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Bergsonian Movement and Multiplicity in the Works of WB Yeats

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Bergsonian Movement and Multiplicity in the Works of WB Yeats MCGUIRE, MEGHAN H., Ph.D. Gyres and Waves: Bergsonian Movement and Multiplicity in the Works of W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf. (2017) Directed by Dr. Anthony Cuda. 167 pp. At the beginning of the twentieth century, French philosopher, Henri Bergson, unsettled the way people understood time and memory by suggesting that our representation of time as measured and linear is actually a discussion of space. For Bergson, real durational time cannot be quantified or delineated; it must be experienced through intuition. Central to Bergson’s philosophy is an emphasis on movement and multiplicity; we exist not as stable entities but as constant, complex processes of becoming. His radical ideas about time, memory, consciousness, and evolution pushed back against a mechanistic and deterministic world-view with a philosophy that not only acknowledged the reality of perpetual change but embraced it—turning threatening chaos into productive creative force. Wildly popular, Bergson’s ideas saturated the literary and artistic landscape of what we now regard as modernism, embracing fluidity and change as well as fragmentation. This dissertation explores the presence of Bergsonian philosophy in the modernist works of W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf, investigating how seemingly disparate writers—like Yeats and Woolf—navigate a rapidly changing and fractured world by implementing patterns and creating systems of order. Focusing specifically on each author’s use of gyre and wave imagery, my study argues that Yeats and Woolf employ Bergsonian images of multidirectional movement as a way of holding binaries in tension with one another without the need for unity or resolution. Rather than enforcing a dualistic system that chooses between order and disorder, progress and decline, Yeats and Woolf find a way to artistically circumvent stasis in favor of a Bergsonian model of mobility and multiplicity. Through this approach, each author is able to achieve a remarkable fluidity of scope, allowing them to move from the external to the internal, the objective to the subjective, and the personal to the national in a way that productively blurs delineations and constructively complicates dualities. This dissertation challenges the scholarly tendency to see Yeats and Woolf as antithetical representations of a monolithic modernism, where Yeats embodies tradition and structure and Woolf exemplifies experimentation and flux. By exploring the movement and fluidity in Yeats’s structured system from A Vision and the order and pattern in Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves, I bring these authors into a new dialectic. After the introduction, the first two chapters of this dissertation break new ground by utilizing unpublished archival materials from Yeats’s personal library to explore the previously undiscussed influence of Bergsonian theory on the poet’s later works. After establishing this relationship between Yeats and Bergson, the last two chapters then discuss the unexpected similarities between Yeats’s mystical system in A Vision and Woolf’s novel The Waves. Through this focused comparative study, I contend that both authors, through their repeated use of gyres and waves, find a way to embrace Bergsonian fluidity and change while calling attention to the comforting artifice of perceived order; they concretize a pattern, but it is one that is cleverly and ironically generative rather than conclusive. GYRES AND WAVES: BERGSONIAN MOVEMENT AND MULTIPLICITY IN THE WORKS OF W. B. YEATS AND VIRGINIA WOOLF by Meghan H. McGuire A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2017 Approved by _____________________________ Committee Chair © 2017 Meghan H. McGuire To Drew and my family, whose love and support made the completion of this project possible. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Meghan H. McGuire has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair._____________________________________ Committee Members._____________________________________ . _____________________________________ ____________________________ Date of Acceptance by Committee __________________________ Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee members—Dr. Anthony Cuda, Dr. Anne Wallace, and Dr. Ben Clarke—for their support and encouragement throughout this process. I appreciate their guidance and feedback, and I am grateful for the examples they set as instructors and scholars. Additionally, a special thanks is due to my committee chair, Dr. Cuda, for his unflinching confidence in my project, for the time and energy he spent providing feedback on my work, and for his perfectly-timed notes of encouragement. This project is stronger because of his mentorship. Many thanks are also due to fellow writers Lilly Berberyan and Brenta Blevins for their support, their humor, and their friendship. I am also grateful to the Yeats Estate for granting me permission to access W.B. Yeats’s personal library, and to the Graduate Student Association at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for awarding me a travel grant, allowing me to conduct vital archival research at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. I am also indebted to the Pierce Loughran Memorial Scholarship, which provided me with the invaluable opportunity to attend the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. Without these two awards, this project would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Drew Meyer, for his patience, love, and support these many years. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................1 Navigating Change.......................................................................................5 Why Yeats and Woolf? ................................................................................8 Why Bergson? ............................................................................................10 A Double Movement in Modernism ..........................................................14 An Outline of Chapters ..............................................................................19 II. W.B. YEATS’S UNEXPECTED BERGSONIAN VISION ...............................23 Mina Bergson and the Order of the Golden Dawn ....................................29 Metaphysics and Psychical Research.........................................................34 Yeats’s Double Gyre ..................................................................................43 Annotating Bergson ...................................................................................50 A Packet for Ezra Pound............................................................................65 III. DIALECTIC TENSION IN THE TOWER AND THE WINDING STAIR ..........71 The Tower ..................................................................................................76 The Winding Stair and Other Poems .........................................................87 IV. PATTERN AND FLUX: ECHOES OF A VISION IN WOOLF’S THE WAVES ..............................................................................110 Woolf’s Mystical Vision ..........................................................................117 Order and Fluidity ....................................................................................124 Reading Yeats ..........................................................................................130 Unresolved Tension .................................................................................135 V. A CENTER THAT CANNOT HOLD: YEATSIAN GYRES IN THE WAVES ..................................................................................................139 Vortical Movement ..................................................................................143 Whirling Around Percival ........................................................................150 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………….. ..................................................................159 v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist […]. —Virginia Woolf, “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” (429). In Virginia Woolf’s 1927 essay “Poetry, Fiction and the Future,” she calls for the radical blurring of generic boundaries, where prose writing possesses all the best qualities of poetry and drama. As a novelist, Woolf’s primary concern is with the future of fiction, but she is also astutely aware that regardless of genre, the literature of the future cannot be like the literature of the past because an individual’s understanding and experience of the world is no longer holistic. Cultural shifts, global conflicts, and the discovery of new knowledge ruptured the way people understood and experienced time, and Woolf describes her current era as “an age clearly when we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving
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