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.