W. B. Yeats and the Theatre of Desolate Reality by David R. Clark (review)

BOOK REVIEWS W. B. YEATS AND THE THEATRE OF DESOLATE REALITY, by David R. Clark, Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1964, 121 pp. Price 30 shillings. This brief book traces Yeats's development as a dramatist in terms of "a return to a deeper realism through cleansing away all devices of circumstantial realism" (p. 45); in so doing it offers a detailed study of only four of the plays: Deirdre, The Dreaming of the Bones, The Words upon the Window-Pane, and Purgatory. The choice of plays is not so arbitrary as it might appear at first sight: the last three works present dead lovers who "dream back" their guilty loves without respite and can obtain no release from their purgatory because the living either cannot or will not help them; as for Deirdre and Naoise, they in a sense dream back their love affair before death. Despite this relationship between the plays, I cannot ,but regret the inclusion of The Dreaming of the Bones: Yeats's unconscious mind rebelled against the priggish ethic of his young Irish revolutionary, I feel, and this explains why, as Clark shrewdly notes, "the verse tends to fall into two categories"; Yeats could not arnievean integrated style because of his inner repugnance to the overt logic of the play. A critical work so narrow in its scope as Clark's needs to compensate for its narrowness by displaying a solid theoretical basis and a broad range of comparative reference. In ,the absence of these, I cannot acquit the book of parochialism. Clark knows his Yeats, naturally, but he does not set that knowledge in an adequate perspective. First of all, the entire theoretical basis of his study comes from a single book, Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater, with its well·known concept of the full tragic rhythm as passing from purpose to passion to perception. Clark rightly stresses the overriding importance of the last of these elements in Yeatsian drama: Yeats's great subject is one for a realist theatre. The soul recognizes that in the struggle with its opposite it transcends its incompleteness. A resolution -that completeness which is reality-is implied by the very violence of the contradictions. This subject is intensely dramatic. It is the climax of the tragic rhythm at the moment of passionate perception. It provides the nearest thing to a Realist idea of a theatre, in Fergusson's sense of the term, that our age has achieved. (pp. 106-1(>7) This emphasis on perception explains why Yeats's greatest theatrical effects occur in recognition scenes: the shaking of the bench in On Baile's Strand as Cuchulain discovers that he has killed his own son; the description of the supposed old woman in Cathleen Ni Houlihan as "a young girl" who "had the walk of a queen"; above all, the cry of the Greek in Resurrection after rourning the risen Christ, "The heart of a phantom is beating!" But if Clark gains valuable insight from his use of Fergusson, he also does not escape the concomitant peril of dogmatism. Much of Clark's discussion of Deirdre reads more like theology than literary criticism as he struggles with his conscience in an agonizing effort to decide whether this play achieves the true Fergussonian rhythm or not. He eventually concedes that it doesn't, but is Deirdre any the worse for its failure to meet an arbitrary standard? I don't deny the usefulness of Fergusson's theory as a tool-a means, not an end-nor its complete validity when applied to certain carefully selected tragedies, but the intensity of its vision is a 358 MODERN DRAMA December function of its restricted focus. Oedipus the King is no more typical of Greek tragedy than Ghosts is of Ibsen or of modern drama in general. But Clark, under Fergusson's influence, writes as if they were and thus falls into his second basic error, a simplistic view of modern drama which makes Yeats appear to swim against the current instead of taking his rightful place in the main stream. In the second sentence of his opening chapter Clark steps off on the wrong foot: Modern drama, being directly...