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COPYRIGHT 2003 Modern Humanities Research Association
The notion of a 'fragmented subject' emerged historically in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting discoveries in the fields of psychology and cultural anthropology. Robert Langbaum has referred to this phenomenon in literature as 'the movement toward depersonalization and abstraction', setting its boundaries between 1875 and 1927. (1) The aesthetics of fragmentation constituted an important influence on W. B. Yeats and Fernando Pessoa, whose poetic debuts occurred respectively in the late 1880s and early 1900s. (2) By the time he started writing his autobiography in 1914 Yeats was convinced that 'the moment we [artists] attain to greatness of any kind by personal labour and will we become fragmentary'. (3) Around the same time Pessoa was performing his heteronymic experiment. He defends artistic depersonalization enthusiastically: 'No artist should have only one personality. On the contrary, he should have several, each one from like states of mind which would discard the fiction that personality is only one and indivisible'. (4) Although pursuing their individual poetic development, they often addressed questions posed by this new aesthetic in a manner that is comparable in its originality and sophistication.
Poetry is particularly amenable to this type of phenomena, for poetic language intrinsically generates 'discordance' within the Self, engendering an 'unsettled and questionable subject'. (5) Undoubtedly, it is the unsettling quality of poetic language that renders the subject of enunciation heterogeneous, as observed by Lacanian theory. Revealing a profound aesthetic intuition, Yeats and Pessoa developed similar techniques of displacement of the subject in their poetry, which implied a rather experimental and innovative use of poetic personae. The techniques addressed in this essay comprise Yeats's 'theory of the mask'--more accurately defined as 'theory of the masks'--and Pessoa's self-coined 'heteronymy'. They represented a departure in conceptual and stylistic terms from the conventional use of the poetic persona, which entailed a differentiation between the poet and the subjective 'I' of the poem, strictly within the boundaries of the poem. The deployment of this poetic device generated in the first instance a division of the enunciating entity or persona, with the consequent emergence of several recurring personae in the Yeatsian and Pessoan poetic universes. Additionally, it altered the function of the persona, extending its action beyond the poem. Both poets were aware of the innovation brought about by these changes, and strove to come to terms with it in their poetic practice and in their aesthetic conceptualization. Therefore, a new terminology that could address the specificity of the aesthetic process emerged in complementary texts of a theoretical nature.
The emergence of the poetic personae and the negotiation of their status were subject to various changes throughout their poetic careers, allowing us to trace different stages of an ongoing development of the method in their poems, as well as in their poetics. Hence, in the early stages of their poetry there is a closer identification between the poet and the personae. In Yeats's case, that interdependency is particularly patent in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds, first published as a separate volume in 1899. In this first edition the personae Aedh (Aodh), Mongan, Michael Robartes, and Hanrahan appear recurrently in the love poems. Thus, the function of these personae is akin to that of a pseudonym in fiction, in that they attempt to disguise, rather than identify, the poet from each particular persona. Traditionally this measure has been related to the autobiographical content of the lyrics. The majority of the poems in the collection address the poet's feelings towards Maud Gonne and his affective relationship with Olivia Shakespear. Hence, by resorting to these linguistic masks, the poet could freely express personal subjective feelings in a detached, objective form. According to this reading the personae were decalquages of the poetic 'I', without possessing much individuality.
Unsurprisingly, the poet did not put much stress on the biographical reading. Rather, he contrived an elaborate explanation for his use of these figures, identifying them as 'personages' in the collections of short fiction The Secret Rose and Stories of Red Hanrahan (1897). In the notes to the collection Wind Among the Reeds Yeats states that he had used them there more as 'principles of the mind' than as 'actual personages'. (6) The fact that the poet refers to these figures as 'principles of the mind', in opposition to the term 'personages', which would have conferred on them a greater autonomy, points to their symbolic function. The symbolic function of the personae constitutes a significant aspect of Yeats's deployment of this technique, for they often embody opposing attitudes tested in the poems. On the other hand, by attributing psychological traits and philosophical viewpoints to these imaginary figures he introduces a fictional element to the poetry that transcends both...
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