Currently reading a full-length psychoanalytic study of Yeats, which as one might expect starts with the family, in particular the maternal/ paternal matrix. What this familial starting point neglects is the way in which the family is always the mediation of a larger social reality, in particular the reality of class and of the Symbolic Order. Within the family, the Symbolic Order itself is reflected and idiosyncratically skewed. So, for example, Susan Yeats’s silence, the silence of the Mother, is not only some primary datum out of which we then trace its effects upon the son etc, it is a class silence.
What does this mean? Yeats’s father renounces his class or ‘caste’ background. Initially he trains in Law at Trinity College, he becomes a barrister. He has family lands in Kildare. This is given up in order to become a portrait painter and enter bohemia. Even so, Susan still writes ‘barrister’ as Father’s Profession on the birth certificate of William. Her silence, then, is (in part) the embodied refusal to recognise John Yeats’s abandonment of the Ascendancy ‘game’, his renunciation of his symbolic mandate, ‘barrister’, his negation of the symbolic order into which he was born and the embrace of a non-traditional ‘community’ defined precisely by this gesture of negation, i.e. bohemia. His wife remains married to the mandate, A Miss Haversham inside her own marriage.
Moreover, JBY’s abrupt renunciation of his ‘tradition’ and traditional titles leads to a number of other effects within the 'realm of authority'. Financial difficulties mean that W.B. Yeats & siblings are offloaded onto the grandparents. The symbolic title of patriarch remains with the Grandfather while the father is condemned as ‘irresponsible’ etc (loses his crown, as it were).
We might also say that JBY has removed a certain ground from under his son’s feet. In contemporary terms he has unplugged from the Symbolic, supported now only by the ‘community’ of art and whatever authority clings to his own loquacity and performance. Legitimate forms of authority and authorisation were available to JBY – the ‘mandate’ of barrister, landlord, the Trinity College ‘investiture’ etc. But none of these can be available in the same way to his son. W.B. Yeats himself cannot now re-enter that abandoned jettisoned world without some reflexive gesture of affirmation. It is no longer simply given, inherited, a self-evident choice. The break has already been instituted.
But the further point which needs emphasising here is that the question of authority, of the Name of the Father (i.e. of Symbolic Titles) which is felt acutely within the Yeats household, is simultaneously the central question put to the Ascendancy itself, a class or 'caste' (Roy Foster's term) historically on its way out.
The question has been eloquently described by Elizabeth Bowen: the condition of a ruling class/ caste left without its legitimacy, its historical guarantee, faced thereby with what it always already was – reliant on a kind of bluff of authority, gestures without substance, objective spirit without the spirit.
The Symbolic Titles of this class lack any ‘underwriting’. Nothing underwrites them. Increasingly, the authority which is supposed to derive from tradition, & from hegemony, must instead be achieved through performance. Performative authority is supercharged as ‘inborn’ authority wanes or is exposed as counterfeit. They must themselves become ‘counterfeiters’.
(incomplete, not entirely coherent, and doubtless to be revised)
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