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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2001 by Rob Doggett

Rather than emphasize those historical narratives that would displace a concrete engagement with history (as if that displacement occurs seamlessly, one narrative simply erasing another), I intend, in keeping with more broad-based deployments of postcolonial theory by critics such as Homi Bhabha, to focus on the moment of displacement itself, a transitional moment when, as Bhabha puts it, "[t]he language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past" (142). Where a strictly Marxist reading would see a dialectical shift from an engagement with history unfolding in the present to a glorification of history in the past, our postcolonial reading will center on this ambivalent moment in war-torn Ireland when history is becoming History, when the heterogeneous scraps of individual experiences are transformed and translated through the discourses of nationalism into homogenous narratives of national history and national identity. By shifting our gaze to this transitional moment itself and to Yeats's engagement with these nationalist constructions of history as they are being formulated, we begin to perceive a more complicated Yeats whose poetic meditations on an Ireland gripped by war may not be so readily dismissed as romantic idealism or naive historical mythmaking. To establish this context for analyzing the poems we must, therefore, briefly turn to the discourses of nationalism shortly before and during "the troubles."

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In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the period during which Yeats wrote "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," the rhetoric of Sinn Fein drew heavily on a type of nationalism popularized in the previous century by Thomas Davis (Boyce 295). Characterized by appeals to Ireland's heroic past of imperial resistance, such nationalism foregrounded both the duty of the patriot to continue that struggle and the duty of the historian and artist, in the words of Davis,

to lead us into the love of self-denial, of justice, of beauty, of valour; of generous life and proud death; and to set up in our souls the memory of great men who shall then be as models and judges of our actions...." (qtd. In Thuente 44)

During their ultimately successful 1918 election bid, Sinn Fein campaigned on a platform of "separatism," the final goal being not simply home rule but a distinct, and increasingly Catholic, Irish Republic, an "imagined community" (11) sanctified through the discourse of Sinn Fein nationalism as that state for which former insurrectionists had given their lives. As historian P. S. O'Hegarty claimed in 1924: "what was sold to the electorate [in 1918], what they voted on, was not Sinn Fein, not the republic, but Easter Week" (qtd. in Boyce 318). (12) Easter Week certainly, but, more important, it was a distinctly "historical" Easter Week couched as the climactic date in a revolutionary calendar whose highlights included 1798, 1848, and 1867, and which affirmed, as the Sinn Fein General Election Manifesto (1918) proclaimed, "the fact that in nearly every generation, and five times within the past 120 years our people have challenged in arms the right of England to rule this country" (Mitchell and O'Snodaigh 48).