11 - Transnational necromancy: W. B. Yeats, Izumi Kyôka and neo-nô as occultic stagecraft

Summary

W. B. Yeats's lifelong involvement in the occult – which entailed an enthusiasm of both the experiential and scholarly kinds – has been an item of embarrassment and bewilderment for his many critics. How could one of the twentieth century's most prominent and influential poets also be so continuously interested in such practices as séances, automatic writing, ritual initiation and necromancy? Whatever one's judgement of his esoteric interests might be, Yeats provides a definitive paradigm as to how poetics and occult speculation coincided in producing new stylistics in the modern period. Leon Surette has most vigorously argued the importance of this convergence in the development of literary modernism. In his view, the inception of modern literary praxis depended to a large extent on forms of an occult revival as the “birth of modernism” (Surette 1994: 36). His broad argument asserts the following: “although occultism is marginal to aesthetic culture”, its overall role in modernism was to extract “esoteric meanings hidden or occluded beneath an exoteric surface” (ibid.: 11, 27). In restoring a sense of occultism – contentious term though it may be – as an inquiry worthy of scholarly attention, Surette highlights how it acted as an alternative hermeneutics for interpreting forms of historical continuity, as a problem of institutional narratives and falsified collective memory.