irish orientalism an overview

Irish Orientalism An Overview

JOSEPH LENNON

Thou vagabond varlet! Thou swiller of sack! If our heads be all scarlet Thy heart is all black! Go on to revile IRAN's nation and race, In thy fish-faggish style!

James Clarence Mangan, 'To the Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Boo!

Djenkinzun' (1846)1

'Why has our school ... been interested mainly in something in Irish life so old that one can no longer say this is Europe, that is Asia?'

W.B. Yeats, Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924)2

During Ireland's Celtic Revival cultural nationalists accentuated Ireland's Celtic history and mythology, positing an 'authentic' Irish identity that predated English colonial influence. Many of the 'revived' images, forms, ideas, and narratives, however, were not actually from an ancient Celtic tradition in Ireland; indeed many had come from constructions of the Orient. Irish writers and cultural nationalists such as W.B. Yeats, James Stephens, and George Russell (AE) borrowed extensively from West Asian and Asian cultures - or European approximations of them - to augment their neo-Celtic narratives.3 The tradition of Oriental motifs in Irish letters stretches back through the works of Aubery de Vere, James Clarence Mangan, and Thomas Moore in the nineteenth century to works of Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Pery in the eighteenth.4 On the one hand, it stems from ideas about the nature of civilization and conceptions of Oriental and Celtic cultures, which emerged during the English Enlightenment and developed during Britain's period of imperial growth. On the other hand, mythic links between Celtic and Oriental cultures had an independent history in native Irish and Gaelic culture since medieval times.

129

130 Ireland and Postcolonia/ Theory

This essay traces the major branches of this Oriental-Celtic connection in Irish literature from the eighteenth century to the early mid-twentieth, beginning with a discussion of Irish antiquarianism and ending with a section on the mutual identification ofW.B.Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. In the nineteenth century, the Orient developed into an important imaginative realm for Irish writers and intellectuals; so much so that, by the time of the Celtic Revival, a prominent aesthetic and theosophical school of Irish Orientalism existed. For many Irish writers, the motif of the Orient allowed a variety of rhetorical strategies, many of which provided discursive control over an aspect of empire, that is, the representation of (other) colonized peoples. Although some pieces of Irish literary Orientalism merely extended the discourse of Orientalism to Ireland (at times including the exotic Celt or Gael as objects of Orientalist study), many worked against the dominant representations of Orientalism, exposing the Orient for its constructed and politicized nature, highlighting its connections to colonial power and nationalist struggle. Such Oriental representations replicated, as a matter of course, many of the trappings of the discourse of Anglo-French Orientalism with which they affiliated, sub specie, but such representations need to be recognized for their difference. Furthermore, these representations reveal the liminal position often occupied by the Irish writers and cultural nationalists within the British Empire, who could at once belong to both the imperial metropole and the colonized periphery. The variety of strategies associated with such a position - both collusive and subversive -suggests the scope and inherent liminality of Irish Orientalism, particularly as it pertains to nationalism and decolonization in Ireland.

Alongside the expansion of European colonialism, Orientalism developed as an academic discipline and knowledge base, as well as a set of cultural and political expectations about Asian and West Asian peoples and cultures. In the same years, Celticism also emerged as an area of inquiry. While Celticism is a discourse distinct from Orientalism, both developed concomitantly. Both occur as Romantic strains in the English literature of the late eighteenth century, especially in imperial histories, Gothic literature, early Romantic poetry, Oriental romances, and Celtic pseudo-translations (cf. James Macpherson's Ossianic tales).5 Moreover, studies of the Oriental and of the Celtic merged in the Irish antiquarian and philological studies of General Charles Vallancey, Henry O'Brien, Sir William Betham and others, in which the Celtic race was argued to have Eastern origins, a conclusion based on various readings and misreadings of medieval and classical allusions to the Celt.6 According to this school of thought, the Celts or Milesians had first colonized Ireland via Spain and Egypt and were related to various 'ancient' Eastern cultures: Egyptian, Carthaginian, Etruscan, Phoenician, Armenian, Hebrew, Chinese, Indian, and others. But these arguments were not universally accepted in the British Isles.7

Two competing schools of thought developed from the same medieval

Irish Orienta/ism: An Overview 131

and classical texts on the origin of the Celts, as Joep Leerssen notes in Remembrance and Imagination (1997): the 'Scytho-Celtic model' pr~pounded that the Celts, descended from the wild biblical Scyths, had migrated across Europe over a long period of time, and the 'Phoenician model' argued that the Celts (actually the Southern Scythians or Magogians or, as Sir William Jones noted, the Persians8) had migrated more directly fro~ the East, that is, along the Phoenician tin trade route by sea from the Middle East to Carthage and around the southern edge of Europe to pre-Roman Spain and the British Isles.9 The differences on this matter cor~espond~d with the cultural and political divide in Ireland over England s colonial presence in Ireland. Native Irish intellectuals and writers ha~ _d.eve~oped the Phoenician model to argue for the ancient pedigree and clVlhzation of the Celts, who had been brought to their poor present condition, they asserted, by successive foreign invasions. The Scytho-Celtic n:odel had also been used for generations to rhetorically confirm the barbanty of the Celt. Edmund Spenser, for instance, employed this version in his View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), in which the English poet proposes that the barbarous, Scythian Irishry be exterminated. Leerssen elaborates on the nature and implications of this split later in the eighteenth century:

Those who took a positive interest in Irish antiquity, ':h_o relie~ on native amanuenses and were willing to envisage a prest1g10us, highly civilized origin for the country's native inhabitants, tended to favour the Phoenician model ... More conservative, anglo-centric scholars, who preferred to believe that Ireland was primordially .a b~rbaric country where all traces of culture were introduced by outside mfluences such as the Vikings or the English, naturally rejected the Phoenician model

and endorsed the Scytho-Celtic one.10

While both schools continued, the Phoenician model enjoyed prominence in the work of early Irish cultural nationalists, achieving such ca~het i.n the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that nearly every native history of Ireland included a section on, or at least a reference to, the Eastern origins of the Celt. Numerous Celtic philologi~al and antiquarian studies appeared, bolstering the links between the ~ncient .Celt and the East. Artefacts, ancient ruins, and even not-so-ancient rums, such as the rou~d towers, were compared synchronically with contemporaneous struc~~es m the Orient (in India particularly) in order to confirm the Eastern ongi.ns .of the contemporary Irish. In a woodcut from Vallancey's ~ssay on t~e A~tzquzty of the Irish Language (1772) a defunct, isolated, a~d. ma~cessible Rou~d Tower at Ardmore Ireland' is depicted next to a similar Round Tower m India' which is shown in a living context, not only with a tree and another buildi~g but also with a man at the top of its steps, entering :he ~nctional tower. In this representation, the ancient and absent Celtic mirrors the

living and present Orient. . . . . . This inverse comparison implies not only some diachronic similitude

132 Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

(co~mon t~ Orientalist works), but also demonstrates that any immanent revival requires a strategy for b~d~ng distance - temporal and geographic -:- ben;een ~ultura~ models. Revivalism usually has meant more than revivm? a de~d past mto the space ~here it once 'lived' - a move that only bridges time an? does n?t admit the understanding that cultures span geography over time. The immanence of a cultural revival demands that the model for the revival be located outside the present here and now. The process of recovering a culture is usually the attempt to trace historical cultural ro~ts, the paths of which stretch beyond the present time and pl~ce. ~n this sense, _place itself is diasporic, and history becomes a story of m1grati_on. Recovering the past, in the Irish case, has meant more than modelling the p_resent culture on an idea of the past (based in history and/or present _ideals). Revivalism has also repeatedly sought cultural models, connections, and contexts in distant cultures. Such distant searches help~d confront inva_sive models posed by the proximate and the modern, that is, the geo~aph1_cally ~los; and imperial culture of England.

Much of this antiquarian scholarship' resonated in Irish culture as Leerssen astutely ?etails, particularly the round tower debate, which cap~re? the at_tent10n of the Irish press and the reading public and left a last~ng impress10n on Irish nationalist iconography and the popular imagination. Between 1770 and 1845, the Royal Irish Academy published numerous tracts and essays on the similarities between the Irish language and Eastern la~gua~es. ~wo pr?mi~ent ~~dies roughly mark the beginning and end of this period m which lmgu1shc and antiquarian proof for the C~lt's Eastern ori!?1ns was so~ght: Vallai:cey's Essay on the Antiquity of the Irish Lan?*1ge, Bezng

1

a Colla~wn of th_e Insh with the Punic Language (1772) and "'.'llham Betham s Etruna - Celtzca; Etruscan Literature and Antiquities Investzgat~d; or '0e Language of that Ancient and Illustrious People Compared and Identified wzth the Iberno-Celtic, and Both Shown to be Phoenician (1842). V~llance~, a founder of the Royal Irish Academy, was the most celebrated Irish ~nt1quarian of his time, but his pseudo-scholarship lost credibility in the mneteenth century, and, as Leerssen notes, 'Vallancey's name has by now becor~~ a by-word for hare-brained fancy. He read dictionaries as moderr: critics would read Finnegans Wake, based elaborate theories on comparisons ~etween languages of which he was utterly ignorant - Gaelic and Algonqm1:, o.r ~aelic and Chinese'. 11 A glimpse into Vallancey's 1786 ~refa_ce to ~ Vzndzcatwn of the Ancient History of Ireland confirms the point; m this sect10n he asserts that the Phoenician-Scythians travelled not only to Ireland:

To a common reader, it must appear the reveries of an etymologist to co~pare ~he language and deities of the Brahmans with those of the ancient ri:ish; but to the philosopher ... there will appear solid reason for so domg: the Brahmans and Guebres were originally a mixture of

I

i

Irish Orientalism: An Overoiew 133

Dedanites and Persians, or Scythians. Fohi, the civiliser of the Chinese,

was a Scythian. The Japanese were Scythians.12

Emphasizing the great mobility of the Scythians and the Celts, Vallancey links the Irish with the founders of other great civilizations, attempting to bridge the geo-temporal distance and make the Scythians relevant. As Leerssen notes, '[Vallancey] could blithely assert that the great Gaelic sixth-century legislator Cenn Faeladh was known in China under the name of Confulus, erroneously rendered as Confucius' .13 If such assertions seem absurd today, we must recall that the models of antiquity on which Vallancey and other antiquarians based their arguments were drawn from the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, wherein the world's linguistic differences stem from the Tower of Babel and all humanity from Noah. While Vallancey's ideas on the origin of the Celt were later disproved by more rigorous scholarship, particularly that of George Petrie,

14 later Celtic

philologists like James Cowles Prichard successfully constructed linguistic arguments for the inclusion of Celtic languages into the Indo-European family of languages based on work Vallancey began (cf. his The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations Proved in a Comparison of Their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages, 1857).

15 This inclusion signalled a validation of Celtic culture while not negating the Oriental-Celt theories. Indeed, the legacy of Irish fascination with the Orient continued during the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, albeit in more alle-

gorical and mystical forms. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as the construct of the Orient

began to represent a lack of civilization in Anglo-French Orientalism - that is, the absence of liberty, rationality, progress, and national autonomy - the link between the Celt and the Oriental had moved into Irish culture at large. References to the Celt's Eastern origins were made in texts spanning many genres: pamphlet collections of pseudo-letters, occasional and epic poetry, political tracts, Oriental romances, newspaper articles, children's literature, British and Anglo-Irish novels, and Irish-language stories. For example, in a footnote to one of W. Smith's Historical Explanations of Emblematic Cards; For the Use of Young Persons 'card LXXX, King Henry VII, or the Union of the Roses', the following explanation is given, 'the lberno Celtic (or Irish) somewhat resembles the primitive language of the Hebrews; and is very like that of the old Phoenicians'.16 This sort of linguistic dating validates the antiquity of Irish and the Celtic languages while highlighting its anti-modern backwardness. Similar references occur in overtly unionist, Anglo-Irish pamphlets, such as the anonymously written Hibernia? Lachryma?; or, The Tears of Ireland, A Poem (Dublin, 1799). Despite being Anglo-centric, the author of this poem relied upon the Phoenician model of Celtic origins, connecting the ancient Irish to the 'Philistines' (who sound more like the contemporary people of Palestine),

17


also referring to them as both 'Milesians' and 'PhCEnecians'. But not all such comparisons emphasized backwardness. Nationalist political paz:i.phlete.er~ invoked the Oriental origins of the Celt in order to justify anti-col~mahsm, as 'Julius Vindex' does in Vindication of the Irish Nation, and Particularly of the Roman Catholics, Against the Calumnies of Libellers, Part N (Dublin, 1802). 'Vindex' argues against the rhetorical practice of the English 'barbarizing' the Irish in justifying their conquest. Significantly, the argument turns the lens of 'savageness' onto the British and uses ancient Oriental-Celtic history to justify the civilized pedigree of the Irish. The author repeatedly uses the word 'colony' to refer to Ireland, despite the recently passed Act of Union with Great Britain - a move that was common in nationalist circles.

The Celtic-Oriental link was continued on an allegorical level in one of th~ most popular works of the early nineteenth century, Thomas Moore's Onental romance, Lalla Rookh (1817), which had received one of the largest book advances to date from the English publisher Longman and Company.18 In some British magazines, favourable reviews made overt Celtic-Oriental comparisons between the subject (the Orient) and the author (an Irishman) of the text, discussing the similarity in Irish and Arab temperaments and natures. For example, Francis Jeffrey (a friend of Moore and.fell~w Whig) makes a particularly pointed comparison in the Edinburgh Review: The beauteous forms, the dazzling splendour, the breathing odours of the East, seem at last to have found a kindred poet in that Green Isle of the West, whose genius has long been suspected to be derived from a warm clime, and now wantons and luxuriates in these voluptious [sic] regions, as if it felt that it had at length required its native element.'19 Moore, the celebrated author of Irish Melodies, is rhetorically 'suspected' of be.l~nging to the Orient because of both the Celt's supposed Eastern ongms and the nationalist affinities the work propounded. Even before its publication Lalla Rookh was linked to the cause of Irish nationalism· for ins:an~e, Lo:d Byron wrote in the prefatory epistle to The Corsair (1S14), which is dedicated to Moore, about both the Irish 'cause' and the brilliance of the forthcoming Lalla Rookh.

Moore also tailored his Oriental romance to fit with the tenor of Oriental i.nte:est in Europe ~t the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially to fit with the enthusiasm for the luxurious East that English writers, such as his fri.ends Byro~ and Samuel Rogers, had raised. But he also rhetorically a~propn.ated .the discourse of Orientalism to suit Irish issues, particularly Insh nationalism, as we see in 'The Fire-Worshippers' section, a point that ha~ .often been. miss~d in criticism (excluding Nigel Leask' s important work British Romantic Writers and the East, 1992). The incredible splash that Lalla Rookh made in England and Ireland - some critics hailed it as the pinnacle of Orientalist poetry20 - strengthened the link between the geniuses of the Celt and the Oriental while subverting British Orientalism, a point I will

'' I

i


turn to later. James Clarence Mangan also picked up on these associations, incorporating them into his 'Literae Oriental es', a s~ries of pseu~o.-translations of West Asian poetry and prose (along with Mangan s invented Oriental poems), which appeared in Dublin University Ma?azi~e ~oi;n 1837 to 1846 - perhaps one of the most obvious of his parodies is h1~ To ~he Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Bo~! ~j~nkinzun' (1846),.m which an Orientalized Persian voice lambastes Bntam s John Bull Jenkinson for his transgressions in the East (see epigraph p. 129). As Da~d Lloyd. has argued in Nationalism and Minor Literatur; (198~), these ve.rs10~s of On:ntal translations are best understood as parod1c translations of Persian, Turkish and Arabic literature.21

What is relevant to note here is that Mangan did not merely reproduce the standard Orientalist techniques of translation; instead he revealed (and thus subverted) the process of translation itself, as Lloyd expl~ins in his intricate study of Mangan's cultural nationalism: 'What [parod1c trans~ation] refuses to do is to supersede the anterior [or original] texts on which it depends, a relationship which is itself parodied .[by M~ngan's footnot.es] ... By holding open that relationship, the parod1c text r~vokes re.flectlon upon the appropriative or refractory nature of translat10n precisely by refusing to exonerate itself from the same processes.'22 Lloyd treats Mangan's translation strategy as both a subversion of cont:mp~raneous translation theories and an element of his cultural nat10nahsm. But Mangan's strategy had even wider ramifications. By 'refusing to exonerate' the traitorous work of the translator, 23 Mangan's translations and accompanying texts also rhetorically challenge the ~rocess. of supplanting an 'original' Oriental text with a civilized. ?rientahs.t vers~on. In oth~r words, by pointing out the incommensurab1hty of ?nentahst translations and their original West Asian texts, Mangan rhetorically deflects a fundame~tal goal of British and French Orientalism: to supplant and govern the Onent with European knowledge of it. .

Furthermore, while Lloyd does not discuss Mangan's sense o.f the semiotic link between the Oriental and the Celt in detail, he does pomt out that Mangan dryly noted 'according to Vallancey every Irishman is an .Ara~' in a preface to his 'Literae O~entales'.2~ Ind~ed, Mangan. ':as ,~ertamly interested in 'the parallel fash10ns of Onentahsm and Celtic1sm.

The exoticism of both, which is sustained in the popular imagination by the comparative remoteness of their location from the centers of Empire, is involved in the notion of an 'original people' in the s~~s.e of one that is less removed from untamed natural origins than the c!Vlhzed European ... The 'originality' of the Oriental poet - or the Celtic - lies in his closeness to the 'origins' of humankind and human feelmg [which, it was supposed, had begun in the Orient].25

Mangan's response to such theories, particularly with regard .to Oriental poetry, is simply to deny and even invert the premises on which they are


based.26

This strategy of inversion, obviating the centre, is common in Orientalist texts of Irish writers, particularly cultural nationalists; by creating a semiotic link Mangan's 'parodic translations' furthered such subversive uses of Orientalism, disrupting many Orientalist conclusions and, by extension, imperialist Celticist conclusions.

In order to better understand this type of strategy, we must briefly examine the parallel movements of Orientalism and Celticism. In Orientalism (1979) Edward Said traced the development of the Orient as a European and American construct. Said's argument focuses on AngloFrench Orientalism and its nexus of 'historical specificity, knowledge, and power' (to borrow from Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg's critique of Orientalism).

27 This nexus of Orientalism had much purchase in Ireland, as

did many Anglo-French narratives, but it cannot fully account for the place of Orientalism in Irish culture, particularly in the texts of Irish cultural nationalists and anti-colonial intellectuals and writers. English and French Orientalists habitually represented Asian and West Asian cultures as sensual, exotic, and primitive, often discussing their lack of skills for selfgovernance both as cultures and races - categories that often elided into one other. Such linked portrayals of diverse colonized peoples aided both colonial administrators and imperial sympathizers in justifying and admin -istering colonial rule across the globe. Likewise, nineteenth-century English pundits and imperialist administrators, as well as French and English Celticists, characterized 'the Celtic races' as feminine, unintellectual, natural, and pre-modern, particularly the Irish, and especially in the decades around the Irish Famine. Two seminal works from the nineteenth century on the Celtic races - an essay by historian, Orientalist and Celticist, Ernest Renan, 'The Poetry of the Celtic Races'28 (1854; first English translation 1893) and a critical study by Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867)

29 - treat the 'Celt' as essentially feminine and, therefore,

complementary to the more masculine Germanic or Teutonic races (emphasizing the Saxon influence in English society). For Arnold, the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt formed a sort of family - with the Anglo-Saxon as the stern, unimaginative parent and the Celt as the ineffectual, intractable, and dreamy child - 'always ready to react against the despotism of fact'.

30 Significantly, both works refer to the Orient in defining

Celticity.

Anglo-Irish intellectuals went further and compared the Celt and the Oriental in a more damning manner than these Celticists. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, a century after British colonialism had taken hold in the Orient, many Anglo-centric Irish intellectuals, most of whom had long opposed theories of the Oriental origins of the Celts, asserted and highlighted the lack of civilization and racial 'primitive' similarities of the colonized peoples. For example, in an 1833 article, Rev. Samuel O'Sullivan compared Irish Ribbonism to the Thuggee in India, 'if the Thugs are their


superiors in the article of safe and expeditious murder, they are imme~surably beyond the Thugs in the article of skilful. perjury'. 3~ Such compansons became more racialized and increased with colonial expansion .. F~r instance, John Pentland Mahaffy's severely racist Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilizations and Their Physical Conditio~s (1869). repeatedly compa~es the Celts with Orientals, Africans, and native Amencans, as well as with neolithic hunter-gatherers.32 Mahaffy, a Trinity professor and well-known Dublin intellectual, cites ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as. Re~an and other Orientalists in drawing his conclusions t~at .the Celtic Insh represent a 'perpetually' primitive people, semiotically linking the Drunken Irishman to the Red Indian and the Black Sambo:

Celts have shown indubitable and marked peculiarities from th~ d.ays of Julius Caesar to the present; so much so, that a brilliant descnphon of the Gauls by a great living German historian, might pass for an account of the pr~sent Irish peasantry ... 'the lazi~ess in the culture o.f the fields; the delight in tippling and brawling; the ~stentat10n, t~e language full of comparisons and hyperbol~s, ~f a.llus10ns an~.quamt turns; the droll humour; the hearty delight m smgmg and rec1tmg th~ deeds of past ages, and the most decided talent for rhetonc and P?etry, the curiosity - no trader was allowed to pas~ before he had told m the open street what he knew, or did not know, m the shape of news - and

h t 133 the extravagant credulity which acted on sue accoun s ·

Mahaffy's essentialist argument, overtly disdainful o~ th~ working cla~s and rural Irish culture, was not uncommon in Anglo-Insh intellectual circle.s. Nor were depictions of the rural Irish as a primitive people uncommon in conservative English culture, as numerous stu~ies over the las~ two decade~ have demonstrated. Such depictions of the Insh seemed obv10~s comple men ts to similar characterizations of various Asian and West Asian peoples

and cultures. . 1 0

· 1 d Mahaffy's pseudo-scientific conclusions regarding Ce ts, . nenta s, an

other 'primitives' only strengthened the semiotic connection b.etwe.en Ireland and the Orient and the presence of the Orienta~ Celt in Ir~sh culture. Even though the political perspective of Anglo-c~ntn~ scholars l~e Mahaffy differed enormously from that of cultural ~at10nahst poets hke Mangan, both relied upon the same Celtic-Or~ental h~k. The L.a~d League even employed the comparison in its own anti-colonial rhetonc, one 1879

t r read 'From the China towers of Pekin to the round towers of fr~~a~d, fro~ the cabins of Connemara to the kraals of Kaffirland, from t.he wattled homes of the isles of Polynesia to the wigwams of North Amenca the cry is: "Down with invaders! Down with tyrants!" Every man to have his own land_ every man to have his own home.'.34 Later, for many nonCatholic Revivalists, the analogical process that linked the ~elt .and ~he Oriental could also be employed in the creation of a new I~1sh identity, once the valences of the characterizations were reversed, that is. Indeed, at


~he c~~se of the. century, vy.B. Yeats, AE, and James Cousins35 consciously identified the Insh Celt with the Occident's cultural 'other' as a means of cultural unification and rhetorical resistance against British colonialism _ ~d, almost. to the extent that they identified with the Celt, they identified with the Oriental.

t:Iist?ri~!lly, Iris~ id~ntification with the East was rarely culturally intersubiec~ive - which is to say, rarely a relationship in which equals re~o~rnze :he~se.l~es in one another, or, to borrow from Hegel, a relation_ ship .m which mdividuals recognize self-consciousness in the other.37 Such rel~tions rely p.rimarily ~pon mutual recognition and reciprocal communication.' The. lr~sh, particularly the Anglo-Irish and wealthy Catholics, ?ccupied a limma~ position in the 'imagined geography' of empire, 3s existmg. as both colornzer and colonized, depending on their position in Irish s~ciety and the purpose of their rhetoric. Furthermore, Irish-Asian and Insh ~ W~st Asian relationships were generally mediated through the British Empire: m that Orientalism as .a knowle?~e base was always already implicated m the power. dynamics of Bntish colonialism in the Orient. Nevertheless, ma~y m~tance~ of colonial resistance and intersubjective cros~-col~ny relat10nsh~ps exist. At the height of the British Empire, the Cel.tic-Or~e~tal connection allowed Irish writers rhetorically to assert both their pr?ximity to ~he centre of empire and their proximity to the periphery, ~ependmg on their context, purpose, and audience. For instance, nationalists a~d ~ultural nationalists used the connection to resist colonialism, just as un10~i~t~ used the connection to promote English imperial dominance. 1'.1e flexibility and allegorical dimension of this Celtic-Oriental connection did not .restrict Irish wr.it~rs in English from publishing in England nor from p~omotmg a non-anglicized Irish national identity, stereotypical or otherwise. I~ short, .d.uri~g the late nineteenth century, this liminal narrative of ~he.toncal ~osit10nmg and semiotic posturing mirrored Ireland's own limmal position in empire.

WJ:ile using tropes. ~f the Orient did not require any immediate understan~ng of the actualities of colonial life in England's distant colonies the ~eltic-Oriental semiotic connection often propelled Irish cultural nati;nalists b.ey.ond Orientalis?1 toward an international critique of European colon.i~lism. And, occasionally, the connection coincided with a mutual and ~urpr~s.mg~y personal (if not entirely factual or intersubjective) cross-colony identification between cultural nationalists in both Ireland and non-Europea~ colonies, particularly India, as we will see in the case of Yeats and Rabmdr~na.th Tagor~. By 'cross-colony identification' I mean a strategy for decolon~zation that mcludes establishing cultural (and sometimes political) connections a.cross bo:h geographic distance and the colonized periphery. S~ch connection~ a.re imagin~d within the boundaries of empire yet exist without the ~ediat10n of the imperial centre (for example, travellers from Ireland or India establishing relations without the official mediation of the

. ' i

Irish Orientalism: An Overoiew 139

East India Company or the British Raj).39 Such connections form when colonized individuals recognize an experience in a distant colony as familiar or notice that other colonized groups share circumstances or racial and cultural traits, which may in fact have begun as administrative comparisons between colonized peoples. The comparisons can be easily subverted, however, to nationalist or decolonizing aims, as when James Stephens asserted the similarities between Celtic and Hindu myth and history in an attempt to create a new national narrative.4° Furthermore, such subversion was embodied by liminal figures such as playwright and socialist journalist Frederick Ryan (who edited the Egyptian Standard in Alexandria, 1905-7) and Ulsterman, Roger Casement, who, while still working as an imperial administrator in the Congo, began to promote human rights and nationalist struggles in Europe's colonies. (Casement eventually vigorously promoted reforms in Africa, South America, and Ireland and later was executed by the English government for his part in the preparation for Ireland's Easter Uprising of 1916.)

The writings and actions of such cultural nationalists imaginatively and temporarily unify the periphery against the centre, rejecting the role designated them by the metropole, despite their borrowings from Orientalism. Cross-colony identification is a reaction to imperialism, but like all efforts at decolonization, successful or not (variously discussed as nationalism, abrogation, appropriation, nativism, collaboration, liberal and radical decolonization, adulteration, allegory, hybridity, and strategic essentialism), 41 it attempts to alter colonial pathologies of power. Also, like other dec.olonization strategies, the strategies of Irish Orientalism did not entirely succeed. The Celtic-Oriental semiotic connection reified along with Celticism during the Revival, and cross-colony identification was mitigated by several factors stemming from Ireland's liminal place in empire: England's geo-cultural proximity to Ireland (and its influence on issues sue~ as ra.ce and governance); the romantic, distancing nature of most Onentalist images and impressions; and the pervasive doctrinal sphere of Orientalist knowledge in Europe - what Edward Said has termed, 'latent Orientalism'.42 Despite such inhibitors, many cases of cross-colony identification emerged and inspired cultural independence and decolonization.

The complicated dynamics of colonial representation in Irish Orientalism differs from the normal binariness of colonizer/colonized relationship. England, as the imperial metropole, exists as the centre and mediator of all sanctioned colonial relationships - as James Cousins puts it in his autobiography, We Two Together (1950): 'London lay between Ireland and India.'43 Britain's Oriental colonies exist at the periphery; Ireland exists in a 'both/and' place between the centre and the periphery. Through Orientalist texts, England represents the Asian and West Asian colonies, which attempt to 'write back' to the centre, but who do not represent them~elv~s in the metropole. Irish writers have more access to self-representation m


the metr?~ole_ but this is primarily through English-language texts and self-exohc1zahon (particularly more anglicized writers such as William Maginn and Thomas Moore) than the non-European colonies. Most knowledge. of the Orien~al periphery comes to Ireland through British representations of the Onent, yet Irish culture often uses such knowledge for new purposes - economic, cultural, political.44

Historically, the imaginative literature of Irish Orientalism offered Irish write.rs a d_iscursive _clutch to disengage from the standard power dynamic of E~ghsh/Insh relations and then imaginatively re-engage the colonial discourse through allegorical or other devices, readdressing Irish tensions fro1:1 a vantage that did not promote an 'either/or' binary of centre and penphery. Such works of Irish Orientalism engaged the colonial discourse ~om a per~pective that could operate with an inclusive 'both/and' perspective - that is'. both_ the centre ~nd the periphery- rhetorically able to employ both the Onentahst perspective of the colonizer and the nationalist convictions of th_e colonized. In _the mid-nineteenth century, such a perspective allowed Insh cultural nationalists the flexibility both to argue for a more se~ure place f~r Irish officers in the East India Company and to create the v01ce ~fan On~n~al speaking back to the empire about imperial inequities, rhetoncall~ umfyi~g the periphery against the centre. Although this voice often was nddled simultaneously with Orientalist notions, it often imagined ~ new power dJ':1amic for the colonized and colonizer and promoted an mdepende~t nah?nal culture as well as a stronger presence in empire.

Insh Onentahsm developed in conjunction with British and French Orientalisms and also as an imaginative riposte to global colonialism. On on: han_d, it differs in audience and purpose from British and French Onentahsms; on the other hand, it often remains rhetorically similar, but only as a parody i~ simi_lar to its original.45 One particular area of similarity c~ncer~s how Onentahst texts comment and build upon one another in a ~1ghly mtertextual fashion. Said provides some useful terms to discuss the mtertextual and author/audience relationships inherent to Orientalism:

Every writer on the Orient ... assumes some Oriental precedent, some prev10us knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself [and, of course, with specific colonial events and places]. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Onent therefore constitute an analyzable formation. 4

6

Irish writers are no different in this regard from British or French writers. They gr?und their ideas-:-- even anti-colonial ones - on Orientalist precedents, literary or otherwise, the bulk of which were British, French, and German sources (for example, see the copious Orientalist notes in Moore's Lalla Rookh and Mangan's 'Literae Orientales').


A clear instance of the train of borrowings in Orientalist projects can be traced in the pseudo-Oriental letters genre of the eighteenth c:ntu_ry. The anonymously published Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to Hzs Frzends at Trebisond, Dublin 1757 (alternately attributed to Viscount Edmund Sexton Pery and Judge Robert Hellen)47 borrowed characters from, and purp.orte.d to be the successor of, Baron George Lyttleton's Letters from a Perszan zn England to His Friend at Ispahan, London 1735. (the fir~t collection of pseudo-letters written originally in English), which had itself borrowed characters from, and purported to be the successor of, Charles, Mont~squieu's anonymously published Les Lettres Persa~es .Gohn Ozell s En~hsh translation, Persian Letters, appeared in 1722), which itself ,h~d popu~anzed the genre that was made well known by Gio~anni Marana s mternahonally popular Letters writ by a Turkish Spy ... at Pans (8 vols., translated 1687-93). Also one of the best works of the genre of pseudo-Oriental letters, The Citiz~n of the World (1762), had an Irish man, Oliver G?ld_smit~, for its witty author. Irish Orientalist literature fully operates w1thm this process of borrowing and building upon other Orientalist texts. Indeed, su~h int:rte~tuality greatly enables the process of parody; parody in Irish Onentahs~ is less obvious than a burlesque or a travesty because it purportedly exists within a tradition of literary affiliation and repetition. It seems to be a contribution to the field, rather than a subversion of it, a~ Manga~'s 'parodic translations' seemed genuine to many Oriental en~hus1asts ~esp1~e his strategies of inversion. Such parody enables subversive narratives ~n which the authors see themselves in the Oriental 'other', and, therefore,_ m a sense, deconstruct their own colonization in the rewriting of a narrative

of colonialism. The relationship between object (the Orient) and t~e author (the Orie~-

talist) is crucial in the analyzable formation of an Onentah~t text.1:-5 ,Sai? notes, 'Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate h1~self vis-a-v_is the Orient.'48 In his analysis of Orientalist philology a~d l~teratu~e, Sa~d maps the distinct positions of British and French Orientahsts m relationship to the Orient, which, en masse, he argues, constitute different analyzable formations. Much of Said's analysis of Anglo-French Orientalism, ther~fore, only accounts for the encouragement of Orientalist visions and the ~ntroduction of Orientalist knowledge in Ireland, in part, because of the simple fact that Irish writers tend to locate themselves differently vis-a ~vis im~e~ -alism and the Orient than British and French writers. Also, wnters w1thm Irish Orientalism, depending upon their particular strategic location, use_d the Orient for divergent ends. For instance, in Irish literature, the strategic location of Pery's pseudo-Oriental letters differs from the Ori~~tal le~ters. of William Sampson and John Wilson Croker, ~et ~ll t~n;e p.art1cipate m Ir,1sh Orientalism. Sampson used an Oriental v01ce m his Chmese Journals to advance radical issues of the United Irishmen in the 1790s.

49 Croker's

Chinese correspondent in An Intercepted Letter from J- T- Esq. Writer at

142 Ireland and Postco/onial Theory

Canton to His Friend in Dublin (1804) discusses the Q allegorical O · t I uang-tongese an

d . nen a group representing the Dublin Irish, in mixed ton:s of con emnation and appreciation.so In vivid contrast Pe h .

~;~lot~cenlric lau;hohr of Letters from an Armenian' in fr'e;a:d~ar~;~r~:~ e ng o- ns and the 'old Native' Gaelic-Irish s1 comm .

f:eq~ently on t.heir drunkeness and need for governance. Such a var~;;:1 ~::o~~~~~s1tions can be accounted for, to some extent, through their

Prior to the Celtic Revivalism of the late ei ht th antiquarianism of the Royal Irish Academy "'ery'gs t eten ~dentury. and the th I . h ' r1 ex proVI es an image of 0 e ns as geo-tempora!Iy distant from both England and the Orient H'

nental .narrator, ~a, after witnessing a native Irish caoineadh, or fu~er~~ ~ail ~r d!fge, rhetorically assails the native Irish, treating them as subjects

~o~nt~a~a!~:a! law, wh? r~ma~n more entrenched in custom and superstiexhibiting traitroress1ve Onlental. .Aza frequently describes the Irish as

. s a so common y attnbuted to 'Easterns'· th 'Vi I ' ~~h ~epres.ent here the Oriental's Oriental. Unlike his li;era~ a~t~~:~~~:s tiv:~r~sf~~e~e°;;d Lyttleton), Pery does not include a discussion of primi-

d ? d b . He describes, however, an excursion through the 'wild an ~ane. eauty' of the Irish countryside, which is marred on! b its Mtles1an mhab1tants. s2 The rural G l' I . h y y 11 I d ( ' ae ic ns seem to be the modern

rog o ytes as Vallancey actually later argued) painted as a I . but presently rude people. The following len~h uote is a ol:~e g onous the letter. One necessary note: Aza and Omar's '/ri~nd' and ·le· parthof countryside is an Ang! I · h gu1 e mto t e

. , 0

- ns man - the necessary interpreter of the Gaeli

dcultu.rte -h.their .Conductor' identifies himself as part of the Gaelic culturec

esp1 e 1s cynicism. ,

:iet~av~ vie~ed, this .Island and it is worth contending for: We travelled Sh ~ ? ~ ro a fair Country, along the Side of a Lake bordered with

ru s o c. OJcest Smell and Beauty; ... our Journey was [throu h] Scenes of wild and varied Beauty· Wh'l t . g . h h . . . I s we were amusing ourselves wit t e Vanety ot Prospects and the Music of the Woods ~~ddenly alarmed .by the Yells of Women howling, and be~t;.e ~:~ [

.e]ast:, ahnd throwing themselves prostrate on the Ground· the gEccho sic o t e1r Lamentations from the Water and the H1'Jls , d' l

That ·d F · . · was 1sma · 0 . , . sai fr my nend, is the Funeral of a Christian of a different Sect o;

pinion. om that which is established by our Laws, and those Cries are

Cso peculiar to this People, as to be distinguished by the Name of th'

ountry - Of a Sudd th . G is G · en, eir roans ceased, and they rose from th, round and departed with much appearance of Mirth· What said 0 e

~~an~ this Change~ Is the Dead revived, or have they so ~oon fo~:; Keir msman or Fnend? Those, answered our Conductor are neither

insmen nor Friends of the Deceased; what you saw is ~ Ceremon performed without any real Sorrow, and as well over the Undeserving, a~

Irish Orienta/ism: An Overoiew 143

the Deserving; Custom has established this feigned Representation of Woe, and Custom is with us more powerful than Laws. 53

The caoineadh was frequently critiqued at the time, but it does not need much exegesis here. 54 Perhaps the most significant aspect is that the Oriental narrator describes the native Irish as more superstitious and entrenched in custom than the Oriental traveller. This representation depicts Gaelic culture as pre-Enlightenment or even anti-Enlightenment culture: the Conductor claims, 'Custom is with us more powerful than Laws'. Such a position inverts the cardinal power dynamic (Occidental over Oriental) of this genre in this anti-Gael text (Enlightened Oriental over barbarous Occidental/Celt), both strengthening the position of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland and asserting the peripheral place of the native Irish in empire. This Gael, and by extension all peripheral Celts, is Orientalized by a representation of and a representative from the Orient - Omar, the cosmopolitan traveller. Pery's early contribution to this tradition reveals the distance that Irish Gaelic culture had from modern English culture in the mid-eighteenth century; this is, in a sense, the geo-temporal distance that later Celtic Revivalists would bridge in their representations.

In the literary texts of Irish Orientalism, we often find an Oriental visiting Ireland and England or commenting on Europe, whether allegorically or directly, which points to a significant difference between it and British and French literary Orientalism. While 'pseudo-Oriental letters' and other accounts of Orientals in Europe originated and flourished in French and British letters - especially in the Enlightenment critiques of the 'barbaric' European society (cf. Montesquieu and Diderot) - the primary AngloFrench Orientalist texts concerned European exploits in the East. Edward Said discusses this important aspect of British Orientalism: 'the Orient was a place of pilgrimage, and every major work belonging to a genuine if not always to an academic Orientalism took its form, style, and intention from the idea of pilgrimage there. In this idea ... the Romantic idea of restorative reconstruction ... is the principal source.' 55 In other words, much of British and French Orientalisms depicted Europeans making pilgrimages or travelling to the Orient to discover it, map it, control it, and/or resuscitate it to the civilized state from which it had supposedly fallen - in short, to 're-civilize' it. 56

In contrast, much early Irish Orientalism either depicted 'civilized' Orientals visiting Ireland or modern Enlightenment Britain (or, in the case of Irish antiquarianism, 'Orientals' coming as the first colonizers of the British Isles), or gave voice to Oriental individuals or nations as they strnggled against the British or another imperial force (for example, the Ottoman Empire). For instance, an 'Irish Officer's' anonymous Dublin pamphlet, The History of Mirza Abu! Hassan Khan ... with Some Account of the Fair Circassian (1819), depicts the Persian ambassador to England on a fictitious visit to Ireland57

- a place, it turns out, he greatly admires and


continually compares with Persia.58 The flattering portrait of the ambassador on the cover makes him the counterpart, in some respects, to the anonymous 'Irish Officer' who writes of him - this is in much contrast to James Morier's unsympathetic and degrading portrayal of Mirza Abu! Hassan Khan in his popular Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Also, Richard Madden, a nineteenth-century Irish historian of the United Irishman, wrote about his years spent in the Turkish Empire, and much of his work concerns his support of nationalist and emancipation movements in Ireland and elsewhere - for example, he documented both Cuban slavery (1840) and the story of Egyptian nationalist Mohammed Ali (1841). Half a century later, Lady Gregory's 'Arabi and His Household', from the London Times (23October1882), describes Arabi or Urabi - the leader of Egypt's thwarted nationalist rebellion - as 'gentle', 'humane', 'earnest', and 'truthful' through the voices of his family, refuting the representation of Arabi in the English press as a cowardly despot aspiring to power.

Through such allegorical, Orientalized representations of other colonized peoples, Irish writers and scholars gained some discursive control over the representation of empire. Thomas Moore wrote in the 1820 Preface to Lalla Rookh that he had had difficulty writing his romance. He was in a sort of post-fame hangover, after the initial success of his early Irish Melodies. But once he found an allegorical path in which he could represent the tensions of Ireland, he launched into the work:

But, at last, fortunately, as it proved, the thought occurred to me of founding a story on the fierce struggle so long maintained between the Ghebers, or ancient Fire-worshippers of Persia, and their haughty Moslem masters. From that moment a new and deep interest in my whole task took possession of me. The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East. 59

The Ghebers in 'The Fire-Worshippers' have often been read as representing the rebellious Irish, hounded by the invading Moslem/British forces. As Howard Mumford Jones noted in 1937, 'The overtones are unmistakably those of Irish rebellion, particularly the Robert Emmet episode. Moore hymns the doomed patriots and goes out of his way to excoriate the wretch who betrayed their cause . . . Hafed is a Persian Robert Emmet, Hinda the unfortunate Sarah Curran, and the traitor a composite portrait of government spies.'60 Alternately, Daniel O'Connell is allegorically lambasted in 'The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan' as the satanic demagogue, Mokanna, who manipulates the religious faith of the masses. Moore, writing of the 'Fire-worshippers' section, once explicitly noted: 'I should not be surprised if this story of the Fire-worshippers were found capable of a doubleness of application.'61 Moore's use of allegory- 'a doubleness of application' - here seems to be a more regulated and considered, but no less integral, version

~ I,

l


of what Luke Gibbons has described as allegory in Ireland. In di~.~~ing th Of allegory by the agrarian protestors, the Whiteboys, 1 obns

e use 1 [' ] mask that can e notes: 'It is not simply, therefore, that al e?ory is ... a . ditions of

moved at will· it is part of consciousness itself under certam con. h re 1 . 1 rule '62 .Moore's Orient allegorizes an Ireland that e~bod1es (w at

~i~~~~s de;cribes as) a 'double struggle' -_'the an~i-impe~1al stru;;~e~~ h one hand, and, on the other hand, an mterna str~gg e . . . . . , 63

~o~stitutional nationalism and a dissident, insurr~~grtl~;:ryge t:~:~t~~~~s M d ot treat the Orient as an escape or pi

oore oes n k b lie 'home' in the Orient to illustrate the

~~~~:as~;~~~~e~;;r:~aen~ ~ s6':~ 0

ai:ti-imperial and an 'internal struggle'

over divergent modes of ~ecolo~z~1~n. between the Orient and the Celt In Lalla Rookh Moore bndges t e s ,an~e . . . f orkin for,

through this , doubleness of application . Significantly, his goal o w f glrish he termed, 'the cause of tolerance' seems to be a commo~ ~ne or

wo~:~talists who are also cultural nationalists; undoubtedly t~1sI1s. ahpropor-h . I . h literature This ns cause,

tionately underrep.resent:d t ~e m /1s his work i~ the light of British

however, is not easily noticed w en rea mg d that the immensely Orientalism. For instance, Te~ence. Brown ~a~.argue bout Ireland and the popular Lalla Rookh merely confirms preiu ices a

Orient' without check:

So the Irish are oriental exiles who find their 'native e.lement' in~v?lurl . [sic] re ·ons' east of the Bosphorus. In wntmg an nen a

tious thergiefore Moore confirmed British stereotypes of Ireland. But, romance, , · rt · that any he also wrote of the Orient in ways that made qmte ce am . politically suspect potential in his ~aterial w~4uld have no opportunity to inhibit his critical and commercial success.

While Brown is correct in concluding that Moore relied upon the disco~rse of Anglo-French Orientalism for ~is fi7n~~l sue:~ L~ii':c;::k:~~fs:e; the incredible advance of 3,000 gumeas or e wo ' and

mere!~ ech~ f~~~~~~e:n!:~:~c~i2:!~n::~~~:~s:~e ~~~::e~~u:~r~~scover ~~~~~~o:uthor straddles the divide between the centre and periphery of

emg~:· particular footnote ~~th reveals .Moore'~ ~r~:.~~~J~~:t~~i;~t~ demonstrates his liminal pos1t10n by offenng ~re ~· m ~ m 'Paradise and enment view of liberty. The footnote refers to t ese mes o

the Peri' :65

Downward the Peri turns her gaze, And, through the war-field's bloody haze Beholds a youthful warrior stand,

Alone beside his native river, -The red blade broken in his hand,

146 Ireland and Postco/onia/ Theory

, . ~d- the last arrow in his quiver. , LIVe, said the Conqueror, 'live to share 1:'he trophies and the crowns I bear!' S~lent that youthful warrior stood -Silent he pointed to the flood All crimson ~th his country's blood, Then sent his last remaining dart For answer, to the Invader's hear;. [sic]

False flew the shaft, though pointed well· The Tyrant liv'd, the Hero fell! _ ' Yet mark'd the Peri where he lay:

. And, when the rush of war ~as past, Swiftly descending on a ray Of morning light, she caught the last -Last glonous drop his heart had shed Before its free-born spirit fled! ,

:Be this,' she cried, as she wing'd her flight, My welcome gift at the Gates of Light

'Though foul are the drops that oft distll 'On the field of warfare, blood like this 'For Liberty shed, so holy is'*66 '

While this fallen hero seems to mere! . d. an acceptance of earthly defeat . y~n icate a sense of resignation and sentimental heroism also challe m e~~ a~ge for eternal rewards, Moore's emerges. The last line of this n;e~ . e imperial discourse from which it note, which has a marked chaqnuo e Ifs interrupted with the following foot-h ge o tone. The note be · b · 1· ·

t e trope of the despotic Orient hi hi" h . . . gms y imp icatmg of the Orient - but then it t ,t g ightmg its place m the reader's sense

urns o anot er agenda:

*Objections may be made to my use of liber . . cially in the story that follows .t II . ty m _this, and more espe-things that has ever existed in :he a~at~~~~ i~apphcable to any state of

medan to employ it in that enlarged a~d n~~l~~:~;ec:nh~o~ ~f course11' un erstood at the present da d I . IC 1s so we yet it is no disparagement to ili an Jneve to s_ay, so little acted upon, pendence, that freedom fro; wor to apply it to that national indeforeigners without which ind d the mterference and dictation of for which ,both Hindoos ;nd p,ee . no l;berty of any kind can exist; and invaders with i ers1ans ought against their Mussulman success.67 , n many cases, a bravery that deserved much better

Here is the liminality of Irish Oriental" .. rial and also native with ' d bl ism - complicit but subversive; impe-

. a ou eness of appli f , Al h mmgled in an Anglo-centric (thou . . ca ion . t ough Moore Rookh, he still wove a strong anti-c~~:::ggish) worl_d when he wrote Lalla Oriental romance, offering naf 1· t hstatei:nent mto the melodramatic

!Ona IS r etonc and allegory amidst the

1.

I I

~i .,. ,.


tropes and language of British Orientalism. While Moore refers to 'Mussulman invaders' instead of English colonizers, the allegory when noticed implicates English imperialism. Moore's footnote - the paratext to the text - instead of justifying Orientalist conclusions, offers a redefinition of Eastern liberty, one amenable to Irish nationalism, one in which liberty itself depends upon 'national independence'.

Other Irish writers also turned to the Orient and strengthened the idea that the Irish were 'oriental exiles who find their "native element" [in the East]' - but not to bolster the stereotypes of Britain (as Brown claims for Moore) - rather to claim the stereotypes as a way of asserting difference within sameness, if crossing geographic distance through imagination, as a mode of cultural decolonization. The power to represent a colonized people is usually consonant with the power of self-representation, both of which run the danger of merely reproducing the power structure within which they operate.68 Irish writers who wrote about an essentialized Orient, in a sense, sought to revise the discourse that also implicated them. Like similar representations of 'we' the 'real Irish', this is a sort of strategic essentialism (to borrow from Gayatri Spivak69), which loosens the fastened binary relations of colonizer and colonized. Moore's Irish Orientalism uses the tools of the dominant discourse to rhetorically subvert it, creating a modified version of liberty which would include national autonomy, in a sense, working toward decolonization from within the dominant discourse. By representing the liminal position between the 'First World' and the 'Third', Irish Orientalists expose the machinations of empire. In such a 'both/and' space, the hegemony of empire becomes more discernible by the simple fact that it is observed from multiple vantages. As Leerssen notes:

The ambiguous case of Ireland, both part of Europe and part of a denigrated colonial periphery, hugely complicates this straightforward binariness. Ireland is subject to hegemonistic representation, but also has access to it. English exoticism did not silence the Irish voice as it silenced the native voices from the colonies; conversely, when Ireland uses the language of exoticism, it does so in less ethnocentrist ways than in England. With Irish authors, it is not just a matter of watching or being watched, seeing or being seen: Ireland is in the Twilight between First and Third World, between the ones in the dark and the ones in the light; Ireland watches how it is watched by England; Ireland watches itself watching the Orient.70

Representing the Orient initiated these Irish writers and thinkers into a new complicity with empire. But, in doing so, many Irish Orientalists also gained insights about their own representation in empire and their own (constructed) Celtic identity. This process becomes akin to observing oneself in folded tripartite mirrors, wherein one watches oneself observe oneself from a vantage not limited by the binariness of direct reflection. Such fresh vantages are crucial for decolonization, and, therefore, the strategies for


producing it are valued and, unfortunately, are reified at times. This tripartite v~ntag~ helped Irish writers renegotiate their position in empire. By witnessmg how they were represented (and how the English operated elsewhere), they could imaginatively break from the colonial binary of colonizer an~ colonized, and ~lter_ their o~e-to-one, colonizer/colonized relationship to m~lude other pomts m the circumference of the periphery. In doing so, the distance between colonized and colonizer becomes a constant, while ~ross.-colony distance lessens as proximity imaginatively builds; the imperi~l bmary of ?1:t~opole/periphery becomes a relationship of a united circumference 101nmg around a fixed centre.

Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries, soldiers, sailors, and Orientalists from Ireland (such as Lafcadio Heam and Stanley Lane-Poole Smith) increasingly made contact with West Asian and Asian cultures (man~ even 'went native'). Significantly, the Irish person in the Orient, like the Insh a~thor of pseudo-Oriental texts, could easily occupy the role of both colonizer and anti-imperialist nationalist. For instance, the nineteenth-century Irish and Greek Orientalist, Lafcadio Heam, who left Ireland as a youth but carried visions of his Irish father and homeland with him throughout his life, occupied a nebulous position as Oriental and Occidental. Although Orientalist stereotypes haunt his texts, he does not observe the strict code of most Orientalists - that an 'irreducible distance' exis~s .between the White Man and the Oriental. 71 Many Irish writers also expllCltly compared the negative effects of colonial projects in Ireland and in Asia and West Asia. For instance, George Bernard Shaw, in his 1906 and 19~? prefaces to John Bull's Other Island (1907), compares the violence of Bntish Bl~ck a~d Ta~s in Ireland with British violence in Egypt at Denshawai and m India at Amritsar. In a 1911 issue of The Irish Review, Fre~erick ~yan intelligently explores the 'The Persian Struggle' against foreign capital and concludes: 'How entirely intelligible, one had almost written, how Irish, it all is.'72 Also, J. Chartres Molony's comparison of India and lr~l~nd in The Riddle of the Irish (1927) discusses this cross-colony recognition caused by imperialism: 'Diwan Bahadur N. Subramaniam, once a well-known figure in South Indian life, remarked to me that Indian and Irishman should understand each other. "Each," he said, "is one of a conquered race, and the conqueror is the same for both.'73 This identification differs dramatically from the perspective of T. E. Lawrence or other British Orientalists, in which Occidentals and Orientals could not fully unders.tand one another because the white man was always the observer, the Oriental always the subject.

Re~resented as being both of Europe and not of Europe, colonizer and colom~ed, ~lso made the Irish a group with which other colonized groups could identify. In 1944, Trinity Orientalist M. Mansoor coined the term, Irish Orientalism, in his study of the subject.74 As a scholar of Irish scholarship on the East, Mansoor points out in the introductory section of his study

,, (.,


that in English and Irish letters 'enough has been said to show that ... an affinity with the East had long been part of the Irish temperament'.75

Significantly, Mansoor, author of The Story of Iri~h1 Orienta/ism, was _'n_ot himself Irish' but was a 'native speaker of Arabic, to quote the Tnmty Orientalist R.M. Gwynn in the Foreword to the stud(6 I n~te ;his primarily in order to make clear that Mansoor descri~ed ~he Insh as a ?I'oup exclusive of himself, yet one with which he felt kmship - he treats himself as a representative of the Orient watching the Irish watch. The proces~ of representation becomes foregrounded. Others in Asi~n and West As~an colonies also watched Ireland watching. For instance, m Gor~ (19~0; first English translation 1924), a novel of the Bengali t_hinker, natlonalis~, and writer Rabindranath Tagore, the titular character discovers th~t he ~u:ise}f is not an Indian Brahmin, but actually an Irish orphan. Unlike Kiplmg s Kim, another Irish orphan in India, however, he is initially distr~ught when he discovers his European 'whiteness' and realize~, by exten~10n, that he must be racially complicit with the system of_ colon~al ~ppression. .

At the tum of the twentieth century, Celtic Revivalists began to expl?it and develop Celtic-Oriental connections fu~ther, as~oci_atin_g them wit~ 'international' and modern European aesthetics by highlightm? t~e positive anti-modernist sides to Celtic-Oriental stereotypes but believing they we:e borrowing 'directly' from Asian art and philosophy.77 In 'The Celtic Element in Literature' (1897), Yeats famously responded to Matthe'."' _Arnold not by refuting Arnold's formulation of Celticity but by e?1phasizm.g t~e positive and heroic traits of the imaginative and_ nature-loving Celt. S~gnificantly, he does not drop the incidental compansons b~tween the Onent~l and the Celt, but rather adds a more specific companson between Ce~hc mythology and 'Mahomedan' literatur~, 78 ther~by, in a s~nse, tra~svalum_~ the values of the colonizer to the colonized while furthenng a native tradi tion of comparing the Celt with the Oriental. . .

Yeats and other Irish writers such as Stephens, Cousi~~, and_ A~ stu~ied in even greater depth than Mangan and Moore sp~cific ~rtlstlc: philosophic, and cultural forms of Asia (particularly of ~abia, In~ia, Chi~a, and Japan) and borrowed tropes from them, incorporatmg them mto their neoCeltic mystical works. In order to recover a lost Celtic past, they imaginatively (or mystically) commuted geographic distance t~r?ugh travel (astral or real) and textual borrowings. ~his fo:m of non-s~tmcal ~arody and Orientalist affiliation was involved m their self-consc10us proiect of creating new national ideals and a new identity for Ireland - attempting to refashion what Homi Bhabha has termed a 'national narrative',79 or to use a term AE coined in 1916, the 'national being'.80 They wrote plays, e~says, stories, poems, and novels with Oriental themes, ideas, and i~ages mt:rwoven with Celtic themes. Stephens went so far as to mmgle Indian philosophy with his versions of Irish mythology (c~. In the La~d of Youth, 1924) and have Irish storytellers mix talk of karma with tales of the seraph


Cuchulain' ('Brien O'Brien' in The Demi-Gods, 1914).81 Also, these Revivalists drew heavily upon the thought and writings of Annie Besant and Madam~ Blavats~ (cf. Isis Unveiled, 1910). Blavatsky's teachings delusively appropriated Indian and other Asian philosophies into her system of :he~sophy. ~ut, in general, two of the best-known examples of the Revivalists borrowmgs from Asian literature are Yeats's Japanese/Irish Noh dramas and Stephens's version of the Tain B6 Cuailnge (the main Irish mythological cycle) written 'in light of the Veda', as Yeats observed.82

By identifying Irish myth, literature, and culture with the 'Orient' these R_evivalists not only created allegories of Ireland, they also imagin~tively dis~ance~ Irel~nd from England and 'de-Europeanized' the country with One~tahzed images of a non-British, non-industrial, non-urban Celtic, Gaehc Ireland. In the Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924; addressed to Lady Gregory) Yeats recounts how he invented verse for the Irish her? Cuc~ulain, based on '[verses] Indian poets have put into the mouth of Knshna, and how some plays of the Revival had 'an odour, a breath, that sugg:sts to me Indian or Japanese poems and legends'.83 Yeats then asks the pomted and self-conscious question for the Irish Orientalist ~ostensibly addressed to Lady Gregory): 'Why has our school . . . been mtere~t~d mainly in something in Irish life so old that one can no longer say this i_s Eur?pe, that is Asia?'84 While Yeats did not fully understand this cultural i~he~itance of a Celtic-Oriental 'something in Irish life', he, like other Reviva_hsts, was familiar with the Phoenician origins myth and sought to re-est~bhsh a thread o~ the cultural connection through theosophy. Indeed, his awareness of this 'something' signifies how embedded in Irish culture were the centuries-old links between the Celt and the Oriental. In many ways, these links culminated during the Revival when cultural nationalists (re)invented their identification with the Orient as both something ~ew ,.and_ so1:1e,thing ancient. The Oriental element that they recognized m Insh hfe felt so closely familiar, in part, because of both the tradition of it in Irish cultur~ and their inherited Celtic colonial identity. Furthermore, he later wrote m the Introduction to An Indian Monk (1932) :hat ~e believed his borrowings were not merely adopted from Oriental~ ism: We have borrowed directly from the East and selected for admiration or re?etition everything in our own past that is least European, as though gropmg backward towards our common mother.'85 Much of Celticism and Gaelic romanticism also share this impetus.

In the Introduction to Tagore's Gitanjali (1912), Yeats comments that reading Tagore's verse was like recognizing a voice in a dream; this seems :o be a metaph~r for r_ecognizing sameness in a cultural other - the unifymg of the colonized circumference. The poet's fascination with the Orient was both varied and long-lived, as illustrated by his involvement with three Ind~ans th~oughou: his life: Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore, and Shn Purohit Swami.Yeats became interested in the teachings of Chatterjee,


an Indian mystic, relatively early in his career, in the 1890s. This intere~t became manifest in his Indian poems of Crossways (1899). Notably, his interest in the East developed at the same time his interest in the west of Ireland and the Celtic Twilight took off. During Yeats's sojourn with Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage in the second decade of the ~entieth c~ntury, Yeats began to formulate ideas about the nature_ of the ?nent and_ hi~ ow~ political and aristocratic aesthetic. He actualized this aesthet_ic m his Irish/Japanese Noh dramas, Four Plays for Dancers: The Dreaming of the Bones At the Hawk's Well, The Only Jealousy of Erner, and Calvary (first perfo~med between 1917 and 1920). Both men also became intereste~ in the work and persona of Rabindranath Tagore and began ~ro~otmg Tagore's work in England and Ireland.86 Yeats wanted to mimic bot~ Tagore's and Japan's 'illustrious', 'unbroken' tradition - or as he urges his readers in his Introduction to Ezra Pound's and Ernest Fenollosa's 1916 translations of Japanese and Chinese literature: 'it is now time to copy the East and live deliberately'.87 Only two weeks after meeting Tagore, Yeats hosted a dinner for the Bengali writer, and soon helped him publish Gitanjali, a volume of his poetry in translation. While Yeats and Pou~d were n~t Tagore's only supporters, they, along with William ~othenstem, were his best advocates and promoters in Europe at the time. The~ create~ an impressive mantle for the Bengali poet and successfully drew i_nternati?nal recognition to his writing -Tagore was awarded the

1

Nobel Pnze for Literature the following year, 1913, ten years before Yeats sown N~bel. L~ter he wrote the Preface to Tagore's symbolic drama, The Post Office, which he arranged for the Irish Players to perform, headed by Lady Gregory. .

Yeats's deepest stated motives for promoting Tagore, however, der~ved from his interest in (what he saw as) the ancient continuity of the Onent. He saw in India, and in all of Asia, a unified culture that had not been ruined by modernization, in short, an ideal for the burgeo~ing Ir~sh ~ation - ideas that only differed from British Orientalism in their application. In his Introduction to Gitanjali, Yeats wrote, 'The work of a supreme culture, [Tagore's lyrics] appear as much the growth o~ the com~on soil ~s the grass and the rushes.'88 But, as Roy Foster notes, m arrangmg the Insh performance of The Post Office, Yeats 'determined that [Tagore's] message sh_ould be spread to Ireland',89 where he felt it was sorely needed for the n~t10nal renewal and decolonization. Later, in the 1930s Yeats became fascinated with the life and writings of Shri Purohit Swami. He pro~pted Swam~ to write an English-language autobiography an.d then :vrote its.Introduction (his autobiography, An Indian Monk, and his mystical :re~tise, The_ Holy Mountain [1934]) as well as the translation of the Ten Pnncipal Upanishads (1937) which Yeats co-authored.90 In these writings, Yeats returns to t~e roots of Irish Orientalism and relies on the 'Phoenician model' of Celtic origins to rejoin Ireland to its pre-colonial, pre-Catholic roots:

152 Ireland and Postco/onial Theory

I associated early Christian Ireland with India; Shri Purohit Swami ... might have been that blessed Cellach who sang upon his deathbed of bird and beast; Bagwan Shri Hamsa's pilgrimage to Mount Kai1as, ... suggested pilgrimages to Croagh Patrick and to Lough Derg . . . Saint Patrick must have found in Ireland, for he was not its first missionary, men whose Christianity had come from Egypt, and retained characteristics of those older faiths that have become so important to our invention.91

B~t Yeats was not merely interested in building mystical or allegorical bndges; he saw these cultures as having the same cultural roots. To become the voice of Ireland, he must be able to hear and identify with the voices of his 'brother' poets in India. Significantly, his enthusiasm for these Indian writers and their voices seems to have been reciprocated, particularly in the case of Tagore. Yeats was not merely interested in Tagore; he was deeply affected by Tagore's vision and persona, and Tagore was also fascinated with the persona ofYeats as the 'national' voice of colonial Ireland, even writing that he found Yeats to be an exemplary poet, comparable to the Vedic poets.92

The reasons for this mutual admiration and cross-colony identification are complex, however, and require some discussion. The two men had similar positions in their own societies, both assuming the persona of a 'national' poet in a British colony, albeit one in the East and one in the West. Both writers emerged from artistic, and in some ways, influential families in British colonies to become figures on the world stage. Both had strong, intellectual or artistic fathers and little contact with their mothers.93 Furthermore, both grew up in culturally liminal worlds, belonging to both the culture of the colonized and the colonizer - British and Bengali or Irish. Both had aristocratic leanings and sympathies, 94 and both emblemized the p~asantry in their work. Both were nationalist poets but eschewed patriotic v10lence and race-hatred. At the time they met, both were writing and producing symbolic and mythical dramas.95 And, in regarding one another, they both respected the persona of the other more than the work, even viewing one another as the embodiment of a culture and a poetic sensibility. Significant is the fact that both poets described one another as the embodiment of his own country, the spirit and voice of a people.

In his Introduction to Tagore's prose translations of his Vaishnavainspired poetry, Yeats confesses how much the pieces impressed him: 'I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it lest some stranger would see how much it moved me.'96 The blend in Tagore's 'songs-offerings' of lucid, vivid, and sensual imagery with spiritual concepts struck a chord with Yeats, who had work~d to create such a blend in his early poetry (cf. Crossways, 1889). Despite the fact that the Tagore family belonged to the Brahmo Samaj -

\ '/


Tagore's grandfather having been an early supporter of the monotheistic, Western -influenced religious sect - much of Bengal's popular Hindu Vaishnavism found its way into Rabindranath's verses.97 Vaishnavism and its blend of the divine and the physical was often mistaken to be a dominant Oriental sensibility, and a main component of Hinduism. 98 While Bengali Vaishnavists encouraged such generalizations, Orientalists ballooned such representations in Europe. The same dynamic was replicated between Tagore and Yeats. Tagore encouraged Yeats's comments on the subtlety, spontaneity, and passion of his poetry, but much ofYeats's praise of Tagore was also a naive Occidental's praise for the Orient - or a confusion of Vaishnava poetry for all of Asia's 'temperament'. For much of artistic and intellectual Europe during 1913, the artistic, spontaneous, and mystical Tagore represented spiritual health.

ForYeats, however, Tagore's spiritual poetry meant more than a fresh expression of the spiritual, it was an avenue to avoid the claptrap of established European religions, particularly the schisms between Catholicism and Protestantism. Tagore provided neutral spiritual ground for the AngloIrish poet to discuss 'universal', cultural, and national issues. Indeed, Yeats once commented in a letter to Lady Gregory that 'my last lecture - that on Tagore - was to some extent an attempt to free myself from the need of religious diplomacy'.99 Freeing himself from this 'religious diplomacy' meant he did not have to choose his words to avoid offending or alienating either Catholics or Protestants. With Indian philosophy as a subject, Yeats was free from that very Irish problem - sectarian politics. Again, the 'cause of tolerance' becomes a dominant theme for the Irish Orientalist interested in cultural nationalism.

Furthermore, Yeats sharply felt conflicting allegiances to Irish and English culture, identifying, in a sense, with the cultures of both the colonized and the colonizer. We may recall that in 1910 he accepted a pension from the British Prime Minister that doubled his annual income. As Foster notes, 'Sinn Fein journalists took to pillorying "Pensioner Yeats" as a lackey of the British government'.100 As an important point of comparison, we might also recall that Tagore had accepted the title of knighthood from the English King but later famously asked Lord Chelmsford to 'relieve' him of it in response to the British government violence at Amritsar in 1919.101

Yeats, although he had rejected an offer of knighthood in 1915, did keep his pension until his death in 1939. Reminiscent of Thomas Moore's ambivalent nationalism, Yeats's dual allegiance was subtly supportive of empire, at times seeming to be that of a subject's. This Orientalist aspect of his view of Tagore is summed up in a statement he made to Edmund Gosse, urging him to make Tagore an honorary member of the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature. Yeats wrote that his election would be 'a piece of wise imperialism' and that 'if we pay him honour, it will be understood that we honour India also'.102 But Yeats's relationship


with the centre of empire should not negate his relationship with the periphery. He still found Tagore's 'message' to be akin to his own antimodem aesthetic and his national aspirations for Ireland, as he explained to William Rothenstein, '[Tagore] pointed a moral that would be valuable to me in Ireland.'103 Tagore helped Yeats visualize a 'supplementary' role for the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, that is, as an intermediary between the English and the Catholic 'Irish-Irish'.104 In short, Yeats, and Irish Orientalism in general, reflected Ireland's liminal position in empire.

~hil~ th:ir poetic visions and personal lives had similarities, perhaps their mam difference concerned the scope of their politics. At the time, Yeats argue.cl ~oth against the 'debasement of modem politics' and 'the lowering of artistic standards for a general audience'.105 And, without realizing that Tagore may not have entirely agreed with his aristocratic aesthetic, Yeats publicly praised him for 'his determination to adhere to higher things' (Irish Times, 24 March 1913): 'Do not think I am condemning politics. They are necessary for Ireland, and I have no doubt they are necessary for India; but my meaning is - different men for different tasks. For those whose business it is to express the soul in art, religion or philosophy, they must have no other preoccupation.'106 But Tagore did not treat politics merely as a 'preoccupation', even though he devoted considerable time to literature. Tagore's awareness of international and colonial politics was much clearer than Yea:s's. I~ ~922 h~ expr~ss~d.his concerns with the enterprises of an overly nat10nahstic and impenahstlc Europe, as well as the violent nationalistic factions in India - themselves results of Indian cultural decolonization and India's own 'double-struggle'. In 'East and West' (1922), he argues that colonialism has damaged Asia and Africa but also Europe: 'the forcible parasitism [Europe] has been practising upon the two large continents of the world - the two most unwieldy whales of humanity - must be causing to her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration'.107

Tagore recognized Yeats's cultural nationalism as something important for a colony, even as something to emulate in Bengal. In his essay 'Poet Yeats', he explains: 'Yeats has made his poetry confluent with the ancient poetic tradition of Ireland. Because he has achieved this naturally, he has won extraordinary recognition. With all his vitality he has been in contact with this traditional world; his knowledge of it is not second-hand.'10s What Tagore did not understand about Yeats or the Celtic Revival is that much of the imagery and sensibility had less to do with ancient Ireland than it had to do with invented images of the Celt, and second-, third-, and fourth-hand inventions at that. Nevertheless, Tagore understood much, and he reveals a clear understanding of what is now seen as part of a process of decolonization: 'Everyone knows that for some time past Ireland has been undergoing a national awakening. As a result of the suppression of the Irish spirit by British rule, this movement has grown in strength ... Her situation is reminiscent of our own country.'109 IfYeats saw India in Tagore,

111

.

'

' . '

·"'!! ~~I


Tagore also saw Ireland in Yeats. Even though he admitted that he did not greatly admire Yeats's poetry,110 Tagore could still write romantically: 'In Yeats's poetry, the soul of Ireland is manifest.'m And, while Yeats also admitted that he found his fellow poet's writings dull at times, he clearly identified with the vision and persona of Tagore.

Clearly, Yeats served somewhat as a model for Tagore, just as Tagore did for Yeats. It was Yeats's presence, stature, and imagination that Tagore admired. Moreover, Tagore's vision was one with which Yeats identified and saw as a model for Ireland: 'A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we ... had heard, perhaps for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream.'112 In a work dedicated to Tagore, New Ways in English Literature (1920), James Cousins recorded the praise that both poets gave one another, concluding, '[there is] something stirring in the spectacle of a poet of transcendent genius standing on the house-top of enthusiasm, proclaiming, on the slightest provocation, the splendours of the genius of a brother-poet'.113 Although the two grew indifferent toward one another over the years, when they did meet again, Yeats told Tagore that he admired his novel The Home and the World (1915, first English translation 1919), claiming that he thought it also 'very true of Irish society: had it not stirred up strong feelings in Bengal as it would have done in Ireland if written by an Irish writer?'.114 Also, years earlier in writing about his contemporary India, even after his friendship with Yeats had cooled, Tagore found a symbolic role for an Irish man as the titular character of his 1910 novel Gora, which I have mentioned. The character Gora (meaning white in Bengali) is an Irish orphan, who, unaware of his Irishness, has assimilated into Indian culture. This position of the Irish orphan adopted by Indian culture is like an ion with a neutral charge - it depends upon another charged atom to determine its own charge. In a sense, an Irish man in India is a free-floating signifier that Kipling could use to bolster imperialism and Tagore could use to bolster Indian culture.

As the Revival moved on, many of the Celtic and Oriental models, like many strategies for decolonization, reified. Many writers at the time reproved Celticism for its indulgent self-inflations, foreshadowing more recent critiques that treat Celticism as a debilitating type of nativism; likewise, they criticized the similar and related enthusiasm for the Orient. James Joyce, for instance, disparaged both the fancy of the Celtic Twilight and the popular fascination with Oriental images and themes. In his short story '.Araby', for example, a young boy becomes disillusioned with romance at an exotic Oriental carnival; the story's setting links the Orient with illusion and fancy. Joyce was not alone in such a perspective; Oliver St John Gogarty and, later, Samuel Beckett also lampooned such fascinations

15fl lrcla11d and Postco/011ial Thcon1

with both the Celt and the Orient as romance and nationalistic fancyns Insh_ Onentalism did not disappear, however; varied Oriental m~tifs contmued to crop up in literature, albeit usually without a sense that Onental_ models could revive a Celtic Ireland. For example, the motif appears m the pseudo-biblical Irish-language stories of Padraic 6 Conaire (1883-1928) and'. throughout the century, in the popular magazine stories about m1ss1onanes and soldiers of fortune in the East. The motif of the Orient continues to develop and change throughout the century, yet severnl constants mclude comparisons of ancientness between Asian cultures and Ireland, an anti-sectarian 'cause for tolerance', and the assertion of sameness across geographic distancen6 These themes underscore the diasporic outlook m Irish mternational relations, where cultural affinities with distant cultures arc often highlighted, even if Irish relations with its own immigrants is not always as welcoming.

As a narrative, and even a cultural discourse, Irish Orientalism both extended and deflected the broader and more well-known Orientalisms of Europe, particularly of England and France. Irish Orientalism includes many strategic locations of writers and intellectuals, a number of whom pursued knowledge of the East and created images of the Orient for purposes other than the justification of European colonialism in Asia and West Asia. for nineteenth-century Anglo-centric intellectuals the Celtic-Oriental link could confirm the barbarity of the Irish. Jn the hands of the Revival's cultural nationalists, this became an allegorical way to obviate empire by revealmg cross-colony identifications and promoting more equitable East-West relations. Often by examining struggles in the East, Insh cultural nationalists gained specific lessons for decolonizing Ireland, as Frederick Ryan's 1911 essay on Persia in The Iris/1 Rcz1icw demonstrates:

In thl' CJSL' llf Pl'rsiJ, Jlso, Wl' leJrn the cssl'ntiJl unity ot thl' humJn probil'm under all its different phases and the futility of thl' phikN1phy ot Western despots who, Jnxinus to dllminJll' and exploit the EJst, set up the pleJsJnt doctrint' t_hat the peoples of the EJst love Lkspotism, and thus tundamentJl!v ditter from the peoples of the \'\lest . . It is in this realisation of human kinship. this shattning of the pride of rJce and the pmk ot power Jnd the pride of religion . . thJt thl're lil's the

greatest hope of morJl Jdvance. 117

Ryan crnKludes by making his lrish-l'ersian comparison clear: 'How entirely mtl'lligible, one had almost written, how Irish, it all is.' In addition to ottering a critique of the nature of Orientalist and imperial representations, this ant1-colurnal essav strengthens cross-colony identification alon<> the colornzl'd circumicrencc of empire, unifying it against the centre. h

. H1stoncally, Irish Oricntalism simultaneously participated in the rhetoric ot till' 1mpcnal ml'tropole and the colonized periphery; it became both 01

Irish Oric11talis111: An ();1n-.: 1icw l 57

way to participate in empire and a way to denv it. Its strategies did r10t

merely replicate or form a subset of Anglo-French Orientalism, nor did its narratives merely repeat and internalize British rnlonial stereotypes of tlw Oriental. Irish Orientalism formed a distinct discourse - a path of resistance, if also, at times, a path of clear collusion. During the m<1st prominent moment of Irish Orientalism, the Celtic Revival, this discomse reasserted a centuries-old strategy of an independent and ancient OriEntal-Ccltic sensibility and culture in the face of received colonial stereotypes. Such a move was a form of cultural decolonization. Despite the varied purposes of individual writers, the Celtic narratives consistently linked Ireland with both Asian cultures and Orientalism, often imaginativ6Jv and/or politically unifying the circumference of empire (as opposed tc> :1

disjointed periphery). Such cross-colony comparisons do not negate colonizer/colonized relations, nor Trish complicity. But they create a limi11al space for critiques to exist. Irish Orientalism reflects Ireland's own limi11al position, existing at the edge of Europe, alongside distant marginal cultures

in the imagined geography of empire.

Notes and References 209

15 See Beckett's remark, 'If you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable.' Cited in J.C.C. Mays (ed.), 'Samuel Beckett' (p. 233) in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 233-313.

Mutinies: India, Ireland and Imperialism 1 It is a measure of the British Empire's confidence that in the 1930s British instruc

tors often gave this text to Indian officer-cadets at the Indian Military Academy as a topic for essays and discussions.

2 Humphrey Evans, Thimayya oflndia: A Soldier's Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960), p. 134.

3 See Prisoner of the British: A Japanese Soldier's Experiences in Burma (London: Cresset Press, 1962).

4 For more on this I would refer the reader to that remarkable collection of essays by Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton University Press, 1993).

Irish Orientalism: An Overview 1 James Clarence Mangan, 'To the Ingleezee Khafir, Calling Himself Djaun Boo\

Djenkinzun' (1846), in The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems: 1845-1847, vol. 3 of 4 vols, Jacques Chuta, Rudolf Patrick eds./Holzapfel and Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 159.

2 W.B.Yeats, Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W B. Yeats Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds./ (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 854.

3 While no scholarship has studied Orientalism as a decolonizing strategy for Revivalists, a few recent literary and cultural studies have examined Asian influences on Irish literature, and a number of other studies have examined the conceptions of Irish identity and nationhood. Several scholarly studies have explored Moore's, Yeats's, and Stephens's interests in Asian forms and cultures (for example, Terence Brown's essay, 'Thomas Moore: A Reputation', in his Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1988); Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings; James Mill's The History of British India and Orienta/ism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Okifumi Komesu, The Double Perspective ofYeats's Aesthetic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984); Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray (eds.), Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1990); Sylvia Ellis, 'Japan, Japonisme and Japonaiserie', in The Plays of WB. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer, 1995; John Rickard, 'Studying a New Science: Yeats, Irishness, and the East', in Susan Shaw Sailer (ed.), Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997); Mair Pitt, The Maha-Yogi and the Mask; A Study of Rabindranath Tagore and WB. Yeats (University of Salzburg Press, 1997); Hilary Pyle, James Stephens; His Work and an Account of His Life (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965). Other studies have discussed the Western sources and socio-political influences for the imagining of Ireland's national identity, for example, Norman Vance, Irish Literature, A Social History: Tradition, Identity and Difference (Cambridge: B. Blackwell, 1990); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modem Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995); Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, (Cork University Press, 1996); Seamus Deane Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Ireland's Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popular Culture (Cork University

210 Notes and References

Press, 2001); Mary Massoud (ed.), Literary Inter-Relations: Ireland, Egypt and the Far East (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1996); and Joseph McMinn (ed.), The Internationalism of Irish Literature and Drama (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992). Furthermore, numerous literary and cultural studies have been done on the role of Orientalism in Europe (mostly France and England) and America, and Joep Leerssen has published a relevant essay on 'Irish Studies and Orientalism: Ireland and the Orient', in C.C. Barfoot and Theo D'haen (eds.), Oriental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East (Amsterdam: Rudolphi, 1998). But no comprehensive study has examined the role of Orientalism in the formation of national myths of Irishness.

4 In particular, Aubery de Vere's Antar and Zara (1877), James Clarence Mangan's 'Literae Orientales' (1847), Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817), Edmund Pery's Letters from an Armenian in Ireland (1757), Oliver Goldsmith's 'Chinese Letters', collected as The Citizen of the World (1764), and Frances Sheridan's 'Eastern Tale', The History ofNourjahad (1767).

5 Celticists (John Home and Hugh Blair) confirmed the validity of MacPherson's 'translations' which later turned out to be concocted (Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760, Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, 1762, Temora, 1763).

6 In Progress in Medieval Irish Studies (Maynooth: Saint Patrick's College, 1996), Kim McCone reports: 'If the ancient Celts had a myth expressing their common ethnic identity similar to the one ascribed to their Germanic neighbours by Tacitus (Germania 2), this has disappeared without trace and the earliest origin tales of Celtic peoples that have come to us emanate from medieval Welsh and Irish pens imbued with clerical learning. The oldest extant versions of these are in Nennius' ninth-century AD. Latin Historia Brittonum . .. [which] must be based upon an early version of the Gaba/a Erenn or "Takings of Ireland". It describes successive invasions leading up to that of the sons of Mil Esp<iine from Spain, a destination ultimately reached in the aftermath of the expulsion from Egypt of an ancestral Scythian nobleman married to Pharoah's daughter Scotta shortly after the Israelites had fled across the Red Sea' (p. 7). McCone continues to explain how biblical stories, in particular the Tower of Babel myth, along with the dubious work of Isidore of Seville, provided medieval Welsh and Irish scholars with sources for the Celtic origin myths (pp. 7-9).

7 Various scholars exposed misreadings of ancient texts on the Celts soon after the ideas were circulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (for example, Thomas Wood's Royal Irish Academy pamphlet, 'On the Mixture of Fable and Fact in the Early Annals of Ireland, and on the Best Mode of Ascertaining what Degree of Credit these Ancient Documents are Justly Entitled To', Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 13 (Dublin, 1818).

8 Sir William Jones, a.k.a. 'Oriental Jones', comments on Vallancey's use of this term in a letter to the 2nd Earl Spencer, in a section dated 10 September 1787, 'Vallancey begins with stating a fact (which is the only curious part of the book) that the Irish have histories of their country, from the first population of it, in their own language; one of which histories he is translating. Then he insists with great warmth, that those histories could not be invented by modern priests: perhaps not; but what is his reason? Because those priests did not understand Persian, (which he calls Southern Scythian) and the ancient Irish were Persians' (The Letters of Sir William Jones (ed.) Garland Cannon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 769).

9 Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork University Press, 1996), p. 72. Elizabeth Butler Cullingford traces the motif of Irish Carthaginians and Irish Scythians in her article 'British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial


metaphor in Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness', Publication of the Modem Langua~e Association, vol. 8 (March 1996), pp. 222-39 (revised as a chapter m her Ir~land s Others: Ethnicity and Gender in Irish Literature and Popul~r Culture, op. cit., PP· 99-131). Cullingford notes that 'The Rome-Carthage motif oi:erates.m comp.lex and variable ways: as origin myth, colonial parable, and site of. mt~rsechon between nationalism and sexuality' (p. 222). She discusses the imagmahve resistance fostered by the link between Ireland and Carthage as far back ,as the eighteenth century, crediting it with what she calls the development of an oppositional identity for the colonized Irish'. She argues that such a metaphor focuse~ Irish imaginative resistance for the colonized Iris~. I agree wi.th Cullingford s conclusions, but her argument only examines a piece of the discourse of Insh Orientalism.

10 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, op. cit., p. 73.

11 ibid., p. 71. . H. .r th B ·t n · 12 Charles Vallancey, An Essay Towards Illustrating the Ancient 1story O; e n .an zc

Isles; Containing an Explanation of the Names Belgae, Scythae, Ce/tae, Bnttam, Albanich, Eirinnich, Caledonii, Siluri, &c. &c. Intended as a Prefac~ to a Work Entitled, A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland. By C.V (Dublm: James Fletcher,

1802), p. 13. . . . 13 Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagmatwn, op. cit., pp. 71-72. . . 14 After years of rumblings about Petrie's findings about the ongms of the roun.d

towers, and after winning a gold medal from the. Royal Iri~h Ac~demy for his research, his study (or at least the first section) was finally published m 1845 as The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, Anterior to the Anglo-Norman Invaswn, Compnsing an Essay on the Origin and Use of the ~ound Towers ~f Ireland.

15 For a discussion on the various efforts to include Insh 11: the Indo-~uropean chart, see Kim McCone's chapter, 'Prehistoric, Old and Middle Insh, m Progress m Medieval Irish Studies, op. cit., pp. 7-53.

16 w. Smith, Historical Explanations of Emblematic Cards; For the Use of Young Persons (Dublin: Marchbank, 1801), p. 57. . . .

17 The narrator adds to the speculative origins of the Mago.gian-Scythia~-Phoemcian-Philistine-Carthaginian-Milesian Celt in the followmg passage: But when the Sov'reign Ruler of the sky / Cast on his people a propitious eye, I Bro~ght them from Egypt; and by Joshua's hand, / Gave them possession of the prom1s'd !an~; I The old Philistines, who dwelt there before, I Were forced to migrate to a foreign shore; /With martial force, these landed on your coast, I And, t.o this day, the .name Milesian boast' (pp. 4-5). One implication of this argum~nt.1s that the takmg of Irish land has historical precedence and theological 1ustification. ,

18 In a letter dated 17 December 1814 to 'Messrs. Longman & Company' M~ore proposes the terms of Lalla Rookh: 'I have taken ou.r conversation,,of yesterday mto consideration, and the following are the terms which I prop~se: Upon my givmg into your hands a poem of the length of Rokeby, I am to receive from you the sum of 3000f [sic]'" (Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], p. 406).

19 Quoted in Brown, 'Thomas Moore: A Reputation', op. cit., P· 22. . 20 In Howard Mumford Jones's biography of Moore, The Harp tha.t One~ (New York. H.

Holt, 1937), he writes of Lalla Rookh's publication and the Onentahst .atmosphere surrounding it in England: 'The book had appeared at exactly the nght time. A score of travel books had whetted the appetite of readers for the glamorous East. Napoleon's exploits in Egypt and Wellesley's in India had increase.d the vogu~ of Orientalism, as had the tales of nabobs returning from the Onent with hver complaint and riches mysteriously acquired. There were Turkish ornaments above


the !onic columns at Carlton_ House, Mameluke saddles and an effigy of Tippoo Sahib m the armory, and Chmese dresses and a palanquin in another chamber; the~e was. an Egyptian .1:all at the Mansion House; the Rosetta Stone puzzled gapmg V1s1tors m the Bntish Museum; and under the innumerable minarets of the Pavilion at Brighton, Chinese mandarins stared at green and pink marble panels on the walls. The fashionable world had yawned over Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama, but The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos restored passion to the East. James Mill began ~is History of British India the year of Lalla Rookh, and Shelley's Laon and Cythna'. which became The Revolt of Islam, was completed in September. What matter 1f to the general imagination India and Egypt, the Turks and the Parsees, the Bosphorus and the Vale of Cashmere were indistinguishable parts of a vague, rich universe of color and dre.am'. "Stick to the East" - it was the only poetical policy. Lalla Rookh was the culmmatmg point in poetical Orientalism' (pp. 170-71).

21 DaVJd Lloyd, Natzonalzsm and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irzsh Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 115.

22 ibid. 23 Translation theory. often explores the idea that the translator, in many ways, must

create a new text, ma sense, betraying the original text. I use the word 'traitorous' to point to this sense of the betrayal of translation.

24 ibid., p. 123. 25 Tuer~ is not enough space here to explore the history of the concept of the Orien

tal ongms of European cultures. But, notably, in 1788 Sir William Jones (who was familiar with Vallancey's work) advanced an argument that supplanted Hebrew Wlth Sanskrit as the originary language of European languages. See Bill Ashcroft's and Pal Ahluwalia's.Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 58, for a bnef summary of the significance of this concept for the discipline of Orientalism.

26 Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature, op. cit., pp. 123-24. 27 Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, 'The Challenge of Orientalism, Economy and

Society, vol. 14 (1.985), pp .. 174-92, p. 180. There are many more interesting critiques and commentanes of Said's Orienta/ism, including his own, 'Orientalism Reconsidered' in Europe and Its Others: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on Sociology of Literature, July 1984'. vol. 1 (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), pp. 14-27, and ~1s Afterword m the 1994 edition of Orienta/ism, as well as many bland and spec10us ones, for example, Keith Windschuttle, 'Edward Said's "Orientalism" Revisited' (Th_e New Criterion, vol. 17, no. 5 (January 1999), pp. 30-38). I will not devote space m '.his e~say to critique Said's argument, except to note that the place of Insh Onentahsm differs radically from the Anglo-French Orientalism that Said prim.arily explores. As Julia Kushigian notes in Orienta/ism in the Hispanic Literary Traditzon (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), we should not expect all Orientalisms to 'do no more than "elaborate" on the"major steps" of the Anglo-French position'. (p. 2). I should also note, however, that Aijaz Ahmad (In Theory: Classes, Natzons, Literatures, London and New York: Verso, 1992), Dennis Porter ('Orientalism and Its_ Problems'., in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Soczology of Literature, (Francis Barker (ed.), Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983), and others make worthy critiques of Said's use of Foucauldian terminology. and concepts. But Ashcroft and Ahluwalia's (Edward Smd: Th~ Paradox. of Identity, op. cit.) explication of Said's humanistic critique of Onenta}1sm conVJ,ncu~gly argues that Said intentionally alters Foucault's conception of discourse t~ mclude a sense of agency. Their argument critiques Said's work according to his own concept of 'wordlines'.


28 Ernest Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, trans. William G. Hutchinson (London: W. Scott, 1896).

29 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in R. H. Super (ed.), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold: English Literature and Irzsh Politics, (11 vols. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), vol. 2.

30 ibid., p. 343. . 31 Quoted in Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, op. cit., p. 143. . . 32 John Pentland Mahaffy, Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilizations and Their Physical

Conditions (London: Longmans, Green, 1869), p. 243. 33 ibid., pp. 8-9. . . . . , 34 The 1879 poster calls for an April 20th 'Great Tenant Right Meetmg m Inshtown ·

I thank Kevin O'Neill for bringing this poster to my attention. . 35 Gauri Viswanathan has written recently about James Cousins in her work Outside

the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998). She explores Cousins's work with Annie Besant and the Theosophica~ Socie~: '_In Cousins's view the interweaving of Irish and Indian cultures gave racial contmmty to their common struggle against British colonialism because Cousins interpreted history through a mystical, theosophical lens, which rei~f?rced some of the id;als of British imperialism, or what would become the Bntish Commonwealth .. (p. 207). She also argues forcefully that theosophy enabled the idea of the Bntish Commonwealth to succeed in India.

36 I borrow this term from philosophy (cf. WV. Quine's Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960)) where it refers to 'the status of being somehow accessible to at least tw.o (usually all, in principle) minds or" subjectiviti~s". It th~s i~plies t.hat there is some sort of communication between those mmds; which m tum 1mphes that each communicating mind is aware not only of the existence of the 0th.er but also of its intention to convey information to the other. The idea, for theonsts, is .that if subjective processes can be brought into agreement, then perhaps that is as good as the (unattainable?) status of being objective' (Jan Narveson, 'Intersub~ jective', in Ted Honderich (ed.), Oxford Companzon to Phzlosop~y (~ew.York. Oxford University Press, 1983)). In the context of this study, I am 1mplymg mtersubjective communication between colonized individuals differs, however, from the type of communication that occurs between colonizer and colonized -

because it is two-way and reciprocal. . 37 See Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), particularly the 'Lordship and

Bondage' chapter. 38 See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). 39 For example, we can see such identification as early as the late eighteenth century

in Dean Mahomed's autobiographical account of his years m Ireland m his Travels (1794), which subverted the Orientalist accounts of the Orient. .see ~1chael Fisher, The First Indian Author in English; Dean Mahomed (1759-1851) m India, Ireland, and England (Oxford University Press, 1996). Also, see Charles Stuart, The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe durzng the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 and 1803, (2 vols, London: Longman, 1810), for an account of one of the first Indian visitors to Ireland who concluded that 'The poverty of peasants or common people in [Ireland] is such that the peasants of India are rich when compared t_o them' (p. 47). I am indebted to C.A. Bayly for this citation. For more on this, s_ee his 'Ireland, India and the Empire: 1780-1914', which appeared in the Transactzons of the Royal Historical Society (sixth series, vol. 10, 2000), pp. 388-98. .

40 For more on this, see my essay 'James Stephens's Diminuitive National Narra-tives', Comparatist (Spring 1996), pp. 62-81.


41 See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 1989); Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic (New York: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge,.1990); Lloyd, Anom.alou~ Sta.tes, op. cit., Said, Culture and Imperialism, op. cit, Gibbons, Transformations in Irzsh Culture, op. cit.; and Gerry Smyth, Decolomzatzon and Crzticism:The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998). ,

42 In Orienta/ism: We~tem Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Vintage, 1979; rev. ed., 1995), Edward Said wntes: 'The distinction I am making is really between an almost u~consc10us (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Onen~ahsm, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, soc10logy, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Wha.tever c~ange .occurs in kno~ledge of ~he Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Onentahsm; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant' (p. 206).

43 James Cousins and Margaret Cousins, We Two Toaether (Madras: Ganesh 1950) p 232. 0 , , .

44 For a non-literary example in Irish culture, Oriental delftware came to Ireland via England, but the c~ntre of production eventually shifted to Ireland.

45 I am usmg parody m the broad sense that Linda Hutcheon defines it in A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen 1985)· repetition with difference. ' .

46 Said, Orienta/ism, op. cit., p. 20. 47 Letters.from an Armenian has been attributed to Robert Hellen, a judge of Common

Pleas m Ireland as well as Edmund Pery (see Hamilton Jewett Smith Oliver Goldsmith's .The Cit~zen of the ~arid (New t;aven: Yale University Pres;, 1926) for a discuss10n on pseudo-Onental letters). Written on the copy in the British M~seum is '.by Judge H-1-n' and the catalogue has [By R. Hellen?]. Halknett and Lamg (Dictzonary of Anonymous Literature, vol. 2, 1883), however, attribute the Letters to Viscount Pery. Also, leading eighteenth-century scholars (such as Kevin Whelan) have expressed the belief that Pery was the author. I will refer to Pery therefore, as the author. '

48 Said, Orienta/ism, op. cit., p. 20. 49 See Mary Helen Thuente's lucid essay, 'William Sampson, United Irish Satirist

and. Son.gwriter', Eighteenth-Century Life; Ireland, 1798-1998: From Revolution to Reviszomsm and Beyond, vol. 22, n.s., 3 (November 1998), pp. 19-30.

50 Interestmgly, Croker was parodying the longstanding public interest in Lord Ma.cCartney's embassy to China, which resulted in numerous pamphlets from the Chmese Emperor to George III, themselves based on the mistranslation of an actual letter, for example, the anonymous pamphlet, The Imperial Epistle from Kien Long, Emperor of China, to George the Third, King of Great Britain, &c. &c. &c. in the Year 1794 (Dublin: J. Milliken, 1799). Also, much was made over the fact that MacCartney was Irish.

51 Edmund Perry, Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to his Friends at Trebisand &c Translated in the Year 1756 (London, 1757), p. 78. ' .

52 ibid., p. 83. 53 ibid., pp. 83-85. Letter xix.

54 Nina Witosze.k and Pat Sheeran would probably disagree. Their Talking to the Dead: A S~u.dy of Irzsh. Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) works over this tradition (but misses Pery's text), attempting to establish it as the primary narrative of Insh culture.

55 Said, Orienta/ism, op. cit., p. 168.

I i ~


56 Oriental pilgrimages were similar to English travel writers going t~ Killarney ~nd elsewhere in western Ireland in the nineteenth century, a pnmary difference bemg that in Ireland they were not seeking to recover a lost culture.

57 The author perhaps conflated the Persian ambassador to England, Mirza Abu! Hassan Khan, who did not visit Ireland but was well known in England, thanks to James Morier's works and the British press, with Mirza Abu Taleb Khan, who was one of the first Indians to visit Ireland (see note 39).

58 One example is especially worth relaying: 'Mirza Abu! Hassan Khan is extensively versed in Oriental literature; he can not only read the Arabian Nights Entertainments in their original language, but also the Tooloonamia, or Numia, or the Tales of the Parrot. He is a great admirer of Hafiz, the last and best of the Persian poets, whose sonnets can be compared to nothing but the effusions of our countryman, Moore. On hearing some of the productions of the Irish poet, which were read to him at Bilton's Hotel, he immediately observed the similarity' (The History of Mirza Abu! Hassan Khan, the Persian Ambassador; with Some Account of the Fair Cirassian by 'An Irish Officer in the Service of Persia' (Dublin: Thomas Christopher Clifford, 1819), p. 18).

59 Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (Buffalo, NY: Derby, 1850), p. x. 60 Jones, The Harp that Once, op. cit., p. 181. . . . 61 Quoted in Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire

62

63

64 65 66 67 68

69

(Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 113. The quote is taken from the Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London and Edinburgh: William Nimmo, 1875), p. 90. Leask adeptly contextualizes Moore's oriental tale within British ~~manticism and Whig Orientalism (cf. Sir William Jones) but also notes, 'The political message. of Moore's oriental revolution seems to be most fully intelligible in his native Insh context ... The poem reworks the love story ... [of] Byron's Bride of Abydos in a context allegorical of the predicament of Irish nationalists under the yoke of British domination' (p. 113). Leask continues his valuable commentary: 'Moore - a Whig"orientalist" of the school of Jones rather than a ref?rmer of_ the s.chool of Mill or Shelley - is sympathetic to the claims of a romantic, ~rgamc nati~nal'.sm which, he implies, must free itself from the imposture of Jacobm cosmopohtamsm and French atheism ... [T]he sort of nationalism idealized by Moore m The Fireworshipper [advocates] a national independence founded on Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union. At the same time he seeks to "enlighten" his address by recommending "Liberty, benevolence, peace and toleration" to the superstitious but oppressed Irish.' . . Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 142. . ibid., p. 146. Gibbons is discussing James Joyce's 'The Dead' in this sect10n and borrows the term' double-struggle' from Joyce. Brown, 'Thomas Moore: A Reputation', op. cit., p. 22. A 'Peri' is the Islamic equivalent of an angel in Christianity. Moore, Lalla Rookh, op. cit., pp. 117-18. ibid., p. 118. Access to representation is crucial in a colonial relationship, Joep Leerssen, echoing Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Leerssen notes m his essay 'Irish Studies and Orientalism: Ireland and the Orient', in Barfoot and D'haen (eds.), Oriental Prospects, op. cit., 'In a colonial relationship, there are those who represent, and those who are represented; the former wield discourse, the latter do not' (p. 173). See Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, op. cit., particularly the intervi_ew by th~ same title. While Spivak is discussing the role of the postcolomal cnhc, the idea of


working within a system one is 'obliged to inhabit' is relevant to the Irish situation (p. 72). Gerry Smyth also makes of these ideas of collusive resistance in an Irish context in his Decolonisation and Criticism, op. cit.

70 Leerssen, 'Irish Studies and Orientalism', op. cit., p. 173. 71 Said, Orienta/ism, op. cit., p. 228. 72 Frederick Ryan, 'The Persian Struggle', The Irish Review, vol. 1, no. 6 (1911), p. 286. 73 J. Chartres Molony, The Riddle of the Irish (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1970), p.

158.

74 Mansoor had earlier published his MA thesis as an article in Hermathena, 'Oriental Studies in Ireland, from the Times of St. Patrick to the Rise of Islam', no. 62 (1943), pp. 40-60.

75 M. Mansoor, The Story of Irish Orienta/ism (Dublin: Hodges Figgis, 1944), p. 13. 76 ibid., p. 5.

77 Yeats and other Revivalists were also fascinated by the fashionable modernist works of French symbolists, who were also interested in 'Asiatic' cultures. Like Pound and his 'ideograms' many modem artists grossly misunderstood their 'material'. Yeats was no exception: for his Celtic Noh dramas, he believed he had found an authentically trained Japanese Noh dancer in Michio Ito, a modem dancer trained in Paris; the irony is significant.

78 It is important to note, however, that in 'The Celtic Element in Literature' (Essays and Introductions, New York: Macmillan, 1961, p. 175) Yeats is not merely making Celtic-Oriental comparisons, rather he is arguing for recognition of the 'Celtic element' in world literature and the importance of national epics for nations, Finnish and 'Mahomedan' as well as Irish.

79 Homi Bhabha uses this term in his essay, 'DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modem Nation', in Homi K. Bhaba (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Bhabha's use of the term 'national narrative' signifies a narrative in the broadest cultural sense, that is, a narrative which permeates a culture, embodying its identity and hegemony.

80 AE adopts this term in his nationalist exploration of Irish identity, The National Being [1916] (New York: Macmillan, 1930). He differentiated the terms: national ideal, national soul, the body or State of the nation, and the national being. On the last of these he wrote: 'In the highest civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters into it, and it becomes an oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his fellow-citizens so that all he does conspires with the labors of others for unity and magnificenc~ of effect' (pp. 11-13).

81 'Brien O'Brien' is Book III in The Demi-Gods (London: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 143-223.

82 Pyle, James Stephens, op. cit., p. 128. 83 Yeats's Preface to The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924) in The Variorum

Edition of the Poems of W B. Yeats, op. cit., p. 854. 84 The Preface to The Cat and the Moon continues, 'It cannot be because of the books

we have read, for we have all read such different books ... That is the kind of insoluble problem that makes the best conversation, and if you will come and visit me, I will call the Dublin poets together, and we will discuss it until midnight' (p. 854).

85 William Butler Yeats, An Indian Monk (London: Macmillan, 1932), p. 8. 86 In Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press,

1988), the chronicle ofYeats's and Pound's friendship, James Langenbach calls them '[Tagore's] two most devoted readers ... they put together what Pound would later call "the cleverest boom of our day" in order to promote his work' (p. 23).

.,.


87 In Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study, 1990, Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray discuss the context from which Yeats drew.

88 Rabindranath, Tagore [sic], Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali; with an Introduction by WB. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. xii.

89 Roy F. Foster, WB. Yeats: A Life: I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 472.

90 In 'Studying a New Science: Yeats, Irishness, and the East', op. cit., John Rickard has detailed much ofYeats's personal relationship with Swami. He also explores what he calls Yeats's "'Indo-Irishness" - his conjunction of Irish and Indian ethnicity and culture - in order to demonstrate some of the ways that "India" functioned as a construct for Yeats in larger historical and ideological struggles' (p. 97).

91 William Butler Yeats, 'Commentary on Supernatural Songs', The Variorum Edition of the Poems of WB. Yeats, op. cit., p. 837.

92 Discussing Yeats and the 'Vedic poets', Tagore writes in his essay, 'Poet Yeats', 'For all those who look candidly, see similarly', Rabindranath Tagore: An Anthology, eds. Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (New York: St Martin's Press), p. 217.

93 For many other personal and artistic similarities between Yeats and Tagore, see Mair Pitt, The Maya-Yogi and the Mask: A Study of Rabindranath Tagore and WB. Yeats (Salzburg University Press, 1997).

94 Tagore's family were wealthy zamindars or landowners, and although they counted themselves members of the Brahma Samaj, they still wore their Brahmin thread. See Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore: The MyriadMinded Man (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996}, for more discussion on this.

95 Tagore even performed the role of the 'Fakir' in his play, The Post Office, just as Yeats occasionally took to the stage in the Abbey.

96 Tagore, Gitanjali, op. cit., p. xii. Some of this section is repeated in another essay of mine, included in 'Writing Across Empire: Rabindranath Tagore and W.B.Yeats', m Rabindranath Tagore: University and Tradition (Patrick Hogan and Lalita Pandit (eds.), forthcoming, AUP 2003}.

97 Vaishnavism concerns the worship ofVishnu, particularly during Vishnu's incarnation as Krishna and Krishna's passionate and physical love for Radha, especially as described in the Gita Govinda. As Dutta and Robinson note in their biography Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit., the blend of 'physical passion, sensuous imagery and verbal music', characteristic of the bestVaishnava poetry, can be seen in Gitanjali (p. 41). They further note: 'There can be no doubt that Vaishnavism was a wellspring of the imagery in Gitanjali that would overwhelm W.B.Yeats in 1912.'

98 For more on this see Richard King, Orienta/ism and Religion: Postco/onzal Theory, India, and 'The Mystic East' (New York: Routledge, 1999).

99 Quoted in Foster, WB. Yeats: A Life, op. cit., p. 483. 100 ibid., p. 428. 101 Tagore, An Anthology, op. cit., pp. 164-65. 102 Quoted in Longenbach, Stone Cottage, op. cit., p. 25. Postcolonial critics may place

much of Yeats's cultural nationalism in the category or mode of 'liberal decolonisation' (cf. Gerry Smyth's Decolonisation and Criticism, op. cit.). Smyth writes: 'Yeats's attempt to discover/construct a valid culture to equal metropolitan culture and thus form the basis for an equal political relationship [a hallmark of liberal decolonisation] was disabled at its conceptual moment, because the drive to assert equality in fact reinforced the structure of inequality' (p. 75). This disablement, however, did not prevent Yeats's ideas and writings from being widely mfluenhal in Irish cultural nationalist circles.


103 Quoted in Foster, WB. Yeats: A Life, op. cit., p. 471. 104 Gerry Smyth also summarizes the 'logic of supplementarity through which

English colonialist discourse functioned' in Ireland in Decolonisation and Criticism. 105 ibid., p. 483. 106 Quoted in ibid. In his essay 'Yeats and Decolonization', Edward Said discusses

Yeats's rivalling allegiances and one of his techniques for resolving sectarian and political tensions: 'For Yeats the overlappings he knew existed between his Irish nationalism and the English cultural heritage that both dominated and empowered him as a writer were bound to cause an overheated tension and it is the pressure .of this urgently political and secular tension that one ma~ speculate caused him to try to resolve it on a "higher", that is, nonpolitical level. Thus the deeply eccentric and aestheticized histories he produced ... are elevations of the tension to an extraworldly level' ('Yeats and Decolonization' Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 80.

107 Tagore, An Anthology, op. cit., p. 210. 108 ibid., p. 218. 109 ibid., p. 219. 110 Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit., p. 225. 111 Tagore, An Anthology, op. cit., p. 216. 112 Tagore, Gitanjali, op. cit., pp. xvi-xvii. 113 Jame~ Cousins, New Ways in English Literature (Madras: Ganesh, 1920), pp. 18-19.

Cousins, who had moved.to .India with his wife Margaret early in the century, often wrote about the s1m1lanties between Irish cultural nationalism and Indian cultural nationalism, having participated in cultural revivals in both countries. Much of their lives is recorded in their autobiography, We Two Together (1950).

114 Dutta and Robinson, Rabindranath Tagore, op. cit., p. 225. 115 In As I was Going Down Sackvi/le Street [1937] (Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1994)

Gogarty writes: 'We are suffering from a nightmare culture of imaginary Gaels' (p. 200). The book also abounds with references to India and China; when two ch.aracters. discuss how to represent Dublin, one concludes: 'The only way to treat this town ts the way the Chineses [sic] treat their pictures; eschew perspective' (p. 58). Later, just after commenting on a queue outside the cinema house - 'Dubliners willing to buy a dream that will let them escape for an hour from their surroundings' - the narrator meets Tim Healy, the 'First Governor-General of the Irish Free State', and they briefly discuss the book of another governor: 'a translation of the Chinese of Po-Chu-I when he was Governor-General of Chung-Chou' (pp. 92-93), from whom the Irish governor gains inspiration. In Samuel Beckett's Murphy [1938] (New York: Grove Press, 1959), Miss Counihan, an Iris.h exile in London, becomes entranced by an 'Oriental' atmosphere in a hotel,.1ust as she an~ other characters become entranced by a 'Celtic' atmosphere ~hinking of Murphy s death: 'Here she cowered, as happy as the night was short, in the midst of Indians, Egyptians, Cyprians, Japanese, Chinese, Siamese and clergymen. Little by little she sucked up to a Hindu polyhistor of dubious caste. He had be~n writing for many years, still was and trusted he would be granted Prana to finish, a monograph provisionally entitled: The Pathetic Fallacy from Avercamp to Kanpendonck' (pp. 195-96).

116 Indeed, related motifs appear as recently as in the titles of Paul Durcan's poetry ('O Westport in the Light of Asia Minor') and Colum McCann's 1998 magical realist story, 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire', in Bill Henderson (ed.), Best of the Small Presses: The Pushcart Prize 1999 (Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1999), in which a Korean soldier finds the 'place of his youth' in Ireland (p. 31). Also see Cullingford's

1: I'.\

i·, ~ 1


Publications of the Modern Language Association essay on Carthaginian themes in contemporary Irish literature (see note 7).

117 Ryan,'The Persian Struggle', op. cit., p. 286.

Spirituality, Internationalism and Decolonization: James Cousins, the 'Irish Poet from India'

1 See Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan, 1917). 2 'A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore', The Crisis, vol. 36,

no. 10 (1929). 3 Cousins's most sustained work on this subject is War: A Theosophical View

(London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1914). 4 James Cousins, Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies (Madras:

Ganesh, 1921), p. 202. 5 See Tagore's Nationalism, op.cit., for the poet's most sustained and impassioned

argument against nationalism. 6 James Cousins, Samadarshana (Synthetic Vision): A Study in Indian Psychology

(Madras: Ganesh, 1925), p. 61. 7 Alan Denson, James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins: A Bio-Biographical Survey

(Kendal: Alan Denson, 1967), p. 14. Benet's article appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, vol. 8 (4 June 1932), p. 772.

8 In his 1912 broadside'Gas from a Burner', Joyce wrote: 'I printed the table-book of Cousins I Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse I 'Twould give you a heartburn in your arse.' The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 349.

9 John Wilson Foster, 'The Interpreters: A Handbook to AE and the Irish Revival', Ariel, vol. 11, no. 3 (July 1980), p. 69. Quoted in D.C. Chatterjee, James Henry Cousins: A Study of His Works in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West (Delhi: Sterling, 1985), p. 17.

10 Among the most significant works in Irish Studies that have appeared in recent years are: David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clare~ce Manga.n and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: Umvers1ty of Cahfornia Press, 1987), and Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Coloma/ Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland:The Literature of the Modern Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1996); Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Natwnhood zn lnsh Wrztzng smce 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). All fine critical studies, but none of them makes any mention of James Cousins.

11 Denson, James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins, op. cit., p. 14. 12 ibid., p. 16. 13 There were precedents for British apprehensions: Charles Johnston (1867-1931)

was a key figure in the Dublin Theosophical Society who came to India as .a member of the Indian Civil Service. But he was forced to leave India because of his suspected political sympathies for Indian nationalists. As D.C. Chatterjee notes in James Henry Cousins, op. cit., the Dublin Theosophical Lodge was a primary channel of Indo-Irish interaction (p. 153).

14 James H. Cousins and Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh, 1950). 15 Letters ofWB. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1954), p'. 613; quoted

in Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 158.

16 The most hard-biting of these articles included 'Patriot Bards and Ballad Makers: A Page from the History of Freedom by an Irish Home Ruler', New India, 11

Ireland and Postcolonial Theory

edited by

CLARE CARROLL

and

PATRICIA KING

CORK 3 ~ UNIVERSITY Lill PRESS

First published in 2003 by Cork University Press

Crawford Business Park Crosses Green

Cork Ireland

©The Editors and Contributors 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any electronic, mechanical or other

means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission

of the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd,

The Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

A CIP record for this publication is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 1 85918 350 6 hardback

Typeset by Tower Books, Ballincollig, Co. Cork Printed by Creative Print and Design Group, Harmondsworth

www.corkuniversitypress.com