Please join us for a discussion of U-M English PhD candidate Asa Chen Zhang's dissertation chapter, "'Not Once but Many Times': Noh and Tragedy in W. B. Yeats’s Purgatory." You can sign up to receive the chapter and RSVP for the workshop here: https://forms.gle/As9gacqBmpwYk8fx6.


Abstract:
Turning from the celebrated beginning of Yeats’s engagement with Japanese theatre
in 1916 to the overlooked final phase of this transnational relationship, this chapter takes
up the shackled presence of Noh’s crazed female specter archetype (“kyōjo mono”) in
Yeats’s penultimate verse play, Purgatory (1938). Serving as both a supernatural catalyst
for Yeats’s valorization of the tragic sublime and a convenient site of suppression as an
embodiment of the Victorian melodramatic heroine, this Noh specter displays an
untamable multiplicity within Yeats’s attempt to harness her generic, transnational, and
mystical resonances in the Purgatory manuscripts and the significantly revised 1937
version of A Vision. Rather than “die into the labyrinth of itself,” this figure, enmeshed in the poet’s ambivalent later affinity with Nietzsche, becomes a subversive manifestation of
Yeats’s own unease with the eugenic and totalitarian underpinnings of his final discourse
on tragedy as revealed in the play’s posthumous companion pamphlet, On the Boiler
(1939). In lieu of the direct replication of Noh’s formal elements in Yeats’s earlier Celtic
heroic plays, the case of Purgatory instances a minor type of “modernist orientalism”—and a less theorized phenomenon of transnationalism at large—where an imported element, no longer visibly foreign, becomes remarkably constitutive of the ideological anxiety of the hosting text.