비남근적 욕망으로서 노년의 몸: 예이츠의 경우

Abstract

Yeats was a poet preoccupied all his life with love almost to the degree of obsession, though his experiences and poetic expressions of love underwent radical transformations. In his hot youth, he was rather puritanical, idealizing love beyond any possible range of gratification. But as he grew older, he began to indulge in unrestrained love relations, even calling himself "a wild old wicked man," or "a foolish passionate man." His love life shows a chiasmatic structure: the young poet lived like an old man, and the old poet lived like a young man. This paper argues that such a transformation coincides with the changed status of his sexual desire from phallic to non-phallic. Phallic desire, under whose influence he had lived his youth, is signified as aggressive (like weapon), thus in need of self-control and repression. A Steinach operation, which he received in April 1934, became the occasion for him to be released from such a phallic hold. As is well known, his Steinach operation was both successful and unsuccessful ambiguously. His rejuvenation by the operation was psychological, not physical or biological, which means that phallus is not a unified whole, but one split into two halves: the psychological and the physical. Yeats' sexual desire was now located in the new terrain of the first half of the two, the desire divested of the physical expenditure of the male body buttressed by the penile erection. Such a sexual desire is receptive and non-phallic and is beyond the dual economy of maleness and femaleness, verging on lesbianism. It is on such a ground that he could affirm his sexual desires without constraint in his later life, as can be seen in poems like "A dialogue of self and soul" and "Crazy Jane and Bishop." His late love poems are not only celebrations of non-phallic love, but also a revelation that repressive phallic desire--which patricentric culture imposed on its members including young Yeats--was a myth well lost. He came to realize that there had never been a phallus for him to lose, thus, nothing to lament for its loss, for it existed only in his cultural fantasy. He had to be liberated away from the phallic fantasy in order to enjoy the real of sexual desire.