Abstract
In Yeats’s only dramatic epistle, “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid” (1923; VP, pp. 460–70) the philosopher Kusta Ben Luka describes his bride’s fascination with his manuscripts; “I saw her stare,” he writes to Abd Al-Rabban,
On old dry writing in a learned tongue
On old dry faggots that could never please
The extravagance of spring; or move a hand
As if that writing or the figured page
Were some dear cheek. (ll. 122–7)
The “figured page” is a pun, replacing “pictured” in Yeats’s drafts.1 It implies more than the literal, “external marks” which Plato’s king considered a barrier rather than a mnemonic aid to understanding (Phaedrus, 274E–275A). It presents inscription as a “figure” or “type” of some unwritten signatum a meaning or truth which the writing cannot comprehend but which cannot be apprehended at all without recourse to writing; it thus invokes the dialectic between speech and writing, initially grounded in a logocentric metaphysics, which has prevailed in Western thought. But the “figure” is also a metonym of the writer, whether Kusta or another, who, while distinct from his text, is nevertheless represented by it; against “time’s disfiguring touch” (l. 110), the phrase poses the familiar Yeatsian antimony between the “perfection of the work” and the “wreck of body” its producer suffers (“The Choice”; “The Tower,” III). As past participle, “figured” implies that the bride has “figured out” (solved) the figural relation between the writer and the writing to see them as identical; embodies the indirect sociality of written discourse, the implicit interchange of persons which writing entails.
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Notes
Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: W. B. Yeats’s Poetry in the Making ( Oxford: Clârendon, 1963 ) p. 82.
John Stuart Mill, “Carlyle’s French Revolution,” in J. B. Schneewind (ed.), Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society ( New York: Collier, 1965 ) p. 190.
George Eliot, “Introduction to Genesis,” in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1963 ) p. 258.
William James, William James on Psychical Research, comp. and eds Gardner Murphy and Robert O. Ballou ( New York: Viking, 1960 ) p. 27;
James H. Hyslop, Life After Death: Problems of the Future Life and Its Nature (New York: Dutton, 1918) pp. 74, 80, 88, 87. For Yeats’s familiarity with Hyslop’s work, see Harper (ed.), Yeats and the Occult, pp. 142, 149.
Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture (1915;London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973) pp. 30–1; James, p. 27;
C. D. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research [The Perrott Lectures] (New York: Humanities Press, 1962) p. 253; Gauld, pp. 18n1, 76–7.
W. B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936) p. ix; see also Au p. 267.
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© 1982 Richard J. Finneran
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Harris, D.A. (1982). The “Figured Page”: Dramatic Epistle in Browning and Yeats. In: Finneran, R.J. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 1. Macmillan Literary Annuals S.. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05324-7_6
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