Metaphor to the Rescue

Yeats invents a rich caste of conceptual and fabular personae. Yeats scholars are of course familiar with such ‘notions’ as the ‘gyres’, even as it is unlikely that a single of those scholars believes in these as historical realities or invests faith in their explanatory value. Yet their 'aesthetic appeal' is attested to. Thus, the gyres are not treated seriously as concepts but appreciated as fictions. A number of questions arise, the most obvious perhaps being which of these attitudes – belief or aesthetic utility – approaches Yeats’ own position. How far did he himself subordinate belief to fictional appeal. The second concerns the heuristic status of metaphor. How is it that we are able to ‘rescue’ as metaphors what are remaindered and vacuous in purely conceptual or propositional terms.

We say: as a ‘belief’ this is obviously ‘silly’ and without foundation; as a metaphor, however,, it is poetically and affectively productive. But what objects should come within the remit of this rescue strategy? Is the séance to be redeemed metaphorically? Fairies? The ‘deeps of mind’? reincarnation? And were these things always for Yeats only ‘metaphors for poetry' - this last been Yeats's phrase for what his Supernatural Instructors gave him.

(The latter (famous) phrase, or ‘get out clause’ depending on one’s point of view, is in any case ambivalent. Did Yeats mean that the instructors gave him metaphors which he was able to use in his poetry, or that they gave him a metaphoric representation of poetry itself as a process, a making. )

In a sense, what we are saying here is that the distinction between literal and metaphorical levels corresponds to the cognitive and affective levels or dimensions of a belief or practice. Thus, whereas the said belief or practice entails propositional content which now seems risible, we assert that its appeal was not at all on this purely cognitive level (i.e., it appealed because of its rigorous…) but rather for its affective charge and cathartic or dramatic power. And whereas the belief-as-belief is the obvious object-choice for the condescension of posterity, it is in reality a decoy or straw man, since people hardly embrace beliefs simply through disinterested cogitation.

‘Belief’ judged purely as belief is, from this point of view, merely the detritus left by history, the empty skeleton of a ‘habitus’, an ‘illusio’, a form of life.. the inessential husk of what had its raison d’être elsewhere… it would therefore be ‘category error’ for the historian to take such beliefs ‘in-themselves’.

To understand, for example, Yeats's attraction to the back-room theatrics of the seance, involves a minimal generosity towards its metaphoric content, and a bracketing off of its propositional truth content.