Yeats & "Nationality"

BOOK REVIEWS derstanding of the enormous impact the Great War had on the consciousness of past and present generations. Evelyn Cobley ________________ University of Victoria Yeats & "Nationality" Marjorie Howes. Yeats's Nations: Gender, Class, andlrishness. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ix + 240 pp. $54.95 IN YEATS'S NATIONS Marjorie Howes sets out to trace the chronology of Yeats's attitudes toward "nationality"—a concept that Howes, following Benedict Anderson, describes as different from "nationalism "—and to examine the way in which gender, class, and "race" are implicated in his writings and political activities. Howes wants to distinguish herself from the slew of critics who have also examined Yeats's long career as a developmental or radically changing one because , she tells us, she is for the first time placing Yeats within the discourse of postcoloniality and scrutinizing his construction of nationality in the light of postcolonial theories. This approach is an exciting and original one; after all, Yeats began formulating ideas of Ireland as a nation at the time when Ireland was a colony. He lived long enough to see it, or at least a part of it, achieve independence and start the process of consolidating itself into a modern nation. As we know from the work of a number of historians and theorists of the modern state, imbricated in ideas of nationality are concepts of gender and "race" or "blood," and no nation in the West can, since the French Revolution, entirely eschew some account of class from its self-definition. Why should we be interested in Yeats's construction of Irish nationality ? As a political figure or theoretician of the modern nation, Yeats is negligible, despite the attention Howes pays to his pronouncements, voting record, even presence at parliamentary sessions as Senator of the Free Irish State. Yet, as Howes ably argues, Yeats's cultural interventions , from his role in the establishment of the Abbey Theatre to his uses of occultism and the pseudoscience of eugenics to bolster his political positions and aesthetics, did present powerful imaginings. Howes avoids an analysis of how these imaginings may have affected the Irish populace or whether Yeats bore any responsibility for particular institutions of the Irish nation. Rather, through her self-described constructivist reading, she argues that Yeats, because of his shifting concepts of nationality, denaturalizes for us the idea of "nation" and the mystifications necessary for national consolidation. What Yeats's constructions 201 ELT 41 : 2 1998 uncover for us, she insists, are the contradictions, inconsistencies, repressions, among other costs, of nation-formation. Two central questions arise in respect to Howes's reassessment of Yeats: One, do we at the end of this century need Yeats as exemplum of the pitfalls, brutality, contradictions, ambivalences of nation building, we who have vividly before us nationalism on the rampage in Europe, the fractured Soviet Empire, Central and North-East Africa, to name but the most recent and obvious "hot" spots? Two, do our historical position and the formulations of postcolonial theory teach us to read Yeats anew, to read him differently, not as a statesman but as a poet, playwright, essayist, and public intellectual? From the way in which I phrased the first question, it is clear that I remain unconvinced that an examination of Yeats's "nations" teaches us anything we have not already been taught, provided we have wanted to learn, about illusions of unity, false notions of "necessity and progress," and "biological determination" used to forge nationality. As for the second question, I think Howes's book offers illuminating glimpses of a Yeats we may not have suspected; that is its greatest strength. It also goes over much familiar ground which, notwithstanding gestures toward Foucault, Said, Geertz, and other contemporary theorists, remains well-traveled and documented by critics whom Howes dismisses or leaves out of her account. Ironically, while she justly argues against the illusion of progress and evolution in assessments of Yeats's oeuvre, in her own practice she believes in the progress of theory and methodology, whereby only recent critics and theorists are quoted with approval. Howes deploys her argument in a chronology that begins with Yeats's Celticism and ends with what Yeats terms...