The point is that Yeats is at his most powerful precisely as he imagines and renders that very moment. It is helpful to remember that “the Anglo-Irish conflict” with which Yeats’s poetic oeuvre is saturated was a “model of twentieth-century wars of liberation.”31 His greatest decolonizing works concern the birth of violence, or the violent birth of change, as in “Leda and the Swan,” instants when a blinding flash of simultaneity is presented to his colonial eyes—the girl’s rape, and alongside that, the question “Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?”32 Yeats situates himself at at juncture where the violence of change is unarguable but where the results of the violence beseech necessary, if not always sufficient, reason. His greatest theme, in the poetry that culminates in The Tower (1928), is how to reconcile the inevitable violence of the colonial conflict with the everyday politics of an ongoing national struggle, and also how to square the power of the various parties in the conflict with the discourse of reason, persuasion, organization, and the requirements of poetry. Yeats’s prophetic perception that at some point violence cannot be enough and that the strategies of politics and reason must come into play is, to my knowledge, the first important announcement in the context of decolonization of the need to balance violent force with an exigent political and organizational process. Fanon’s assertion that liberation cannot be accomplished simply by seizing power (though “Even the wisest man grows tense / With some sort of violence”)33 comes almost half a century later. That neither Yeats nor Fanon offers a prescription for making a transition after decolonization to a period when a new political order achieves moral hegemony is symptomatic of the difficulty that millions of people live with today.
It is an amazing thing that the problem of Irish liberation not only has continued longer than other comparable struggles, but is so often not regarded as being an imperial or nationalist issue; instead it is comprehended as an aberration within the British dominions. Yet the facts conclusively reveal otherwise. Since Spenser’s 1596 tract on Ireland, a whole tradition of British and European thought has considered the Irish to be a separate and inferior race, usually unregenerately barbarian, often delinquent and primitive. Irish nationalism for at least the last two hundred years is marked by internecine struggles involving the land question, the Church, the nature of parties and leaders. But dominating the movement is the attempt to regain control of the land where, in the words of the 1916 proclamation that founded the Irish Republic, “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, [is] to be sovereign and indefeasible.”34
Yeats cannot be severed from this quest. Regardless of his astounding genius, he contributed, as Thomas Flanagan puts it, “in Irish terms, and of course in a singularly powerful and compelling manner, that process of simultaneous abstraction and reification that, defiant of logic, is the heart of nationalism.”35 And to this work several generations of lesser writers also contributed, articulating the expression of Irish identity as it attaches to the land, to its Celtic origins, to a growing body of nationalist experiences and leaders (Wolfe Tone, Connolly, Mitchel, Isaac Butt, O’Connell, the United Irishmen, the Home Rule movement, and so on), and to a specifically national literature.36 Literary nationalism also retrospectively includes many forerunners: Thomas Moore, early literary historians like the Abbe McGeoghehan and Samuel Ferguson, James Clarence Mangan, the Orange–Young Ireland movement, Standish O’Grady. In the poetic, dramatic, and scholarly work of today’s Field Day Company (Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin) and of the literary historians Declan Kiberd and W. J. McCormack, these “revivals” of the Irish national experience are brilliantly reimagined and take the nationalist adventure to new forms of verbal expression.37
The essential Yeatsian themes sound through the earlier and later literary work: the problem of assuring the marriage of knowledge to power, of understanding violence; interestingly they are also sounded in Gramsci’s roughly contemporary work, undertaken and elaborated in a different context. In the Irish colonial setting, Yeats seems best able to pose and re-pose the question provocatively, using his poetry, Blackmur says, as a technique of trouble.38 And he goes further in the great poems of summation and vision like “Among School Children,” “The Tower,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Under Ben Bulben,” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” These are poems of genealogy and recapitulation, of course: telling and retelling the story of his life from early nationalist turbulence to the status of a senator walking through a classroom and thinking of how Leda figured in all their pasts, or a loving father thinking about his child, or a senior artist trying to achieve equanimity of vision, or finally, as a long-time craftsman somehow surviving the loss (desertion) of his powers, Yeats reconstructs his own life poetically as an epitome of the national life.
These poems reverse the reductive and slanderous encapsulation of Irish actualities which, according to Joseph Leerssen’s learned book Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael, had been the fate of the Irish at the hands of English writers for eight centuries, displacing ahistorical rubrics like “potato-eaters,” or “bog-dwellers,” or “shanty people.”39 Yeats’s poetry joins his people to its history, the more imperatively in that as father, or as “sixty-year-old smiling public man,” or as son and husband, the poet assumes that the narrative and the density of personal experience are equivalent to the experience of his people. The references in the closing strophes of “Among School Children” suggest that Yeats was reminding his audience that history and the nation are not separable, any more than a dancer is separate from the dance.
The drama of Yeats’s accomplishment in restoring a suppressed history and rejoining the nation to it is expressed well by Fanon’s description of the situation Yeats had to overcome: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”40 Yeats rises from the level of personal and folk experience to that of national archetype without losing the immediacy of the former or the stature of the latter. And his unerring choice of genealogical fables and figures speaks to another aspect of colonialism as Fanon described it: its capacity for separating the individual from his or her own instinctual life, breaking the generative lineaments of the national identity:
On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gently loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.
In such a situation the claims of the native intellectual [and poet] are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent program. The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation’s legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people.41
No wonder that Yeats instructed Irish poets to
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.42
That in the process Yeats ended up creating not individuals but types that “cannot quite overcome the abstractions from which they sprang,” again according to Blackmur,43 is true insofar as the decolonizing program and its background in the history of Ireland’s subjugation are ignored, as Blackmur was wont to do; his interpretations are masterful yet ahistorical. When the colonial realities are taken into account, we get insight and experience, and not merely “the allegorical simulacrum churned with action.”44
Yeats’s full system of cycles, pernes, and gyres seems importan
t only as it symbolizes his efforts to lay hold of a distant and yet orderly reality as a refuge from the turbulence of his immediate experience. When in the Byzantium poems he asks to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, the need for respite from age and from what he would later call “the struggle of the fly in marmalade” is even more starkly at work. Otherwise it is difficult to read most of his poetry and not feel that Swift’s devastating anger and genius were harnessed by Yeats to lift the burdens of Ireland’s colonial afflictions. True, he stopped short of imagining full political liberation, but he gave us a major international achievement in cultural decolonization nonetheless.
from Culture and Imperialism
PART III
Late Styles
12
Performance as an Extreme Occasion (1989)
“Performance as an Extreme Occasion” was the first of three Wellek Library lectures that Edward Said delivered in May 1989 at the University of California at Irvine. Later published in Musical Elaborations, the lectures reflect Said’s long-standing interest in polyphonic, Western classical music. An accomplished pianist, Said had studied piano under Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Cairo in 1933 where he instructed the city’s haute société. Although Said did not pursue the piano professionally (he found practicing physically exacting and monotonous), he would go on to write about classical music with as much as passion as he would play it. In 1986 Said began writing an occasional music column for The Nation magazine, which was far more willing in the 1980s to publish his reviews of performances of Berlioz and Beethoven than his comments on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
One of the significant statements in contemporary criticism occurs at the opening of Richard Poirier’s classic essay “The Performing Self.” He is discussing modern writers like Yeats, Norman Mailer, and Henry James whose “powers of rendition” define the “performance that matters—pacing, economics, juxtapositions, aggregations of tone, the whole conduct of the shaping presence.” And if this, says Poirier, partakes of brutality and even savagery it is because
Performance is an exercise of power, a very anxious one. Curious because it is at first so furiously self-consultive, so even narcissistic, and later so eager for publicity, love and historical dimensions. Out of an accumulation of secretive acts emerges at last a form that presumes to complete with reality itself for control of the mind exposed to it. Performance in writing, in painting, or in dance is made of thousands of tiny movements each made with a calculation that is also its innocence. By innocence I mean that the movements have an utterly moral neutrality—they are designed to serve one another and nothing else; and they are innocent, too, because contrived with only a vague general notion of what they might ultimately be responsible for—the final thing, the accumulation called “the work.”1
Poirier’s purpose in these lines is to separate the academic, liberal, and melioristic attitudes toward literature, attitudes that serve codes, institutions, and orthodoxies, from the processes of literary performance that, he argues, are essentially “dislocating, disturbing impulses.” Yet performance is not merely a happening but rather “an action which must go through passages that both impede the action and give it form.” Thus, “performance comes to function at precisely the point where the potentially destructive impulse to mastery brings forth from the material its most essential irreducible, clarified, and therefore beautiful nature.”2
Although Poirier does not discuss music here, all of his comments about rendition and enactment—except perhaps the one about innocence, to which I’d like to return later—are deeply pertinent to modern musical performance, which is also rather like an athletic event in its demand for the admiringly rapt attention of its spectators. Yet Poirier’s literary examples are drawn from the work of creative artists, whereas the performances that concern me here are the essentially re-creative and interpretive reenactments of musical compositions by pianists, violinists, singers, and so forth. Indeed we should begin by noting how the extreme specialization of all aesthetic activity in the contemporary West has overtaken and been inscribed within musical performance so effectively as to screen entirely the composer from the performer. There are no major performers before the public today who are also influential composers of the first rank; even Pierre Boulez and Leonard Bernstein, to mention two immediately obvious possible exceptions, belong separately albeit simultaneously and equally to the worlds of composing and of performing, but it is not as performers of their own work that they are known principally. Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and Liszt were.
There is a further specialization to be noted, that of the listeners or spectators who in the aggregate make up audiences at events of musical performance. Some years ago Adorno wrote a famous and, I think, correct account of “the regression of hearing,” in which he emphasized the lack of continuity, concentration, and knowledge in the listeners that has made real musical attention more or less impossible. Adorno blamed such things as radio and records for undermining and practically eliminating the possibility that the average concertgoer could play an instrument or read a score.3 To those disabilities we can add today’s complete professionalization of performance. This has widened the distance between the “artist” in evening dress or tails and, in a lesser, lower, far more secondary space, the listener who buys records, frequents concert halls, and is routinely made to feel the impossibility of attaining packaged virtuosity of a professional performer. Whether we focus on the repeatable mechanically reproduced performance available on disc, tape, or video-record, or on the alienating social ritual of the concert itself, with the scarcity of tickets and the staggeringly brilliant technique of the performer achieving roughly the same distancing effect, the listener is in a relatively weak and not entirely admirable position. Here Poirier’s rather melodramatic ideas about brutality, savagery, and power can be moderated with an acknowledgment of the listener’s poignant speechlessness as he/she faces an onslaught of such refinement, articulation, and technique as almost to constitute a sadomasochistic experience.4
Consider as an example the performance of Chopin’s Etudes by Maurizio Pollini, the extraordinarily proficient and brilliant Italian pianist. His interpretation is available on disc and, since Pollini performs the works regularly in recital and was also winner of the Chopin Prize when he was only eighteen, these recorded performances of opus 10 and opus 25 stand as representative of his considerable virtuosity. Chopin wrote them originally as aids to his teaching, as explanations of various aspects of keyboard technique (octaves, thirds, left-hand and passage work, legato playing, arpeggios, etc.). In Pollini’s performance the power and astonishing assertiveness of the playing, which begins in opus 10, number 1, with a massive C-major bass octave chord and is immediately followed by a burst of lightning-fast arpeggiated passage work, absolutely free of hesitation, wrong notes, or grasping, immediately establishes the distance between these performances and any amateur attempt to render Chopin’s music. Moreover, the grandeur of Pollini’s technique, its scale, and its dominating display and reach completely dispatch any remnant of Chopin’s original intention for the music, which was to afford the pianist, any pianist, an entry into the relative seclusion and reflectiveness of problems of technique.
Evidence testifying to the performer’s power, unattached to the correlative skills either of improvisation or of composing, emerges after the first third of the nineteenth century. The virtuoso singer, pianist, or violinist who is the ancestor of today’s Jessye Norman, Pollini, or Menuhin comes not just with the appearance of Paganini on European stages in the late 1820s, the great archetype of the preternaturally skilled and demonic performer on endlessly fascinating display, but with the emergence of transcription as an art both of display and of encroachment, and along with transcription a relative demotion in the priority of the musical text (about which in his magisterial book Nineteenth-Century Music Carl Dahlhaus has interesting things to say).5 When pianists invade the orchestral or operati
c repertoire we have gone well beyond even the contests in virtuosity that engaged Bach, Handel, and Mozart, who played the music of other masters as easily as they cannibalized and plagiarized their own work. Modern performance has to do with rights asserted over music written by and for others, rights won by a rigorous, highly specialized training in interpretation most often not grounded in composition. Busoni may be the last of the major composers, transcribers, and performers to operate before a Western musical public; the line of impressive omni-competent musicians that was so boldly begun with Bach, so robustly continued with Beethoven, so color-fully overstated with Liszt and Busoni, disappears completely after Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Britten, and Bartok.
Performance cut off from composing therefore constitutes a special form of ownership and work. Let me return briefly to transcription, since it is in the theory and practice of transcription that the various incorporations and consolidations of monopolistic performance most strikingly take place. There is in all Western classical music from the late seventeenth century on a dynamic between performance designed for the public place secured and held by church and court, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, music whose performance is private and domestic. Orchestral and choral works of any moderate size belong principally to the public sphere, although both Bach and Handel trafficked across the lines so to speak in writing music that could be performed in either one space or the other, by one kind of instrument, solo or concerted, or another. Many of Beethoven’s instrumental works and lieder were written for nonprofessionals, although they have since become standard works in the performing repertory of professional singers and instrumentalists.