Table Of ContentStates
OF
Desire
Wilde, Yeats,
Joyce, and
the Irish
Experiment
VICKI MAHAFFEY
New York • Oxford
Oxford University Press
1998
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Copyright © 1998 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicalion Data
Mahaffey, Vicki.
States of desire : Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the
Irish experiment / by Vicki Mahaffey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511 592-9
1. English literature—Irish authors—History and criticism.
2. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939—Criticism and interpretation.
3. Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900—Criticism and interpretation.
4. Joyce, James, 1882-194]—Criticism and interpretation.
5. English literature—19th century—History and criticism.
6. English literature—20th century—History and criticism.
7. National characteristics, Irish, in literature.
8. Ireland—In literature. I. Title.
PR8750.M34 1997
820.9'9415'09041—DC21 96-54631
Portions of States of Desire were published elsewhere in an earlier form. I am grateful to the
lames Joyce Quarterly and The University of Michigan Press for permission to reprint revised
versions of these articles:
"Fantastic Histories: Nomadology and Female Piracy in Finnegans Wake," in Joyce and History,
ed. Mark Wollaeger. Victor Luftig, and Robert Spoo (University of Michigan Press, 1996),
157-76.
"Heirs of Yeats: Eire as Female Poets Revise Her," in The Future of Modernism, cd. Hugh Wite-
meyer (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 101-17.
"Fascism and Silence: The Coded History of Amalia Popper," James Joyce Quarterly 32
(Spring/Summer 1995): 501-22.
"Pere-version and Im-mere-sion: Idealized Corruption in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and The Picture of Dorian Gray," special issue of The James Joyce Quarterly 31 (Spring 1994),
"Joyce and Homosexuality": 189-206. Reprinted in Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente (University
of Michigan Press, 1998, 121-36).
'"Minxing Marrage and Making Loof: Anti-Oedipal Reading," James Joyce Quarterly 30 (Winter
1993): 219-37.
"Wunderlich on Joyce: The Case Against Art." Critical Inquiry 1 7 (Summer 1 991): 667-92.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Chris
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Preface
Small things matter, and that's where the leakage begins.
—Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
w When I was working on the issue of authority in the
writings of James Joyce,1 I attempted to define an ex-
ercise of authority that was unoppressive, dynamic, and even joyous, which I
associated with the authority of experience (as opposed to the more tyrannical
authority of power or force). This is the kind of authority I had come to enjoy in
the classroom, and it offers all the rewards that are usually associated with
mastery of one's discipline and the ability to restage that mastery for students.
What I also came to recognize was that this kind of authority is by definition
backward-looking, even nostalgic, since it depends upon a re-presentation or
belated staging of discovery; moreover, the authority of experience produces a
feeling of widening distance between teacher and students, who are cast pri-
marily as audience. I found it increasingly disturbing, for example, to teach the
works of Samuel Beckett, and especially Waiting for Godot and Endgame. These
two plays were uncannily beginning to resemble, in the relation between char-
acters and audience, the relation between myself and my students. Like teach-
ers, Beckett's characters are experienced at playing the same scenarios day after
day, and at moments they succeed both in entertaining and in being enter-
tained, but the ennui of repetition frays their patience to the point that they
long for ending, and they question the meaning of such rituals even while per-
forming them. Despite their preoccupation with routines authorized by experi-
ence, with behaviors randomly repaid by carrots or sticks, Beckett's characters
sometimes recall the allure of "beginning," which is not an idealized or fetish-
ized youth, but the process of discovery that precedes the formation of habit. In
Endgame, Hamm asks Clov, as Clov pushes Hamm's wheelchair toward the
light, "Do you remember, in the beginning, when you took me for a turn? You
used to hold the chair too high. At every step you nearly tipped me out. (With
senile quaver.) Ah, great fun we had, the two of us, great fun. (Gloomily.) And
then we got into the way of it."2 Or, as Vladimir expresses it in Waiting for Godot,
"We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a
great deadener."3 Beckett exposes mastery as a disguise of habit, intermittently
ludicrous and delightful, but also excruciatingly boring. As Vladimir explains,
'All I know is that the hours are long, under these conditions, and constrain us
vii PREFACE
to beguile them with proceedings which—how shall I say—which may at first
sight seem reasonable, until they become a habit" (Godot, 51).
The only sparks of vitality in Godot are associated not with experience but
with experiment, with the kind of discovery that becomes possible when we
abandon the intentions, goals, and expectations born of experience. Didi
and Gogo agree that it is more difficult to discover something if you are looking
for it:
VLADIMIR: When you seek you hear.
ESTRAGON: You do.
VLADIMIR: That prevents you from finding.
ESTRAGON: It does. (Godot, 41)
Moreover, our desire to discover is handicapped by our tendency to set our
sights too high, to situate ourselves in a frame of reference that is too large. Be-
cause they are expecting Godot, Didi and Gogo fail to learn anything from the
arrival(s) of Pozzo and Lucky. They are so preoccupied by their appointment
with the unknown, which they faithfully await, that they miss the opportunity
to analyze or learn from the events of the present. The problem with such a uni-
versalizing or generalizing approach is that it never delivers the promised reve-
lation because, as Clov puts it in Endgame, you "need a microscope to find [a
telescope]" (76).
One of the most important tools for registering the energies of buried desire,
then, is a microscope. As Woolf writes in Night and Day, "Small things matter."
James Joyce famously makes a similar point in Dubliners by emphasizing the
vital importance of local control, the loss of which constitutes paralysis, Joyce's
ruling figure for dis-ability in Dubliners, In a similar way, William Butler Yeats
redefines the national as the local, and especially the rural; he is invariably less
interested in resisting the British empire than in rediscovering the history,
mythology, and speech patterns of individual Irish communities. Although
Yeats is known as a propagandist of nationalism, he is actually what I call a mi-
cronationalist, since all of his fulminations against cosmopolitanism are rooted
in his Blakean conviction that you can find the whole universe in a grain of
sand.4 As he suggested in an article for the Providence Sunday Journal in 1888,
national experience is only ever realized as local experience. He envisions a "na-
tion" as something small and personal, a glove on the hand with which one
reaches out to the universe:
To the greater poets everything they see has its relation to the national life,
and through that to the universal and divine life: nothing is an isolated artis-
tic moment; there is a unity everywhere; everything fulfills a purpose that is
not its own; the hailstone is a journeyman of God; the grass blade carries the
universe upon its point. But to this universalism, this seeing of unity every-
where, you can only attain through what is near you, your nation, or, if you
be no traveller, your village and the cobwebs on your walls. You can no more
have the greater poetry without a nation than religion without symbols. One
can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand—that glove is one's
nation, the only thing one knows even a little of. (LNI, 78)
PREFACE ix
Although Yeats's credo partakes of the rhetoric of nationalism, what he is actu-
ally endorsing is not an abstract category (which is how "nation" is usually un-
derstood), but micronationalism, the poetic concreteness of the local, the par-
ticular. What we know is what we can touch, but we can only touch the world
through our knowledge of local detail. For Yeats, too, only a microscope gives
access to more telescopic perspectives.
Several decades later, the value of microscopic attention also forms the basis
of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's insistence on the importance of what they
call "micropolitics," as well as informing their advocacy of "minority" litera-
ture. Micropolitics is a version of what Oscar Wilde called "individualism," a re-
sistance to all forms of coercion at the microlevel of an individual's private
thoughts and desires. It is the antithesis of imitation, which Wilde unambigu-
ously condemned as a mode of unnatural and barbaric conformity: "All imita-
tion in morals and in life is wrong."5 Wilde extravagantly criticized all forms of
authority and government, especially those forms "accompanied by prizes and
awards," as demoralizing and degrading. They make
People . . . less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them,
and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals,
without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's
thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one
may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for
a single moment. (A as C, 267)
Wilde's interest in crime and his declaration that "disobedience is the original
virtue" both stem from his appreciation of individualism. Importantly, Wilde
sees the epitome of individualism not in Satan but in Christ. He warns that
protest is not an end in itself but simply a means to its own antithesis, for "[t]he
note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace" (A as C, 263). Wilde's
appreciation of Christ as the supreme individualist shows that his stance is not
one of unthinking resistance to authority. On the contrary, he intimates that
peace is only possible through an acceptance of paradox, through an embrace
of incompatible extremes.
These three Irishmen's insistence on recovering local control was rendered
all the more urgent by their acute awareness of Ireland's impoverishment
under foreign rule, although each focused his attention on the microcosms of
local language, customs, and individual identity. Wilde centered his campaign
for greater artistic, personal, and national autonomy on the multifaceted indi-
vidual personality, celebrating its real contradictions and inconsistencies rather
than an unnatural, socially acceptable coherence. Both Yeats and Joyce trained
their microscopes more consistently on the individual moment—in life and in
language—building a symbolic system and a verbal world out of the complex
interplay of moments (instead of taking a world and dividing it into arbitrary
units, as a clock does to time). Through painstaking revision and elaboration
(Joyce's books took anywhere from seven to seventeen years to complete, and
Yeats revised his poems intensively for subsequent editions), both Joyce and
Yeats honed the precision of their words and the art of their arrangement,
x PREFACE
making it imperative for their readers, too, to exercise precise local control in
their reading. The object is to restore to reading and thinking the unpredicta-
bility of desire together with the agility, strength, and dynamism of athletics,
thereby developing the reader's resistance to uses of language that sedate
rather than energize independent thought and expression. In some respects,
both Joyce and Yeats were trying to reinvent the politically effective, sinewy po-
etic language extolled by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 18 21, language that strength-
ens the "faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same
manner as exercise strengthens a limb." It is facility with such language that, in
Shelley's famous phrase, makes poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the
World" ("A Defense of Poetry").
In choosing to focus on three Irish writers, I have sought to illustrate the im-
portance of attending to the local, the concrete, and the historically and geo-
graphically specific. Ireland is a concentrated symptom of the contradictions of
modernity, poised between economic shortage and imaginative richness, riven
by seven centuries of violence, invisibly divided by different branches of the
same creed, and forced to articulate its protests in English, the language of the
colonizer. As a symptom of modernity, Ireland allows us to see the outlines of
the larger condition, while condensing what is finest and most volatile in that
condition. In the twentieth century, Ireland has also produced a disproportion-
ate number of successful experimental writers for the size of its population. The
predominance of Irish writers was recently brought home to me once again
when I was teaching a large lecture course on British experimental writing. At
the end of the course, one of the students complained with what I believe to be
genuine naivete, 'Are all British writers Irish? Why don't we read Wilde, or
Shaw?"
Irish literature and history provide a particularly rich terrain for study not
only because they are layered and densely concentrated, but also because they
bear traces of two dramatically different narratives: the story of a long and bit-
ter oppression by the English interwoven with an ancient mythic tradition of
underground life, in which the power of the unconscious is given vitality, speci-
ficity, and history. Tir na n-Og, the "Land of the Young," is according to Irish
mythology both a parallel world and an afterworld. Its perfection is the mirror
image of the real Ireland, corresponding with and countering it at every point.
Ireland and Tir na n-Og are simultaneously identical and opposite—if it is
autumn in Ireland, it will be spring in Tir na n-Og; Tir na n-Og is the shadow
land that haunts and completes the imperfect life of mortals. As James
Stephens describes it in his book, In the Land of Youth, Tir na n-Og "is within the
world you have left, as an apple is within its skin, and all who die in your world
come to this one."6 But as the Irish poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill points out, the
Irish otherworld ("an saol eile") "is not simply an anticipated joyful afterlife; it is
also—even primarily—an alternative to reality."7 To enter the otherworld is to
pass through the looking glass, to leave the world of rational constraint for the
more vivid and threatening world of imagination and desire.
In Ireland, desire, forced underground and dammed up by a long and bloody
history of colonial oppression, pours forth again in exuberant language, a dy-
PREFACE xi
namic, everchanging language that seeks to spend itself on the richly layered
landscape of history. Such language, while playful, is trivial only in the most lit-
eral sense of "trivia," as a place of magical insight where three roads cross; as
Wilde implied a century ago, the "trivial" activity of play is earnest as well as
pleasurable. Moreover, Ireland—which produced the finest playboys of the
western world—is a place where everyone recognizes that play is political. Like
childhood, Ireland became a green world animated by fairies in response to a
very real oppression—its often violent domination by England—but the im-
pulse that produced the green world was not simply escapist. Play, as any child
knows, is the language of outlawed desire, a subversive expression of resistance
when rebellion fails. Like Puck, play unobtrusively drains the pleasure out of
arbitrarily exercised power, drawing pleasure to itself. Play unleashes the prin-
ciple of excess to sport with the law of oppressive denial, until denial finds itself
exhausted. The desire that fuels play is both exuberant and corrosive, violent
and prolific. It riddles prescriptive, unified images of self, text, and nation,
breaking up categories and setting the shards dancing in unexpected ways. The
resulting combinations and recombinations of "meaning" continue to change,
dramatizing at every moment both the importance and the inadequacy of each
constituent part.
Verbal invention is implicitly political because it challenges hardened ideas,
ideas that have grown into communal ideals, which are the mental equivalent
of institutions. Ideals can be inspiring, but when the number of socially accepta-
ble ideals is relatively small, and when we idealize accidents of birth (such as
sex, race, or class) instead of qualities of mind, ideals become a means of en-
couraging conformity, of standardizing a population. Conformity comes to
seem highly desirable despite—perhaps even because of—the fact that it is im-
possible for many people to meet the privileged standards by virtue of their sex
or their skin color. Play—animated by outlawed desire—dispels the aura of ide-
alized standards, exposing it as artificial. In other words, play interrupts the
conformist's desire to belong to a privileged group, replacing the passive desire
to belong with the more active, concrete pleasures of invention.
It is because aesthetic play encourages potentially political independent
thinking that the Puritans closed the theaters during the Reformation and the
Nazis confiscated experimental art. I am writing this book partly as a reminder
of the destructive power of idealism and the dangers of idealizing conformity in
particular. As George Bernard Shaw (an Irishman) said of the Golden Rule, "Do
unto others as you would have others do unto you? Hell no, they might be dif-
ferent!" This book is designed to illustrate an alternative to imperialist idealism,
an alternative available to everyone because it is rooted in language and
thought. This alternative goes by many names in the pages that follow—play,
experimentation, micronationalism, subversive desire—but what differentiates
it from idealism is its emphasis on active questioning rather than passive admi-
ration. What disciplined play enables us to discover arc the hidden affinities
that connect even the most apparently disparate subjects. Ireland has been a
successful laboratory for such verbal play (which is never divorced from social
and historical contexts) because of its intertwined legacies of imaginative rich-
