Magical Nationalism, Lyric Poetry and the Marvellous: W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney

Summary

If the ‘literary fantastic’, in Tzetvan Todorov's terms, is applicable to fictional narratives only, not to poetry, in what ways can we approach the use of marvellous and fantastic elements in poetry so as to make sense of their aesthetic and ideological functions? I focus on what Todorov might call the ‘marvellous’ in Irish legendary narratives, with particular emphasis on how one modern poet, W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) and one contemporary poet, Seamus Heaney, have adapted traditional materials for their own lyric purposes. I will argue that lyric poems using fantastic elements, shaped from indigenous folklore narratives, have the power to convey counter-cultural values and counter-imperialist descriptions of experience. In so doing, I probe the special features that are intrinsic to the lyric form that allow it to use fantastic elements productively, and consider the effects achieved when fantastic elements are borrowed from narrative and adapted to lyric poetry.

Todorov and the Fantastic

For Todorov, the ‘literary fantastic’ occurs in the hesitation between deciding whether a series of apparently miraculous, supernatural events narrated in fiction are indeed supernatural or rationally explicable, and within the rules of natural law – ‘Does it transcend the laws of Nature as we know them?’ (Todorov, p. 28). This experience of uncertainty or hesitation defines the literary fantastic:

Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really exists, precisely like other living beings – with this reservation, that we encounter him infrequently.

The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. (Todorov, p. 25)

That is, once a decision has been reached (by the character experiencing those events, or the reader, or both), then the events are described as ‘marvellous’ (supernatural), or ‘uncanny’ (merely a trick of the mind or of perception). Accordingly, the ‘fantastic’ dominates only a portion of the narrative and the reader's experience of it. It is temporary, unless the period of hesitation is prolonged for the duration of the narrative, as in some cases discussed by Neil Cornwell, such as The Turn of the Screw. In that case, the narrative may be described as purely ‘fantastic’.