Once the object has beneath the
brooding look of Melancholy become allegorical, once life has flowed out of it,
the object itself remains behind, dead, yet preserved for all eternity; it lies
before the allegorist, given over to him utterly, for good or ill. In other
words, the object itself is henceforth incapable of projecting any meaning on
its own; it can only take on that meaning which the allegorist wishes to lend
it. (Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama).
We should also note that what concerns Benjamin is not the
particular allegorical symbols and their meaning but the meaning of allegory
itself as a form. The governing question is: Of what is the emergence of
allegory (as Benjamin understands it) symptomatic?
“Allegory is the dominant mode of expression of a world in
which things have been for whatever reason utterly sundered from meaning, from
spirit, from genuine human existence.”
The fact that Sign and meaning, matter and spirit, writing
and voice, have all been separated from one another is something that happens
not simply as a result of literary evolution. It is a crystallisation of what
has already happened in the world itself.
In the 17th century”, writes Benjamin, “the word Trauespiel
was applied in the same way both to dramas and historical events”. The
Trauerspiel revealed a world in which social rituals were empty, objects
“morbidly cold”. The hollowing out of language, the calcification of habitual
practices into dead conventions, revealed the work of History. When, in war or epochal changes, the thread
of intelligibility seems lost from events, when once habitual practices are
calcified into hollow conventions, or when traditions enter the stages of their
terminal decline: it is in such conditions that the “allegoric” is the implicit
texture of the world itself, brought to consciousness by literary form.
How might this relate to the example of Yeats? It is first of
all obvious that 19th century Ireland undergoes a series of crises,
catastrophes and upheavals. It’s not possible to outline these in the current post.
But briefly, we are talking about the Famine, the rise of Irish nationalism and
the decline of the Anglo-Irish ruling bloc, the so-called (and self-titled)
Protestant Ascendancy. Yeats is of the Ascendancy, he belongs to it by lineage
and upbringing, but grows up against the background of events which signalled
the end of its domination and the disintegration of its mandate to rule.
A key event in this decline was the 1801 Act of Union, which
abolished the Ascendancy-run parliament in Dublin, and transferred power to Westminster.
In 1869, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Ireland. The Ascendancy’s
legal and symbolic supports were being dismantled. Its legitimacy and “right to
govern” progressively removed. Writes one historian: “The Anglo-Irish ruling
class were, from the famine onwards, living on borrowed time.”
Elizabeth Bowen, a scion of the Ascendancy, and surely an
emeritus at the Academy of the Underrated, provides us with one of the most
exact and detailed descriptions of what a class in decline looks like, and how
its decline translates into experience, imagination and language. On disestablishment, Bowen writes:
It made Protestants, dislodged
from their state-religious position, decidedly more extreme, more evangelical,
and it undermined their political dominance.
The word ‘dislodgement’ is one that returns in Bowen. The
Ascendancy stay in one place, but are nonetheless dispossessed. And this is because
what’s been removed is the mandate, the Symbolic power which was the invisible
support of this way of life. Bowen again, on “social rituals”:
Society – which can only exist
when people are sure of themselves and immune from fears – was no longer, in
the Anglo-Ireland I speak of, in what I called the magnetic and growing stage,
it was on the decline, it was breaking up. It could exist in detail –
comings and goings, entertainments, marriages - but the main healthy abstract
was gone”
The social rituals are still performed, but they are no
longer underwritten by legitimacy and power. It is these which have been
subtracted, even if the theatre of appearances continues. And what is true of
social rituals is also true of property and architecture:
Dublin exhales melancholy, the
past and the sense of an obliterated purpose that no new world activity can
exactly renew: an anti-climactic, possibly endless pause hangs over her large
squares, long light streets and darkening Georgian facades.
Dublin had signified a Protestant national capital,
signified Ascendancy hegemony: but such meanings have been erased. Denuded of
its prior significance, Dublin becomes, for some, but an after-image of its
former status, a “shell of grandeur”:
As the nineteenth century wore
on, ascendancy marginalisation was reflected in their relation to architecture
as well as to landowning. Dublin was reduced to echoing, cavernous,
half-abandoned public buildings and streetscapes .
The landscape which the historian (Roy Foster) paints is a
melancholy one, a picture which can be briefly explained. Foster refers to an
architecture which, as it were, “intends” the Protestant Ascendancy, its
grandeur reflecting and born by theirs. Yeats’s native city could “boast some
of the finest Georgian architecture in the British Isles”. And what unifies
this architecture is not only bricks and mortar, but the social position of the
resident class. To the Ascendancy, the Georgian grandeur of Dublin is its
architectural correlative: its “sense of
prestige” or “historical purpose” deposit themselves in such buildings, which
are the petrification of social and historical status into matter, into
casings, doors and balustrades. But when the Ascendancy way of life declines, its
symbolic practices and enshrinements eroded or removed by Westminster edict, these
physical structures are surrendered to posterity as a shell to be turned inside
out and re-occupied with very different meanings and social functions:
About thirty percent (87, 000)
of the people in Dublin lived in the slums which were for the most part the worn-out
shells of Georgian mansions
If, in allegory, the significance invested in archaic objects
effaces what meaning they originally possessed, and inserts them in a context
defined by the present, this process might itself stand as a description of
what happens to Ascendancy building: they become emptied of their former
meanings. Given over to new uses- though still radioactive with a lost
significance - the facades which address North Dublin’s streets are inhabited
now with a different daily life: “Georgian Dublin had become tenanted by
solicitors’ and government offices”. The bohemian remnant and déclassé products
of that history, walk through the fallen streets of a “sordid, poverty-ridden, monotonous...
existence in a city whose former greatness seemed in eclipse”.
It’s in this context we can read Yeats’s early short story
Rosa Alchemica. The story is set in a Dublin Georgian Protestant house:
A house my ancestors had made
almost famous through their part in the politics of the city and their friendships
with the famous men of their generations.
These ancestral portraits had adorned the walls, the familial
tradition which is also a class portrait. But the narrator has
removed these portraits and replaced them with a “tapestry, full of the blue
and bronze of peacocks” and a range of his own eclectic materials. It’s as if into the space vacated by family –
and class- tradition the narrator has introduced all kinds of semi-private
symbols, a range of objects removed from their original context and arranged for
aesthetic contemplation:
I was sitting dreaming of what I
had written, in my house in one of the old parts of Dublin; a house my
ancestors had made almost famous through their part in the politics of the city
and their friendships with the famous men of their generations; and was feeling
an unwonted happiness at having at last accomplished a long-cherished design,
and made my rooms an expression of this favourite doctrine. The portraits, of
more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the
blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and
activity untouched with beauty and peace.
This fictional vignette is also a snapshot of history. The
narrator no longer invested in or attached to the Symbolic Order of his class,
had instead plugged himself into a range of other traditions which express not
a collective identity but a kind of “grotto of subjectivity”, a refuge from the
flood of history.
I’d like in the next post to talk more about the Ascendancy
and Yeats’s particular relation to it.
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