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6 P OT e N T I A l I T y, R e A d I N G , A N d G e O R G e y e AT s Personality, no matter how habitual, is a constantly renewed choice. William Butler Yeats, A Vision Speaking of voices! It is the evening of April 6, 1919, around ten o’clock, in the parlor of a house on the outskirts of Dundrum, then a hamlet separate from Dublin. William Butler Yeats and his young wife George, married for less than a year and a half, are engaged in intense talk. Their dialogue might as well be called authoring, because she is writing down both his questions and her answers. And their dialogue might as well be called publishing, because they would like to believe that her voice is not hers but the voice of spirits. “Is daimon of opposite sex to ego?” he suddenly inquires. “Yes,” responds George, or the entity she is broadcasting. With good reason, this exchange can be taken as fanciful, nonsensical , or ludicrous. But for Yeats in 1919, already a well-established writer and public lecturer, it proved formative. For English teachers today the exchange, understood in the context of Yeats’s life-course and especially of the automatic writing, can alter the way they read and teach some of his most famous poems and plays. The point of this chapter, however, is not that biographical information will newly explicate some literary classics. Certainly, the littleknown story of Yeats’s curiosity about the sex of the daimon is fascinating in its own right, and we will not apologize for recovering it from the three thick volumes of the Yeats automatic script and retelling it in some detail. The stranger-than-fiction history will illustrate our previous positions on authoring, potentiality, gendership, and voice and allow us to extend them from novice-student writing to famous-author writing. For our purposes, Yeats’s odd tale finally applies not only to reading his works but also to reading anything, including student 76 AU T H ORI N G authoring. The 1919 answer from the spirit guides, according to our interpretation, has to do with the potentiality of reading. And Yeats’s wife George, who was the voice of the spirit guides, has much to teach us about the way teachers can maintain and expand the potentiality of their students. Up to this point we have been looking at authoring in the classroom largely from the angle of student production. The same emphasis can be put on reception, not only how teachers might read student texts better, but also how students might better read their own texts in process and the works of others already published. As we will see, approaching the act of reading from the angle of potentiality will help collapse the distinction between students as mere “writers” and published writers as actual “authors” that we questioned in Chapter 1. Like writing, reading also survives by maintaining potentiality. Like writing, reading is a capacity that can stall or burn out if it lacks an ongoing frame for creative work and room and encouragement to keep fit. Every literature teacher who is reading “The Second Coming” for the twenty-second time knows this. But not every student knows it. Weird as it sounds, George Yeats’s automatically uttered reply can generate a chain reaction of potentiality, from the potential for success of her marriage, to the potential of the gendering of her husband’s daimon, to the potential for gendership in his literary output, to the potential for interpretation in his readers, to the potential for students to continue reading—and authoring—all their lives. yeAT s, Ge Nde RsHI P, AN d HI s ReA deRs, PART 1 Let’s begin in medias res in this chain of potentiality. Gendership in Yeats’s writing is a good example of the way potentiality in reading can be stalled. Everyone knows that he sometimes wrote in the voice or, as he would say, with the mask of a woman. The motives of Yeats and other male authors in doing so, however, has not met with universal approval. For instance, in a 1994 collection of essays called Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory and the Question of Genders (Morgan 1994), the editor and contributors accuse “cross-gendering” male authors the likes of Wordsworth, Lawrence, Verlaine, and Faulkner of assuming “the false identity of a woman,” of probing “repressed and...

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