4.2.08

Paleo-modernism and Oppositions

If Eliot's ideas seem confusing, it's because they are. Eliot, following F.H. Bradley, was a monist. This is one of the most slippery ideas in philosophy. Monists, the original being Spinoza, believed that reality is only composed of a single substance. Distinctions between substances are essentially an illusion. For Spinoza, God was everything, which strangely led contemporaries to call him an atheist.

Nietzsche said that all of Western history had been formed by a single illusion, started by Plato - that of the difference between mind and body. In "Among School Children" Yeats mentions the Platonic idea that we all began as whole but were condemned to division. From the original wholeness, there was division. What divisions?

mind body
Dionysus Apollo
soul body
universal particular
reality imagination
science religion

and many, many more. Nietzsche thought that, history being circular, these divisions would at length be rejoined. And the paleo-modernists made this their project, whether they knew it or not.

Henry James and W.B. Yeats both dealt in these opposites, but had opposite life stories, in a way. James began as a writer of realist fiction and turned into a symbolist writer. His late books, his best work, are also maddeningly obscure. Yeats began as a symbolist poet, then migrated in a realist direction, then transformed himself again.

Realism? Shaw, Flaubert, Frank Norris, Zola... Realism and symbolism, as oppositions, became so absolute that you could divide this paper (if this were a piece of paper) into two columns and list the resulting binaries:

content form
objectivity subjectivity
conscious unconscious
time eternal
immanence transcendence
empirical science epistemology
prose poetry
encyclopedic symbolic
description myth
fact invention
life art
laboratory labyrinth (a classic illustrative pedagogical device)

Get the idea? There is little room for compromise between these divisions, but compromise is not what paleo-modernism is about.

Yeats's early works are romantic: "The Wanderings of Oisin" are sheer myth, journey, Romanticism. But he got involved with the French poet Mallarme in the 1890s. Earlier he had written Romantic poems that delighted the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. Then he became a symbolist poet in the 1890s. Yeats's heroes, like "The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland" and Red Hanrahan, deserted the real world for the world of imagination. But even then, he considered the imagination a mixed blessing. He knew, unlike the European Romantics, that the life of the imagination might mean he would cease to be human, never live at all, become addicted to escapism. The imagination was incompatible with normality and responsibility.

Yeats then became a more realist poet, around 1912. His verse became more definite and hard-edged. He wrote about political themes, used images of rocks and thorns. But at the same time he wrote of Shaw, the leading realist of the Anglo-Irish stage, that he had appeared to him in a dream as a sewing machine that clicked and smiled perpetually. Just as he became a realist, adopting plainness and clarity, he condemned realist optimism in his prose.

Yeats never came to terms with the opposition between the real world and the imagination. He turned to "science": astrology, necromancy, alchemy, theosophy... These were obsolete poetic sciences. He turned to a study of trance states and dream states as Carl Jung did at the same time. These experiments led him to "A Vision," a book written out of dictation that his wife took from spirits.

More about this, Yeats's strangest work, soon.

The four phases of Yeats's career were:
1. The Romantic or Preraphaelite
2. The Symbolist (1890s)
3. The Realist (1912-)
4. The paleo-modernist (1920s and 1930s)

1 comment:

Bad Horse said...

This is a good summary, but it seems to quote heavily from Jeffrey Perl's lecture series "Literary Modernism" without citing it.