Violence, Narrative and Myth in Joyce and Yeats

Subjective Identity and Anarcho-Syndicalist Traditions

T. Balinisteanu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137291585
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This book answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

1

Yeats’s Revolving Gyres

A Metaphorical Language for the Modern Experience of Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Political Aesthetics

I shall begin by outlining a theoretical perspective on the role of art in the production of material reality derived from the anarchist tradition, that may serve as an alternative to Marxist analyses. The anarchist perspective is based on the theorisation of labour as an artisan’s work kindred with the creative labour of artists. This kinship prompts the consideration of the view that art is actively implicated in the production of material reality, whereas the Marxist perspective dissociates between the alienated work of the proletariat and its reflection in art in the cultural superstructure. In keeping with the anarchist tradition, I regard art as a means of production of material reality and social subjects.

In the first part of the chapter I examine aspects of the anarchist tradition which suggest a kinship between artistic and non-artistic labour. In the second part I analyse this kinship through using W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’. Based on this reading I argue, in the third part of the chapter, that the forces at work in literary narrative shape material relations in a dialectic process through which art and reality recreate each other in unceasing revolution.

The kinship between artistic and non-artistic labour

Modernist literary and anarchist political discourses evince a faith that art should engage the emotions, instincts, feelings, and imagination of readers in order to bring them into shape for action against established authority. Both positions suggest the notion that, metaphorically or even literally speaking, an art text might energise our being for action by conveying in its language a vibration the wavelength of which changes our perception of material reality. For the famous Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), the processes of learning and artistic creation should take place in a social system that allows for no central authority, only for fine negotiations of the terms of sociality between oneself and the next man. Only the social group finely attuned is ready for action, and, it is implied, the arts provide a medium for such fine tuning between the individual and the group. In The Conquest of Bread (1892), Kropotkin anticipates a social world in which the work of artists ‘will be an integral part of a living whole that would not be complete without them, any more than they would be complete without it. […] Everything that surrounds man, in the street, in the interior and exterior of public monuments, must be of a pure artistic form’ (Kropotkin, 1926, pp. 107–8). Consensual social harmony is partly the effect of aesthetic mediation between part and whole, individual and group, in a physical world fully turned into an art text. In ‘Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal’ (1896), Kropotkin traces developments in astronomy to show how the initial perception of the universe with the Earth at its centre has changed into a perception of the universe as a system of forces that balance each other in an unceasing dynamic of creation and recreation of worlds:

the center, the origin of force, formerly transferred from the earth to the sun, now turns out to be scattered and disseminated. It is everywhere and nowhere […] The idea of force governing the world, pre-established law, preconceived harmony, disappears to make room for the harmony that Fourier caught a glimpse of; the one which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each in equilibrium. (Kropotkin, 2002, pp. 117–8)

Although Yeats, who met Kropotkin, did not consistently adhere to this paradigm in its relevance for the arts, he did share Kropotkin’s hopes that art might achieve attunement of self and other within a shared faith in social and political change. Yeats’s letter to the editor of the United Irishman, dated 17 October 1903, spells out his political aesthetic thus:

I would see, in every branch of our National propaganda, young men who would have the sincerity and the precision of those Russian revolutionists that Kropotkin and Stepniak tell us of, men who would never use an argument to convince others which would not convince themselves, who could not make a mob drunk with a passion they could not share, and who would above all seek for fine things for their own sake, and for precise knowledge for its own sake, and not for its momentary use. (Yeats in Kelly and Schuchard, 2003, pp. 448–9)

Yeats’s position suggests, somewhat contradictorily, that art serves both individual enlightenment through art for art’s sake, and the emancipation of the masses through a shared passion engendered by art, or, rather, that one can only be achieved through the other. As Yeats himself acknowledged in the same letter, these thoughts run through his plays Where There Is Nothing (1902), first performed in 1904 by the London Stage Society, and The King’s Threshold (1904), first performed in Dublin in 1903 by the Irish National Theatre Society. Although Yeats himself grew contemptuous towards Where There Is Nothing over the years, and criticised it at length in his autobiography (Yeats, 1938, p. 388), the play found praise in anarchist quarters. The Russian émigré anarchist Emma Goldman (1869–1940) reviewed Where There Is Nothing to conclude that the play ‘is of great social significance, deeply revolutionary in the sense that it carries the message of the destruction of every institution – State, Property, and Church – that enslaves humanity. For where there is nothing, there man begins’ (Goldman, 1914, p. 260). Indeed, much of the life of the play’s protagonist, Paul Ruttledge, is dedicated to enticing the ‘mob’ to share a passion for life lived against institutional authority and in the embrace of nature, with echoes of the philosophy of H. D. Thoreau (1817–62). But in the end it is the idea of the estranged hero punished by the mob for his progressive ideals which predominates, rather than the idea of harmonious social solidarity which Kropotkin advocated.

In Kropotkin’s terms, James Joyce, who read his work and that of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), developed an aesthetic of the centre which ‘is everywhere and nowhere’ in a social world ‘which results from the disorderly and incoherent movements of numberless hosts of matter, each of which goes its own way and all of which hold each in equilibrium’ (Kropotkin, 2002, pp. 117–8). Thus, while Yeats responded to established authority by seeking to ruin it through a quest for a godly and aesthetic centre situated in a metaphysical otherworld, Joyce responded to it by showing how centres of authority slip and disintegrate in the worldliness of the flux of life in disorderly harmony. However, for both Yeats and Joyce, in its concern with authority, art engenders politics, rather than being subordinated to it. In this, they, like many modernist writers and thinkers, share the ethos of anarchist activism.

For instance, although in his writings Bakunin offered little on the role of aesthetics in social change, he often expressed his political views literarily, the ‘I’ of his discourse positioned almost as a romantic narrative subject. That is, his activism was governed by an aesthetic. As Andrzej Walicki writes, referring to the Narodnik movement that brought progressive students to the Russian countryside in search of a purer, bucolic, self:

Of the two factions that took part in the 1873–74 ‘Go to the people’ movement, the Bakuninites were in the majority, representing the ‘romantic’ side of the movement; they appealed to the emotions and instincts of the peasants, whereas the Lavrovites (the other faction) wished to teach the peasants, to mold their consciousness. (Walicki, 1979, p. 280, original italics)

In the 1830s, Bakunin was a member of the Hegelian circle organised by Nikolai Stankevich (1813-40), taking over its leadership in 1837. There he befriended Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48). Belinsky favoured realism in art, but ‘warned against confusing a faithful portrait with a mere copy’ and argued that ‘the true rendering of reality requires the revelation of the universal in the particular, the portrayal of typical phenomena that contain the essence of the infinite variety of life – universality distilled from an apparent chaos of facts.’ (Walicki, 1979, p. 127, original italics) According to Walicki:

Belinsky emphasized that universality in a work of art should not be confused with a ‘logical syllogism’ or ‘schematic abstraction.’ This would be transgressing against the nature of art, which he defined as ‘thinking in images’. Artistic generalization must obtain its effects through vital, concrete images working directly on the feelings and imagination of the reader, otherwise it is nothing but ‘vague rhetoric.’ (1979, p. 127)

It is more in this vein that Bakunin and the anarchists envisioned the role of art: yes, in the service of politics, but not merely propaganda or vague rhetoric; rather, art and life create each other in a (Hegelian) way that cannot be but political.

Anarchism and syndicalism as modes of aesthetic self-creation are transnational phenomena, formed from literary and political experiments and activism across the globe. For instance, in Australia, too, aesthetics was seen as driving political and social change in socialist and anarchist circles, as Bruce Scates points out:

a number of literary devices served to popularise political thought […] radical writers appropriated work with which the reader was already familiar. Reading George, Gronlund or Kropotkin, one encountered the prose of Carlyle, the poetry of Shelley, the science of Darwin, landmarks which led the reader through new and often challenging terrain. (Scates, 1997, p. 68)

The prominent Australian anarchist J. A. Andrews (1865–1903) ‘used utopian literature to visualise a new society’ (Scates, 1997, p. 120). An active member of the Melbourne Anarchist Club founded in 1886, Andrews wrote a novel entitled The Triumph of Freedom (1892) which promotes the idea that ‘only anarchism and a return to life on the land’ can save the people from oppression by Government and plutocracy (Scates, 1997, p. 121). Andrews’s novel chimes with Yeats’s play Where There Is Nothing with both carrying echoes of Thoreau’s and Kropotkin’s philosophies. Andrews was a cofounder of an Isis Lodge in Sidney in 1897, attempting to affiliate it with Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. In 1890 an Irish National League was formed at Godwood, Australia, its founder ‘likening the open bush of South Australia to crowded, land-locked Ireland’ (Scates, 1997, p. 24). A fellow member of Andrews at the Melbourne Anarchist Club, John William Fleming (1863–1950), invited Emma Goldman to tour Australia in 1907. Goldman reviewed Yeats’s play Where There Is Nothing in 1914. In Australia, David Andrade (1859–1928), founder of the Melbourne Anarchist Club, published the periodical Honesty (1887–1889) modelled on Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (August 1881–April 1908). Joyce was inspired by Tucker’s political philosophy. The first page of Liberty of 28 January 1888 records a donation made in support of its publication and the Proudhon Library by the Peter O’Neil Crowley branch of the Irish National Emergency Association. Tucker reported Irish land agitation in Liberty, and was engaged in debates in Dora Marsden’s Egoist, where Joyce was published. Wyndham Lewis and T. E. Hulme were involved in the Egoist circles and both analysed Sorel’s work in their writing. In India, the anarcho-syndicalist Bhagat Singh (1907–1931) read Bakunin extensively and in 1928 wrote approvingly of anarchism in Kirti, the monthly magazine of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (Grewal, 2007, p. 54). The works of these writers and activists show a marked interest in the idea that art and life create each other, and I shall comment on how this interest is developed in aspects of their poetics and philosophies in due course.

Art and life in Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’

Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ provides the elements of a figurative idiom which we may use to illustrate the proposition that art and life create each other. This poem, written in January 1919, first published in the Dial (November 1920) and the Nation (6 November 1920), and reprinted in the 1921 volume of poetry, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Jeffares, 1984, p. 201, Ross, 2009, p. 222), offers one of the most expressive renderings of the sense of change which permeated the modernist worldview, while also suggesting tropes and figures for a discussion of the dynamic relations between art and politics.

As Norman Jeffares points out, Yeats annotated the poem in terms of a story which figures Michael Robartes sharing with Owen Aherne (two fictional characters, but perhaps not quite so to Yeats), in Yeats’s own words, ‘several mathematical diagrams from the Speculum [by Gyraldus, which Robartes found among the Judwalis in Arabia, a fictional tribe of diagrammatists], squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles’. Robartes conveys the belief of the Judwalis that the living mind has a ‘fundamental mathematical movement’, the trajectory of which reveals the ‘expression of the mind’s desire’ thus freeing the soul from material bondage. This trajectory is represented in a figure ‘frequently drawn as a double cone, the narrow end of each cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other’ (Yeats in Jeffares, 1984, pp. 201–2, brackets mine). The figure reveals how:

the human soul is always moving outward into the objective world or inward into the self; & this movement is double because the human soul would not be conscious were it not suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. (Yeats in Jeffares, 1984, p. 202)

Thus, on the one hand, for Yeats, the two cones represent contrary tendencies within the self. On the other hand, as Yeats put it, ‘this figure is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction’. At the moment Yeats was writing he perceived that the life gyre was sweeping outward, having almost reached its greatest expansion: ‘all our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating heterogeneous civilisation belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself, but the revelation as in a lightning flash, […] of the civilisation that must slowly take its place’ (Yeats in Jeffares, 1984, p. 211). Critics have noted that Yeats’s fear of the forthcoming disintegration of human civilisation was brought ashore by ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ (Yeats, 1997, p. 189) of historical events: ‘the grim violence of Easter, 1916, and the attendant civil disorder’ (Unterecker, 1996, p. 158); ‘the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 3 March 1918, which envisaged control of semi-autonomous Baltic states and the Ukraine by postwar Germany’; ‘January 1919 […] was the month in which the Spartakist Uprising was put down with much blood in Germany; civil war raged in Russia with the Franco-British Expeditionary Force enforcing a coastal blockade’; on 21 January 1919 ‘two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were murdered in County Tipperary by a group of Volunteers’, an event which ‘came to be seen as the first blow struck in the guerrilla War of Independence’; and the subsequent retaliatory ‘atrocities of the Black and Tans’ (Brown, 2001, pp. 270–1). Such frightening falling apart of established authority, mere anarchy loosed upon the world, inspired in Yeats the apocalyptic vision of the beast which struggles to become born in the violence of the world’s remaking. But this violence is a whirl of contrary tendencies: even though destructive it is also darkly creative. As Bakunin would have it in ‘The Reaction in Germany’ (1842), ‘the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!’ (1972, p. 57). The revolving gyres unravel the world at the same time as they weave a new one: a terrible beauty is born in which both grace and violence are manifested.

Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ is of course but one example, a most expressive one, of the perception of contrary tendencies within the modern consciousness, a consciousness in which grace and violence set each other in motion even as they revolve in opposite directions. Another expression of this dynamic can be found in Georges Sorel’s work. Taking cue from ‘a single clause in Reflections on Violence’ (1906) in which ‘Sorel says that syndicalism is based on “corporate exclusiveness, which resembles the local or racial spirit”’, Michael Tratner argues that literary modernism can be described along two lines of ‘nationalism’ and ‘pluralism’ respectively. The pluralists emphasised the idea of the local, that is, of small groups without elites, whereas nationalists emphasised the idea of racial unity, advocating in favour of elites whose role is to provide the myths that unite the masses. According to Tratner, in so far as literary narratives serve as means to negotiate particular social changes, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf ‘tried to show that one can have enthusiasm, the joys of group unity, and even myths, without elites, without “common blood”, and without violence’ whereas T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats ‘tried to show that one needs elites and blood ties to have the enthusiasm of group unity, and Yeats defended the necessity of violence’ (Tratner, 1995, pp. 38–41). He then goes on to argue that, nevertheless, there is violence in the texts of Joyce and Woolf as they ‘recognized the power of violence to express and satisfy the unconscious desires for liberation created by social oppression’ (Tratner, 1995, p. 41). In this context Tratner argues that Sorel defined ‘the crowd mind as the superior and deeper mind and the conscious personality as a dull complex of habits’, with violence and the general strike understood as ‘in essence disruptions that cause an intense need for something to happen with no sense of what that something will be’ (Tratner, 1995, p. 35). But this is clearly not the case with Sorel. Taking in the events of early Christianity, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and nineteenth-century unification of Italy, Sorel finds that although the myths and visions which animated the faithful and the revolutionary were not realised exactly ‘to the letter’, that is, exactly as envisioned, whatever has been achieved (in fact a great deal) would not have come to pass had those myths and visions not driven the subject to action (Sorel, 2004, pp. 125–6). It is a strength of Sorel’s theory that it accommodates both vision and the possibility of practical results:

And yet without leaving the present, without reasoning about this future, which seems forever condemned to escape our reason, we should be unable to act at all. Experience shows that the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective […] even supposing the revolutionaries to have been wholly and entirely deluded in setting up this imaginary picture of the general strike, this picture may yet have been, in the course of the preparation for the Revolution, a great element of strength, if it has embodied all the aspirations of Socialism, and if it has given to the whole body of Revolut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Yeats’s Revolving Gyres: A Metaphorical Language for the Modern Experience of Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Political Aesthetics
• 2 Social Myth, Material Reality, and the Aesthetico-Ideological Functions of Art 33
• 3 The Political Aesthetic of Yeats’s Myth in Anarchist and Syndicalist Contexts
• 4 Social Myth, Literary Narrative, and Political Aesthetics
• 5 Social Myth and James Joyce’s Political Aesthetic
• 6 Social and Anti-social Aesthetic Drives in Joyce, Yeats, and Sorel
• 7 W. B. Yeats, Social Myth, and Monoglossia
• 8 James Joyce, Social Myth, and Heteroglossia
• 9 Heteroglossic Desubjection and Monoglossic Subjection in Joyce, Yeats, and Sorel: Social Myth, Anarchy, and Syndicalism
• 10 Modernism, Myth, Violence, and Social Change
• 11 Modernist Art, Politics, and Social Change: A Sorelian Perspective
• 12 Modernism, Narrative, and Violence
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index