Phantasms as Signposts of the Invisible: Yeats’s Mask Theory Revisited

Abstract

Yeats often stresses the vital importance of the “unique” image which helps a person to sieve “unmeaning circumstance” from one’s real passions. As the poet’s definition of this “life-long, secret image” surprisingly fits Agamben’s study of the phantasm this article explores how this psychological phenomenon functions in the poet’s writings. Starting from Lacan’s idea that the so-called individual is an interaction between the unconscious Other, the split or social self, others (persons and objects in one’s life) and the inner self this contribution analyses ten key poems in which the phantasm forms a bridging role between inner and outer worlds, between the visible and the invisible aspects of the body. A special form of phantasm is the body image in which Paul Schilder situates libidinal communications, which in turn are picked up in Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “the flesh”. As many poems are set in a schooling context, Yeats shows that secret personal conflicts can be simultaneously studied and sung.