Aesthetic Experience, Religion, and Economic Materialism in Yeats

Abstract

The main argument in the previous chapters was that for James Joyce and W. B. Yeats the creative process is a form of aesthetic experience of self-recreation which is simultaneously a form of labour, a form of political experience, and a form of religious experience. New identities unfold from an epiphanic experience triggered through the invocation of the powers of art to reveal what is there to be seen in one’s relations to the world that can only be conceived in aesthetic language. There occurs a transubstantiation of the mundane self through this epiphany, achieved in the coalescence of the social self and the aesthetic self glimpsed in poetic vision or felt in ‘the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea’ (Joyce, 1965, p. 233). In practical terms, this transubstantiation triggers a transformation of the highly personal aesthetic experience into social attitudes. A specific aesthetic experience lived in a state of mind manifesting faith, belief, and enthusiasm in Yeats’s case, or faithlessness, disbelief/unbelief, and irony in Joyce’s case, informs one’s specific position in relation to the social, material world.