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In A Vision, Yeats provides multiple trans-temporal (crossing different periods in history) and trans-national(crossing different nations) collage of “the glance characteristic of a civilization in its final phase,” and provides different images of eyes for each period. Each of these images is related to a certain point between concernful dealing with the world and the vision of the infinite world. Each image of the gaze characteristic of sculpture represents a civilization, and constitutes a “discontinuous image” which connotes “the symbolic message.” In fact, Yeats reveals each image of the eye as a fragment or stasis of a moment of the spiritual eye, and at the same time as the representation of Yeats's intention to quest for the Unity of Culture, the “vast design” of his transnational poetics.
The objective of this paper is to trace the trajectory of Yeats's poetics and rhetoric. My contention is that Yeats reveals his major shift from the poetics to the rhetoric in the midst of the multi-level “twists and turns” which mark an important manifestation of the process of transmigration toward the Unity of Culture, and I argue that Yeats’s quest for the Unity of Culture manifest a transnational poetics. Yeats’s poetic development manifests the on-going process of contestation and fragmentation on the bridge between the poetics and the rhetoric. The bridge is a site of turbulent aporia site in which duplication of contestation creates a simultaneous centripetal and centrifugal movement, comingled with multiplication of fragmentation.
Between “Magic” essay and A Vision, there is a missing link to establish the so-called “linguistic turn” in the career of Yeats the transnational poet/theorist. Yeats in his Per Amica Silentia Lunae already conceived the doubling intertext of intentionality as an anchoring center of the breakthrough out of the dilemma of the theory of magic. In fact, what Yeats has done in Per Amica Silentia is to create conflict, tension, and equilibrium between the theory of magic and the theory of the linguistic turn, thereby rupturing the inauthentic theory of correspondence and establishing the foreground of the authentic concept of correspondence in terms of Othering. The Only Jealousy of Emer is the dramatic manifestion of Yeats’s linguistic turn in the speech of the characters in relation to the desire of the Other. My focus here in this play is rather the role of the multiple masks which represent the nature of the Other as well as the process of Othering. The Other has been represented by the multiple characters’ masks such as those of Bricriu (The Figure of Cuchulain), Fand (Woman of the Sidhe), The Ghost of Cuchulain, Emer, Eithne Inguba.
As a unified vision of Yeats’s own diachronic and synchronic transnational poetics, A Vision can be seen in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring- production.” Opposed to the (negative) Lacanian dialectic of lack and desire, Deleuze and Guattari propose a theory of “desiring-production,” which they define as a “pure multiplicity, that is to say, an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.” If we re-consider A Vision as a desiring-machine that is connected to other desiring-machines, we deterritorialize the perspective which constructs lack as the centre of subjectivity, thereby reterritorializing subjectivity as a network of multiplicities. The gaze of the writing subjects in A Vision become autonomous, creating automatic writing and automatic speech. Then, A Vision which is given for the metaphors for poetry and poetry achieves its being in language. In short, Yeats has established a transnational poetics which traces its poetics of the Other and Othering back to the poetics and the rhetoric of the linguistic turn, a turn in which poetry exists in language and turned toward an inner reality.