Yeats and the Sense of History

There is a beautiful and suggestive phrase in Yeats, where he describes himself as “A poet of my time, through my poetical faculty living its history.”

Initially I thought of a comparable image in Adorno, who talks about the necessity of seeing poetry as a “sundial telling the time of history”. A sundial is not of course “like” time but allows us to measure it, and something analogous is implied for poetry. Even the most ostensibly apolitical poems are nonetheless shadows cast by a history which is present in the shape of its absence.

Yeats’s metaphor, though, is quite different. Poetry is a particular seismograph or divining instrument through which history is lived, apprehended and experienced. No doubt Yeats “lives” history in other ways, but it’s as if the poetic faculty is attuned to history in some unique and incomparable way.

We’d then need to think though what this “living of history” might mean. And Yeats’s poetic faculty has deposited ample evidence for us to examine. Of course, there are many poems in which he directly addresses historical events, but many, in fact the vast majority, which do not. And it’s this latter category of poems which would arguably be the more interesting object of analysis in terms of the presence of history.

In order to do this, we need a sense of history which extends beyond battles and coronations. We need to think of history in its more inclusive sense, wherein all areas of our existence, our values, beliefs and practices are part of history. Our forms of life, which we initially at least take for granted, are part of history and will one day be looked back on as quaint, unaccountable or abhorrent by some future posterity (which will in turn feel itself exempt from history).

For literary criticism, the challenge in taking up Yeats’s quote, and Adorno’s too, is to examine literature in relation to history without renouncing close textual analysis. This textual analysis won’t of course have the same form as practical criticism but will take its first cues and clues from the text so to speak, nonetheless. It will be a criticism, or hermeneutic, which does not simply seek the meaning of content, but also the meaning of forms. I will try and suggest, at some later point, how this might be done, as well as outlining the particular history Yeats's poetry is “living”.

Before that, it’s worth remarking on the historical sense itself. Yeats doesn’t simply inhabit history but is also aware of being historical. It is not all individuals and not all eras that have this historical sense. As Lukacs points out, this historical sense is itself historical. That is, only at certain critical moments do people become aware of their existence, the very timbre of their life as being part of history, as reflecting and contributing to a larger historical narrative or period of seismographic change. And by history, we don't simply mean significant events like the 1916 Rising (this is many people’s working definition of what history looks like.) Rather it’s about history as a time when we are saying goodbye to one form of life and announcing or saluting the emergence of another, the contours and content of which certainly eludes us. "The old is dying and the new cannot be born". A sense that something is happening without being able to say what. This sense of one’s historicity is rare and changes existence itself. It changes existence, for example, in making you aware of the transient or arbitrary foundation of  your way of life. It is this combination of transience and arbitrariness which Walter Benjamin detects in the forms of the German Trauerspiel.

It is this, I think, we also find in Yeats, and which hasn’t really been written about in detail. I’d also be curious to hear which other writers people feel have this sense?

Barthes and Style

We saw that for Synge, style was born from the encounter and shock of geographical and cultural otherness, the jump and juxtaposition between fin-de-siècle Paris, on the one hand, and the small peasant communities of the West of Ireland on the other.  

For Barthes, style is rooted in the body. The site of an otherness which percolates into language is not the geographically or culturally remote but this inner Otherness, that uncanny strangeness which lives within us, and even sometimes turns against us.

Style exists at the intersection of the linguistic - our customary expressions, our grammar, the whole symbolic apparatus of language in fact – and the extralinguistic, the somatic peculiarities of the individual self. In the idiosyncrasies of Style we detect “the fragments of a reality absolutely alien to language”. Style is a kind of seismograph registering this Otherness.

In some sense, Barthes seems like the culmination of the modern notion of style as the principle of individuation, that which marks me out as separate and distinct. For this individuality is best pictured in terms of the quirks and tics, the abilities and malfunctions of the individual body, which are never simply replicated in another person. It is also perhaps one of the last versions of the idea of style, and thought itself, arising on the back of an encounter between language and its outside, thought and its outside.

But what we also know is that the body, it’s pains and pleasures, its tensions and tremors, are not simply outside language. We know that culture in general – the great invasive weight and reach of the values, distinctions and priorities that culture carves out and continues – and our family in particular as a bearer of this general culture, enter and transform the body. The pains, pleasures, tensions and tremors, the anxieties and rushes of release, all partly somatic, have been created and determined via innumerable edicts, prohibitions and aspirations not simply native to our constitution but delivered and drummed in by the culture in general and the family in particular. And this process always has a linguistic dimension, and cannot operate without words and symbols.

Barthes is nonetheless right that the body is not reducible to language, to the symbolic in the broadest sense, and will often resist and object to what has been introduced into it from the outside. It is always a site of resistance if we’re able to listen to its non- linguistic messages. But in this sense, what we said about style, that it exists at the intersection of the linguistic and another alien and non-linguistic reality, is first of all true of the body itself.

Literary style would then be the continuation and refinement of this amalgam which is the body. 

On the concept of "style" in modern literature

I’ve been thinking about the modern concept and practice of literary “style”, particularly the notion of style as the signature of an individuality. Each writer must discover or create (there is often an ambivalence about this) a unique and recognisable style, to express or define their uniqueness, yes, but also to distinguish them from other writers in the marketplace. 

The need for this individual signature relates to the familiar distinction between traditional and modern modes of subjectivity. Traditional modes of subjectivity are defined by immersion in long established, handed-down and practices which have become “naturalised” through time, and because there is no visible alternative. The modern subject, by contrast, feels himself free to reflexively choose his values and practices. They are objects of purposeful intention - and invention. 

In traditional societies, where there are common oratorical and rhetorical practices shared by writer (or bard) and audience, the “problem” of hammering out a style does not arise in the same way. But in the modern era, nothing can be taken for granted. Literary style becomes a problem and an object of reflection and choice. 

“Style” in this sense, as a kind of principle of individuation, is most pronounced in high modernism (Fredric Jameson): 

the explosion of modern literature into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms 

… the Faulknerian long sentence with its breathless gerundives, Lawrentian nature imagery punctuated by testy colloquialism, Wallace Stevens’ inveterate hypostasis of non-substantive parts of speech (‘the intricate evasions of as’), the fateful, but finally predictable, swoops in Mahler from high orchestral pathos into village accordion sentiment

Yeats, despite gravitating towards the ‘traditional’, in the form of Ireland’s peasantry and the world of oral storytelling, is nonetheless immersed in the modern present, and recognises the necessity of forging a distinctive style, albeit inspired and galvanised by that West of Ireland he encounters in its moribund and pathetic magnificence. Like Synge, he will reach into this older oral world in order to assist in the modern quest for a unique stylistic “signature”.

This leads us to a sub-category of this modern notion of style, the idea of style arising from an encounter with difference. Yeats famously suggests that J.M Synge leaves the languor of Paris and goes to Aran in the Western seaboard of Ireland, a move which leads to the development of Synge’s distinctive and melodious prose. “Style”, Synge explains to Yeats after his Aran sojourn, “Comes from the shock of new material”. Aran offered him this material. 

This idea that style, the creation of a distinctive linguistic signature, arises from the shock of an encounter is also a peculiarly modern idea. Often the shocks are supplied by the “insistent jerky nearness” of the new metropolises. But as often, paradoxically, as in Synge’s case (and Yeats’s) the “new material” is the traditional, various “older” or more “primitive” forms of social and cultural life - the "shock of the old".

One could also trace a line from Synge’s idea to a series of modern artists and thinkers for whom not just style but various forms of creativity arise from Shock, from an encounter with the strikingly or brutally different:

"Eisenstein’s argument: [..] thought depends on shock which gives birth to it.”(Deleuze).

Thought, and artistic and literary creation, do not come simply from within themselves, from being immersed in literature or philosophy, from developing prior genres or rules. They are galvanised, prompted, set in motion by something outside themselves. Thought (etc) is confronted with its “outside” – that which its categories and protocols cannot simply enclose or assimilate. 

In one sense, this displaces the subject from its centre. The subject is not the pure origin of thought, style, innovation. The initiative, the force, has come from outside. On the other hand this same subject is creatively strengthened precisely in answering destabilisation, by way of resistance. This at least is what we get in Yeats. The idea of style as a creative resistance around the shock of otherness.

So to recap, the modern notion of style involves: 

1. the notion of style as the signature of an individuality, and the sense that arriving at and creating such a style is of crucial importance.

2. the idea of style as the result of an encounter with otherness, with something that jolts or disrupts the mind and senses of the artist, writer or thinker. 
3. Style as a sort of discipline forced on the subject by the encounter with otherness. 

Second part of these reflections to follow... 

Twitter Tropes 1: Opinion

On Twitter, and elsewhere of course, you frequently see "I'm entitled to my opinion", as if that ends the matter. As if your "opinion" is analogous to your right to wear a hat or grow a moustache. You can't of course refute a hat. And "I'm entitled to my opinion" is a curious attempt to place an opinion beyond refutation. Something like this happened in an exchange about Roman history between an eminent professor of History and a notorious Brexit ruffian. 

It's a generalisation, but this 'opinion' move is very often used by people on the political right, as part of a "freedom of speech" spiel. Usually, it's linked to a related move: the idea that contesting someone's 'opinion' is contesting their so-called right to hold that opinion. This is of course false. Contesting an opinion, calling out it flaws and biases, is precisely  to treat it as an opinion that makes some sort of claim about the world, not as some personal foible that should be merely "tolerated".

The pretence is always that someone is not objecting to the content of your opinion but to the mere fact that it's a different opinion. This of course is in turn a ruse to portray your opponent as intolerant. The nonsensical idea that objecting to an opinion is a failure to tolerate it. 

Of course, nothing quite riles this 'opinion' brigade as the claim that they are racist. Again, there is a kind of pretence that the claim of racism is a form of intolerance. "they call me racist because they disagree with my opinion" etc, whereas, as even the slowest of minds can grasp, they disagree with your opinion because it is racist. The implicit assumption behind these claims is that the charge of racism can never have any real content but is a kind of name-calling activity. 

Anyway, rather than talking about being "entitled to my opinion" it might be better to say people are entitled to make statements. Statements are open to argumentation and refutation.

Chaos and Creation

In Deleuze, how is chaos linked to creation?

Chaos is not the opposite of Creation. They are allies.

The opposite of creation is: cliché, opinion, calcified habits, thoughts made into commodities, inherited frameworks masquerading as fresh perceptions. 

The world we inhabit is always cluttered and almost full. There is very little space. What occupies the world is not simply things or facts but names, rules, formulas, classifications, categories. Everywhere we turn, things have been assigned a name, a rule, a role, a mode of employment.

Everywhere also there are little communities: academics, businessmen, salesmen, with their nomenclatures, their jargon, their games, their symbolic systems, their open yet masonic gestures.

This is where we begin, in this already occupied territory.

One must first of all destroy some of it, tear through some of it, move it aside or collapse it in order to create. Or rather in order to allow the air to rush in without which there is no creation.

The writer or artist begins not with a blank page or a blank canvas but a word already there, a stereotype, a world of seeming facts, opinions and habits that have to be rubbed out and destroyed in order to win air and freedom. Once one has cut into this canvas of clichés, this page of preconceptions, something else is let in, something behind or above or underneath it. Air, chaos. “a breath of fresh air from the chaos that brings us vision”.

This act of destruction is the first creative act. It is destruction but always escape. An act of escape. Literary language is both these things at one. A destruction of received language and an escape, a continuous and innervating escape from the weight and numbness of consuetude.

But chaos can be anything, whatever punctures or disrupts the run-of-the-mill. In Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, chaos is the catacombs, the seeping wounded earth, the frozen agonies of Pompei seen by the Bergman character. In such moments, in the dark corridors of the dead or face to face with ancient statuary, with the steaming wound in the ground, one is stripped of one’s symbolic clothing, pitched beyond opinion, rules, law, one feels the inrush of air from the outside.

Chaos is anything which deranges the conditioned perceptions and senses, anything which awakens you to your own symbolic servitude. Bergman, unlike her costive husband, has the potential to open herself to this chaos but in the end reverts to her joyless marriage.

"Philosophers are often like children.."(or perhaps not)

Wittgenstein notes: 'Philosophers are often like children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and then ask an adult "what is that?"

This seems right, but perhaps more difficult to say exactly what W. intends. I interpret it to mean that philosophers too frequently ask "what is x?" type questions, but that the x is a phantom generated by their own philosophical language or by grammar. For example, the grammatical subject, the "I," leads to questions about what constitutes this "I", what is its content etc, questions that assume a thing corresponding  to the I (like a self). But perhaps this I is just a grammatical convenience, like the 'it' of 'it rains. And the child, similarly, assumes that something must correspond to its scribbles. Like certain types of philosopher, the child (Or Wittgenstein's child example) in thrall to this idea of correspondence or representation. 

But I wonder if that's quite right. When a child points to something he or she has drawn and asks, What is that? there's a recognition from the child that something has been made present, there is, from the child a kind of minimal surprise that creation has escaped them, that a "something" has emerged on the page which they could not have anticipated. The child has recognised something elementary about creation - that it results in an object, a texture, unfamiliar to our intention. That what confronts us on the page is something which contains a quantum of alienation. 

Anyway, my favourite example here is the child who's asked by the teacher what they've drawn  and replies "God". "But no one knows what God looks like," says the teacher, and the child replies "They do now." 

Introducing philosophy through children

I’m wondering if it’s been done already: the attempt to write an introduction to philosophy through the philosophical questions that children encounter on an almost daily basis, or rather that their parents encounter through being with their children. An example. When H. was a small child, I pointed out green on a chart in a book. It was a story book, but had a chart of colours at the back. The story was in fact a vehicle for learning about colour. Later, out in the car park near our flat, H. points to a car and says “green!” But the car is not the same shade of green as the green in the colour chart. How does H. know that the word “green” doesn’t simply apply to the shade of green he’s seen in the book? How does he, or any child of course, have a concept of green which allows him to identify different instances of green? This example would seem to open a door to very classic philosophical problems about Ideas, about difference and identity. 

Another example: I notice that H., and I think probably all small children, often chances on the metaphorical sense of a word before, or at the same time, as the literal sense. One very windy day in winter, the bare branches of the tree outside our window were swaying and bobbing around. “The trees are panicking” H says. I couldn’t remember him using ‘panicking’ or ‘panic’ before, but he’d clearly understood something about the concept of panicking and the result was (what grown ups would call) a lovely metaphor. You might then say that this something was a kind of partial understanding of meaning which then enabled the metaphor. Similarly, when he said that the noise of the train “copied” the thunder. He had grasped that copying is about a relation of likeness but not the specific quality of imitation. Again, this would be a very illuminating lead in to a discussion of metaphor.

Lastly, when we were in Italy, I had to take H. to the toilet. A dark rather smelly toilet with no seat and some broken fixtures. H. says that this is the “ghost of a toilet”. Bracket off for now that this too was metaphorical in some sense. I “explained” why there can’t be the ghost of a toilet, even though I don’t believe in ghosts in any case. But clearly, the explanation of why there can’t be ghost toilets is an explication of the idea of a ghost (ie something that once lived) irrespective of it’s truth or falsehood. The explanation of why there isn’t such a thing as a ghost, on the other hand is a completely different kind of explanation, based on a philosophical commitment to materialism, for example.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear whether such an introduction exists, or if anyone has further examples..