theorised through using Henri Bergson’s intuitionist psychology, studied extensively also by Yeats. However, although Yeats studied Bergson, his understanding of the nature of the source of one’s being is closer to Plotinus’ philosophy. While for Sorel the source of one’s being is found in the élan vital which channels intuition and thus makes possible the re-creation of the self, for Yeats it is found in a Divine Mind as also a site of a collective racial consciousness. Nevertheless, there is a common ground in Yeats’s and Sorel’s understandings of the instrumental value of myth, which both derive from Bergson, even though for Yeats the experience of duration is filtered through mysticism, whereas Sorel’s understanding of that experience is more closely related to phenomenology in a scientific manner. This is a topic that shall demand further elaboration throughout this study. For now, suffice it to note that Sorel, too, cherished the notion that belief is the spring of all action when he defined social myth as ‘at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement’ (Sorel, 2004, p. 50). John L. Stanley, translator, editor, and analyst of Sorel’s work, argues that for Sorel: ‘The myth is as much a part of reality as the machine because the myth moves men to action; that is, it has practical and perceivable consequences. It is a force in the world, and people act on the present with it’ (Stanley, 1987, p. 56). However, while Sorel theorised the aesthetico-religious experience of social myth as implicitly ethical and moral, tying it to socialist activism, Yeats believed that, as he put it in a letter to Frederick James Gregg in the late summer of 1886: ‘The moral impulse and the religious destroy each other in most cases’ (Yeats in Kelly and Domville, 1986, pp. 7–8). Moreover, in a letter to Katharine Tynan dated 25 June 1887, Yeats recorded: ‘However though I think socialism good work I am not sure that it is my work’ (Yeats in Kelly and Domville, 1986, p. 23). But these differences should not deter critics from exploring Yeats’s writing through Sorel’s, when the main focus is their understanding of aesthetic experience as form of religious experience and labour that drives social change.

In the notes to the 1931 version of his play, The Resurrection (first published in 1927), Yeats confesses: ‘For years I have been preoccupied with a certain myth […] I do not mean a fiction, but one of those statements our nature is compelled to make and employ as a truth though there cannot be sufficient evidence’ (Yeats, 2001, p. 722). That certain myth is a myth of loss and return as seen in ‘the story of Oisin in Tir-nan-oge’ which Yeats reshaped into Wanderings of Oisin, and Yeats used this myth to contest the myth of progress and replace it with an understanding of progress as truly achievable only through vision, thus attempting ‘to prove that all life rose and fell as in my poem’ (Yeats, 2001, p. 722, Yeats’s original spelling retained). Yeats’s perspective on progress as achievable through leaps of faith demanded by poetic vision chimes with Sorel’s perspective that rapture rather than reason leads to progress:

many of the great things of history were accomplished by the human masses who, during a more or less lengthy period, were dominated by convictions similar to religious forces in that they are sufficiently absolute to make them forget many of the material circumstances which are habitually taken into consideration in choosing the direction to be taken. If one wishes to express this fact in a language appropriate to the procedures which are called scientific, juridical, or logical, it is necessary to formulate principles which will be considered as having been those of ahistoric men, more or less thrust on the road of the absolute. (Sorel, 2004, pp. 258–9, original italics)

While one may easily surmise that the contents of the myths to which Yeats and Sorel refer are different, their understanding of the nature of the aesthetic experience of myth and its instrumental value echo each other. Both Yeats and Sorel developed independently Vico’s idea that progress is achieved not solely through the application of reason, but through reasoning guided by religious aesthetic experience. Exploring Yeats’s understanding of the notion of progress, Barbara A. Suess argues that in Yeats’s essay, ‘The Irish Literary Theatre’ (1900), the poet ‘describes both perfection and progress as possible only through the sudden, individual perception of an instinctual truth’ (Suess, 2003, p. 31). Yeats’s phrasing in that essay could be used to also describe Sorel’s concept of social myth in relation to progress: ‘all life is revelation beginning in miracle and enthusiasm […]. Progress is miracle, and it is sudden, because miracles are the work of an all-powerful energy’ (Yeats, 2007, p. 126). Comparing Marxist and Sorelian philosophies, Stanley notes that ‘Sorel replaces […] historicism with an artistic understanding of the world which receives its impetus from labour’ (Stanley, 1987, p. 298). For Yeats, as for Sorel, myth is a tool that expresses one’s nature in the form of compelling conviction and can be employed to move men to action. And action is one with labour: the creative process is a process of self-transformation and self-revision, that is, a form of labour in which the object of labour is one’s own self, and which circumscribes the range of possible actions of that self in material reality.

In this context, love, ‘word known to all men’, and passion are important concepts for the analyses developed in this book because they are closely connected to faith, belief, and enthusiasm (U, 9: 429–30).¹ Love and passion, like epiphany, transubstantiation, or epiclesis, are experienced in a moment void of time, outside history. Of course, the modes of love and passion differ according to the nature of their object and other contextual circumstances (romantic, political, Christian related, and so forth). However, an intuitive comparison between the experience of romantic love and aesthetic experience may offer a starting point for exploring how they relate to each other, and how these interrelated experiences are connected to religious feeling as well as to self-transformation and social change. One cannot place with precision in measurable standard time the moment when one has fallen in love any more than an author can say when exactly s/he experienced creative vision, or readers can be certain of the exact clock time at which they have become absorbed into the world of an art text thus becoming absent to the material world around them. And the object of one’s love is transfigured in that moment, which is what happens in revelatory vision with the segment of reality that is experienced anew, or with one’s identity when one momentarily forgets oneself by finding his/her identity in the character of a poem, novel, play, or other forms of art texts. Love and passion are forms of experience akin to epiphany, transubstantiation, or epiclesis in a very broad understanding of these concepts. One grows through such epiphanic re-creations of one’s relation to others, and through the change of many the world also changes not only subjectively but also in its material, objective existence. The material changes are the result of actions performed by social actors with faith, belief, and enthusiasm, or of actions determined by the need to discover and enact their conditions of possibility.

Thus, although the love and passion engendered by aesthetics or religion are experienced subjectively, they have consequences in the material, social world. The attitudes of faith, belief, or enthusiasm which are fired by love and passion may be translated into destructive action in the social world as shown in Yeats’s play, The Unicorn from the Stars, first published in 1908 (Clark and Clark, 2001, p. 857). The central character of the play, the coachbuilder Martin Hearne, misinterprets the guidance received in a vision regarding the way in which one’s passion must be invested in order to discover one’s godly self (which is always an aesthetic self with Yeats). Martin misinterprets the trampling of the unicorns as a call for the destruction of worldly law and authority, represented in the play by British imperial order, property, and military forces, only to eventually realise that it is one’s acceptance of life lived within the constraints imposed by law and authority of any kind that one must overcome. The vision did not call for the destruction of the material embodiments of authority and law, but for the unfettering of the self from the constraints they create in one’s heart and mind when one consents to being signified through the discourse of law and authority. It called for a revolt of the soul against the intellect.

This revolt emerged from a distinction between the imagination and the intellect developed from the ethos of William Blake’s poetry. In 1896 Yeats wrote an unpublished review of Blake’s The First Book of Urizen (1794), a text which shows the influence of the German mystic and shoemaker Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). Yeats claimed that Boehme ‘first taught in the modern world the principles which Blake expressed in the language of poetry; and of these the most important, and the one from which the others spring, is that the imagination is the means whereby we communicate with God’ (Yeats in Kelly and Domville, 1986, p. 224). David Weir has argued that Blake was a precursor of ‘the anarcho-modernist revolution in literature that took place early in the twentieth century’ (Weir, 1997, p. 242). Weir compares Blake’s aesthetic with the egoist philosophy of Max Stirner (1806–56) through the surrealist prose poem, Les Chants de Maldoror (1868–9), by Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, 1846–70), which was praised in Dora Marsden’s Egoist (1914–19), where sections of Joyce’s Ulysses appeared in 1919. According to Weir:

In terms of cultural history, Lautréamont and Blake are related more closely to the age of modernism than to their own times, and both writers had a place in the egoistic anarchism of the prewar years and the period immediately following. […] With Blake, the revolutionary moment often occurs when the individual recognizes his own inhibitions as the basis of enslavement to external authority: political oppression is figured as a psychosexual condition grounded in the repression of desire. (Weir, 1997, p. 242)

In this context, Yeats’s revolt of the soul against the intellect can be interpreted as having an anarchistic value. The revolt should free one’s desire, allowing the manifestation of passion and love as forms of resistance which have political value. That is, aesthetic creation is a political act of opposition to authority that allows individuals to renegotiate the terms of their sensual engagement with other individuals and the material world, thereby redefining their lives as faithful, believing, and enthusiastic.

This Blakean ethos is manifested in the text of Yeats’s The Hour-Glass, where the main character, the Wise Man, a scholar whose teaching and life are devoted to rational intellectualism, undergoes a conversion from faithlessness to faith. He is compelled to find in himself the strength of the imagination required for a leap of faith. In the Christian contexts of the play that strength of the imagination and faithfulness is connected to passion and love. The kinds of passion and love hinted at in The Hour-Glass are less elaborated upon in this play, their importance for Yeats’s philosophy being further developed in other Christian plays, such as Calvary (dated 1920, first published 1921). In Calvary, as Yeats explains in a note to the play in Four Plays for Dancers (1921), the figure of Christ expresses the nature of objective men, who invest their passion in a cause or institution, whereas the subjective natures of Lazarus, Judas, and the birds express the contentment ‘whether joyous or sorrowful, sufficient to itself’ which comes from a resignation to being ‘true to type, seeking always that which is unique or personal’ (Yeats, 2001, p. 696). The human personality contains both these warring natures, one tending towards the objective, the other towards the subjective. When the subjective nature wins over the objective as it does in artists, love and passion, whether joyous or sorrowful, are invested not in an external cause in the realm of history, but in a realm of aesthetic perfection that lies beyond and above it. In Calvary, those with whom Christ argues are not artists, but the note which explains their characters suggests that the play engages with a more encompassing set of beliefs pertaining to Yeats’s poetic philosophy. The tale of the old Arab conveyed by that aspect of Yeats named Robartes concerning Choice and Chance as attributes of God is revelatory in this respect. According to the tale, in the old Arab’s words, God is both Choice and Chance:

Some worship His Choice; that is easy; to know that He has willed for some unknown purpose all that happens is pleasant; but I have spent my life in worshipping His Chance, and that moment when I understand the immensity of His Chance is the moment when I am nearest Him. (Yeats, 2001, p. 697)

In the perfection of God, objective nature meets the subjective. Those who understand God in this way aspire in their lives to reconcile the passion invested in a historical cause with the perfection of being true to type, content with wearing the mask imposed on them by Chance, yet wearing it out in creative labour until the mask becomes an artefact expressing aesthetically the passions and loves of one’s life. In short, one aspires to reach in one’s vision the state of experience in which Choice meets Chance. In the old Arab’s tale, this epiphany that brings one nearest God is shown as being engendered by the worshipping of Chance, rather than Choice. In other words, if we are to find the sacred in a cause, thus discovering the godly marvellous of Choice in the realm of history, we must first worship Chance. This worshipping of Chance is the labour of artists. Artists discover lovingly the unique and personal of the role into which they have been cast by God because they find themselves embodying a godly design which is revealed aesthetically through poetry. They bear the mask imposed by that role, but they also perfect it and wear it out until it becomes an art object. Only by accepting the mask and transforming it into art text can one find one’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Argument and Contexts
• Part I The Creative Process and Social Action
• Part II Reader Response and Social Action
• Conclusion: Art and Life Rhythms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index