Tudor Balinisteanu, Universtiy of Gasgow
This paper proposes an analysis of Yeats's poem "Long-legged Fly" based on the idea that the self is a space wherein imagination's drives inscribe ideographic realities of desire. I will argue that the re-presentation of such inscriptions in the presence of signs and symbols masks the absence of objective reality. Given that the sign is a landmark of memory, I will explore how remembering gives a pleasure that is anchored both in the reality effect of signs' presence and in the imaginary.
In the first stanza we read: "That civilisation may not sink, / Its great battle lost, / Quiet the dog, tether the pony / To a distant post."1 The poet requires the reader to lower the pressure of immediate, objective reality so that the mind's eye can inspect the inner imaginative reality. On a metapoetic level the reader may now focus on the metonymic relation between objective and imagined reality, that is, on the way inner processes are structured so that their expression becomes part for whole.
Imaginations are accounts of the past filtering into presence through the experience of the here and now. This is not to say that through imagination we can relive the past. We may live a contextualized past that resonates with present experience. Through imagination we nestle the past in the present. The reality we experience becomes sanctioned by memory, it becomes a site of memory. And we may speak of a memory of humanity if we trust it exists as Yeats does: "Our master Caesar is in the tent / Where the maps are spread, / His eyes fixed upon nothing, / A hand under his head" (287). This passage from the first stanza functions as a metaphor: Caesar's mastery of unknown territories evokes the artist's mastery of the unknown spaces of the mind. Like Caesar's quest, the writer's work is to map these spaces out. But in the presence of the formed and civilized unknown (be that through conquering it in writing) the eye is "fixed upon nothing." The passage evinces a paradox: mapping should stabilize ("fix") the unknown, should offer a mantra for concentrating reality in the mind's eye. For bringing knowledge in sight, for offering insight into reality. Why, then, are Caesar's eyes fixed upon nothing? Where has his quest brought him? How does the quest of writing reach into the unknown territory of the mind?
In metaphorical perspective the first stanza conceptualizes the artist's work (his working) as a quest by resorting to accounts of historical events perceived to be similar in purpose. The purpose of the writer's work-of mapping out the spaces of the mind-shares in its essence with the civilizing purpose of a conqueror like Caesar. The metaphor's terms are structured around the dichotomy unknown/spelled out. While the metaphor is not striking, the way in which Yeats manages it is.
Yeats conceptualizes the importance of artistic creation by referring to a historical situation that he feels is similar in process. But that situation (in our case, Caesar's) is itself an imagination of the past. The present (reality of writing, reading) is impregnated with actualized perceptions of the past, that is, it becomes a play of memories. In other words, describing the present is particularizing the past. The play is real and it is the reader's pleasure to decipher it. What he deciphers is imaginary, and that is also pleasurable: "Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence" (287). Time is a stream. The mind forms the present out of memories by adjusting them idiosyncratically. What is really present is but the mind's movement, its construction of the present through mapping out the past; its making something out of nothing: a simile of presence out of projections of the past whose bringing up characterizes and defines "present." This process itself is the present: the Yeatsean "measured quietude."
While the first stanza deals with imaginations of the past sited (sighted) in the present, the second stanza deals with the embedding of the past into present: "That the topless towers be burnt / And men recall that face, / Move most gently if move you must / In this lonely place" (287). The first lines refer to Agamemnon's story. In Yeatsean perspective (see also "Leda and the Swan") the violent union between an all-powerful god and a mortal woman leads to the creation of Greek civilization. Our present has grown out of that explosive overflow of energies. Yeats saw reality as permeated by such regular principles as the classics thought to underlie the secret scheme of the universe. Interestingly, Yeats's most classical work in this sense, based on strict calculations and criteria, is entitled A Vision. The combination between classic rule and romantic organic vision gives Yeats's specific perception of the past growing into the present. Yet these perceptions remain nature-geared in a romantic sense since they are possible only by imagining the mind in a romantic paradigm: as a locus of revelation wherein the past lies hidden. The bringing of the universe inside the mind affords the romantics a unique vision of the world as living organism: living because it only exists to the extent that the mind reveals and relives it. Perhaps to say "relieves" is also appropriate. The confinement of the world to the realm of the mind and the conception that the world is at the same time limitless because of its potential of becoming can only be reconciled by spatializing the imagination, and then granting these spaces privileged status. It becomes possible to understand the universe in its "unity of being." The romantic meaning of the notion of cosmic spirit must have inspired Yeats to conceive a way whereby the universe inhabits the mind while the mind may expand through vision and encompass the universe.
But the realization of the past into the present is counteracted by the destruction of the past in the process of its reinvestment with presence. If the past must be here with us in the present of experience, how can it still remain the past? Ultimately, it is not the past that informs the present but the games of the imagination, the movement of the mind, its operations of creating and dissolving reality upon the instant. Reality is becoming; but essentially it is empty: "Move most gently if move you must / In this lonely place. Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / Her mind moves upon silence" (287). Besides reality's pleasurable spectacle, which is the work of the imagination, alone responsible for its creation, there is reality's loneliness. It characterizes a longing for balance but also the revelation of the terrible beauty of the enchanted stone that has mastered the stream: "That girls at puberty may find / The first Adam in their thought, / Shut the door of the Pope's chapel, / Keep those children out" (287). These lines suggest a romantic dissociation between innocence and experience. Innocence is romantically associated with a space where events are atemporal, that is, they always happen for the first time. No need for a scaffold of rational constructions and conventions of the arts: "There on that scaffolding reclines / Michael Angelo. / With no more sound than the mice make / His hand moves to and fro. / Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence" (287). The poem evokes the romantic gesture of wrecking reality on the rock of delusive subjectivity. The conception of reality as lacking any solid foundations and the attempt to dismantle the foundational claims of reality's coherence can be related to contemporary research inspired by postmodern theory.
Modernism and its acceleration in postmodernism belong to the "just now" paradigm of romanticism. But how do the past and tradition help us in the present? What is there for us that is pleasurable?
Yeats's poem is modern in that it is concerned with form and content, a pernicious dichotomy. It proposes a conception of how reality is formed and it suggests some of its forms (history, myth, and art forming experience). But while accepting rational form, Yeats denies rationality of content. Yeats invests content with mystery, while preserving rational principles in its formal expression. For instance, the leitmotif grants rhythm and regularity to the poem; but by its repetition it also strengthens the sense of occult invocation. In restoring to reality its mystery Yeats is romantic. The pleasure of contemplation of a dynamic reality is balanced with the pleasure of encountering reality's mystery in a meeting of opposites where dualism melts. This sends us to myth. For Yeats the imagination's reassembling of historical facts always has myth as background.
Memory is for the poet a phenomenon of recuperation of humanity's great moments, but it also implies rearrangements and reshaping in a sui generis equation of the facts of history. While forms of the imagination may reflect the tide of history, the ontology of Yeats's imaginative spaces remains anchored in the eternal principles of the classics: Caesar's, Agamemnon's, Michael Angelo's. The mystery of classical aesthetics is that of the music of the spheres, even though for Yeats such music is sometimes drowned in the thundering noise of the tide of history.
"Long-legged Fly" lacks the aesthetic unity of sealed artistic territories harmonized to the ideological and political demands of the day. It helps us conceive imagination as lacking homogeneity with reality, sharing with it nothing but the present of imaginary rearrangements of the "facts" of the past. The poem sets side by side the general Caesar, a woman, and Michael Angelo, melting hierarchies set in the historiographic canon. Caesar is the well-known general, but his military and ruling prerogatives are reduced to nothingness; the woman is three parts child; Michael Angelo is the artist, but his presence also evokes the sensual nature of sacred femininity infused with virility. Yeats's poem spawns fractal-like associations of ideas, collapsing history into the present and dissolving the historical concept (having a history of representing the real) into imagination's games (lit up upon the instant).
The poem resonates with contemporary trends in theoretical research. According to Duarte's review of past cultural practices: "The whole project of historiography is further predicated on the primacy of individual agency and Cartesian subjectivity; this means that, on one hand, events are attributed to the actions of more or less exceptional individuals and, on the other hand, the self-effacement of the subject of discourse is bound to generate an effect of objective knowledge unencumbered by value judgements and personal bias."2
The objective character of reality has been questioned in recent theory. Yeats's poem mentions exceptional individuals and grants them agency in the realization of great achievements. Yet it does not allow the self-effacement of their subjectivity. Thus, Caesar's empire or Michael Angelo's art do not gain objectivity and therefore can be seen as the products of the imagination that they are. No mystification about objective knowledge here. Reality is rather a reality effect of memory, and memory is the event of playing imaginatively with such knowledge as is being circulated in the present. But a principle of organization of reality transcendental in relation to imaginative spaces is denied. On a different level, this cultural mode of conceiving the real challenges the various embodiments in political and social practice of monolithic conceptions of truth, be that about a nation, a people, men, women, etc.
Even though "Long-legged Fly" focuses on the present experience of imagination's play, denying it transcendental principles of organization, eternity is recuperated by canceling death. The poem cancels death by canceling history. It cancels history by pointing out how imagination rubs out the past in order to re-form it: the palimpsest that memory is. One of the main concerns of the poem is death: death of civilization, "its great battle lost," death of potency to master, the burnt "topless towers," death of innocence, of the possibility to find one's self as an other in one's thought. Death comes about as the threat of materialized history. Caesar's victories, his mapping out of the incommensurable unknown other that nothingness is, can only gain significance to the extent that they survive. His achievement is measured up against death. The emperor's conquest, and likewise the writer's work, is a harbinger of death. The cry against silence is pointless unless it masks death. Yeats's poem, however, seeks to unmask death: accepting nothingness returns us to myth, where, for instance, "girls at puberty find the first Adam in their thought." Sacrificing reality to consciousness of its imagined character returns us to the reality play that myth is. Yeats returns us to myth by casting us out of history, where imagination is in danger of being arrested in frozen memories of great men. His poem helps us realize the undecidability effect of classicism: perfect form organizes infinite potential of becoming. What Caesar's and Michael Angelo's endeavors share is the principle of perfect organization of form-which does not exclude the variety of its realization. The play is located between acceptance of formal perfection and realization of the nothingness of its content, which at once is its "everythingness." Though given only once in perfect form, reality is received thousands of times in infinite ways: imagination enriches it. The value of classic perfect form lies in its ability to fire up imagination, thus providing the spectator with renewed spiritual satisfaction.
The perfect realization of a possible present out of the past, a realm of the heart's desire, is impregnated with its undoing upon the instant; the present cannot last: the eternal here and now of a moment is at once silenced by its having become memory. Thus, the mind's flight upon the silent stream of time.
Remembering gives a pleasure both real and imaginary. If Yeats's poem returns us to a mythic space of what I would call "uncarved" silence, that is, a silence not yet portioned by words, what has become of the self? After all, the self is performed experience of reality. But since reality is but a play of the imagination, what kind of experience is available for the self's performance? Obviously, the self's identity can no longer be stabilized and therefore must experience its non-identity. The self is being refused an image for self-contemplation.
Let us remember Yeats's experimentation with the Noh theater techniques. In Noh theater the performers need not speak nor move, but they pose: a frozen moment of eternity that spans infinite possible actions that the viewer imagines. Reality is both still and changing. The imagination's play changes it upon the instant, yet the performer's posture does not change. Silence breeds (as Buddha breathes) infinite action. The spectator's pleasure lies in attuning the imagination to the memories it re-forms. The pleasure is imagined in a game with reality. The pleasure is real in a game of the imaginary. In psychological terms, pleasure exists because we can imagine it. We can imagine it because we remember it.
Yeats's "Long-legged Fly" bears the mark of the modernist conception of the processes of the mind whereby memory serves as the locus where identity is deposited: of the individual, but more importantly, of the collective identity.
Jakobson's theorization of subconscious processes in terms of metonymy and metaphor permits a reinterpretation of the dichotomy essence vs. existence. Reality exists only as a simile of, or part for, an essential whole. This wholesomeness can be extended to include the collective memory of a race (as indeed it has been). Envisioning an essential whole creates a space beyond reality that one can visit to the purpose of collecting the signs of tradition in order to reassemble a dreamed-of present. This foray into the past seems worth pursuing because essence is true and whole, while existence is ghostly and fragmentary, a metaphor or metonym of essence. In "Fergus and the Druid," Yeats has the Druid say: "Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams; / Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round," upon which Fergus replies: "I see my life go drifting like a river / From change to change; I have been many things- / A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light / Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill, / An old slave grinding at a heavy quern, / A king sitting upon a chair of gold- / And all these things were wonderful and great; / But now I have grown nothing, knowing all. / Ah! Druid, Druid, how great webs of sorrow / Lay hidden in the small slate-coloured thing!" (25).
Indeed, Yeats is a great explorer of the collective past. His poetry brings out druids, great men like Fergus, Caesar, Michael Angelo, the gleam upon an ancient sword, or the gold of ancient wisdom. But Yeats is aware that all these are but games of the imaginary: the past is but "a little bag of dreams." Life goes "drifting like a river / From change to change;" the mind "moves upon silence." Knowledge of the past is but an effect of the imagination's presence as play. Because one can play infinitely, one can seem to know all. But this kind of knowledge is metaphorical and metonymical if we must reconstruct the present out of similes for, and symbols of, the past. The reality of the present is imagination's reassembling of the past in dreams; beyond dreams lies nothingness.
Yeats returns us to myth in the sense that he reinvests the present with mystery. But for Yeats the space of myth is not where essence lies. The essential self is not an essential other termed "subconscious" by the psychological science of his age. The space of myth is in the here and now of experience: in the childish reality play of the imagination; beyond the constraints of history, to the extent that we, the readers, become spectators to the unfolding of the moment's potential, like the spectators of Noh plays do. We are in myth when we have "grown nothing, knowing all": the present is nothing because it is everything that imagination can make it be. The "can make it be" creates its mystery and revelation: the meeting of contrary opposites in unity of being, a past revealed through the bearing of imagination upon memory in a present mysterious, because dreamed.
Yeats's concern with images reflects the modernist credo: Ezra Pound's definition of "image" as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. For Yeats, there are images perfectly formed: memories, metonyms, and metaphors of the past struggle to inhabit the moment of presence, tending toward a moment of unity between past and present in the perfect realization the present always is. Yet the present cannot last. In "The Rose of the World," Yeats asks himself: "Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?" For Yeats, beauty equates the Greco-Roman clarity: because fertile yet formal, it impresses the poet with its sensuality of thinking. Like Pound, Yeats finds that there exists a sensuality beyond time, a sensuality that invests the imagined present ("passing like a dream") with the flavor of the ("dreamed") past.
Yet Yeats's present as a moment of revelation cannot heal the wounds of the past, because the past cannot exist except as imagined out of fragments stocked in one's memory. The wounds actually stem from new reassembling of memory's inscriptions in the here and now of experience. They are in a sense performed, and because of the present, they lack time. How can one heal if one can't feel time? "We and the labouring world are passing by: / Amid men's souls, that waver and give place / Like the pale waters in their wintry race, / Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, / Lives on this lonely face" (28). On the one hand, we need our memories to remind us who we are. On the other hand, memories are interpretations, not facts. Living, we learn that it is the reassembling of memories that creates reality; it dances it into being: Yeats's poetry becomes a lieu de memoire, a site of making and remaking the present by interpreting and reinterpreting memories. Time itself is "a dreamless wave"; it is "the dancer by the dreamless wave" who gives it consistency, because it brings forth the images that have been impressed in our memory as symbols of the self's being, of its desire and of its drives. For Yeats, the self is often forged in the dreams of Irish tradition. In "The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland," Yeats tells the story of a man who died only to be reborn in the realm of the fairy. While lying buried, "A lug-worm with its grey and muddy mouth / Sang that somewhere to north or west or south / There dwelt a gay, exulting, gentle race / Under the golden or the silver skies; / That if a dancer stayed his hungry foot / It seemed the sun and moon were in the fruit: / And at that singing he was no more wise" (35).
These are images taken from folkloric tales of Irish tradition. The reader is informed that after death one may hear the song of the fairy race. The present of experience, the present of reading, is formed out of images inherited from the collective tradition of the Irish. These images remind the reader that his desires and inner drives have been once formed, imagined in the shape of an "exulting, gentle race." The reader is invited to allow such collective memories to inhabit the self: perhaps then one can see the gold and the silver of the sky, the brotherhood of night and day, of sun and moon? Once the self has been reassembled out of memories preserved in the fairy lore, might not we become, for that moment of revelation, incarnations of the past? Fairy, ourselves?
Yeats does invite us to remain in that dreamed moment. If we allow ourselves the reinterpretation of what we are in terms of Irish myth, we may be capable of living in the moment of abandonment to imagination's play the revelation of wholesome sensuality of the fairy: the sun and moon in the fruit. We have become "the lovers that no lovers miss," that is, we have acquired an imagined identity built on ways of inhabiting the present fashioned out of a set of memories that evoke the Irish mythological tradition. The mythic tradition, however, is in conflict with the Christian tradition.
Valorizing life through death, as Christian tradition preaches, is valorizing life through sacrifice, a key word in the Revivalist movement. Giving life purpose is endowing it with historicity, with time that denies the present because it has its purpose in the future. But this closes the possible opening toward the eternity of the here and now, denying the spectator's pleasure and the recognition of the self in the lands marked out by his desires and dreams. Purposeful reality-Caesar's, Michael Angelo's, God's-is movement to the purpose of denying death's silence: "Why should those lovers that no lovers miss / Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss? / The man has found no comfort in the grave" (36). Because silence need not be death; in the absence of death lives the present: the kind of present encapsulated in the frozen postures of Noh plays, the present of the fertile play of the imagination whereby memories of the past come to meet what memories can be forged about the future. But hopefully the fairy, even though not missed in life vouchsafed by God's given purpose, shall dream our nature and its fervor of desire, so that we may find comfort in the eternity of a present not threatened by the grim prospect of the grave. But also perhaps this hope itself is made possible by realignments of fragments remembered from various conflicting traditions. At least, as we read, we may inhabit those conflicts and learn more about what we are; by remembering what Yeats once imagined we may become out of his own imagination's play with memories.
Cultural identity takes shape out of the reflections in the mirror held up by tradition. Tradition is made up of paradigms of memory. Imagination reassembles these to create the illusion of being in history. Yeats bids us leave "the bitter glass / The demons, with their subtle guile, / Lift up before us when they pass" (39). Thus, we deal with a present of history and with a present of the imagination. The present of history is itself an illusion, an effect of imagination; but it lacks the opening to eternity through play. It stands under the sign of death because it legitimates itself against it. Being not eternal in the way of the classics, that is, infused with the sensuality of the harmonization between becoming and stillness, it is decadent. In Yeats's (and the moderns') historical present "a fatal image grows / That the stormy night receives, / Roots half hidden under snows, / Broken boughs and blackened leaves" (40).
These lines, from the poem "The Two Trees," evoke Yeats's fear of becoming without imagination: history whose memories are not nourished by imagination's play-demonized becoming that turns all reality barren. A landscape of the mind that strangely evokes machinelike spaces where the cold eye of reason sees one's disheartened reflection. Modern history, for Yeats, is history without places where thought can rest to recompose the harmony of the intertwined branches of the mythic Tree of Life, a spectacle without pleasure. Thus, the poet hands down to us an image of the modern past torn between the enduring time of the imagination's present and the lifeless time of history which is but ticking the measure of approaching death. This modernist portioning of reality offers the contemporary reader a site where we may recognize our own cultural identity in terms of the moderns' conflicts. Reenacting it now, we recompose ourselves with an awareness of time's duration that affects how we judge and act in reference to received conceptions of the past. It keeps the question mark in place: have we mastered time, or is time our master? Is our humanity with us, or have we invested it in some purpose which beholds us in an outworn present? Do we, "cruel claw and hungry throat," wage war on the present in the name of a barren marriage with a history that has forsaken the "flaming circle of our days"?
In "The Valley of the Black Pig," Yeats writes: "The dews drop slowly and dreams gather: unknown spears / Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes, / And then the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries / Of unknown punishing armies beat about my ears. / We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore, / The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew, / Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you, / Master of the still stars and of the flaming door" (53). We may regard Yeats's poems as double gateways into the past: while we are able to retrieve the past in Yeats's imaginative play with collective and personal memories and experience the spectator's pleasure on terms he establishes, we are also able, from the perspective of our contemporaneity, to retrieve Yeats's time as a space of conflict which we may inhabit. Thus, both the past Yeats conjures and the past where we remember him to be acquire new elements from today's perspectives. We might reconsider our relationship with a contemporary history void of images that, corresponding with the past, could inflame the present into an experience of the moment that transgresses linear time. Yeats's Incorruptible Rose reminds us that time is the mind's creation, and that we may miss the experience of eternity if we chose to contemplate but the corrupted forming of time in sequences unsanctioned by memory's attribution of duration. But the blessed ones may travel through time "In twilights of dew and of fire": "'O blessedness comes in the night and the day / And whither the wise heart knows; / And one has seen in the redness of wine / The Incorruptible Rose, // 'That drowsily drops faint leaves on him / And the sweetness of desire, / While time and the world are ebbing away / In twilights of dew and of fire'" (56).
This analysis of Yeats's "Long-legged Fly" evidences one of the poet's favorite dichotomies, echoing one of modernism's favorite dual pairs: heart vs. mind. If the realm of the heart is a realm of desire (in Yeats's words, "a realm of heart's desire"), the realm of the mind is a space of linear time, wherein history organizes the past in variegated forms of individual or collective memory. Yeats conceives a unity of being between heart and mind, the former providing the eternity of the moment of presence, the latter such forms as would endure for eternity. For Yeats the present is "the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols." 3
The self is where the heart is, that is, anywhere in history where it resonates with its imagination. The self is a site of memory where imagination's processing of the past yields its metaphorical and metonymical relationships with the present. Staged realities permit the study of identity through memories of the self. The home of the self is the locus of imagination. Memories and the process of remembering driven by desire replace the unnamable desired with concrete imaginations of (personal) histories. This is done by subjectivizing tradition because all thought is seen as relying on the past that tradition conserves. Thus, tradition is not done away with but is reinterpreted. The literary text becomes the meeting point of past, present, and future, a site of modernism's desire.
For Yeats, settling in the heartlands of the imaginary means evoking the eternity of the classics, it means forming nothingness: formalizing the other. But Yeats is aware of the nothingness within form. Its silence reconciles the eternal forms of the classics and the rush of history in times that do not invest in the present: "the sound and the fury" of the modern age. But perhaps nothingness, Macbeth's true enemy, is also Caesar's true enemy.
Notes
1. W. B. Yeats, The Complete Poems of W. B. Yeats (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2000) 287. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
Return to article
2. João Ferreira Duarte, "Translation and the Space of History," The European English Messenger XII (Spring 2003): 17.
Return to article
3. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961) 159.
Return to article