In discussing “Yeats and Decolonization” in Culture
and Imperialism, Edward Said writes: “His greatest theme, in the poetry
that culminates in The Tower (1928), is how to reconcile the inevitable
violence of the colonial conflict with the everyday politics of ongoing
national struggle” (Said 235). Although
Yeats has been considered, as Said asserts, “the indisputably great national
poet who during a period of anti-imperialist resistance articulates the
experiences, the aspirations and the restorative vision of a people suffering
under the domination of an offshore power” (Said 220), Yeats is seldom
portrayed or referenced in contemporary fiction, let alone detective fiction,
as a major influence on narratives. Despite the publication in 2002 of the
provocatively titled collective work Yeats is Dead (Vintage, 2002) in
which fifteen Irish novelists including Roddy Doyle and Gene Kerrigan each
contributed a chapter to a mystery novel
about a missing Joyce manuscript, it is really with Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s
overlooked novel The Habit of Fear (Scribners, 1987) that Yeats is used most
potently as a political as well as literary figure in keeping with Said’s
notion of him as a writer immersed in Irish “literary nationalism” (Said 236).
Indeed, as Davis’s title suggests, The Habit of
Fear is steeped in direct references to Yeats. The plot centres around the
search, in Ireland, of a New York reporter, Julie Hayes, who had just been
brutally raped by two Irishmen in New York, for her father, a nationalist poet
who abandoned her at birth. Yet, as soon as she is on Irish soil, Hayes becomes
embroiled in the conflicts of a series of ultra nationalist Irish organizations
including the Sin Fein, the “Provos” and the ONI (One Nation Indivisible). As
she tracks down the traces of her father, she discovers that his code name was
Aengus as she reads and quotes from the poem “The Song of the Wandering
Aengus”: “The golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon” (Davis
129). At one point, she visits Yeats’s grave in Sligo and tries to decode his
enigmatic epitaph “Cast a cold eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by” (Davis
182); she listens to a local rock group called the Wolfe Tones in echo of
Yeats’ “Sixteen Dead Men” in which he writes “How could you dream they’d listen
/ That have an ear alone / For those new comrades they have found, / Lord
Edward and Wolfe Tone,” and visits a monument to the fallen of the 1799
insurrection at Wicklow.
This paper will examine the numerous intertexts
between Davis’s The Habit of Fear and Yeats’ more political poems in
order to understand how Davis uses Yeats not only as a figurehead for the
confused nationalist agendas of the political groups she writes about in
Ireland but as the key to her protagonist Julie Haye’s personal quest for her
own sense of identity as well.
Prof. Peter Schulman is affiliated to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Old Dominion University, Virginia, United States of America. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (Purdue University Press, 2003) as well as Le dernier livre du siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has edited a critical edition of Jules Verne's The Begum’s Millions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and recently translated Jules Verne's last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (University of Nebraska Press. 2012) as well as Suburban Beauty from poet Jacques Reda (VVV editions, 2009) and Adamah from Céline Zins (Gival Press, 2010). He is currently co-editor in chief of a new journal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities and is at work on a book on French filmmaker Alain Resnais for the University of Mississippi Press. He may be contacted at pschulma@odu.edu.
Prof. Peter Schulman is affiliated to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Old Dominion University, Virginia, United States of America. He is the author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern Eccentric (Purdue University Press, 2003) as well as Le dernier livre du siècle (Romillat, 2001) with Mischa Zabotin. He has edited a critical edition of Jules Verne's The Begum’s Millions (Wesleyan University Press, 2005) and recently translated Jules Verne's last novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz (University of Nebraska Press. 2012) as well as Suburban Beauty from poet Jacques Reda (VVV editions, 2009) and Adamah from Céline Zins (Gival Press, 2010). He is currently co-editor in chief of a new journal of eco-criticism, Green Humanities and is at work on a book on French filmmaker Alain Resnais for the University of Mississippi Press. He may be contacted at pschulma@odu.edu.