The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-century Spiritualism and the Occult by Kontou Tatiana. Willburn Sarah A. & Sarah Willburn

Author:Kontou, Tatiana.,Willburn, Sarah A. & Sarah Willburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2012-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion and/as Premise

‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’ returns at its end to the imagery of the Treasure House of its beginning. In this final synchronic act, the poem’s ending becomes a portal for its beginning; and yet both beginning and ending retain their temporal positions. The synchronic does not occlude the diachronic. The resulting paradox is not exclusively of the occult, however. In this chapter, I argue for tangible connections, interdependencies, between seemingly incommensurable parts: the poem’s poetics, the mysticism and structure of the Nights, Ireland and the Arab world, Irish Orientalism and the Shahrazadian role of the medium. These parts exist side-by-side and in combination, isolated and interdependent. In conclusion, I gesture to the premise in which I make these claims, and reclaim the same in the conclusion, the differential lying in the body of the chapter. ‘The literary text’, Kontou explains, ‘can therefore be understood as a materialized spirit – an embodied entity summoned from the netherworld, living and dead at the same time.’54

1 I use the term ‘Oriental’ as derived from Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ to refer to the historical and ideological processes that manufacture images and myths about the East.

2 See Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats (Oxford, 2006). Harper states that, beginning ‘in 1920, the various methods of reception underwent a major change, as WBY recorded in a notebook, under the heading “New Method”: “George speaks while asleap [sic.]”’ (p. 8).

3 Ibid., pp. 4–5.

4 Sarah A. Willburn, Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings (Aldershot, 2006), p. 1.

5 Warwick Gould quoted by Neil Mann, ‘From Qusta ibn Luqa to Kusta ben Luka’, at www.yeatsvision.com (accessed 25 May 2010).

6 Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-Victorian (New York, 2009), p. 3.

7 W.B. Yeats, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, in The Poems: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York, 1983), pp. 443–50, p. 445. Subsequent line references will be given in parentheses.

8 Margaret Mills Harper, ‘Nemo: George Yeats and Her Automatic Script’, New Literary History, 33 (2002): 291–314, pp. 303–4.

9 Mann, ‘From Qusta ibn Luqa to Kusta ben Luka’. Mann explains Gould’s position and quotes Gould.

10 Richard F. Burton, The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights (New York, 2001), p. 7.

11 Ibid., p. 4.

12 In Heart of Darkness, Marlow narrates: ‘But suddenly as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage’ (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York, 2005), p. 35).

13 Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (New York, 1992), p. 8.

14 Ibid. I chose Husain Haddawy’s 1990 translation as a counterpoint to Burton’s version, because, as Robert Irwin states, it ‘is both accurate and a pleasure to read … Haddawy’s translation cannot be too highly recommended’ (Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 2005), p.

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