Yeats, Autodidacticism and Ireland.

Dowden gave me some of the little poems of Yeats to read: it is twilight stuff, vague and unsubstantial. I couldn’t read them. Poor fellow! He is autodidaktos. He never worked under a master.”  (Mahaffy)

The concept of “cultural capital”, coined by Pierre Bourdieu, refers firstly to what is perceived as “legitimate culture” in any particular society, the possession of which confers status and worth. In England this might include: Shakespeare, Opera, a knowledge of wine…roughly synonymous with what’s called “high culture”. But also crucial for Bourdieu is the mode of its acquisition. It should ideally be imbibed, almost effortlessly, through the family, and through class, and incrementally over the course of one’s upbringing. Cultural capital ought to be part of the medium in which one lives and breathes – it should metamorphosise into “taste”. To betray any signs of having acquired it through too much labour, as the autodidact does, is to delegitimise it and oneself to some extent. To be too eager to display it is likewise an embarrassment to those who have picked it up through the legitimate channels.

There is a remarkable passage in Yeats’s Autobiographies which I think is most rewardingly read in these terms:

A young Irish poet, who wrote excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years later, ‘You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters’, and if all the Rhymers had not been polite, if most of them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, the greater number would have said the same thing. I was full of  thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art schools instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to a university, and learned all the classical founda­tions of English literature and English culture, all that great erudition , which once accepted frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had to give up my Irish subject-matter, or attempt to found a new tradi­tion. Lacking sufficient recognized prec_edent, I must needs find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born; and when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and that there was no help for it seeing that my country was not born all. I was of those doomed to imperfect achievement and under a curse, as it were, like some race of birds compelled to spend the time needed for the making of the nest in argument as to the convenience of moss and twig and lichen.

There is much to unpack in this passage. What might it mean, firstly, to ‘talk like a man of letters’? Presumably, one talks in a way that is ‘laboured’, awkward and clotted with abstraction. An absence of ‘grace’ or ‘naturalness’. This is the sure mark of the autodidact. A poet, by contrast, or the image of the poet in the popular imagination, has a certain spontaneous eloquence, a facility with language. ‘Poet’ is often used, still, to denote a category of person rather than a ‘profession’. The other members of the Rhymers club, Oxbridge educated, and with a different relation to culture, are closer to “poets” in this sense. They wear their learning lightly and without the clumsy introduction of “ideas”.

‘I must needs find out some reason for all I did..’

In other words, everything has to be justified; nothing is given. Again, the grace, spontaneity, taken-for-grantedness of one who insouciantly inhabits a culture, is absent. One cannot assume one’s values – they are objects of labour and consideration. And this ‘prolegomena of justifications’, the sense that everything must be thought-through, be first of all an object of choice, sought-out, this is a sure mark of an ‘awkward’, autodidactic relation to culture. The autodidact is the one who must first work to reach the point from which others have already started.

I knew almost from the start that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born;

‘not to be well born’ is not to have a reserve of cultural capital on which to rely, it’s having to create what others can assume (ie an inherited stock of capital). But this created stock will always bear the stain of labour. What legitimacy it has will derive not from the inherited, from tradition, but from the sheer performative power of the individual. Again, the sense is of not being able to get off the ground, having to expend effort constructing what others can take for granted.

I was full of  thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images

We see also here some of the specifics behind Yeats’s antipathy to the ‘abstract’. ‘Abstraction’, not untypically, is the name given to that which does not spontaneously agree with naturalised dispositions. Yeats sees abstraction as something that marks his own speech, his own relation to culture. He stands at an oblique and awkward relation to that which the other rhymers have properly ingested and made their own. Yeats therefore aspires to the image. The image is immediate, intuitive, and a spontaneous marriage of the ideal and the sensuous. Yeats’s desire for the image is therefore also a desire for a different relation to culture. A relation characterised by a certain aristocratic grace and ease. Thus, the ‘desire for the image’ is a desire for the “naturalness” that characterizes the legitimate carrier of culture. The effortless grace of the aristocrat etc, of those whose cultural acquisition has been through a kind of gradual and ‘careless’ osmosis.

‘Culture’ is for Yeats not simply the air one breathes, it is not bequeathed by birth and displayed in every habitual reflex and gesture. Culture is a problem and the object of labour.  And because its acquisition is a labour, because it is not an inheritance, so does this laboured mode of acquisition betrays itself ceaselessly in his demeanour, dispositions and manner of speaking – the abstractions, the ideas that have not yet dissolved into reflexes and feelings.

But Yeats’s next move, however, is key. Yeats, rather than regretting this ‘exclusion’ from official culture and from received routes of acquisition, sees that it is a positive condition of his ‘nationalism’. He has been diverted into alternative cultural fields etc, alternate taxonomies, canons, areas of research, hierarchies of taste. This, indeed, is characteristic of autodidacts in general. The crucial difference, however, is that in Yeats’s case it is able to rise from the level of a solitary pursuit to that of a collective project. That is to say, nationalism as a cultural project is in part necessarily ‘autodidactic’, it takes place outside the official institutions of cultural transmission and validation. It is autodidacticism raised to the status of an organised group enterprise.

What this also means, Yeats thinks, with some validity, is that there is a necessary connection  between his own position and that of the nation: both, equally, are ‘waiting to be born’; both do not yet inhere within a ‘tradition’, both, equally, await ‘definition’. But the relation is of course not simply one of analogy. The significant realization here is precisely that the labour of working though one level necessarily involves, is inextricable from, that whole other level – that the individual and collective projects cannot be sundered in reality.

Thus although Yeats is certainly an autodidact, and displays many of the traits of the autodidactic imagination as we find it in Blake and others, it also the case that in his situation the problem of autodidacticism is not an individual one and nor is the ‘solution’. That is, firstly, the sense of an awkward relation to culture, of being not quite at home in its ill-fitting clothes, of having to think about and justify what others simply assume: all this is also situation of the Irish as such. Yeats’s autodidacticism is part of a larger historical aggregate. That is, what might otherwise have been something marginal and eccentric, at the border of madness – as in Blake, has a larger space into which expand and develop.

For what happens in late nineteenth century Ireland is a kind of seismic shift in what counts as cultural capital, in what is perceived as value-conferring legitimate culture. The historian Roy Foster sees this shift made visible in a detail from Joyce’s short story “The Dead”. The principal character Gabriel, a guest at his aunt’s Christmas dinner party, speaks of his own “grade of culture”, by which he seems to mean Anglophone and European culture. But there is another guest at the party, Ms Ivors, who mocks Gabriel as a “West Briton”, that is someone with no knowledge of the Irish Language or indigenous culture.

Ivors is an Irish nationalist, and the category of “West Britonism” is one marker of the new “taste culture”, for which the Irish language and Irish songs and poetry are the legitimate currency and capital. The devaluation of what had been the currency of  “legitimate culture” and the promotion of a new (Irish) currency, is integral to the nationalist project. The exchange between Miss Ivors and Gabriel, Foster suggests, represents an ascendant “taste culture” becoming increasingly visible and confident.

Dubliners was published in 1914. In the 1890’s, this same taste culture was in an earlier and more emergent phase.

The Autodidactic Imagination: Yeats and Others

Dowden gave me some of the little poems of Yeats to read: it is twilight stuff, vague and unsubstantial. I couldn’t read them. Poor fellow! He is autodidaktos. He never worked under a master.”  (Mahaffy)

As ever, this great autodidact [Yeats] was immersed in those arcane magical studies which, for all their silliness, fed his imagination and his writings. "A poetic life in letters," Irish Times, October 11, 1997

There is at least a chapter and more probably a book to be written on W.B.Yeats and the autodidactic imagination. Yeats. Along with Blake, and a number of others is of course one of the great autodidacts of literature written in English.

What, though, is an autodidact, and how is autodidacticism a cast of mind, a structure of thinking and feeling, beyond rather than simply learning for oneself what others acquire from a master and institutionally?

The work of Pierre Bourdieu, albeit written in the very specific context of 20^th century French culture, is useful here. The autodidact is one with a peculiar and oblique relationship to “legitimate culture” and the official channels of its acquisition and transmission. The autodidact has either been excluded from that culture and its channels, or for some reason chosen alternative channels and contents. Bourdieu defines at least two kinds of autodidact: the figure totally excluded from cultural acquisition until a relatively late age, who then sets about learning with ardent and compensatory zeal. His respect for ‘canonical knowledge' is exaggerated – perhaps veering toward parody - and he is ‘given away’ by this over reverence. There is a second kind who, deterred or excluded from the echelons of “official knowledge,” is pushed into areas “disclaimed and abandoned by the official education system” – the occult for example, or various heretical and “secret” counternarratives to official knowledge. This typically involves clubs and institutions other than those legitimated by the state and not traditionally recognized as markers of class distinction.

The early Yeats is certainly closer to the second kind of autodidact. Having firstly been shut out from the Trinity College education re rigeur for a certain class of Anglo-Irish family, he pursues occult and hermetic “knowledge” in the “alternative university” of the secret society. On the other hand, he acquires his knowledge of literature and history through (at the time marginal) organizations such as the Young Ireland Societies, Fenian groups, the Bohemian Dublin of the Contemporary Club, the counter-nationalism of a William Morris, and, in general, the emergent debating forums of cultural nationalism.

Emerging cultural nationalism is crucial here. For whereas in another context, ‘areas disclaimed or abandoned by official culture’ could only mean the cranky and eccentric, marginal and lonely pursuits; in Ireland, there is a whole ‘counter-cultural movement’ based around neglected popular forms, and the resurrection of these as important and valid forms of knowledge.

It is from the point of view of these contexts of counter-cultural knowledge -nationalist cells and secret societies - that Yeats makes his attacks on official and authorized forms (eg Trinity College).

Because these counter-cultural forms – again, whether nationalist or hermetic - involve also the disavowal of official authority, of sanctioned forms, they are also characterized by the attempt to create new authority from scratch, or by the claim to discover ‘deeper’ or more ‘original’ authorities deep within the national or occult “traditions”. In this sense, two of the early Yeats’s most passionate attachments, nationalism and the occult, have a similar structure, a comparable set of concerns.

Symbolic Investiture and Modernity

 Eric Santner’s book My Own Private Germany, addresses and explores the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber. Schreber suffered a psychotic breakdown after being appointed to the role of High Court Judge, unable as it were to metabolise his new title, his mandate.

The ritual whereby someone is admitted to the High Court is an instance of what Santner calls “symbolic investiture”, which he defines thus:

by symbolic investiture I mean [..] those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferal of a title and mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared symbolic universe.

Santner reads Schreber’s breakdown in the context of a wider “crisis of investiture” in modernity. Here is part of a synopsis of Santner’s book:

The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject’s self-understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some “other” who threatens our borders and our treasures.

Unable to “assume” the symbolic mantle, the title, Schreber experiences it as a kind of obscene and external injunction from an invasive and persecutory God.

What’s interesting to me is the suggestion that this suspension of symbolic investiture (ie the suspension of its self-evidence, of its digestibility) occurs at times of historical instability, and is readable as a historical symptom. A particular “symbolic universe” has disintegrated or been eroded, such that faced with a particular symbolic mandate, the subject does not salute it and say “Yes, that’s me, that’s my destination”, but instead confronts it as something external and disagreeable. I’m interested also in the space that this suspension or crisis opens up – whether it be a space of madness or a space of freedom.

Inevitably perhaps, my point of reference is Yeats. First of all, in fact, Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats. The Yeats family is fairly solidly of the Anglo-Irish ruling bloc. There are certain expectations that go along with that, certain educational and career destinations and trajectories that go unquestioned. Or they do until a certain historical point. That certain historical juncture is Yeats’s Father. John Butler Yeats embarks on the expected Protestant Ascendancy biography. He trains in the law at Trinity College with a view to becoming a barrister. He then abandons all this to become a portrait painter, and to exist in way that can accurately be named bohemian.

On the one level, this decision is attributable to John Butler Yeats’s “capricious personality.” But it is also the case that such a choice would have been inconceivable even a generation previously. The historical substance itself has altered. The social substance in which such a destiny could naturally and unproblematically be lived has hardened and cracked. Land Acts, Catholic emancipation and social advance, the imminence of Home Rule, all represent the ‘silent weaving of the spirit’ which leaves the Anglo-Irish groundless.

John Butler Yeats’s refusal of his social destiny, the mantle of barrister, is surely based on this recognition that the historical substance has changed. A space of freedom opens up wherein the social substance no longer exactly fixed, foreseen, predictable, prescribed. 

On W.B. Yeats’s birth certificate, “Father’s Profession” is listed as ‘barrister’, when the Father had already given up that title and the class trajectory that went with it. Susan Yeats, the Poet’s mother, who made this entry, was still wedded to the symbolic universe that the father had refused. AS the William Murphy the family’s biographer puts it

She entered on a game with one set of rules only to find them changed as soon as the game began.

Murphy (and WBY himself) says that Susan was often a silent presence in the Yeats household. And her subsequent silence can be interpreted as a ‘symptom’ not just of some personal malaise but of a kind of knot in history, whereby one person is still invested in the (disintegrating) symbolic “game” of a particular class, whilst the other refuses and negates it.

What I'd like to talk about in the next post is the secret societies that W.B. Yeats belongs to, which are all about acts and rituals of investiture, albeit often theatrical and even parodic.