Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. All history is local: modernism and the question of memory in a global Ireland
- Part I THE EROTICS OF MEMORY
- Part II THE SPECTACLES OF HISTORY
- 4 The birth of a nation: Irish nationalism and the technology of memory, 1891–1921
- 5 Fighting the waves: Yeats, Cuchulain and the lethal histories of “romantic Ireland”
- 6 Joyce's erotics of memory: temporal anamorphosis in Finnegans Wake
- Afterword. The ends of memory and the ex-sistence of Ireland
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Fighting the waves: Yeats, Cuchulain and the lethal histories of “romantic Ireland”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction. All history is local: modernism and the question of memory in a global Ireland
- Part I THE EROTICS OF MEMORY
- Part II THE SPECTACLES OF HISTORY
- 4 The birth of a nation: Irish nationalism and the technology of memory, 1891–1921
- 5 Fighting the waves: Yeats, Cuchulain and the lethal histories of “romantic Ireland”
- 6 Joyce's erotics of memory: temporal anamorphosis in Finnegans Wake
- Afterword. The ends of memory and the ex-sistence of Ireland
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
History is necessity until it takes fire in someone's imagination and becomes myth or passion.
W. B. Yeats AutobiographiesAmong modern Irish writers, William Butler Yeats is certainly among the least likely to be considered as having been influenced by the cinema. At one extreme, the poet's cosmopolitanism aligns him with the traditional elitism of literary “high” culture, rather than with the public immediacy and pervasiveness of popular mass media. At the other, his fascination with rural Irish life officially locates his perception of cultural authenticity in an ancient oral tradition rooted in the land itself rather than a modern visual one based on perceptions of Ireland. Yet it is worth noting that in his prose writings, Yeats detailed his own active participation in the nineteenth-century parlor culture that in fact constitutes the prehistory of the cinema's culture of spectacle. The popularity of seances and occult practices, institutionalized by groups such as Madame Blavatsky's Order of the Golden Dawn, revolved around the very discourse of attractions that the cinema would realize with a new technological force in 1895. The projection of “familiars” on waving screens or on columns of smoke to effect apparent visitations by ghosts, for example, was common practice at such events. Yeats, whose genius with language appears to have been matched only by his credulousness, seems not to have fully understood the importance of such spectacles as games and illusions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism, Ireland and the Erotics of Memory , pp. 127 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002