Mixing Everything at the Beginning: Telling Stories about Empire in Yeats's On Baile’s Strand

Abstract

These are the words of a fool spoken to a blind man: the men are bound together by necessity and mutual distrust, one needing wisdom, the other sight, one lacking guidance, the other lacking passion. It is a story to be understood, mixed from the beginning, mingled in the telling, uncertain in the closing. In W.B. Yeats's On Baile's Strand, written for Ireland's National Theatre, drawn from Ireland's troubled past, and centering on the self-defeating passion of a legendary Irish hero, it is perhaps more than fitting that the Fool, with the insight of his Shakespearean namesake, should ask his eternal companion about beginnings and endings, narrating past and present, finally getting "the hang" of the story. For these are the questions of a colonized people whose sense of identity is inextricably bound with empire, whose history is not one tale but a tangle of multiple stories, silences, erasures, buried myths of heroism and tragic defeat, a people who, digging into the past for some artifact of an original, distinct Ireland, discover that, in the words of Seamus Heaney, "Every layer they strip / Seems camped on before"