The Paradoxes of Cynicism

Before reverting to the literary analysis later in the article, I begin with some reflections on the shifting meanings of cynicism, modern and ancient, and specifically its relation to suffering, the theme of this special issue. On the one hand, the cynical attitude seems distant from suffering understood as pain, grief, passion, or intensity of emotion. Indeed, cynicism manifests as weak affect. Cynics may be disillusioned but not crushed, or perhaps not in pain because they have proleptically dispensed with the possibility of disappointment. There are many differences between the common sense of cynicism as used today and its classical origins, the philosophical school associated with Antisthenes, Diogenes, and Crates, but both adopt a stance of knowing refusal. Both share what could be characterized as attitudinal prophylaxis. Ancient cynics dispense with things, modern cynics with hopes. In both cases, they protect themselves from disappointment by expecting the worst: or perhaps more precisely they define themselves as knowing, undeluded, and unduped. Why leave oneself open to loss and disappointment by nurturing delusory hopes or depending on unnecessary frippery? The 1647 painting by Nicolas Poussin, “Landscape with Diogenes,” held in the Louvre, depicts the famous story whereby the famous Cynic throws away his last remaining possession, his drinking cup, when he sees a boy drinking from a stream by cupping his hands. For the ancient Cynics, precursors to the Stoics as they were, reliance on material objects for satisfaction renders one vulnerable to their loss. A better way to live is to forsake them as much as possible and live as close to nature as you can. Freedom, and indeed ethical living, means dispensing with luxury. Nature, for Diogenes, provides enough for one’s needs and, conversely, what is natural cannot be shameful or indecent. Hence Diogenes and his fellows, like many a modern cynic, relished violating conventions and scandalizing public propriety, all in the name of stripping away the deluded niceties of social norms with no basis in reason or nature. The cynics ate in the temple and defecated in the street. Diogenes dressed in rags prompting his nickname the “Dog.” (Dogs are often associated with Greek Cynics, though in some ways the modern connotation might be more cat like—self-interested, manipulative, knowing but indifferent.)Footnote ⁷

The ancient Cynic does without wealth in order to be free, but the modern cynic, sardonic, selfish, urban, and urbane, is hardly famous for forsaking like’s luxuries. But they do share with this Hellenic predecessor the self-image of the clear-eyed truth-teller, the exposer of hypocrisy, the debunker of cant. We can recognize some of Diogenes’s uninhibited and unintimidated urge to illuminate in modern cynicism, which adopts Diogenes’s ethos of puncturing pretension and scorning status. But with the modern cynic’s scepticism comes shrewdness not courage; they may be street wise, but not as often Greek wise. The cynic has low expectations of human behavior, distrusts rhetoric, disbelieves promises, expects the worst, and adopting an image as nobody’s fool, takes pride in that identification. Modern cynicism often deploys modes of irony and the nonliteral, which is one reason why cynical attitudinizing often buttresses modern satire and comedy of darker shades, in a tradition that can be traced back to Diogenes’s disciple, Menippus of Gadara, the founder of Menippean satire, and, after cynical ideas migrated to the Roman Empire, in the Assyrian-Roman second-century ironist Lucian of Samosata, whose voluminous writings ridicule hypocrisy, pretension, and superstition. This humor that delights not only in exposing a double-standard, but in playing with taboo and transgression. But cynical satire is also a mode of self-protection, an attitudinal response to disappointment or even trauma. Freud’s observation about the analgesic effect of humor applies particularly to the cynical mode. “The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.”Footnote ⁸ Tragedy, comedy, and cynicism all emerge from the distance between the imagined or idealized world and a recalcitrant reality and the pain that results from that schism between fact and value. All are attempts to textualize that falling short through incongruity, anomaly, or tragic conflict.

By virtue of its analytical cast of mind, cynicism takes a posture of distance. It tends toward the temporally totalizing, which may be one of its attractions. I mean that, of its nature, cynicism brings the past to bear on the present and future. Its investment in seeing the whole dismal picture creates a narrative totality: the cynic applies the lessons of the past to the future, and thereby avoids false hope. This tendency toward an integrated or deterministic prejudice, which tends to see the future inevitably reproducing the failing of the past, might tend the cynic toward conservative politics, which is perhaps one reason why postcolonial theory has fought shy of extensive discussion of the abundance of cynical satire in postcolonial writing. The cynic will agree that the social conditions are awful but will tell you that your utopian plans will fail—because the system is rigged or because those in charge are always corrupt. While politically speaking it’s common to decry cynicism as the enemy of agency and aspiration, it has a crucial role in exposing the hypocrisies of the preachers or in checking political fanaticism. It thrives as a counter to the revolution, emerging when idealistic movements run aground or when authoritarian regimes insist on maintaining the veneer of fading zeal, the distance between noble goals and squalid reality. In some cases, it enables adaptive, if disillusioned, participation in a compromised polity.

The chafing against inherited institutions, the doubting of conventional authority, the individuality, the faith in reason, it is little wonder that so many Enlightenment figures looked back admiringly at the ancient Cynics. It’s clear in a text like Voltaire’s Candide (1759) how idealism and cynicism, trust in progress and the suspicion of Panglossian cheeriness, are braided in Enlightenment thinking. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s preference for thought over custom, nature over artifice, earned him notoriety as a “modern Diogenes.” One feature of cynicism is that, like critique, it has a tendency to turn on itself. It emerges from the attitudinal scepticism of modernity.Footnote ⁹ Yet it was also during the Enlightenment when cynicism started to accrue some of its pejorative connotations. Even in classical times, cynics could be mocked, as well as be the source of mockery, especially when imitators started to form countercultural groups. It was Lucian who turned cynicism back on itself, making fun of the earnestness and moralism of the movement. His dialogue on Peregrinus Proteus mocks a hypocritical cynic, who in an act of faux supreme renunciation, announces his own suicide expecting to be restrained from going through with it, but is then forced to burn himself at the 165 CE Olympic Games in order to save face.Footnote ¹⁰

Cynicism can turn its withering gaze onto the cynical mode itself, especially since cynicism for all its nay-saying and ostensible heterodoxy has a tendency to congeal into modes of counter-establishment conformity. By Lucian’s time, the cloak and staff of the self-identifying cynic had become a uniform as much as the long hair and hippy beads of later refuseniks. Dropping out is often also and contrapuntally dropping in. Cynicism begins with an attempt to avoid conformity and inherited authority, but often thereby depends on that same authority by defining itself in oppositional terms. The cynic, like the countercultural urbanite, often relies on that orthodoxy in order to be dissensual. This is why, perhaps, we imagine Cynics living on the edge of the city rather than in the desert like anchorites: they depend on that which they renounce. Lauren Berlant writes, in Cruel Optimism:

There is perhaps a “kind pessimism” to the cynical attempts to forestall or short circuit the disappointments they claim are inevitable. It also indicates just how implicated and immersed the cynic is from the political formations they seek to repudiate.

There is, then, a contradictory braid in cynicism and not just that which marks out ancient and modern. It is within the connotations of the word itself and is evident in a taxonomy of its meanings. One facet is highly moral, critical of hypocrisy and the distance between words and actions. Another aspect is venal, evasive, self-interested, spurning standards altogether. There is ascetic cynicism, exemplified by the Greeks, and a modern writer like Samuel Beckett, and there is amoral cynicism, which is deeply self-interested action that plays the system. We also have the cynicism of ennui, the too-knowing figure of Hamlet. Cynicism is often caught up in doubleness and paradox: between pain and satisfaction, realism and idealism, bravery and cowardice, antiestablishment and reliant on the establishment, realism and a scarcely obscured idealism. It is about a stern refusal to be deluded coupled with a suspicion with truth itself. It is radically individualist, but also rapidly becomes a group identity of dropouts or conspiracy theorists. It is undeluded and unmoved, but also rather smug and pleased with itself. We can see cynicism and idealism slot into each one another hand and glove in contemporary populist politics, with its suspicions of self-serving “elites” and “fake news” combined with fervid belief in a demagogic leader and faith that the swamp can indeed be drained.

In the humanities, there has been a surge of interest in cynicism since the early 1980s, especially concerning reflections on the perils and possibilities of modernity and critique. Many of these works argue that cynicism is more important to the emergence of modern modes of thought than has been generally acknowledged. Remarkably, two major philosophers, working independently, wrote works on cynicism in the early eighties: Peter Sloterdijk wrote his Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), and his French contemporary Michel Foucault, whose final 1983–1984 lectures on ancient Greek truth telling, or parrhesia, were published in English in two volumes, The Government of Self (2010) and The Courage of Truth (2011).Footnote ¹² Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting’s 1979 book on how Diogenes’s Kynismus devolved into modern Zynismus was a sizeable influence on both Sloterdijk and Foucault.Footnote ¹³ To these works we could add, in English, the monographs by Louisa Shea, and Sharon A. Stanley, which I have already mentioned, as well as a pioneering collection of essays by R. Brach Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, and books by Timothy Bewes, David Mazella, Arthur Rose, and others.Footnote ¹⁴

Sloterdijk’s book affords the most thoroughgoing analysis of the connection between cynicism and political disillusionment. He diagnoses a broad cynical malaise in the aftermath of the dashing of the revolutionary hopes of the 1960s. For Sloterdijk, cynicism is closely connected to the history of Enlightenment critique, the systemic doubt that pulls away delusion and superstition but also leads to disenchantment and disillusionment. Both critique and cynical reason are the cause of “soreness” and pain but also provide a means to endure and go on. A “diffuse cynicism” in his view characterizes the late twentieth century, when the possibility of political change seems itself exhausted. Modern cynicism for Sloterdijk is an attitudinal deadness. For Sloterdijk, we live in an age when political ideals have atrophied to the point of knowing uselessness. It is not just the failure of a particular project, but rather the belief that political action or reform is always doomed, though we must act as if it is possible. So the contemporary cynic deploys a spectral, empty hope, even though he knows it’s a chimera, a condition he dubs “enlightened false consciousness [emphasis his].”Footnote ¹⁵ Modern cynicism (Zynismus) betrays its origins in ancient Cynicism (Kynismus), by putting on a suit and tie, assuming an air of bourgeois respectability. To return to its satirical energies, it must break away from society, to stick its tongue out in the embodied and somatic refusals that he finds in Diogenes. Sloterdijk offers a rather sixties solution to a post-sixties phenomenon: a carnivalesque, bodily wisdom, based on spontaneity and rootedness, opposed to philosophical abstraction and bloodless rationalization.

Sloterdijk is much less sympathetic to Lucian, who he sees as pandering to the bourgeois cultural elite, “the paradigm of a new cynical tone of voice that intellectuals of more advanced times assume as their contempt is provoked.”Footnote ¹⁶ Yet it is the satirical elements of later cynicism. those deriving from culture rather than nature, that allows cynicism to turn on itself, to play with language and double meaning, to mock its own mockery. Cynicism starts out by demurring from an orthodoxy, but its own heterodox alternative can quickly calcify into a set of propositions every bit as fixed and certain. It is in this anticonformity conformism that cults are born. It is also where attitudinal cynicism congeals into complacency or superciliousness. Or indeed where, like Rousseau, a complete solitude becomes the only option. Recursive cynicism, cynicism about cynicism, acknowledges a lack of fixity and the precarity of the spurious totalities that cynicism needs—of self, time, and narrative. It reproduces the tendency for critique to cast a cold eye on its own presumptions. A metacynicism that discriminates between cynicisms, whose scepticism and doubt can double back, cracks open this sense of assuredness and stasis, showing up the limitations of rational analysis without abandoning it. It is this recursive cynicism I would like to trace now in some major texts of Irish modernism.

Gallous Stories, Dirty Deeds

Political cynicism, the gap between rhetoric and reality, between revolutionary goals and squalid outcomes, is often true for the experience of decolonization. It is certainly true for the Irish literary experience, which reflects mordantly on the way high ideals ended in fratricidal violence of a civil war, followed by a repressive and impoverished new state, marked by emigration and confessionalism. That Ireland had such close geographical and linguistic ties to the colonial center also meant that some of its writers had the option of sloughing off nationhood for an assumed urbanity and cosmopolitanism: many did so under the banner of universal modernism. Cynics, often literally in the tropology of postcolonial writing, show that great ideals have turned to shit, even as they negotiate the imperial discourse that associate a subject people with dirt and excrement.Footnote ¹⁷ Analyzing African fiction, Joshua Esty has argued that excrement functions not just as a naturalistic detail but as “a governing trope of postcolonial literature.”Footnote ¹⁸ Esty discerns scatological investments in both Soyinka and Armah and in the Irish modernists, specifically Joyce and Beckett. For Esty, the excremental vision complicates the colonized/colonizer boundaries that have dominated the field of postcolonial studies insofar as the scatological metaphors typically mock both the colonial aesthetic categories and the nationalist modes that are used to resist them.

Just as Armah and Soyinka express disillusionment about African independence, so Joyce and Beckett satirize the tired conventions of the Irish renaissance. If the excremental vision aligns with postcoloniality, we might note its equal kinship with cynicism, ancient and modern. Post-independence cynicism targets both sides—colonizer and colonizer—precisely because of its habitual stance of distance and affective detachment. Shit, the cynic shrugs, is never far away, however much we fancy ourselves as the stuff of angels. Another Irishman, Jonathan Swift, also liked to puncture high-minded ideals and respectable conventions with the brute facticity of human excrement. Even the loveliest ladies keep chamber pots as his “The Lady’s Dressing Room” satirically illustrates.

Cynics are sceptical of love, romance, anything noble, anything residually invested in idioms of the sacral: we are, they remind us, creatures of finitude, limitation, and waste, even as we aspire toward the elevated, the noble, and the grand. In his poem “Crazy Jane and the Bishop,” Yeats’s alter ego, the sexual and libidinous Crazy Jane, calls out the disingenuity and self-deceit of official piety. The bishop, seeing that Jane has aged, urges her to tame her wild ways and to live in “a heavenly mansion / Not in some foul sty”; Jane triumphantly proclaims the falsity of the binary:

Patriotic ideals as well as romantic ones are, for the cynic, tellingly close to the organs of excretion. What is discomfiting for romantic love is also so for romantic nationalism. In the Irish case, the nationalism that fueled both the cultural revival and the move for political independence fetishized an authentic, precolonial Irish identity that replicated the British idea of Irishness as primitive and colorful. The Irish modernists that followed defined themselves against these mystifications and sentimental obfuscations, debunking what Beckett called the “altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael.”Footnote ²⁰ There are few modern writers more searingly cynical than Beckett, and Irish cultural and political nationalism was a particularly rich target for his scorn. Notably, on several occasions he deploys an excremental vision to describe its idealism and mystifications, such as his short story “First Love” (1970):

The tone of this judgment is mordantly cynical, debunking nationalist veneration of historical narrative precisely by pulling its high ideals into the muck. For the narrator of Beckett’s story, the dereliction of independent Irish society, its population depleted by emigration, its sexual life policed by Catholic dogma, is counterpointed by the slavish veneration of nationalist history. Beckett has no more time for the cultural revival, excoriated in his famous manifesto “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), where he derides the “antiquarians” as “in flight from self awareness” in an essay replete with a tropology aligning the national imaginary with Irish peat bogs.Footnote ²²

Although part of the motive of so-figuring Irish national concerns is to disavow firmly any obligation to partake of the national allegory, to declare a modernist’s independence from local concerns, excremental satire also tends to turn toward itself. As Esty crucially argues, the key point of scatological aggression, missed by many accounts of political satire, is that it “carries a secret charge of self-implication.”Footnote ²³ Excrement may, like money, be that which flattens difference and creates sheer equivalence, but it is also charged with a certain infantile creativity, emergent from the body but also other, both subject and object. In that respect to present everything as having gone to shit also collapses the power of critique to effect change. The excremental vision of postcolonial despondency often marks a depletion of political and aesthetic energy, even as it presents itself as knowing and distant. In breaking down self and nonself, excrement also begins to turn cynical critique back on itself, having nothing else to target. In a similar fashion, the cynical observers of postcolonial revolution are implicated in those very failures they deride.

Money, again like excrement, is a great unifier. The father of Diogenes, Hicesius, was employed at a bank or a mint. The story goes that the young Diogenes was instructed by the oracle to deface the coinage, a crime for which he was banished from Sinope, eventually ending up in his famous barrel in the outskirts of Athens.Footnote ²⁴ The act of currency defacement is a powerful metaphor for cynicism’s relation to value: if money represents agreed upon price and the conventions of equivalence, the cynic refuses and refutes such systems. Money is based on shared belief, or “credit”; the cynic withholds their “credo” and thus disrupts the circulation of settled norms. Oscar Wilde’s famous definition of the cynic—a man who knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing”—could, from this perspective, be inverted. The cynic disorientates homo economicus, precisely by opening the gap between price and value. Or by challenging the convention that holds agreed value together.

So the cynic from this perspective reduces or resists the flattening pressure of exchange value. By contrast, however, the more pejorative modern sense of the cynic is in direct opposition to this challenge. Indeed, the modern cynic stands accused of reducing everything, including high ideals and tender love, to the basest equivalence: to money or to excrement. For the cynic, everything and everyone has a price, a price that must be prised from any high-faluting or moralistic notions of the good that are used to obscure it. There are many literary cynics in this vein, villainous wheedlers like Iago or Uriah Heap, who seek to exploit the idealism of others. One of the purist senses of modern cynicism is the denial of any notion of intrinsic good: all value is exchange value, and all is drearily reducible to the uniformity of hard currency. The Irish writer and journalist Flann O’Brien, writing in the socially and economically stagnant context of the Irish Free State, gives a satirical trope for this attitude in The Third Policeman (1939), where all the differentiated goods in the world can be reduced to “omnium.” A character in this novel expresses a nihilistic view of the good of life, precisely because he cannot convert it to self-interest and utility:

Flann O’Brien’s life and career emerged in an independent Ireland, which in contrast to the high ideals of the revolutionary period had calcified into the conservative and repressive pieties of the impoverished “free state,” stifled by confessional politics and censorship. As in many post-revolutionary societies, high ideals, corroded by bitter reality, breed cynical irony and satire.

The Irish modernist literary tradition, of which O’Brien is a distinguished late embodiment, emerged in tangled opposition to the fluorescence of cultural creativity, nationalist romance, and political ambition of the Irish revival. So marked by recognizable tropes and sentimental, twilight, volkisch aesthetic modes was the revival that one could claim the counter-revival was born almost simultaneously. Leading Anglo-Irish revivalists, such as J. M. Synge or W. B. Yeats, were themselves sceptical or cynical about aspects of that variegated cultural phenomenon, while there was no shortage of sneering by the so-called Irish-Islanders against what they perceived as the elitist opportunism of the ascendency eavesdroppers of the Abbey theater. Synge’s work in particular is based on disillusionment, disappointment, and a keen tragic sense of frustrated idealism, as witnessed for example in his most famous play, the tragicomic The Playboy of the Western World (1907). This play, adapted to 1950s Trinidad by Mustafa Matura, tells of a community starved of spiritual, emotional, and sexual stimulation that becomes enchanted by an outsider, Christy Mahon, with a story of having killed his father. When real, as opposed to reported, violence occurs on stage, the villagers turn on their erstwhile hero. Christy’s sweetheart, Pegeen Mike, ruefully declares “There’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.”Footnote ²⁶ It is this gap, between the ideal and the real, rhetoric and reality, where cynicism, ancient and modern, resides. It is a realization that carries the threat of pain, but calling it out, declaring it, cynically, as the way things are, proleptically neuters it.

The Irish counter-revival is in many ways energized by cynicism, by a critical and sceptical spirit against nationalist idealism that emerges in Synge’s plays and in those of a later playwright, Sean O’Casey. “A principle’s a principle,” declares Johnny Boyle, the physically and mentally crippled veteran of the War of Independence, in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1924), set during the Irish civil war. His long-suffering, pragmatic mother Juno remonstrates, “Ah, you lost your best principle, me boy, when you lost your arm; them’s the only sort o’ principles that’s any good to a workin’ man.”Footnote ²⁷ Both cultural and political nationalism were, in the Irish case, accompanied by disbelief and urbane mockery in Irish literature, not least because the Irish metropolitan writers were themselves caught up with aspirations and aesthetics often geared to a London market, not to mention the sectarian divisions within Irish literary life. The best of these cynical texts are often recursive, doubting both the piety and pretense of nationalist ideologues but also the liberal complacency that mocks them. In other words, they end up being cynical about their own cynicism, and thereby undercut the idea that any side has a monopoly on wisdom. James Joyce’s disdain for the revivalists’ provincial ethos is notorious and is evident in essays such as “The Day of the Rabblement” (1901). Yet this picture is greatly complicated by the tautly responsive depictions of revivalist debates and personalities in other works, both fiction and nonfiction. Episode 9 of Ulysses (1922), “Scylla and Charybdis,” has some ripe parodies of Lady Gregory’s and Synge’s Hiberno-English, but it also acknowledges an intellectual power to the literary movement that is beyond flowery-tongued peasant exoticism. The relationship of Joyce and Irish cultural and political nationalism and its colonial status has been the subject of much commentary and debate.Footnote ²⁸ But part of his strategy of silence, exile, and cunning is the deployment of provisional cynical modes, which nonetheless typically self-undercut, just as the assumed authority of the self-styled artistic insurgent Stephen Dedalus is always ambivalent and undercut by narrative irony.

In Dubliners (1914) Joyce sets out his fictional career seeking to expose the foibles and hypocrisies of his native city, caught as it is in paralysis both religious and imperial. It eschews the detailed interest in excretion and bodily waste of Ulysses (1922), which the earlier collection carries with it; he tells his publisher, “the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal.”Footnote ²⁹ The concluding story, “The Dead,” deals ambivalently with the whole question of nationalism and identity. Gabriel Conroy is dismissive of the nationalist Molly Ivors, who chides him for writing for the Daily Express and for holidaying on the continent, rather than in the west of Ireland. Gabriel, embarrassed by her description of him as a “West Briton,” is scornful of her shrill patriotism. “O to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it.”Footnote ³⁰ But by the end of the story, his cosmopolitan cynicism has been replaced by humility and expansiveness. His imagination does indeed move westward, toward Connemara, and downward, toward the dead. He moves against his own certainties, toward a recognition if not of Miss Ivors’s national pieties, at least toward the occluded lives and passions of his snowclad country.

Another example of a cynicism that turns flat in a famous Irish text is Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916,” which begins with the protestant poet remembering his encounters with the mostly Catholic and declassé intellectuals and writers who would lead the future Irish rebellion. They come from the “counter and desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses” of Dublin; he passes with “a nod of the head” or exchanges “polite meaningless words.”Footnote ³¹ But later will amuse his friends at an exclusive gentlemen’s club with stories, deriding these middle-class idealists:

The poem moves from mockery to tribute, as from comedy to tragedy, motley to green or certainty to bewilderment, haughtiness to humility. In other words, the poem upends the poet’s own initial cynicism, and it moves not toward celebration but rather toward expansiveness, magnanimity, ambivalence, fellow feeling, as he comes to memorialize the martyred rebels by naming them in the final lines.

Yeats’s use of cynicism in his poetry is intriguing because he is always a poet of contraries and, with its photograph negative relationship to hope and affirmation, its dependence on the optimism it renounces, cynicism is deeply dialectical. He can invoke Burkean scepticism and Swiftian scorn, but is also lured by the prophetic and visionary force of Shelley and Blake and their revolutionary age. Yeats’s tendency for system building, for elaborate imaginative and intellectual edifices, is profoundly twinned with a sense of their precarity and fragility. He is at once the most credulous and the most sceptical of figures, an artist moulded both by fugitive religious urges and a need for positive verification. Even as he vaunts the triumphs of culture across history, he is contrapuntally aware of the shifting sands that underlie them—an awareness that fuels his great poems of apocalypse like “Leda and the Swan,” “The Second Coming,” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.”

“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”

I am going to conclude with an in-depth consideration of the last of these. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” uses its moment of historical crisis and destruction both Irish and European to reflect on the inevitability of civilizational collapse. Yeats confessed to Olivia Shakespear that when he reread the The Tower (1928), the collection in which this poem appears, he was struck by the “bitterness” he found therein. Yet, he went on to claim “that bitterness gave the book its power” and “it is the best book I have written.”Footnote ³² Of all the great poems in that estimable volume, “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is surely the bitterest and has a claim to be the most pessimistic poem Yeats ever wrote. In an earlier letter to Shakespear in 1921, Yeats described the poem sequence that would become “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:

The result was indeed first published in The Dial (September 1921) as “Thoughts Upon the Current State of the World,” though the world in this instance is mainly the Irish revolutionary struggle and the violence it has unleashed, some of which occurs near his own home, deeply affecting him. The cosmopolitan implications of “world” include geography and history as the poet reflects with anguish on the seeming permanence but actual transience of all the achievements, both artistic and ethical, or so-called civilization, including the Anglo-Irish, settler “Big House” culture, which he liked to glorify. Though Yeats calls it a series of poems in his letter to Olivia Shakespear, most critics treat it as one poem, divided into what Helen Vendler calls “stations,” signaled by roman numerals.Footnote ³⁴ The poem is, among many other things, a great exploration of modern attitudinal cynicism. It explores a number of the various taxonomies of cynicism—clear-eyed despondency, self-isolating rejection (“ghostly solitude”), mockery of the ideals of others—as responses to the problem of the discordant clash between human value and brute reality. The poem’s governing thematic is the awareness of the precarity and transience of all hope, effort, human achievement, a stricken assertion of bestial humanity, unadorned by culture. It is a poem that sees through the veil at the great whirl of destruction underneath. Across six stations variations on the timeless question “What, in the face of our condition is the point in trying?”

Yeats’s aforementioned claim that these are “passionate” rather than “philosophical” explorations needs some glossing in this respect. The poem does not begin with an eschewal of philosophy, but rather discards it: ratiocination frays as a result of imaginative strain. Reaching across history for figures and emblems of civilizational collapse, the poet stumbles upon precarity and groundlessness that not merely confirm a cynical diagnosis but, crucially, risk collapsing its own capacity to diagnose. In other words, the cynicism falls on its own strictures: already the recursive, self-implicating pattern emerges.

The poem begins with an image of the fallen Acropolis: “Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude, / Protected from the circle of the moon / That pitches common things about.”Footnote ³⁵ The Greeks thought—as so many did after them—that their achievement would endure, that there was an eternal quality to their achievement. Yet the fall of Greece has been repeated, throughout history, and the poet’s attention now turns to the awful cataclysm that has befallen Ireland and Europe, unleashing fanaticism and untrammelled violence:

The tone is belated and regretful, bruised by historical adulthood: it ruefully recalls the naive turn of the century confidence that war was over permanently and that “civilization” was on an ever upward path, as we today might look back on premature declarations of the end of history in the 1990s. Enlightenment, it was vainly believed, had “worked.” Peace had come. Canons could really become ploughshares, “teeth drawn,” armies retained only for ceremonial show. But, he moves quickly to point out:

This is not just a local historical catastrophe but rather the dropping of a veil, an exposure of the savage default behind civilization’s temporary protections, the enduring Hobbesian reality.Footnote ³⁶

This leads the poet to reflect on the transience of all effort, all work of creativity whatever damage it does to the creator. “He who can read the signs” already knows the vanity of effort and has protected himself from the intoxicating destructiveness of futile dreaming:

The cynic here remains “manned” because clear-sighted, intelligent, undeluded, but comforted by his independent mindedness and autonomy. The cynic needs the worst. Because he has staked the very pith of his identity on expecting the worst, on nay-saying and refusal of effort, the only risk he faces is that the disavowed triumph would “but break upon his ghostly solitude.”

By his use of the third person here, the poet remains distant from the cynic or subjects him to the same analytical reading of signs that he habitually gives to the efforts and dreams of others. But cynicism nonetheless offers a tempting response to the reality that “Man is in love and loves what vanishes.” Importantly, the poet does not follow the cynic, identified in this poem—where pronouns are greatly important—by the third person masculine. Or rather he adopts a much more befuddled tone than this all too resigned and knowing figure. In station II, the poet imagines that the “platonic year,” like a Chinese dancer carrying a floating ribbon of cloth, “whirls out new right and wrong / Whirls in the old instead / All men are dancers and their tread goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.” The whirl of right and wrong, the endless change and passing of all things, sounds like the Nietzschean concept of becoming in contrast to the fixity of being, which traditional institutions and philosophy vaunt and venerate. Yet despite the provisional solution of solitary withdrawal and meditation considered in station III, there is no answer here to the melioristic impulse, which can now be dismissed: “O but we dreamed to mend / Whatever mischief seemed / To afflict mankind, but now / That winds of winter blow / Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.”

It is an ambivalent sort of a renunciation here, which both declares the erstwhile dreams to be “crack-pated” while at the same time recognizing that it is only winter—that is a time of violence and crisis—that teaches this truth. A world of continual change is not one that the Cynic can get any purchase on either, for even his own certainties are subject to the whirling motion, both dance and dissonance. Again, we have the motif that cynicism itself, with its propensity to doubt and deride, needs to be doubted. Part V famously runs with a ballad-like refrain:

Each stanza has a fifth line, producing a rhyming couple in a sort of discord or superfluity with the alternating rhyme of the quatrain. The great, the wise, and the good foolishly underestimate the forces of change, which will wipe away their toil and effort to produce something valuable that endures. The “levelling wind” makes their efforts vain. Yet mockers do not escape mockery, indeed the injunction in the final stanza of part V is an instruction, not as before an invitation (“Come let us”).Footnote ³⁷ If the wise can only stare at the sun, the cynic can only passively point at the “winds of winter.” The cynic is wedded to a fixity of purposelessness that mirrors the fixity of purpose that afflicts those meliorists who try to make things better and more truthful. The “traffic” here, echoing the dreadful, disrespectful traffic in ornamental grasshopper and bees at the end of part I, suggests mindless commerce, equivalence, the flattening of value, as well as the endless circulation of time and change, the movement of wind, dancers, ribbons, and horses that pervade the poem.

This movement is not linear, but rather a circulation that brings past and present together, evincing a collapse of history into the present in the concluding section. “Herodias’ daughters have returned again, / A sudden blast of dusty wind and after / Thunder of feet, tumult of images / Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind.” Both values and valuelessness are caught up in the flux. But in the disturbing final lines, the poem sees the wind drop, the arrival of unenlightened fanaticism, and modes of “blindness,” in the form of the “insolent fiend Robert Artisson,” his “great eyes without thought.” Artisson is the familiar of the murderous fourteenth-century Lady Kyteler, the first recorded woman in Ireland condemned for witchcraft. (Yeats’s note defines him as “an evil spirit much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century.”)Footnote ³⁸ So although “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” both indulges in and indicts cynicism, it also ends with a horrific, disturbing image of the departure of critical thought, the brutality of atavism and credulity. The poem does not end on the uplifting note of “The Tower” or even “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” adjacent in the same volume. But it does end with a warning, or a fear, about credulous violence or violent credulity. Michael Wood argues of Robert Artisson’s and Lady Kyteler’s appearance that “they are the thing itself, they are what happens when the wind drops and the dust settles,” embodying the “undying power and desire, the ability to enchant and the longing to be enchanted, a world of magical dominion and magical sacrifice.”Footnote ³⁹ Yet surely they are simply one alternative mode of social relationship rather than “the thing itself,” if by that Wood means the “real” nature underneath the veil of culture. They are horrific not because they are what is really there behind the wind and discordant dance of human activity, but rather because they resonate uncomfortably with better cultural productions. They are part of history. Note the wind drops; it does not stop. It will pick up again, and as part II puts it, “The platonic year / Whirls out new right and wrong, / whirls in the old instead.” The items in the tortuous last line—“Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks”—are themselves part of the endless cycle of “pretty toys.” But some things that human beings traffic in are preferable to others, and despite the mockery of part V, the poem does conclude with making a value judgment: one in favor of thought (a word repeated eight times in the poem). The eyes of the ghastly Artisson are “without thought” and under the “shadow of stupid straw-pale locks.” The superstitious tokens offered to him are a parody of “ingenious lovely things.” In other words, the poem is not ultimately nihilistic in outlook: it reflects painfully that civilization is temporary, provisional, precarious, and shot through with violence. But it also negates its own negations, which does not here amount to an affirmation but rather to a weakened epistemology, a more humble and bewildered tone that productively counterpoints the historical sweep and ambition of the poem.

“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” may not be a philosophical poem, as Yeats claimed, if by that we mean expressing a particular philosophical viewpoint. It nonetheless is a poem concerned with encounters between intellect and suffering or, more particularly intellect and disappointment, personal and political. That encounter is the province of cynicism. It also brings together the cataclysm of the First World War, an imperialist war, with Ireland’s own painful struggle toward postcolonial independence, a pairing made pertinent by the high numbers of Irish soldiers who fought in the former. As the first half of this article surveyed, cynicism has many contradictory meanings and connotations. “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” explores many of them, including ascetic solitude, salesmanship and trade, and self-satisfied mockery. Yet these remain contingent stances, rather than resolutions, ones that implicate the poet as both mocker and mocked. It is precisely because it puts thought itself under a critical eye that ways of knowing, other than ratiocination, can emerge. It shows that cynicism can be disrupted by its own procedures. The poem does not settle. It’s aware of the locatedness of its own diagnostics, which leads it to a weak thought, not one of which dispenses with thought altogether. This weak thought checks the idea of moral and political purity. In that respect the poem might point toward a nightmarish history that can give cynicism and scepticism their due, without leading to the renunciation and certainty of cynical stagnation.