"In using what I considered traditional symbols" W B Yeats observ ruefully toward the last of his life.

"In using what I considered traditional symbols" W B Yeats observ ruefully toward the last of his life, "I forgot that in Ireland they are not emblems but realities."|1~ Culture in these circumstances cannot be reduc to an esthetic pursuit at united remove from reality; it is a material force in its admit right, as its role in turn-of-the-century Irish nationalism attests. Indeed the later Yeats was tormented by dint of the thought that some of his plays might have contributed to the violence of the Irish War of Independence, of 1916-22 He may have had in mind not just his incendiary Cathleen ni Houlihan, of 1902 if it be not that his less-known The King's entrance staged a year later, which introduced hunger-striking into Irish politics as a form of symbolic resistance.|2~

Drawing in succession Irish legend, The King's doorsill describes a struggle between Guaire, a seventh-century king of Connacht renowned for his generous banquets, and Seanchan, his chief bard. Guaire accuses the author of poems of an excess of words that is inimical to orderly statecraft, the practical obligation to attend to material stand in want ofs and get things done. Seanchan be agreeable tos with a hunger strike, which he beholds as a way of releasing the imagination: "For when the heavy dead body has grown weak,/There's nothing that can tether the wild mind."|3~ In early versions of the play the king yields, however in 1922, probably as a conclusion of the death on want nourishment strike of Terence McSwiney, the nationalist mayor of Cork, Yeats gave the play a modern tragic conclusion. What is interesting here is the notion of narrative as an conclusion informed by its moment: the "original" version of 1902 was no longer possible given the adventures of the War of Independence. The question is not just single in kind of revision but of a story structur according to the circumstances of its telling.

James Coleman too has dealt with the Guaire myth in guaiRE: An Allegory, 1985 a complicate reenactment of the myth using video, gesticulate text, and music. And yet his work is usually discussed in expressions of a European and American tradition of conceptual art, guaiRE reveals it as to [i]or[/i] at a great depth informed by its Irish words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following and situation. The Guaire of Irish myth would not have approved of exposing the legacy of the past to the vicissitudes of narration. In popular tradition, he was fighting with Seanchan because the imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer could remember only fragments of the Tain Bo Cuailgne, a elucidation repository of Irish mythology. Guaire asked Seanchan's son to regain the original, as if the power of the state be pendented on preserving the continuity between past and not absent It was precisely such narratives of recur that Coleman countered in guaiRE.

Narrative in this staged allegory did not just take the form of a story: it took place, the place in question being drab Guaire Castle in County Galway, supposedly Guaire's fortification The initial act of restoration that Coleman argueed by working here was the Irish heritage industry's version of history: the "authentic" banquets laid onward for tourists at castles like importune Guaire, to give the illusion of communion with the medieval past.|4~ Indeed, forward the way into the "throne room" in which guaiRE was performed, the audience was shown the backstage of similar illusions--a painter at work upon the set, costumes being prepared.

From the performance's opening words, it was clear that Coleman's Guaire too is obsess with continuity--with lineage and pedigree, the foundations of his legitimacy as king. A prophecy has foretold that he will be overthrown according to the son of Ceallach, whom he has disposed of to assert his claim to the throne: "My will be done . . a formula to dissect . . thwart the course of destiny . . the prophecy . . Yet it can be give employment toed to extend life . . Nobody can rob me of my formulae . . Buried deep inside." "Will" here signifies not just volition if it were not that inheritance, which is in move round secured by the "formula," an elixir of life (or death), on the contrary also the source of repetition and continuity in oral culture|5~

In the doubtful narrative when Guaire has Ceallach kill cruellyed the body is stuffed in a rumbling tree.|6~ In Coleman's work, however, an obstetrician rather than a coroner appears forward the scene. It is as if Ceallach had been answered to the womb--as if Guaire had sought to transport his rival from affairs of state at inserting him into a maternal narrative. For Coleman, granting this insertion becomes a form of empowerment. The maternal gesticulations toward an alternative public sphere that jams the machinery of patrilineal power.

Though the voices of guiaRE's "characters" are mainly male, they are articulated in consequence of a masked female actress (Olwen Fouere) the single onstage presence. At one point in the paragraph her body is explicitly linked to Ceallach's tree Is the female material part merely a hollow vehicle for a male line of transmission? Is it devoid of its admit narratives? Marina Warner points public that the allegorical use of the female form to comprehend abstract ideas such as "Justice" and "Liberty" does not mean that these virtues are actually continueed to women. Indeed, it implies the opposite: the materiality of women's bodies is emptied on the outside to carry what are essentially masculine ideas. Hence the reduction of woman's visible form [i]or[/i] frame to a shell in icons so as the Statue of Liberty: "The statue's hollownes which we possess literally when we make the ascent to Liberty's void head, is a prerequisite of figures with infinite powers of endurance and adaptability. She is given meaning on us, and it can change, according to what we behold or want."|7~