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"Yeats, W. B. 1865-1939 Manuscripts."
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Conversion and the Idea of the Secret
Obsessed with the notion of the secret in his writings on religion, Jacques Derrida uncannily evokes a predecessor with whom he has rarely, if at all, been compared—the Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. This essay argues that Blavatsky’s occult writings set the stage for the kinds of speculations on crypto-conversion, conscience, and responsibility that subsequently engaged Derrida. Like Blavatsky, Derrida saw conversion not as change but as retaining whatever it displaces in the form of a secret, persisting as an enduring reminder of supplanted religious beliefs. While Derrida was more interested in conversion as a form of repression that mutually constitutes the old and the new, Blavatsky held a broader and more dynamic view of conversion-as-repression: in describing Christianity’s battle against the heterogeneous belief-systems it eventually supplanted, she sought to illuminate conversion as a larger process well beyond the individual and involving religious expansion and consolidation. The essay culminates in a close reading of an occult text, W. B. Yeats’s “The Manuscript of ‘Leo Africanus,’” that exemplifies the problematics of crypto-conversion as delineated by Blavatsky and Derrida in their respective ways. “Leo Africanus” stages Yeats’s encounter with a dead spirit alternatively grasped as his anti-self and historical conscience. A breakthrough in understanding allows Yeats to acknowledge an occluded history—his as much as that of his deceased interlocutor—that can only be told in the terms of crypto-conversion, in this instance of a sixteenth-century African slave forcibly converted to Christianity and turned into a native informant of African history and geography.
Journal Article
At the hawk's well ; and, The cat and the moon : manuscript materials
\"Both At the Hawk's Well (1917) and The Cat and the Moon (1924) dramatize their characters' journeys of the soul to sacred wells. In At the Hawk's Well, the characters believe the miraculous well is a source of eternal life, but neither benefits from it. The play portrays the failure of its hero's quest in the Irish heroic age and makes clear W. B. Yeats's own preoccupation with aging, marriage, and perhaps waning inspiration. In The Cat and the Moon, the characters again put their faith in a sacred well and the saint who guards it, and both are rewarded with miracles: it is a parodic repetition of the earlier play but with a happy ending. The characters are satirical portraits of actual people, yet they are subject to the lunar cycles of personal and historical change.\" \"The Cornell Yeats edition of these two plays presents photographs and transcriptions of the typescripts that the author prepared and revised, along with images of Lennox Robinson's musical settings for the songs in the 1931 performances of The Cat and the Moon. Andrew Parkin prefaces the texts with a census of manuscripts, an introduction discussing the content of the plays, the history of their composition and performance, and a chronology of their composition. In both plays, Yeats drew on the conventions of Noh theater, and he suggested that they be performed in a single evening (along with The Dreaming of the Bones).\"--BOOK JACKET.
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