Mixing Everything at the Beginning: Telling Stories about Empire in Yeats's On Baile's Strand

Mixing Everything at the Beginning: Telling Stories about Empire in Yeats's On Baile sStrand ROB DOGGETT ITJhere is 110 longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility a/what ;s better. - Theodore Adorno (Minima Moralia 25) What a mix~up you make of evelything. Blind man! You were telling me one story, and now you are teiling me another story. How can Jget the hang oj jt at the end ifyou mix everything at the beginning? - The Fool (011 Baile's Strand 53) I These are the words of a fool spoken to a blind man: the men are bound together by necessity and mutual distrust, one needing wisdom, the other sight, one lacking guidance, the other lacking passion. It is a story to be understood , mixed from the beginning, mingled in the telling, uncertain in the closing. In W.B. Yeats's On Baile's Strand, written for Ireland's National Theatre, drawn from Ireland's troubled past, and centering on the self-defeating passion of a legendary Irish hero, it is perhaps more than fitting that the Fool, with the insight of his Shakespearean namesake, should ask his eternal companion about beginnings and endings, narrating past and present, finally getting "the hang" of the story. For these are the questions of a colonized people whose sense of identity is inextricably bound with empire, whose history is not one tale but a tangle of multiple stories, silences, erasures, buried myths of heroism and tragic defeat, a people who, digging into the past for some artifact of an original, distinct Ireland, discover that, in the words of Seamus Heaney, "Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before" (86). In one of his finest late poems, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Yeats Modern Drama, 45:4 (Winter 2002) 545 ROB DOGGETT writes that he felt "enchanted" by "the dream itself' of On Baile's Strand: the image of Cuchulain, having unwittingly killed his own son at the behest of Ireland's High King, Conchubar, plunging into the waves, turning his sword in despair upon "the ungovernable sea." Although the play's tragic power emerges primarily from this instant of "Character isolated by a deed," and although the play is set in an Irish past preceding the stain of empire, On Baile's Strand has other stories to tell (Yeats, Poems 346- 47). These are stories of colonization and colonial memory, of two cultures bound together in mutual fascination and animosity, of an artist's attempts to respond to the initial "wrong" of colonialism and [0 create, from the scraps of Ireland's past, art that mighl express the soul of the Irish people, that might (re)define Ihe Irish nation. Yel these are not the stories found in scholarly readings of On Baile's Strand. In part, Ihis is because the play - first performed in 1904 at the opening of the Abbey Theatre and staged again, after fairly substantial revising, in 19061 - is generally considered a transitional text, marking a departure, both aesthetically and politically, from the type of romantic and, in the case of Cathleelllli Houlihan (1902), more explicitly anti-imperial nationalism expressed in Yeats's early verse and drama.' As Yeats himself explains in a 19041etterlo George Russell, much of his work from the nineties suffered from "an exaggeralion of senliment and sentimental beauly" (Leuers 434), and in his noles for In the Seven Woods (1904) he characterizes On Baile's Strand as "foreshadowing I...] a change Ihal may bring a less dream-burdened will into my verses" (Variorum Poems 814). Yeats was equally clear regarding his political attachments, describing the first.years of the twentieth century as a period when, as he would later write in "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time" (1910), he experienced "the dissolution of a school of patriotism that held sway over my youth" (Essays 312). That is, a school of patriotism devoted to the idealization of all things Irish, to the denigration of all things British, and to an uncompromising, revolutionary agenda as it might be "understood by a child in a National School...