Self-Consciousness and Tradition in Literary Modernism: Yeats and Others

“It was this search for a tradition that urged George Pollexfen and myself to study the visions and thoughts of the country people..” (Yeats)

One constitutive feature of literary modernism is the combination of a modern consciousness, steeped in the experience of Modernity, nonetheless fascinated by the still existing presence of pre-modern, traditional life-worlds. These traditional forms of life, often vestigial, are then seen as the proper material or content for a writing which remains, in its form, definitively modern.

There is an early, and little read novella by Yeats, which illustrated some of these tensions.

John Sherman explores – inter alia - the situation of a Modern character (Howard) who visits and discovers himself in tantalising proximity to the world of rurality and storytelling. The following passage is from near the beginning:

There was scarcely any one abroad. Once or twice a countryman went by in yellow gaiters covered with mud and looked at the guest. Once an old woman with a basket of clothes, recognizing the Protestant curate’s Iocum tenens, made a low curtsey.The clouds gradually drifted away, the twilight deepened and the stars came out. The guest, having bought some cigarettes, had spread his waterproof on the parapet of the bridge and was now leaning his elbows upon it, looking at the river and feeling at last quite tranquil. His meditations, he repeated, to himself, were plated with silver by the stars [My emphasis].

We can note the curious punctuation here, which duplicates and deepens the sense of slow deliberation which is the content of the sentence.  “He repeated, to himself,” differs from “he repeated to himself” by that extra level of self-awareness, that second arrest of thought which is also the underlined realisation of solitude. Consciousness is arrested not simply by the object perceived but by its own movements, consciousness thickens to become its own object. To “repeat” a meditation is actually to turn it into the thing meditated on. And to repeat a statement is also to winnow it of substance, as when, through countless repetition, we turn a word to pure sound, so that nothing is left but the pure inward intelligence, the "I" as the negation of every particular content. Note also the peculiar following line: “were plated with silver by the stars”. His ‘meditations’ are as it were ‘repeated’ in silver, re-glossed and doubled by stellar light. This very image is therefore itself the emblem of self-reflection. The passage continues: 

[..]         Yes; he felt now quite contented with the. world. Amidst his enjoyment of the shadows and the river — a veritable festival of silence — was mixed pleasantly the knowledge that, as he leant there with the light of a neighbouring gas-jet ‘flickering faintly on his refined form and nervous face and glancing from the little medal of some Anglican order that hung upon his watch-guard, he must have seemed — if there had been any to witness — a being of a different kind to the inhabitants — at once rough and conventional — of this half-deserted town. Between these two feelings - the unworldly and the worldly - tossed a leaping wave of perfect enjoyment. How pleasantly conscious of his own identity it made him when he thought how he and not those whose birthright it was, felt most the beauty of these shadows and this river? To him who had read much, seen operas and plays, known religious ex­periences, and written verse to a waterfall in Switzerland, and not to those who dwelt upon its borders for their whole lives, did this river raise a tumult of images and wonders. What meaning it had for them he could not imagine. Some meaning surely it must have! [My Emph.]

To be ‘pleasantly conscious’ is to discover pleasure in the sheer fact of being conscious, presumably in so far as this elevates you above the perceivable content and corroborates your own ‘positional superiority’ with regard to it. (“Pleasantly conscious” might also be a definition of “smug”.) This is consciousness halting, inspecting its every movement and tremor; every perception of an object turns (as it were 180 degrees) back upon the perceiving subject. What has turned the perceiving subject back upon himself is in part the knowledge of his ec-centricity, that he is in some sense excluded from the scene he witnesses, that he brings to it a cultural luggage and range of reference not shared by the inhabitants themselves. Specifically, there is the crucial awareness of a meaning from which he, the alien point of view, is excluded – some meaning surely it must have! Note the clear suggestion of frustration, as the understanding bumps up against a stubborn lack. It’s condescending of course - these people are too sightless to see or be grateful for the beauty of their surroundings -  yet also petulant and defeated. There is the nagging unease that another and more real Meaning lies behind what he can perceive.

The exclamation is however, misconceived. It is not so much that this world must have for its inhabitants a meaning, comparable but different from his own (a “different perspective”). Rather it is an altogether different kind of “meaning”. The Other already owns and inhabits – in an ingrained and unconscious way - this world that he merely savours and appreciates (aesthetically). It is this realisation which then hollows out his perceptions, as if there were a missing but more real dimension to what is in his field of vision, a dimension which flattens out his perceptions to delicate sensations and mirror images rather then 3-dimensional and taken-for-granted experiences. This is clear in “…did this river raise a tumult of images and wonders”.  The object itself is, as it were, jettisoned and replaced by what it “raises” or imaginatively summons which is then taken to be its true importance. Thus it does not ‘mean’ something for the inhabitants in the sense that whereas for Howard it ‘calls to mind’ certain literary images, for them it ‘calls to mind’ something else that he can only guess at. What is peculiar to the observer is precisely the habit of relating to things for what they ‘call to mind’. And this form of subjectivity is the point of cultural difference. What Howard’s understanding bumps up against, therefore, is not simply a different content but an altogether dissimilar form (of subjectivity). It is not simply that the Other ‘has’ different values, beliefs etc, but the very ‘having’ is different. 

[part two here:]