Abstract
A fragmentation of self often informed the modernist quest for redefining the authorial self, a development explored in this chapter. The focus lies on the crisis of authorship as it manifested in the works of British writers and artists who claimed to have been inspired by fairies or even had their works produced by fairies. Occultist, antiquarian and artistic discourses concerning fairies could collide, as the chapter’s case study of William Butler Yeats shows. In a milieu where fairies were captured in photographs and cited as inspiration for paintings and literature, fairies could play an important role in experiments into fragmenting the authorial self, contributing to the modernist perception of the creative subject as passive and unstable, or even splintered, by ascribing artistic innovation to external entities.
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Notes
- 1.
See also the Spirit photograph by S.W. Fallis (1901, available online at: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3g01845) and Ada Emma Deane ’s The Armistice Ceremony (1923; Barlow Collection, British Library, available online at http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2012/04/the-cenotaph-alfred-rosenberg-ada-emma-deane-and-the-ghost-hunter-harry-price/), which are very similar to fairy dance imagery.
- 2.
Blavatsky (1988b, 1).
- 3.
Paracelsus himself does not use the word elemental to refer to these spirits, this being a label attached to them by later commentators on his writings.
- 4.
From the 1960s to the 1980s or so, there was fervent activity among scholars wanting to deconstruct European folklore as more or less an invention of Romantics and nationalist antiquarians. Today, this position has lost ground and is heavily criticized. In other words, most scholars presently working with the material in folklore archives agree that there existed a vernacular peasant culture beyond Romantic and nationalist constructs, which is not ‘inaccessible’ to us due to a supposed nationalist bias in the source materials. In fact, these are often of much higher quality than deconstructionist scholars have suggested (on this, see Skott, 2008; Mitchell, 2000).
- 5.
Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and published A Vision (where the mediumistic material was first presented to the public) in 1925. The mediumistic sessions had begun almost immediately after he married George in 1917, and it seems unlikely that it was a coincidence that publication should have been held off until two years after his reception of the Nobel Prize.
- 6.
Not all theosophists viewed elementals and fairies as completely identical; see Besant ([1898] 1899, 87). (Besant prefers the term nature spirits.)
- 7.
In all fairness, it should also be noted that there is an episode in the same book where Yeats tells of an encounter with a male visionary poet who can see the fairies (ibid., 15–22), though he does not quite function as a medium between them and Yeats himself in the way the young woman does.
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Faxneld, P. (2018). ‘Only Poets and Occultists Believe in Them Just Now’: Fairies and the Modernist Crisis of Authorship. In: Bauduin, T., Johnsson, H. (eds) The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76499-3_5
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