Second Sight Against the Celtic Twilight

I. Two Collectors of the Same Material

W. B. Yeats spent the early 1890s doing something that looks, on its surface, like fieldwork: traveling through Sligo, transcribing the testimony of tenant farmers and old women about banshees, pookas, and the “wee folk,” and publishing the results as The Celtic Twilight (1893), a book he described as an attempt to build “a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things” of a fading oral culture. Yeats’s collecting stance is famously double: he wants to preserve peasant belief ethnographically while also, at moments, affirming it personally — “No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the faeries,” he writes, a line that refuses to resolve whether he is reporting a superstition or confessing one. James Mulhern’s Give Them Unquiet Dreams inherits this same material — banshees, second sight, the porousness of the dead and the living — but redeploys it inside a realist, first-person American novel rather than a folklore anthology. Reading Aiden Glencar’s gift against Yeats’s Sligo material clarifies exactly what Mulhern keeps from the tradition, what he discards, and what he invents that has no real precedent in the Celtic Twilight at all.

II. What Mulhern Keeps: The Taxonomy of the Uncanny

Aiden’s grandfather transmits the family’s supernatural inheritance to the boy using vocabulary drawn directly from the folk taxonomy Yeats spent a career cataloguing. The banshee appears by name and by function exactly as Yeats records it — a wailing spirit whose cry is a portent of death, heard collectively by an entire household the night before a tragedy: “On the night before, she heard banshees calling out to her. What’s a banshee? A type of fairy or spirit… And there were three knocks on the door, which means someone is going to die.”¹ This is not literary embellishment; it reproduces, almost procedurally, the banshee’s function in Irish oral tradition as recorded by Yeats and his contemporaries — a supernatural messenger rather than an active agent of harm, whose appearance is diagnostic rather than causal. The pooka receives the same careful, taxonomic treatment: “A pooka is an evil spirit not to be trusted… If she is a pooka, she can change her form into a variety of animals — a cat, a goat, a horse, even an eagle. A shape shifter, the Irish call them… Often, pookas relay veiled messages about your future.”¹ Yeats’s own Sligo informants describe the pooka in nearly identical terms — a shapeshifting, often equine trickster spirit whose favor or wrath depends on how a household treats the land it disturbs. Mulhern’s grandfather even reproduces the folklorist’s own anxious epistemic posture, hedging between literal belief and interpretive caution — “I haven’t ruled out the possibility of ghosts or second sight. But believing those things makes life too complicated”¹ — a line that could sit comfortably inside The Celtic Twilight itself, where Yeats repeatedly stages his own uncertainty about how literally to take what he is told.

III. Second Sight as a Documented Folk Category, Not an Invention

The single most important continuity between Mulhern’s novel and the Celtic Twilight tradition is that “second sight” is not Mulhern’s invention or metaphor — it is a real, widely attested folk category in the Irish and Scottish Gaelic world that Yeats encountered directly within his own family. Yeats’s cousin Lucy Middleton, visited at Rosses Point near Sligo, was said to possess second sight and to have described “amazing experiences” of it; Yeats’s brother Jack, too, “had heard mysterious sounds and seen mysterious sights,” and the young Yeats, by his own account, felt no impulse “to doubt the invisible.” Mulhern gives Aiden’s grandfather almost the same genealogical framing — the gift as a specific family inheritance, traceable through named female relatives, not a general psychic capacity available to anyone: “Second sight has been in your family for years… Your grandmother’s ma had the gift, and she, too, was demonized.”¹ This detail — that the gift’s transmission is matrilineal and that it exposes its bearers to social punishment rather than admiration — matches the folkloric record closely. Yeats’s own informants describe seers as figures who are as often pitied or feared by their neighbors as they are consulted; second sight in the tradition is a burden as much as a power, precisely as Aiden experiences it: “To me ’second sight’ was a curse, a burden.”¹

IV. What Mulhern Discards: The Land, the Fairy Rath, the Collective

Where Mulhern departs sharply from the Celtic Twilight material is in setting. Yeats’s fairy world is inseparable from a specific rural Irish landscape — raths, fairy forts, particular fields and roads near Sligo where the supernatural is understood to reside in the land itself, encountered by whole communities who share and cross-verify one another’s sightings. Mulhern relocates the inheritance to Irish-American Boston, where it survives only inside a single family’s bedroom, stripped of its geographic anchor and its communal verification. Nobody in Give Them Unquiet Dreams other than Aiden’s blood relatives takes the supernatural claims seriously; where Yeats can report, with some satisfaction, “there are some doubters even in the western villages” but a broader ambient belief that makes doubt itself remarkable, Mulhern’s Boston is saturated with exactly the opposite default: Martin’s blunt “Aiden, she was acting crazy”¹ represents not a lone skeptic in a believing community but the ordinary, unremarkable modern consensus, against which Aiden and Laura’s inherited belief is an isolated and stigmatizing anomaly. The fairy fort has been replaced by a psychiatric hospital; the shared village epistemology has been replaced by a diagnosis. This is Mulhern’s most significant revision of the tradition: he keeps the taxonomy of the uncanny but relocates it from a folk-communal world, where such claims are at least debatable in good faith, into a clinical-modern world that has already decided, institutionally, what counts as real.

V. What Mulhern Invents: The Metaphysics Yeats Never Supplied

Yeats’s Celtic Twilight material is resolutely local and anecdotal — individual encounters, individual spirits, individual portents — and it does not offer, nor pretend to offer, a unified theory of time or consciousness underlying the phenomena it records. Mulhern’s grandfather supplies exactly that missing metaphysics, and it is here that the novel moves furthest from its folkloric source: the “block of wood” speech, in which all of time is said to exist “all at once,” with consciousness merely a “flashlight” moving across an already-complete block of past, present, and future, has no real analogue in Yeats’s fairy lore.¹ This is closer to modern philosophical eternalism, or to the visionary systems Yeats himself would later construct in A Vision — an entirely different, far more esoteric and idiosyncratic project than the folk collecting of The Celtic Twilight — than to anything a Sligo tenant farmer told him about a banshee. Mulhern’s innovation is to graft a genuinely systematic time-metaphysics onto folk-taxonomic materials that were never meant to bear that theoretical weight, converting what in Yeats remains a loose anthology of local hauntings into a single coherent cosmology that explains, all at once, prophecy, grief, ghosts, and the family’s specific inherited guilt.

VI. Conclusion: Inheriting the Twilight, Not the Village

Aiden Glencar is best understood not as a modern retelling of a Yeatsian fairy-seer but as what happens to that figure once the village that once made her intelligible has been dissolved by emigration and by a full century of secular psychiatric authority. Mulhern preserves the taxonomy — banshees, pookas, shimmerers, three knocks on the door — with a fidelity that suggests real engagement with the tradition rather than vague gesture toward “Irish mysticism” in general. But he strips that taxonomy of its communal ground and supplies, in its place, a metaphysical system Yeats’s folklore never needed, because Yeats could still assume, however anxiously, an audience for whom “no matter what one doubts, one never doubts the faeries.” Aiden has no such audience. His inheritance survives, when it survives at all, in a single bedroom, transmitted by a single ghost, believed by a single boy — the Celtic Twilight’s public folk cosmology reduced to one family’s private and increasingly unverifiable faith.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Second Sight as Narrative Technology