Tragedy and Revolution in the Williamsian and Yeatsian Disciplines
On the part of Williams’ treatment of revolution, what is most strikingly noticeable is his association of it with tragedy. In Modern Tragedy,1 Williams first traces the origin of revolution back to social institutions. For Williams, when institutions grow old and effete, they begin to take on their real quality as systematic violence and disorder. And from this quality arises the source of revolutionary action. “What is finally necessary is the recognition of our own involvement in such structural violence…From the experience of this disorder, and through its specific action, order is recreated. The process of this action is at times remarkably similar to the real action of revolution”(66). In Williams’ version of revolution, the central point seems to be a cause and effect: dysfunctional and outmoded institutions are bound to wind up as the oppression of violence and the genesis of disorder. In response, people resort to violence to counteract this oppression and to restore order. From this, we see Williams add an essential qualification to his so-called revolution: the acceptance of inevitable violence.2
As a matter of fact, Williams’ attitude towards revolution is far from original; it is markedly similar to Marx’s viewpoint. Chi Sheng, Shih, in his Karl Marx’s Theory and Contemporary Social Systems, observes, “When it comes to class struggle, power distribution is strictly binary: the ruling class with power and the ruled class with nothing. There is no gray area”(83). S. A. Resnick and R. D. Wolff also articulate that for Marx, society will eventually be stratified into the classes of oppressors and the oppressed. Class struggle will
1 Frank Kermode, in his “Tragedy and Revolution,” ambivalently comments on this book. First, he approves the author’s intention of establishing “the connections, in modern tragedy, between event and experience and idea, and its form which is designed at once to explore and to emphasize these radical connections.” Then he criticizes this book for being “a work of such ambitious unity to anyone but the author.” And “the surprising thing is not that it is unconvincing but that it is never ridiculous.” See Frank Kermode, “Tragedy and Revolution,” Encounter 27(1966): 83-5.
2 In fact, Higgins points out that Williams “argues against the ways in which we commonly narrow down the meaning of revolution to a moment of violence and terror, rather than accepting revolution as a moment of violence in a whole history of violence and terror.” That is, Williams, accepting inevitable revolutionary violence, attempts to place revolution within a historical context. See Higgins, 72-3.
arise as resistance between the two classes intensifies (Knowledge, 201). All of them acknowledge between-class oppression to be the root cause of revolution. Williams merely displaces the oppression from classes to institutions.
On the other hand, Williams binds this cause and effect of revolution with tragedy. First, Williams dissents from the common, rhetoric use of the word ‘tragedy’:
The events which are not seen as tragic are deep in the pattern of our own culture:
war, famine, work, traffic, politics. To see no ethical content or human agency in such events, or to say that we cannot connect them with general meanings, and especially with permanent and universal meanings, is to admit a strange and particular bankruptcy, with no rhetoric of tragedy can finally hide. (49)
Williams proposes a stricter use of this word ‘tragedy,’ which requires us to call an event a tragedy only when we can see in it ethical contents or connections with universal meanings.
O’Connor views it as an inseparability of event and response (Raymond Williams, 82). Then Williams begins his redefinition of tragedy:
What is common in the works we call tragedies is that they dramatize a particular and grievous disorder and its resolution…Significant tragic drama is associated not with fixed faiths or stable ‘organic communities’ but with cultures moving toward violent internal conflict and major transformations. (54)
As Williams accounts for the happening of revolution on a social, causal basis, he also articulates that tragedy offers a truthful dramatization of this cause and effect. For Williams, tragedy dramaturgically presents how disorder can be resolved, and how transformation is facilitated conflictually, both of which fall into the purview of revolution. Williams argues,
“Revolution asserted the possibility of man altering his condition, tragedy showed its impossibility, and the consequent spiritual effect”(Modern Tragedy, 68). This interrelationship may be elucidated in somewhat more plain language: tragedy is what it is simply because it shows how it is impossible to alter people’s condition. After seeing tragedy,
people, spiritually stirred up, turn to revolution, a possibility of altering their condition.
In fact, this conception is an extension of Williams’ literature/society dialectic. In a broad sense, Williams seems to situate sociality of tragedy. And Williams is certainly not the only Marxist that attempts to bridge the gap between a social phenomenon like revolution, and a literary genre like tragedy. Fredric Jameson, in his The Prison-House of Language, thinks a text ought to work as “the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction”(77). That is, a text should give a social contradiction a “symptomatic expression and conceptual reflex”(83). By
‘social contradiction,’ Jameson means a social abuse that contradicts the author’s idealism.
Hence, it also motivates the author to put an imagined solution in his text. It perfectly corresponds to Williams’ possibility-impossibility oxymoron of revolution.
Last but not least, as such an embracer of revolution, Williams does not believe in the masses:
…masses was a new word for mob, and the traditional characteristics of the mob were retained in its significance: gullibility, fickleness, herd prejudice, lowness of taste and habit. The masses, on this evidence, formed the perpetual threat to culture. (Culture and Society, 298)
Of course, Williams’ comment on the masses/mob issue is a part of his cultural criticism.
Here, I’ve displaced it from the Williamsian cultural construct because it provides a proper transition to Yeats.
Yeats shares an almost identical dislike, only to a much higher degree. Yeats is so typical of a hater of the masses, which may be exemplified in Yeats’ record of the 1897 Jubilee Riot:
That evening there was a meeting of our council in the City Hall, and when we came out after it the crowds were waiting for us all round the Hall…Presently they began breaking windows where there were decorations…Then I too resigned myself and felt the excitement of the moment, that joyous irresponsibility and sense of power. (Memoirs, 112-3)
Yeats’ phrase “joyous irresponsibility and sense of power” may seem a little bit ambivalent.
However, we should be aware that Maud Gonne’s inflammatory speech preceded this gathering of the crowds. And in the course of this speech, Yeats noticed that “the whole crowd went wild”(112). Howes points out that this experience with the riot has enlightened Yeats of the crowds’ threatening weakness for allurement, seduction, and violence (77-8). Of course, this negative view has brought about Yeats’ distaste for the crowds, and eventually made Yeats a non-believer of revolution.
Instead of appealing to revolutionary action, Yeats believes that theater will provide a mobilization that can take its place. To put it simply, for Yeats, the crowds are a mob, and he recommends that theater transform the mob into a people:
Victor Hugo has said that in the theater the mob became a people, and, though this could be perfectly true only of ancient times…I have some hope that, if we have enough success to go on from year to year, we may help to bring a little ideal thought into the common thought of the times. (Uncollected Prose, Vol. II, 141)
Yeats urges the Irish theater to emulate the ancient dramatic arts, to transform the mob into a people. For Yeats, this transformation means to “create a great community”(Explorations, 28), where “many minds can flow into one another…our memories are a part of one great memory”(Essays and Introduction, 28). In Yeats’ opinion, only when there is a unification of unbreakable bondage will a people be formed. On the other hand, Yeats is confident that theater can consummate this transformation because theatricality is more or less invested with a hypnotic power, as I have stated in the previous chapter. And Yeats thinks that in every civilization, people are held together by this hypnotic power (Autobiography, 326).
In our pursuit of Yeats’ so-called ‘transformation,’ we should be able to see that it is essentially a practice of Yeats’ philosophy of unity. Most important of all, it has also become Yeats’ substitute for revolution. As usual, my next move is to disclose the frailty of this unity.
I think the key lies in the Yeatsian immanence of a people or a nation. Yeats needs Ireland to have “a Sophocles or a Shakespeare, or even some lesser genius who the sincerity of the Great Masters, ” who will “give their character to their people”(Uncollected Prose, Vol. II, 470). He even claims:
Do not try to pour Ireland into any political system. Think first how many able men with public minds this country has…and mould your system upon those men…These men, whether six or six thousand, are the core of Ireland, are Ireland itself. (Explorations, 414)
By now, the paradox is glaring: with his theater, Yeats desires to unify the Irish crowds/mob into a people. However, this unification is aimed at creating a hierarchical nation. (You can even say that Yeats himself has sabotaged his own unity!)(This belief of Yeats’ has often stigmatized him as a dissenter of democracy, or a fascist. In “From Democracy to Authority, ” Yeats has made such a prediction: Ireland will have “a steady movement towards the creation of a nation controlled by highly trained intellectuals”(Uncollected Prose, Vol. II, 435). Most curiously, Williams also takes great exception to democracy, “Democracy…is majority rule…But majority rule will…be mass-rule. Further, if the masses are, essentially, the mob, democracy will be mob-rule…it is necessary to ask again: who are the masses?”(Culture and Society, 298-9))
As for tragedy, Yeats, like Williams, launches into a redefinition. He first affirms that “life is a perpetual injustice,” on the basis of which the dramatist creates the tragedy where the hero struggles with destiny (Memoirs, 254). That is, Yeats’ redefinition of tragedy is characteristic of his rejection of passive victimization of the hero. Instead, Yeats believes that the hero should rise to the challenge of willing his own fate.
Knowing the tragic hero should tackle his own fate, Yeats is actually asserting a freedom-seeking process. In A Vision, Yeats states, “All that keeps the spirit from its freedom may be compared to a knot that has to be united”(226). In review of a Yeatsian tragedy,
Hazard Adams believes that “the individual must seek a mask, an opposite perhaps impossible to attain, and thus freedom is “fated” in so far as our natures are not freely chosen”(“Some Yeatsian Versions of Comedy,”58). Adams perceives this Yeatsian, in-tragedy freedom to be an attainment of the individual’s opposite, namely, an employment of Yeats’
mask theory, or his philosophy of unity. Flannery is more observant:
On the purely natural or humanistic level, tragedy provided a living demonstration of how man attained Unity of Being by facing and conquering despair, defeat, and inevitable death…[namely,] the hero’s struggle with fate. (39, italics mine)
By juxtaposition, Adams equates Yeats’ so-called freedom with his search for and union with his mask, while Flannery points out what Yeats proposes should be done to achieve Unity of Being. In Yeats’ opinion, what constitutes a tragedy is the protagonist’s cost of embracing inevitable worldly suffering (, which is also the protagonist’s mask) in order to fulfill Unity of Being. Not until this point should we introduce the Yeatsian term, “tragic joy” or “tragic pleasure,” which is basically an extension of Yeats’ “double-unity model,” with more focus on theatrical specifics. As the name suggests, this term refers to a paradoxical case scenario:
under untoward circumstances, it is joyous that the hero has succeeded in accomplishing his Unity of Being. But it is tragic as well that its cost is so tremendous or inexorable. What intrigues me most is its pragmatic aspect:
It was only by watching my own plays that I came to understand that this reverie, this twilight between sleep and waking, this bout of fencing, alike on the stage and in the mind…is the condition of tragic pleasure and to understand why it is so rare and so brief. (Plays for an Irish Theater, x)
For Yeats, the tragic joy, in practice, serves the purpose of putting the audience in a trance.
And the audience’s trance, according to Yeats, is also to honor this goal, “Tragedy must always be a drowning and breaking of the dykes that separate man from man”(Essays and
Introductions, 297). Yeats has faith in the instrumentality of tragedy with the dissolution of individual subjectivities into oneness. That is, as far as Yeats is concerned, tragic joy supposedly has a mesmerizing effect on the audience, and will consummate an ultimate unification.
It’s so apparent that in terms of tragedy, Yeats’ philosophy of unity is implemented on two interrelated levels. On the theatrical level, it is the protagonist’s endeavor to attain Unity of Being. The protagonist’s endeavor brings about tragic joy, which, on the real-life level, contributes to the unity of the audience.(By now it is even clearer how the two implementations are so reminiscent of Yeats’ “double-unity model!”)
I’ve decided to seek textual instantiation of the Yeatsian tragedy in The Death of Cuchulain.
First, as I have mentioned previously, the hero, Cuchulain, is Yeats’ ideal paradigm of Anglo-Irishness. In addition, David Lynch, in Yeats: The Poetics of the Self, states that the subject of this play is “a terror of a far more archaic sort”(181), namely, the hero’s death.
Taylor claims that Yeats
presents the death of Cuchulain as that of a solar hero passing through the final phases of his predestined cycle and arriving back at a stage of objectivity and passivity represented by phase one, the dark of the moon. (170)
With his own death drawing near, Cuchulain, by Yeats’ construction of this play, is destined to circle around Yeats’ ‘gyre’ (See Figure 1 on page 8). Certainly, it is an opposite-merging process, or a representation of Yeats’ philosophy of unity. Most of all, Yeats has metaphorized this process as Cuchulain’s encounters. For instance, Cuchulain’s first encounter is of Eithne, who is “the early manifestation of the subjective ideal at phase fifteen”(Taylor 170, also see Figure 1 on page 8). Cuchulain mistakenly accuses her of a willing betrayal:
EITHNE: Cuchulain! Cuchulain!
Cuchulain enters from back
I am Emer’s messenger,
Wrongly accusing Eithne, Cuchulain may as well have his own death predetermined. In the end, Cuchulain is beheaded by the blind man from On Baile’s Strand:
BLIND MAN:
Regarding this last encounter, Ure thinks the blind man in this play creates the comic-tragic effect of “a resounding irony”(Yeats the Playwright, 82). Ironically indeed, such a hero as Cuchulain gets killed by a clown-like figure. Taylor points out that this blind man is Cuchulain’s mask with which he must be united (173). At any rate, Cuchulain and the blind man are so contrary to each other that their encounter could be a supreme aesthetic practice of Yeats’ mask theory or philosophy of unity!
Last but not least, Yeats in this play also hints his disrelish for revolutionary violence. At the end of this play, there is a song:
Are those things that men adore and loathe Their sole reality?
What stood in the Post Office With Pearse and Connoly?
………..
Who thought Cuchulain till it seemed
He stood where they had stood? (212-5, 218-9)
“The Post Office” or “Pearse and Connoly” apparently alludes to the Easter Rising. More interestingly, Yeats binds Cuchulain with the martyrs in this rebellion. Superficially, Yeats lauds these revolutionists for taking on Cuchulain’s heroism. However, as Duncan points out, by implication Yeats actually raises a sharp question: could the killings in the Easter Rising have been avoided? The answer is: No doubt (182)!
Personally, what amazes me about this play is not how Yeats has threaded characters from his previous plays through the entire work (, though it’s indeed like a retrospect of Yeats’
theatrical career, or metaphorically, Yeats’ farewell to the audience before he exits from the stage!) As I have stated above, Yeats enunciates a unifying power of tragic joy in the moment when the hero meets and unites with his antithesis. In The Death of Cuchulain, Cuchulain undergoes three opposite-assimilating processes, which, by Yeats’ theory of tragedy, is equal to triple buildups of the unifying power of tragic joy. This is precisely why I think this play may exemplify the Yeatsian tragedy so properly!
By now a sharp-minded, erudite reader will have detected a dialectical vulnerability: a lack of the dialogical possibility between the Williamsian and Yeatsian systems of tragedy and revolution. Indeed, they two seem like two disjunctive, divided parts of this chapter, completely insulated from each other. However, I believe that underneath them is a deep structure of homology that can help me connect all the dots. First, Williams sees institutions are to become fossilized and oppressive. His emphasis is how tragedy plays on people’s emotionality and prods people into revolutionary action in order to create a new order:
institutions tragedy revolution new order
Differentiated from Williams, Yeats removes revolution from the equation. However, I am deeply intrigued by the fact that Yeats likewise targets people’s emotionality when they see a tragedy. Of course, with deep hatred for the crowds, Yeats makes good use of tragedy to make possible a unification of them into a people or a nation:
the crowds tragedy unification a people
By such a formulation, it’s rather clear that Williams and Yeats actually have quite a bit in common! For starters, they both see an unsatisfactory reality. Through the agency of tragedy, they both work on people’s emotionality for a reality-changing purpose. For them, tragedy is a catalyst of a gradual but radical change of society. This is what I mean by “a deep structure of homology.” It seems like a hidden pattern both Williams and Yeats follow (, consciously or unconsciously,) as they devise their formulas of tragedy. In fact, this hidden pattern also lends more accountability to the disillusionment of Yeats’ unified people. As I have stated, tragedy actually helps Yeats realize a dream: the materialization of an Anglo-Irish-ruling society, in place of a people of true unity. I think the main problematic lies in how Yeats toys with Irish people’s emotionality. The way Yeats treats tragedy, he has literally become a manipulator of the audience’s emotionality in order to achieve his goal. And in the course of his manipulation, Yeats must have spontaneously naturalized his Anglo-Irish thinking, and forced this naturalization upon the audience.
Cathleen ni Houlihan as a tragedy
Cathleen ni Houlihan is one of the most discussed Yeatsian plays. In other words, my research would not be complete at all without any treatment of it! Here I have adopted a