Yeats the Autobiographer: A Dialogue of Self and Soul

5. YEATS THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER: A DIALOGUE OF SELF AND SOUL Daniel T. O'Hara. Tragic Knowledge: Yeats's "Autobiography" and Hermenéutica. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981. $22.50 For the student of William Butler Yeats, the poet's self-dramatization—at times narcissistic, at others ironic—is one key to understanding his work: Yeats's creation of personae, his assumption of masks, and his preoccupation with both the history of his family and of his race clearly underlie his achievement in poems as different as "The Cap and Bells," "Meditations in Time of Civil War," and "Under Ben Bulben." Less commonly held, however, is the belief that Yeats's autobiographical essays—those collected in the single volume entitled Autobiographies —constitute an artistically successful example of the process of ironic self-reflection at work in his poems. This is the argument of Daniel O'Hara's Tragic Knowledge, a study which employs Paul Ricour's "dialectical hermeneutics" as the interpretive model "most appropriate for reading in a coherent and openended fashion the interplay of ironic juxtaposition and narrative elaboration present in a highly self-conscious text like Yeats's Autobiography" (p. 2). Like Harold Bloom and John Pilling, O'Hara takes the autobiographical essays seriously, as more than material useful for elucidation of the poems and plays; Tragic Knowledge deserves our attention. O'Hara's reading of the Autobiographies is elegant, provocative, and—ultimately —challenging to accepted ways of looking at Yeats's books. Spurred by his attempt to "incorporate both phenomenological description and critical interpretation within an open-ended dialectical hermeneutic of imaginative restoration" (p. 3), I reread Yeats's autobiographical essays and came away with an enhanced awareness of their aesthetic qualities and their relationship to the texts of Yeats's poems and plays. On this basis, Tragic Knowledge makes a positive contribution to our understanding of Yeats's artistry. Nevertheless, as my resistance to O'Hara's use of "Autobiography" and my reiteration of "Autobiographies" surely Indicate, I find his book open to criticism even in its remarkably cogent attempt to trace the emergence of an increasingly self-critical Irony in Yeats's text. This is not to challenge the validity of O'Hara's central hypothesis—that in the autobiographical essays Yeats confronts the burden posed by the past, his own as well as Irelend's, and works out an acceptance of the fundamental fragmentation he finds in his culture and himself. "Yeats lives through the crisis of identity," he says, discussing the poet's treatment of George Russell, "by re-living and reshaping the crises of his friends, each of whom, like Russell, becomes in the process representative of another of his own imaginative potentialities" (p. 25). The meditative method Yeats employs in his autobiographical writing "is a form of self-interpretation, in which the mind dwells upon its own antithetical arrangements of the minute particulars of experience" (p. 57), in the process achieving personal and artistic freedom in the act of reconstruction. In short, O'Hara concludes, Yeats himself becomes "the writer as tragic hero, the artist as a martyr to the craft of his art, who desires, as in 'Ego Dominus Tuus,' an ideal reader to interpret to him the otherwise indecipherable characters of his life. That is, Yeats desires to become his own perfect reader, and to tell his life to himself" (p. 48). This argument goes a long way toward explaining away the surface discontinuities in Yeats's autobiographical essays, and O'Hara supports it with analysis which is sensitive both to details and to the larger rhetorical patterns at work in the Autobiographies. 143 Stated as baldly (and unfairly) as I have put It, however, O'Hara's reading of Yeats's Autobiographies looks remarkably like the Emperor's New Clothes. It is an argument familiar in its general outlines to those of us who know Richard EIlmann 's pioneer work on Yeats's poetry and plays· Certainly, since Tragic Knowledge enables us to place the autobiographical texts within the thematic and technical contexts of the larger oeuvre, O'Hara has achieved a great deal. It Is the implicit claim that his treatment of the Autobiographies is original, exclusively...