Rent: Crazy Jane and the Image of Love

"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass."

—Adorno

"Insanity is repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results."

—Anonymous

"True love" is a recurring theme throughout Yeats's oeuvre.¹ Yet to speak of "true love" in the context of his poetry is not merely to speak of love, but also to say something about truth and to entertain the possibility that poetry may bring out such a truth. His notion of love is clearly no longer the primarily intersubjective one that keeps marriages together and leaves high schoolers inarticulate (although it may not be entirely unrelated to such empirical manifestations—many poets marry, and many high schoolers write poetry), but is intimately related to the source of poetic idealization itself in its most romantic formulations, to the ability of poetry to produce its own timeless truth. Yet, if poetry, in its most naïve form, might promise "true love" as the possibility of a topos where "time will surely forget us" (CPY 42), there remains the more pressing question of whether poetry can provide a refuge in which we might forget time: of whether poetry has "stilts" high enough to remove all traces of that other topos, the landscape of human concerns that Yeats will ultimately characterize as the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" (CPY 348). What at first seems like the question of a choice—of settling on either the "work" or the "life"—soon gives way to the impossibility of choosing between them.² To achieve "perfection" in either one is to discover that "toil has left its mark" in the other (CPY 246-47). As Yeats's career progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that even a poetry that would stand on "stilts" inevitably retains its "mark" of "toil" as what had to be sacrificed for its production in the first place and that continually reveals the difference between poetry and life, topos and actual landscape, poetic notions of love and those phrasings, such as "true love" itself, that are sometimes meant to pass for them.³ One might describe such a mark, which inscribes each image of love with what has been presupposed to be heterogeneous to it, as the brand left on each particular "dancer" by the "dance" of poetic form.

One such dancer, who proudly bears her "mark" of "toil" like a meticulously crafted tattoo, is Crazy Jane. Originally named "Cracked Mary" (CPY 462). Crazy Jane reminds us of the mark that will not fade: the necessary imperfection that haunts all attempts to achieve "perfection" in either the "life" or the "work" and that inevitably leaves them in opposition to each other with no hope of reconciliation. Declaiming that "nothing" can be "sole" (itself) or "whole" (complete) unless it has been "rent"—in which case it cannot really be "sole" or "whole" anyway—Crazy Jane speaks of an irreducible rending ("love's truth") that first makes possible the promise of completion ("true love").

The Broken Heart (Nancy)

In examining a set of poems that deal with a term as exhausted—and potentially hackneyed—as "true love," the work of Jean-Luc Nancy is of particular relevance. In "Shattered Love" ("L'amour en éclats"), Jean-Luc Nancy has examined both the philosophical and the poetological stakes of the notion of love and made a strong case for understanding love in terms irreducible to familiar notions of intersubjective communication or communion.⁴ Beginning with a discussion of the conceptual exhaustion of the notion of love in contemporary discourse and moving toward a post-Heideggerian ontology,⁵ Nancy develops a notion of being that is intimately linked to love, but that would not simply be identified with or named by it. Working through the notion of love as both the promise of completion and as what rends (or "shatters") this promise, Nancy's essay is thus helpful in teasing out the resources of "love's truth" as it emerges in the Crazy Jane cycle (SL 108). For Nancy, love's promise of completion is inseparable from the possibility of incompletion. At the...