Writing out chaos: Constructions of history in Yeats's "nineteen hundred and nineteen" and "meditations in time of civil war" - of

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

-Oscar Wilde (50)

the problem after any revolution is what to do with your gunmen

as old Billyum found out in Oireland....

-Ezra Pound (74)

For those of us engaged in bringing postcolonial theory to bear on Yeats studies, The Tower, a collection traditionally read within the context of "British" high modernism, offers a tempting point of entry. Published in 1928, (1) The Tower contains poems mostly written during the nine-year period that saw the drafting of the Irish Declaration of Independence in 1919, the passage of the Government of Ireland act in 1920 and of the Anglo-Irish treaty in 1921, and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922--a period that, viewed from one angle, marked Ireland's emergence from the shadow of imperialism into the light of postcolonial independence. Published after this supposed instant of transition, The Tower may allow critics to position Yeats as a postcolonial poet, an attractive move given the current scholarly cache attached to the postcolonial and given the potential such a characterization would afford for counterbalancing the attacks on Yeats's politics that have gained prominence since the l980s. (2)

Scholars who analyze Yeats and Irish literature from a historical vantage, a practice that inevitably raises issues related to British imperialism, colonization, and Irish nationalism, have, however, been correctly suspicious of the temptation to make broad-based, prematurely celebratory, postcolonial readings. (3) Echoing the cautionary remarks of postcolonial theorists Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, and others, they have argued that such readings, in assuming a clean break between an oppressive colonial past and a liberated "postcolonial" present, obscure the complexities and unique features of the Irish situation, fail to examine in detail the transitional period itself (one in progress to this day), and, most importantly, ignore empire's crippling economic, political, cultural, and psychological legacies, as Frantz Fanon has famously outlined. (4) Indeed, recent Yeats scholarship has been particularly attentive to these considerations, frequently emphasizing the degree to which his verse from the 1920s and 30s remains bound in empire's Manichean logic, idealizing those aspects of Irish culture and those apparently essential qualities of the Irish race that imperial discourse had used to mark the former colony as "other." (5) According to critics ranging from Donald Torchiana and Conor Cruise O'Brien to Terry Eagleton and Seamus Deane, Yeatsian cultural nationalism worked to romanticize, and thus to reinscribe, these outmoded forms of Irish identity, and in his late verse we can perceive Yeats liberally rewriting Irish history in the service of that end, fetishizing an eighteenth century during which peasant and Ascendancy landlord existed in supposed harmony.

Despite the emergence of counterbalancing arguments by Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, and Edward Said, (6) more work needs to be done responding to these criticisms and expanding the possibilities for reading Yeats through the lens of a locally engaged postcolonial theory that attends to the specifics of the Irish situation. Rather than offering a means either to celebrate Yeats as a writer whose verse somehow transcends the legacy of imperialism (7) or to attack Yeats (again) for his admittedly aristocratic and authoritarian politics, the postcolonial affords a new vantage from which to reinvestigate Yeats's verse in light of Irish history, to uncover his complex relationship with an Ireland in transition that, as Auden has famously written, "hurt [him] into poetry" (81).

This essay will focus on an issue often explored in postcolonial criticism: constructions of history during a period of militant nationalism. After situating my work in relation to Yeats's more hostile postcolonial critics and after briefly analyzing the discourse of Irish nationalisms in the early 1920s, I will argue that in two key poems from The Tower, "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War," Yeats is exercising his "one duty" (Wilde 50) to rewrite history. But far from reinscribing an outmoded nationalist mindset that idealizes one form of Irish identity, eighteenth century or otherwise, Yeats pointedly challenges former and current nationalist narratives of history by focusing instead on instances of rupture and the chaos of the present. In so doing, Yeats undercuts those stable narratives of a unified heroic nation that were central to the political and cultural nationalists' agendas in the 20s and that helped to perpetuate, in Deane's words, a "colonialist mentality" even after the establishment of the Free State (49).

Looking broadly at Yeats's evolving project of cultural nationalism, particularly as it is represented in his most bitterly nostalgic works in the 1930s, (8) it would be difficult to defend yeats against the claim "that he distorted history in the service of myth" (Deane 32), (9) and it is not my intention to do so here. Seamus Deane and Terry Eagleton are certainly correct when they argue that Yeatsian cultural nationalism was, at least in part, grounded in an ultimately conservative attachment to an idealized vision of Ireland's Ascendancy past, (10) a romantic conception of Irish identity and Irish history that, according to Deane, "clearly harbours the desire to obliterate or reduce the problems of class, economic development, bureaucratic organization, and the like, concentrating on the essences of self, community, nationhood, racial theory, Zeitgeist" (33). However, while I agree to some extent with their general claims, I differ with them concerning "Meditations in Time of Civil War" and "Nineteen Hund red and Nineteen." The primary point of contention involves their reliance on a traditional Marxist reading of historical false consciousness whereby these poems are viewed as expressing a retreat from the material present into an imagined past.