ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will provide a close reading of W.B. Yeats’s A Vision. I will argue that it has tended to be misunderstood and requires a new critical approach. The work has been read either as a failure in Romantic vision, a manifestation of fascism, or a product of Yeats’s divided Anglo-Irish inheritance. A tendency to understand the work as a system of belief rather than a constructed text has compounded misreadings. Hazard Adams, in his excellent The Book of Yeats’s Vision,2 has offered the type of approach, sensitive to the literary mode of the work, which I would endorse. However, this way of reading A Vision must be wedded to an awareness of its political meanings – its status as a specifically ‘Irish heresy’ – which I will attempt to decode through the version of the concept of minor literature outlined in the first section. I will look in particular at the significance of changes to the text between the 1925 and 1937 editions, frequently ignored by critics, which radically change the tone of the work: in an act of Vichian translation, the earlier edition, which perhaps still hopes to engender a ‘terrible beauty’, is transformed into something far more ironic. The work has much in common with a good deal of Irish writing, which tends to share its mocking tenor and its comic play with self-referential paradoxes. Additionally, it appears that a shift in the cultural meaning of the occult in postmodernism reveals A Vision to be a much less eccentric text than has been thought. The work also appears to be a blueprint for a certain type of historical consciousness, developing out of the experience of nationalism, which it shares with the later works of Joyce. A Vision reveals the ways in which idealism, cyclical history and the Hermetic tradition can be put to use in a postcolonial setting.
