DENIS DONOGHUE
Ireland: Race, Nation, State
(Part Two)
I bring forward these considerations of Iri sh nationalism to clarify the rela–
tion between Yeats's work as a cultural nationalist and his dealings with
magic. We have only to note his emphasis on subconscious, collective
experience, in the essay on magic, to see how compatible they are:
I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call
magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not
know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the
visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed;
and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed
down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magi–
cal practices. These doctrines are:-
(1) that the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many
minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a sin–
gle mind, a single energy,
(2) that the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our
memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature her–
self, and
(3) that this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
So everything begins to cohere: ances tral memories, magic, the
spmtus
mundi,
the summoning of a race to become a nation, the practice of an
antinomian politics as cultural nationalism, the politics of difference, the
tragic theater. In the 1892 version of "To Ireland in the Conling Times"
Yeats clarified the propinquity of magic and cultural nationalism by claim–
ing ·for himself, by comparison with Davis, Mangan, and Ferguson, that
Editor's note:
" Ireland: Race, Nation, State" is an extended version of the 1998 Parnell
Memorial Lecture originally delivered at Magdalene College, Cambridge, on March
9. The first half of this article appeared in
Partisan Review's
Spring 1999 issue.
