The Comps Reading Project part 11

The Unicorn From The Stars and Other Plays, William Butler Yeats.

Yeats' reputation as a poet looms so justifiably large over the 20th century that it is easy to forget that he was also a playwright--that in fact that was how he actually paid the bills early in his career.  Here are the selected plays of his included on my comps list:

"Unicorn From the Stars"
1907 three-act play co-authored with Lady Gregory.  Young Martin falls into a trance, and awakened prematurely by Father John, announces a vision of unicorns breaking all in their path.  A stray word from a beggar causes him to interpret the vision as a call to arms, for Ireland to not only break English law, but all law in general in a glorious anarchy, destroying all the in the world that can be destroyed, for only the soul cannot be destroyed, destroying all that stands between us and God. He begins by destroying the carriage he had been commissioned to build for the visiting King of England himself, and in one night leads 200 men to burn down a Mansion.  He leads others to forsake the mundane "work" of this world, to eschatologically seek only the things of the next; it is an implicit rejection of the Protestant work ethic for an Edenistic world of reverie.  The play thus far fits in comfortably with the apocalyptic Fin de siècle.

The next day Martin falls into another trance; this time Father John refuses to awaken him prematurely.  Now when Martin at last stirs, he has the complete vision; it is not to destroy this world physically, but within our own minds that the world must be destroyed.  He is accused of treason by his followers, but Father John restrains them.  His followers in turn defend him when constables arrive to arrest Martin for arson; a gun goes off in the confusion, killing Martin.  In his death-throws, Martin declares to Father John that we are mistaken about heaven--it is not a place of peace, but of battle, continuous, glorious battle.

It appears from this play that even at this juncture, Yeats was already losing faith in the capacity of armed rebellion to effect any real social change; little did he know that the Easter Uprising would occur in less than a decade.

"Cathleen Ni Houlihan"
Highly nationalistic 1902 one-act play co-written with Lady Gregory, centered upon the 1798 Irish revolt.  The woman in question is a mythical symbol of Irish Nationalism; she appears in the play as an old beggar at the house of a newly-wed couple, who ends up calling the groom to take up arms in revolt.

"At The Hawk's Well"
One-act 1917 play, Yeats' attempt at Japanese Noh theatre (so perhaps Jameson's choice to integrate Japan into his Modernist Papers is not such a stretch after all).  Centers on an adventure of Cuchulain, the mythical hero of Ulster, his encounter with an Old Man standing futile watch of the miraculous waters of immortality, at a dry well that have eluded him for 50 years, and of his battle with a supernatural Hawk-woman who carries a curse of violence and discontent which causes him to abandon the Old Man and miss the bubbling of the well yet again (apropos for the then-recent Easter Uprising).

"The Words Upon the Window Pane"
1930 one-act play likewise arguably indebted to Noh theatre; centered upon Yeats' well-known affinity for seances.  Although Yeats was a Spiritualist true believer, he nevertheless surprisingly leaves room for the skeptical in this dramatic portrayal of the sort of seance he doubtless participated in many times.  The spirits channeled upon this particular encounter are those of the famed Anglo-Irish cynic Jonathan Swift and his lover Stella, as they resume their old quarrel about Swift's refusal to have more children, and thus add to the horrors of the human race (almost Beckettian in its despair).  I wanted to include this play on my comps list due to its attitudes towards the presence of the dead, far closer to Latin-America than the neighboring English.


The Rising of the Moon, Lady Gregory [Isabella Augusta Persse].

A charming little one-act comedy written by Yeats' co-playwright/partner in crime, Lady Gregory, from 1907.  It involves an encounter between an escaping Republican agitator in disguise and a policeman with covert, unadmitted-even-to-himself Republican sympathies.  The title refers to
a popular nationalistic ballad that the former intentionally mis-sings, prompting the policeman to start singing the correct words himself.

The Complete Plays, John Millington Synge.

"The Playboy of the Western World"
So this is the infamous play, huh--the one that incited bona fide riots in Dublin when it first premiered in January 1907, the ones immortalized by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that Yeats himself referred to nearly 20 years later when he lashed out against protestors of O'Casey's plays: "You have disgraced yourselves again!  Is this to be the recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?"

But is this play genius?  It's certainly a fun play--one that's slightly risqué even by today's standards: a young drifter arrives in a provincial Irish town with a mopy story of having just murdered his tyrannical father.  The novelty of a patricide causes all the young women of the town to fall in love with him, and further comic mishaps ensue when the actual Father--not dead at all!--arrives in town to taunt his son for the weak blow he gave.  This causes the town to turn on the young man, who, to defend his reputation, must violently assault his Father again.  The townfolk now realize that their goading has made them accessories to murder, and begin to lynch him before the authorities can make an inquest.  But then the Father improbably gets up once more, and he and his son drunkenly reconcile and leave town together.  A cowardly scholar who's fiancee had fallen in love with the drifter tries to propose to her once more, but she shrugs him off, bemoaning that she has just lost the "last playboy of the western world."

Ok, so the play's not a terribly flattering portrait of provincial Irish life--but it's clearly told in good fun, with a comedic ending and a colorful cast of characters.  But I guess once you've suffered through centuries of English invaders justifying their brutal colonization by characterizing your people as backwards and barbaric--and if you're then in the midst of a high cultural revival meant to repudiate those stereotypes in the midst of your fight for homerule--then I suppose tempers can a little high.

"The Well of the Saints"
Another three-act comedy from Synge, written in 1905.  Taking place "a century or more ago", a blind couple of beggars, who have been tricked into thinking they are beautiful by the cruel townsfolk, miraculously get their sight back from a traveling Saint.  Hijinks and harsh disillusionment ensue, causing them to reject the Saint when their blindness returns and he offers to cure them again.

"Riders to the Sea"
A one-act tragedy written in 1904; set on the isle of Donegal, there is no real plot, except that the last of an old widow's sons is killed by the ocean.  There is no real antagonist, except the sea and God.  The widow even has second-sight by which to warn her sons, but the tragedy is compounded by how useless it is against the hubris of man and the cruelty of the sea itself.

"In Shadow of the Glen"
A one-act comedy from 1903; a tramp comes upon a young widow in a barn, dressing the body of her deceased, older husband.  She goes inside to meet her young lover, whereupon the old man wakes up and reveals to the shocked tramp that he's just testing his young wife.  When she returns to the barn to hear her lover's proposals for marriage, he gets up and banishes her from his property.  The tramp takes umbrage, and offers to go with the young lady and show her a life of freedom.  After they leave, the confused lover and old man sit down for drinks.  This is a strange play.

"The Tinker's Wedding"
A one-act, Carnivalesque comedy from 1909 but that could've been written by Chaucer, wherein a young couple try to bribe a priest into marrying them for less than he usually accepts; and when her Mom steals the money to go drinking and so the Priest refuses to perform the wedding, they tie him up in a burlap sack until he agrees not to press charges.  Also a strange play.

"Deirdre of the Sorrows"
Then after all that slapstick, we have a sober 1910 historical tragedy, taking place in the ancient times of pre-christian Ireland. Young princess Deidre is betrothed to the aged Conchubar, King of Ulster; but she is free-spirited, and runs off with her lover Naoise, and they live secretly in peace for 7 years.  At last the King offers to at last make amends, but he betrays them, and has Naoise killed.  Deidre then kills herself in order to deny the King his prize.  Very melodramatic.

The Modernist Papers, Frederic Jameson.

This 2007 essay collection, corralling together articles written on the loose banner of "Modernism" from the '70s clear up to 2006, finds renowned cultural critic Frederic Jameson backing off from the Marxist analysis and Postmodernism that has defined so much of his career, to instead narrow down his focus onto close readings of some of the canonical writers of the earlier Modernist period.  The work is intended as a sort of companion piece to his 2002 study A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present.  Unlike some of the other works on my special topic reading list, this massive volume makes little effort to interrogate the "canon," neither exploring how it was formed, nor how it was defined, nor how or even if it should be defined.  His one foray away from Eurocentrism is a fascinating section on Japanese writers of the post-WWII period (though even there, his focus is still upon First World imperial powers).

The focus of these various essays is on individual writers, not upon any sort of cohesive or encompassing conception of the era as a whole.  With the exception of Japan, he hits on most of the standard players one comes to expect from any sort of Modernist study: Joyce, Proust, Pound, Stein, Beckett, Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Thomas Mann, William Carlos Williams,  Kafka, Wallace Stevens; the Japanese novelists Kojin Karatani, Natsume Soseki, Oe Kenzaburo, and the German novelist Peter Weiss are his only real fresh contributions to the field Modernist studies.  Jameson's project here (inasmuch as he has a project) is not to break new ground, but to carefully analyze the broken ground itself.

I'll admit he almost lost me when he proclaimed "Ithaca" one of the two most boring chapters in Ulysses.  Blasphemy, that extended satire of catechism is a delight to read; Joyce himself called it his favorite chapter to write, and it shows!  Why won't Jameson let himself like nice things?

Paradiso, José Lezama Lima.

Nightwood if it were set in Cuba; Djuna Barnes as a Latin-American writer--and not just because of its bold-for-the-era eroticism (including some of the most pretentiously-written sex scenes you will ever encounter) and a philosophy-drenched homosexuality.  (Really, in terms of genre expectation, this novel should be approached more as a philosophic text than as a straight narrative).  Rather, this massive novel can't help but remind of Nightwood due to its labyrinthine prose, written in the same sort of dense, dreamlike, disjointed, difficult-to-follow neo-baroque style as Nightwood, with a similarly strange fixation upon over-literate European culture and aristocratic creature comforts (between this and Carpentier, what is it with post-Castro Cuban novelists and their obsession with Europe?  Shouldn't the island's isolated geography, Afro-Caribe heritage, and 1959 Revolution leave them the best positioned to break free from the Continent altogether?  Or do those factors paradoxically tie them to the Old World all the more desperately?). 

TS Eliot had written in Nightwood's preface "that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it", and that statement is double so of Paradiso, which is the sole novel of an actual poet, José Lezama Lima.  Like a poem, it is a text that one experiences more than understands.  A turn-of-the-century Cuban Künstlerroman published in 1966, following the tale of young Cuban aristocrat José Cemí, an aspiring scholar/poet--the novel ends with him ready to begin.  First published in 1966, the novel was celebrated by the likes of Vargas as well as Julio Cortázar, although the latter (reportedly with Lezima's blessing) made many "corrections" to the first edition--primarily grammatical, though given the great dialectical differences between Caribbean and South American Spanish, those corrections may not have been "minor" at all.

Note: Pg. 234 has a fascinating juxtaposition of a "James Joyce's Goethe" and "a sixth-century BC Chinese Sartre", establishing an interweaving labyrinth of disparate literary traditions that includes the Irish.

Tres tristes tigres [Three Sad Tigers, but usually translated Three Trapped Tigers], Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

Can you tell that the Spanish professor on my committee is Cuban?  Because here comes yet another Cuban novel!

But what a novel--it is in many ways the perfect pairing with Paradiso.  Whereas the latter is all aristocratic privilege and mellifluous philosophizing, this text is all about the poor, the working class, the dregs of Havana society.  Interweaving the tales of the various denizens and tourists inhabiting cabaret society in 1950s pre-Castro Cuba, this novel is the wild philosophizing of the gutter--and features the dazzling experimentation of the jazz club!  Cabrera Infante had once said "It's not a bad idea to read this novel out loud" (lending further creedence to the connection between traditional orality and experimentalism similarly found in Irish Modernism and Postmodernism), but he even undermines even that suggestion in the breath-taking mid-section of the novel, where pictograms, visual poems, footnotes, multiple revisions of the same story with lines crossed-out, blacked-out pages, whited-out pages (references to Castro censorship?) etc, and other unvocalizable elements, all collage together in the same wild chaos as the nightclub.  These wild characters are fragmenting and spiraling out of control (sometimes literally--such as in the untimely death of the obese lounge singer La Estrella), and the text spirals out of control with it.

This novel, with its endless puns, wordplay, and stream of conscious, has been called the Cuban Ulysses--and that distinction is heightened by the fact that James Joyce, as well as TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Baudelaire, Kafka, Faulkner, Hemingway, etc, (goodness, was the Anglo-Modernist canon already so established by the mid-60s?), with their names often transliterated into Cuban dialect, are all liberally cited throughout--again, along with his contemporaries Lezama Lima and Carpentier, the Cubans seem intent on out-Europeaning the Europeans.  (Cabrera Infante even performs pastiche of his contemporaries in a section fictionalizing literary responses to the then-recent assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City).  The Joyce Ulysses comparisons are openly courted and played with throughout this meta-text.

And though no mention is made of his contemporary Becket, the closing line "hes shoving it in hes rummaging in my belly and pulling my guts out he wants to see what color they are for sure   cant go no further" is of a piece with The Unnameables' closing "I can't go on, I'll go on."

Note: keeping the Irish theme alive, pg. 384 contains an open allusion to Yeats' "The Second Coming."  The narrator appears to wish to draw a direct connection between the insane violence of the Irish Civil Wars with this 1965 text Post-Revolution (Cabrera Infante initially supported the Castro, until his magazine was censored, then he went into exile and became the regime's bitterest critic).
Note: pg. 396-7 feature the French once more; and again on pg. 465-6.
Note: pg. 413 Discussion of exile polyglot identity with discussion of a Cuban born on a U.S. UFC ship sailing off Guatemala under a Liberian flag...