Analysis of how texts’ rhetorical strategies endanger or sustain the narcissisticstructure of the self is an important approach in recent deconstruction criticism. Thiscriticism carries out a challenge to the analogy between the mind and nature that isto establish a coherent image of the mind and the self. By taking Wordsworth’s thePrelude and a few poems in the earliest Yeats, this essay focuses more centrally onthreats to the self and the possibility of self-representation posed by the process ofrepresentation itself.
In Book IV of The Prelude, the dynamic of passion and memory operatesthrough the image of self-knowledge as a ‘reflection.’ The motion from past topresent is a totalization of the self by means of metonymical substitution: the mereeye that looks into the water receives a whole image. But as the word hang, deeps,and gleam suggest, the motion is not necessary to lead to a totality of the self.Passion and prop of affection is always already involved in the self-reflection,preventing it from closing upon itself. The complex dynamic of passion andmemory thus is inimical to self-representation. The Blessed Babe passage in Book IIis also governed by the figure of passage, present here in the word passion as asort of originary movement. The self-recognition of the poet is structured ascrossing between past and present relations. Here substitution occurs as atransformation of the negation of the mother into a positive gain of nature. But thephrase ‘unknown cause’ and the reference to a ‘trouble’ imply the disruption of thepassage from the maternal props to natural properties.
The dominant mood of Yeats's earliest poetry is one of narcissisticself-contemplation. The poet in the mood does not contemplate a thing in nature but the working of his own mind. The outside world is used as a pretext and a mirrorfor self-representation. In “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” the shell is not sheernature, impressing itself upon a passively receptive consciousness, but the subjectivedream of a human imagination. In spite of the apparent replacement of all thesubstance of the object by its reflection, however, the image of the shell remainsaltogether conditioned by the existence of this object. The reflection can be left toexist as a mere phantom of the self without substantial existence of nature. Thefailure is made explicit in “The Sad Shepherd” where the same shell shatters hissong into confusion. Yeats is well aware of this paradox. In order to escape fromthis narcissistic predicament, for example, he uses the image of a parrot in “TheIndian to His Love” who rages “at his own image in the enamelled sea.”