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DISORIENTALISM Asian Subversions, Irish Visions by Ciaran Murray

INTRODUCTION Why is Dublin Castle like a temple garden? Why is Whistler’s Irish lover like a woodblock print? Why is Hemingway’s Irish warrior like a Noh play? The answers involve the arts of Europe over two and a half centuries: the Romantic sublime is defined by Burke; Wilde is the supreme exemplar of Aestheticism; and at the centre of Modernism stands Yeats.

I. AESTHETICS 1. Kyoto’s Temples to Tara’s Halls. English Romanticism, stimulated by the Japanese garden, is adapted for Ireland by Henry and Charlotte Brooke.

2. Lady Morgan & the Moonlight Menace. Owenson inverts Burke’s aesthetic, locating the beautiful in England, the sublime in Ireland.

3. Oscar Cancels a Country. Wilde repudiates Romanticism for Aestheticism, influenced by Whistler’s valuation of the Japanese woodblock print.

II. ARCHETYPES 4. Japan as Celtic Otherworld. Hearn sees Japan in Aesthetic terms -- and also Irish, in musings echoed by Joyce in ‘The Dead’.

5. Byzantium and the Mandala. Yeats, following Morris, locates Jung’s archetype of the centre in the city which unites east and west, north and south.

6. Shimmering. Developing it further in the alchemical imagery common to east and west.

III. APOPHASIS 7. Buddha in the Buried City. Yeats’ valuation of Buddhism in ‘The Statues’ conditioned by Spengler..

8. Some Versions of Nothing. The unutterable of the apophatic tradition linked to the meaningful void of Indian zero, Sino-Japanese painting and the Zen garden, and echoed by the eloquent silences and tension-filled spaces of Modernism in Yeats, Joyce and others.

9. Métaphysique Nocturne. Apophasis in Eriugena traced through Byzantium and Alexandria to India.

‘Intellectually rigorous and intellectually exciting’ -- Robert Morton, editor, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan.

‘Outstanding scholarship, sensibility and enthusiasm’ -- Ken’ichi Matsumura, translator, The Voyage of Bran to the Land of the Living.

‘How beautifully sculpted are the sentences that float on the sea of references and background’ -- David Burleigh, editor, Helen Waddell’s Writings from Japan.

‘A stimulating work which bravely “goes it alone” as far as trends and cliques go. A rich feast indeed’ -- Nicholas Meihuizen, author, Yeats and the Drama of Sacred Space.

‘Very clearly a labour of love, as well as a meticulous and invigorating work of scholarship…surprising turns and swift insights on every page…opening up new vistas of thought and inheritance’ -- Robert Welch, editor, The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature.

‘A marvellous work’ -- Charles De Wolf, translator, Akutagawa Mandarins.

‘Unique command of western and eastern culture…stunning’ -- Christopher Murray, author, Yeats & the Noh.

‘Magical book’ -- Cleo McNelly Kearns, author, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions.