VV(12): Yeats?

[Dave Monroe]

"'Ever heard of D'Annunzio?'  Then: Mussolini?  Fiume?  Italia
irredenta?  Fascisti?  National Socialist German Workers' Party?  Adolf 
Hitler?  Kautsky's Independents?" (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 24)

Pound? (Wm.) Joyce?

Yeats?

>From John Dugdale, Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power (London: 
Macmillan, 1990), Chapter 2, "V.," pp. 76-123 ...

... some of these traits and attitudes are also attributable to Yeats, and 
as the chapter [17] progresses the character [Old Stencil] moves closer and 
closer to the poet who wrote 'The Second Coming' and 'Nineteen Hundred and 
Nineteen' in the year in which it is set.  In his 'theory of Paracletian 
politics' ([V., pp.] 479-80), for example ... (98)

[and here see V., p. 472, "The matter of a Paraclete's coming" through 
"Would the Paraclete be also a mother?"]

The questions ... echo the last line of 'The Second Coming' ....  Stencil's 
theory mixes Joachim of Fiore's Three Ages [cf. Third Reich, by the way] 
with the Gnostic myth of of the Sophia or Shekhinah ....  Both elements can 
be found in Yeats' apocalyptic romances, the first in 'The Tables of the 
Law' (1896), and the second in 'The Adoration of the Magi' (1897).  Placed 
immediately after a list of the grievances of eight groups on Malta, the 
passage mocks the absurdities resulting from Yeats' transformation of 
politics into myth.  (During the Venezuela crisis mentioned in Chapter 7 
Yeats asked in a letter, 'Has the magical armageddon begun at last?")  Here 
and at the end of the chapter, the June disturbances in Malta parallel the 
events of Easter 1916 in the Irish independence struggle, translated by 
Yeats from black comedy to 'terrible beauty'.  Additionally, Old Stencil's 
strange liaison with Veronica Manganese, an agent of Mussolini, parodies 
Yeats's vision of Maud Gonne as art-object and revolutionary at once [here 
see V., p. 487, "Riot was her element] ... and glances at his involvement 
with Fascism. (98)

[there's a nice genealogy of Pynchon's figurations here, by the way, 
Faulkner, Conrad, Pound, Joyce, Rilke, Eliot, Melville, Poe, Dante, 
Sarraulte, Camus, Bellow, even]

... the dancer and the 'terrible beauty' of Yeats ... (105)

... Old Stencil is a parody of Yeats. (110)

The question of the involvement of major Modernist figures with Fascism 
would have been topical when V. was presumably conceived, in 1958-9, as the 
treason charges against Pound were dropped in 1958.  Yet there is no attempt 
to stigmatise the writers by name, or to expose the biographical evidence 
and the incrimination statements, apart perhaps from one off-hand to the 
'Usury Canto' ([V., p.) 354).  In place of such a direct indictment, there 
is, on the one hand, a more complicated political critique, centered on the 
structures, strategies, ideas and images of the actual works ... and, on the 
other, the messages which can be deciphered from the relationship of Old 
Stencil to V., of V. to Mussolini and D'Annunzio, and from the case of 
D'Annunzio himself, the one modern artist that Pynchon does consider 
directly. (110)

[again, though, compare "White faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in 
the dark" (p. 244) with "The apparition of these faces in the crowd:/ Petals 
on a wet, black bough" (Ezra Pound, "In the Station of the Metro" [1913]), 
and note that "haw haw," as in William "Lord Haw Haw" Joyce (p. 241) as 
well]

The unsuccessful occupation [of Fiume by D'Annunzio] was the direct 
inspiration for Mussolini's so-called 'march on Rome' in 1922.  D'Annunzio 
has the unique distinction among the artists of the period of having acted 
as a catalyst to a revolution.  His abortive intervention in the real world, 
with its appeal for a nationalist hero uncannily answered by the Fascist 
dictator. (An agent of Mussolini before Fiume, V. i s the link between the 
two men.  Ironically she dies on Malta as the result of an Italian air raid, 
victim of a mad extension of irredentism in which the island was bombed to 
rubble in an impossible attempt to regain it for Italy.)  D'Annunzio, the 
preposterous mythomaniac and author of luxurious romance like Il Fuoco, is a 
mocking mirror for a figure like Pound, who adopted the Machiavellian idea 
of virtu and became associated with Mussolini ... (111)

A passage in which Old Godolphin tries to generalize from the case of 
D'Annunzio has often received critical attention.  Vera has asked him what 
he thinks will fill the void left by 'the likes of Vheissu', which here 
apparently signifies any 'dream' from his own expedition to D'Annunzio 
novels:

[here, "What is already filling it" through "our Vheissus are no longer our 
own, or even confined to a circle of friends; they're public property," from 
V., p. 248]

Overtly, the passage explains the attraction to political activism for 
D'Annunzio, or Pound, or Yeats.  Reacting to the expropriation of art and 
fantasy by the new mass society, they seek to reverse the process by 
entering and altering the public world.  however, the terms of the passage 
lend themselves to conversion into a description of a process with which the 
text is also concerned, in which the dream is followed by the real thing, 
but the dreamier is not the agent of its realization.  Instead of the artist 
'working out' his political hallucinations on a real human population (as at 
Fiume) they work out, become political fact (as in Mussolini's coup) as if 
through magical causation. (111)

... and then on, via "The courier's Tragedy" (TCOL49) to Jacobean theater 
and the Schwartzkommando (GR).  Dugdale, by the way, recommends the 
following ...

Cullingford, Elizabeth.  Yeats, Ireland and Fascism.
   London: Macmillan, 1981.

... which I'm not familiar with, but, then again, I'm barely familiar with 
Yeats as it is (so any help would be appreciated).  But it is interesting 
how Fascist Modernists are alluded to throughout the novel.  Reminds me ...

Golsan, Richard J., ed.
   Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture.
   Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1992.

Hewitt, Andrew.  Fascist Modernism:
   Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.
   Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993.

Now what about Wyndham Lewis?  Hm ...
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