This [see here] is the key duality for much
modernism. For the modern artist, the sensuous object is valuable only in so
far as it ‘recalls’ the inwardness of the observer, the sensuous thing is
confiscated by a self-aware perceiver for purposes of “self-expression”. But
there’s also the awareness of an Other meaning, stubborn, elusive, ‘behind’ but
perhaps more substantial than this ‘theatrical’ surface, a more “immediate” way
of relating to the world. This can in turn lead in two directions: a
self-conscious aestheticism, delighting in the autonomy of images and words; or a desire to somehow access Life in its unsymbolised state. In some case the two
are somehow combined. Yeats is one such.
What the passage from Yeats
(see here) also returns us to is the question of the symbolic. The Meaning which
Howard extracts from his experience arises through the absence of the meaning it has for the inhabitants. Once
again, the symbolic meaning is “raised” on an absence in the
object of perception. This is what Fredric Jameson says about the symbolic mode:
Whatever the merits of
symbolic and symbolizing modes.. their presence in the work always stands as an
indication that that the immediate meaning of objects has disappeared: the
process would not arise in the first place if objects had not already become
problematical in their very nature
By having recourse to it
[symbolism] the writer implies that some original, objective meaning in objects
is henceforth inaccessible to him, that he must invent a new and fictive one to
conceal this basic absence, this basic silence of things
What is also interesting here is
that whilst the passage from John Sherman, formally enacts the doubling of consciousness, the
turning of consciousness in on itself, the whole passage, in its entirety, is
also a kind of doubling. That is, this fictional passage is a thinly-disguised
doubling of Yeats’s own experience as articulated elsewhere:
When was a child I had
only to climb the hill behind the house to see the long, blue, ragged bills
flowing along the Southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of
emotion is still perhaps lacking in me, because nobody told me, not even the
merchant captains who knew everything, that Cruachan of the Enchantments lay
behind those long, blue, ragged hills.
Whereas in John Sherman the
attitude is one of petulance and condescension, here there is a more frustrated
longing. But in each case, there is the same awareness of a Meaning attached to
the environment which the Other possesses first. The modern spectator is a belated arrival. But it is this very “loss of
meaning,” the sense that something signifies without being able to lay claim to
what, that is the source of literary or aesthetic invention. W.J. McCormack glosses the
passage as follows:
For those for whom the hills
automatically had mythological references, those who needed no dictionary to
decode place names, there was little sense of any creative discovery in the
landscape. But to Yeats it was precisely the barrier, which he came to
recognise between his childhood experience and those obvious meanings, which
generated a poetic significance.
Once again, we have the sense
that “poetic significance,” symbolism, aesthetic experience itself, arises out of some
perceived deficit in experience. What Yeats has ‘lost’ is a kind of knowledge
that comes from belonging. Him and Lady Gregory can of course, as they did,
collect and collate folk lore, but no amount of quantitative anthropological
data can compensate or fill in the absence of that basic belonging, and the meaning that comes from habitation. As such the
collector or collator of folk tales and mythology always goes away empty
handed. What then happens, because of that, is that the ragged hills then turn
into Symbols of melancholy and desolation.
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