Strange Couplings, French Connections, and Various Encounters of the Ground by Foot, Leg and Body(Abstract)

Dr. Adrienne Janus

Abstract – Communication

The Annual Conference of the International Yeats Society

Maison de la Recherche – University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle

12–14 December 2019

Strange Couplings, French Connections, and Various Encounters of the Ground by Foot, Leg and Body

Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axël and Sara, W.B. Yeats’ Forgael and Dectora… The murmuring forests, sighing breaths, and trembling, hair-covered liebestod of these couples mark Yeats’ romantic, symbolist phase of the 1890S, early 1900s, with Maud Gonne as muse, and Arthur Symons’ translations of the French Symbolists as mid-wife. These couplings appear to have little connection to the shuffling feet, severed heads and erotic asphyxia of Yeats’ later, modernist period, and the Noh-inspired plays of 1913 onwards, with Ezra Pound as muse and Ernst Fennelosa’s translations from the Japanese as mid-wife. Common to both earlier and later periods of Yeats’ oeuvre, however, and growing in intensity from The Shadowy Waters (1896/1900) to At the Hawk’s Well (1916) to The Death of Cuchulain (1939), is the conception of the body not as a vehicle of expression but as a vector of rhythmical, ritual movement, and the coupling of individual bodies with rhythms imposed from the outside, moved by forces beyond their control.

I’d like to associate these strange couplings with connections made in Paris, from Maud Gonne’s meeting with Valentine de Saint Point in the 1890s, and the rhythmical movements of de Saint-Point’s “Métachorie,” to Yeats’ meeting with the Japanese dancer Michio Ito, trained in the rhythmical movements of Jacques-Emile Dalcroze, whom Daniel Albright calls the “great exercise guru of Modernism,” and whose Eurythmic method took the world by storm in the wake of the Paris performance of The Rite of Spring, in 1913. I’ll argue that this coupling of individual bodies with rhythms imposed from the outside not only has something to do with what might be called the ‘dialectical embrace'[1] of ‘romantic’ organic form with ‘modernist’ geometric form common to de Saint-Point’s Métachorie, Dalcroze’s Eurythmics, and Yeats’ later works. I’ll show how the aesthetics of modernist geometric form, and the erotics of surface tactility as opposed to Romantic depth, is also implicated in the foot fetishes and claustrophilia, the strange “encounters of the ground by foot, leg and foot, body and foot” (Dalcroze), and the fascination with the rhythmical movement of walking under the pressures of increasing spatial confinement that connects Yeats’ oeuvre to that of later 20th century works by Samuel Beckett and Bruce Nauman.

[1] Against “The emphasis in Anglo-American modernism on making it new […]” Jacob Edmonds describes the relation between reproduction (of the old) and innovation as one of a ‘dialectical embrace,’ where copying the old and making it new impel each other. Edmonds’ argument relates to the literary poetics of media technology, but the relation between what Beckett would call the ‘antiquarians’ and the ‘modernists’ I think applies to Yeats. “Yet the relation of modernism to the copy is better conceived of as a ‘dialectical embrace.’ Technologies of reproduction and techniques of innovation frequently impel each other.” Jacob Edmond, Make It The Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media, Columbia U Press, 2019.