Abstract
Images of identity are often grounded in particular places; however, place is not purely a spatial concept. If place is produced through memories, associations and residues of past events, it is equally a temporal concept. This chapter looks at a play by W. B. Yeats—The Dreaming of the Bones—written in response to one of the key events in modern Irish history, the 1916 Rising, in which questions of identity were contested in a military uprising whose meaning continues to be disputed. Combining a genetic approach to literature with historicist reading, framed in the context of Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the dual nature of the image, this chapter explores the spatial and temporal axes of the production of identity in Yeats’s work for the theatre.
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street.
W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1957b, 630)
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Notes
- 1.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Field Day Review 11 (2015), 121–136.
- 2.
In describing the “Four Faculties” in the 1925 edition of A Vision , Yeats uses words that indicate how closely his ideas of theatre were tied in with his wider speculations in those years: “The stage manager having chosen his actor, the Will, chooses for this actor, that he may display him the better, a scenario, Body of Fate, which offers to his Creative Mind the greatest possible difficulty that it can face without despair” (2008, 17; emphasis in original).
- 3.
The Cornell Yeats provides facing page transcriptions of photographic reproductions of the manuscripts. Hence, all page references refer to two pages: the reproduction of the manuscript, and the transcription opposite.
- 4.
The colophon reads: “Of this poem twenty-five copies have been privately printed by Clement Shorter for distribution among his friends.”
- 5.
Mac Murchada was born ca. 1110; he fled Ireland to seek Henry II’s help in 1166.
- 6.
If subsequent productions of the play at the Abbey in the 1940s followed the 1931 staging, more detailed records give a clearer indication as to what that first production must have looked like, confirming that it stayed close to the stage directions in the published script (Abbey Theatre n.d., 2).
- 7.
Yeats quotes the lines on page xv: “They travelled seeing for the strange and for the picturesque: ‘I go about with my heart set upon no particular place, no more than a cloud’” (1916).
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Morash, C. (2019). W. B. Yeats’s The Dreaming of the Bones: Self-Consuming Images of Identity. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_8
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