Reviving and Revising Cuchulain: W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero

Abstract

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain:W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero Heather McCracken (bio) W.B. Yeats is perhaps more often remembered as a poet than a playwright, but his work in the theater was a central part of his artistic identity during his lifetime. The form, style, and accessibility of his plays varied over his career, but the theme was consistent: Irish mythology. The myths to which he frequently returned dealt with the Ulster cycle hero Cuchulain. In addition to several poems, Yeats wrote five plays addressing different episodes in the hero's life with the purpose of shaping Cuchulain as a new culture hero for Ireland. These play's—On Bailes Strand (1904), The Green Helmet (1910), At the Hawk's Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—are imaginative revisions promoting an Irish culture separate from that of England's, and they reflect the struggles of an author and a nation fighting for independence. Irish decolonization was not a simple, unitary effort, and Yeats believed that he could be a voice to guide the nation, whether the nation wanted his guidance or not. These struggles—defining Irish identity, moving toward independence, and Yeats's role in the formation of a postcolonial Ireland—are all on display in the Cuchulain plays. That Yeats wanted to create an Irish national identity from precolonial myths and legends is not a new discovery,1 but [End Page 147] his deliberate shaping of Cuchulain as an Irish culture hero warrants more exploration. My analysis provides a deeper reading of Yeats's plays by focusing on the shifting, uncertain relations between Yeats, Cuchulain, and postcolonial Ireland, where Cuchulain is a cultural "superhero" stand-in for Irish national identity and a metonymical representation of Yeats's political frustrations. Because Yeats authored his public identity in these plays in unique and complicated ways—raising questions about his role as an artist/citizen—examining Cuchulain as a culture hero and role model for the nation illuminates the personal and political struggles that Yeats faced as a postcolonial author. Postcolonial theorists have suggested that culture heroes such as Cuchulain function as significant metonymic figures for colonized nations struggling for a sense of identity. In Calibrations, Ato Quayson explains how culture heroes contribute to national identities as an invaluable part of cultural decolonization. "How," Quayson asks, "do we isolate a particular social, cultural, or political phenomenon for analysis while retaining a view of its relationship to complex and contradictory historical processes that allow it to be perceived as an object or objective field in the first place?" (31). His solution centers on the culture hero. Quayson defines the trope of cultural heroism as a "mode of characterization of agency." whose typology involves some of the heroic associations of priests, traditional rulers, medicine men, hunters, politicians, and even thieves and popular rogues" (36). In other words, a culture hero emerges as a socially recognizable figure capable of exhibiting some degree of agency. In the case of a colonized nation, Quayson explains that the native population looks to these culture heroes as models for the formation of an anticolonial national identity because culture heroism "is a threshold that reveals important structural ideas about the nation-state form" (33). I believe it is important to attend to this threshold by examining heroic characterizations of agency for Irish decolonization efforts. As Quayson notes, culture heroism "provides a peculiar intersection of the discourses of literature, politics and civil society" (Postcolonialism 76). Examining culture heroes such as Cuchulain in Ireland—a nation with a well-documented unique relationship between art and politics—can help to shape an understanding of the kinds of anticolonial resistance narratives used by the Irish and to expand our understanding of postcolonial culture heroes generally. Although Quayson drew his examples of culture heroes from [End Page 148] what he called "the everyday genres" of West Africa, I believe that this critical apparatus has great value in colonial settings like Ireland because of the shared concern with shaping a national identity. Understanding the image of the culture hero metonymically, we can see that this figure would serve as a valuable...