Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 12:04:33 -0600
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
I'm no expert on Yeats, and his poetry perhaps should be read as establishing the ironic distancing (as in Browning?) of writer from the character who speaks the poem. I can't quite see it.
The Leaders of the Crowd
They must to keep their certainty accuse All that are different of a base intent; Pull down established honour; hawk for news Whatever their loose fantasy invent And murmur it with bated breath, as though The abounding gutter had been Helicon Or calumny a song. How can they know Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come, They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
(1921)
Tell that to the Haymarket hanged or to the former Czarist general, threatened with hanging if he did not renounce the Revolution, who proclaimed, "I die a bolshevik." Yeats _did_ write _books_, not collections of disconnected poems, and this poem is the ninth in the volume, _Michael Robartes and the Dancer_, preceded by (5) "Easter 1916," (6) "Sixteen Dead Men," (7) "The Rose Tree," and (8) "On a Political Prisoner." It would seem to undercut, quite unironically, the claim in the first of these five poems, that
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born,
And underline (now unqualified) the lines which follow immediately after "beauty is born":
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
This is essentially a repetition of the blindsiding of democratic politics performed by Plato when he twists the argument of Thrasymachus to apply to individuals rather than classes. Those who offer to give voice to the "crowd" are shrill, not beautiful, except in death -- for, afterall, "England may keep faith / For all that is done and said."
And this too reflects Yeats's own response to the claim made by Keats (and affirmed by Mervyn), for "Sailing to Byzantium" is, among other things, an answer to _Ode on a Nightingale_:
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
And
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
And
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing . . . .
Truth and beauty only in here in frozen beauty ("artifice of eternity" "golden bird") -- that is in death, in that "lonely impulse of delight" which freezes the airman for all time in the work of art which he has made of his life. That work of art happened, of course, to carry with it the deaths of many others, others against whom he had nothing negative to say, and who just perhaps (in fact probably) were dying not for that lonely minute of delight but for the reasons Tobin inaccurately ascribed to Yeats's airman -- i.e. for some reason (if only the cheers of the crowd) external to their own inward turning focus.
I really feel that Yeats certainly needed an excuse. In fact Pound's vicious politics were vicious only in their perverted focus, not in their initial drive, which was for human happiness, not the artist's lonely self-satisfaction. If one chooses to back off a bit from Pound's immediate occasions (as Mervyn backs off from Yeats's immediate occasion), then the vilest passages in _Rock-Drill_ or _Thrones_ point back, not to the death camps but to Pound's earlier response to World War I:
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor" . . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
And
V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.
(Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)
It is also worth noting that those "leaders of the crowd" at whom Yeats sneers were among the few in Europe (outside of Rosa Luxemberg, William Liebknect, and the bolsheviks) who opposed that slaughter.
Carrol
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Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 07:58:12 +1000 From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan at qut.edu.au>
Cuchulain Comforted
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man Violent and famous, strode among the dead; Eyes started out of the branches and were gone.
Then certain shrouds that muttered head to head Came and were gone. He leans upon a tree As though to meditate on wounds and blood.
A shroud that seemed to have authority Among those bird-like things came, and let fall A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three
Came creeping up because the man was still. And thereupon that linen-carrier said: "Your life can grow much sweeter if you will
Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud; Mainly because of what we only know The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.
We thread the needles' eyes and all we do All must together do.' That done, the man Took up the nearest and began to sew.
'Now must we sing and sing the best we can, But first you must be told our character; Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain.
'Or driven from home and left to die in fear.' They sang, but had not human tunes nor words, Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.
January 13,1939.
This was one of Yeats' very last poems. I read a very good critique of it by Harold Bloom in 1990 in China but I do not have the article to hand. I mention Bloom only because for a long time I was convinced that the reading was better than the original poem. But now I have come to like the poem a good deal more. I also need to acknowledge that when I write about it now I cannot be sure which ideas are mine and which I owe to Bloom.
There are a number of familiar themes here. Most immediately there is the clash between the artist and the warrior - home poeticus versus homo politicus. (This tension is also present of course in Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Tennyson' Lady of Shalott.) It is a theme understated in An Irish Airman foresees his death. The warrior works on the world and achieves transcendence. The artist poet cringes in envy.
Edward Said uses the term 'molestation' to describe the artist's realisation that she is confined to a fictive world. BTW Chen Kaige's Farewell my Concubine is a very sustained meditation on molestation - where the 'emperor' in the opera had to continually confront the reality of the non-fictive world.
Yeats seems to have a very bad case of the molestations. Throughout his poetry there is the envy of the warrior. The Irish Rebellion of 1916 threw him into a frenzy. Not because he approved of the politics - he didn't but because the courage and bravery of the rebels contrasted with his own feeling that he himself was a coward at heart. So he is driven in his poem Easter 1916 to aestheticise the politics - almost in an act of unconscious revenge. Hence the nonsense of the key metaphors. He uses the 'casual comedy' as a description of the struggle for Irish Independence and socialism; and of the act of rebellion itself he is driven back on this metaphor:-
Our part To murmur name upon name As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild.
There was of course nothing childish at all about the act of defiance of British Imperialism. The great James Connolly himself as he went out to his death spoke about the uprising as being a blow against WW1. Yeats -old Tory that he was- could not encompass such politics. No more could Exra Pound's politics help him to understand WW1. He may have condemned it and Carrol is quite right to point this out but we need to insist on the truth that WW1 was not about the struggle for
For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books. (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts)
Major Gregory (Lady Gregory's son and the 'airman') was for Yeats the unity of the both the artist and the warrior - 'Our Sydney and our perfect man'. One is tempted to say 'ubermensch' here for of course the vision is Nietzschean and as such deeply flawed.
Where I think Critical Realism can push us forward here - contra Tobin - is through insisting that the aesthetic be incorporated within the ethical - the good. And of course a truly ethical world would block the execution of Meyerhold and also would have counselled a nervous young man from Sligo out of his feelings of inadequacies vis a vis the warrior caste. Indeed an ethical society would lead to a drastic reduction in the number of warriors. Would life then become "boring" as the Nietzscheans allege?
Before we get dragged on to that terrain, it is well to recall that for most of the world life remains 'nasty, brutish and short'. Most of the victims of today's super Imperialism would settle for a respite from the warriors.
regards
Gary
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Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 19:47:51 -0500 From: Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus at gis.net>
Mervyn wrote:
<< I was speaking, not of the relationship of ethics to aesthetics in the Soviets, but in a eudaimonic society of freely flourishing and creative people.>>
Well, if so, then what about today? But what you wrote was that for DCR, aesthetics and ethics were kin. That sounds like a proposition that is supposed to be true now as well as then.
<<I gave a clear example of a sense in which Bacon's art is not ugly but beautiful. I doubt Keats means by 'beauty', 'pretty', rather, something capable of conveying the joys of aesthetic experience, in which we inter alia transcend ourselves and are never more ourselves than when we do,>>
Aesthetics in this sense can be prompted by all sorts of things: the night sky, a mathematical formula, the dynamics of capitalism, and for Hannibal Lector probably his murders (I never read the novel or saw the movie, so maybe I've misunderstood this one). So aesthetics covers more than art, you'll probably agree. And for the sake of argument, I'll go along with:
<<as Bhaskar says PE155 'There is in aesthetic experience a genuine aspiration to concrete utopianism, neo-Blochian hope and prefigurationality.' Of course, if you stay on the surface, a screaming Pope is a screaming Pope. But the paintings bear witness to the deeper possibility of a non-alienated existence.>>
So, you're welcome to say "aesthetics = aspiration to concrete utopianism etc." (I'm not sure I buy this, but I'll let that pass.) But this doesn't mean "aesthetics = the beautiful," since ugliness can also reflect an aspiration to concrete utopianism. The aspiration may be beautiful, that that doesn't imply the object that expresses it is beautiful -- and I think that possibility (and with it the difference between expression and abstract implication) should be respected. You think that I'm merely staying on the surface by saying that great art can be ugly; I feel you're getting overly abstract and flattening out the possibilities of creativity by saying all art is beautiful. Ditto for saying truth is beauty and vice versa. This gets to a level of abstraction far off terra firma.
Think about aesthetics in terms of negativity. Society can be reproduced by human inaction (or potentially, even by efforts to radically change it, if that's not too Foucauldian); an aspiration toward concrete utopianism be expressed or experienced through things that aren't utopian in the least.
<<< <<Keats's claim is lovely, but highly Romantic in every sense.[Tobin]>>
<< Since when was Romantic a boo word? [Mervyn]>>
It's not a boo word: Romanticism was a historical movement that had its strengths and it also had its limitations.
T. Tobin Nellhaus
========
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 21:28:29 -0500 From: Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus at gis.net>
Hi Gary--
<<Where I think Critical Realism can push us forward here - is contra Tobin - is through insisting that the aesthetic be incorporated within the ethical - the good.>>
There are several different issues here. One is the theoretical connection between aesthetics and ethics. Another is how aesthetics is being defined; in particular, what sort of object is deemed to have aesthetic properties (and for what reasons). As I say in my reply to Mervyn, that definition shouldn't be made narrowly. Finally, there's the problem of "insisting." Who is doing this insisting? How do they enforce that? Here in the U.S., there are scads of people who demand that art meet ethical criteria, which happen to designate art that concerns sex -- especially homosexuality -- to be unethical to the point of evil. It's all well and good for us to say our ethics are better, but there's still quite a doorway there for deciding that art we don't like is ethically suspect, art with bad politics to be bad art, and art that follows our politics to be good art -- and there's plenty of history of that on the left as well as the right. When art must serve as a handmaiden to politics (ethics put to practice), as far as I'm concerned the politics/ethics are bad.
Don't get me wrong -- I very much feel that art has political implications, and I encourage art that tries to help make a better, more democratic world. I'm practically a hereditary Brechtian. I've performed in and directed political plays; I recently co-edited a book on a community-based form of activist theater. But I think artists have to tie their work to left politics through their own informed choice -- not by social coercion, not by legal sanctions, and not (as being proposed here) by theoretical fiat. Theories lead to practices, and a theory that doesn't give sufficient autonomy to the arts at the philosophical level won't do it when put to practice.
T. Tobin Nellhaus
====
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 21:24:02 -0600 From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
This discussion can rapidly spin out of control; for the present I'd like to respond to just one separated bit of Tobin's post.
Tobin Nellhaus wrote:
> When art must serve as a
> handmaiden to politics (ethics put to practice),
> as far as I'm concerned the
> politics/ethics are bad.
You perhaps here are operating with too restrictive a notion of "must" in this context -- perhaps the image of the Commissar ordering the artist to paint a heroic industrial worker or the poet to write a hymn of praise to the stakhanovite [sp?] movement.
But "must" can be internally felt rather than externally imposed -- and one can argue as does Gary that, _today_, artists who do not feel this internal _compulsion_ to incorporatE the aesthetic within the ethical - the good, are not apt to create the highest art. (I would phrase it differently, since I accept Ollman's argument that Marxism does not incorporate an ethic, but the essential thrust would be the same.)
Incidentally, I think to some extent Mervyn's "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death" is a better poem than the poem I think Yeats wrote. :-) And perhaps _my_ Cantos is a better poem than Pound wrote. ;-<
Carrol
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Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2002 18:38:15 +0000 From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh at jaspere.demon.co.uk>
<<<Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus at gis.net> writes
<<[Quoting Mervyn] I was speaking, not of the relationship of ethics to aesthetics in the Soviets, but in a eudaimonic society of freely flourishing and creative people.>>
Well, if so, then what about today? But what you wrote was that for DCR, aesthetics and ethics were kin. That sounds like a proposition that is supposed to be true now as well as then.>>>
Well, it *is* (arguably) true now, as possibility. Were you to object that that's 'only' possibility, I would say that (D)CR is fundamentally about, not the Actual, but accessing the structures of possibility of the Real via the Actual.
I don't think I can take the discussion of aesthetics much further. I agree that the aesthetic can't simply be equated with art or with the beautiful.
Mervyn
[CLIP]
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Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 10:09:20 +0000 From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh at jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Dear Carrol,
Thanks for this. You (and Gary) have certainly made out a good case that Yeats needs excusing. Well, let's not excuse him then except insofar as his poetry can be 'appropriated' for non-vile ends.
Mervyn
Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes
[CLIP]
END OF FORWARDS ============
I'm mostly a lurker on the Bhaskar list and thought I'd interrupted their main concerns enough. But perhaps LBO posters will have more to say.
Carrol