Yeats and the Theatre

92 D.E.S. MAXWELL element central to desire (which is always limited when desire interacts with the world) to a reconstruction of the world in desire's terms. Unfortunately Bersani does not, or cannot, provide a final synthesis between these two psychological modes. It seems that the desublirnated self can only exist in literature, whereas the individual in society is doomed to endless reconciliations with his world. However, he is at least freed to question both the assumptions of his world and the psychology he makes for himself. In a book of this scope one is naturally left with many questions: since Persuasion would have challenged and even extended Bersani's discussion of Jane Austen, why was it not included? In light of de Sade's pertinence to Lautreamont, why was he almost virtually ignored? Does Bersani know Wilhelm Reich's work on sexuality, which has striking affinities with some of his own conclusions? Of course the list could go on, but it is not meant to detract from Bersani's achievement. Though the reader may be puzzled, exasperated, and sometimes troubled by the implications of A Future for Astyanax, he will always be rewarded foran active reading if he makes himself as open to it as the books on his shelf. This would probably please Bersani, who, I suspect, might argue that that is what criticism is largely about. Yeats and the Theatre D.E.S. MAXWELL James W. Flannery. W.B. Yeats and the Idea of a Theatre. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada 1976. xx, 404. $29.50 James Flannery is an enthusiast with pretensions to moderation. He says in his Introduction that he hopes 'to make a valid assessment of the reasons for Yeats's failure as a dramatist - or whether, in fact, his dramatic work failed at all.' That Yeats may have failed as a dramatist is not, however, really within Flannery's scheme of possibilities. While he appears to have some reseIVations about The Countess Cathleen, he more typically finds that 'there are few more effective moments perhaps in " all modem dramatic literature than the climax of The Resurrection,' and that Yeats achieved 'perhaps the widest range of experiment of any major dramatist in the history of the theatre.' Perhaps. Critics who dismiss Yeats's plays 'have concentrated on literary at the expense of theatrical concerns and values.' Flannery himself is in fact perfectly at home in the rarefied air of Higher Yeats. There is nothing of a peculiarly theatrical application in the following commentary on the Cuchulain cycle: 'it portrays the progress of Cuchulain's soul moving from absorption in the objective world to subjective realization and back again to complete absorption in the objective world ... in The Only Jealousy of Erner he is in the process of passing through Phase Fifteen of the Lunar Cycle ... Fand is herself an emanation of Phase Fifteen...' Flannery is also severe with critics who, professing dramatic criteria, YEATS AND THE THEATRE 93 arrive at adverse judgments. He chides Professor Helen Vendler for her opinion that Yeats's plays are merely 'devices within which to embody lyrics.' Flannery, in rebuttal, takes the same data and finds them good, though without any very precise clarification of why and how. ]n short, one must be alert to a certain favouritism in Flannery's account of Yeats's plays, stirred in part by his own experience of producing them. The scope of the book is exhaustive. It covers all the major elements in the shaping of Yeats's imagination: the important personal experiences - Maud Ganne, of course, his family, and the whole circle of friends and colleagues, the boyish endeavours which, in Flannery's view, helped form Yeats's 'histrionic sensibility'; the doctrine of the ·mask; the mysticism in its varied expressions (ritual and the daimonic are important here, and help to keep Yeats contemporary - Flannery cites approvingly the opinion of a sociologist called Cox that the hippies are the fore-runners of a form of neo-mysticism)j the politics ofhis times; the aristocratic and peasant Irish inheritance; the theatre of Wagner, the French Symbolists, Ibsen, and their English adversaries and imitators; Yeats's course through the theatre arts - acting...