Louis MacNeice and the Writing of the Mind

• Main Author: Jones, Alexander David
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Trinity College Dublin. School of English. Discipline of English 1480
• Subjects: Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Poetry; Louis MacNeice; Radio drama; Modernism; Philosophy of mind; Iceland
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2262/96614; https://tcdlocalportal.tcd.ie/pls/EnterApex/f?p=800:71:0::::P71_USERNAME:JONESA5

APPROVED This thesis explores the influence of psychology and philosophy of mind on the writing of Louis MacNeice. This challenges current thinking on MacNeice s treatment of selfhood and consciousness, which has previously been read in metaphysical terms. Textual and archival evidence demonstrates the extent to which MacNeice was engaged, both directly and indirectly, with psychological theories and contemporaneous debates about the relationship between the mind, the self, and the other. Over the course of four main chapters, each dealing with a separate psychological theme or concept, the thesis seeks to reorient MacNeice as a writer of the mind by positing psychology as an intervening frame of knowledge that mediates between his philosophical education and his experience of the world. In so doing, this research expands the current critical view of the networks, discourses, and intellectual milieus that MacNeice was connected to. Resultantly, it is argued that MacNeice s psychological poetics offer a means by which our understanding of his relationship to modernism more generally can be deepened. The introduction establishes the aims of the thesis and its place in current critical discussions. It is noted that MacNeice demonstrated an ambivalent attitude towards psychology throughout his writing, and so the thesis aims to explore how psychology clashed with different ways of understanding the mind to build up an individual, distinctly MacNeicean, set of ideas about the mind. The first chapter is themed around irrationality. It begins by looking at MacNeice s juvenile collection of poetry, Blind Fireworks (1927), in the context of contemporaneous debates about the role of British classics education in moulding the rational subject. His writing evidences an irrational counter-strain to this thinking, which goes on to influence his translation of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1936). Archive evidence demonstrates that MacNeice s later translation of Goethe s Faust (1951) was influenced by his reading of Jung in the thirties. This leads to a discussion of the radio as a young broadcast medium that relied on psychological discourses for its own self-understanding. As a result, The Dark Tower (1946) and the unpublished play The Careerist (1946), are given novel readings that take advantage of this context. The chapter closes by considering how the development of parable in these plays informs the lyric parables of MacNeice s later career. The second chapter examines the garden and the sea in MacNeice s poetry, which are described in Experiences with Images (1949) as being among those images he is likely to use instinctively . It is argued that instinct in this case is being used by MacNeice to circumscribe a set of poetic significances tied to childhood and the unknown self. This means that the garden and the sea can be read as indicators of unconscious activity within the poetry, which in turn challenges existing readings of both images in purely metaphysical terms. Each image is examined in turn, and then a final section briefly looks at the importance of instinct to the later parable poetry. The third chapter examines the psychology of spatiality in MacNeice s poetry. It begins by looking at how MacNeice contests psychology with Aristotelean teleology in his thirties work that examines the spatial navigation of Birmingham, Iceland and the Hebrides. The lesser-examined work Zoo is argued to bear similarities with Freud s Civilization and its Discontents, which reflects on the depiction of the individual and the anxious pre-war crowd in Autumn Journal. The pre-war travel sequence The Coming of War is seen to combine discourses of travel literature with war anxiety. Finally, the chapter examines MacNeice s poetry of Blitz London in the context of the crosscurrents of psychological discourses during wartime. Throughout, the chapter argues that different frames of knowledge root MacNeice s exploration of self and society in the mind. The final chapter uses Jean-Michel Rabaté s concept of haunted modernity to examine the mental workings of time, memory and haunting in MacNeice s post-war poetry. It will be demonstrated that MacNeice is positioned at the end of a discourse about time and the mind that stretches back to Henri Bergson s durée, and that the rupture in his work between the past and present creates a haunted poetics. Sections examining Holes in the Sky (1948), Ten Burnt Offerings (1952), Autumn Sequel (1954), and Solstices (1961), will read the temporal breaks of the poetry in the contexts of British declinism, MacNeice s radio work and idealist philosophy. It is argued that, over the course of these collections, MacNeice evolves a series of ideas about the community of the mind that allows him to cope with being haunted by deceased friends and his own loosening grasp on a cohesive sense of self. The chapter ends by looking at his attempts to form a communal self out of his memories of the war. A concluding coda briefly summarises the original contribution of the thesis, stating that the thesis contributes to an understanding of MacNeice s place in his intellectual milieu and modernism more widely.