Ancestral Recall: The Celtic Revival and Japanese Modernism 9780773598669

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Ancestral Recall

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A nc est r al R ec a ll The Celtic Revival and Japanese Modernism A o i f e A s s u m p ta H a r t

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016

ISBN 978-0-7735-4690-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-4691-2 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-9866-9 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-7735-9867-6 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hart, Aoife Assumpta, 1974–, author Ancestral recall : the Celtic revival and Japanese modernism / Aoife Assumpta Hart. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4690-5 (cloth). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4691-2 (paper). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9866-9 (ePDF). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9867-6 (ePUB) 1. Irish literature – Translations into Japanese – History and criticism.  2. Irish literature – 20th century – History and criticism.  3. Japanese literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 4. Japanese literature – Irish influences.  5. Irish literature – Japanese influences. 6. Irish literature – Appreciation – Japan.  7. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939 – Influence.  8. Comparative literature – Irish and Japanese.  9. Comparative literature – Japanese and Irish.  10. Transnationalism in literature.  11. Transnationalism – History – 20th century.  I . Title.

PR8719.H37 2016  820.9’9415 C2016-900603-4 C2016-900604-2

Set in 11/14 Warnock Pro with Source Sans Pro Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

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Abbreviations | vii Prefatory Remarks | ix 1 The Crossed Roads of Interculturality | 3 2 The Cartography of Dreams or the Landscape of Nation? | 55 3 The Politics of Telling Twilight | 118 4 Airurando bungakukai and the Translation of Fairies | 191 5 Accessing Ancestral Houses | 262 6 The Stagecraft of Twilight | 321 7 The Cursing of the Bones | 382 Notes | 417 Bibliography | 451 Index | 479

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a b b r e v i at i o n s

Au Autobiographies

CP

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats: The Plays

CPo

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: The Poems

CT

The Celtic Twilight

DB

The Dreaming of the Bones

EI

Essays and Introductions

FLM

Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth

GUJ

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

HW

At the Hawk’s Well

IFF

Irish Folk and Fairy Tales

ITS

Irish Texts Society

JAI

Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation

Le

The Letters of W.B. Yeats

Le2

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats

NKBZ

Nihon koten bungaku zenshū [An Anthology of Classical Japanese Literature]

SB

The Speckled Bird

SW

The Shadowy Waters

TM

Tōno monogatari

Vi

A Vision

VPl

The Variorum Edition of the Plays

WO

The Wanderings of Oisin

viii | Abbreviations

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Any work of scholarship benefits immeasurably from a variety of encounters, both professional and personal, through which fledgling ideas are slowly brought into radical flight. This has been particularly so for this book, which involved research activities, library excursions, loud debates, and many cups of tea in three countries (Ireland, Canada, and Japan) and in three languages (Irish Gaelic, English, and Japanese). I would like to acknowledge now the countless hours of time that were saved, as well as the increased pleasure in this task, owing to the many suggestions kindly given by a very broad range of people in those places, and in those words. Foremost, I would like to extend my boundless gratitude to John Xiros Cooper, who has been both great friend and mentor to me during the various stages of preparation of this manuscript. He has been, and continues to be, a major reason I believe in art’s ability to create change, to promote communities and solidarities, and to champion social, ethical, and political awareness. Joshua Mostow, in sharing with me his expert knowledge of premodern and modern Japanese literature, enabled me to reformulate some of the presentations of Japanese literary contexts. Likewise, I would like to thank Kawagoe Chizu for her advice regarding many details of Japanese cultural practices that I could not have accessed without her guidance. Niiro Motohisa, who recently passed from this world, prepared for me a large map based on the Tokyo transit system with pen marks for all locations of library archives. Shyamal

Bagchee also generously agreed to read my manuscript, and many of his suggestions have enabled me to improve my focus on certain matters. Kevin McNeilly, always critical yet very supportive, enriched my research with his pressing questions and guiding comments on theoretical perspectives. All translations from the Japanese are my own, unless otherwise noted. For additional reference, I have also consulted, in deference to their skill, published translations if available. For Irish Gaelic texts, I provide renderings in English, when possible, from those editions that were available to W.B. Yeats and his contemporaries. Otherwise, translations from the Irish are also my own. Japanese names are given in the traditional format, family name first. In some specific instances, I do not follow this convention. For example, in referring to authors who publish primarily in English, and whose names are customarily familiar to English-reading audiences, I do provide their names in the Western format: Haruo Shirane or Eiko Ikegami are two examples. Moreover, I refer to several Japanese writers by their pen names, as is the accepted and affectionate tradition in Japan: for example. Kyōka (not Izumi), Sōseki (not Natsume), Santōka (not Taneda). The ideas for this work, as first fermenting in my mind, came directly from an extended stay with friends in Kildare and Sligo on various occasions. Their hospitality gave me the opportunity to return to Ireland for a much-needed spot of decompression. There, and with them, I was entirely free to pursue my interests and passions outside of academic contexts, and this was intensely productive for my own self-growth. A particularly raging row one night, about how one authentically pronounces Dún na nGall, reminded me of the inescapable pull that regional identities and local accents still have on individual and collective notions of identity as sites of intervention. Sligo folk are continuously harassed for lifts, directions, and local information, especially by Yeats-admiring blow-ins like myself; however, my hosts never showed any disdain toward my many requests for their help. For proving that Irish hospitality is not a cliché, I thank Tony Fallon, Sandra McDermott, Iarla and Eemer Ó Lionáird, and Michael Quirke.

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I would like to thank the staff at the National Art Gallery of Ireland, who on several occasions allowed me access to materials that were not currently on display. Similarly, in Japan, my work was aided by researchers at the Lafcadio Hearn Museum (Matsue) and the archivists overseeing the collection of Izumi Kyōka’s work in Kanazawa. The burden of overseas living was greatly lessened by many kind acquaintances who so willingly opened their homes to me on countless occasions. They also invited me into their social lives as well, augmenting, through personal encounters, the information I had gleaned from books and lectures. Vancouver is where the bulk of the composition and revisions took place. For their great support and camaraderie, I would like to thank Christine Stewart, Yoshinaga Masumi, Tyson Stolte, and Yamashiro Takeo. Shirin Eshri, the specialist for Japanese books at the University of British Columbia Asian Studies library, gave me more of her time than I deserve. For providing knowing glances and understanding grins, I acknowledge the warm kinship of Peter Mahon, who also knows of an Ireland that was before all of this Celtic Tiger, and now post–Celtic Tiger, business. It also must be said with all emphasis that Mark Abley was an attentive, sensitive, patient, and committed editor. Without his support, this monograph would currently be languishing somewhere on a flash drive in County Cork. I offer him therefore a great deal of my gratitude. I likewise extend massive thanks and appreciation to the outside readers of this manuscript. Quite honestly, I was deeply blessed that my manuscript was examined by three passionate individuals with unique scholarly perspectives and backgrounds. Their thoughtful, thorough, enthusiastic but critical reviews helped to shape this into a much better book. Their insights were specific, penetrating, and most of all fashioned from the highest level of incisive scholarly assessment. And the suggested revisions helped me to recast and hone my arguments in what I hope is a more user-friendly version than what I initially inflicted upon them. In countless ways, the finished product benefited invaluably from their care and attention. As I cannot know them by name, I just take this moment to express feelings of recurrent

Prefatory Remarks | xi

appreciation for their efforts. I truly benefited from the consideration and the time that they invested in my ideas, and I am heartened by the care and criticism provided through their reports. This was the review process at its best. Harold Otto and Kate Baltais provided expert attention with copyediting. Thank you most sincerely. The completion of this monograph was aided by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship, and so I state my thanks to the council. Paul Matthew St Pierre offered his support and supervision during my postdoctoral period. When my one-year postdoc was concluded, I found myself, then as now, with inconsistent academic employment, making final revisions on a ten-year-old laptop that suffered a warp core breach. On a parttime sessional lecturer’s salary, the idea of a new computer was about as whimsical as a trip to the moon. But with a generosity that was both unassuming and sincere, Siân Echard gave me her spare machine. This manuscript literally would not have reached completion without her unscripted kindness and generous gift, allowing me to salvage garbled .doc files from a dead drive and migrate them onto Siân’s donated machine to continue on with the work. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity here to acknowledge some personal matters: I completed many of the revisions to the manuscript during the rather exciting and unpredictable time of my gender transition. One does lose friends, family, and, in my case, a job this way. Nonetheless, I am continually encouraged by the respect and acceptance shown to me by friends and colleagues, in Japan, Ireland, and Canada, who have welcomed me as a transsexual woman. Colleagues, for the most part, were courteous in adopting my legal name and preferred pronouns – and this is especially so with McGillQueen’s University Press, and other scholars with whom I’ve collaborated at conferences, most memorably the very happy occasion of attending the Hybrid Irelands Conference (University of Notre Dame, 2012). This was my first opportunity to present my work in my authentic gender – truly a wonderful thing; and I am thankful to the organizers, John Dillon and Nathaniel Meyers, for this chance. This conference was, really, one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had as an academic, enriched by the reception I received. Warm regards are due to Paula Meehan, David Lloyd, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill,

xii | Prefatory Remarks

Ailbhe Darcy, Spurgeon Thompson, Clair Willis, Robinson Murphy, Michael Malouf, and Heather Brown, as well as many others, who made this occasion so blessedly memorable, intellectually fulfilling, and personally encouraging. Also from the lovely Notre Dame, I am continually encouraged by my friend Brian Ó Conchubhair. During the inevitable turmoil and tumult of such a process as gender transition, I have found in this book something solid to hold onto, something that required devotion, and something that provided me comfort and stability through the attention that I gave it. Transition, of course, frequently entails a legal name change. McGill-Queen’s University Press demonstrated flawless attention in updating their forms of address and their files for me. I thank the readers and editors for their patience in that the circumstances of my transition slowed my scholarly activity at times. I have recently taken my partner’s second name, on that happy day that we were married. Catherine Hart – you whom I met a year after I authentically declared my truest self, at a terrifying time when I thought no one would love this self, have been my wife and my family. Space is limited; thankfulness is not. I conclude with a sentiment to my best friend in Japan, for her profound encouragement that enabled me to first emerge as and then embrace an authentic life, I express a special note of gratitude to my o-nē-san, Sakurai Emi: 絵美ちゃん、 貴方はあたしのラピスラズリ. はるか彼方、西洋から東洋を幾千年も旅 をして言葉、文化、芸術、 そして友達を運んで来てくれたこの石は、 あた しの宝物となりました. ラピスラズリはあたしの大切なものです. 本当に自分でいられるよう勇 気づけてくれてありがとう. 絵美ちゃんの支援に対して心から感謝して います.

Is tú mo chara is fearr go deo. –Aoife Assumpta Hart, Cincíse Dé Domhnaigh, 2015

Prefatory Remarks | xiii

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History is not born unless we turn our heads back [fukikaetta] to the past. How sad that, now, we find ourselves washed away from moment to moment, unable to stop even for an instant to glance behind and recall [kaerimiru] the road we have taken to get to where we are. For the benefit of the future, our past is trampled upon as though it never even existed. As something uprooted, we are pushed forward, and further forward again. – Natsume Sōseki, Mādokku-sensei no “Nihon rekishi” [A Review of Professor Murdoch’s A History of Japan]

They were all the more easily uprooted because they lacked knowledge of their own history and of a philosophy which attributed great value to national community. Had they been aware of their national history they would not have been driven like chaff before the imperial wind; but they knew little of y glendid a fu (the beauty that was); they had been suffering from amnesia for centuries … – Gwynfor Evans, Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau

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The Crossed Roads of Interculturality We require history, for the past continues to flow within us in a hundred waves; we ourselves are, indeed, nothing but that which at every moment we experience of this continued flowing. – Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1933, Bernard Shaw attended a Noh performance that was being held in his honour in Tokyo. Disconnected from both the language and the stylistics of the genre, he noted that, although he could not claim to understand the meaning of the plays, he could sympathize with their “artistic intentions” (Shaw, “Speech” 315). In an image that would later be reproduced in Life magazine (15 November 1948), Shaw posed for a photograph during this trip wearing an okina [old man] Noh mask.1 For Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), a prominent Japanese author who was becoming increasingly skeptical of Western influences on the art of his nation, the opportunity for a public jab at this cultural tourist was too enticing. In a critical essay on Shaw’s visit, Tanizaki (1933) coined an epithet that summarized his opinions of this Irishman: he referred to him, and his presumptions, as “Bānādo Shō okina” [Bernard Shaw, the crazy old guy] (“Geidan,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū, vol. 20, 435–6). Was Shaw’s wearing of the nōmen [Noh mask] a sign of artistic solidarity, a pretentious pose in appropriated costume, or a sort of

intercultural prank? Although Japanese journalists paid little attention to this dramatist’s ten-day visit to their country, Tanizaki went further than name-calling in reproving Shaw, further describing him as a man who does not possess a sliver of understanding of the Eastern disposition [iki] (“Geidan” 435–6). Very dismissive of Shaw as a limited-term tourist with artistic pretensions, Tanizaki’s essay “Geidan” [Talks about Art] (1933), in part, demonstrates Tanizaki’s increasingly polemical desire to codify into differential classifications the artistic mindsets of East and West. Shaw was an unfortunate representative of the presumptuous West. In Tanizaki’s view, one that elicited a great deal of Japanese sympathy at the time, Eastern artists pursue inner cultivation whereas Western artists take pride in craftsmanship and fame. Through this nickname, okina, Tanizaki implies that Shaw had treated the Noh masks, and by extension Japanese artistic traditions, as a publicity prop in a manner that was offensive, ignorant, and clownish. As for Shaw, who had a sizable readership in Japan, he probably considered the event as one of benign silliness with no aesthetic philosophy attached. But to those in the more insular mindset of Tanizaki, this mishandling of an honoured item of Japanese dramatic history served to demonstrate the inability of Westerners to understand Asian art. The essay “Geidan” overall argues for the inextricable relationship between the artifacts of national tradition and their communal history of encoding with feelings of loss, mourning, and dispossession. Shaw, in Tanizaki’s view, would never understand the contextual framework of cultural experience: without the language, without the tradition, and without the nationalized sensibility, Shaw’s claim to understand artistic intention in Japanese art is false and arrogant. Thus, Tanizaki utilizes Shaw’s lacklustre visit in order to reify his own claims about gei [art] as a localized manifestation determined by culturally geographical space. But Shaw had his agenda as well: his visit to Japan was intended to promote Marxism, the subject of his first speech in Tokyo, as a universally appreciable solution for all cultural domains and economic systems. As Shaw had predicted in an unpublished essay about his visit, “you may live to see a statue of Lenin and a bust of Marx in every Shinto temple” (Dukore 2010, 253).

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Major literary critics in Japan took notice of Tanizaki’s accusations toward Western artists, and their implications for intercultural exchange. Kobayashi Hideo, in his seminal piece of literary criticism “Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku” [“Literature of the Lost Home”] (1933; English translation 1995), picks up on how Tanizaki disparaged Shaw as a boyish grandpa, or in Tanizaki’s phrase botchan jiji-chan (“Geidan” 436). Kobayashi quotes from Shaw’s speech in Tokyo so as to ascribe to him a perverse feeling of hopelessness regarding art’s ability to affect material conditions. Instead of nationalistic distinctions, Kobayashi tries to find mutual similarities between Shaw and Tanizaki by situating them as counterparts in an irreconcilable pathos that all artists in the modern era experience as they struggle to create in times of disappearance and dread. Kobayashi, by interpolating Shaw’s and Tanizaki’s voices together in this essay, positions an international convergence of cultural notions about art’s relationship to transition and trauma. As Kobayashi notes, linking himself with these authors, “from an early age my feelings were distorted by an endless series of changes occurring too fast” (48). What would have been an appropriate way for Shaw to not just appreciate Noh, but to “sympathize” with Noh, as he claimed? Was donning one of the specialized tools of the actor, the Noh mask, in a casual way for a photo opportunity an insult to tradition? Broader questions began to emerge for Kobayashi and Tanizaki. What precisely is the status of traditional art during a period of rapid change and political isolationism? Is it a cultural relic? A heritage monument? An actor’s costume? An ethnographic prop? A relic of lost Japan? Or is it a symptom, an irreducible remainder of those artistic intentions that “where there is no memory, there is no home” (“Lost Home” 48). Shaw’s visit to Japan was preceded by almost four decades of IrishJapanese exchange, and his arrival in that country would have pleased many who were eager to enhance Japan’s sense of connection to the European world, especially Ireland. Previously, without success, maximum efforts had been put into bringing W.B. Yeats, another Irish Nobel laureate, to Japan for a series of lectures. Due to his age, perhaps among other reasons, Yeats never accepted the offer, thus denying us the opportunity of knowing what his first-hand impressions

The Crossed Roads of Interculturality  |  5

of Japan would have been. Most likely, he would not have envisioned busts of Marx enshrined within a Shintō temple [honden], the sacred precincts of indigenous Japanese worship. But would he have been any more sensitive, than Shaw, in claiming to understand Noh? Yeats, along with other Celtic Revivalists, was widely translated, read, and in many ways studied, as my research will document. Through a boom of interest in Irish writing, Japanese authors had undertaken an extended project of interpreting Ireland, through its literature, as a complimentary yet also conflicting foil to their own national predicament. To evaluate these connections, the interdisciplinary research in this monograph documents and analyzes how the Celtic Revival, a movement concerned with the survival and adaptability of an Irish Celtic heritage, came to have deep and discernible effects on Japanese literature and ethnography of the modern period. In a process of mutual debate and enrichment, this influence would then retroactively inspire the Celtic Revivalists to reconsider their formulation of the Celtic in response to the reception history of interpretations of Irishness by Japanese poets, ethnographers, and historians. My work argues for a multilingual, transnational assessment of critical tropes about the Celtic Revival as positioned in a reflective relationship with Japanese modernity, and vice versa. Thus, as a distinctive example of transnational modernism, this study takes up an exploration of a cultural estuary space, a muddied but incredibly fertile literary history that few literary critics have documented. These trans-Pacific exchanges were profoundly indicative of the early phases of globalization in the twentieth century. Moreover, these interactions of Japanese-Irish interculturality reveal a broader portrait of a cross-literary paradigm coming into maturation in the twentieth century, one demonstrating an overall conceptualization of modernity’s struggles with cosmopolitanism, tradition, and transnationality. My analysis is directed toward readers of both Japanese and Irish modernist literatures, as well as those who are concerned with issues related to translation, transition, and interpretation of national, political, and cultural identities in a global framework. Learning which Irish or Celtic themes attracted artists on the other side of the world can change the way we read Irish literature by seeing how Revivalist writers responded and reformulated their sense of the Celtic as

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a considered response to Japanese conceptualizations. The literary and cultural interactions operated bilaterally, engaging both sides in a reciprocal flow of ideas. Various sites of cross-cultural exchange began to tentatively form along this Irish-Japanese dialogue, in which questions of community, identity, and ancestry are continually negotiated and set in play. In theorizing these interactions, I take a different approach from many of my scholarly predecessors. Rather than adopting a unidirectional approach – in which Western modernist authors of West, often gripped by Orientalist notions, exploit the East as an ideation of European longings for a pre-modern past – my perspective pursues a multilingual modernism that invoked cross-cultural links and fluid understanding of mutual influences. This is not to say that activities documented here were without pitfalls. My theoretical emphases throughout on twilight, (dis)embodied voices, transnational circulation of heritage, ghosts as markers of loss, and the broader mutual influences flowing between the Celtic Revivalists and Japanese modernists are intended to demonstrate the inevitable complexities that accompany the attempted narration of culture and tradition – particularly in interlingual and international contexts. My arguments thus speak to the literary concerns of Ireland and Japan, but they also address wider issues such as translation theory, cultural hybridity, and the input of culture into politics. George Yúdice in his provocative book The Expediency of Culture (2004) challenges us to rework our preconceptions as to culture’s manner of operation in a global era. His analysis reconsiders culture by recognizing that it primarily acts as a resource through pluralistic contacts: “culture-as-resource is much more than commodity” (1, original emphasis) since it promotes forms of political and capital development that “is expedient as a recourse for attaining an end” (29), one that acts as an interface between the local and global “to meet the requirements of the bottom line” (16). In such a reading, culture’s purpose is to acquire cachet, at every level of social power. Yúdice’s arguments take on a strongly cautionary tone so as to not romanticize culture as high art, perfect realm of struggle, fetishization of identity, or space for artistic sovereignty. As always, the precise implications for resistance and activism remain undecided. But Yúdice

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affirms that discussions of culture must acknowledge that the activity of culturalization requires multiple nodes of development, none of them being categorically either local or global. The modernization processes of the twentieth century, in which international capitalism took over the reigns of imperialism, intensified the sense in which cultural negotiations continually reconfigure themselves according to the multiplicity of encounters across diverse societies. The struggle with diversification is a touchstone of modernism. Manuel Castells, in The Rise of Network Society (2000), describes the modern period as an era when the power of space – as in geography and transnational horizontality – came to overpower the sense of time – as in history, heritage, and ancestral continuity. At the advent of the twentieth century, specific localized identities, narrated in a state of flux between present-day constructions and dislocated histories, faced an increasing number of outside political pressures, driven by globalizing forces that promoted homogenization and national cohesion. Although Antonio Gramsci’s more classical notion of culture as the terrain of struggle must be connected to its determination by class, his concepts also locate culture’s field of performances as particularized by its anthropological connections to the sociocultural specifics of the spaces and places of its construction and dissemination. Culture in such a view is always the domain of the lived and the locally inhabited; and this observation has been the guiding emphasis for cultural geographers such as Keith H. Basso (1996), who observes that “place-making is a universal tool of the historical imagination” (5). Faced with multiple threats of cultural dispossession, yet cognizant of the fact that a fetishistic attachment to insular, local traditions only consolidates the gap between ancestry as an abstract ideal and tradition as rooted in living practices, the writers of the Celtic Revival explored the role that folklore plays in the ongoing, fluid process of constituting a localized heritage. The Celtic Revival, also called the Irish Renaissance, challenged a global audience with its dedication to the local and particular of Irish historical formation of cultural resistance, but one also potentially translatable into, or representative within, transnational contexts of modernity. Far from being a nativist retreat into some dreamy Celtic past, the transnational dynamic

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of the Celtic Revival represents an attempt to establish a conversation with tradition that can exist across the transnational contexts of modernity. That this literary movement would come to have distinctive interaction with Japanese literati is thus one of modernism’s most unique demonstrations of transnationalism as intermingled praxis. Authors in both these regions recognized each other’s involvement in articulating the constitutive role of folklore for narrating a heritage culture [Japanese, minzokugaku; Irish Gaelic, dúchas] in the formulation and dissemination of cultural subjectivities as locally produced, but internationally circulated, during the early phases of global intercourse. But how and why did these literary and ethnographic intersections, ones that facilitated Irish-Japanese literary exchange, in particular, provide cross-textual pathways for debating what constitutes cultural identity and heritage? Various Irish and Japanese authors registered their ethnic identities through levels of interactive exchange, as part of an overall project of modernizing nations and how they analyzed the ways in which other societies were coping with the complexities inherent to the era. The Irish-Japanese nexus enabled distinctive examples of modernism’s negotiations with the feasibility for sharing heritage and for interpreting and translating culture in transnational, multilingual spaces. Although concerned with a variety of poets, environmental activists, philosophers, and folklorists, who to various degrees established the Celtic Revival as a collective movement, W.B. Yeats, in particular, emerges as a focus in this work. The major reason for this is that Yeats had significant international stature as an author and statesman whose diverse body of writings had sufficiently wide exposure to generate the forms of interpersonal contact that were formed between Ireland and Japan. Practical, on-the-ground networks require salient figures who embody a mixture of diplomacy, prominence, and international cachet. For an Irish-Japanese phase of literary interculturality to have taken place in the interpersonal ways that it did, the situation necessitated a name of global reputation to generate dialogue. And W.B. Yeats willingly took on this role, as both text and icon, and thus became the global spokesman of the Celtic Revival. Buoyed by widespread regard and a diverse output of ideas, as well as a Nobel Prize in Literature, Yeats possessed the requisite visibility

The Crossed Roads of Interculturality  |  9

for facilitating these kinds of trans-Pacific dialogue. Yeats, as a major figure who penned the major works, proved to be tremendously influential to Japanese authors, both in terms of genre and trope. Nevertheless, as this study examines, Japanese authors understood Yeats, and the Celtic Revival in general, as more than a single author, but a multi-faceted figuration of Celtic identifications, the process of forming an Irish literary culture, and the ideological category of Éire as a whole. Although this monograph’s sense of the Celtic Revival is transnational in operation, critics have traditionally seen the Celtic Revival as a parochial, inward gazing quest for authenticity so as to prop up notions of citizenship for an emerging Irish republic. To some extent, of course, this is true. However, this movement also acted as a dynamic interpretation of the past that exemplified the difficulties in categorizing or narrating a cultural identity as something representative beyond national borders. My research interrogates the commonly held belief that the Celtic Revival only had stiflingly provincial implications. In particular, the global circulation of the Celtic both inspired and frustrated Japanese scholars and authors who were engaged in a similar project for codifying Japaneseness. The intricate artistic relations that emerged between Ireland and Japan suggest that the Irish Revival had distinctively internationalist consequences. My findings argue that a formulation of folklore, as both a historicist’s term and an artistic zone of enquiry, allowed for a common cultural logic to be shared between authors in these two nations. They sought to develop vistas of perception that accounted for cultural topographies both local and foreign. This evidenced transition, of a localized cultural nationalism into transnational nodal points for debate, exposes an innovative exchange of global interfacings, heralded by the advent of the modern period. These interstices, ones that connect Ireland and Japan, suggest overall research conclusions about how convergent societies negotiate the feasibility of sharing heritage and for translating culture. The proliferation of hybridized cultural materials, through transnational recontextualization, both aids and impedes the pursuit of culture as globally accessible. On the themes and tropes that linked Ireland and Japan, I argue that the influence of Irish letters on modern Japanese literature at this time contributes

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to our understanding of global processes of influence, intercultural relations and transnationality in the twentieth century. Widely translated and widely read in Japan at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Celtic Revivalists inspired an active group of Japanese writers who formed the Airurando bungakukai, or Irish Literary Studies Society.2 Yeats was the leading figure of interest to the rise of the society; its membership encompassed many major Japanese modernist authors who passionately translated and discussed Celtic Revivalist works. Other Irish authors enjoyed an audience in Japan, too, but the Celtic Revival received some of the most consistent and passionate attention of any literary movement from Europe. Many of the qualities that critics find so dismissive about the Revival – its emphasis on fairy lore, the supernatural, folkloric tradition – are intriguingly the materials that endeared them to many of Japan’s leading modernist writers. Their attention blossomed into a conversation, and Ireland and Japan drew comparative examples from each other for the formulation of paranormal themes for depicting their methods of occultic narrative ethnography: liminal spaces, the locative intermingling of spirit/place, and the multi-temporal force of tradition. Through this example of the Celtic Revival as interpreted by Japan, and vice versa, a more comprehensive vantage point appears, one that draws together the wide topography of interactions between the Celtic Revival and Japanese literature in modernity. Japanese and Irish literary ethnography at the time engaged in what Michael Cronin has more generally identified as endotic travel, movements of close attention across small and localized spaces, noting the social configuration of ideas through their performative practices in their specific style of analysis and reporting. The Celtic Revival emphasized endotic attention to the local and particular as a way of understanding other locals and particulars, and Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight supplied Japanese authors with a source model for discussion, debate, and critique about the role of folklore and locality in a rapidly centralizing society. Whether endotic or exotic, any consideration of the Celtic Revival must necessarily concern itself with the literary, political, and cultural debates of the Irish movement for Home Rule. Yet it was exactly

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these fraught debates over Irish sovereignty and efforts to narrate historical senses of belonging – and the struggle to find stability for these interpretations – that were very much the themes that would attract Japanese authors. Yeats and others promoted through their publications the question of Irish nationhood to the world and developed an extraordinary range of international contacts including Ezra Pound, Suzuki Daisetsu, Noguchi Yonejirō, Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Further, it was through interconnections with Japan that the Celtic Revival would find its most enthusiastic audience. For this study, then, the Celtic Revival is both point of departure and a place of arrival. The phenomenon of Irish-Japanese intertextuality included many diverse figures, with differing agendas, who formulated and disseminated transnational subjectivities through convergent exchange. The diverse materials developed by both national literary traditions, in response to one another, need to be assessed as relativized factors cooperating in a continuous project, one conceived of as interactivity rather than discussed in broadly comparative, disconnected, and monolingual terms. A recurring term in the vocabularies of Japanese and Irish authors is the ancestral, as being the manner in which tradition itself repeatedly seeks to write itself into the contemporary experience of cultural emplacement. What we might do in response is explore how the intercultural relationships arising out of the Celtic Revival managed to connect with a Japanese range of perspectives that, in various ways, helped shape modernist literary sensibilities in both nations. This picture had been complicated by Japanese authors and ethnographers in the early twentieth century whose own national consciousness was undergoing some of the same stresses and strains as in Ireland of identity politics and emergent national identities. The rise of cosmopolitan modernism, centrally located in metropolises such as New York and London, minimized the need to draw on or preserve local cultures. Yeats observed, over a lifetime considering the trace and transience of tradition, those transformations and transitions through which memory attempts to recall tradition. A major theme that informed his ideas was that cultural and intercultural sensitivities require an imaginative comprehension for their

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metamorphic qualities, ones that are not easily defined or readily produced. He writes of this predicament in The Celtic Twilight (1991 [1902]): “In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few people – three or four thousand out of millions – favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet the imagination is the man himself ” (CT 154). History loses its elasticity as both recollection and imagination recede. As Yeats suggests, we should not confuse the systems of representation for that which is being represented. Irish and Japanese authors, although varied in their approaches, were aware of such a pitfall, and this is a theme discussed throughout this work. How did modernism, through transnational exchange, manage the tensions, contentions, pastiches, ideologies, discursivities, and subjugations that claim ancestral authenticity? For an artist, and not just politicians who manipulate their art, the moral stake is serious. Can one stand apart from emergent political trends? To what extent does the present owe a responsibility to preserve continuity with the past? Are minority languages worth saving? Why even conceive of culture as historical artifact if the product is preordained to serve fantasy and illusion? If history is an empty dream, why recall what was confused to begin with? What should be preserved or what can possibly survive? The Japanese and Irish authors in my study do not provide the same answers: they accepted the difficulties of the modernizing predicament, and many (but not all) did not foreclose the potential for beneficial moments of intercultural self-reflection. Their responses vary, but they did seek answers more representative than an elderly Irishman trying on a Japanese mask for laughs. Some of Shaw’s and Yeats’s artistic contemporaries in Asia were engaged in activities that paralleled the nationalist, and transnationalist, statesmanship of the Celtic Revivalists. Through these perceived mutual concerns in modernist development, friendships and political alliances were forged interlinguistically and interculturally. Therefore, mindful of Clifford Geertz’s (1985) claim – that “the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and encasements” (4) – my monograph evaluates how Irish and Japanese authors, through comparative interaction,

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examined the cultural narratives of particularized histories as somehow representatively embedded in social habitats, regional dialects, and communal customs. My sense, however, is that the ineluctably local becomes the inevitably global, inseparable from the pathways of recirculation, a process that should give both hope and worry. After all, the diverse, translocal materials­­­of the poem (practices that are cultural, political, religious) coalesce in unpredictable ways – and across multiple geographies. “Lapis Lazuli” (1936), one of Yeats’s later and more favoured poems, thus exhibits qualities that critics have generally lauded for its maturity. But how did Yeats, and Irish literary culture more generally, come to this point of transnational understanding at a time when the new Irish republic was being formed through a fight for insular sovereignty? It is because of its efforts to narrate, at a more international level, an Irish identity that the Celtic Revival has often been described, and derided, in terms of promoting expedient nationalist clichés. However, arguments can be made that, rather than providing hackneyed vignettes of national identity, many writers in the Celtic Revival not only discerned those troubled, bureaucratic ideals of institutional nationhood, but also those performance-oriented conditions that produced more unpredictable interpretations of lore, location, and legacy. In terms of nationalism, the future of the Irish nation, the Celtic Revival had already anticipated the disastrous loss of rural communities and the networking of the pan-European state. Mindful of this predicament, Celtic Revival nationalism – its interests in the Irish state, its conceptions of Irish culture, and its conscious sense of Irish history – would actually lead to its transnationality: its ongoing encounters with global cultures, particularly those of Japan. The primary allegation against the Celtic Revival’s nationalism, however, is that its output, notably that of the 1890s, is Irish gimcrack of the most stubborn variety. However, especially if given closer attention through historicized comparative approaches, the materials provide a complex depiction of an Ireland juggling the competing pressures of modernity and trauma. In terms of the Celtic Revival’s transnationality – which is the ultimate method of my study – Revivalists may be said to be guilty of the mistakes of fantastic misrepresentation: shallow conjectures and misleading caricatures, but

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this time for the exotic other rather than their own country. However, a reassessment of these claims, rather than a rejection, should appreciate the sensitive ethnic issues at hand, in terms of colonized peoples and peripheral cultures. In taking this view that estimates how interculturality organized itself as practical exchange, I argue that there is a growing reconsideration of modernism’s role in establishing positive multiculturalism that is demonstratively apparent in the Irish-Japanese cross-cultural frameworks. In thinking more complexly about the East-West exchange in literature and religion, the past few years have brought us vigorous and valuable defences of cultural hybridity in the twentieth century. Harry Oldmeadow (2004), in particular, gives a thorough counterargument to the prevalent tendencies to evaluate all Europeans as functioning in a single category of Orientalistic fetishism.3 Oldmeadow offers a balanced but optimistic assessment – that some of these encounters between intellectual figures helped initiate ecological and pacifist movements. While problems of misinterpretation affected what Yeats concluded, he nonetheless was a key member of the early effort to bring the Occidental and the Oriental into fruitful communication. A more penetrating look at not just the Celtic Revival and Japan (as the equation usually goes) but also more retroactively at Japan and the Celtic Revival would do much to show the complexity of the issues. If we look to see what the East is saying about the West, we find a more complex dialogue emerging. My arguments navigate a situation of modernist interculturality that took place through interactive discussion, between Ireland and Japan. If we consider the conversation point of view, a dialogue rather than a gaze, a more dynamic interchange becomes apparent. But this interchange, while often leading to constructive development through cross-cultural discussion, did not always lead to consensus. The Celtic Revival’s nationalism or transnationalism was never one hundred per cent absolute in judgment, instead being always unbalanced by the deliberate insertion of alternative possibilities and dispositions out of which ancestral confusion through recall reveals. This procedure of uncertainty helps to create a more rhizomatic movement, one that constantly brought into opposition the

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competing viewpoints they held. When questioning nation, folklore, and heritage, Revivalists acknowledged the role of invention and re-narrativization as filtering assumptions of heritage. By the same measure, because of their practical relevance to Ireland, Yeats could not dismiss either cultural memory or communal history as mere ideology, insubstantial or illusory. His studies of folklore, and its connections to the ancestral vox populi/vox loci, were based on modes of inspection that were not always essential, but concerned with why certain essential beliefs enabled the linking of community. Yeats notes, in Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth, “Even if it is all dreaming, why have they dreamed this particular dream?” (“Irish Faeries,” FLM 19). Furthermore, as Yeats would later say in an epigraph to Responsibilities, and Other Poems (1916) “In dreams begins responsibility.” But waking dreams depend upon the materials that history has given for their phantasmal epistemologies. What shape those materials take, under the ideological pressures of present demands as well as imaginative recourse, is a major concern of my study. The results of identity politics, particularly as they are fashioned out of the inherently spectral quality of folklore, are hardly stable and safely typological. The legacy of these materials, and their investment value as cultural expedients, remains contested. This is an ongoing matter of panic and debate. Recently, by way of example, Calum Colvin exhibited several pieces at the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh) under the title Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry. One of these paintings, Twa Dogs (2000), juxtaposes a craggy landscape and a warm hearth (images of an Ossianic era) with consumer goods emblazoned with the crests of the Celtic and Rangers football clubs (Glasgow-centric tribalism of the modern day). Colvin’s Twa Dogs, alluding to the Burns poem of the same name, redefines the canine’s identities according to contemporary sectarian lines. With such a contested presentation, the University of Stirling, which had used Colvin’s art to promote their ML itt in Modern Scottish Writing program, asks these questions on its posters: Is Scotland Different? Is Scotland Real? How is Colvin suggesting that Scotland can be reduced to Celtic FC jelly tots or an Ibrox coffee mug? Do all enquiries into cultural history and heritage reveal, collaterally, mass-produced

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trinkets or shallow sigils? Catriona Black (2002), writing for the Sunday Herald, argues that Colvin’s work does not claim that all Celtic tradition is fabricated, so much as it interrogates the conditions of tradition as something fluid and subject to appropriation: “Colvin has used kitsch and tartanry to examine our ambiguous relationship with our own cultural heritage, in which we have lost a grip on what is real, what is reconstructed, and what is nothing but romantic nonsense.”4 This is the precise dichotomy that proves to be quite unsatisfactory both in theory or practice: a romanticized sense of the real and permanent, a nugget of material culture that lies buried and needs only the right tools to be mined out of the earth; or the cynical sense of nonsense, that culture invariably is an ad hoc invention, contiguous to no historical continuum, and understandable only as an apparatus of ideological chicanery. The consequence of the former is a naïve sentimentalism that worships unquestionably a transcendental spirit of cultural essence that is ahistorical. The consequence of the latter is a pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion that invalidates the agency of communal solidarity as well as the possibility for heritage recuperation. Neither of these options is politically tenable to minority cultures under severe threat of erasure. Through my Japanese and Irish examples, I am attempting to explore other possibilities. By focusing in some ways on the narrative trope of the folkloric ghost as the marker of a culture on the brink of disappearance, I consider the ways in which the Celtic Revivalists and their Japanese counterparts sought a middle ground between these two poles of impossibility. Their task was to work through the nearly unsustainable endeavour of locating, creating, and solidifying spaces where cultural heritage might flourish as a living, embodied force at a time of profound transformation. Materials surveyed in this monograph fluctuate across space and time, linking diverse geographies, varying linguistic realms, and diverging cultural milieus. I have chosen to address important issues through progressive discussions, thinking at times in a multi-textual way of how various tensions and critical points unfold in relation to the many perspectives offered by Irish narrative ethnography in relationship to Japanese renditions of the same project.

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The first half of this monograph focuses on several of the Celtic Revival’s early efforts to establish an understanding of how heritage represents an attempt to establish a connection with tradition. This initial development is necessary in order to understand how this understanding can exist within the transnational contexts of modernity, the primary issue in the second half of this book. In considering where are the spaces and domains for cultural recovery, chapter 2 examines the development of Revivalist writing as the liminal space through which the cultural present dissipates into the nebulous region of heritage through processes of erasure. Profoundly aware that traditions cannot be divorced from living cultural practices – the Celtic Revival developed a new conception of heritage that can exist within the transnational contexts of modernity. Revivalist writings of this period are compared against preceding efforts at pseudo-epigraphy to explore their more overtly ethnographic dimensions. I critique the instability for articulating the uncertain notions of heritage in the face of modernization. To explore how modernism conceived of this practice as a form of ancestral recall, I begin with the Greek poet-historian Constantine Cavafy, through whom twentieth-century poetic ethnography began to cast off the discredited efforts of Celtic pseudo-epigraphy, or the Victorian fascination with Atlantis as arche-history. By focusing on The Wanderings of Oisin in this chapter, I develop a sense of how Yeats initially responds to the dilemma of access to heritage as irrecoverable. Yeats stages in this early poem a variety of historical figures, movements, and topics – all clustered around the desire to discover (and recover) some pure connection with an imagined, ancestral genealogy. In many ways, Ireland was pressed to codify a cultural cartography for the changing nation; yet this requires puzzling through links to the past, in the form of a landscape of dreams in which myth, memory, and history linger as both material and affective traces. As a retreat into nostalgia, Yeats depicts Oisin as one who has embraced this world of dreams, and thus divorced identity from a tactile connection to the local and particular of the political present. But, as Oisin discovers, to then reject this world of dreams in favour of the embodied now is to cast oneself back into the flux of accelerated modernity, where identity is severed from

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the ancestral. Ultimately, Yeats’s poem emerges as a fraught point of enquiry, where the dichotomy of authentic and imagined collapses, within this liminal space between the twilight world and fluctuating present. This indefinable zone envelops the ancestral spirit that inheres vaguely to the moment of presence, but remains disembodied as vanishing associations. Chapter 3 further assesses a fundamental shift in Revivalist methodology toward literary ethnography and experiential forms of cultural narratives that are indicative of modernist practice. Two fundamental texts of this renovation in approach are Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight and Patrick Dinneen’s Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla [Irish-English Dictionary]. Inspired by Hibernifying revisions to the cartography of Ireland owing to the ordnance surveys of the nineteenth century, these intriguingly multi-voiced documents demonstrate the Revivalist sensibility of geographical place as the living site of cultural production. The activities that this chapter analyzes, with its attention to the sensory and embodied nature of tradition as communal practice, hearken to the concept of culturalization as interrelated levels of interfacing that become activated through interactive connections to the communal. From these vectors arise the sensations of relics and rituals – the music, dances, stories, and dialects that Dinneen and Yeats document. As I examine, in their endotic attention to regionalized identities, some Revivalist authors posit approaches that remind of Henri Lefebvre’s (1992) understanding of spatial production: “Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and many contributing currents … every social space has a history, one invariably grounded in nature” (110). Lefebvre’s curiously poetic claim that “time has more than one writing” offers suggestive implications for the unorthodox style of The Celtic Twilight and its curious fixation on the uncertain traces of history as unstable, curious resonances – ones experienced, but never substantiated. I theorize in this chapter several important concepts that the Gaelic Revival develops. In particular, twilight became understood as the elusive domain through which the uncertain traces of the cultural past exist in dynamic tension as cognitive memory, bodily practice, and dislocated history. Twilight symptomatizes the collectively conscious desire for an ancestral source, but

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without the preconceived certainty of defining such a source, since by its nature dimness is receding and only partially visible. In many ways, the Revivalists begin to affirm the value of a localized attachment to the specifics of place as resistance to global modernity, with its commodified geographies. However, they are hampered by the sheer inaccessibility of solid tropes as firmament to build an impervious cultural identity for contemporary desires. Twilight arose from this disjunction. The supernatural, in the form of ghosts and fairies, is a bestiary of figurations that are site dependent, but also imaginatively unpredictable. They are, as I describe, shapeshifters. Their liminal status as disconnected ancestors denotes trauma, disconnection, forgetfulness, erasure, and vanishing. Although the Revival has been associated with the worst excesses of faux Celticity that has led to the plastic paddyism of postmodernity, this chapter considers how obsessions with the Irish question coincided with the political psychology to narrate an Irish answer to capitalist and colonialist erasure. Having presented this understanding of the Celtic Revival, chapter 4 argues that this Revivalist emphasis on the ghost or fairy as disembodied, performative voice became the principle feature that would attract Japanese attention to the Celtic Revival as cultural modernism. The notion of twilight, as connected to various spectres who perform inconclusively as ancestral presences, exerted a powerful influence on Japanese letters around the beginning of the twentieth century, one that, in turn, had an effect on Yeats’s own literary experiments, especially the dramas, which he wrote after his encounter with Pound, of the classical Noh theatre circa 1915–16. The Revivalists promoted an attention to tactile connections with the landscape: they negotiated the neologism of tradition as a sort of detective story. A marginalized society’s search for tradition is cursed to find its own decomposing culturalized body, one that exists in the present tense but is already fading into a dim past. In this theme, Japanese authors found in the Celtic Revival a foil and counterpart within the crisis of modernity. I introduce, in direct interpretive relationship to the Revival, several major Japanese authors in the second half of this monograph. I chart the chain of inter-fluences that developed in a transnational manner. In particular, Lafcadio Hearn – the reluctant Irishman in

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Japan – acted as a primary nodal figure of linkage. Hearn [Koizumi Yakumo], as I read him, was something of a conflicted Celtic Revivalist in exile, and he has also been thoroughly castigated for Orientalist activity. Nonetheless, in Japan, he remains held in high regard, a standing that tends to be at odds with his dissenting objectors.5 On the one hand, Hirakawa Sukehiro, a translator of both Dante and Hearn, has been one of Hearn’s most ardent defenders. I do not entirely share Hirakawa’s absolutely reverent appreciation for Hearn. However, I also do not side with critics such as Ōta, who dismisses Hearn’s Japanophilia as a hopeless tryst that was “veering from early infatuation to disillusioned realism” (in Hirakawa 1997, 204). Instead, my approach provides extended treatments on Hearn that demonstrate his profound interaction with a generation of Japanese writers, including as one example the translator of Homer, Doi Bansui (1871–1952), who had a mastery of Classical Greek and Latin, and the many Japanese authors whose knowledge of Ireland was learned under his tutelage. Hearn was part of a modernist transnationality that was emerging, yet also departing, from Victorian colonialism. Issues of Orientalism, as the circulation of fabrication of culture and ethnicity for imperial objectives, need not be elided to find Hearn’s still-valuable contributions. Many previous examinations of Hearn have not considered his role as university educator and as a major impetus in the formation of the Irish Studies Society in Japan. Hearn, it must be said, was an immigrant, struggling with a visual disability, working to adapt and identify with a foreign culture during an era when such an alien presence was problematic. Rather than rebuke him entirely or praise him altogether, in my view, Hearn should be understood in a fraught, divided context, with a certain dispensation given for the fact that he was a writer, not a historian, and he coped, like everyone, with the limitations of linguistics, customs, and expatriation. Essential to my study, Hearn would prove to be one of the major catalysts for the Airurando bungakukai, which were scholarly chapters formed in both Tokyo and Kansai, dedicated to the translation and study of Irish literature and culture. My fourth chapter considers the reception history of Celtic Revivalist literature in Japan as a tension between translation, subjectivity, and cultural narration. My

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discussion continues by considering Hearn’s integral relationship to various Japanese authors, especially Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, whose translations from The Celtic Twilight present an example of how twilight became modified, through this cross-cultural dialogue. Akutagawa was a major participant within the network of the Irish Studies Society, whose members also included Yanagita Kunio, author of Tōno monogatari, an ethnographic work written shortly after he had read Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight. These major texts, with Revivalist connections, demonstrate the process through which the cultural imagination revises and expands its self-awareness through interfacing, in forms of translation, transition, and adaptation, as the perceived ethos of the national other. Chapter 5 further expands this complex scope of the Irish-Japanese literary exchange, particularly by focusing on shared modes of ancestral narration. My analysis develops the emerging strategy of twilight and ancestral recall as the tracing of culture as a felt absence. I utilize the symbol of Satō’s sword, from Yeats’s poetry cycle Meditations in Time of Civil War, to further examine the terms of their cultural interchange. The tactile sword possesses a transnational as well as multi-temporal function because of its relic status, enhanced by its resonant multiplicity of eras and auras, in which various spaces and various times interconnect with each other. Although comparative in approach, chapter 5 emphasizes that Japanese modernists did not simply annex the stylistics of the Celtic Revival as a superficial mode of appropriation, imitation, and replication. The conceptual distinctions become especially apparent when Yeats’s statements on folklore and heritage are positioned against Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s essay In’ei raisan [In Praise of Shadows] (1933), a work that Mishima Yukio believed to be directly indebted to the Celtic Revival. There is a possibility that this is so, but ultimately not provable. Yet one wonders – what did Mishima, and others, perceive in making this claim of connection? My comparison of In’ei raisan with The Celtic Twilight exegetically explores how Tanizaki and Yeats are, indeed, mutually concerned with tradio in the strict sense of handing down: the aura of a relic is, actually, the glossy sweat of personal touch. But my chapter argues that Tanizaki, although utilizing twilightlike terms in assessing the problem of shadows and a disappearing past, in many ways

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forecloses the possibility of transnational exchange by arguing for the cross-accessibility of authentic cultural translation. This is also evident in his essay on Shaw. So, in many ways, his interpretation of a past national culture and the dynamic of transnational exchange results in a mournful and somewhat reactionary exclusionism, a rejection of Revivalist interculturality. The chapters so far will consider how various genres and literary stylistics attempted to enter a realm of disembodied tradition, to locate an ancestral voice without a mouth but somehow give it utterance. Chapter 6 thus argues that, for Yeats and other Revivalists, theatre became the most appropriate platform for performing the art of ancestral recall. I re-examine the complex semiology of neo-nō [contemporary Noh or shinsaku nō] as a modernist movement cross-operating in Ireland and Japan and requiring re-evaluation. An extended treatment of the materials, comparatively situated in the context of modernist Japanese literature, can give a new perspective on the dramaturgy in Yeats’s theatrics. This chapter places in comparative perspectives Yeats’s Noh with several dramas by Izumi Kyōka, who – in a way that greatly parallels Yeats – reinvented Noh drama as a theatrics of twilight. Interestingly, both of them pursued a development narrative folklore that moved from prose depictions to performative enactments. Yeats could not have known Kyōka’s dramas, and it would be incorrect to claim a genealogy of influence, say, like the one we can prove with Akutagawa to Yeats. However, as I document, Japanese critics who were familiar with both Yeats and Kyōka’s works detected strong points of similarity in comparatively assessing their concepts of dramaturgy and folklore. Kyōka’s promotion of tasogare [twilight] recalls very much Yeats’s deployment of twilight as a chiaroscuro stagecraft of shadows, which are processes within and beyond location and heritage that historicized rationality cannot empirically measure. Critics in Japan observing both Yeats and Kyōka explicitly made this link between both authors, and I pursue with hermeneutic evaluation what their linkage could imply. In the time of Kyōka or Yeats there was little crossover between the insular world of classical theatre, such as Noh, with the modern movements and their innovative theatrical outlooks. But there was a great deal of debate

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and dispute over the direction that modern theatre in Japan was supposed to take. Perhaps the overlaps between Irish and Japanese theatre seem more than coincidental. One readily finds concrete connections, between Japanese theatre and Yeats. In particular, Itō Michio, the Japanese dancer for whom Yeats wrote At the Hawk’s Well, acts as a pivotal figure. Itō was a fascinating character, and his brothers, Senda Koreya and Itō Kisaku, were active in modern [shingeki] theatre in Japan through much of the twentieth century, although Itō himself chose to perform abroad. Itō, trained in Japan but as an expatriate and very much an outsider to Japanese society, was ideally positioned to act as an agent of cultural interface and transnational exchange. Thus, my main thesis is not that the Celtic Revival is solely accountable for the development of the theme of shadows and twilight in Japanese literature, although there is a discernible exchange in play. Rather, through the expansive direction of various intertextual pathways, the similarity of development for contemporary currents of cultural theatre arose in a tandem with theatrical interpretations for the powers of the stage in interrogative conflict with tradition. This is not to say that their enactments of ancestral recall through drama, in which the phantom voices of the past are lent a mask in order to announce themselves, is an unmitigated sentimentality. Both Kyōka’s and Yeats’s dramas struggle with the incompatibility of the present with the past, through the unpredictable zone of twilight. Chapter 7 thus concludes with an examination of The Dreaming of the Bones. In contrast to The Wanderings of Oisin, the ancestral or the dream world that has become utterly unfamiliar, and the accelerated modernity moving away from it, grips the landscape with the force of revolution. In cultural-nationalist terms, this means, paradoxically, a rejection of the romantic heritage that gives legitimacy to the inspired revolution, in favour of the political payoff for violent nation building in the present. Yet throughout each of these dance plays by Yeats examined in this chapter, the haunting ancestral remains as a part of the setting – the localization of vicarious hauntings mark the landscape through previous inheritances of conflict. My explorations take critical looks at the pre-modern Ulster cycle (At the Hawk’s

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Well), the Christianized era (The Cat and the Moon), and the modern age of 1916 revolution (The Dreaming of the Bones). Throughout the course of these chapters, several thematic concepts link the rather disparate range of authors, cultures, and languages under examination. These concepts, as they are approached, evolved through points of contact between the writers through their communicative and interrogative response to the socio-historical predicaments they found themselves in. This is not to say that they offered exactly the same interpretations or solutions. In terms of twilight, as the major tropic approach shared by the authors in this study, the expression of the ancestral as relatable to the local and the particular is important precisely because it allows for transnational dialogue – the exploration not only of one’s geography, but to another in comparison. Twilight was deliberately encoded as liminal, ephemeral, fluctuating, and open-ended. It resists codification. As such, twilight as theorized in this monograph relates to what Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), identifies as the rather paranormal activity of heritage in conflict with the cultural present, something at once vanished or vanishing, but also contingent on the present context. The realm of communal self-questioning, in order to break free from a dominant discourse of hegemonic histories, must carve out an alternate domain: “We must join them in the fluctuating movement to which they are just giving a shape … It is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come” (152). Twilight positioned the sense of the cultural fantastic as a phantasm that reacts against the rational enterprise of the forward-thinking utilitarianism of imperial hegemony. In a fascinating study of Japanese modernity, Marilyn Ivy (1995) developed a framework of investigation called “the discourse of the vanishing” as an assessment of the phantasmal effects that are the tenuous conditions of disconnection between heritage, national desire, and the modernist advancement: “I am gesturing toward a body of work on phantasm and the event that reveals how an originary event can never be grasped in its punctual thusness, but can only emerge as an event across a temporal deferral” (22). Furthermore, Ivy draws our attention to how this discourse of the present tense

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turning into the past as holographic attempts to address, although is not able to revive, “the displaced origins that the invocation of tradition would call up” (22). Crucially, to term such activities as an engagement with the ancestral phantasm, the face under progressive erasure, is not to say that “there is nothing to tradition.” Nor is the longing to understand a continuity with a dissipating sense of what has come before “mean that people are nostalgic for no good reason” (22). The tension between loss and recovery, unknowable origins and unsatisfying rapid modernization, results in the synergistic efforts to summon up the vanishing as they vanish: the ancestral recall gestures toward a feeling of strangeness that very much leaves its traces on contemporary circumstances. For this reason, the remnants of history and culture become, in effect, wraiths, fairies, and o-bake struggling to maintain connection with their former contexts of lived embodiment. The developmental drive of modernity overwrites, displaces, and erodes both habitation and culture within the local specifics. Both Irish and Japanese authors were urgently aware of this predicament of loss and erasure. Yeats’s earliest writings, such as The Celtic Twilight, depict this epochal shift in which tradition, in form and spirit, is made dislocated and discarnated. Japanese thinkers found in this text, and other similar productions by the Revivalists, a codeword for symptomatic ideations that provided mournful glimpses of a “spectral status of an object that is both factually present and yet absent, that is dead but yet live” (Ivy 1995, 86). Gerald Figal has similarly argued that the fantastic is directly imbedded in the production of the modern condition. His Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (1999) investigates “the fantastic as an object of interest and mode of thought that manifests itself across literary, scientific, educational, medical, religious, and even legal discourses” (11). As such, this book makes robust explorations of historical conjunctures, described as phantasmal, as they become complex aggregates of the supernatural, cultural, and ideological. Figal examines a range of genres as demonstrating this principle of the fushigi, a Japanese word that suggests strangeness or uncanniness. The fantastic can make itself partially known through the artifactual remnants that act as ancestral referents. Through

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the sensory practice of awareness in cultural habits, these relics become configured as interstices for community and heritage, past and present, to “explore the diffuse moments of uncertainty” (Figal 1999, 3). However, as Figal and this study likewise argue, the efforts to locate in the fantastic alternative forms of cultural epistemes are not without strong ideological interference. In effect, to point at the spectre and say what was that then is to also, in part, consolidate a claim to who we are now. At the macro-political as well as psychoanalytical levels, such interpretations are never ideologically free of drives and desires that are determined to define the future imperfect by present tense ambitions. I concur with Figal that the roots of the Japanese word tasogare [twilight] help to epitomize the problem at hand, and I find similar efforts in the Revival. In Japanese, the etymology of tasogare is, perhaps, ta so kare [誰そ彼], which means Who is that? This suggests that, in twilight, the familiar – although still somewhat recognizable – takes on an indeterminate quality and therefore becomes distant and dissipating. In such a state of transition and in-between-ness, the visible becomes less certain, and the placeable undergoes a changeover into a state more difficult to recognize. In twilight, one sees that people and places are there, but not exactly who they are or what they are becoming. For both Japanese and Irish authors, the thematic power of twilight, as liminally representative of a modernization through a sacrificial dissolution of the past, becomes a shared symptom for the very real process of cultural dislocation. Tantalizingly, Figal on several occasions in his book hints briefly at an Irish connection as cooperative in the development of tasogare and fushigi in Japan. This work intends to complement Figal’s arguments by theorizing this Irish connection, its formulations, and its proponents. Certainly, the Japanese taste for twilight was a good deal older than their interest in the Irish Revival. However, the Revival provided genres, modes, and practical enactments that mutually augmented the development of twilight as a literary and cultural activity, as interpreted and developed in Japan. Twilight, although intimately contingent upon the local cultural continuum from which it arises, was never defined as a phenomenon distinctive of only the Japanese or Irish national spirit. In this sense of its irreducibility of practice, the concept was much

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more open to revision and adaptation, unlike ethnocentric claims to national uniqueness such as Kuki Shūzō’s iki: in his view, iki was a specialized Japanese sensibility of the chic and stylish. In such a way, he coincides with Tanizaki in the manner in which they argued for the preciseness of a singular Japanese aesthetic. In contrast to this kind of exclusion, the multilingual twilight offered a decidedly transnational and intercultural formation. By its nature, twilight enacted an inquiry into the liminal region of the in-between, by deploying language and sensations culled from these contact zones to interrogate those other perforated border regions, the ones that separate this world and the next, the physical and metaphysical, the vanishing past and contentious present. Twilight moves, knowing locations, but not nations, offering possibilities but not resolutions. Given this Japanese attention to twilight as multi-temporal, the Revivalists’ later interests in Japan’s versions of anthropological necromancy, ancestral rites, funerary customs, and ghost lore of Shintō and Buddhism that had been relayed back to the Revivalists become more apparent. The exchange went both ways, since they were reading and interpreting each other. Yeats’s interest in Noh, and more generally Japanese folklore of the Edo era (1603–1868), was not an isolated dabbling in foreign persuasions; rather, his examination – and eventual implementation – of these dramatic traditions gave an invaluable contribution to the creation of an epistemologically unpredictable sphere for investigating the rotation of the twilight.6 Concurrent with the development of twilight as the space for the multi-temporal recovering of a version of the past, Japanese and Irish authors implemented fantastic creatures and personages into this domain as figurations of loss. As a means of giving articulation to disembodied tradition, as in enacting mouths to give voice to a lost utterance, paranormal figurations like ghosts, fairies, and other specimens took on mysterious countenances that elusively speak for marginalized cultural presences. In these terms, The Celtic Twilight provided a fushigi form of spectral culturality, a narrative demonstrating the potential realities of the heterochronic fantastic to Japanese authors. As an example of literary ethnography, in both Irish and Japanese modernism, the ancestral phantasm enables a destabilization of normative modes of progress that, in various ways,

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overwrite through ignoring the marks of landscape, community, and culture. The Revivalists and their Japanese counterparts, through different understandings, and with various genres, opened up spaces in which the ancestral phantasm works through the chronotope of twilight. Twilight, as the multiple traces of the cultural memory and the processes of communities, is not invented wholly anew, nor does it successfully liberate some transhistorical ideal. Rather, the phantasmal condition enabled practices of backward-looking analysis that often ran against the modernistic perspectives on progress and development. In these ways, Yeats’s Celtic Twilight was remarkably different from the methodology of more scientific texts being read in Japan – such as Sir Laurence Gomme’s Ethnology in Folklore (1892). And, arguably, he was far more appealing for that reason. What shapes might embody the phantasms? Irish and Japanese authors developed a complex re-narrativization of the creatures, ghosts, and spirits from the folklore of their respective regions. Phantoms, fairies, and púca [goblins] have been, quite frankly, an embarrassment to many critics who research the Celtic Revival. Some studies have tried to exonerate the topic in terms of their debt to Irish mythology. However, it was the manner in which the Revival strategically deployed such characters as a reinvention of heritage that proved to be of most interest to Japanese authors. The Revival’s species of the fantastic – for example, a fairy or bean sí [banshee] – speaks with a quality of paradoxical utterances, situated in a time/space nexus both related to and separate from the present moment and the realms of the ancestors. Scholars of Japanese modernism have, in general, been more sensitive to the involvement of the fantastic directly within the production of modernity, and not as an ancillary side interest of so-called eccentrics, luddites, and toothless bogtrotters. Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade (2008) provides a multidimensional and interdisciplinary account of how monsters provide a projective iconography for shifting cultural attitudes, particular to Japan. His description of fantasy as “something ambiguous, continually shifting, a constant presence that is forever absent” opens up the line of thinking that views such monsters of time as unstable entities (2). By nature of their weirdness, they invoke a para-textual commentary to the more mainstream voices of institutional discourse. As

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the miasma of dissipated history, or the shapes of fading notions of culture, the phantasm offers duplicitous and contradictory endorsements for the nation as a project in progress. The Celtic Revival understood the loss of tradition as in tension with the attempts to narrate it through incomplete and unstable materials. Yeats perceived the conflict between Irish social life, and its presentation of itself through symbolic forms, against the manner in which those symbolic forms had been skeptically repudiated through the urbane mentality of the newspaper media: “Tradition seems half gone. Thomas of Ercildoune and his like go with it. The newspaper editors and other men of the quill this long while have been elbowing fairy and fairy seer from hearth and board” (“Scots and Irish Faeries,” in FLM 26). The kind of differentiation affirmed here, between the newspaper and tradition (orature), is an ethical issue of great importance for Yeats. The enquiring mind, for Yeats, should not accept the absolutes offered by nihilism: “When all is said and done, how do we know that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth?” (“Belief and Unbelief,” in FLM 112). But, as important as the issue of negotiating with the phantoms of heritage had been, a degree of careful consideration is required. The many nuances of these fantastic creatures resist categorical definition, particularly upon the moment they are applied. They cannot unilaterally be declared to support a single ideology. For this reason, Revivalists are notoriously elusive in their understanding of fairy or ghost, particularly in preceding relations to historical narratives and national frameworks. It was on these terms of shapeshifting – between the vanishing past, its latent figurations as phantasm, and its utterances to the contemporary crisis – that Japanese authors were so thoroughly interested with the fairy element of the Revivalists’ depiction of the discourse of the vanishing. As one example I will explore, the Celtic Revival’s own interpretations of fairies as dislocated ancestry that would coincide with Yanagita Kunio’s shift from discussing tengu [hobgoblins] to senzo [ancestors]. As I analyze in Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s translations from The Celtic Twilight, he preferred to translate fairy as ancestor. Akutagawa theorized that Yeats’s sense of the fairy actually implied an exiled ancestor, or a banished figure who represented ancestrality – a discourse of the van-

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ishing. Parallel developments between Irish and Japanese modernist literature can be uncovered by first understanding what Yeats wanted to accomplish in the twilight aesthetics of the early works. For this reason, the usages of the fantastic/fushigi are best shown in context, by example, rather than abstractly defined. As a literary technique, necromantic and oneiromantic devices of twilight are comparative themes of my study. The reciprocal relationships between Yeats, Hearn, Akutagawa, and Kyōka developed as a kind of communion between ghosts, authors, and topographies of heritage. Their search for the chūkan [in-between-ness], which overlaps with Yeats’s twilight, had deep social motivations driving it. Influenced by the Celtic Revival, the playwright Izumi Kyōka developed from Noh, as Yeats developed from Old Irish aisling literature, a discourse of twilight as an investigation into received cultural patterns: the speech acts of the ancestors, a perspective on the glosses of culture, the resonances of relics and ruins. Yeats and his Japanese counterparts investigated that what one imaginatively thinks of as sídhe [fairy people beneath the mound] or yōkai [monster] may actually be voices from banished cultural elements and persons. This is not necessarily a foolish epistemology. As Certeau notes, in Culture in the Plural (1997), “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not” (108). Since places, in order to have a meaningful sense of themselves, must be inwardly turning in order to confront their fragments, Certeau is able to extrapolate that “haunted places are the only ones people can live in” (108). Michael Dylan Foster (2008) penetratingly claims that yōkai, as a broad category of monsters on the margin of Japanese national narratives, act as “a quasi-nationalistic discourse in which yōkai play an intimate role,” and this has remarkable similarities to the Celtic Revival (16). In Revivalist depictions, the fragments occupy a space of ontological inconsistency, of shape changing and spectralization, as a result of how the past has become metamorphosed into abjection through marginalization. The ghosts and changelings of Irish modernist folklore always have political bite, a quality that the Japanese interpreters of the Celtic had been quick to note. Seemingly banished to the peripheries and beyond, the tropes of a lullaby or picture book, the changelings operate in an occult mode

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of articulated absences that inform, critique, and supplement the mainstream national agenda, whether it be as commodity, nostalgia, or other forms of symbolic cultural capital. Foster (2000) also acknowledges that, as a peculiar ontological category, the mysterious transforms itself, resisting categorization, and representing an “impossibility of articulation” (19) even as it claims residency and belonging. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) view of home as belonging applies to that impossible yet necessary task of studying the cultural landscape with changing eyes: “Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds” (311). Aware that the accumulated forms of experience, which marked a sense of localized historical continuity, were being eroded by the process of modernism, Irish and Japanese authors were ensnared in a paradox in which tradition was impossible to explain but impossible to ignore. We find comparative examples of recovery and impossibility, so thematically central to the Revivalists, in such essays as Kobayashi Hideo’s “Literature of the Lost Home” (1995; “Kokyō o ushinatta bunkgaku” [1933]). Critical of the nostalgic return to an earlier, purer Japan in modernist nativism, Kobayashi laments, like Deleuze and Guattari, the integral lack and non-existence of home in which the search for origins depends upon the improbability of discovery: “Never was there sufficient time to nurture the sources of a powerful and enduring memory, attached to the concrete and the particular” (cited in Lippit 2002, 1). Modernism, in its crisis of condition, is it itself an irreparable rupture: as Kobayashi (1995) concludes, “We can no longer distinguish what is under the force of this influence [Westernization] from what is not” (53). Despite a sense of encroaching sacrifice, folklore became an alternative kind of symbolization for marginal communities from what was offered by the assimilative powers of the global and the contemporary. To assert the power of folklore in the methods of the Celtic Revivalists is to require careful consideration of who the folk are and what exactly (or where exactly) is their lore. On this activity, the Celtic Revival has received consistent critical accusations for its identitarian hallucinations about Ireland and the Irish people, and

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the cheapening of identity politics. As the tone of the criticisms generally run, the Celtic Revival imagined an Ireland as an ideologically loaded fantasy, one that has little to do with the material realities of the island. This is certainly part of many modes of resistance to colonialism. This Ireland required a population to inhabit it, one with ethnic distinctiveness, a genealogical right of ownership, and a national spirit that is fundamentally historical, but a history that is anthologized against imperial impositions. In short, for political ends, these Revivalists propagated notions of Irishness, misusing and misrepresenting everything from fiddle music to the Old Irish epics to promote their cause. Kenneth Hurlston Jackson (1971) provides one of the more scathing accounts: It has been the fashion to think of the Celtic mind as something mysterious and magical, filled with dark broodings over a mighty past … The so-called “Celtic Revival” of the end of the last century did much to foster this preposterous idea. A group of writers, approaching the Celtic literatures (about which they usually knew very little, since most of them could not read the languages at all) with a variety of the above prejudices conditioned by the pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements and their own individual turns of mind, were responsible for the still widely held belief that they are full of mournful, languishing melancholy, of the dim “Celtic Twilight” (Yeats’s term), or else an intolerable whimsicality or sentimentality. Although scholars have long known, and all educated people really acquainted with the Celtic literatures now know, this is a gross misrepresentation, the opinion is still widely held, and for instance a Welshman can hardly publish a book of the most realistic and cynical short stories without some reviewer tracing in them the evidences of “Celtic mysticism” or the like. (19–20) There is, of course, a great deal of accuracy to what Jackson identifies. Many concerned activists overseeing the Home Rule project had essentialist prescriptions for abstract traits that made the Irish be, well, Irish. The Revivalists now receive the most complaints for this

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disingenuous project of inventing an Emerald Isle out of sentimentality and blarney with an affected Kiltartanese accent. And these synthetic formulations of anam na hÉireann [the soul of Ireland] have only become more brittle with time, as Irish politics have sought to reinvent themselves as something that is not a colony called West Britain, and a hegemony that would seek to erase any discernible differences between Cork and Yorkshire. The Irish prescription for identity has been further complicated in that nostalgic longings for belonging found in sections of the Irish diaspora have also hardened these notions: the green beer and flame-haired vixens of tourist advertisements. In the court of public opinion, the Celtic Revival has been often blamed for originating these bogus claims to Irish authenticity, having first legitimized the tropes as heritage. Irish assessments of Yeats have always been mixed: a certain popular derision for his eccentricities, but also a willingness to cash in on his name whenever possible. In 2008, the National Library of Ireland exhibit on Yeats was, by all accounts, well attended. Then, in 2009, a horse named Yeats became the first to win four Ascot gold cups. Paintings by Jack Yeats still fetch the highest bids at Dublin auctions. Indeed, Yeats – through the process of iconification – has become more than Yeats the man, but an intensely material personification of the problem of Irish selfreflection. His poetry readily becomes the lyrical voice of the IrishAmerican in Million Dollar Baby. And, as reported in the New York Times and the Irish Independent, productions of Yeats’s plays bring revitalization in terms of ticket sales for theatre troupes from Manhattan to Dublin. Yet, in Irish films and novels, slagging Yeats is a sure way to seem urbane, sophisticated, and decidedly un-Irish. A retroactive social process has led to the materialization of Yeats: he has been transformed from person to national icon, a symbol of both cultural expediency and national self-cynicism. This is a complicated topic, involving many pop cultural references, and I would prefer to more fully explore this theme elsewhere, as it is not entirely relevant to the core focus of this study. However, the Revivalists’ relationship to the understanding of an Irish historiography, in the manner that they not only describe Irish culture but try to explain it, is a fundamental project that first attracted Japanese interest to their cause.

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The Japanese authors I am presenting here first and foremost viewed the Revival as the most successful version of literary ethnography that the modern world had presented. It is on this principle of narrative tradition that their enthusiasm was increased and sustained. In his introduction to Locating Irish Folklore (2000), Diarmuid Ó Giolláin assesses the number of ways in which tradition, as requiring something already vanished in order to assert itself, can conjure up shibboleths that have no practical or tangible relationships to that which it claims to articulate. But Ó Giolláin’s overall analysis, in considering how folklore acted in reaction to colonial modernity, documents how tradition enabled forms of communal communication, particularly on the peripheries, and he finds many positive contributions that folklore has made in the process of national self-consciousness. Ó Giolláin’s conclusions, in fact, hint at a theory that Gayatri Spivak (1988) has wrestled with difficulty: the potentials of a “strategic essentialism.” Never entirely satisfied with how to formulate such a counteractive operation, Spivak nonetheless identifies how marginalized cultures must engage in folklore (as national self-questioning) to become a more dynamic space in asserting their collective rights through the resources of heritage and difference. It became clear to the Revivalists that, although Irish had meant various things in various periods, its most consistent application had been to marginalize and colonize the people of Ireland with the imposition of being othered. Therefore, a re-narrativization of Irish, on terms that would illustrate the necessity of Home Rule, became a primary concern for political agency. Antonio Gramsci’s own considerations of this subject are helpful in evaluating the Revivalist approach to folklore and colonization. Gramsci (1971) often champions folklore as a zone of knowledge that exists in opposition to overt domination and control: “It is only in folklore that one finds surviving evidence, adulterated and manipulated,” of world views that stand somewhat outside of hegemony. But this is not to say folklore is a pristine reservoir of an untainted subaltern: “Folklore has always been tied to the culture of the dominant class and, in its own way, has drawn from it the motifs which have become inserted into combinations with the previous traditions” (195). This is the oppositional challenge, in Gramsci’s view: what appears to be

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folklore is, for many marginal communities, the only personalized record they have as a culture distinct from civilization. Yet the very project of collecting, maintaining, and perpetuating the folklore entails some measure of collusion with authority, or the reinstatement of a new taxonomy of social control. For Gramsci, culture is always the terrain of opposition, and folklore offers an unstable, permeable topography of conflict that in order to be effective must be nebulous. But Gramsci insists that passive adoration of an idealized past, of a desire to keep folklore static under the hands of curators, would interfere with its most important characteristics: innovation, adaptation, and dynamic progression. The ethnographic turn in the discourse of representations in Revivalist writing spoke to these conditions of confrontation of “the rooted against rootless people” (quoted in Ellmann 1987 [1948], 242). The omnivorous habits of cosmopolitan capitalism, as a homogenizing internationalism, devour both the culture and the landscape of the regional. Lady Augusta Gregory (1995), in her essay on the unlocatable grave of the poet Raftery [Antoine Ó Raifteiri], takes account of how change and amnesia collude in destroying a community’s sense of a shared past: “But the nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries; and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been two great landslips – the breaking of the continuity of the social life of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their intellectual life by the shoving out of the language” (127). But how does an author represent that “continuity of the social life” and how effectively can any single term, like Celtic, categorize it? Emancipating the archaic, of bringing the force of cultural memory into the present under the coined rubric of tradition, was one strategy of recall. Terms such as tradition are themselves neologisms, terms drawn up in the present moment to periodize the past; in such a way, the Celtic Revival, along with its Japanese interpreters, refocused the oppositions between heritage and transition, of communal practices and progressive history. Their political commitments viewed culture as a communitarian resource, and this view has been upheld by recent scholars. In The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socio-Economic Development: Contests and Contexts (2010), John Walsh presents a radical critique of how the

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disappearance of the Irish language in the nineteenth century led to catastrophic economic and societal consequences that mar Ireland even today. Building on prior arguments he made in Díchoimisiúnú Teanga: Coimisiún na Gaeltachta 1926 [Decommissioning Language: The Gaeltacht Commision] Walsh forcefully argues that rapid language shift led to a disastrous sequence of repercussions in terms of both culture and economy, as both are tied to acts of sovereignty and communal purpose. Post-colonial frameworks in general have observed similar consequences. This kind of analysis has been forwarded by First Nations activists, as well as featuring prominently in theorists such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (2004 [1986]). Yeats, of course, was far from a promoter of the Irish language, but other Revivalists such as Patrick Dinneen and Padraic Colum were, seeing the Irish language as distinctively evolving as a negotiation with the habitat of culture in which it has continuously operated for centuries. The Celtic Revivalists wanted praxis more than theory – such was the urgency. The possibility of difference, as a means to renegotiate colonial enforcement of sameness, opened up places for articulating those differences. This was the beginning of revolt, through cultural articulation. But on what terms and in whose voice? The Celtic Revivalists’ attention to folklore and the placing of Irish cultural practices fits within the context of the macro-economic analysis forwarded by Walsh, and his assessment of disappearing heritage and its effects on national financial independence as a result of the communal collapse brought in the years after the famines of the nineteenth century. Rob Doggett, also through the lens of post-colonial theory, argues for a more complex view of Yeats’s considerations of Irish self-consciousness as informing the present nation-state in connection to a historical continuum. In particular, Doggett (2001) emphasizes Yeats’s use of “fissure,” the moment “when history is becoming History”: “By shifting our gaze to this transitional moment itself and to Yeats’s engagement with these nationalist constructions of history as they are being formulated, we begin to perceive a more complicated Yeats whose poetic meditations on an Ireland gripped by war may not be so readily dismissed as romantic idealism or naive historical mythmaking” (4). Arguing for the methodology of the Revival in

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relationship to its narrative predicament of a past as spectre, Gregory Castle (2001) presents a case for the ethnographic dimension of the Celtic Renaissance, also referred to as the Irish Literary Revival, as directly productive in the development of Irish modernity: “At the fin de siècle, the Revival was a complex and multifaceted movement, comprising a variety of approaches to the representation of Irish culture” (3). Castle also brings an emphasis, albeit a cautionary one, on the Revivalists’ “reclamation” of “harbingers of what Said calls the ‘revisionist postcolonial effort to reclaim traditions, histories and cultures from imperialism’” (35). David Lloyd has been among critics at the forefront in arguing that tradition in Ireland entailed more complex intentions than that of a trite reminiscence for a purer Ireland that exists only in deluded acts of fantasy. In Lloyd’s (2008) view, the past offers glimpses of possibility that are recalcitrant to the “process of progress and development” that would relegate too much to the “rubbish heap” (7). Likewise, my study is very much in tune with Lloyd’s analysis of how alternative forms of history, in Ireland (and by extension Japan), served crucial purposes that functioned as forms of resistance, particularly conceived of as multi-temporal: Both in the invention of social formations and imaginaries that project temporal horizons and ethical frames that are out of kilter with modernity and in the displaced structure of memory that refuse to succumb to forgetting and moving on, post-Famine Irish culture secretes a resistance to the obliterative tendencies of modernization. It does so, however, not by remaining fixed in the past, but by inhabiting a temporal dimension composed simultaneously of multiple and often incommensurable temporalities for which the terms “tradition” and “modernity” are only partial and certainly inadequate designations. (Lloyd 2008, 6) Along these forms of inquiry, David Lloyd’s recent research on Irish cultural self-presentation has focused on the invaluable importance of orature for survival. My thinking runs in a similar direction, being mindful in particular of the Revivalists’ emphasis on public perform-

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ance, such as music, storytelling, folk songs, and other forms of localized culture-as-event. Still, there is the lingering debate that, in abstractly taking the gael out of the gaeltacht, Revivalists commit elitist acts of appropriation through abstract imitation. Declan Kiberd reconsiders this view, in his essay “On National Culture” (2005), where he applies an experiential analysis of Frantz Fanon’s historiographical account of the “liberation phase” in Irish nationalism. Rather than prop up a straw, however strategic – essentialism – Irish authors could disrupt the master-narrative through exaggerated mimicry: “In Ireland, mimicry eventuated in two traditions: a political resemblance called nationalism (which tended to repeat old models) and a literary movement dubbed Irish modernism (which tended to subvert them)” (132). But whether entirely essential, or entirely inessential (mimicked), neither of these binary extremes fully explains the activities of cultural nationalism in building their heterogeneous, yet collectively aligned, paradigms for identifying social and geographical space. In a different mode of resistance, Seamus Deane (1985) analyzes Yeats’s folklore as an ideology of the reactionary, one opposed to promissory, in terms of its evaluation of ethnicity and mythology: “He [Yeats] repudiated the stage-Irish, tourist Ireland of some of the nineteenth-century collectors and emphasized in its stead the importance of folklore for the realization of both nationality and literature” (212). According to Yeats, anti-colonial literature and sovereign self-awareness as a nation are co-dependent. Deane reminds us, however, that Yeats need not be read as a call to a singular volk consciousness, but that folklore is a diverse, dynamic repository for cultural self-examination, not ossification. Peripheral communities can neither turn back, nor turn their back, to the flow of history as it shapes and delineates the present informed by a past that is both tangible (landmarks) and intangible (heritage). As chapter 3 examines, the Revivalists, like many authors with an ethnographic bent, were influenced by the methods of Johann Gottfried von Herder. In attacking the pretenses of a pan-European Enlightenment that considered a homogeneous civilization, modelled after its own synthetic ideals, to be the singular purpose of rational human commerce. Herder, in stark opposition to this, championed

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the Romantic sensibility that favoured plurality, local regions, and the diversity of cultures as embodied in varied and divergent practices, particularly folk practices, which offered an alternative to the expansive conquest sought by civilization. Individuals like W.B. Yeats and Pádraic Colum sought Romantic resistance through attention to forms of cultural practice as embodiment: dialect, musical practices, dances, songs, festivals, rituals, and so forth, all under the elusive label of folklore. In his work Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), Keith H. Basso provides a memorable defence of localized knowledge through which heritage coincides with the ongoing condition of social emplacement, as individual and collective responsibility: “knowledge of places is closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s own community, and securing a confident sense of who one is as a person” (34). Pádraic Colum, as he reports, initially turned down a request to write what became the book A Treasury of Irish Folklore (1954 [1916]), calling himself a poet rather than a folklorist. But, as he was told by his publisher, you “have an acquaintance with the traditional way of life out of which folklore came” (xvi). As Colum would discover, it was precisely his training as a poet that enabled him to engage in forms of ethnographic insight that, as James Clifford (1993) would put it, account for “different chronotropes for art and culture collecting” (71). The chronotope, in Bakhtin’s (1986) conceptualization, necessitates an overlapping of multiplicity, in which place comes into contact with various vectors of time. This requires a rather unorthodox approach to narration and representation – and this is why twilight, as in-between-ness, becomes that crucial stylistic function for enabling the chronotope. The concentric circles that the Celtic Revivalists attempted to draw around space and time are based on a recursive history, of locating spaces of memory available for recollection and re-enactment in order to restore a claim to informed continuity with the nationalized past. It is very difficult to define, quantitatively, a consistent methodology in the Celtic Revival as offering a single version of a cultural nationalism, through historiography, memory, or myth. The Revival generally understood myth as an ancestral utterance transmitted

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through communal practice into contemporary circumstances, as having ethical obligations in the contemporary. They also saw the resources of collective memory as facilitating this recourse to a cultural past. The Celtic Revival created varying symbolic systems of historical enquiry through diverse genres. These were fashioned to be unstable in nature, as communications with a half-absent subject that is the past. In such a way, they could also reposition their own arrangements and organizations for stylistic, political, and rhetorical effects. Their conceptions of the haunting of the contemporary moment extended from their own circumstances to inform cooperatively a critique of assimilating cultural forces. Edward Said (1994), overall, had rather positive assessments of Yeats’s relationship to imperialism’s impositions of its knowledge/ power circuit: “Far from being an outdated nationalism, Yeats’s willful mysticism and incoherence embody a revolutionary potential” (226). This claim sounds appealing, but it is not precisely certain how mystical incoherence engenders cultural and political resistance. Said’s comments seem somewhat in tune with Fanon’s (1963) desire for a “zone of occult instability,” another coinage that is equally opaque. Where is this zone, how does culture take shape therein, and how would such a space somehow connect present communities to their historical past? For the Revivalists, the answer is twilight. Twilight is the most developed tactic and technique that exhibits the Revival’s capacity to subvert inherited models to explore the new consciousness of Irish independence. The Revivalists engage with the ancestral as a possible prosopopoeia for negotiating as what Homi Bhabha (2004) describes by saying: “language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past” (142). The Celtic Revival’s invocation of atemporal and multi-locative voices presents such fissures, contextualized in the circumstances of Irish self-determination as well as the development of global interculturality. Yeats’s ancestral, as phantasmal speaking into current contexts, puts into literary practice a form of localized awareness that Bhabha posits more abstractly: “the knowledge of the people depends on the discovery, Fanon says, ‘of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being

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renewed,’ a structure of repetition that is not visible in the translucidity of the people’s customs or the obvious objectifications which seem to characterize the people” (218). As Alastair Macintosh explores in Rekindling Community: Connecting People, Environment and Spirituality (2008), a study on the tensions between the local and universal in the Hebrides, the critiques about globalization are rooted in how deeply the local and particular offers specific complexities about the socio-ecological foundations of belonging. In many ways, the Celtic Revival was an eco-critical movement, and the terrain of Ireland had interested Japanese authors as much as its inhabitants. The collaborative result was a fusion of horizons through material and intellectual exchange. The networking of heterogeneity allows for a bit of stone to function in multiple ways, adapting to the geographies of varying culture through dialogue. The sources for such a design can be found in the very earliest of Yeats’s writing: the vigorous political debates of his journalism, as well as his re-narrativization of Irish myth and folklore as conditions of performance. Ethico-political readings have seen Yeats’s engagement with a sentimental Irish past as at best elitist and at worst quasi-fascist, and such readings can be extended to his treatment of Japan. Indeed, many of the criticisms of Yeats’s Celtic as misrepresentation are echoed in his approach to “Japanese” materials as misinterpretation. Yeats has been associated with Orientalism, particularly the appropriating project of japonisme, especially in the criticism of Joseph Lennon (2004) and John de Gruchy (2003). Indeed, the very idea that – once more – Yeats would be spoken of in relationship to Japan will no doubt raise eyebrows. True enough, books and articles continue to appear that, in one way or another, focus entirely on the link between Yeats’s plays and Noh. The Irish-Japanese connection has previously only been understood along these very limited lines. There is a great deal of existing scholarship on Yeats and Noh that confines itself to studies of his debt to the dramatic form, either as approval for his experiments with genre, or as an indictment of his misguided Orientalism. But scholars repeat certain accepted formulations – about the dance plays and their cognates in the Japanese originals, about Yeats’s

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directorial adaptations on actors’ roles like shite and waki – and do not venture very far past these basic comparisons. The Fenollosa-Pound-Yeats triad (with Arthur Waley on the side) has come under much unfavourable scrutiny. Likewise, Yeats has been connected to Zen Buddhism, Sufi mysticism, and Vedic asceticism in various ways, often through Jungian modes of archetypal analysis. Two specific studies on Yeats’s relationship to Suzuki Daisetsu’s formulation of Zen can be found in Gerald Doherty, author of Dubliners’ Dozen: The Games Narrators Play (2004) and Shirō Naitō, who wrote Yeats and Zen: A Study of the Transformation of His Mask (1984). Yeats’s reputation for Orientalism has not been helped by critics who, themselves not knowing the Japanese language, have also promoted misunderstandings through their writing on Yeats. For example, those who would treat Zeami, one of the foremost playwrights, as somehow a kind of Asian equivalent of John Dee, an occultist of the court, have strayed very far from what research on Japanese theatre has shown. It has been misleading that researchers too often speak of Noh as if it were a singular genre which would make about as much sense as speaking of European opera as a uniform category. True, there is perhaps a logical grammar for implied similarities, but the diversity of expression, style, and production are completely elided through generalization and broad inclusivity. For example, Marvin Carlson’s book The Haunted Stage (2001) certainly contains many fascinating insights; but his judgment that “Noh is surely the most intensely haunted of any of the world’s classic dramatic forms, since its central figure is often literally a ghost” (20) is an overstatement in how it conflates the aspects of this complex art form. Ancestral spirits do figure in certain subgenres of the Noh, particular the kind known as mugen, a category of plays that focus on phantasms and a non-linear sense of time. As this study assesses, Yeats – and Japanese contemporaries like Izumi Kyōka – found in the mugen a kind of aesthetic of layered time and multi-dimensional dialogue. Their efforts – however innovative and fascinating – cannot be readily typologized according to classical Noh rubrics, nor do I think

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these authors had any desire to fit into that template. Speaking about Japanese Noh through such an application, as has been done particularly to Yeats, relies too much on tenuous connections and swift generalizations. So far, many critics have pointed out the features in Yeats’s dance plays that seem to bear witness to his studies of Fenollosa’s papers: the use of Noh-style typecasting for roles, the simplification of the set design, the importance of patterned movement, and so forth. Yeats acknowledges his own debt on several occasions: he found its performances representational of his sense that drama should “distrust bodily distance, mechanism, and loud noise” (Essays and Introductions 225). Many observations have been recycled at this point. It is more productive, however, to consider how both Yeats and Kyōka, operating under similar discursivities of twilight, mostly broke away from Noh and its highly restrictive forms to invent contemporary forms of avant-garde drama. In fact, in Kyōka’s time (1873–1939), which overlaps quite closely with Yeats’s (1865–1939), there was very little crossover between classical and modern drama in Japan. It is true that Kyōka wrote mostly for the shinpa [new school] theatre, but shinpa refused to stage most of his most interesting neo-nō plays, whose paranormal theatrics were very far from the sentimental melodramas that shinpa audiences loved to see. Yeats’s and Kyōka’s are more comparable as eccentric dramaturgy in their respective societies that were debating what direction the future of drama should take. Moreover, a theme that unites them, in theory and dramaturgical practice, is the twilight chronotope: the nearness of the dead, their intercessional relationship to the living, the apparitional figurations of lost discourse and disembodied culture: “the dead things talk with human voices” (EI 175). Yeats and Kyōka, as a specific point of comparison, illuminate and exemplify this monograph’s main analysis: how Irish examples coincided with Japanese authors through a method in which the phantasmal becomes an apparition of the vanishing, or how the ancestral becomes the abject. Irish and Japanese folklore are more than romantic tales of the past. They are configurations and expressions of local communities disembodied through geopolitical progress that

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typified post-Meiji Japan as well as colonial Ireland. In the modern period, with the advancement of technology, market societies, and transnational collectives, the mode of the alterity offered by the fantastic can distort the modules and functions of the institutional mandate to change by embodying the timelessness of the disembodied. Thus, while my treatment of the forms of exchange here is largely more sympathetic than that some of my predecessors, I nonetheless note the major ethical questions about the accessing of cultural tradition through conduits that must necessarily extend in international directions. There are claims that an authentic sensitivity comes only from belonging to the internal coherence of a cultural tradition, one that outsiders cannot share in. This would render intercultural communication impossible, for through what channel can legitimate access, or exchange, take place? And if a form of dialogue is enabled, can it produce anything besides disinformation and prejudiced rhetoric? In the points of exchange I examine, we find early twentiethcentury examples in which the formation of world literature results through intersections and dialogue, rather than remote comparisons or scattered case studies linked only by very general themes under broad taxonomies like European or Asian. A majority of transnational studies, however beneficial their perspectives and theses, make use of texts only in translation. They also tend to present Asia as a transposed facsimile that has only the most tenuous connections to a context of origin. Moreover, these assessments have almost entirely focused on Anglo-American examples for comparison. And much of the scholarship on transnational modernity – especially that written from a comparative perspective of Europe – makes little use of historical or critical materials in Asian languages. In such approaches, Asia materializes as little more than an object in the knowledge-power circuit of Western Orientalist fantasy. Recently, however, there has been a much-needed increase in a new style of literary critics with the necessary training to employ multilingual and interdisciplinary approaches. What these trends in scholarship have increasingly found, particularly through researchers working in source texts and critical voices in Chinese and Japanese, is

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that the level of communication, between a so-called East and West is more diverse, bidirectional, and example-specific than blunt theory and broad themes can easily assess. In demonstrating how transnational scholarship can be emboldened most effectively through research that navigates multilingual resources and texts, modernist scholars working in such a way produce exciting forms of heterocultural analysis. These find new means to track the subtle and dynamic interplay of complex ideas across multiple languages and cultural discourses. This kind of innovative scholarship can be found in such works as Jonathan Stalling’s compelling Poetics of Emptiness (2010). As a penetrating example of this kind of multilingual approach, Stalling demonstrates how inter and trans become hetero, as the supposed autonomous spheres of cultural independence find new and invigorating ways to migrate and exchange.7 Stalling’s examples are taken from later in the twentieth century, mainly from a post–Second World War period in which globalization more strongly affected the postmodern reality of cultural fusions. My own thinking tends to focus more on the modern period, when our authors – correctly or incorrectly – perceived themselves as national entities fighting for self-possession during the advent of rapid technological and sociological reformations of the affective cartography of place, belonging, and history. My discussions emphasize throughout the depth of details involved between Japan (not thought of as emblematic overall of Asia to the Irish) and Ireland (not thought of as emblematic overall of Europe to the Japanese) as interculturality. By accounting for theoretical statements and literary formats in both Japanese and English, such activities as the Keruto kenkyūkai [Celtic Studies organizations], which developed out of the Airurando bungakukai, sought to challenge generalized interpretations of the Western with the Irish acting as the counter-example to the increasing impression in Japan of Europe as a monolith. The Irish-Japanese networks provide a formative example of what Charles Taylor termed, through Gadamer, a “fusion of horizons.” But how such a fusion of diverse cultural identities can occur, and at what cost, are precisely the issues that most troubled Japanese

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and Irish authors: the impasse of translation and comprehension in reading the national literature of the other through globalization. In the years after the Second World War, Yokomitsu Ri’ichi, a writer who specialized in Chinese classics as well as Japanese nationalism, compiled a number of anecdotes concerning Hermann Hesse’s encounters with Japanese Buddhism in an essay called Akunin no kuruma [The Cart of the Evildoer] (2006 [1948]). To enhance the parable-like quality of this work, Yokomitsu frequently cites from a letter from Hesse to a Japanese novelist. Hesse was advising this enthusiast of Western culture that his adoration of European academics and writers is misplaced, that experiential practices are more valuable than books and essays (350).8 This is, as Hesse says, an impasse of apprehension: you admire me, I admire you, but if we do not meet each other then there is no beneficial ethics of sharing. What is required is a middle way of informed exchange. Personal limits are hard to overcome, but that should not negate the capacity for interaction. As Yeats wrote, “I was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it” (EI 518). Along this line, Yokomitsu Ri’ichi discusses Hesse’s inability to convert to Buddhism. Hesse felt that he could not escape the faith of his birth by latently taking up a different religion. Hesse saw conversion as an illegitimate escape into the exotic. Hesse stipulates that the translation or appreciation of another tradition must never be, as Yokomitsu translates with great attention, “生半可” [namahanka: superficial] (350). Hesse is hesitating here, in a way that Shaw did not. Instead, as Yokomitsu relays, he warily reminds his Japanese colleague that the reach often exceeds the grasp: 私は禅を尊敬してゐる. 貴方のいふヨーロッパ的理想などよりもず っと尊敬し、 もっと霊妙なものの一つと思ってゐる. (350)

[I hold Zen Buddhism in high regard. I consider it superior, and more mystical, than your so-called European ideals.] Respect, fascination, and idealization are insufficient. What is most helpful, Yokomitsu and Hesse suggest, is when two people of different cultures, aware of the fundamentals established by their

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own backgrounds, sit down together in an informed sincerity that produces both dialogue as well as self-reflection. Discussions of art and religion, in particular, can promote these forms of international exchange. Spurred by some of the political agendas of the time period, some Japanese began to promote very essentialistic claims about the Japanese spirit [wa no kokoro] and its perceived degree of solidarity sameness with the Celtic [Keruto]. As documented in my later chapters, this trend began quite early, particularly in the works of Watsuji Tetsurō, a Japanese philosopher concerned with the relationship between climate and culture. Yone Noguchi, in 1916, promoted the idea that Yeats, given his particular occultic interests, is an ancestor worshipper almost as if Japanese. Itō Michio, the Japanese expatriate who served as a bridge between Japanese and European drama, had claimed that he initially had no interest in Noh whatsoever, believing it to be a tired and boring hangover of fossilized tradition. Pound’s and Yeats’s fascination, however, caused him to reconsider this prejudice. This is a somewhat common story for Japan in the modern period: outsiders, such as B.H. Chamberlain, renewed the national appetite for native culture through the efforts of an appreciative visitor. However, perhaps in a bid to win prestige for an ethnic identity by seizing upon the interest of a famous foreign celebrity, the rhetoric in a rising Japan often exaggerated perceived cross-cultural connections in order to position Japaneseness through international interfacing.9 From our vantage point, we recognize the folly of the kind of cultural logic of identification at play here. The assertive claim to homogeneous national characterhood functions through its comparative relationship to others. However, as my later chapter explores, this viewpoint offered a counter-discourse to the exclusionist policies that some Japanese thinkers began to promote: the notion that Japan is so utterly unique and distinctive its treasures will remain forever inaccessible to the ethnically impaired other. Itō Michio, one of Yeats’s contested Japanese contacts, was particularly fascinated by how translation invariably leads to transcreation. Repeatedly in the autobiography Utsukushiku naru kyōshitsu [A Schoolroom for Beauty’s Becoming] (1956), he notes that his first impression of Noh translations was one of peculiar fascination: the

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English versions produced beautiful oddities of phrase and image that would have been counterintuitive to a native Japanese speaker. He was aware of the problem of cultural cross-idealization, from his own first-hand disappointment in finding that opera, as then performed in Paris, did not measure up to the expectations of what he had imagined it to be based on study in Japan. The process depended upon the maturation of interpretation through experience. The more that the Celtic Revivalists assessed the situation of Ireland, the more their attention also expanded to include areas such as Japan. Such an activity, in return, was reciprocated – and a shared dialogue began. Japanese authors were fascinated with Ireland’s status as shimaguni, or island nation, at the edge of its continent and enduring ongoing troubles with its neighbours. Intercultural exchange, translation, and convergence can be perplexing experiences, and, in this paradigmatic example of Ireland-Japan, the potentials and pitfalls of modernism’s preliminary efforts become observable. It is, of course, not easy to rest comfortably with discourses that, to whatever extent, seek to narrate national identity, collective culture, or ethnographic continuity. These narratives of cohesion, already suspect, increase in volatility when they are exchanged through transnational encounters. Without exaggeration, we know that errant words, false impressions, and arrogant lies have led to wars and other forms of international trauma. Yet I try to be optimistic in my account of how authors saw the necessity of understanding in a globalizing age as a foundation for a discourse of peace. Michael Cronin, through an astute allusion to James Joyce, states of the ethical imperative that is the desire for intercultural comprehension: “The last thing we want in the Echoland is our planet it to be condemned to the sound of our own voices” (7). As peculiar as an Irish-Japanese interface may seem at first thought, part of this monograph’s task is to document how Japanese and Irish authors themselves perceived and promoted this connection, rather than the author retroactively applying a thematic correspondence after the fact. As I document, the modernist critic Sangū Makoto (1913) specifically recommended Yeats’s plays in his review of Izumi Kyōka’s Kōgyoku. And, more recently, Ōe Kenzaburō in his Nobel Prize speech (1994) made the explicit point of acknowledging

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his major debt to W.B. Yeats, and not Kawabata Yasunari, as many might have assumed.10 Mishima Yukio, as I noted earlier, ascribes a direct correspondence between the Celtic Revival and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In’ei raisan. He perceived both as depicting those metaphysical architectures of haunting, in which spiritism and shadows are an extended dimensionality of landscape. Mishima Yukio makes this point emphatically in a letter to Kawabata Yasunari (1997 [1946]): “Move beyond Tanizaki’s darkness. The past can be made ours again, and we can wake up to this daylight through the example of Irish literature” (32). Mishima sensed a tremendous arc in themes that united Tanizaki and Yeats in this insightful letter; but his comment follows a very long trend that had developed in Japanese literary circles about the uniqueness of Irish culture as distinct from Western hegemony, one that offered, in comparative reflection, useful frameworks for Japanese critiques. To explore these possibilities, in Tokyo and Kansai, Airu­ rando bungakukai [Irish Literary Studies Society] was active and passionate, receiving support from such premier writers as Saijō Yasō, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and many of the leading ethnographers and poets of that time. And, while this Celtic studies society was active, Irish authors like Pádraic Colum were imagining the reinvention of Noh on Irish soil. It seems more than coincidental that the Celtic Revival’s commitment to alternative metaphysics and interculturality coincided with their use of Asian performance conventions that created his non-realist dramas as a rejection of dominant modes of theatre. From this perspective, neo-nō [contemporary versions of Noh drama] became one of the most prominent ways in Ireland and Japan to employ ritual and stylization as narrative techniques for reaching back into the ancient past, and in doing so, tried to import the voices of older performance traditions. This is not to say that Japanese and Irish renditions and interpretations of each other, under similarly conceived notions like twilight and time, are interchangeable. Despite Mishima’s intriguing interpretation, I find that Tanizaki’s discussion of Japanese aesthetics in In’ei raisan vigorously promotes a sense of Japanese uniqueness that is attuned to shadows in a way that is deliberately distinct from what he perceives to be the Western mindset. Tanizaki repeatedly main-

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tains that an inclination for shadows and vagueness is peculiar to his nation, and he argues that this sensibility arises from the cultural habitats of traditional Japanese wooden houses, that have no glass windows to pass light directly into the rooms. His viewpoint is quite different from Yeats’s twilight, even if at that time many of Yeats’s theories had become widely circulated among the Japanese literati. But one must wonder: why did authors of the renown of Mishima argue for congruencies? What exactly did he, and others, detect as explicit linkages to the Irish Revival? I wish to explore the possible connections, thematic as well as textual, between these two literary traditions. The Irish Revival and Japanese modernism interacted on the theme of source materials – be they communal, aesthetic, and so forth – undergoing displacement that results in states of partial absence and phantasmalization. Mishima overstates his claim to similarities between Yeats and Tani­ zaki. Still, there is a history behind these perceived connections. Japanese authors kept perceiving this connection between Ireland and Japan, utilizing twilight as the thematic framework for assessment. Of all the texts Mishima could have chosen to compare to In’ei raisan, he directly claims influence from The Celtic Twilight. Likewise, Sangū Makoto took the Celtic Revival as a useful correlate for interpreting Japan’s own modernist desire to reach back into antiquity to remake the present. In such a transcultural way, one might reassess the relationship to heritage and history that surfaced with the early lyrical narratives and increased in urgency throughout the work of the Celtic Revivalists. Certainly, Japanese authors, who spent a great deal of energy analyzing Yeats’s work as a representation of the Celt or Celtic [Keruto], found that the first thirty years of his writing entailed a project with more depth than a mismanaged form of Irishized pre-Raphaelitism. Indeed, such works as The Wanderings of Oisin and The Celtic Twilight depict concerns found in The Tower that helped to initiate the reception of Irish literature at the global level. Indeed, these earlier works inspired conscientious response from Japanese literary modernism, which partially fashioned its methods from considerations of the early Yeats and other Revivalist authors. While recognizing the romantic function of summoning up the fantastic and esoteric, there

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is also cynicism and mistrust that threaten the twilight ideal with the pressures of a material modernity. Therefore, texts such as The Celtic Twilight, and other related works written by the Celtic Revivalists, document and enunciate crucial developments in an Irish authorship’s confrontations with heritage and tradition, a case study in a strategic regionalism’s struggles with cosmopolitanism and ethnic identity as necessarily operating transnationally. At its best, the Japanese-Irish network provides a compellingly intricate model of cultural narration through international contact as one of the definitive features of modernism. The examples I analyze are thus demonstrative of a process that Bakhtin (1986) generally theorized: In the realm of culture, outsidedness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly. A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths. (7) What Bakhtin describes here, in principle, is also a fundamental aspect of Yeats’s literary praxis and the means through which cultural information can pass horizontally, not necessarily through institutional venues. Popular notions of culture emerge through extension; interpretations of what constitutes understanding benefit from encounters and exchanges that come from horizontal movements. Optimistically – although necessarily aware of such dangers as appropriation and commodification – a revealed meaning arises through the interfacing of cultural articulations. Authors find that textto-text encounters open up spaces for engagements, ones that consider mutual pasts as well as approaching dialogical futures. Yes,

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there are risks, but the potential requires the personal investment. As is increasingly being recognized, for example, in Hans Küng’s Welt­ ethos [global ethics] movements, modernism’s invitations to multireligious communication forged important, initial zones of contact. I return again to the modernist author Yokomitsu Ri’ichi, who uses Hesse as a spoken counterpoint, in his modernist argument that genuine, mutual understanding can only arise from conditions of shared, balanced information – not by conversion. Hesse is saying that when he has an understanding of Christianity, and Yokomitsu has knowledge of Zen, only then will their intentions behind the traditions lead to fruitful discussion beyond the superficial. Yokomitsu concludes: 諦念めに諦念を重ねて生の肯定に起つ意識の訓練は西洋人にも 通じるところのものだったにちがひない. (356)

[Although repeatedly resigned and defeated, life encourages us to rise up again, to improve our will (ishiki) through personal development (kunren). Indeed, Westerners also share in and understand this common truth.] Ancestral recall allowed for a recourse to form collective memory that, while not essential or transhistorical, nonetheless managed to flow through the passage of history as reviewed through alternative conceptions. Timothy J. Van Compernolle (2006), in his analysis of Higuchi Ichiyō’s contribution to Japanese modernity, describes this process as essential to the advent of Japanese modernist literature. Ichiyō “offers the possibility of rewriting our literary histories of the Meiji era and interrogating a critical discourse that can only conceive of the time before 1868 as the spectral Other of modernity and that can only imagine gestures toward the classical canon as nostalgia” (33). Similarly, Nicholas Andrew Miller (2002) identifies Irish modernity as an era in which memory performs as “the unfolding process through which the past continuously ‘occurs,’ for the first time, to the present. Looking back is always a ‘local’ endeavour, an attempt by human rememberers to make the past present” (12).

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Both Japanese and Irish authors investigated this framing of modernity as something innovatively separating from, yet contiguous with, a dissipating past. And they mutually turned to phantasmal models of cultural narration, bending time against space in trying to recover both, as the committed and fraught acts of ancestral recall.

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e

c ha p t e r t w o

The Cartography of Dreams or the Landscape of Nation? A sheanóir do shálobh do chiall beag in sgel gan a mbeith beó a raiph do shlúgaibh ann sin ní bhia as ní fhuil acht mar cheó.1 – Duanaire Finn (LVII , 37)

Summer, 1892 – Yeats was preparing preliminary chapters for The Celtic Twilight. This innovative work, which would become one of the principal texts of the Irish Revival, entailed a broader project than his own literary self-development. Yeats had to evolve both sense and sensibility for an emergent Ireland that was examining the various social strata that placed some on the inside and others on the outside, and especially within the rural communities where cultural belonging was felt particularly within these marginal spaces. For a young poet, painfully conscious of being at a formative crossroads of art and politics, this collection would become the culmination of an experiment in genre, voice, imagination, politics, and population. The Celtic Twilight would prove to be a text of departure, as much as arrival, for both Yeats’s personal aesthetic and the Celtic Revival’s overall methodology. Beyond an impact on Ireland, this multivalent, multi-voiced work, so concerned with the localized vocal and physical maps of Leinster and Connacht, would be instrumental in

attracting the attention of Japanese authors. The Celtic Revival, as a movement concerned with land and memory, expanded through a global frame of cultural contact. Through the channels and byways of transnational modernity, a book primarily so concerned with the rhythms of Irish collectivity would end up in the hands of Japanese translators. They would, with great enthusiasm, reintegrate and re­ imagine the Revival’s themes. The Celtic Twilight, as one of the most important artistic works in developing the Irish-Japanese literary exchange, concerned itself with the habitational strategies of Irish belonging. Precisely on this principle of collectivity in view of community it would facilitate this itinerary of international exchange, leading to a modernist paradigm of translocality. In examining how Celt or Celtic became reformulated into Japanese modernism as Keruto, the Celtic Revival became both source and supplement in positioning a sense of Irish tradition and its negotiation of the modernizing project. In many ways, to Asian audiences Yeats represented the Celtic Revival, and, through him, his compatriots such as Edward Plunkett (Lord Dunsany), Lafcadio Hearn, Lady Gregory, and Fiona Shaw would later come into view. Nevertheless, the so-called early Yeats, who has slid steadily out of critical view, wrote the poems and essays that would be at the forefront of attention for Japanese literati, as these writings exemplified a concept of Keruto, and with it an alternative version of Westernness besides the standard Anglo-American. The early Yeats, as an interpreter of past and future, developed a Revivalist project that tested the tensions between the landscape of dreams – as the presumptive glimpses of cultural auras and ideals of the past – and the cartography of nation, as the topography of polity in the modern era. The second half of this book examines in detail the intermingling of Irish and Japanese texts, authors, and their concepts. First, in order to establish the terms that allowed for this confluence of inspiration to take place, I begin in this chapter by documenting the tropic strategies and intellectual questions that the Celtic Revival proposed through the circuits of folklore and history for the emerging Irish nation-state. By examining how this process developed in Ireland, I can later demonstrate how the very same materials would dramatically elicit a response from Japanese writers, which would then

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lead back – by way of recirculation – to an Irish literary interest in Japanese genres and folkloric identities. Authors of the Celtic Revival had various purposes in re-narrativizing poetic materials that celebrated a mythic heritage removed, in time and text, from contemporary environs. Their basic methodology considered how heritage elements coincided with bodily practices to engender a sense of lore as a localized archive of collective memory that is handed down and re-enacted. Douglas Hyde (1885) recognized that the precipitous decline of the indigenous language coincided with a breakdown in the collective sense of memory, tradition, and continuation: “As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power” (221). In some ways, Revivalists engaged in documentary realism, taking notes and sketching portraits that were not too dissimilar to other more proto-disciplinary ethnographers such as Franz Boas. But, as writers of a more literary mindset, they allowed for the creative imagination to engage in a recuperative art of ancestral recall, or cultural recovery. The dimensions of the otherworldly, as intimately connected to the transitions and traumas of the temporal world, allowed them to fashion a phantasmic critique through more experimental genres. Rather than tabled data and genealogical labels, as more scientific ethnography had done in trying to make itself into a discipline itself at the time, the Celtic Revival developed a symbolic praxis in verse, one spoken through folkloric avatars such as Oisín.2 Such personages provided storied voices for studying the increasing conflict between historical idealization and contemporary social realities. These ancestral figures are time-lapsed spectres, at once indigenous to an ancestral landscape yet temporally divorced from its current circumstances and located in twilight. They are transliminal entities whose historical reference cannot tangibly be transferred into the present. Ossian – or Aengus, Forgael, and Fergus – exists in a diachronic trap: space and physicality have been abandoned for an otherworld that lies outside of normative dimensions. In such a state, these mythical heroes are motivated by a desperate sentimentality that seeks to avoid the crumbling moment of the past as passing. Yet this Otherspace to which they are relegated, removed from time as historical

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enactors, provides nothing substantial, nothing that converges with cultural activities and human (poetic) sensation in political corporeality. To return to reality is to encounter once more the embodiment of emotion as an organic response to palpable stimuli. Having been so out-of-time, and thus out-of-world, Yeats’s Oisin no longer can navigate or recognize his homeland habitat. As such Oisin depicts the dangerous dilemma of ancestry, landscape, and change. His confusion results from leaving a landscape of dreams, and returning to a changing landscape of the contemporary. This theme coincides with Yeats’s political and poetic developments from lyrical Celticism to endotic narrative. For the Revivalists, retreating into some pseudorealm of symbolic eternity does not confer any meaningful status to a nation assembling its counter-colonial claims. But they understood that the present moment, as hinged on cultural tradition, does not provide simple answers in immediacy. In between present and past they recognized an elemental world of heritage and landscape, permeable to change and conquest, and the attendant unstable subjectivities that make claims to rootedness for the sake of independent futurity. Departure from worldliness into other-worldliness entailed a sacrifice of personhood, in the sense that action is networked with the circumstances, customs, and changes that mark the progression of a material history. Yeats, in The Wanderings of Oisin (WO , 1889) confronts the vestiges of symbolist poetry, as a form of intellectual escapism popular in fin de siècle European writing, one typically expressed as a conundrum of a phantasm preferable to physically uncomfortable placement. Symbolism might rely on conceiving the allure of Irish folklore as remote icons of yesteryear, as aesthetic ideations. They are alluring in their static conditions as fragments of presumed purity. To transplant these artifacts into the present would betray their status through a kind of lowering from the astral into the brutishness of incarnation. However, the Celtic Revivalists needed more than the ethereal to voice the purposes of history; their mindfulness of a material present concurrent with the ancestral traced a continuity of connections. Tangible times and places are demarcated by all manner of signs that reveal the past as coinciding with the contemporary. To realize the past as a cultural present, The Wanderings of

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Oisin exposes the false substance of an ethereal world so far removed from national cartographies that its domain has no more influence than a dream. To critique the symbolist perspective, Yeats uses Oisin as a figure of vanishing, a discourse of the almost-disappeared. Oisin is a victim of transition that is Patrick’s Christianizing dynasty that erases heritage to reinstall a new hegemony. The Revivalists ask difficult questions through such figures: what identity does mythic heritage have for a modern era? Where has the Ireland of its origins gone, and who has the power to recover it, if such is even possible? How can Revivalism articulate tradition within the shifting tensions and dilemmas of rapidly progressing history? If Oisin becomes a figment of negligible mythology, what ongoing influence can he have on contemporary politics? In depicting Oisin’s dissipation from the Irish cultural landscape, Yeats begins to work through these complex issues that were churning in an emerging Irish nationalist identity. Cavafis, Modernity, and the Ancient Voice Also in 1892, an entire continent away from Ireland, under the shadows of minarets and the ghosts of the Ptolemies, Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) attempted to both invoke and reject the past, working in a post-Symbolist mood of modernity in which the poet-historian balances haphazardly a historical knowledge with current skepticism. For Cavafy, the cultural habitats of Alexandria or the Acropolis, fixed as remembrance and connected to a burned archive or a crumbled temple, provide a mark in the land through which speculation on the forces of creation can be pursued. The cultural landscape as it was, and the landscape as it is now, can be resuscitated through an imaginative circulation of landmark, its historical happenstance, and the imaginative point of a present-centred reference. Alexandria lives on through the dimensions of mythopoesis, and mythopoesis interprets the physical through its referential sequence along a formative past. The Victorian period had preliminary examples of ethnographers and poets trying to find contemporary evidence for the events narrated in the lyrics of the past. For some folklorists, the Bavarian forest comes alive with the dialects of yesteryear. The geysers of Iceland

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seemed to hiss Edda verses. Dramatic repossession of an idyllic past allowed for a sheen of antiquity, one in contrast to the profaneness of the present. Many Symbolist writers eschewed the mundane realms of politics, society, and progress, insofar as such topics do not properly enshrine Myth. However, the Celtic Revival and Cavafy investigated the ancestral, without construing them as a remote distancing of heritage and figurative transcendence. Rather, the present was to be understood as in a physical continuum with the past along the textures of memory and temporal translation. Cavafy’s temporal poetics often suggest the Symbolists’ reclusive gesture, a withdrawal from elemental powers and urban confusion into symbolic realms. His visions of classical culture – as modelled into a classical present – perceive human events as ongoing conditions initiated by mythic precedent. For example, in Cavafy’s (1911) transitional didactic “Ithaka” (48), the teleology of the person is described as a process of navigation, rather than a culmination of destiny. In “The Horses of Achilles” (7), the divine personage of Zeus is limited to a form of one-dimensional omniscience. The great God, caught between event and consequence, can only witness a material disaster from a distance, if he remains in transhistorical isolation. Cavafy’s maturing method as a poet was to expand the narrowness of Symbolist allusions to social energies of the present. His early fascination with Classical Greek poetic ideals – stylistically as well as thematically – had partially failed to satisfy a desire for an innovative style to a Greek diaspora uncertain of what qualified as home. Linguistic hygiene in the form of lexical purism was taking hold. Sociolinguistic pressures were intervening on a hermetic portrait of the insulated, undefiled classicalist discourse. Cavafy’s poetry examines this lexical struggle in its combination of Hellenistic (purist) Greek with the emerging demotic (contemporary) argot, which in his mind more accurately reflects ancestral voice as it allows for contemporary practices to carry on tradition.3 The scholarly retreat into an artificial past was antagonistic to poetic vitality. Thus, the materials of Cavafy’s composition, the Greek language and its Hellenic configuration, were in a state of contention, just as the nation of Greece was under pressure from both Europe and Asia Minor.

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The need to preserve a distinctive presentation of one’s ethnicity through the patrimony of a unique language had particular influence on the expatriates in Egypt, particularly Greeks like Cavafy. Across the Mediterranean, Greeks were in a period of return, from Turkey and across Asia Minor, in an accelerated repatriation – their destination the piers of Piraeus, then the slums commemorated by rem­be­tika. The modernist ennui of cultural confusion for the drawing-room diaspora abroad took shape in their pipe smoke – the fancies of Athens, the heroics of the Olympics, the tongues of philosophy. The new Athenian national imagination dreamt that the Socratic academy could be rebuilt, or at least refitted, but would require an unmixed discourse of restored Attic dialects for its hallowed halls. The only suitable tongue of civility and philosophy for the new state would be the language of Socrates, which had to be restored, in the artificially fashioned katharevoussa (cleansed Greek). Supposedly, this would return speech back to the semiotics of the truly ancestral. This rhetorical enterprise sought to resurrect, phonologically, lexically, and architecturally, the condition of a lost Attica in synthetic diction. This sort of idealized language policy is not unusual. Feminist linguists such as Deborah Cameron have documented the sort of agenda at operation in cleansed language: verbal hygiene is a normative expectation that is conducive to producing healthy, pure citizenship. Throughout the period, language decontaminators argued for conscious expulsion of foreign words and influences from people’s mouths in order to re-territorialize the civil mind according to prior purities. The Greek diaspora, overwhelmed by the majority languages of their adopted countries, fostered neo-Classical ideals of Hellenic sublimity in nostalgia. The lofty and leisurely pursuit of purging a corrupt language and establishing a facsimile of ancient eloquence suited their rather sentimental, but also elitist, position. Guardians of the Greek academy had the same notions; and katharevoussa became the preferred mode for law, education, and governance. The architectural image of the Acropolis becomes both beacon and landmark: the symbolic forms of Doric architecture become reformed so as to stand against the erosion wrought by modernity. And as far as

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national identity was concerned as a declarative project, the best way to confront modernity was to overcome it, not accommodate it. Yeats and Cavafy, as two poets of the modern period are both motivated to some extent by a tradition of Baudelarian Symbolism, an abstract poetical mode that embraces both antiquity (classical culture) as well as vulgarity. Cavafy’s poetic-historicism ultimately championed demotika, the Greek of contemporary times. The Celtic Revivalists – for many of whom a working knowledge of Irish Gaelic was largely absent – perceived in the possibilities of the native Irish tongue, as well as in Hiberno-English, a form of knowledge that was not a restored idealization of a fossilized discourse. Hiberno-English, a conflation of Irish lexicon and grammatical structures crossed with the colonial English, still had a distinctive character and did not require everyone, en masse, to master some version of antiquated Gaelic. Indeed, at this time, the decline in the number of Irish Gaelic speakers was just about to become a free-fall. Revivalist linguistics for spoken Irish took living speakers as its sources. As François Maspero demonstrates in his travelogue Les passagers du Roissy Express [Roissy Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs] (1990), human geographies exist as palimpsestuous local lives, particularly in the ways that the local is connected to the thickness of dialect and language. For the Irish poets, the language of the peasantry, of disempowerment and marginalization, had also once been the speech of the epics, of the Brehon laws of pre-modern Ireland, and several hagiographies. The Irish Demotica – the displaced Gaelic in the form of Hiberno-English – had an ethnic heroism to it that the newspapers of Dublin and their polished English did not. The native language had suffered from persecution and loss of habitat, and its prestige was colonial martyrdom. Gaeltachtaí (Irishspeaking regions) remained, but not in a widespread way, and they were eroding quickly as communities collapsed. The lexically picturesque of the country-tongue actually stood against the hackneyed nobility of the Queen’s English. This impulse toward dialect informs the Revivalists’ writing, and many Irish writers since them, because of how it presents distinction through historical circumstances.4 The particularities of dialect language, and the localized traces it contains, combine the vestiges of the past with the circumstances of the

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present. The turn toward the colloquial local, over all in modernism, was rural speech as a form of revolt. The Revivalists reaffirm the vernacular, as an attention to naturalized cacophony that resists the hegemony of centralized speech and accent. The Revivalist shift toward vernacular meant a more materialistic approach to cultural embodiment. Language, in this way, represents the habits of social bodies in cultural emplacement, rather than through abstract icons of ancestral predecessors. If the poet-historian seeks instead a mystical or aesthetical idealization of a transhistorical spirit, then he or she must turn away from social circumstances. In many ways, Yeats was slowly shrugging off this theme of Decadent authors of the nineteenth century. Some had suggested a sort of gnostic path that marked the escapist trend into the ideation of the cultural past, in which mundane reality is associated with the lowest form of experience that the grand movement of time consumes. For example, Durtal, in Huysmans’s Là-bas (1972 [1891]), sought trans­ historical escape into a realm codified as the Middle Ages, and, much like Yeats’s Byzantium, understood this to be an ontological kingdom in which art, life, and spirituality were unified: “The day on which Durtal had plunged into the frightful and delightful latter mediæval age had been the dawn of a new existence. The flouting of his actual surroundings brought peace to Durtal’s soul, and he had completely reorganized his life, mentally cloistering himself, far from the furor of contemporary letters” (21). To enter these Middle Ages, one has to cloister the senses away from the corruption of modernity. To accomplish this, the novel’s wizened astrologer, Des Hermies, offers this advice: “There is one recourse left … To escape the horrors of the present day never raise your eyes. Look down at the sidewalk always, preserving the attitude of timid modesty. When you look only at the pavement you see the reflections of the sky signs in all sorts of fantastic shapes; alchemic symbols, talismanic characters, bizarre pentacles with suns, hammers, and anchors, and you can imagine yourself right in the midst of the Middle Ages” (272). Huysmans, through Durtal, clearly is aware that his concept of the Middle Ages is shaped by a rhetorical framework the wilfully eschews any reflection on historical reality. Historical reality, past or present, is precisely the problem, the inevitable trap of the mind that is the predicament of

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being-in-the-world. Only tremendous personal devotion can transfer the psyche out of the temporal banality within the commonplace. To wake from the nightmare of history, one must transfer the soul into a realm outside of history: the Middle Ages, in this sense, is an intellectual escapism to an artistic ideal of the insulated imagination. As such a form of meditative visualization, Durtal’s Middle Ages provide a comprehensive set of images, a thematic paradigm, and a spiritual atmosphere that offer solace to the world-weary spirit. Although his novels explore how one comes into permanent contact with this higher place, Huysmans never fully reconciles spiritual ideation with the process of everyday life. He transfers the problem of living into an ethereal portrait in the form of penitential Catholicism, in a mode typical of mysticism. Huysmans’s (1972) psychological artifice allows for a means of personal transformation through a wilful illusion of the past as aesthetically transcendent. Spiritual alchemy, operating through consciously devised alternatives of art, transmutes the agitations of material existence into glorious art. The mental realm effects a portal of escape into an imaginatively symbolic supra-reality, enabling “a delicious straying away from the world, and never the return” (181). Cultural salvation and recuperation must occur outside of space and time at a personal level, since the physical world, and its societies, must always be associated with corruption. In Là-bas, the symbol for a haphazard, gross culture is the ongoing neglect of the bell-ringer, Carhaix. His craft, the announcing of the liturgical hours, has no spiritual impact on the indifferent populace: indeed, in a moment that has similarities to a Kyōka play that I examine later, the classical art of bell-ringing is ridiculed by a public who considers it obsolete. The bells, Carhaix sighs, will soon be replaced by machines; and the skill and meaning of the bells as ancestral timekeeper and spiritual portent will be relegated to a vanished past. The only noise that does have impact is the clutter and clamour of a local election, as demonstrative of the violence that makes real history. And so, in the scene that concludes the novel, an angry rally outside indicates the power of social processes that Durtal and his aesthete refugees have no wish to participate in. Indeed, to Durtal, the noisiness of the faux democracy is worse sacrilege than the Satanic anti-Mass he attends in an earlier chapter. The

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Satanic, although in a subversive fashion, at least still concerns itself with the Eternal, whereas politics and society make an idol of the mundane here and now. Huysmans’s transcendental realm, a higher plane of idealized sensibility, excludes both the organic present and historical fact. Of course, in authors like Yeats and Cavafy, vestiges of this symbolic mindset can be seen. In one of his earliest poems, Cavafy (1976) expresses a similar desire to transmute sensory experience into loftier realization: When I enter a church of the Greeks, With its fragrance of incense, With its voices and liturgical choirs … My mind goes to the high honours of our race, To the glory of our Byzantine tradition. (“In Church,” ll. 4–6, 10–11) Phillip Larkin’s (2003) visit to a church, however, resonates more closely with the more modernist mindset: But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky … (“Church Going,” ll. 35–6) For Cavafy, the danger of an orthodox imagination is that it attunes to a theological symbol that embodies the past, since the form of the present is spiritually insufficient.5 Cavafy (1972) – as well as his successor, George Seferis (1900–1971) – reintroduces the Hellenic antiquity into the hybridizing negotiation of the here and now: What extract can be found according to the formulas Prepared by the ancient Grecosyrian magi which, Along with this return to the past, Can also evoke for me our little room? (“Grecosyrian,” ll. 10–13)

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Cavafy and Seferis intentionally complicate the devotion to an ancestral aesthetic as one completely removed from everyday circumstances. In doing so, they represent the beginning of a shift in the twentieth century in how conceptions of ancestral recall feature in poetic historiography. Cavafy, to affirm the physical, turns it into an eroticism of memory. He actively repeals a Christian dedication to the insulated soul as only immaterially meaningful and the idea that amelioration of the soul requires a discarnate concentration on the icon. Cavafy wants to physically engage an icon through sensual contact. The general problem with modernist appropriations, or re-examinations, of heritage is that the sources are ideologically distorted in scale and perspective in the material demands of recovery. How can a revivalist best bring into juxtaposition the presences of dissipating antiquity with the material concreteness of the present? The Mediterranean examples of cultural displacement and reconsidered intellectual geographies show that ancestrality, as testament to cultural ideations of heritage, must also be experienced in physicality (aesthetically). These materials conduct a continuity with the patterns of the past only through reinvention. Concerned as he is with taking the classical into the present in a touchable form, Cavafy plays the role of Callimachus, a restorer of outdated hymns and anachronistic odes, against the hegemonic epic and its proclamation of the macro-society. In her recent translations of Cavafy, Aliki Barnstone finds in both Yeats and Cavafy a form of mytho-historicism that combines a personal perspective, which can take national particulars and turn them into cosmopolitan discourse. For this to be the case, an understanding of poet-historian begins to become apparent. In attempting to find the poetic-historians form of conduct, Cavafy was under the influence of two competing modes of history, Thucydides and Herodotus. Cavafy (1976) resists documenting the events occurring around him, as the proximity of the present, with Thucydidean accuracy for the ancestral order as linear. Poems such as “Myris: Alexandria, 340 C.E.” (187) invoke the Herodotean mode of fantastic narrative that references the past through interpretive visioning. Facts are not amorphous putty, but they are not blocks of concrete either. Poetry addresses the partially subsumed forms of historical images that position relics and

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ruins as structured points of reference. The poetic serves to remodel continuity as a kinetic site of interaction; the allusion becomes malleable and intermingles with the present circumstance. Modernity, noted both for its allusive attention to classical ideals as well as a break from the classical through dispossession, drifts between polar opposites: transcendence or society, inner mysticism or the mass electorate, wistful nostalgia or avant-garde repudiation. These fraught practices become particularly cumbersome for the Celtic Revival. If, ultimately, the Revival entails a political movement of material practices as much as ancestral evaluation, what kind of cartography are Revivalists drawing up in mapping the collective memory? Where do they find their historicized locations, in the names of an ancient Ireland or by promoting new terms for an invented one? The polarities, for the Celtic Revival, cannot hold. The particular formation of the historical avatar, as the symbolic appearance of national history, is a fragmented part of a structural design in decay. The situating of history in landscape, the geographical staging of how static heritage becomes active avatar of the ancestral presence, requires an audience that can participate cooperatively in the fashioning of collective memory. Celtic Pseudepigrapha: Sensation, Sentiment, and the Lost Origin The Celtic Revival examines the modernist struggle for what exactly constitutes the materials and perspective of a mytho-history as a recuperative strategy. In the 1890s, several trends climaxed in the Irish movement for independence. These included such influences as facsimile reproductions (and authentication) of national-culture texts, increasing political disputes over territorial integrity, and the waning of colonialist trends that imposed a hierarchy of meaning for externally enforcing an Irish social order. The authentic source for a universal sense of meta-history arises in ideas, not materials. The pursuit of nation and nation-formation, however, increasingly sought a pedigree through archaeology and old manuscripts, yet a rooted sense of a cultural landscape is situated in geographical places that are fractured by abrupt transitions.

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Critics have adopted varying exegesis in discovering Yeats’s national politics, as emblematic of Revivalist tendencies in cultural recovery, by addressing his early poetry. “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (CP 55) may be a post-Symbolist lament for unattainable beauty, a standby lyric in many a folk guitarist’s repertoire for conjuring up the sentimental pain of dispositioning. Or, in Deirdre Toomey’s reading (1997), this poem allegorizes the quest for national sovereignty: to find the Beloved, costumed as she is in the iconography of Lady Eire, means to actualize the freedom of the state. Elizabeth Cullingford (1996) has argued that gendered prescriptions dominate the depiction of Irish character as a feminine weakness, convenient enough for the colonialists, or as the perpetuation of the red-haired rebel in art or music, and thus discursively suitable for sentimental revolutionaries and their male privilege. Yeats’s early poetry does not fit any of these categories neatly, and these works deserve consideration about how they challenge preceding trends of the Symbolists, while at the same time assessing myth as a resource for communal inheritance. Yeats, in addressing the status of cultural narratives, sought ways to bridge historical separation. In such a way, he first experiments with what will be lifelong theorizations. His renovations of Irish lore assess how the traces of the past become displaced, and how they might relate to present day circumstances of a community. The Wanderings of Oisin (WO ) seeks to disclose what happens when the ancestral is accessed, and what face does it attain through this interrogative meditation from the present. Yeats’s practice of Celtic Revivalism has often been classified as a latent Romantic lyricism, a dabbling in Pre-Raphaelitism, or an escapist mode of allegorical thought and representation that forego material realities in favour of imaginative decadence. True, Revivalists in general experimented with all of these inherited styles; but Oisin ultimately is the story of one who does not remain bound to the abstracted sanctimony of the past. Indeed, Yeats found Pre-Raphaelite stylization to be wanting in addressing the tangible merits of cultural geographies, of ancestral symbols in touch with physical place. That is not to say that Yeats disregarded Symbolism entirely, nor that he had no curiosity for the paranormal, nor that poems such as The Wanderings of Oisin do not engage in metaphysical conjecture. The

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political, however, does not exclude the metaphysical, and vice versa. Yeats was being tugged in various directions, and the contradictory directions of these poems represent a skeptical engagement, rather than a single, obligatory point of view. The sensibility of Symbolism itself entails locating the metaphysics of poetic apprehension in a kind of shadowy waters, “Shadows before now / Have driven travelers mad for their own sport” (SW 104–5). An attempt to disconnect the symbol from its means of sensual engagement takes representation, the physical form, to a place where only its shadow, an outline, remains. There are certainly Symbolist models in all of the major genres within which Yeats worked: the codified tropes of the poems (the rose, dancers, the tower), the complex cosmology of A Vision (1925), and the formula of presentation and representation in some of the drama. The Symbolists’ legacy establishes a Romantic ontology of a world order, where nature – to paraphrase Baudelaire – is a temple, and the poet-priest invokes correspondences to the universal symbols. Yeats’s Rose cycle of poems, for example, evidence some of this method, and thus have lent themselves to Jungian readings. The retreat into the dream world, and its ethereal patterns, is opposed to the engagement with historical terms and their attempts to emplace the ancestral not as dream, but as realizable trace. The Celtic Revival had a conflicted relationship with the more general project of recovering an ethnic history through pre-modern literature, in the form of texts presumed to be indicative of ethnic origins and thus situated as distanced from a blurred modernity. But in my reading, the Revival was not a reductionist yearning for a primordial national ethos, one entrenched in a simplistic reading of nativistic poetry. For all of his countless words on the subject, Yeats offers no single-viewed conception of either literary heritage or indigenous experience. Much to the annoyance of critics seeking to pin him down, Yeats contradicts himself on numerous occasions, intentionally so. The complications of a forthcoming civil war require no less than such an attitude of multivalence. Yeats, in fact, dramatizes how a nation-state changes through decolonization: the Revival itself is entrenched in the discursive practice of cultural location, first as the politics of local ecology and culture, out of which arises the

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call to self-determination, sovereignty, and resistance to colonialist interference. This chapter focuses on how the Celtic Revivalists navigated the condition of culture in the fissures of Irish anti-imperialism, exploring how they particularized the problem of cultural instability through the tropes of twilight dimensionality and ancestral necromancy. W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory are prominent in experimenting with myth as a kind of unstable circuit for recovering and transmitting heritage through time according to the continuum of local space. In this kind of performative feedback loop, the ancestral state proves to be influential but not recoverable. The Revivalists thus recalibrated their approach to one more dynamic and, therefore, more fluid in its possibilities, than faith in a restoration of purity. The Revivalists’ efforts at ancestral recall had a long, confused pedigree of examples to which they could compare themselves. The past, as a recoverable subject for the modern age, is not a project unique to Ireland (or Japan, as I will later show); this practice can be detected in many different eras and times. I situate here the Celtic Revival as a movement emerging from a successive pattern that has a long history in European searches for origin. Prior to the nineteenth century, many ethnic detectives sought in the manuscript evidence to prove, a posteriori, the nationalist presumption of singular origin. This pursuit can be traced to Franciscus Junius (the younger, 1591–1677), who introduced a form of philology that, in attempting to scientifically manage archives and ancient manuscripts, was driven by the motivatation to revive a buried Teutonic sensibility. The formulation of the past – as recovered texts from an ancient era – came into shape through a contemporary desire to compensate for the lack of national cohesion. English antiquarians have generally been likewise biased in their efforts: William Camden’s Britannia (1586) has its specious fixation on the Glastonbury Cross, the talisman recovered during the exhumation of King Arthur’s grave.6 Ruins, in their tangibly archaic suggestibility, seem to contain an adaptive surplus of mythical attributes. Camden gave extensive attention to this artifact, reproducing at great cost the letterforms of the inscription for an epigraphically correct document of pedigree. The Glastonbury Cross was pictorially presented, as accurately

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as possible, for the sake of documentary idealization. As a scholar, Camden (1551–1623) pioneered historicist methods for documenting the process of typography by engaging in a preliminary form of investigative archaeology. Nonetheless, rather fancifully, Camden appends several anecdotal markers to such physical traces of the past, as his way of justifying spurious links to a vanished Fatherland. Similarly, Matthew Parker (1504–1575; Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559) revived Old English, as a linguistic predecessor of ancestral ideology, through an assertion that the language demonstrated an indigenous pedigree of the church: he was arguing for an English institution for an English people. Thus Aaron J. Kleist (2006) has argued that Parker manipulated Ælfric of Eynsham’s homilies and hagiographies to inscribe them as precedents to his political vantage point. Kleist’s conclusion is worth repeating here: “while Parker may not remain faithful to the spirit of Ælfric’s thought, he is at least careful to remain faithful to the letter” (327). According to Kleist, Matthew Parker adopts Ælfric’s theology as a typological precedent, an assumption that does not fairly represent Ælfric’s actual perspective. Parker is faithful to the typographical letter as the physical matter of the text. Indeed, his methods helped to establish a scientific model for preserving and disseminating manuscripts. But archaeology was also developing as an experiment in substantiating national heritage. National discourse, connected to tangential antiquity, can frame whatever political pursuit the compiler wishes. Such was the pressure felt in Anglo-England. Pressed into the margins as they were, the various countries claiming a Celtic identity would also erect a literary counter-tradition, one against the dominant Latin-Saxony and its veneration of a supremacist heritage. Their efforts produced just as many frauds, however. A particularly troublesome example, related in subject matter as it is to Yeats, is James Macpherson’s The Works of Ossian (1765), a collection that compiled a lifetime’s work of (supposed) accumulating, translating, and anthologizing from Gaelic sources. Macpherson prefaces his work with a declaration of timeless authenticity and therefore cultural pedigree. He claims to offer us a genealogical collection of recovered knowledge, in the form of a translated epic from the ethnic

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past, as a gesture of preservation of Highland Gaelic culture that is now lost to colonized disarray. But it was all invented, or faked. In short, it was ventriloquism in the dummy voice of the ancestral. Rather than taking on mere homage, Macpherson imitated the role of linguistic detective: digging in the ethnic midden of the past, he falsified authenticity with the presumptive dirt that had covered up the rural community’s stories. Unsurprisingly, controversy followed Macpherson’s edition from the start. Samuel Johnson had famously attacked the legitimacy of the materials in his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). Johnson, his own anti-Scottish stance also needing to be accounted for, did have a point. Satisfactory documentation that could legitimize the folk origins of Macpherson’s ancestral voices has never been produced. The antique status of the poems had come under such assault that the 1773 edition included an apologia, entitled rather blandly as “A Preliminary Discourse.” Rather than arguing in a scholarly manner for a defence of the legitimacy of the works, Macpherson (1851) appeals instead to the graces of the imagination: “Some Scotch critics, who should not be ignorant of the strongholds and fastnesses of the advocates for the authenticity of these poems, appear so convinced of their insufficiency, that they pronounce the question put to rest forever. But we greatly distrust that any literary question, possessing a single inch of debatable ground to stand upon, will be suffered to enjoy much rest in an age like the present. There are as many minds as men, and of wranglers there is no end.” (19). The editor of the 1773 edition also had tried to suggest that the most vocal critics were “prevalent among the men of letters in London” (6), which is coded rhetoric that they were geographically dodgy, being legates of the empire that causes the loss of such texts in the first place. This “Preliminary Discourse” cites firm believers such as Hugh Blair, who offer fiery support, but lukewarm documentation. Thus, Macpherson lost credibility very quickly. Appeals to authority ultimately fail when the material evidence is absent. The sheen of antiquity was not attached to any substance. And, to this day, scarequotes must be attached to the words translator or folklorist if they are used in reference to Macpherson and his chicanery.

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Certainly, however, Macpherson’s work had enormous emotional appeal to a cultural territory under threat and dispute that desired a heritage to voice its distinction. Macpherson was enticing because he tried to demonstrate that the Celtic, as a continuum of a cultural entity whose dwelling had been driven to the margins of the continent, had a specific line of development. One can better understand the enthusiasm for Macpherson by remembering that the Scottish countryside was gutted by events such as the 1746 Battle of Culloden. The furious defeat to Scottish sovereignty resulted in acts of horror that are, today, described as ethnic cleansing by locals. As a countryside occupied and eroded irrecoverably, an audience was ready for an incorruptible treasure that survived the vandalized past. The desire for a post-colonial Celtic voice, to speak for a dissipating body of the past through literary recovery, had become contagious. The same need for restoration also hung over the recovery of literary heritage in Wales. Arguably, there existed a more detailed record of medieval Welsh literature. Iolo Morganwg (the Celticized pen name of Edward Williams, 1747–1826) summoned cultural ancestry by claiming to produce lost poems of a Welsh language icon, Dafydd ap Gwilym Morganwg (c. 1315/1320–c. 1350/1370). He had also, it is now generally assumed, forged most of these poems as concoctions culled from many sources. Morganwg’s inventions strangely mixed a druidic occultism with a more scholarly fascination for Welsh poetic forms. Pseudo-history merged with the unique textual mechanics of the Welsh style, united into a textuality that claimed both ancient wisdom and as ancestral scansion. The printed edition of Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (1789) thus had a Welsh sensibility not only for its typological format, but also the forms of knowledge presumed to be preserved in Welsh stylistics. Debates on the meaning of bard had existed in sixteenth-century Wales, and the modernist creation of the Eisteddfod, a festival of literature, music, and performance evolved from an ongoing effort to revive the past as public performance and standardized ritual. In terms of other Celtic acts of cultural recuperation, song collecting in Brittany fared better. Théodore-Claude-Henry-Hersart de la Villemarqué’s edition of the Barzaz Breiz (1995 [1839]) also claimed

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a pastoral authority as its foundation. Pushed to the edges of society, literally at the edges of geography, the rural communities of the Breton offered a musicality that industrial elites and their French music did not have. Villemarqué proposed himself as a pioneering ethno-musicologist. He was a collector of the folk songs of the Breton peasantry and presented their oral, communal tradition as alternative history. Accusations of counterfeiting have also been pointed at Villermarqué, although his research has been ardently defended, and substantiated, certainly more than certain Welsh and Scottish examples. His was faithful to legitimate sources, it must be said, derived from field contact with a vanishing language and musical tradition as still practised. In his preface to the standard French-Breton edition of the work, editor and translator Yann-Fañch Kemener writes, “L’édition de 1867, et la quarelle qui va s’ensuivre, sur fond d’authenticité et de rigueur scientifique, va servir la recherché sur la matière orale de Bretagne et susciter de nouvelles vocations pour plusieurs de generations” (10). That is to say, the scholarly credibility, in compiling musical passages of the past, must be present if the songbook is to have any authentic modern impact in its claim to Breton language and musical culturality. Given that its compiler exercised such ethnographic care, Barzaz Breizh remains crucial material for musicians, language students, and proponents of Breton culture as distinctive in its formation. Irish scholars – much like their Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, and Basque colleagues – were pursuing the fragments of the past as cultural precedents. They also developed folio societies, which pursued a re-examination of historical texts through the ideological art of editing and anthologization. Music, being a form of social performance, was particularly useful to their politics – and so likewise were other forms of collective engagement with the past as performative such as dance, storytelling, local myths, and so forth. These various Celtic societies even began to imagine the concept of a pan-Celtic identity, one trumpeted as a future political union. One can easily see how this arose from an urgency of change and influence that threatened to push all the Celtic nations into the sea. The Celtic Revival’s efforts should be considered within these general trends of pan-Celtic revivalism. In Wales, near the same time as Yeats, the translation

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of the Mabinogi by Lady Charlotte Guest (1812–1895), while surely surpassed by later scholarship, denoted a pioneering trend for approaching Celtic literature and languages as a source of distinctive literary traditions. Villermarqué’s influence on Guest is apparent, and their association is well known. The Erosion of Oisin: Collective Memory and Material Effects Importantly, the pan-Celtic movement arose as a discourse of positioned resistance. Lady Gregory’s and W.B. Yeats’s literary studies framed themselves against Matthew Arnold’s definition of the Celtic as an inept cultural category. To accomplish difference, they had to undertake a historical viewpoint against Arnold’s concept. Thus, The Wanderings of Oisin reveals both Yeats’s interest in literary recovery, but also his unwillingness to act as either passive editor of a selective past, or a conscientious fabricator of tradition. Yeats struck a deliberate, if often contradictory, balance between mythic personage, literary inheritance, and contemporary landscape in articulating a Celtic consciousness. His inevitable paradoxes of juxtaposing time with space, and of depositing lost figureheads into a transformed topography, allowed and invited a skepticism that was markedly innovative. The Wanderings of Oisin has a rather complex political edge in its portrayal of an Irish hero consigned at first to immateriality and then to aged neglect. As a dialogical dramatization of a heritage conundrum, the poem demonstrates an assessment to how Revivalism should address its sources. Oisin is lodged within the trapped space of a time-lapsed narrative. In a Celtic Revivalist mode, Yeats initially derived his source material from the wealth of anonymous medieval Irish literature. Some of the more crucial texts include Cath Gabhra [The Battle of Gabhra]7 and Duanaire Finn [The Lays of Finn]. Cath Gabhra narrates the climactic battle that ends the Fenian era (and with it the Fenian Cycle of literature). Cairbré Lifechair, high king of Ireland, defeated the Fianna, shattering their ranks as well as their prestige. According to Nicholas O’Kearney,8 who was Yeats’s primary source according to Alspach (1943), the Fianna had invited the battle through their boasting, a

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flaunting of their near omnipotence in controlling Irish society. As O’Kearney describes, the Fianna claimed first right to all the mna na hÉireann [women of Ireland], and only those women whom the elite had passed over could then be released into the public marriage pool. Love became leftovers for those outside the Fianna clique. Cath Gabhra describes the Fenians as having become so corrupted with power that they were little more than extortionists, shaking up others for protection money. Likewise, The Book of Leinster and the Metrical Dindshenchas describe the Battle of Gabhra as an inevitable contest of power and networked control in ancient Ireland. Further important sources for Yeats are various wonder voyage narratives to be found in earlier traditions. Based on various textual characteristics, scholars have divided this genre into two subcategories: echtra and immram (pl: immrama). Echtra (or Middle Irish: eachtra), meaning adventure, as well as a cognate of the Latin extra, refers to those tales that focus specifically on a hero’s exploits – adventures – after he arrives at the phantom island. Immram, meaning to row and go forth, is a tale that focuses on the voyage itself. A work like The Voyage of Bran [Immram Brain] (8th C ) entails elements of both immram and echtra, as implied in the work’s preamble: “Imram Brain maic Febail, ocus a Echtra andso sís” [The Voyage of Bran son of Febal, and his Expedition (echtra) Here Below] (Meyer 1895, 3). Of course, even within the corpus of these diverse tales, distinctions become largely theoretical, although they have served scholars with useful classifications. Immram Máele Dúin [The Voyage of Máele Dúin] (c. 1000), which was the spark for a Tennyson romance, involves a revenge parable that shifts into a Christian conversion discourse as the journey progresses. The immram narratives concentrate on the experience of searching that is the process of being en route to a vanishing destination as a mode of recovery. The Wanderings of Oisin certainly reveals a conscious awareness of Irish literary tradition, as it involves the conflicted world views between pagan and Christian historical dynamics: “the man of many white croziers” and the man with a “staff of wood” (1.366) floating on “dreamy foam” (3.77). Yeats’s reworking of immram for critical purposes also makes use of precedents in Irish literature. Rather than being static, immrama had always been readily adaptable and reworked for satirical pur-

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poses. Dáithi Ó hÓgáin (2006) notes that immrama, once the didactic domain of religious authors, had been seized upon in the Middle Ages for more secular and humorous uses. Fidelity to the original storyline was not important. The Oisín stories, in particular, served sarcastic functions rather well. Later writers worked with the themes of this dialogue, and more satirical versions were developed out of the previously didactic verse. As Ó hÓgáin describes, “When the lay writers put their hands to composing such dialogues, however, they had Oisín pointing out the sanctimonious attitudes of the clergy and stressing the generosity of the Fianna” (411). To indirectly mock the prehistoric pretensions of the otherworld, and to refocus attention on Ireland’s present condition, Yeats re-enlists his Oisin into a narrative framework of Irish identity. Yeats took liberties in adopting the implicative possibilities of the Oisín storyline, but nonetheless places the poem in canonical continuity with Irish literary heritage. As Yeats notes regarding the composition of The Wanderings of Oisin, extending Oisin’s journey to multiple islands was largely his own innovation. Yeats also finds inspiration in Standish Hayes O’Grady’s compilation Silva Gadelica (1892), which was mostly culled from the Book of Lismore’s [Leabhar Mhic Cárthaigh Riabhaigh] version of the Colloquy. Yeats noted in 1912 that O’Grady’s version of the Colloquy contained a story that showed Oisín being far-ranging in his travels (A Vision 793). So, extending Oisin’s journey to multiple islands was not entirely his own innovation (see, too, Alspach 1943). The Irish cartographic imagination – particularly in the Middle Ages – did envision the Atlantic Ocean as the uncertain margin of the known world. This liminal frontier challenged the imagination of poets, merchants, and monks alike. Tonsured evangelists pushed off in their currach to convert the denizens beyond the unknown seas. The Voyage of St Brendan [Navigatio Sancti Brendani], which also exists in a number of Irish-language sources as well as an early Dutch analogue, describes this saint’s wonder voyage across the Atlantic to the phantom Island of the Blessed. The previously mentioned The Voyage of Máel Dúil describes a holy figure whose watery sojourn touches upon a number of immaterial isles. Mysterious islands came to increasingly feature in folk tales in the regions of Celtic-speaking peoples: Ker-Ys, in Brittany; Hy Brazil, a misty island somewhere in

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the North Atlantic where dwell the descendants of the ancient Irish clan, Breasil; and the Cornish Lyonesse, which can be found in some Arthurian legends. The etymology of these place names is highly complex, and stories surrounding them can be traced back over a very long period. But how far back is the problem. Thomas Higginson (1898) reveals the common thinking when he argues, “The HyBrasail of the Irish is evidently a part of the Atlantis of Plato; who, in his ‘Timæus,’ says that that island was totally swallowed up by a prodigious earthquake” (245). Similarly, W.R. Lethaby in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1892) identifies in the Basque region similar post-Atlantis cues in the local geography: “Teneriffe was another such site, so that in a Spanish map of 1346 it bears the name of the Island of Hades; Ireland had ‘St Patrick’s purgatory’; beyond, again, it is the New Atlantis of the western ocean” (166). Ossianic literature straddles two eras: the Fianna, and heroromances of pre-Christian Ireland, but also the arrival of St Patrick and the cultural changes this brought. Ossian is a representative of a vanishing era, a sole survivor of an ancient world view. Textually, Christian scribes transferred his personhood from Fiannaíocht literature into a Trinitarian perspective. The idyllic life before Cath Garbha becomes only post-apocalyptic memories in a Catholic Ireland, which, to Ossian, is no longer recognizable. The choice is to convert, or to disappear. Such is the ultimatum that had evolved out of the early, pagan literature. Oisin confronts the dawning of a new era, personified by the evangelizer St Patrick, as the catalyst of a Europeanizing dynasty of Christianity. Acallam na Senórach [The Colloquy of the Old Men] entrenched this scenario. Frequently, likeminded perspectives evidenced this ecclesiastical bias that puts St Patrick in an apostolic matrix, converting the entire heathen past and its cultural geography, signified in the deathbed confession of Ossian who renounces both himself and his social era. The colloquy, as both literary trope and depiction of transitional history, debates not just the respective merits of monastic or warrior lifestyles, but deliberates the contest between two competing Weltgeist. The wraiths of Patrick and Oisin are situated in contested domains, both physical and metaphysical.

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Yeats, by his own admission, reworks later renditions of Irish myth, rather than translating from original Irish Gaelic legends. This has troubled some critics in that Yeats does not reproduce with much fidelity the very sources he appeals to for historicity. Still, the Celtic Revival did play a role in inspiring the scholarly attention to Irish texts that has matured into our time. Moreover, we should not assume that academic precision mattered to Yeats. His Oisin only partially resembles the Ossian of antique tradition. Certainly, these later versions that became readily available in Yeats’s era are scholarly, but they are also politically charged, their editions are pressured by nationalistic ambitions. Yeats’s Oisin, denuded of his phenomenological connections to the landscape, must make a pledge of new-found faith or else vanish entirely. Patrick attempts to efface the self-knowledge of a hero who has lost his immortality. Sacramental dispensation means out with the old, in with the new, the old man being thrown out with his baptismal water. In many ways, Yeats’s Oisin enacts the re-narrativization according to a modernist paradox. The poet has a desire to treat literary anecdote as accepted historical fact, and this motivation legitimized much research at that time, as is apparent with O’Kearney. But re-narrativization is also transcreation. Another example is Bryan O’Looney, who translated Laoi Oisín ar Thír n-Óg, as featured in the Transactions of the Ossianic Society (1861). O’Looney was interested not only in the art of translation, but also in proving, geographically, the actual placing of those sites described, even if some sleight-ofreference was required. In this manner, a tension ensued between what persists in cultural memory and what is enacted in these recovered traces put into new narrative form. To situate the text in a contemporary readership, the personages and emblems of the works required an ideological coherence defined by the art of recovery that is calling the text into present circumstances as a national treasure. This is the problem of corporeality in Yeats’s earliest efforts at forms of cultural nationalism through a reverence for a heroic age. How can immaterial symbols and allusions become politically expedient in the contemporary paradigm? What use is a mytho-historical map, whose topography locates itself in a misty locale of the before, rather than

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the recognizable geography of the now? The Irish Revival worked from multiple sources, such as the translators listed above, but they did not merely reintroduce the works through paraphrase. Instead, the Revival would gradually seek to reground and reframe the original tale through resonant landmarks of Irish place names of the present that had archaeological significance as well as contemporary sympathy. This was done even if it meant sacrificing the original details of the legend for the sake of anti-colonial effect. We can think of Yeats’s Oisin as explicitly caught in the cartography of dreams that resists the pull of St Patrick’s accelerated modernity. But this hologram in the past tense, because of its dreamy nature, becomes non-contiguous with the landscape of nation. As Yeats situates him, Oisin’s cultural identity is severed from the very soil and community upon which his cultural claims depend. Thus the coherence of Oisin’s communitarian identity dissipates across a cross-temporal continuum. The crucial strategy of re-narrativization in The Wanderings of Oisin – the departure from recycled literary recovery and into thematic innovation – distinguishes Yeats from much of the work that preceded him. Yeats designs his own version of the folkloric present, wherein myth becomes partially displaced from its conventional heritage, and aligned (in)congruously with present circumstances. Neither straightforward accounts of political allegory (for example, an Aengus who nostalgically tromps through modern Ireland in search of his love-bride, the past), nor purely Symbolist readings (Oisin archetypally denotes the psyche in search of its Self ), sufficiently describe the multiple strata of time and place as mutually referential. The folkloric present combines the dynastic resonances of the ancestral avatars, as brought into operation with the geopolitical quandaries of Yeats’s time. Neither the folklore of the past nor the politics of the present remain stable. Each has the power to overrule the other. Yeats, like Cavafy, makes this multiple-historical viewpoint a principle hallmark of his style. This temporal mirroring, sometimes overt and sometimes subtle, began with The Wanderings of Oisin and would remain an essential aspect of his repertoire. Thus, later works such as The Dreaming of the Bones (1919, CP 307) and “Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn” (1934, CP o 289) will operate from

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this same confrontation between spectral ancestry and material resources of the social present. As time-lapsed and displaced, Oisin barely exists with his return to the contemporaneous space. Oisin’s sense of reality is a memory from twilight that has devolved from the current circumstances. In his absence, Patrick has become the administrator of forward-thinking present (or dawn). The historical or mythical personage, invoked in relation to this current new world order, acts as a revenant of interference. Oisin thus takes on a haunted personage of a barely substantive corporeality. His phantasmal impulse manifests as a ghost that crosses temporal boundaries, in the sense of both polter and geist. Spirit and place, in the twilight figuration, cannot be reduced to the linear logic of progress that is Patrick’s program of conversion. Importantly, Yeats is not content to treat Patrick or Oisin as simple personae, literary formulae, or abstract symbols. They are dramatic characters, epochally placed and managed on a stage; and Yeats carefully establishes the boundaries of physicality (or non-physicality) that circumscribe them. Their shaping occurs through references to a changing geographical situation and shifts in the collective status of Irish society. In this way, for the characters, the poem is dialogical. The situating of that ancestral ghost into these diversified chronological contexts is a form of stagecraft through the materiality of the landscape. Their debate is brought into distortion through its manifestation into the changing geography of what Oisin remembers and what Patrick anticipates. As such, Oisin coalesces with Patrick’s sense of place as a chronotope, but one of disorientation. The shifting boundaries of place, identity, and territory disturb the contact. The Shadowy Waters and The Wanderings of Oisin interrogate this liminal truth-seeking of an Irish ethos as a relic of the past. Oisin has traded the dislocation of astral bewilderment for the confusion of an unrecognizable contemporary moment. To emphasize Oisin’s relationship to a contemporary Ireland, even if narrated in the past, Yeats’s revisions to The Wanderings of Oisin would emphasize and enhance specific cartographic references from contemporary Irish geography. Exact place names, ones familiar on contemporary maps, provide the poem with locative orientation.

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Yeats’s own revisions to the manuscript reveal increasing attention to local place names. The two rather distinct versions of The Wanderings of Oisin evidence, through Yeats’s emendations, a shift from the vague to the localized. For example, the earliest version of the Wanderings of Oisin manuscript, dating to the years 1886–87, contains no references to Sligo at all, even though the formal literary tradition has Oisín, as a child, discovered on Benbulben, which, besides Knocknarea, is an important landmark visible from Sligo Town.9 However, the later version – which would be the source for the published volume of 1895 – increasingly cites the particularities of Sligo place-naming as psychogeography, of interrelating collective memory with the presences of mytho-landmark identification. George Bornstein (1994), in his edition of the materials for the Cornell Yeats, identifies this poem’s emerging importance that “connected him [Yeats] to Irish nationalism and Irish politics, with which he maintained a love-hate relationship throughout his career” (5). Part of this Irish turn in the early Yeats, and its rejection of fantasy antiquarianism, is this deliberate strategy for situating lore into a recognizably native landscape. The manuscript revisions of The Wanderings of Oisin show in detail such fundamental changes in the geographical structure of the work: the 1889 published version of the poem shifts the location, as once in the 1887 manuscript, from Killarney to Sligo. This, in effect, takes the myth out of its traditional habitat – Leinster and Gabhra – and situates it near Maeve’s cairn, atop Knocknarea: Came to the cairn-heaped grassy hill Where passionate Maeve is stony-still. (A Vision 3, ll. 17–18) By initiating the main action of this revision in Sligo, Yeats is effectively working from his home turf, as such. His political passions, associated with his personal experiences of rural Irish marginalization, inform the situation of this poem. County Sligo serves as Yeats’s personal cartographic almanac of symbols and associations. As historian Joe McGowan (2001) has described, ample oral tradition, localized in the county, has its own apocryphal anecdotes. Off the coast of

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Sligo, near the isle of Inishmurray, is said to be the mysterious island Banc Ghráinne [Gráinne’s Shoal]. According to these local customs, Oisin adopted Christianity at this site upon hearing the ringing of the Angelus. Yeats naturally involved himself in the speech genres of Sligo, which perpetuated their own scenarios for Oisin. Instead of repeating the canonical account of how Oisin was adopted on a Sligo mountain, Yeats emphasizes his later death, through a priestly adoption, upon a Sligo hill. The county’s mythic registry would become Yeats’s domain for mapping the interstices between ancestral past and current geographical reality. Such a method is also evident in such poems as “The Stolen Child,” a veritable catalogue of many Sligo locations, rhetorically powerful because of their mythic, as well as geographical, significance. Yeats, by establishing County Sligo as the primary setting for his version of the dialogue in The Wandering of Oisin, attempts to restore a more material locale for the framing of an Irish geographical narrative. This enhances the tension of Oisin’s predicament, as he fails to reinscribe his presence on Ireland upon his return. The readers of the poem recognize the landscape, but he does not: there is no “home to me again” (2.65). Foucault (1988) offers a useful comment that could diagnose Oisin’s cartographic liminality and by extension the folly of hankering after the otherworldly: “It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fool’s boat; it is from the other world he comes when he disembarks … a half-real, half-imaginary geography” (8). Yeats’s carefully versed rebukes – phrased through fantasy islands and hallucinatory heroes such as in The Wanderings of Oisin – satirizes the notion that a historicized retreat from material culture can somehow provide a heritage justification for national self-determination in the modern period. As the dialogue between Oisin and Patrick suggests, the cause of Irish republicanism was better served through social activism in the current social context, rather than sought out through mytho-political retrogression. Yeats, and the Celtic Revival more broadly, conceptualized folklore as site dependent, upon which the embodied, performative voice exists as located in the socio-geographical specifics of cultural habitation. But any further discussion of toponymy, landscape, and Irish national heroes in the

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nineteenth century must first consider the intensely contested state of the land, as territory, in colonial Ireland. Agricultural land tenure had become a colonialist quagmire for British authorities, especially their landlord surrogates. In response to the increasing agitation, ambivalent legislation sought to address the rights of tenants, while at the same time safeguarding foreign ownership. Approximately seven major land acts were passed between 1870 (Landlord and Tenant Act) and 1903 (the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act). As a solution to the land question, and the intensified rebellions of the local populaces, these acts included various schemes to provide tenants a method for purchasing their holdings. Sligo, with its large Protestant population and strategic proximity to Ulster, has had a particular prominence in these national issues. Liam Swords (1995), in a chapter entitled “The Land War,” describes the Diocese of Achonry’s broad activity as a centre for revolt: antirent manifestos, ecclesiastical meetings, and such led to police action against popular spokespeople. In 1881, in the village of Knocknaskea, County Mayo, eleven members of the Royal Irish Constabulary unleashed a volley of rifle fire, injuring several locals, including a seventeen-year-old girl, Kate Byrne, who had been working in the potato fields (242). Although shot four times, she recovered to testify against the constables. Despite her wounds and eyewitness account, no charges were filed and no outcome decided against her assailants.10 Knocknaskea was not an isolated example, and violence etched the land. The Celtic Revival, for practical political considerations, draws upon the stylistic trends of the Gaelic tradition, as well as the emerging nation-writing, that are not easily reduced to packaged attributes. As Yeats would explore and critique through his earliest poetry, a myth without a storyteller is a dispossessed voice – a narrative without a frame, and thus only a floating symbol. Before he could turn to forms of narrative realism in the art of storytelling – as in The Celtic Twilight – Yeats first had to establish the folly of Irish cultural history as something only sought in the imagined. The Wanderings of Oisin in many ways exemplifies the Revivalists’ desire to recover Irish-language genres, especially as they functioned as a localized combination of myth, lyric, and history, with a desire to

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develop entirely contemporary literary works for the purposes of cultural self-awareness. In this epic poem, Yeats deliberately reworks the wonder-voyage genre of Old Irish literature, as a kind of reprimand to the ideologies of those whose sense of the cultural past led to forms of empty, disembodied escapism. Yeats’s early lyrical poem exposes the core tension in Revivalist discourse: on the one hand, legendary narratives provide a link with the past, yet to embrace the legend too fully separates communities from their current connection to the local and particular. Being a “Stolen Child” is not conducive to a happy life or an independent nation. Should Irish nationalism seek to justify itself through references to a disembodied tradition, its sense of geographical sovereignty will always be displaced. The Wanderings of Oisin represents Yeats’s initial response to this dilemma, particularly in how it reinvents Irish legends as a way of moving beyond some desire to discover a pure connection with an imagined, ancestral tradition. Ultimately, Yeats’s poem reveals his attempts to claim an island space that is physical, and not the mythic one that exists only through emotional associations. Such would be his movement from the lyrical meditations of The Wanderings of Oisin to the affective ethnography of The Celtic Twilight. Oisin, as described in Yeats’s revision of immram, fixes his bearings on a changeling geography, one that holds no authentic place-inspace for him. Therefore, those artificial realms provide no tangible feeling of a socio-cultural context. The world-forgotten isle, in fact, forgets the world, and prefers a metaphysical limbo of speculation. Instead of hankering after Atlantis, Yeats wants Oisin to return to Ireland, not move away from it. In a letter to Katharine Tynan (1887), Yeats expressed his relationship to the landscape in this poem, where, like Oisin, history and experience of that history have left him confused and dislocated: “This to me is the loneliest place in the world. Going for a walk is a continual meeting with ghosts. For Sligo for me has no flesh and blood attractions – only memories and sentimentalities accumulated here as a child, making it more dear than any other place.”11 The Wanderings of Oisin can certainly feel like a narrative of liminality, of spectral characters, broken shorelines, and changing

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dynasties – and lead to a decontexualization that results in dissipation. But by experiencing such continual divisions, Oisin attempts to relocate memories and sentimentalities – the collective power of history that breaks Oisin’s trance – as rooted in communal processes of the Irish nation. In this way, Oisin’s story describes cultural experiences as embodiment. Yeats would continually explore this theme: only through material subjectivity does meaningful communal exchange occur. In the physical Ireland, Oisin grows old and dies – but this is an elemental process, more valuable than the ethereal fantasy of vanished islands and illusory ancestral connections. Yeats, by establishing a Sligo setting for his version of this dialogue, makes Oisin analogous to Yeats’s own position in a changing Ireland. The overlapping contexts of Patrick, as the bringer of a new era that overwrites the ancestral past, and Yeats, as poet in a radically altered Ireland, are conflated in this work through landscape and trope. Oisin’s illusory embrace with the dream world, as a false ontology, is depicted with multiple symbols to express the degrees of dissatisfaction. Instead of the force of dreams, Patrick himself emphasizes that tactility is power: O wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-branch is naught, For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of Earth. (WO III , ll. 123–4) The extraordinary concern for a more spiritually imbued otherworld, or at least a more pleasurable one, had pagan overtones that Christian literature disdained or reworked in a more acceptable format. More than a spiritual failing, however, the poem examines how the islands demonstrate a failure in isolation, of being in a noncommunitarian sense. The Wanderings of Oisin relates the mystery voyage of a “wandering mind” (1.1), of one who is “wrecked among heathen dreams” (1.31), who tells his story with references to a “country far / Beyond the tumbling of the tide” (1.48–9). With this cartography of dreams, Yeats shows his familiarity with Celtic lore

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about vanishing islands. He saw this as a categorical trope of literary tradition, with examples including Tir-na-nÓg and Hy Brazil.12 Evidently, Yeats had an ongoing interest in the topic of disappearing land masses, perhaps suggestive of the fascination for Atlantis at the time. Through the dispossession of a lost place, the poem concerns itself with the historical dislocation that results when one is lost in a mirage of displaced mythic locations. Because Oisin is such an asynchronic hero, the temporal displacements he carries back with him from these vanished places challenge the kind of normative sense of time represented by Patrick, of one dynasty replacing another, of one era being subsumed into the next. There is no attempt by Yeats to engage in an ideological positioning of the islands in this poem in the faddish interest in the geographical fabulous. The poem entirely avoids any references to Atlantis or the Atlantic Ocean: the ocean that Oisin sails upon, presumably the Atlantic, is instead referred to throughout as a generic “sea.” Oisin does not find anything in his journeys through time and space; rather, he gets lost within the “dreams of the islands,” those spaces where neither history nor environment is factual (3.175). Yeats had further ciphered the Oisin’s predicament of the three islands in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” (1939, CP o 355): he equates one with “vain gaiety,” a pseudo-pleasure; “vain battle,” conflict without results; and “vain repose,” sloth without rest. In listing the three symbolic activities that lead to fruitless delusion in fantasy, Yeats seems to be paraphrasing in English from a 1917 translation of the Bhagavad Gītā by Charles Francis Horne: “The Doors of Hell are threefold, whereby men to ruin pass, The door of Lust, the door of Wrath, the door of Avarice. Let a man shun those three!” (16:21). An overall point of the poem, then, is that to indulge in these cartographic dreams is to become disconnected with the geography of the present day. The shift from romantic past to the tensions of the present is the teleology of this poem. A quick reading of The Wanderings of Oisin could dwell on the romantic and symbolist themes of this lyrical work. The ethereal beguiles the seeker; and the hero, so beguiled, struggles with the monstrous unknown. These themes have been read as Yeats’s dreamy lyricism with a Celtic accent. But much of

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this dreaminess, far from being informative, actually results in acute cases of dislocation. From this sense, Yeats shifts the poem’s focus from an imitation of medieval Irish literature to a more contemporary parable. Importantly, the vanishing beings in search of these vanished islands have no meaningful relationship to the real and social. Because, ultimately, the trancelike obsession with the artificial paradise only stupefies the dreamer, who is unable to properly measure the meaningfulness of realistic settings and situations. In Oisin’s case, the allure of the Atlantic Ocean leads him away from Irish society: “the forgetfulness of dreamy foam” (1.365–6). Oisin does not find kinfolk in these islands, and he feels no lasting connection to them, not to the extent he felt in Ireland itself. Thus, in Yeats’s version, it is not so much what Oisin resembles in terms of Old Irish literature, but what the figuration of Oisin means in a rapidly modernizing Ireland. The dialogue between St Patrick and Oisin revolves around how the memories of the past become converted into the culture of the present: “where for the swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes the crozier gleams” (3.196). Yeats’s immram-esque navigation of The Wanderings of Oisin leads the hero from his homeland to those realms of supposed cultural ancestry, “isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come” (3:132). However, instead of finding Atlantean paradises, or ancestral repertoires to supplement his knowledge of a functioning of Irish proto-society, Oisin gets lost in the features of their non-reality. Rather than substantiate legendary history through an archaeological record that these islands should contain, the false landscapes preclude authenticity because they are only glamorous emptiness. As terrains of mist, they are entirely bereft of tactile sensuality and political agency: the qualities that living, contemporary, and engaged societies need as expedients for community. Oisin describes his increasing cultural amnesia as a kind of organic forgetfulness: “there I forgot / That the spear-shaft is made out of ashwood” (3.81–2). The basic human experiences like a carnal instinct, the simple pleasures of the home, and the power of friendship – themes that would be promoted throughout Yeats’s work – are no longer possible in immateriality. Thus, as Yeats writes elsewhere in “The

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White Birds,” this is the sad state “Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come no more” (1893, CP o 37). Yet, across the nebulous zone of mists, the material facts of Irish society return to Oisin in the form of tangible artifacts connected to Oisin’s previously emplaced existence. In fact, the only things that can awaken Oisin from his astral stupor, as an intervention that occurs three times in the poem, are the physical palpability of natural objects that derive their meaning from being directly connected to the communal validity of Ireland at the present moment. The broken lance (WO 1.367), the beech-bough (2.226), and the starling (3.103) are not abstract symbols or apostrophic gimmicks. Each of the three tokens that breaks Oisin’s trance is a thing of natural growth from Irish soil that had become, in some way, disconnected from the physical landscape of its source. This reverses the Atlantean idea that the far-off isles hold the relics that reveal cultural origins through archaeological data. In this case, the archaeology of the present provides the evidence of habitation and culture that is forgotten in romance and escapism. These talismans of touch – produced as they are from organic growth and practical purpose – enter the imaginary Celtic kingdoms of the Atlantic to remind Oisin of factual geographies of the national landscape. In doing so, their earthy character, as actual tokens of touch and action, dispels the legendary realm and its discourse of the vanishing. The navigation of the liminal in The Wanderings of Oisin leads to those “isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come” (3.132), which are generic non-realities of monotonous behaviour. These landscapes preclude physicality, and that tactile sensuality and political turmoil that accompany active, engaged societies. Carnal instinct, the simple pleasures of the home, and the power of friendship – themes that would dominate Yeats’s work – are entirely absent in these isles. This void of feeling, more than anything, unveils their false glamour: it is a kind of Manichaeism in reverse, where matter and reality describe truth, but spirit and dream actually reveal nonsense. Oisin’s disembodied trance is broken in three different incidents, each time because of a material artifact that shatters the monotony of the trance. The dynamic, the energy of tangible materials, and the

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affective attachments they create, disrupt the habitual fantasy. Real communal processes, in fact, create the lustre of time that imbues a cultural object with an attestable sense of that energy that has circulated it. The dilemma, however, is when twilight, as this fading shadow of the physical world, becomes entirely disconnected from the material reality from which it derives its contours. An expansive gulf comes between Oisin, his memories, and the events and communities from which he orients his sense of history and geography. These three islands are case studies in escapist epistemology. Yeats argues – and this will become the crucial feature of The Celtic Twilight and Revivalist understandings of ethnography – that the elemental always has more power than the fanciful. Thus, the anonymous battle staff, “of wood / From some dead warrior’s broken lance,” has power to break the hypnosis of the abstract symbol, because it can actually hurt people, and it has probably done so on many occasions (WO 1.361–2). The rich smell of blood is on it. Oisin’s memory of similar objects, aroused through this surrogate reference, brings back to memory his own battles. The touchability of the object situates the mind in historical contexts. But therein lies the problem. The staff has the aura of shared usage, which really is the organic grime of sweat and blood. To be elemental also means to be subject to decay and change, to dynastic shifts in the continuity of community: “And the moon like a pale rose wither away” (1.427), the warning that concludes the first canto. Each of the three artifacts that breaks the trance was a species of natural growth that had been, in some way, cut or broken from its source: this wooden battle staff, the beech bough (2.226); and the “odour of new-mown hay” (3.153). With ease, these organisms – disconnected as they are from growth – enter the imaginary Celtic kingdoms and, in doing so, dispel them. This long poem describes the organic as having supreme authority – connected as it is to the excitement of body – over the hazy fakery of the Atlantean dreams. Oisin becomes a vision of the decontextualized ancestral, a myth so radically disconnected from terrain that it drifts in the abodes of the inconsequential. References to warfare and conflict in Ireland – Oisin’s battle lust – would call to an audience’s mind the ongoing conflict for Home Rule. The Land League faction was concerned with an Irish past as a cul-

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tural marker for the new nationalist enterprise. Yeats, the poet, sits on the cusp of change, just as Oisin does. Although Oisin fixates on the memories of his wonder voyage, the crucial tension of this poem actually exists in the dialectical conflict between St Patrick, he who is the bringer of a new era from the European continent, and Oisin as a fading figurehead of Irish history. Patrick represents the forces of hegemonic change when the communal past has so disappeared that none of it remains to contest his model for progress. I might relate Patrick’s logic of futurity to Walter Benjamin’s (1986) description of a “homogeneous, empty time.” In his understanding, this refers to a particular conception of time that favours a linear emphasis on progress, development, and utility. This kind of understanding readily suits certain capitalistic modes of history, given the prioritization of production, consumption, and a value system based entirely on what profit tomorrow will bring. This is why the phantom islands are so insidious in their conglomerate of fantasy and illusion: the evolving homeland – Ireland – needs to be understood tangibly and materialistically. The demand for sovereignty through hazy references cannot muster any effective political clout to a colonized people. Therefore, the dynamic of an affective geography, as opposed to the imaginative one, called Oisin away from hallucination and back to history. For Oisin, history is predicated upon real communal processes, participatory ones in all cases. Neither the romantic cartography of absence or the homogeneous, empty time of presence will provide the landscape of Ireland with a model of independence. In the ancestral space as displacement, Oisin functions like the literary forgeries of recovered epics, a speculative past with scant material evidence. This is an unsatisfactory model, since the right to self-determination should not be argued through a derivative mandate, especially a pseudo-historical one. The Home Rule movement needed sovereignty to be rendered as an intact claim based on observable boundaries and material societies. Oisin’s disorientation through temporal dislocation – his sense of Ireland is split between a diachronic past and phantasmal memory – intensifies for Yeats’s audience the contemporary predicament of Home Rule. Many of the nationalistic groups promoting Irish independence in Ireland itself – cultural, political, social, or the Land League – were all variously

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concerned with articulating an Irish past as a cultural reference marker for the new sovereign enterprise. Thus, far from offering a sense of rootedness, Yeats makes a curiously brief reference to the phantom island in the Atlantic, “Hy Brazil,” the appearance of which “forebodes national troubles” (CT 111). The dream legends of the Atlantic isles provide nothing of a qualitative proximity from which one might navigate the oncoming era of Irish independence. This foreboding of national troubles, and Oisin’s attempts to navigate the changing landscape of a home now uncannily a not-home, has an allegorical appeal to the act of nation building, and emplacing, as Irish modernity. As a noteworthy example of cartographic reclamation – and refamiliarization – the Irish Ordnance Survey, begun in the early nineteenth century under a British colonial imperative, investigated the reality of territory through exploration and the sovereignty of names. This cartographic survey, as a national project, sought to name the landscape from an indigenous point of view. We have extensive records from John O’Donovan’s (1856) exploration of County Donegal that documents cartographic features, as well as providing notes concerning dialect, genealogy, and history. O’Donovan’s writing demonstrates that folk sayings had achieved serious prominence, as a way of standardizing cartography that privileged local tradition. O’Donovan’s letters abound in references to the Fianna, and the Fenian Cycle of myth, and he develops his own form of impromptu folktelling himself on several occasions. Place naming, in Ireland as elsewhere, involves the resonance of a fable, story, or anecdote, as it achieves linguistic association with the location. The Celtic Revival understood the historicity that linguistically existed as traces in the christening of the local region through local names. That the natural distinctiveness of geography serves as mythic documentation delighted O’Donovan: “We viewed the Lake of the Fair Finn to see if the name could have been imposed from the brightness of its waters” (O’Donovan, Letters 86 [fionn: IG bright]). O’Donovan’s letters accepted local tradition, even if such seems at odds with the official historical record: “The general tradition in the country is that Killybegs is dedicated to St Catherine which shews

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that there must have been a nunnery there though we have no record which mentions it.” There is also little archaeological evidence to justify this claim, as Donovan notes (Letters 87). However, O’Donovan continues with a paragraph that extrapolates a meaning from the Old Irish etymology for the harbour’s name as counter-evidence for the town’s ecclesiastical heritage. As final proof, he offers a citation from Annals of the Four Masters that “corroborates the tradition at present prevalent among the peasantry” (114). Local pride in the village’s history had been the standard for centuries. Thus, the proprietary right of the villagers to inscribe their meanings, arising from the accepted habit, had priority. In a Revivalist way, the historical method of Herodotus was preferred to the technique of Thucydides. The Irish were navigating a hybridized landscape, of Anglo impositions that had chipped away at Gaelic sources. If an official topography of the nation were to be declared, the cartography of local custom had to be recovered. The heritage of the landscape, as containing an archive of references and markers of history, provided a ready framework for initial efforts to trace back along the continuum of indigenous development of the island. This sense to feel emotional possession of the land should not be relegated to the shelf of mere nostalgia for the dispossessed. The native landscape as another’s property, the legacy of corrupted ownership, the Famine as a result of policy and not nature – these are pressing themes in Irish literature in negotiating local spaces, and had been so for some time. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) compellingly describes the problems of absentee landlordism. Emily Lawless’s works describe the Land Wars and the peasant uprisings, although Yeats found such works as Hurrish (1886) to be political journalism, and had a somewhat mixed opinion of the newspaper-friendly With Essex in Ireland (1890).13 Another major trend, not overtly political but sympathetic to nationhood, was the officialization of the local cartography’s uniqueness, as that unifying physicality that solidifies the Irish experience. George Moore writes in The Untilled Field (2000): “There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchan-

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ging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The bar-room was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of wandering hills” (31). Moore’s sentiments here remind us of Oisin, for whom human exchange is coupled with mortal landscape, the mental echoes of which are attained through artifacts with emotional resonances. In The Wanderings of Oisin, Patrick, the evangelizer of the hegemonic Word and world, brings a pan-European Christianity that must first absorb and then erase the pagan particulars of a previous Ireland. Both landscape and cultural context shift tremendously. Oisin, thereby stripped of his longevity as ancestral presence, cannot exist in the new framework of a revised history or geography; his own culturality is eclipsed by a new religion, a new era, redefining the local geography through the missionary work of assimilation and erasure. Oisin is a failed critique of the linear logic and utilitarian demands of the changes associated with modernization as epochal shift through hegemony. Patrick’s religious fundamentalism reminds of imperialistic commerce that disconnects people from their places and narrows their relationships through commodification and oppression. In various places, Revivalists expressed grave distrust for the manufacturing of centralized realism as a mode of historical documentation that was taking the form of disposable opinions and facts confirmed and distributed through a network of newspapers. Lady Gregory’s (1990 [1920]) diaries repeatedly refer to her editorial battles with the Irish Times to have her views more accurately represented in the press. Similarly, Yeats saw the juggernaut of journalism as a direct threat to an underclass of people – disconnected from the articulations of an elite nation – perpetuated through the privilege of print culture centred in the market capitals and their mass technologies. But how might Oisin succeed, if the alternative discourse of resistance, outside of homogeneous time, has already vanished? Gradually, as became increasingly important to the Revival, the poetics of ancestry had to relate to making home and its integral relationship to making place. These communitarian formations are “the spectral world of the modern knowledge”; Pheng Cheah explains this phrase as “the

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material forces of upheaval” interrelated with “the haunting of the people” that is the re-enchantment of the local topoi (274). Many Irish writers address civil rights, historical grudges, and personal injustice as connected directly to landscape. Eibhlín Ní Chonaill’s (1961) elegy for her husband, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, is a passionate love poem, but also an indictment of penal laws and apartheid justice in eighteenth-century Ireland. She modifies the genre of keening into a call for contemporary revenge. The Wolfe Tone rebellion of 1798 particularly incensed the moral sensibilities of the national literary culture. Edward Said’s (1994) reading that, under colonial fixation, the colonized are “too hard pressed by the wasps to make any honey” does not seem apt. In Ireland, the bees were busy being harassed, by the heavy artillery wasps, so they banded together to combine into a hive comprised of a community of smaller stingers. On such a theme, Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow (1873) [Knocknagow or The Homes of Tipperary (2004)] presents a contrasted world of a settled, pastoral people exploited harshly by the landlord system. The situated communities unite according to their proximity and mutually shared customs. This novel is a polemic, but one invested in distinguishing the cachet of a unique Irish character. This particular ejaculation, from the thirty-sixth chapter, gives a sense of the rhetorical identity politics: “‘God bless us!’ exclaimed Jack Delany’s wife as she stooped to pick up the ‘rattler’ and ‘corncrake,’ when the priest had passed, ‘did any wan ever see a man wud such a proud walk?’” Perhaps because of such forms of “Tipperese,” and this novel abounds in such passages, the political overtones of the work turned it into a best-seller. Kickham wrote for such Fenian outlets as the Nation and the Irish People.14 The Revival’s Ossianic allusions, and the Fianna in general, have become linked to those Fenian mores that Ossian represents; and, of course, Fenian has been an ongoing code word for Republican activity or sympathies. Oisin, in Yeats’s time as now, represents a period free from the consequences of English settlement. Thus, the nationalist activities of the Ossianic Society – national literatures as political stepping stones – were certainly well understood. Founded officially on St Patrick’s Day, 1853, the group was a sort of preservation society for the Irish language, as a collective strategy for independence.15

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Members such as John O’Daly did much to expand interest in Irish literary heritage. As both commentators and translators, authors in these periodicals develop themes of ethnic idealism as a response to colonialist provocation.16 As one voice among many for the soil, the Ossianic Society had conflicting inter-relationships with the Irish Archaeological Society, the Celtic Society, and others. When on friendly terms, these organizations studied the sociolinguistic situation of Ireland, examining traces from a material record of habitation. Although these groups had similar goals, they nonetheless were divided somewhat according to sectarian biases (see Robert Somerville-Woodward 1999). So much of the dreaminess in Revivalists’ writing, after all, ends up in acute pity for the vanished heroes, as these abject beings carry severely disadvantaged relationships to the historically real and socially meaningful. Reassessing how they maintain a historical consciousness compared with the present moment was a difficult predicament. For Yeats, the Fae confound more than they comfort in their partial participation in Irish landscapes. In “The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland” (1893, CP o 39) a sort of abbreviated The Wanderings of Oisin in the way it demonstrates how Yeats thought of the otherworld as social dislocation, the illusory state of apolitical contentment, within an immaterial “Faeryland,” contrasts with the rough, but rewarding, experiences of mortality. Ultimately, the trancelike obsession with the imaginative world stupefies the dreamer, who is unable to properly measure the meaningfulness of everyday living. But this poem is also intensely cartographic, each of the four sections – meditating on a human concern – is entrenched within a particular location: Drumahair, Lissadell, Scanavin, and Lugnagall. Rather than appreciating the pleasure and peace afforded by being imminently in-theworld, Oisin wrongly fixates himself on a changeling geography, one that holds no authentic place-in-space for him. In trying to escape the tensions inherent in worldly being, Oisin actually sheds himself of the very elements that enable real experience. The “world-forgotten isle” (WO 8) itself has forgotten the world and exists in a metaphysical limbo. In such a way, “Who Goes with Fergus?” is ultimately a rhetorical question. The anti-climatic tír na nÓg (the mythical Land of Youth) entails a banishment among a nondescript heap of stars.

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Yeats’s poetry overall explores this conflict between a departure for some sort of land of immutable icons – a Byzantium, or a Land of the Young – as a presumed space of cultural stability, a transhistorical factum, as opposed to the physical world and its ruthless sociohistorical processes through which the clamour of dynasties come and go. Being in the socio-historical world requires the building of the modern polis, the social network Durtal so despised, and the one that ultimately renders Oisin old and prone to decay. However, to refuse the world in favour of the archetypal realm means an absorption of the creative imagination into a realm outside of the organic. In such a scenario, the imagination overwhelmingly selects one side of the dialectic between the real and the symbolic. Lady Gregory, perhaps most vigorously of the Revivalists, retains the mode of legend-teller in her collections, such as The Kiltartan History Book (1909). But a review of her essays written at the same time reveals a woman intensely dedicated to the survival of the Irish language; and therefore she saw these stories as best operating in their native oral habitat. Even in translation, however, they’re expressions of what the Irish language accomplished artistically as creative labour. Translation from Irish Gaelic, as activism, seeks to draw attention to the source as an oral and emplaced habit in which the conditions of Irish language self-actualization must occur. Thus, both Gregory and Yeats would revise their formulations of Irish cultural identity by shifting attention from legends as prior spaces to tales as contemporary voices that perpetuate in the making of cultural ideation into communal causation. What is of interest on this point is that Yeats often turns away from the symbolizing of cultural communities as the basis of concrete action. Symbols, for Oisin, cannot be artifacts: the latter are tactile devices, the former mental apparitions. Overdependence on either, it seems, leads to unfulfilled social consciousness. Rather, Yeats queries the inherent incapacity of such an immaterial ideal. Material conflicts must ground both the spectre of the creation, the symbol, as well as the imagination of the beholder. From the beginning, in an effect that has evolved from Baudelaire or the Romantics, Yeats deliberately and defiantly obscures the perspective that enables the modelled meaning of symbol to be maintained. The Symbolist

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configuration, as Rimbaud famously stated, required a delirium of cognition, which then could accommodate its own distortions. This cognition, however, had to render into a hypostatic unity the disparate dimensions of representation. For Yeats, this is often too much to ask. In the essay “Symbolism in Painting,” he writes, “Every visionary knows that the mind’s eye soon comes to see a capricious and variable world, which the will cannot shape or change, though it can call it up and banish it again” (Essays and Introductions 151). The spectres of reference – the discarnate vision in which the symbol/object are apprehended – arise in a terrain of occlusion. Under such conditions in The Shadowy Waters, Forgael’s harp, an invocational tool of the Bard, becomes tangled with the net, the snare of confused meaning: “Both you and I are taken in the net. / It was their hands that plucked the wind awake” (SW 322–3). At this point, Forgeal can no longer distinguish reality, ideal, fate, and action within the obfuscated patterns of this inter-world. The Shadowy Waters concerns another voyage, also at the edge of the Unknown, that leads to a dissipation of the principal seeker. It is a journey without a cartography. Like The Wanderings of Oisin, The Shadowy Waters depicts not just the modelling of the symbol, but also the interiority of the mind doing the figuration. As this work suggests, Symbolism misleads as much as it enchants in terms of claims to history. Aibric, the voice of reason, loyalty, and collective living, can accept neither the water nor the shadows:             Shadows, illusions, That the Shape-changers, the Ever-laughing ones, The Immortal Mockers have cast into his mind, Or called before his eyes. (SW 565–8) Like Yeats’s comment on the “variable world,” Aibric describes the impermanent quality of mental substances, the infinite reducibility in their essence. Beginning with “shadows” and ending with “eyes,” the cycle of data swerves from the ethereal to the empirical that results in an inescapable obscurity. The only force that can distinguish them is the effort shaped from one’s own dislocated desire. In this case, Forgael’s obsession will either find the Ideal, or force its appearance,

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Dectora, to become that Ideal. To transform their beings, they must sacrifice a version of the material world – “we will gaze upon this world no longer” (SW 613) – to escape, and discarnate, into the shadows. Their physical presence, with the cutting of the rope, becomes a conscious dissolution of one into the other. The phrase “the world” had been repeated endlessly throughout the work. The material concept of “the world” had been disbanded. The Shadowy Waters exhibits two extremes of human ambition: the gross greed for material pleasures – treasure – and the maddening pursuit of the Ideal. As the psychological drama of these works entails, the poetic idealism leads either to a confused cartography of illusions, or a murky mixture of landless oceans. Oisin’s antidote is the physical geology of his native land, not just as visible landscape, but as proof of Jameson’s claim that “history is what hurts” (Political Unconsciousness 102);17 Forgael, however, too far from the shore, drowns in the strange seas of his own thought in the ahistorical and conditionless. The moment of symbolization entails, in part, a departure from the material. The mind overrules nature in favour of the transcendental.18 But the imagined and the imaginer are much more conflicted in Yeats than for Verlaine or Baudelaire. In “Adam’s Curse” (1904, CP o 78) a wobbling moment of self-recognition – “That you were beautiful, and that I strove / To love you in the old high way of love” (35–6) – acknowledges that figuration manages the figure. What higher authority can be appealed to for justification? What poems such as these do, partially, is challenge the carte blanche acceptance that Symbolists gave to the existential independence, and validity, of their own creations. The more codified symbols in Yeats’s portfolio – the rose, for example – must be identified as organic species subject to the climate and conditions of worldliness: “Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the world! / You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled” (“The Rose of Battle,” CP o 33, ll. 25–6). In the essay “Symbolism and Poetry” (EI 153–64) Yeats quotes Robert Burns, that a moon disappearing behind a wave is an event simultaneous with Time, as depicting the mutability of symbolism in the operations of the intellect. Yeats derived from French and German Symbolism, particularly its anti-realist stance, the idea that freed the imagination from Victorian rationalism. However, as Symbolism turned to

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Decadence, he developed a precautionary attitude that eschewed the crypto-Catholic literariness of the movement, bedevilled by its transubstantiation, of the Ideal in a perceptible form (see Jean Moréas, The Symbolist Manifesto, 1886). In privileging materiality, Yeats must accept that the idea of Byzantium is rendered incomplete. Likewise, the emergence into Byzantium entails a radical transmutation of the personhood, to the point that the elements of individuality become nondescript. In the strange isle of The Wanderings of Oisin, flowers do not really bloom, and trees do not take root. The contradictory implications of Yeats in the 1890s reveal an innovative, multi-faceted, young poet, attracted to the magnetism of many new orientations. Yeats exhibits the phantasm of inconclusivity, a willingness to keep unresolved artistic, spiritual, or historical conundrums as a check against the power of hegemonic claims on time and place. Being pulled by many influences, he is not yanked holus-bolus into a particular doctrine of poetic thought. Yeats assesses, without formal commitment, many different materials, without being recruited entirely by any particular movement. For some, this results in an irresolute body of work that, due to its many faces, lacks the cohesiveness of the mature writing. However, that cohesiveness never really materializes for Yeats; and these early experiments with form, content, and voice demonstrate a poet keen on political experience as much as on aesthetic craft. In his essay, “The Happiest of Poets” (1902, EI 53–64), Yeats expresses respect for Rossetti’s vivid distinction against the moral earnestness of grey, Victorian literature. His introductory comments focus on colour and palette, appropriate critical material for an aesthetic that produced more painters than poets. Yeats finds in Rossetti that tension between “the cry of the flesh” with the “rejection of Nature” (53) that interested him all his life. To hypostatically link supernatural with natural, a certain degree of Neoplatonism must inform a reading that the soul, “drunk with natural beauty” should come upon “supernatural beauty, the impossible beauty” (64). But The Wanderings of Oisin is a rejection of impossible beauty, of ideals that never were, nor ever can be, since their ideation resists tangible incarnation. Yet Yeats has been seen as a continuation of the Pre-Raphaelite, for his lush scenarios and vibrant damsels. George

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Watson (1979), for example, finds throughout The Wind among the Reeds (CP o 51–74) a strong Pre-Raphaelite influence, based on the physical traits of the sídhe (the Fae), they said to resemble the Marian and mythological portraits of Rossetti or Waterhouse. In my view, however, the ethereal qualities are consistently undermined by the naturalistic contexts in which these ideals are placed. The organic nature of thought leads to the rhetorical decay in works by Yeats such as “The Moods” (1899, CP o 52). In another way, “The Fish” (1899, CP o 54) using those images again of tide, nets, and Time, demonstrates how mental phenomena require nascent linkages between word and effect. This same conflicted intensity in these poems – between figure and figuration, image and imaginer – will be explored in the same manner by more renowned poems like “Among School Children” (1928, CP o 219–21). The ballad of dementia, a tragic description of something like Alzheimer’s disease in “The Song of the Old Mother” (1899, CP o 56) does not rely on symbolism for impact: wind and fire, as elemental realities in themselves, also lead to their own decomposition and forgetting. In The Voyage of Bran (Meyer 1895), St Patrick’s advice is to avoid the vain pleasure of life, and keep one’s sufferings directed toward the divine: It is a law of pride in this world To believe in the creatures, to forget God, Overthrow by diseases, and old age. (22–3)19 Yeats counters with poetic creations that convulse with both sensory pleasure and the biological decay of memory: this is to love the world, not to take pride in it. The tension between these two realms, the disconnected symbolic and organic reality, is affirmed by pressing political situations like the Home Rule movement in Ireland, and cannot be ignored or silenced. Their uncomfortably organic concerns often intrude on the flight into fancy. For example, the outright sentimentality of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (1899, 70) describes a lingering concern with the sustainability of a metaphor’s tenor – the cloths of heaven – woven into a mortal’s apparel, not to be worn. As this poem notes, the garment will be “spread … under your feet” (7), over the puddles

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in the manner of Sir Walter Raleigh. The tenor and vehicle of the metaphor collide with footwear. Raleigh, as indirectly alluded to, did not “tread softly” on the figurative puddle of Ireland: his suppression of the Desmond rebellions fundamentally changed land ownership and the distribution of power in the country.20 If Yeats has a Pre-Raphaelite streak, we might identify it with his time in the Rhymers’ Club. Ensconced in the Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street, across the waters from Ireland, the Rhymers’ Club members themselves were something of an island of vainglory. Generally more concerned with self-perceptions of tragedy and mournfulness, their activities tended toward chat rather than poetry, although two anthologies managed to be produced. Yeats’s participation in the Rhymers’ Club was the closest he would come to membership in a Pre-Raphaelite circle or a society for the sake of decadence. William Morris was a decidedly poignant figure early in Yeats’s life, imparting to him a late Romanticism that was picturesque, brooding, and with icons in decay. Morris also, especially in his speculative fiction, incorporated Icelandic and Celtic imagery as ancestral layering to the narrative’s explorations of communal mythic inheritance, especially in The Earthly Paradise (1870) and The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897). Morris’s Victorian scholarship of Old Norse and Celtic languages appealed to Yeats’s own growing awareness of literary traditions outside of the Anglo-English canon. Although decidedly a London phenomenon, almost all of the members of the Rhymers’ Club still professed their Celtic connections. Lionel Johnson converted to Catholicism, and Arthur Symons was Welsh-born, of Cornish extraction. T.W. Rolleston, originally of County Offaly, an intermittent associate of the group, produced several volumes of Irish folklore, in the manner of Thomas Crofton Croker. These authors were important to the Revivalist development of orature, of listening as a strategy for asynchronous recovery of communal discourse. Certainly, elements of the Revival had very arched presentations of Irish cultural life. Rolleston’s anthologized poem “The Dead at Clonmacnoise” paraphrased the Irish of a forgotten poet, Enoch O’Gillan [Aongus Ó Giolláin]. As another example, Charles P. O’Conor’s “Maura Du of Ballyshannon” (1932) ideologically contrasts presentations of pure Irish girlhood against a culturally picturesque postcard.

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An excerpt from the fourth stanza provides an example of the kinds of Revivalist romanticism that have been frequently suspected of Yeats: Maura du of Ballyshannon!   Maura du, when winds blow south, I will with the birds fly homeward,   There to kiss your Irish mouth. Maura du, my own, my honey! (159) In thinking of the Celtic as lacking a label for aggregates of identity, both imagined and experienced, the effort to define usually failed to achieve coherency: As R.F. Foster observes, “The Celtic element, in any case, became diluted with time” (vol 1, 107). But not just time, but also an anthropology of place, must account for the dispersal of the material. This is not exactly the project for the Celtic element of the Rhymers’ Club, which expressed itself as a dabbling in appearances, or as a kind of ancestral blood fetish. Seemingly more a drinking and smoking club, the Rhymers’ Club project relied on stagemanship for its ongoing sense of purpose. True, Symons produced influential essays on Symbolism, and French literature in particular, analyzing for example, Pater in relation to Baudelaire. Such works as “Spiritual Adventures” (1905) and “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893) established him as an influential channel of French literature, whom T.S. Eliot acknowledges as his gateway into Jules LaForgue and Baudelaire. Symons played a hand in Joyce’s early publications. But as a group the purpose of the Rhymers’ Club was hardly fixed. As Yeats said to Joyce, aside, “Symons has always had a longing to commit great sin, but he has never been able to get beyond ballet girls” (quoted in Ellmann 1987, 112). This suggests the decadence remained in the world of the Degas painting, rather than an avowed vocation in Symons’s habits. While individual members of this group espoused viewpoints such as Pre-Raphaelitism, decadence, and so forth, they as a whole produced no manifesto that established a unified declaration of the group’s intent. It is important to recognize that Yeats was under the sway of many of their aesthetics, but not altogether pulled or possessed by them. Much as Oisin quits the islands he has been welcomed

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into, Yeats distanced himself from this group, just as he had from other covens in which he took initiation and fellowship. This, in fact, is a pattern for much of Yeats’s life: a curiosity leads to admission within a society, only to be abandoned within due time once the veil has been lifted, and the inner life of the organization revealed. I have examined here how Yeats’s early conundrum with the relationship between time and culture led him to reconsider the framework of his presentations. Yeats would join and eventually drift from the the Rhymers’ Club, the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, and many other indoorsy guilds. Johnson’s ghost surfaces in the third section of “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (1919, CP o 132–5) as a man who prefers the cloister of study to the company of people: “the measureless consummation he dreamed” has a resemblance to Forgael’s “My teeth are in the world, / but have not bitten yet” (278– 9). Yeats’s poetry, concerned as it is with sensuality, the energy of the landscape, and the immediacy of the elements, has no wish to leave his mouth gaping. Yeats recognized in himself a tendency to symbolist escapism: “The chorus to the ‘stollen child’ [sic] sums it up – That is not the poetry of insight and knowledge but of longing and complaint – the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that and write poetry of knowledge” (Le2, vol. 1, 54–5). The existential lesson of “The Stolen Child” is recognized in those countless ballad renditions of this poem, from musicians such as the Waterboys to Loreena McKennitt, who wax yearningly around these lyrics. One mere second of a whistling kettle is worth one hundred years of glamour. The brown mice plotting their way into a theft of oatmeal, a legitimate hunger, have a tangible quality that the Faestolen cherries do not. The last verse, dedicated to the “solemn-eyed,” so different from the glittering eyes of “Lapis Lazuli,” offers a farewell to those investments in simplicity that lead to subjective experience. The dividends of the dream life pay unpredictably. Emotions depend on interaction with that which initiated them originally; to be removed from these is to lose the very thing that makes the emotions worthwhile. The boiling kettle produces the tea that comforts the breast, whereas the frothy bubbles of fairy land are only chased, and are infused with no taste. The fairies merrymaking or the whistling kettle – the play between the imaginary and the actual in Yeats is

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quite contrapuntal, as melodies of opposition sounding against each other. Yet for a poem un-slipped from the bonds of earthiness, “The Stolen Child” resonates with the almanac of the Sligo countryside. Yeats conducted his own sort of ordnance survey: poems such as The Wanderings of Oisin and “The Stolen Child” negotiate landscape through not only mythical reference, but an interaction with natural features. A waterfall or a particular rock formation guides the senses, leaving the child “solemn-eyed.” The emergent strategy for the Revivalists, moving away from Ossianic disposition, is to seek dispensation from the local landscape as the persistence of memory. But, as the examples in this chapter suggests, a complacent awareness of the past as perfect continuum of receivership is not an unmitigated good. Political speeches could make swift references to cultural pride. Lady Gregory (1995) quotes, somewhat uneasily, Michael Collins: “Through the medium of the past it linked the people with the past and led them to look to a future that would be a noble continuation of it” (37). The Revival depended upon slogans to some extent for mobilizing mass sentiments. In rebuttal, Gregory writes, “the small beginning, in Galway first of all, and then other Irish-speaking places, the bringing together of the people to give the songs and poems, old and new, kept in their memory, led to the discovery, the disclosure, of folk-learning, of folk-poetry of an ancient tradition” (37). Gregory here is contrasting the “small beginning” to Collins’s rapturous announcement of the “great event.” The philosophy of the small beginning, as preferential attention to the local, would be instrumental in The Celtic Twilight’s methodology, as I take up in the next chapter. But first Yeats had to work through a sense of locating the cultural space, away from Symbolism and into the symposium of local residents, in Irish society, at all levels. Thus, in The Wanderings of Oisin, the physical object always restores the errors of hyperbole and fantasy. What grounds, even relieves, the poet in times of cartographic confusion is an awareness of the particularities of the earth, the blessed tangibility of the landscape. In such a way, Yeats mimics the Irish Dindsenchas. A complicated, lengthy piece of literature, Dindsenchas maps the countryside through a topography-as-verse. The Irish passion for naming – for consecrating the landscape with personages and events – is

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catalogued within Dindsenchas, which records and associates the repertoire of mythic figures with particular locations. These catalogues of names and places enabled bards and storytellers to develop a highly idiomatic form of travel poetry in which allusion and events could be substituted for generic place names. Thus, directions could be given through metaphoric reference, rather than by a compass. In such poetry, geography becomes framed as a continuous narrative. For example, Temair noblest of hills under which is Erin of the forays, the lofty city of Cormac son of Art, son of mighty Conn of the hundred fights. (Dindsenchas III , ll. 1–4) Yeats’s sort of Dindsenchas for Sligo reads like this: Caoilte, and Conan, and Finn were there, When we followed a deer with our baying hounds, With Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair, And passing the Firbolgs’ burial-mounds (WO I , ll. 12–16) Poems such as “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899, CP o 55–6) result in a wandering through unfulfilled landscape: although orchards abound, Aengus wants the taste of golden apples, vanished though they may be. Despite having his mind on an unrealized destination, Aengus finds his way according to geographical references such as “hazel wood,” a particular forest on the banks of Lough Gille. In such a way, “The Ballad of Father O’Hart” (1889, CP o 19) describes a congress of noise gathered from the locales of the countryside. These are the most effective way markers. Rather than a form of juvenile topophilia, The Wanderings of Oisin addresses the conflict between action-in-the-world and a retreat, in which mythic-time contrasts with landscapes suspended in their artificiality, or a cultural geography altered utterly by change. This poem does not necessarily demonstrate an achievement in narra-

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tive verse – the model of Tennyson – nor a detailed description of a personal history – as in Browning’s monologues. Even in the medieval Irish genre of the wonder voyage, this poem acts unpredictably and unnervingly. The dialogue partnership of this poem – the repudiation of St Patrick by Oisin – enables a dichotomizing of themes and personages: ecclesiastics and mystics compete for the right to an epistemological history as well as a psychology of mortality for knowing place. The temporal reflex of the poem, Oisin’s flawed immortality, unites the passage of time with the persecution of geography. The Wanderings of Oisin also addresses themes that will be echoed later in poems such as “Easter, 1916” (1921, CP o 182): issues of what constitutes natural or unnatural artifacts for the imagination, as debated by a skepticism toward both heritage and society. What is at stake in these poems is the failure to realize ancestral permanence through a retreat into the purely imagined. The Wanderings of Oisin is an important poem that addresses, historically and geographically, the past and future of the Irish landscape. Dramatic poems such as The Wanderings of Oisin and Shadowy Waters also anticipate and prefigure, in acute but preliminary ways, Yeats’s later reinventions of Noh drama as the performance of the ancestral ghost allowing “us to be where we were not, forge all the connections that had not been forged, and then replay all the ‘(hi)stories’ differently” (Certeau 1986, 194). On this situation of stories and the fashioning of connection, as Yeats sought to develop multiplicity of voice as culture in the present tense, we might remember that The Wanderings of Oisin and Shadowy Waters are closet dramas. As such, they configure time, space, and geography, through a conflict of the spectral in relation to the physical. The dramatic imagination, enabled by strategies of this poetic form in the staging of Oisin or Forgael’s living-death, acts as a warping mirror that reflects both metaphysical and social conditions. These figureheads – Oisin or Forgael – work performatively as theatrical characters, not just allegorical symbols; the manner in which they are staged, by temporal and physical settings, is as important as the personalities they enact. What occurs in The Wanderings of Oisin, its forms of failed ancestral recall, contribute to Yeats’s later interpretation of the mugen nō [phantasmal spirit Noh]

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as allowing for alternative modes of historicizing that position the asynchronous against the myopia of the present. The Wanderings of Oisin and The Dreaming of the Bones erect a spatial dimension akin to the battlements of Hamlet’s castle. Ghost and mortality meet, truth versus history becomes contested, and a castle’s and a country’s future are confronted. Dramatic necromancy turns a ghost story into performed actualization of alternative metaphysics in which twilight contorts normative modes of time and progress. In a mode that I will compare with Izumi Kyōka later, Douglas Hyde (1885) referred to the “dim twilight of antiquity” from which the literature of the past still exerts influence, but only if appropriate attention is given to reading its sentiments (221). In much of the writing in the Celtic Revival, the ghostly is understood as unresolved resonances of trauma that ripples through the national self-consciousness. The figurations of the monster or spectre, framed in the genre of folk tale or the like, situate affect on a communal scale through the objective trope that inspires collective fear or apprehension due to its uncanniness. As will be discussed in later chapters, this mode of interpretation functioned in both Japanese and Irish literary modernism, with Irish models providing important catalysts for Japanese authors, who had their own archives of imagery to draw upon. In authors such as Lady Francesca Speranza Wilde (1887) or Fiona Macleod, those beasts who haunt the liminal outskirts of society usually retain identifying markers of their previous humanness, although their general form has been contorted by pain and decay, as well as forgetting and time. The Epistemology of Dissolution My initial comparison between Yeats and Cavafy, as both being examples of the poet-historian who emerged as writers in a modernist mode, was not meant to imply exact social similarities. Cavafy was one of many Greek émigrés spread out across the Mediterranean, dreaming of a Hellenic World, a classical Hellenic era, and the echoes of such in a displaced present. With the new pressures to create a historiography to document the past, what would synthesize classical artifacts with contemporary nationalism, a lyrical poet or a careerist

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politician? Cavafy’s efforts were born abroad, an extension of a nation whose cultural sensibilities arose within other territories. Yeats remained close to home: the questions of state and culture constantly were inflamed by the occupying power. These two revivalist poets, grappling with their own forms of late nineteenth-century introversion, demonstrated one of those predicaments that came to a crisis with the cusp of modernism. Yeats, like Cavafy, adopted the verse of the past tense into multi-temporal animation within the landscape. This quality in his poetics will become thematically resonant in the deepening of his connections to Tagore, Hearn, and Pound. Numerous critics, specializing in various media, have described this trend as an ongoing process of revolutionary zeal, derived from the advent of cultural technologies of print and representation. The gaps between past and present are navigated between representation (facsimile) as interpretive and the raw facticity of some unmediated reality. However, modernism’s mass communication powers could take these data and codify them into the ideal of Irish character. Once devised in abstraction, the ideal can be applied by prescription. Considering the cultural material productions of the Revival carried out anywhere that preservation was a crucial issue – such as song collection and native language translation – it is difficult to rest easy with the claim that the Celtic Revival is reducible to sentiment or fetish in the form of media. Certainly, we must be aware of how the production of music or poetry, as cultural enterprises, has genealogical development, through modes of instruction as well as community performance, and to a likewise increased orature. For Yeats, Irish folk music and its modes of transmission provided an appealing model of communal performance and how localized artistic production circulates through contact. Consider “The Fiddler of Dooney” (1899, CP o 71). An itinerant musician buys a generic songbook from the Sligo fair. However, the moniker of his reputation is based on his place of birth, the experience of the public performance, and the geographical distinctions of his fiddle style. “The Fiddler of Dooney,” light lyric that it is, nonetheless identifies who are the primary agents in nation-building: the people who build the nation. The poem throughout emphasizes the learning of a musical tradition as a communal activity, as a shared

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practice, rather than through songbooks propped up on pianos in parlours. Musical notes can be learned from a book, but musical style­ – the Clare fiddle style, the Dooney fiddle style – is acquired through performance, not private consumption of the sheet music. Thus, Revivalists were more interested in the public displays that combine inherited musical tradition with festival performance, such as the Wren Boys or mummers, rather than the mass-produced consumer products intended for the privacy of the home. The Fiddler suggests that a shout in the town square creates a louder call to action than privately lived prayerbooks of the priest to whom he compares himself. Likewise, Yeats’s national influence, inseparable from these early poems, involves a figure who had a much greater impact than a folk lyric expressing a national sentiment, or a pamphlet espousing a political agenda. Performative strategies have particular expressions of nationhood through music and marching in Ulster. These, of course, include the infamous marches, including lambeg drums, fifes, and sectarian lyrics, served up as ritualistic, public discourse. The Apprentice Boys of Derry constituted public ceremonies to commemorate the 1688 victory against the Jacobite siege within a year of that event. They only grew in size from there, and their contentious prominence in Irish society is always a worry. In these marches, public declarations of territory and turf enflame the local conditions and tension between rival communities. On these points a major shift would occur in Revivalist style, particular demonstrated in Yeats’s shift from lyrical epics to the hybrid storytelling genres of The Celtic Twilight. This would be a major moment in a modernist mindset coming into being. Those commitments Yeats had to nineteenth-century modes of symbolism and lyric were challenged by encroaching political crises – of land, nation, and nationality. Hence, the contestation of the landscape involves forces of assimilated history – colonialism, landlordism, capitalism – against heritage, which sustains a mythic connection to people as belonging in a particular history within nature. Some of Yeats’s quotations do seem like hackneyed nostalgia – “Indeed Cuchulain, Fionn, Oisin, St Patrick, the whole ancient world of Erin may well have been sung out of the void by the harps of the great bardic order” (FLM 52). In his

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later works, the relationship of void, as erasure, and harp, as ancestral recall, becomes clearer in purposes. And, as environmentalists know, one purpose of folklore is to erect barriers against technological processes that would push nature out of view. Folklore provides a discourse for appreciating and communalizing a public landscape that is, without exaggeration, endangered. Landscape in Yeats’s poetry and Lady Gregory’s plays, which at first might seem devoted to the otherworldy, identifies primarily the importance of local landscape as a natural resource to be harmonized with a non-invasive human influence. And, in many ways, their concerns seem entirely prescient; Ireland now sits, as I type, overdeveloped and undermaintained, having traded much of its national ecological collateral for quick profits of intercontinental finance trading. Activists have pointed out repeatedly that the cost of this includes the lives of the people now living, and the legacy of those who lived (and were lost) before. As John Banville notes in the New York Times (17 December 2011), “The violent poetry of leave-taking is ingrained in the Irish consciousness.” In post–Celtic Tiger Ireland, the appraisal of the meaningful cultural past – an in-placed source – has been under serious threat from industry, bureaucracy, and constitutionality, all of which are answerable to contemporary demands for profit and production. The reverence for antiquity does seek an offering that becomes contentious, as modelled from an ethnographic gaze. Industry tolerates ethnicity insofar as it has market potential; an open-air museum represents more collateral than scattered dolmens in a farmer’s field. The myopia of technology fixates on the maximum productivity of the present; the past does not dissolve, but only disappears from view, including those ancient landscapes and cultural traces. In exposing the treachery of the dream in The Wanderings of Oisin, Yeats emphasizes his concern for the particulars of place and community founded upon ecological concerns and environmental obligation. The specific integrity of a local habitat, and its cultural contexts, is to be understood through its resonance configuring a continuous community. Yeats’s poetry is thus often intensely ecological and nationalistic. Its depictions of decontextualized cultures and vanishing presences critiques invasive social processes that annex the past. Yeats identifies both the necessary importance (and inevitability) of

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social change and historical process, but warns against their power to erode and erase tradition. The first antiquarians of the early modern period were very much shoring up the past against change, although in their case it was religious change: the Reformation, the dissolution of monasteries, the urgency of a new national order. Place writing can take the form of a cringe-worthy veneration of the aulde sod. It can also be marketable nostalgia, such as the recent scheme to sell bags full of Irish dirt to be scattered over the graves of the diasporic children of Éire.21 But Yeats’s point of view is neither of these. He argues that economic expansion, served by mass media, would eliminate the particulars of culture and landscape through its exponential growth: “If the papers and lectures have not done it, they think, surely at any rate the steam-whistle has scared the whole tribe out of the world” (“Irish Faeries,” FLM 60). In an anticipatory way, Yeats is identifying what will become serious threats to the very ecological foundations that sustain the environment. On this point, Ireland continues to question the promise of progress against sustainability. Just ask the elderly women of Corrib, lined up at dawn, rosaries in hand, to protest Royal Dutch Shell’s offshore gas terminal near Bellanaboy. They are, in fact, refusing to accept the oil industry’s treatment of the local landscape as selfish resource. That the earth can continually provide us limit­ less capital, while holding limitless waste, is the far bigger dream world than anything in The Rose (1895). Yeats’s acumen, prescient as it was, detected those industrial forces whose tendency is to assess the future as power. To fight against such an invasion, Oisin would become the director of the Abbey Theatre, as well as a statesman. The concerns that the Celtic Revival raised have increased, rather than diminished, for an Ireland constantly trying to position itself in Europe and beyond. Indeed, the Irish fascination for its own demarcated countryside has become a political crisis in the Europhilia of politicians. The Mapmaker (2001), a political thriller about Irish autonomy, focuses on a cinematographic view of the Irish countryside as a kind of modern cultural topography, layered with narrative references from Irish literature. In this film, the area surrounding the northern border becomes a realm of mystery, somehow zigzagged

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by an invisible line that represents the United Kingdom. Identifiable features prominently act as backdrops, and it becomes something of a game to see how many topographic features one can identify. Even Benbulben makes a cameo appearance. The film hints strongly at the continued dispute over Northern Ireland as a landscape, which, because of occupation, has turned the ethics of place into a blurred dialectic between culture and geography. Another example of contemporary Irish writing includes Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams (1992), whose series of short stories frequently allude to the Celtic Revival from the cartographic partition of contemporary Ireland. One of Adams’s stories in The Street, “The Mountains of Mourne,” is a surprisingly fair-minded account of a Protestant and Catholic working together for a drinks company. Devoid of Sinn Féin sloganeering, the narrative evolves as the two characters recognize their common class situation and their mutual interest in the history of the land. In one scene, they give a lift to a rather rough-looking older man, who gives his own cartography of the mountains: “The bloody border … You can’t see that awful bloody imaginary line that they pretend can divide the air and the mountain ranges and the rivers … Listen to all the names: Slieve Donard, or Bearnagh or Meelbeg or Meelmore – all in our own language. For all their efforts they’ve never killed that either” (51). Geordie, a Protestant, evinces the Ulster paradox: the nationalistic collusion of Irish myth and landscape precludes a belonging to others, even if legalistically they hold a sense of power: “You and that oul’ eejit Paddy are pups from the same Fenian litter, but you remember one thing, young fella-me-lad, yous may have the music and songs and history and even the bloody mountains, but we’ve got everything else; you remember that!” (53). The narrator, surprised by the outburst, can only reply that the mountains (and therefore the music) do not actually belong to any one person or single political unit: “It’s not ours to give and take. You were born here same as me” (53). The national assemblies, however, do not see the issue so simply. The turmoil surrounding Irish place naming and tourism continues to be a thorny issue. Oisin’s prophecies of an overrun, bureaucratic Ireland have been realized. Turf continues to be divided as the

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regimes of political discourse inscribe territory over landscape. For example, consider the Gaelic Athletic Association’s laws regarding the acceptability of sport. The GAA posits an integrity to the pitch of the Gaelic games as a sacrosanct field of indigenous play. Only after a vote in 2005 did the GAA suspend Rule 42, which then permitted Croke Park to be used for colonialist sporting events. Previously, the regulation stipulated that Gaelic sport grounds are reserved for Gaelic sport, and on the odd occasion for Australian rules football or American rules football. Colonialist trespassers, namely, soccer and rugby, were not welcome. A ban continues to exclude British servicemen and members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary from participation in hurling leagues. The GAA made this point clearly by derailing a partnered bid between Scotland and Ireland to host the European soccer championship. The connection between terrain and identity is clear: Cumann na Fuiseoige, a Belfast-based GAA club, has faced criticism over the republican symbols on its badge. Yeats feared that the landscape could be turned into a commodity to be controlled and manipulated by an elite few. The Icelandic poet Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson (1924–1993), whose manual on Old Norse poetics (rímur) Bragfræði og Háttatal is a standard textbook, has argued the same point. A sheep farmer, poet, and pagan priest, Beinteinsson has increased awareness of the archaeological significance of local landmarks, their relationship to the national literature, and their importance to the life of the community. As he described in an interview with Gisela Graichen not long before his death, G.: Is Nature taking revenge while she dies because man has lost his relationship with her? Is that what you’re saying? S.B.: Yes, I can well remember what the old people used to say to me as a kid: “Let the tree stand; leave the moss on the rock; don’t kill the fly in the window!” Nature was a part of our lives back then. After the arrival of technology and like someone who is being forced to dance. A long time ago, I knew of people who were forced to dance and couldn’t stop dancing until they either fell completely exhausted or dropped dead. That how it is in the world today with all its wars. The world is dancing itself to death and can’t stop itself.22

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Yeats would understand this metaphor: “How can we know the dancer from the dance” when the centre cannot stop itself? Yeats’s green politics, surfacing in the early poetry, point out the consequence to local landscape and local communities under threat from erasure and erosion. The landscape offers sensual interaction and situates the body as being: And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth. (“The Fisherman,” CP o 148–9, ll. 29–32) For verse to equal the cold and passionate qualities of dawn, it must proffer organic reminders. In the case of Seamus Heaney’s bog bodies, history is a corpse preserved in the grime of natural time. Importantly, in these early works, we can see how the Celtic Revival is investigating the phantasm of heritage. The Symbolist ideation of an otherworld realm of transcendental truth, as Oisin discovered, is dangerously impractical. Likewise, the utilitarian view of history as defined by the present moment could easily justify violent agendas that forsake the past, and its cultural heritage. This was St Patrick’s disregard for the national cartography that he reinvents. Out of these questions, Yeats began to formulate the ancestral past as located in a domain of twilight, resonant of previous generations, perpetuating their knowledge, but also confrontationally contiguous with the mediation from the present day. David Lloyd (2008) describes this situation in Ireland as follows: “Can redress then take place except in disjunction from the order of the present, which is no less than the future imposed on the dead by past violence?” (40). An important aspect of twilight is that it a disjunction at once removed partially from the “order of the present” but not detached altogether from the experience of the landscape. Synchronically, the ancestral trace – in recession – retains an estranged relationship with historical multiplicity. Twilight has an agency to be, in the words of Herbert Blau (1982), “the uncentring dilemma into the methodology at the heart of the story” (283). This practice served as the primary

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strategy through which Japanese authors began their extensive considerations of the Celtic Revival as a methodology for interpreting the indeterminacy of heritage in their own island place. Certainly, Irish and Japanese writers found in each other a comparative predicament in the conditions of modernity. The juggernaut of progress had demonstrated its potential to overrun the particulars of place, in Ireland or Japan. On this theme of twilight, Irish and Japanese literary modernity developed comparative models for debating and assessing the discourses of the vanishing, as Marilyn Ivy (1995) terms it, in relation to the forces that would decontextualize and displace them, from both society and geography. To rebel against the expansion of generic modernity and its utilitarian goals, the Celtic Revivalists – Yeats especially – devised a lyrical cartography of both physical and mythopoetic boundaries, textures, and landmarks, negotiating political and symbolic way markers to work against topographical displacement. Beinteinsson states that to destroy the landmark is to lose the poetry. The actual geography becomes merely a footnote, a scholarly exercise in identifying a forgotten place or feature. The real connection has been irrecoverably destroyed; the authentic traces vanish. Thus, the critical nexus between folklore and the environment is the obligation of the person. The person recognizes the processes of the past as well as the inheritance of the future. Beinteinsson does not propose a generic Luddism, but he questions whether SUV s and regular flights across the globe are incontrovertible rights, in terms of both global and local side effects. Generally speaking, while the world of folklore is now often dismissed as sentimental fetishism, its forms of knowledge provide alternative stories that describe the interactions between communities, as well as their dependency upon the natural world. What is lost for the sake of mechanical conveniences is irreplaceable. Considering that some motorways in Iceland are marked with goblin warnings, a certain prestige for storytelling has achieved more than mere superstition. But, as Lady Gregory emphasized in her essay “The Felons of Our Land” (1995 [1900]), when institutional orthodoxy, in control of the transmission of history, tramples upon the collective identity of its subjects, then people will revolt through the shout in the street:

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“Irish history, having been forbidden in the national schools, has lifted up its voice in the streets, and has sung the memory of each new movement, and of the men who guided it, into the memory of each new generation” (257). Gregory saw landscape and language as intertwined through bodily practices of cultural acquisition, through which they take shared possession of a common yet heterogeneous history that is understood to be bordered by space. As she argues, “we had a lyric poetry before Chaucer, and a literature that is now the mine at which scholars in France and Germany are eagerly working … when a movement begins among the people and is then taken up by the priests, we may be sure the elements of success have been recognised within it” (251). But for Gregory the somatic qualities of speech and language, as the taste of ancestral resonance, had to be a priority. Thus, how the folk tale sounded announced, in part, what it had to say: “the true extent of their loss is the loss of the widened horizon and intellectual training of a bilingual people” (250). To be bilingual is to be equipped, mentally and viscerally, to hold off assimilation from the imperial other-over. Thus, listening to this singing is political activism at the grassroots level. For the Celtic Revival, cultural landscape and its attendant aura of twilight enable all ancestral processes, all memories, to come into contemporary being through interconnected relationships: “No conscious invention can take the place of tradition, for he who would write a folk tale, and thereby bring a new life into literature, must have the fatigue of the spade in his hands and the stupors of the field in his heart” (“A Literary Causerie,” FLM 89). The customs and practices of a culture produce a narrative and grant it the air of primacy. They then perpetuate it through the conventions of the generations. People precede myths – not, as Jung had it, the other way around. For such reasons, the etymology of the word gehenna, the hell of the Tanakh, is derived from a site south of Jerusalem, where all the town’s rubbish was burned.

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e

c ha p t e r t h r e e

The Politics of Telling Twilight … a furious “local joskin” with a mobile phone, “giving out,” says Quirke when he’s gone, “about Yeats. Said he was only a story-teller, as if there’s anything wrong with that. That he only listened to people, as if there was anything wrong with that. Of course he never listens to anyone.” – Mark McCrum, The Craíc1

The Celtic Twilight – a curiously hybrid text of interpolated genres, storytelling, myth, and necromancy – epitomizes the advent in the Celtic Revival of a shift toward a literary ethnography that sought to identity through narrative interaction the elements and traces connected to a vanishing past as a continuum within Ireland. Its intertextual method functions through a multiplicity of voices, which was a style that would become crucial to the viewpoint of the Revival. As sympathetic to the power of folklore, in the form of localized orature, The Celtic Twilight depends upon a practice of talking with and not just a listening to. Yeats previously reached a state of paralysis in exploring modes of ancestral memory through symbolization. In The Celtic Twilight, he adopts the reciprocal mode of storyteller/listener, inviting a range of engagements with various voices within the social spheres of Ireland. Utilizing this polyglossic format, Yeats addresses, analyzes, and narrativizes the vanishing discourses of an Ireland in historical tran-

sition. Central to this strategy is the exploration of the contiguous layering of twilight, as an in-between realm of utterances in the midst of disappearance, as intermingling with realism, the social habitats of the people are revealed in a process of looking backward. Because of this layering, The Celtic Twilight functions in a rhizomatic manner of multi-voiced exchange, in which forms of lateral communications not only invite the past, but also posit futures not yet appreciable. Particularly due to this framework of connecting folkloric narratives with ghosts and fairies – those creatures most capable of crossing the rhizome as spectral bodies of dislocated culture – The Celtic Twilight would dramatically attract the widespread attention of a Japanese readership for its alternative approaches to cultural historicity. In order to understand why and how The Celtic Twilight entered into a process of reciprocity with Japanese modernity, to be then reflected back to Ireland, which the latter half of this book examines, I consider in this chapter how the Revivalist method of twilight is actualized through speech, location, and tradition. In particular, The Celtic Twilight enacted a full practice of the Revivalist effort to assess the psychic loss of the culturally dispossessed through a regionalized understanding of community and landscape as interconnected, storied realities. These stories may be imagined, but the people doing the imagining were not imaginary. The Celtic Revival fashioned alternative spaces for enquiry and assessment, as well as questioning, despite being peripheral and under the glare of colonial imposition. Posturing the Ancients: The Speckled Bird and Autobiographical Nationalism The Celtic Twilight (1893) had been preceded by Yeats’s The Speckled Bird (1902), incomplete and in several draft versions (edited into a single volume by William H. O’Donnell, 1976), which comes closest to a hermetic autobiography. It totals about four hundred pages, in various versions, but remained unpublished in Yeats’s lifetime. Its unfulfilled conception was to depict the development of the individual mage, the sorcerer as a young man, as he allegorically progresses through gradual stages of knowledge toward an esoteric epiphany. As such, The Speckled Bird sought to meld Yeats’s personal experiences

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of the esoteric into a preliminary textbook out of which an occultic order could be established, complete with rites appropriate to a Celtic system of magic. The Speckled Bird is the foundation for a new, initiatiatory fraternity, one based on kabbalah as well as on Celticism. In some ways, The Speckled Bird anticipates the paranormal formula to be propounded in sections of A Vision (1925), but prefers for the moment the narrative genre of a Bildungsroman to reveal the mystic, as a young man, growing up on the path of an aspirant. The story is not entirely bereft of local anecdotes, however. Through meditations, recollections, and visions, attuned to the particular environments of Sligo, Michael Hearne experiments with modes of magical epistemology. The power of childhood memory proves to be more interesting to the author than the possibility of magical performance. The Speckled Bird ultimately formulates its reflections in the manner of a childhood memoir, rather than providing the Rosicrucian handbook that it seemingly desires to be. In this way, the personal involvement in the conditions of Irish social practice demonstrates Yeats’s emergent interest in narrative realism. This stylistically diverges from the somewhat impersonal conventions of the folklore collection, of tales repeated from a distance without naming teller or listening, a format Yeats earlier pursued in Irish Folk and Fairy Tales (IFF , 2003) and one that many of his contemporaries were also penning. The focus in The Speckled Bird is the force of memory and interlocution as respect for the idiomatic quality of Irish social discourse. Nevertheless, the work still retains that pursuit of gnostic realization. Tradition and personhood converge through the metaphoric alchemy of Hearne’s mind in pursuit of the mysteries. The field of this investigation, the landscape, relates to consciousness through the intermediary of spirit, a power of creative imagination that distinguishes Reality from realities. However, concerned with locality, The Speckled Bird claims dissatisfaction with the empirical world, preferring the dimensions of the transcendental spirit.2 The physical is, at best, a portal to higher truths, and at worst a distraction. The narrative begins in rural Sligo, continues into the ceremonial Masonic temples of Europe, and concludes with an eastward glance.

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The persona of Michael Hearne combines the disparate masks of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne into a singular portrait of Yeats’s revolt against ecclesiastically organized religion. As an antidote to hermetic isolation, as depicted in Huysmans’s Durtal (see chapter 2), the young protagonist of The Speckled Bird seeks out individuals of a spiritualist bent, regardless of their location in Irish social frameworks. Foster’s (2003) summary of this work, noting in particular Yeats’s autobiographical implications, makes several apt observations: “A slightly satirical note was introduced into his hero’s adventures among the adepts, along with a more sceptical portrait of Mathers … But if the passages of The Speckled Bird inspired by the Golden Dawn in 1900 are ironical, those which record his and Gonne’s pursuit of ‘Celtic Mysteries’ are not” (vol. 1, 233). True, The Speckled Bird often defies any one evaluation of its purpose, on account of its inconsistent tones of sincerity and irony. Yeats did heap equal derision on formal, established occultic networks, while privately developing an idealistic vision of founding his own. This sardonic view of Blavatsky (1994 [1888]) and other reclusive gurus and poobahs can be found in A Vision as well as in The Speckled Bird. Hearne expects Ireland to provide the missing ingredient to constitute the Celtic as not only a cultural ideal, but also a timeless metaphysical essence or ideal. As an ancestral appeal, the Celtic named an aggregate of ethical and aesthetic qualities that predate Patrick’s European-based evangelization of Ireland. As we have come to expect in Yeats, The Speckled Bird is a story of failed love in a time of uncertain ideals. The romance of Michael (Yeats) and Margaret (Gonne), like the tarot card of the twins aligned as the cosmic heterosexual matrix, should invoke a new aeon of tantric unity, in which sexual acts and spiritual ambitions unite under a neo-pagan banner of Ancient Ireland reborn. The love plot, more than the esoterica, defines the novel’s sense of transcendence and rebirth. Interest in the paranormal serves a function of intersubjectivity. For example, Hearne swaps ghost stories with Margaret, as a kind of foreplay. Previously, Hearne debated philosophy with his father as a means to know him better. In Margaret, he anticipates a rosa alchemica that will release a kundalini spirit of transformation.

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This sexual druidism, as a kind of revived spirituality, can reinstate the Brehon laws of the past for a contemporary society. The coming Castle of Heroes, which Hearne and Margaret intend to build, remains only a blip in the childhood imagination of thwarted love and cultural discontent. Notably, Yeats never finished the work of The Speckled Bird; he never formalized the kinds of impractical sorcery and their relationship to political revolution. For an author not afraid of multiple revisions to bring a work to fruition, it is noteworthy that Yeats never brought this text to publication. Perhaps the reason for this is that the work, however interesting it may be, fails in its primary purpose. For all of its aspirations to the geometry of Mystery, much of the manuscript is actually motivated by intensely personal assessments on the theme of not belonging, in a country that does not know where (or to whom) it belongs. The Speckled Bird critiques conditions, from a youth’s perspective, of the various kinds of class strategy in Ireland and the accompanying alienation. Hearne’s strongest emotions involve the sense of disconnection he feels from religious institutions, community networks, and other forms of mainstream belonging. Hearne, rather than addressing a secret fraternity, directs his attention to the everyday level of the community. He describes the phantomization of specific, local knowledge (available to popular access, and not just for an elite few), which is being assimilated or overwritten by transnational authority: from Rome or London, for example. The ghosts are post-famine figures of memory and loss whose sensation is mainly pain. Hearne seeks to recover the submerged voices, of disappearing languages and emigrating citizens, which he detects in the local acts of storytelling as a response to historical disempowerment. Having a receptive ear, for the cadences and stories of his youth, actually becomes Hearne’s main principle for gaining special knowledge. Indeed, listening becomes the major practice for understanding the impulses of the soul and its diverse relations. Hearne discovers that the people around him, although variously aligned to institutional orthodoxies, regularly disregard dogma in favour of a good tale. The most pious Catholic provides him with entertaining (and educational) tales of the apparitional Virgin at

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Knock that contain traces of pre-modern folk beliefs. Much more than the artificial seriousness of the magus, Hearne delights in these rural modes of speech, which he appreciates for their tone, timbre, and forms of local history and lore that they reveal. Throughout The Speckled Bird, clergymen, labourers, and soothsayers – of all sects and classes – enunciate particular forms of embodied experience that inform Hearne in ways that his symbolist texts do not. Their comfortable contradictions in spiritual matters, their unconventional methods of delivering a story, all resonant with speech practices of Irish Gaelic and Hiberno-English dialects, mark each speaker in a manner that demonstrates a shared sense of communal practice and experience. These modes of speech, in their cadences of bilingual syntax and allusions to cultural habitat, enchant Hearne far more than some abstract alchemy. Indeed, Hearne’s real magical training is achieved through oral exchange with the locals of Sligo and the spellcraft of narrative clairvoyance. The cumulative effect of the dialogue is a trance of audibility, of acoustic wisdom, whose commonplace utterances enrich far more than the unattainable druidic ideal. What characterizes their personal narrations, which to our contemporary ears may sound like hackneyed Irish blether, are forms of oral history that document a post-famine Ireland in a time of extraordinary social exchange. As a memorable example, Patrick Scanlan’s theatrical description of the misadventures of the Irishman in Boston, an expatriate most likely fleeing from the social dissolution of nineteenth-century Ireland, has a great impact on Hearne, far more than the cold lectures he hears from hierophants: “My curse on the curraghs and my blessing on the boats; my curse on the booker that did the treachery” (SB 38). Scanlan’s tale of his emigrant brothers, the disasters and racism that awaited them in the New World, take up far more textual space than any occultist because they speak directly, through humour and shame, of an Irish national character that has endured the multiple tragedies of colonization. In terms of attuning his magic, Hearne prefers the homespun experience at the dockside, with its local flavour and earnest reflections on love and loss, to the abstract formulations of the secret temple.

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In prioritizing the local and particular, and its marked forms of verbal style, the narrative structure of The Speckled Bird must implicitly reject its two fundamental goals: the first was to form a secret society known as the Order of the Grail,3 an elite institution for a magically gifted few; and the second was to provide this abbey with suitable instruction for its hermetically removed members, through the Castle of Heroes. Hearne initially desired a Celticity, as a panacea of ancient spiritual identity, to provide the qualitative mood for his distinctly Irish form of Masonry. The Speckled Bird, however, in its hermeticism, relates the semi-autobiography of an Irish poet in his youth, a voice coming into its own, set in a colonized nation enduring a period of swift political change, having recently experienced intense social trauma. The work’s uninhibited romanticism, combined with repressed sexuality, finds in occultism a mythology for integrating sentiment with flesh as a way of ennobling the body of the confused boy and perhaps the abused Ireland. Frustrated by unconsummated love, Hearne turns his contempt into formal attacks on Irish partisan politics, Catholicism, materialism, and other causes that he finds responsible for the general cultural impotence. Hearne, however, cannot bring about an alternative to these establishments. In response to the banality of contemporary thinkers, Hearne initially clings to a formulation of Ireland as sacred inheritance, one possessing the true knowledge of the mythic. The Celtic, as the spiritual heritage of old Ireland, must be restored if the portal of initiation is to open for the elite aspirant. Coded in such a way, in The Speckled Bird, the Celtic suggests a magical milieu for a human condition predating industrial society. Or so Hearne, as did others at that time, imagine. But, as The Speckled Bird staggers under its own narrative wishes left unfulfilled, Hearne’s own theosophy turns into vapour. For the Celtic to have some meaning as political space for considerations of difference, and thus be more immediate in its point of reference than Red Branch myths and heroic codes of ethics, Hearne cannot depend upon conjurations out of his old storybooks. He focuses, instead, on the living speech that excites him with its nearness, its connections to the ethos of place. Father Gillam notices this trend first in Hearne, that of listening, by warning his father:

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“You must not take Master Michael Hearne in the boat fishing.” “Why mustn’t I?” says I. Says he, “Because he is putting nonsense into people’s heads and getting nonsense put into his own head, and because he is without religion and without the grace of God.” (SB 35) To decode Father Gilliam’s admonition, Hearne is simply enjoying too much craic, in listening to the local talkers, bantering back in response, and studying the forms of local knowledge they communicate. There is little point to a non-figurative description of Irish society. If an authentic alternative to church and occupation can be found in Ireland, surely it is in the words of its inhabitants, their unique ways of describing their history and geography. A less circumspect writer may well have completed The Speckled Bird with a tediously resolute conclusion; Yeats, however, abandoned the work, leaving it unfinished and unresolved and along with it the irresolvable idealism. The incompleteness of the manuscript – and Yeats’s unwillingness to formally publish it or resolve its flawed esotericism – testifies to the inevitable confusion of Hearne’s preoccupations that symptomatically impair the narrative. As intriguing as the book may be, even critics who are particularly interested in Yeats’s occultism do not devote much time to The Speckled Bird, and it is fair to say that Yeats was dissatisfied with it. As a generic bit of mystery school literature, The Speckled Bird can be related to the fad for ethnic occult treatises: a Celtic counterpart to arcane Egyptology, Persian mystery schools, or secret Tibet. But one feels the struggle of decolonial urgency. Hearne, in this general climate of late Victorian esoterica, sought to invent a version of a distinctly Irish wisdom academy, but allied to the broader curiosity for lost, arcane knowledge of Atlantis. In detecting a shared vision of mystical knowledge, Edward Hirsch (1983) attunes the “transcendental moment” of The Speckled Bird to a pure expression of Neoplatonic dissolution into the Eternal (61). However, whatever its pretensions, no such ego-dissolution occurs in The Speckled Bird, either through the spiritual, sexual, or a combination of both. In short, Hearne finds himself in the same position as Forgael: all shadows and no substance. The Speckled Bird’s

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project of a hidden tower collapses with the separation of Michael and Margaret (or Willie and Maud), overpowered by the exterior conditions of rule and morality as discourse in Irish society. The Speckled Bird, like much of Yeats’s later prose, attempts to render into narrative what could not be elaborately detailed in the conventions of his poetry. Much of the panoramic output of the Celtic Revival, in terms of form and format, can be understood as a process of confronting or circumventing genre conventions. For all of its flaws, a very noticeable characteristic of The Speckled Bird is its polyphonic vocality, which tests the boundaries of utterableness by imitating speech genres. Although a failed experiment for Yeats, The Speckled Bird documents his first concerted efforts with oral tradition in contemporary Ireland, as daily usage. The Brehon laws remain in the past, but Yeats finds in contemporary circumstances modes of debate and discussion that offer both a connection to the past and a viable kind of community discourse in the present. The Speckled Bird prefigures and anticipates the more elaborate forms of cultural narration developed in The Celtic Twilight (1893, rev. ed. 1902), which explores themes of literacy, information, and ethos in a much more comprehensive way, while owing its conception to much of The Speckled Bird’s failed ambitions. The Celtic Twilight: Storytelling as Tradition and Transition The Celtic Twilight emerges, but also critically turns away, from the trend of literary genres that eddied throughout the Victorian period that practised forms of premature ethnography in response to the arrival of modernity, as discussed in the precious chapter. For Yeats, The Celtic Twilight developed into new formats of epistemology that required a versatile style, one that might document qualitative aspects of Irish society and its various bodies and projections of culture, as well as quantitative observation of communal memory. The Celtic Twilight combines all of Yeats’s earlier efforts at short fiction, poetry, auto-ethnography, and political journalism. As such, it represents crucial experiments with artistic style and cultural issues. Critics have argued over how to decipher the anti-colonial goals of this

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work. Its tensions with comparable genres – in folklore, ethnography, and paranormal literature – pull the narrative into multi-dimensionality in the construction of culture as immateriality. At face value, the episodic structure relays a series of Irish folk tales, although spoken as contemporary and influential rather than buried and archival; one might also see these working in tandem with a national identity crisis. It is this latter condition that can, in fact, evaluate the former: memories reside in the body and produce legible stories in cultural action. The Celtic Twilight takes a more politically invested approach than the impersonal ethnographies of continental Europe. Certainly, The Celtic Twilight has a vigorous political argument that separates it from more benign and complacent travelogues of the time. Ireland had its own tradition of indigenous tourism, the kind of journey through my native land, such as Synge’s In Wicklow and West Kerry (1912). The passer-through sequences his quips and observations, taking snapshots of locals and his or her passing impressions of the terrain. Very little dialogue occurs, and discussions of the weather predominate. The Celtic Twilight instinctively asserts its purpose to be more than this kind of breezy travelogue. Nevertheless, in terms of critical reception, The Celtic Twilight has an uncomfortable status as some kind of manifesto for the Celtic Renaissance, as well as a soppy form of Victorian heritage mongering. The Celtic Twilight provides cultural information and appraisals of localized distinctions of social practice with more depth than ethnic posturing and mere essentializing. This work employs Celtic in a variegated form rather than basic green, and in it fairylore, rather than retreat from the world, confronts the world with its politics of speech acts. The ethico-political readings that would see Yeats’s engagement with the past as quasi-fascist or blithely nationalist should not be dismissed out of hand, and it is not my intention to do so. I would like to rethink the framing of these accusations, to then draw out an alternative reading to the political readings of storytelling in The Celtic Twilight, and by extension its relation to Revivalist methodology overall, and by further degrees its impact on ethno-literary stylistics in Japanese modernism. I wish to resituate the terms of discussion from presumed forgery to Pheng Cheah’s sense of “the community of language and the overcoming of death” (Cheah 121).

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Edited by Tom Inglis, a recent collection of essays considers from diverse perspectives the elusive question, Are the Irish Different? (2014), concurrently recognizing that Irish identities are fluid, adaptive, and variable – yet somehow offering a series of portraits that draw our attention to Irish distinctiveness, culturally and geographically. An absolute essence of discernible Irishness that characterizes the authentic is impossibly elusive, even if obliquely suggestive. What is the soul, or the soil, or Ireland? David Lloyd’s (2000) analysis often emphasizes the affective role of colonization and violence as the framework for Irish self-investigation: “In the shadow of nationalism, as colonialism, there lurk, we might say, melancholy survivors” (29). The political temptation, particularly for Ireland, was to sift cultural survivor from imperialist obfuscation. Where are the tangible presences of these survivors? The Celtic Revival sought these in the formation of an Irish vernacular of the everyday, in which Gaelic culture and language coincide with the epistemology of Irish national insurrection. Sinéad Garrigan Mattar (2010) rejects the idea that authenticity is a necessary achievement to The Celtic Twilight, as post-colonial recovery: The stories are often given (seemingly) in the words of the local tellers themselves. Yet it would still be wrong to make much of the folkloric authenticity of the volume: Yeats’s agenda has absolute priority. London is the field for Yeats’s collection as much as Ireland, and his accounts of magical evocations in the company of urban clerks sit uncompromisingly squarely with the more traditional “Celtic” tales. The real value of The Celtic Twilight is as Yeats’s own memorate of his Celtic spiritual quest; his role as folklorist collecting others’ accounts remains secondary to that. (251) Mattar’s comments certainly remind us to be suspicious of the editorial perspective of Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats: a Protestant Big House resident and her worldly protégé come calling at a peasant cottage for the purposes of recording. Nonetheless, Mattar’s account, in viewing The Celtic Twilight as a monolingual text of Yeats’s with-

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drawn folkloric solipsism, cannot readily account for the auditory diversity of utterance and elements in the tales. In a reading whose sensibilities are closer to mine, David Dwan notes the formation of resistant variation in Yeats’s work: the folk tales can function as “an act of resistance, waged in defence of traditional speech communities against the polluting effects of the modern mass media” (159). Yeats takes up the discourse of the vanishing, instead of the rhetoric of homogeneous reformation. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (2000) notes the relationship of folklore to Irish nation building: “Tradition may be seen as synonymous with ‘cultural elements,’ but not with culture, which implies the ordering of elements into a system … Culture organizes tradition. The elements form a system of symbols, and represent the group’s cohesiveness” (71). Such symbols, however, are not bereft of meaningful material facticity. Dwan’s study of culture and nationalism in Ireland notes that a reductive romanticism perceives values only in floating signifiers; however, regarding the Celtic Revival, “the ethical community of Yeats and of Young Ireland was not a ‘romantic distortion’ or aesthetic sublimation of politics, but had a distinctive political logic” (4). Such an optimistic view of the Celtic Revival’s political logic is not universally shared. A committed critique of the Revivalists as cultural fabricators – indeed, of a new imperialism – can be found in Colin Graham’s (2001) assessment of Yeats’s folkloric enterprise, in light of cultural tokenism epitomized in the film The Quiet Man, as the manufacturing of a counterfeit Irishness disguised as quaintly faked heirlooms of the countryside.4 The Revival had a retrograde formula for sentimental kitsch. Taking up the themes of imagined communities and invented traditions, Graham exhorts us to be critically sensitive toward the kinds of nationalist machinations Yeats might be undertaking, under the spontaneously improvised notion of Celtic. Graham’s findings are worth considering in some detail, as they reflect some of the resentment, both in criticism as well as popular opinion, about how Yeats propagated illusory ideals of Ireland, the Irish, and Irishness. Primarily using Adorno and Baudrillard’s sense of authenticity to evaluate the presumptions of The Celtic Twilight, Graham analyzes Yeats’s position within the colonial, as well as the liminal, in pursuit of manufacturing Irishness, one produced

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by Yeats’s manipulations of himself as mediator. Graham finds that “Yeats can be understood as colonizer controlling the voice of the colonized” (68). Graham later softens this evaluation somewhat, demonstrating how such a view is a fraught assessment of Yeats that requires qualification. Still, the kernel of Graham’s reading is that Yeats acts as a pivot in phases of Irish representation. Old authenticity, the precursor movement to the Celtic Renaissance evolves into, the new authenticity, which finds its expression in the heritage industry of post-colonial Irish tourism. Yeats manages the gap between these two stages of ethnic posturing by reproducing a declaration of synthetic Irishness that answers to both the call of the past and the market economy of the future. The Celtic Twilight invents antiquity in the service of foregrounding an elitist modernity, as entitled to the label “Irish,” which later can be exploited, under trademark, for profit. In Graham’s view, Yeats cannot avoid acting as a colonizer who is doubling-down on a nationalistic gamble, by pumping and dumping a market stock of Irishness for the power network of imperialism and his own literary ambitions. In such a system, heritage cannot be recovered. In fact, it never really existed, since the notion of it only arises through supply and demand in the present circumstances. In such a way, Yeats’s illusions work, at least initially, since they depend upon a null hypothesis of Irish nationalist rhetoric: there must be an authentic Ireland, since we’re Irish people arguing for an independent Ireland. The Celtic advertises its clout through culture, the contents of which are forwarded through putative evidence always taken for granted. The application of Baudrillard’s (1996) lens on authenticity has perhaps a more pertinent view to offer on Yeats. Yeats’s emulation of folklore might be acting as a kind of commodity culture that converts presumptions about living, popular traditions into the conjured simulacra of Irishness. Such a reading could then argue that Yeats is a businessman in the ethnic marketplace, a nationalistic entrepreneur, rather than an artist questioning a cultural inheritance during a time of prosecution and legislation. This judgment can be put in explicitly stern tones: The Celtic Twilight resulted from the plot of a profiteer, or perhaps a fool incapable of skepticism, discretion, or other cau-

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tionary measures to manage his romantic materials, and his manner in receiving them. Describing the twentieth century as a culture of similitude, a Baudrillardian reading could see Yeats as presenting replicas of a presupposed Irish authenticity, redistributed for the purposes of cultural sale and capitalist profit. Yeats not only collects folk stories, but geopolitical debts as well – he colonizes through his recording. Thus, Yeats exploits Celtic for an agenda of the heritage industry: the stress is on industry, and much less on heritage. But we have alternative views. Ó Giolláin’s (2000) assessment of Yeats is reserved but also complimentary – thinking of Yeats as an Irish pioneer in the literary use of folklore against the decay of Irish tradition. True, institutional forms of heritage preservation in Ireland such as Dúchas and An Chomhairle Oidhreachta explore heritage in terms that closely correlate history with nationality, but it would be problematic to dismiss their program – so closely aligned with the belief that culture and the arts makes for a better society – out of hand. These statutory bodies initiate the laws and policies that identify, justify, and enhance cultural objects as collateral of national heritage. And while experience heritage is a contemporary slogan for the tourist authority, for Yeats it was a multiplicity of encounters that first and foremost addressed embodied traditions in their spaces of practice. The Celtic Twilight has neither the legislative design, nor the entrepreneurial goals, nor the institutional blueprint, to enact power. An Irish nationalist search for a single visage of the motherland, “a vision something of the face of Ireland,” seems to preclude variability (CT 32); however, the multiple vignettes of The Celtic Twilight, the always shifting something of which the vision cannot hold in singular view, are very doubled and Janus-faced. Many examples from The Celtic Twilight, in its consideration of multiple voices and perspectives, reveal varieties of people who are connected and identify with unique qualities of place. Yeats shows that if tradition is entirely turned into phantasm, the referents that make possible the debate of society will be lost. Yeats, rather than offering essential definitions, leaves open the possibility of enquiry and interrogation for evaluating internal coherences within Irish society. The faces that Yeats recalls

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are ancestral in that they are living people who maintain a communication with a continuity of cultural knowledge defined by place. Many contemporary activists in Ireland, particularly in the arts, recognized that whatever elements might involve a notion of Ireland, they were threatened with imperial encroachment and assimilation. Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, from an eco-critical perspective, record the features and perspectives on an endangered landscape. This view parallels The Celtic Twilight in its concern with Irish settings and scenes as a contemporary activity, framed by the natural environmental. Tradition, in its encounter with paint or words, functions in a relationship of cultural-situational knowledge, a phenomenology of identity and its underlying ecology of beingness. The Yeats brothers, in different media, testified to the same perceived threat of extinction. Strategies developed, in painting and poetry, to articulate the forms of local discourse that if erased would also delete the bonds of communities. A Bakhtinian (1986) reading could see the vignettes of The Celtic Twilight not as disconnected stories, collected secondhand, but as a circulation of speech as a genre. Marginal communities define and support them as a proclamation of self-reliance. In such a way, fairy tales, words supposedly aimed at fantasy, are actually a rebellion against those forthcoming communications that absorb all with which they come in contact. The Celtic Twilight is replete with multivalent rhetoric as speech acts, dynamic linkages in a communal network that connect with a continuity of the past. These include such examples as the religious pluralism in “Our Lady of the Hills,” the self-sacrifice of “The Religion of the Sailor,” or Yeats’s analysis of the many voices who, like him, have debated the role of ethos in “The Evangel of Folk-lore” (1894, FLM 135–58). And, stepping away from Machen or even the Grimms, The Celtic Twilight resists so many of the conventions of moralism in the fairy-tale genre by stepping outside of unorthodox typologies of iconic storytelling, and into the diversified fields of multiple speech. In this way, neither the anthropological nor literary dimension overrules the other in creating ethnic meaning. Folk tradition and local orature as performance, always approached as intersectional, offer livelier forms of discourse and substantial perceptions of cultural environments. They present a perspective more comprehensive than

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those intransigent ideologues who reject outright the coherence of culture, or the continuity of tradition, they who simply “deny for denial’s sake,” as Yeats described in a quote from the 1893 version of “Belief and Unbelief ” (FLM 111). The Celtic Twilight understands belief, philosophically speaking, as potentiality, as a willingness to engage in the ancestral phantasm and to document its mark upon territory. Unbelief is the relentless drive to scoop up materials in the service of monetary progress. We should recognize the problematic functions of romance, nationalist ethnography, and the literary fantastic, all of which are aspects of The Celtic Twilight as it expands in its function of outward nation-gazing, in the modern period, across a landscape both marginal and seeking sovereignty. The Celtic Revival documented alternative living strategies among the ethos of a community that had been, in traumatic ways, shattered by a colonial mandate and its impositions of violence and cultural negation. In order to recover a differentiated voice from that which had been super-inscribed, the practice of listening to and recording that community was an activity pursued by amateur ethnographers throughout Ireland, in the Revival and since. This is not about primordial identity finding, but the animated formations of communal self-awareness. For example, although not normally on the list of Revivalists, Charles McGlinchey (1986) compiled a diary of anecdotes of threatened community practices in Donegal. When he writes, “Times were changing … the weaving was slack and I went over to the harvest one year with others from these parts” (141), he, in a Revivalist manner, is recording the collapse of a self-sustaining, localized economy, which has been eroded by overwhelming market pressures of process capital. In short, both labour and money are leaving Donegal, and the conditions of the people in both the social and economic senses are the worse for it. In thinking of twilight and vanishing discourses, more nuanced attention can be given to The Celtic Twilight’s multiple genre mechanics, as exhibiting trends in the history of ethnography, cultural discourse, and poetic experimentation. The Celtic Twilight may engage in both imaginative ethnography and narrative realism, but it also provides alternative sensibilities and experiences in contrast

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to much of what existed in the popular reckoning of Ireland in other nations. Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (2000) charts Yeats’s interest in folklore from Romanticism to the popular literature of the Young Ireland movement and, ultimately, into his own modernist approach, yet not detached from the ongoing sensibility in Ireland to contemplate Irishness as a narrative tradition: “He [Yeats] considered folklore to be a continuation of the same imagination that created medieval Irish heroic literature” (105). The Celtic Twilight is a multivalent reaction to specific cultural situations and their contextual voices, very broadly defined by the island of Ireland but continually marked by a diversity of opinions. As a kind of utterance in progress, Yeats’s methods can be described as a fraught example of nativist ethnography. Its attention to the discursivity of vanishing voices, often taking the shape of spectres and fairies, enhances the tense correlations between memory and trauma and the figuration of recovery as a cultural struggle. To some extent, Yeats and the Revivalists do depend upon a certain homogenization of style, in terms of repeated tropes and focuses of attention. David Lloyd (2000) identifies the purpose of such a stylistic: “Cultural nationalism requires a certain homogenization of affect … a considerable degree of stylistic uniformity, a simulacrum of the anonymity of ‘folk’ artifacts, is indispensable to the project: stylistics idiosyncrasy would be counter-productive; stylization is of the essence” (90). This leads to a sort of kitsch that Lloyd identifies, and that other critics have seen as the beginning of an industry of plasticity. The Celtic Twilight, however, is far from promoting stable definitions of Irish and Ireland. Yeats makes obvious his interventions, whenever they occur, and no pretense to scientific neutrality is made. The work operates on these interactions of the personal and the public. The authorial and its relationship to the collective subject can be understood as parallel in formation. The shifting position of narrator and narration, in relationship to audience, shapes the ambiguous text through recursion. The term public relates to political engagement as a communal activity, community-centred discourses, a nationally minded way of rallying themes and ideas to enunciate the peripheries of locality and particularity. As such, the experiential merit this work presents is one of cultural geographical concerns,

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the relationship of ethnicity to cultural assumptions about itself and its place. But Yeats is a poet, not an anthropologist. The personal describes the strongly self-referential nature of this text, Yeats’s mindfulness of his artistic experiment and development, as well as the politics of a man who will one day be a senator in the new Irish state. This latter aspect distinguishes his from other works of heritage collecting, such as Frazer’s Golden Bough and puts Yeats more in the Romantic line of Herder. What exactly defines The Celtic Twilight, in terms of genre, quantitative disciplines, or historical documentation? Is it but one of a number of moments in the rise of Irish national self-consciousness in the late nineteenth century, or is it an entirely imaginative document? Is it a blow against the imposition of British culture via the imperatives of imperialism, or is it an early form of resistance to a far more serious threat to local cultures?5 How does The Celtic Twilight document and enunciate crucial developments in Yeats’s early confrontations with heritage and tradition? Should The Celtic Twilight be read instead as a kind of discourse of phantasm, an attempt to reckon with the vanishing, during a phase of globalization as we know it in our own time? One could argue that the text is to one degree or another all of these things. However, it is in this latter sense that the text takes on a far more important meaning than it has hitherto been given. The Celtic Twilight, a format for listening to the isolated voices, resists the hegemonic force of a global culture, driven by market-based economics as well as by political conquest. The Celtic Twilight does not neatly fit with the various ethnographic genres that various cultural claimants had used for ethnic bravado in the nineteenth century: its diversity in form, tone, and dialogue suggest a project with a commitment to tradition, but variable in its political argument, and primarily concerned with a here and now. More than an endorsement, The Celtic Twilight is, in fact, a warning of heritage identities endangered and also somewhat of a prophecy for the incumbent powers of environmentally unfriendly industry and capital. The Celtic Revival is romantic in the sense that it champions cultural independence and non-utilitarian approaches to an understanding of what is valuable to a society and its environment. Certainly, though, the Revivalists identified with, but ultimately separated

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themselves from, the preceding century of philosophical ethnography, and its varying considerations of folk, tradition, and cultural origins. A primary formulator of these thematic concerns, and investigations into ethos, was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803). Herder established a way of understanding folk narrative not as relying on assertions of an essential purity of essence, existing outside of the processes of time and society, but as a crucial variable that is enmeshed in location through the continuity of custom. Herder’s “Essay on the Origin of Language” (1966 [1772]) concerns itself with the development of human language. His pronouncements go on to examine and appraise the origins – and the symbiotic relationships – of culture to vernacular discourse, as a performance of national identity. To draw out this connection, Herder first builds his hypothesis on a distinction between the characteristics of human linguistic structures and the auditory behaviour of animals. Herder sees that language naturally arises according to humanity’s rational and irrational faculties, as cognition seeks to assert itself – poetically, as Herder would have it – as an introspective response to its environment. As this corollary of processes develops reflexively, and conventionalizes itself along historical patterns, a language will become inextricably bound up within a distinct culture. This culture is a set of conventions that correspond to special features of a locale that in turn nurture and produce this language: “And what else, after all, is the entire structure of language but a manner of growth of his spirit, a history of discoveries?” (132). Therefore, to pursue Herder’s eventual conclusion, a distinct geographical ethos could be preserved and revived through a passionate attention to folklore, traditional songs, and oral stories of the countryside. These possess, he insists, a deeper expression of the real sentiment of a community – a continuum with the past – as opposed to the affected nomenclature used by the aristocratic class. This is the Purist Hellenism described in the previous chapter, a language refining itself artificially as a means of negotiating power and diplomacy. Herder’s essay introduced the concept of volk as the spirit of a people arising from pragmatic functions within a given community.6 The Grimm brothers took note: not long after Herder’s publications, they began their lifelong efforts in collecting rural folk tales, culminat-

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ing in Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812, rev. ed. 1815, 1819). Not merely a fanciful collection for the amusement of children, the Grimms combined their rural sensitivities with nationalist desires toward creating what they felt to be a compendium of distinctive Germanic culture and tradition. Not surprisingly, their work with fairy tales, as the phantasmic imagination in continuity with older traditions, would be combined with philological scholarship. Jacob Grimm, besides writing Märchen, also penned many works on German linguistics and lexicography, including the massive Deutsche Grammatik as well as an expansive dictionary documenting regional variations.7 Underwriting these efforts, quite apparently, was a romantic longing for a kind of pre-Industrial integrity, not necessarily a source saturated in purity, but at least a condition that pre-existed the onset of exploitive capitalism and cultural hegemony. At this time of exponential utility, the Industrial Age, such a desire seems more than a facile yearning for myth but a political assertion of a subject-formation that can organize its own terms of exploration. The Romantics, such as Blake, understood from Herder that folk culture could enunciate a more ancestral condition, an earlier and purer remnant of religious truth and cosmological understanding. In questioning what enables cultural longevity, a profound interest in folk culture spread across most of Europe, coinciding with this rise of markets and machinery. In Finland, Elias Lönnrot arranged selections from supposed oral sources into the Kalevala (1839, rev. ed. 1845),8 which was to be a patriotic anthology of classical poetry, formulated as a national epic of origin and progress that would be definitively Finnish in its character, vocabulary, and themes. Yeats admired the Kalevala and thought it to be a fine example of literature acting as cultural redemption, a legacy of the past that cooperates with community as a particular practice of a language. The forged Celtic classics discussed previously borrow from this more general mood of nostalgia and history; and the Revivalists had no interest in producing facsimiles of a literary voice now thoroughly relegated to history. Based on the above examples, we can make broad formulations: a national mythology is never complete within a nation-state itself, as both are too co-dependent on mutual agreement for stability.

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One always looks to the other, the state to its mythology and vice versa, in order to conflate bits and pieces of data and example with assumptions and structures built around those assumptions. Eventually, some hegemonic national narrative arises that lays claims to an origin. For modernist literature, however, which may not necessarily be in service to the state, the construction of nation must necessarily include those two aspects: reverence for, but willingness to depart from, the yet-to-be established past. The Celtic Twilight, however, exhibits a strategy entirely different from the Kalevala. Fundamentally, it does not purport to be a transcription of ancient authority. It takes its materials from contemporary voices, understood as having a greater sense of communal investment in a local history than some facile projections of the past. Indeed, those voices saw themselves as informed by a dialogue with that which precedes the present moment, the Nietzschean flow of history. Yeats sought to move out of this trend. He is more in line with other nationalist projects of cultural preservation typical of early modernism: the work of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and Patrick Dinneen, for example. It is important to think of the Celtic Revival as not merely a historically located movement. In Ireland throughout the twentieth century deliberate interactions with folklore sought to preserve regional stories, histories, and dialect. Joe McGowan (2001) records anecdotes about vestiges of pagan customs, and their confluence with Catholicism, in counties Sligo, Leitrim, and Fermanagh. In her introduction to Ulster folk music, Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin (2003) describes the dependence on music as a form of circulation particular to localized features: “a hidden world – accessible only to those who could speak and read the Irish language, that is, to people like myself whose home language was Irish and whose parents had made a commitment in the hope that their children might have a greater understanding of the life-enhancing tradition from which they came and which it was their right to know” (15). Ní Uallacháin sees collection, if done properly, as a necessary reaction to the collapse of the normal method of instruction: community. Seeing a similar threat to voice, Dorothy Harrison Therman (1998) assembled, through recorded transcriptions, various conversations with residents of Tory Island, County Donegal. Often, the topics still now concern the

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supernatural, the manufacture of magical charms, or distillation of potín.9 These vignettes of Irish cultural practices were not intended to typify the hijinks of some bog Irish, downtrodden by superstition and rurality. Rather, the stories that frame these activities reveal many important recollections of dying community activity, relations, and lineages. The anecdotes relay on much larger patterns of reference and understanding for a localized community’s ethics, especially as they now come into conflict with modernity. The possibility for uniquely fashioned information, contextualized according to place and formed through experiential practices, is revealed through orature that resonates through repetition with the cultural continuum into the past. Certainly, the rural – as liminal social geography – exhibits unique features that appealed to both poets and ethnographers as possessing discursive features that were at odds with the cosmopolitanization of the urban centres. Although likewise dismissed as romantic and anti-progressive, environmental activists have long argued that the erosion of the rural environment places the distinctiveness of human geographies in peril. Ireland and Scotland have had a great number of authors, after Yeats, who have followed the praxis laid out in The Celtic Twilight and other Revivalist texts. For example, Margaret Bennett (2000), in Scotland, demonstrates that orature is adaptable and can cope successfully except with that which seeks to erase it. The Celtic Revival, having sensed the forthcoming deterioration as a result of nineteenth-century causes, anticipated the necessity of cultural documentation and its ethical imperative toward conservation and preservation. Vanishing, which is what happens to a tradition that dissipates in shape and substance as its contexts yield to radical change, invokes the notion of twilight as the genre for the disappearing. I cite these examples to place The Celtic Twilight with a very lively and ongoing form of endotic travel writing in the Celtic regions of Europe that have always marked themselves by a political inclination against homogenizing rationalisms that erase difference and distinction. In turning to the specific narrative stylistics of The Celtic Twilight, I first begin by thinking of those two terms contained in the title, both of which have been thought of having dubious properties.

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Celtic, it is thought, poses pernicious racial assumptions. Twilight, as opaque mystery, further shrouds the racial assumptions with the cloak of exoticization. But Celtic need not incarnate a singular essentialism, a quintessential Irish soul to be represented and indoctrinated as the true ethnic state of being. In Yeats’s time, the term worked very flexibly as an attack on British sovereignty and its own empire-driven notion of racial clarity. For such a reason, the political nature of Pan-Celticism, as a political polemic of lineage, acted out against imperialism, organizing its oppositional clout according to a broad theme of historical and geographical distinction. Archaeologists certainly can find both the merits and flaws in the label Celtic. But for their disparate social situations – as Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Galicia were – a Celtic ideation drove independence movements forward with a more cohesive diplomatic agenda.10 The Pan-Celtic Society in Dublin (founded in 1888) as well as a Celtic Congress (held in 1900) had a sufficient turnout to suggest that their form of political identity could seize both a moral ground as well as a cartographic one. Independence, arising from an envisioned sense of a shared geographical culture, could comfortably allow some blurring of the relative distinctions of linguistic, cultural, or historical category of Celtic. Not all of those who used this term sought to mandate nativist prescriptions. The word itself derived from the churlish keltoi, a leftover moniker from a long-dead Greek historian, which had been reclaimed by the Revivalist mindset. In such a way, Celtic had power as an operation against colonialism and its agents. Post-colonial analyst Leela Gandhi (1998) argues that “the colonial aftermath calls for an ameliorative and therapeutic theory which is responsive to the task of remembering and recalling the colonial past” (3). Celtic frames this theory as a transgressive alternative to Anglo dominance and its campaign of terror still vivid in the collective feeling of the Irish and their colonial predicament. It is true that Celtic has many applications, in linguistics as well as archaeology. In twentieth-century usage, Celtic has also acquired too much of a blood fetish attached to its prescriptive claims on heritage. But Yeats is not working in the mode of Kalevala: The Celtic Twilight does not attempt to lay claims to origins that can be

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collectively assigned to the current circumstances of the Irish and their nation-making project. In the Revivalist era, suspicions of onedimensional representations of a uniform Irish-Celtic identity were very much a part of the nation-building process. The stage Irishman, so dominant in its hateful ethnic mockery, had loomed large over the Irish at home, as well as abroad, throughout the nineteenth century.11 Surely, Yeats was aware of the pressing dilemma of the instability of a static typification that might either assert a national character or demean it. Yeats set himself up against, in particular, the pedagogical racism of Matthew Arnold (1903), who had first done much to coin Celtic as a pejorative label. In the discourse of education, Celtic implied a substandard form of backwater civilization. His infamous essay concerning the “Celtic element” of literature typified the Celtic (and more specifically, the Irish) as an effeminate group-think of superstitions, uncontrolled emotionally and lacking in rational sophistication.12 This depiction of the primitive, coupled with an imperialist strategy, could be seized upon to defend a British paternalistic attitude toward its retrogressive colony. An attitude of needful attendance must keep in check the culturally stunted underling. This became part of the broader, underlying bigotry that guided so many policy decisions. Certainly, then, a response would come from these marginalized cultures, ones that would naturally seize back this label and redefine it through a surge of ethnic pride and communal responsibility. Yeats had his mind exactly on Arnold’s formulation, and he used his essay “The Celtic Element in Literature” (in Essays and Introductions, EI ) to make numerous rebuttals: “When Matthew Arnold wrote, it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk-song and folk-belief, and I do not think he understood that our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature and the troubled ecstasy before her” (EI 176). This comment can easily be picked up the wrong way: in disabusing Arnold of his sentimental caricature, is Yeats instead proffering his own? Following my earlier reading of Beinteinsson in the previous chapter, I do not believe that Yeats ultimately defends a fantasy of Celtic transhistoricism as a plan for either sentimental environmentalism nor naïve ethno-essentialism about the Irish Way. Ancient religion, in my

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reading, refers to a previously uninterrupted convention of beliefs and practices that had been disturbed by foreign incursions, as the colonial parable of St Patrick, in The Wanderings of Oisin, suggests. The worship of nature, the troubled ecstasy of gaia – Yeats uses such phrases to describe a geography that has been violated. There is no magic but nature itself, and the derived customs of a community in relation to this energy of organic experience. Various forces, usually industrial, fabricate an economic dawn of capital, as arising from these resources. The economic reconfigures the traditional culture as twilight, something fading into the past, the zone in which the discourse of the vanishing struggles to shape its utterance, which acts against the rise of new dynamisms that silence the performance of culture. The economic model, Yeats argues, is the false mythology: forward-thinking rationalism that anticipates infinite gains from infinite resources is the dangerous false-consciousness. It is only an act of tactical hypocrisy to attack environmentalism and local activism as misguided fashioners of an authenticity hoax: “The lover of the Irish folk-song bids his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find them in the heart of the woods” (EI 179). Environmental death, as we know from Oisin and radical climate change, is the eradication of those same woods, the pollution of those streams, the loss of all those habitats. Revivalists documented this in many places, including Jack B. Yeats’s landscapes of coastal erosion. His aesthetic topographies of the physical landscape become envisioned, in an eco-critical way, as the bio-regionally supportive space in which the mode of the living connects and is supported. The Revivalist efforts to rephrase Celtic as a politically expedient manoeuvre against colonialism conversed in a much larger debate in Ireland over how to name the specificity of Irish development. The political anxiety of that time, so evidently near to realizing Home Rule, amplified the rhetoric. D.P. Moran, a member of the Gaelic League, came to prominence as a feisty journalist who mocked the general mood and pretensions of a Celtic Twilight. This phrase became one of Moran’s favoured terms of abuse for the perceived cabal of Yeats and his associates. Moran had expressed a certain tone

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of disdain for the political aspirations of the early Sinn Féin and other nationalist parties. By his reckoning, Irish nationalism was entirely a Catholic affair, with Yeats and his ilk fitting into an uncomfortable category of Anglo-Irish literature. That those least able to claim affinity should thus be wearing the Celtic badge bothered him, obviously. In response to Moran’s assessments of Catholic Celticism, in 1900 Yeats published a letter in Moran’s newspaper, The Leader (FLM 279). The purpose was to defend himself against Moran’s scurrilous editorials, which had insinuated that Yeats propagated a ridiculous presentation of the Irish people. Moran had argued that the perverse aesthetics of the Celtic Renaissance had done nothing to effect genuine political change. Yeats established two key points: first, he expands on his deconstruction of Matthew Arnold’s Celtic, by recasting what, politically, might be meant by the Celtic element in a national literature. Yeats defends the notion that Celtic is not necessarily fixed essentially. Second, Yeats takes the opportunity to make a retort to Moran’s Anglo label of Yeats’s writing, and his view that Yeats involuntarily shares Arnold’s opinion that there is a definitively Celtic nature that can be reified and appraised. By adopting such a dual line of response, Yeats argues that his sense of Irish character is much more exegetically diverse than Arnold’s superficial analysis of a pandemic Celtic. Moreover, he can suggest that Moran’s Catholic loyalties, as somehow counter-colonial, can also be a kind of political limitation. I quote here from a letter to Moran, in Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth: You have been misled, doubtless, by reading what some indiscreet friend or careless opponent has written, into supposing that I have ever used the phrase “Celtic note” or “Celtic renaissance” except as a quotation from others, if even then, or that I have quoted Matthew Arnold’s essay on Celtic literature on “a hundred platforms” or elsewhere in support of the ideas behind these phrases, or that I have changed my opinions about the revival of the Irish language since a certain speech in Galway. I have avoided “Celtic note” and “Celtic renaissance” partly because they are both vague and one is grandiloquent

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… I have argued that the characteristics [Arnold] has called Celtic, mark all races just in so far as they preserve the qualities of the early races of the world. (“To D.P. Moran’s Leader,” in FLM 279) In the 1890s, certainly a crucial moment for national self-reflection, the romantic aspirations of nation did not neglect practical identity. Yeats wants to affirm the present rather than a quest for a mythic past. Celtic can suggest, rather than essentialize, outlining communities in a particular place in time, subject to eradication. Yeats does not necessarily understand Celtic as a fixed racial prototype, some monolingual identity beyond reproach. The Celtic Twilight presents the term through a diversity of portraits, united through a shared sense of political ambition and cultural circumstances, however flexible (and prone to defeat) those might be. Such a method is far less essential, and runs deliberately counter to Matthew Arnold’s singular definitions or other colonial impositions, in which the othering of Ireland is maintained through a popular impression of the Irish as in need of paternal care. As a modernist counter to this propaganda, the Celtic Revival understood the ramifications of a culture fractured by the conflict between recovery and eroded tradition. Deborah Fleming (1995) suggests that Yeats’s understanding of Celtic, considering its geographical and commercial marginalization, preserves a cultural repertoire that arose as a response to invasive market societies: “Because of their closeness to nature, the peasants could appreciate poetry as the materialistic urban classes could not” (83). This may seem too pat for some readers, but Fleming cites many examples from Yeats’s essays and letters in which he concerns himself with the “hidden character” contained within the tightly knit communities. I see in several of Yeats’s essays and pieces of journalism a similar concern: modernity threatens the local and particular, substituting a generic formula for heritage. Organizing a cohesive response to such invasive threats, colonial ones, necessitates a certain amount of strategic essentialism, insofar as Celtic might meaningfully identity human rights needs of specific communities. The Revivalists were not, however, alone in their worry about how far the

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strategy should go, in response to what has already been lost, and was sliding into the penumbral dislocation of the twilight.13 Thus, it is also important to keep in mind that Yeats was not the sole engineer behind the Celtic Renaissance, nor even its most monolithic proponent. Historians and politicians such as Standish O’Grady and George Sigerson had attempted to identity formulations in much more zealous ways than Yeats. Anthologies of fairy tales were also published by William Carleton and Thomas Crofton Croker, both of whom have also been accused of having a derisive attitude to their subject matter and for lacking the Irish language. Mary Helen Thuente’s (1994) study of the Celtic Revival examines how, as a political consensus, the Revivalist movement in Ireland combined many disparate committees that considered various formulations of national aspiration through cultural identification. Charles Gavan Duffy’s Young Ireland movement advocated the founding of cultural institutions to forge national character; however, there is a militant sensibility that caused a gradual distancing between Young Ireland and Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Movement, primarily over the issues of violence as a means of national self-assertion. Certainly there were many other organizations and leagues who, distinct but somewhat interchangeable by alliance, nonetheless shared general characteristics of forwarding the cause of Irish independence through a revival of cultural practices, ones supposedly indigenous to Ireland, against colonialist interference. Likewise complex and in flux, the second element of Yeats’s title is twilight, often thought of as intending to remind the reader of the evocative aura that imbues the Celtic with their magical capacity for praeternatural perceptions. In terms of what The Celtic Twilight attempts to accomplish as a sociopolitical document, however, twilight entails the penumbral condition of the fantastic, the liminal strata through which the present becomes dislocated into the nebulous past. Twilight is a place of forgetting, a stage upon which the discourses of the vanishing arise and fade, and a phase of dematerialization for people and their practices being relegated first to non-importance and then disappearance. The Celtic Twilight operates within twilight through its asynchronic mandate, in which past and future reference

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each other along a bi-directional trajectory in rethinking cultural formation and cultural possibilities. Twilight always demands the question, “Who is that?” And so its aesthetic characteristics suggest the qualities that Nicholas Mansergh identifies in The Irish Question (1965) when he writes, “Yeats’s vision of Ireland was imprecise, but in one sense it was that very imprecision that made it so stirring an inspiration, for it meant different things to different men” (259). Twilight both locates and must come to acquiesce to the gradually unsubstantial ephemera of those identities through which they are located. Twilight as storytelling strategy also has its own share of dubious nuances that further destabilize the stable nuances of Celtic. The Speckled Bird had sought that archetype of the heroic age for its apotheosis – the passage through the misty threshold of twilight describes the seeker’s transition from the mundane into the ethereal. Negotiating the sacred nostalgia has been a difficult issue for Irish writers. Contemporary Irish Gaelic poetry has brought its own unique perspective on this theme. Consider Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s (1990) depiction of the famous vanishing island in the late of day: ag rá liom teacht go dtí do oileán draíochta … “Tair chugam, tair chugam, éinne atá traochta.” (4–6, 13–15)14 This verse echoes the call in the concluding poem of The Celtic Twilight, “Into the Twilight,” to the out-worn heart. As another take on Ossianic deliverance, the desire for disappearance into the higher reality leads to surrender. But The Celtic Twilight, unlike its predecessor The Wanderings of Oisin, attempts to resituate that disappearance as arising from explicit causes in the material culture of Irish history and Irish presences. Twilight thus imposes a very disconcerting presence in The Celtic Twilight. The psychologically disjointed, split with cognitive dissonance, can detect neither space nor time. “Into the Twilight” describes a “Young mother Eire” in contrast with the “grey twilight,” and the

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seeker’s emotional ideals are corrupted, being in a stasis between personified country and vanishing atmosphere. The heart goes to “where hill is heaped upon hill: / For there the mystical brotherhood ” – is this a cairn? The fraternity here arises from the interrelationship of natural elements: sun, moon, water, and wood operating according to “their will.” This poem also features, rare for Yeats, a direct reference to God, who presides over the turning and dissipation of a world caught in time. The twilight, in fact, envelops the principal constituents of the poem: the condition of modern Ireland cannot negotiate a bargain with either twilight (history), dew (sweat and work), or morning (the future). How does this poem, a paratextual observation of The Celtic Twilight’s overall metanarrative in search of Celtic in the twilight, relate to the overall shape of the book’s argument? Twilight implies a vanishing, but not the hermetic kind as an escape from the world. The Celtic Twilight’s focus on disintegrating voices shows that twilight is a form of phantasmafication. The rapidly evaporating becomes disembodied, and then dissipated, a transition from daylight into darkness. Coming to terms with twilight best gives a sense of how to understand Celtic. We know that Yeats’s frequent distrust of rationality, as the ideology of industrialization, left him with the fearful impression that a person could be “gone as if the earth had swallowed her up” (CT 84). Phantasms can be visibly detected as the movement of substance into a darkening disappearance. Yeats, through satire and elegy, would frequently use the wraith as a return of the dislocated culture of the erased past. In The Celtic Twilight, he continues this theme from his earlier epics, and lays the groundwork for experiments in his drama and later poems. Yeats would redevelop a concept of a Golden Age, or heroic era, as an ancestral vision of the past that seeks to act in fraught continuity with the present. Its purpose is to inform the rapidly changing present of what preceded it. Both past and present can be vocalized concurrently, synchronically, through the access to twilight: “It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but they must sing and we must weep until the eternal gates swing open” (CT 123). This is the sense of The Celtic Twilight as the polyphony of collaborative speech genres, from living communities as well as traumatic past. The Heroic Age as

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a functioning domain of the paranormal, first explored in The Celtic Twilight, will be a crucial feature of Yeats’s Noh plays. Golden implies a lustre through handling, touch, and the lapis lazuli-like transmission of the relic and the ruins. Objects obtain a nostalgic charm not only through an aura of heritage, but from the oil of the hands that created and care for the object. This similarity will be increasingly clear in Yeats’s study of Noh drama, and his influence on Japanese responses to modernity more generally, but first the methodology of The Celtic Twilight as a theory of ancestral recall placed into practice. Affective Cartographies, Linguistic Landmarks Yeats’s introduction to the 1893 edition of The Celtic Twilight certainly lacks the theoretical framework that we would now expect of an ethnographic study with a scientific method. But he hardly seems interested in taking on the mantle of either rationalist or anthropologist. Nonetheless, his empirical models of cultural emplacement are based on the data of conversation and reflection, “what I have heard and seen,” as intersections for various commentaries, not scientifically satisfying. Yeats aligns himself with the artist, yet his material must not be overly subsumed by his own agenda, so as to be “unoffended or defended by any arguments of mine.” The Muses of hope and memory, he suggests, are also a counter-hegemonic methodology through which art and community interrelate against normative systems of the official archive. Kathleen Raine (1991), in her introduction, insists on the importance of The Celtic Twilight as a literary attempt at endotic documentation: “It is his own life that he records. In County Sligo he discovered the map of the territory of his own imagination, bounded by contours in hill and wood, wind and weather, bird and beast” (19). This assessment draws attention to a prevalent condition of this work: its role in Yeats’s development as a poet, its articulation of liminality, as well as twilight’s environmental contiguity with the boundaries of the natural world. The problem, so keenly felt in The Wanderings of Oisin, is where the supernatural begins and the natural ends, or when the ancestral becomes detached from the present space. Oisin had taken up the challenge: “The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, the willingness to go

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to the margins: ‘Here are lions’” (WO 43). Yeats turns away from the quest as archetype, and concentrates instead on speech genres as a search of localized history. Closer attention to the vignettes in The Celtic Twilight, rather than general descriptions of their overall intention, reveals how multivalent the disappearing voices are. The nineteenth-century waves of emigration, which were journeys into the unknown on coffin ships across the Atlantic, had reconsidered the historical trauma of the Famine for the poetry of the immram genre. With a third of the population dead or effectively exiled, the edges of the Atlantic offered not mystery but eclipse. The Celtic Twilight, as a response to a crisis in population and culture, explores, evaluates, and negotiates the landscape of native place as artifact rather than symbol. There is no voyage, but a conscientious attention to the environment that is being changed, argued over, and sometimes abandoned. The Wanderings of Oisin explored this intangibleness, in which culture is only a dream: tactile sensation, as proof of a social context, breaks the spell. In The Celtic Twilight the aural imagination, the act of listening, engages the soundscapes of nature and community, the dimension through which so many of the cultural phantasms are transferred. The first vignette, “The Teller of Tales,” enacts this primacy of listening, as all the forthcoming sections follow from this initial sketch of voicing. Auditory effects such as snoozing under a hedge may suggest more than pastoral banality, but an examination of an entire soundscape particular to the region. The storyteller pursues a way of life, a way of using the natural world that cannot be offered by the impersonalism of corporate media that ignore the small and non-famous. The sleeping figure contrasts with the industrialization that Yeats clearly saw as noisy, invasive, and destructive, with an enormous ecological footprint. That is the real monster. The fairies, whatever they are, offer an auditory experience and communicative experiences that are more like natural rhythms: “I have seen it,” he said, “down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.” (CT 35). Keeping in mind this first impression of the phantasmal, Yeats’s focus becomes clearer: the soundscape of conversation, in relation to the natural acoustic, form the enquiry between people and their heritage. The status of fairies allows for a kind of engaged pantheism that restores life and performance to the

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environment, as well as possibly representing a previous experience of the land. In being primarily a document of unrehearsed listening to the present moment as interrelated with the ruins and their ruinous past, The Celtic Twilight differentiates itself from many of the previous ethnographic nationalisms in Europe. Unlike Lönnrot and his claims to a source text, The Celtic Twilight does not seek to present a definitively singular-voiced assertion of Irish identity, nor does it fixate itself on mythic origins that establish a heroic lineage and a people’s probate. In The Celtic Twilight, Yeats is first hearer, then recorder, who reveals people and their storied sense of a community of emotion, to borrow a phrase from post-colonial theorist Rajat Kanta Ray’s analysis (2003, 33), rather than disembodied mythologies. The recorded dialogues predicate themselves on the author acting as attentive participant within a living social practice, a sense of location and belonging to it, not through a page but among the shouts in the streets. Only then can any material fit into the dimensions of poetic presentation. The Celtic Twilight is very elusive in terms of conventions and genre. It has neither the entirely self-invented manner of Andersen’s fairy tales, nor the objective, impersonally archived feeling of the Grimms. As masterful as those texts were, they spoke to a nineteenthcentury attitude toward regional identities. Yeats does not claim to be the sole creator of these stories, yet they are completely filtered and shaped by his personal participation as well as his intervening commentary. In their versatility of themes and gestures, they pose complex suggestions rather than soft anthems of uniformity. Genre – and this is key to understanding his work with Noh as I will explicate later – entails much more than following a set of rules in a particular context. He writes a hybrid text, within the urgency of a colonialized society, revealing a breakdown of traditional hegemonic forms. This is, generally, the way in which modernism began within outlying countries, as being cultivated away from more centralized nations and their economic hubs. Yeats, and the Celtic Revival in general, invented a discursive means of dealing with the modern experience; these are not just transcriptions but creative acts. Yeats plays with this ambivalence by embedding romantic sentiments into The Celtic Twilight’s complicated and unstable frame-

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works. But to what extent is The Celtic Twilight exhibiting symptoms of the Gabriel Conroy syndrome? The Celtic Twilight diversified its material through voicings and situations that give a much more nuanced confrontation to the notion of the west of Ireland. Conroy’s nostalgia arises from the fact of increasing loss, the dissipation of Connacht, combined with a convenience that he does not have to live there. Dublin means departure: a transportation locus that allows the option of a ferry to Paris, from a train arriving from Tralee. This is the Dublin of expansion that now, as its suburban environs swell and expand, absorbs villages and towns into itself. Its infrastructure of exponential growth demands wider motorways, more cars, and the transport mechanism to aid and abet rapid development. Those on the outskirts of the metropolis’s sprawl, however, do not have the Conroy option. The Celtic Revival marked out an alternative mode of custom and marginality that coincided in how it addressed landscaped sites shared through tradition and interconnected history. Positioned on the edges, these communities face serious threats, then as now. The destruction or assimilation of landscape means the loss of community, or vice versa. Conroy personifies a general sense of anxiety that Ireland, as traditionally split into feudal kingdoms, cannot unify itself into a politically hegemonic, contemporary nation-state.15 Conroy’s dialogue occurs in the drawing room, whereas The Celtic Twilight moves from outdoor scenes. Thus, it cannot offer a manifesto for the enshrinement of the Celtic, as either political entity or ethnic essence, for the materials in question will not yield to political specifications. Yeats attempted a formulation of national consciousness in his more public-oriented projects – the Abbey Theatre being another kind of community-engaged concourse. The Celtic Twilight’s elegiac tones, on the contrary, mourn the sustained diversity that is sacrificed in pursuit of unified national mobility. Yeats challenges the ar­ tificial climate of political awakening with his own personal poetics, not just as the subjugated interests of the author, but as strategies working concurrently in the creation of texts. The survival and continued expression of Irish folklore operates against the katharevousa of the capital. Yeats’s sympathies are adamant, as he makes clear in Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth (1993): “Past Irish

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literary movements were given overmuch to argument and oratory. Many had come to think the Irish nation essentially rhetorical and unpoetical, essentially a nation of public speakers and journalists, for only the careful student could separate the real voice of Ireland, the song which has never been hushed since history began, from all this din and bombast” (“The Evangel of Folk-lore,” in FLM 135). Yeats has identified the “din and bombast” as coming from a number of exhaust pipes of that time, blowing and fuming across the countryside. The Celtic Twilight approaches its subject matter through a belief in its capacity to contradict modernity’s sense of its manifest form, of exploring “forms of unevenness that call into question the historicist narrative that understands modernism as the progress from the backward to the advanced” (Lloyd 2008, 3). That this kind of mediating different temporal arcs does not require accessorization, in the form of technology or industry, offers an alternative to resource capital. The “story-teller’s commerce” (CT 33) exists, as much as it can, outside the trademark hysteria of print industries and packaged entertainment. Thus, Paddy Flynn acts against the commodification of the countryside via industrial and colonial impositions. On this theme of resistance, The Celtic Twilight, with highlighted satire, presents hilarious parables of this process, such as “The Devil.” Working against storytellers, Satan, in his devilry, chooses to take the form of a newspaper to conduct his mischief. In a maelstrom of broadsheets, he attacks a woman, enveloping her with inky pages. I have quoted Yeats on his distrust of mass communication previously, and sketches such as this make the same point metaphorically. The paper “flaps in her face” (CT 65), almost suffocating her. There is no dialogue or sharing of information, only a blur of headlines, produced hastily from the urban centre. Yeats cannot help but point out that, on account of the weight of this diabolic paper, “she knew by the size of it that it was the Irish Times” (CT 65). The devil prefers print from the cosmopolitan capital; fairies take to music and local tales. This is the principal theme of vanishing discourse that encouraged the Revivalists to shift their attention to the contextual situation of Ireland as a historical rupture of cultural death and the potential for rebirth intermingling. As Lady Gregory wrote, quoting an old ballad, on the back of a photograph of Parnell:

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Oh, I hae dream’d a dreary dream Beyond the Isle of Skye: I saw a dead man win a fight And I think that man was I. (CT 39) And, as the rather comical scene of the demonic newsprint, the Diablo Newspaper acts as a metaphor for the frenzied rhetoric that is suffocating the people. When Yeats speaks of the Devil, he often has in mind the consequences of a malevolent agenda in society. The Dáil has not arrived yet, but Yeats is cautious about what it will offer, in exchange for sole governance. The Celtic Twilight frequently combines considerations of the paranormal with the parliamentary. Similarly, “The Sorcerers” narrates Yeats’s experimental participation in an urban circle of Satanists (62–4). This is assumed to be autobiographical: Yeats seemed willing to try anything once, especially if the paranormal was involved. Tellingly, this coven is composed of clerks and civil servants. They invite the poet to a private gathering of public officials who have a demonic invocation on the agenda. Unlike much of The Celtic Twilight, which is deeply interrelated with landscape, this meeting occurs in black curtained rooms, devoid of any natural or organic connection, to beseech dark powers from indoors. Their clothes and habitat are the antithesis of the natural world. In inverting the laws of love, they promise more than they deliver. Yeats describes them as a uniformed lot of robed buffoons, stuttering spells to the ancestral, spoken in mangled Arabic, the pretension of the cosmopolitan dilettante. What is frightening is that, despite the mishaps and clumsiness of the proceedings, a black cloud does somehow appear. Like the demonic newspaper, the thick mass threatens to absorb everyone present, to further gather individuality up into a monochrome uniformity. In fact, aware that the arcane pursuit has in fact led to a potential loss of individuality, the chief magician concedes that the true threat is to “go out of this room … with his character added to your own” (CT 64), that is – to have one’s uniqueness co-opted by Satan. This is, we need remember, a civil servant in the chasuble of a Black Mass speaking. In The Celtic Twilight the devil is associated with assimilation. Like being mummified by the broadsheets of the Irish Times, the

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monolithic cloud leads to an envelopment – hegemony, if you like – that assimilates individuality. Having a character added to your own implies a possession of the soul, one in which the person is replaced with a monomaniacal proxy. When this abstract force materializes “in shapes as solid and heavy as our own” (CT 62), they become embodied spectres, powers derived from the dark turned into poltergeists that overwhelm with a “deathly trance” (CT 64). Only a “needful exorcism” can return the mind to its natural state, “the freedom which is the breath of life” (CT 62). These Satanists, at the end of the day, are petty administrators, dabbling in arcane arts that promise authoritarian power that they covet for their careers. Their devil is more suggestive of the bureaucracy they serve than the eternal hell of theology. What further distinguishes them from the overall folk traditions in The Celtic Twilight is how they eagerly gather up a wealth of material artifacts, ritual implements, and affected talismans. This is the artifice of their magniloquence, since the “din and bombast” of their clumsy chants has no audience. Without stories, the sorcerers can only speak in vague allusion. Their “vow of silence” (one of Yeats’s amusing asides) prevents genuine communication. The robed clerks, parodies of legislators and the judiciary, provide no aural satisfaction, no context, and no soul. Using them as a counter-example, Yeats turns to the real purpose of The Celtic Twilight as coming from the storytellers’ living speech, not from these kinds of silence and hollow ceremony. The opposite of a vow of silence in this section is, of course, a vow of speech. And much of the Revivalist methodology concerned itself with accent, and regional dialect, as resultant from a localized habit of usage, as indicative of a continuum of interfaces that shape regional identity. Post-colonial theory has long recognized the power of thinking of language as a particularized force that arises not from mere convention, but through conference and interchange. The Celtic Revival took this as an anti-colonial strategy. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2004) has made the case for this purpose to linguistic practice as having a localized identity: “But there is more to it: communication between human beings is also the basis and process of evolving culture. In doing similar kinds of things and actions over and over again under

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similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patterns, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences and knowledge emerge. Those experiences are handed over to the next generation and become the inherited basis for their further actions on nature and on themselves” (14). Thus the daunting language issue – what is Irish speech, and how much of it is dependent upon the Irish language? – became an argued focus for the Revival overall. In thinking of how Yeats turned to listening as political practice in The Celtic Twilight, we might think more generally about how regional Irish speech, and its Irish speakers, became attuned to both political and artistic sensibilities. The Irish Texts Society, as custodians of the archive that held the history of Irish-language literature, took on the duty to act in an important academic role in codifying texts of the pre-modern classics. These works, not understood as providing a national narrative of origins, offered a sense of a continuous Irish literary tradition, one whose works are reflected in the Irish Gaelic language of the present. Founded in 1898, the Society’s goal was not only translating Irish classics, but also annotating them to preserve the cultural information contained within the tradition. Their efforts, certainly, triggered reform movements throughout Ireland’s diverse dialect regions that sought to standardize a written and spoken form of Gaelic. Arguably, this came at the expense of minority dialects. Father Dinneen’s Dictionary and the Mapping of Lexical Ireland Father Patrick Dinneen, an important member of the ITS and renowned lexicographer, had important connections to the Celtic Revival through his Gaelic language activism. He realized that something more needed to occur than just archiving and footnoting manuscripts. Certainly one needed to remember, to copy-edit, the oral forms of the older epics and their medieval manuscripts. But, to best accomplish this, the pre-modern language had to be understood according to its resonances in the living nuances of dialect. The truest line to the conversations of the past lay in the Irish and

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Hiberno-English, Gaelic as really used by the populace. Dinneen thus took to the countryside and began compiling his famous dictionary of the Irish language, recorded from listening to spoken usages, according to regional custom and occupational cant. What he discovered was a breathing legacy of historical connotations, coloured by regional experiences and social variations, that had ethnographic character. Noel O’Connor, former secretary of the ITS , described Dinneen’s work this way: “But his dictionary is not merely a compendium of words and their meanings. He gives examples of usage and idiom that have seduced the reader over the years into many fascinating byways. As his was the first modern dictionary he had to wrestle with problems of spelling and standardisation of a language in the doldrums for two centuries and split into three main dialects. His rigorous training revealed itself in his capacity to make firm sound decisions on these major matters so that his book would be the virtual cornerstone of the Gaelic Revival.”16 Dinneen’s dictionary appeared in 1904 and made an immediate impact, not only for the etymological information it provides but the detailed notes concerning practical utilization of the lexicon as daily practice, developed through communal sensibilities. Thus, Dinneen’s dictionary is a compendium of Irish rural elocution as the proclivity of distinct speech acts, which are also historical referants. Dinneen was a lexicographer, but he was not entirely possessed by scientific detachment. He undertook a more interactive anthropological approach, in which his oral sources also became his defining contexts. For example, for the word samhain [October], he writes: “All Hallow-tide, the feast of the dead in pagan and Christian times, signalising the close of the harvest and the initial winter season lasting till May, during which troops (esp. the Fiann) were quartered, the fairies (aor sídhe) were imagined as particularly active at this season, from it the half-year is reckoned” (1996, 937). This definition is followed by a list of idiomatic expressions, which document how samhain also functions as slang in the vernacular to describe mysterious circumstances. Many of Dinneen’s entries further detail folkloric names derived from this word, as well as other references to how this word has become embedded in Anglicized place names. The

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local metaphors, which exist in the place names, still exert influence, despite colonial assimilation. Dinneen’s Irish-English dictionary is more than a collection of definitions and orthographical details: for example, he compiles a field notebook that saw how folk customs, attitudes, and practices relate to the specific implications of a word. Language, as Dinneen saw, can be made susceptible to vanishing, and in the throes of disappearance acts as its own metanarrative of disappearance. His extensive fieldwork puts into practice the concepts that Yi-Fu Tuan (2001) forwarded in his analysis of spatial values in relationship to the words given, by persons, to create symbolic interactions with the space that holds those values. Most ITS documents provided glossaries of Gaelic as static examples from history, their semantics fossilized in a particular epic or verse. Dinneen (1996) went much further by documenting active usages; he proved that the pre-modern language, through a continuity of exchange, exists in the utterances of the present, evolving but still hearkening to ancestral custom. The language of the past remains the vernacular after all. Its academic status, as a museum piece, was secondary to its ongoing implementation in people’s lives. Táin as a word is best known in reference to an incident from mythic literature, as in the Táin Bó Cuailnge [The Cattle Raid of Cooley], but the word had been an important agricultural term for cattle rearing and herding, as well as an idiom for ruffians. Eabhóg is not only the word for aspen tree, but also a favourite wood for certain parts of a spinning wheel; mo ghrádha-ra do thromán do chluara ir do rhlinneán a bhí déanta d’eabhóig, what a lovely whorl, lug and standard of aspen (address to a spinning wheel). (383) Dinneen’s documentation of the continuity of cultural meaning in Irish Gaelic, as inherited linguistic tradition of communication, continues to have a particular sense of urgency. Many of the arboreal species he documented are now endangered or under threat. As a sign of how the government is trying to restore a more bio-regional view, the newly established National Tree Council each year encourages

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a reforestation of Ireland: 2007 was the year of the aspen, Bliain an chrinn chreathaig. Dinneen’s contextual circumstances required in the Irish Renaissance had a pressing attention to customs and nuances, exemplifying communal heritage, which had associations with ancestral practices. He sought to chart the genealogy of a minority language whose fluent speakers were dwindling in number. In his view of his role with the Irish Texts Society, the way Irish is spoken now has much to reveal about the literature of the past, and vice versa. The colloquial speech of Irish Gaelic would soon be at the mercy of artificial language reforms as well as the Queen’s English. Despite its now archaic font and obsolete orthography, Dinneen’s dictionary gives a snapshot of Irish as a dynamic language that engages a location through cognitive frameworks that see custom and language as co-dependent.17 This kind of investigation makes an attempt, through living speech, toward legitimate cultural traces. As Herder argued, these words necessarily resonate, rather possessively, in the spoken tongue. Yeats, too, listened and recorded everyday activity in varieties of the Hiberno-English dialect, within a habitat that frames its communal significance. Dinneen and Yeats move away from a previous tendency to pseudepigraphy, in people such as James Macpherson (1851 [1773]), keen on rural speech only as circumstantial evidence for inventing epics. For Macpherson, it is not the words and their present indications that matter, only that they burnish the creation of fake antiques. Dinneen’s attention to the nuances and particularities of accent, dialect, and linguistic relativism were very much central to Lady Gregory’s (1995) sense of the Celtic Revival: “Old people tell how they were forced to speak English in their school days. ‘I used to have a card tied round my neck,’ an Aran man says, ‘when I was going home from school, and if I spoke one word of Irish there was to be a mark put on it, and I’d get a beating the next day” (250). Gregory defends linguistic uniqueness, and speaks of “Irish-thinking” as a distinctive cognitive reality.18 Gregory’s discussion above brings to mind Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s description of punitive measures against the colonized in Decolonizing the Mind (2004). Anti-colonial perspectives tend to see regional languages as immediate resources as both bodily prac-

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tice and cultural associations; they develop unique modalities for community expression. The Irish language is a result of a succession of contexts, ones of space and time, and therefore causality. Perhaps to Yeats’s possible chagrin (if also his prediction), some of the recognition and protection of the rural in contemporary Ireland has fallen into the hands of civil servants. What Yeats recognized as Celtic, the belief in overcoming Conroy’s sense of dislocation and to engage with the local, now has become constitutional practice in a mandate of Irish self-awareness. There are a number of agencies that arose in service to this folkloric purpose: the Irish Folklore Commission and the Department of Communal, Rural, and Gaeltacht affairs, An t-Uas, and so forth. As a means of self-preservation that is very similar to The Celtic Twilight, these councils archived their predecessors’ more earthy work, including the recently deceased Seán O’hEochaidh, of Teelin, Donegal (1932–2002). Over his lifetime, he preserved a massive number of stories, memories, and songs from his native county during the 1930s and 1940s, recording them all on wax cylinders. His efforts almost single-handedly saved masterworks of the Irish language, including Micí Mac Gabhann’s, O’hEochaidh’s father-in-law, Rotha Mór an tSaoil [The Hard Road to Klondike] (1959). A listener, transcriber, and recorder of rural lore and personal reminiscences, O’hEochaidh has many similarities to Yeats. He compiled several books of Donegal folklore, unique in its geographical position as being on the edge of Ulster, as being a debated historical unit as well as a contentious national demarcation. The subject matter of the stories resembles The Celtic Twilight frequently: residents of Inishmurray, for example, recount eerie tales of supernatural encounters, disappearances, and ghosts.19 In the general mood of the Revival, Charles McGlinchey (1861– 1954), a tailor from the Inishowen area of County Donegal as well as a friend of Patrick Kavanagh, also accumulated a personal collection of songs, lore, and details about his native peninsula. His presentation of the supernatural includes shocking depictions of archaic communal practices. No doubt, many of these activities – for example, unwed mothers abandoning babies – are gladly left in the past. He does not overlook the negative aspects, and one senses his desire to accurately record a cultural terrain in a period of radical collapse.

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But McGlinchey’s The Last of the Name (1986) – Brian Friel’s edition based on McGlinchey’s private journals – consciously exclude Irish political issues that pertain to national movements. Home Rule parties, Parnell, and so forth do not feature in his writing, because they are so concerned with constitutions they forget people. McGlinchey’s political statement, by means of ignoring politics, focuses on the endemic, the particulars of the region. Authority comes from using a sort of dialect that McGlinchey refers to “as the old people say” (76).20 In terms of poetic verse, “as the old people say” comprises much of the content in The Celtic Twilight, exemplifying Yeats’s attentive listening to the connections between vox populi and vox loci. Although The Celtic Twilight resounds with much poetic content – evocative language, lyrical phrases, and melodic cadences – formal, stanzaic poetics are largely absent from the text. Yeats, as Poet, rarely announces himself, nor does he take on some role as the central interlocutor for composing verses and stanzas. Notably, Yeats defers the title of poet, its bardic position as ancestral voice, to Raftery (Antoine Ó Raifteiri, 1779–1835). No fabrication of myth, Raftery, the blind and wandering bard, represents the declining era of Irish-language verse and the customs of orature and countryside audiences. Douglas Hyde, conscientious of Raftery’s accomplishments, helped to maintain his ongoing reputation by publishing an edition of translations in 1903. It is clear to see why Raftery occupied such a prominent position as an embodiment of Irish literature. Known for his love poems and skills in Irish syntax, Raftery also had a pronounced social activism in his verse: “An Cíos Caitliceach” [The Catholic Rent], for example, depicts the subscription used among the disenfranchised agricultural class to amass funds for Catholic emancipation. In terms of grassroots political organization, the subscription was successful in networking scattered, disempowered labourers. In short, Raftery’s legacy arose from living the poetry that he wrote, and writing the poetry that he lived, in Ireland’s western counties.21 That Yeats includes so little of his own verse, but highlights Raftery, as in “Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye,” emphasizes the presence of the ancestral voice as imminent and tangible within the contemporary context. And much of the poetry in The Celtic Twilight, as formal stanzas, comes out of ancient mouths.

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Storytelling has direct correspondences to people as interactive locators, whose locution is embodied in space and time, as voicing or vocalizing the particulars of a place. The general indifference of the urban, characterized by the noise of industry, does not attain this level of sensitivity. Paddy Flynn’s metaphorical awareness of his surroundings counteracts his physiological deafness. Yeats shifts attention toward the intertwining of human culture and its natural surroundings. Technology, after all, fosters a kind of deafness, and rural dialects are at odds with modern conventions of language. These qualities in Yeats suggest trends of what we now call eco-criticism. Yeats’s initial concern for the destruction of habit, biological and cultural, reveals those alarm bells going off long ago, during the rise of globalization. The Chronicles of Celtic Circumstances The Celtic Twilight is not organized by lexical headings. Yeats’s own knowledge of Irish Gaelic was minimal. So, listening to the Hiberno-English of a colonized Ireland, he transcribes his chapters as identifiable by conversations, in dialogically centred social encounters with social realities. The vignettes of The Celtic Twilight do not remain hermetically sealed or self-absorbed but derive their qualities through outward interactivity. Antithetical themes and attitudes are held together through the dynamic exchange of people who enable a cooperative storytelling. However, despite the ethnographic qualities of The Celtic Twilight, Yeats’s interjections remind us that this text concurrently acted as a diary. That Yeats’s sense of custom and heritage was also a personal repository of poetic ideas does not detract from these sources as variations of voices within time and community. Celtic provides a multivalent space for individual spokespersons to interact through creative non-complacency. Celtic actually counteracts the solipsism of The Speckled Bird. Thus, likewise, on a larger scale, Celtic acts against the grey, sooty glamour of prosperous empire, the Victorian enterprise, primarily through its phatasmagoric rebelliousness that also strives to maintain human contact. Victorian corporations, generally, praised individual sacrifice as a utilitarian virtue, necessary for social progress. Institutional models

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for collective engagement derived from a reliance on development and productivity as the ultimate merit. The Celtic Twilight, like Dinneen (1996 [1904, second edition 1927]), commits itself to a public community, but recognizes individual agency whose efficacy is realized through its faculty to rebel against uniformity. Each voice, acting as both speaker and preserver, offers a perspective on those sub-conventional traditions that articulate its marginality. The individual is given the power to rescind commitment. This theme, certainly, has been a principle of post-colonial scholarship in general. The palimpsestic model, seeking out transgressive alternatives in how culture is framed and figurated, offered genuine resistance to commercial mass media. As Yeats explains in “The Celtic Element in Literature,” the interest in ancient Ireland is not a mere resuscitation of fantasy: “I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times” (EI 185). “Chronicle of circumstances” describes the result of a machinery that demoralizes culture and in which people are reduced to records of rational progress. Resonances, as Yeats and others maintained, arise not from a mythic Golden Age, but as conditions of sociolinguistic practice that operate against the colonial procedure through their timelessness. Yeats, however, does not passively receive these songs, odes, and stories in The Celtic Twilight, as if he were incapable of exercising a healthy distrust for ready-made claims to cultural facticity. He understands that a nation, seeking maturity through independence, must be capable of accepting the positives and negatives of its cultural history. The Celtic Twilight remains complex because of this principle. Who is to say which scores highest in mimetic accuracy? What is more reflective of the Celtic Revival, I’m arguing, is the oral format of The Celtic Twilight that allows for a multiplicity of opinions. Post-colonialists have frequently noted that orature and folk customs necessarily antagonize the forces of imperial oppression and, by their nature, threaten the dominant norm. Yeats was reacting against a certain Scottish counterpart whose writing had served “to moralize over the defects of the Irish character” (“Irish Fairy Beliefs,” in FLM 250). Yeats then notes, “moralizing over defects and virtues

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of national character is for the most part foolish.” Rather than a national character, Yeats wants to locate a cultural power that becomes collectively self-conscious through historical development. In trying to identify a zone of temporal overlapping between the vanishing and the strictly empirical rational historicism, the Celtic Revival posited a liminal state that connects to physicality but is, at the same time, not restricted by knowledge determined by the here and now. This is a conceptual direction that other modernizing nations, attempting to fight off colonial oppression, adopted. Jawaharlal Nehru (2004), India’s first prime minister, writing in his younger years, stated that an Indian political movement needed to appreciate India as “an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously” (51). For Yeats, the textures of these layers could be sifted in the presence of the organics of place. The capitalistic mandate of colonialism, seeing conquest as the capturing of land as disposable resource, works against this thinking. Heidegger (2003) makes a point that is relevant to this historical predicament: “The circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a world which has become an unworld” (107). Hence, in thinking of the twilight that is such a necessary quality of The Celtic Twilight, the narrative way of interpreting the land requires interaction with that community of emotion that is interconnected with the historical continuum of place and place making. It is important to remember that Yeats, philosophically or politically speaking, attempts to locate and define a pre-modern state of Celticity that, in whatever remaining degrees, now saturates the landscape of Ireland itself as a natural body of cultural understanding. Poetically, however, he is willing to consider how the dichotomy of culture and nature can be better repositioned if one can account for the environment as a co-determinant in the dynamic of local tradition. That Irish has enough of a historical continuity in usage, if not in definition, creates the opening for examining thoroughly the conditions for its formation. This is the spectral culturality of dimness and twilight in The Celtic Twilight. Twilight becomes the zone through which a wider

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panorama of asynchronic viewpoints, through forms of storytelling, cross the interstices of time, people, and land. What arises through the peripheral lens of twilight is a polyvalent mode of a symbolic landscape. This polyvalent mode promotes an attitude of utterances and ancestral recall against the dominant modes of imposition whereby, as Judith Lewis Herman (1997) describes as the political order of violence, according to which “secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defence” (8). The Speckled Bird and The Celtic Twilight have a point in common in that both texts move from broad patterns of politics to concentrate on the situation at the ground level. The circulation of counter-colonial forces commune in spontaneous locations. At the crossroads, an unscripted public display of mourning takes place: “Presently, a score of men and boys and girls, with shawls over their heads, gathered to listen. Somebody sang Sa Muirnín Díles [Savourna Delight], and then somebody else Jimmy Mo Mílestór [Jimmy Mo Mhile Stór], mournful songs of separation, of death, and of exile” (“By the Roadside,” in CT 153). Yeats’s knowledge of music is a bit imprecise, although his listening affirms the central power of folk music as an empirical experience of the past, as collected inheritance. “Savourna Delight” is a slow air, in D -major, of Irish origin, but popular enough in Scotland to be included in The Gow Collection of Scottish Dance Music (1784–1822). “Jimmy Mo Mhile Stór,” a standard for the likes of Dolores Keane, describes the pains of separation. With her lover away overseas, the speaker is unable to bear her grief, and seeks a kind of solace in nature. These two pieces mentioned here combine a stately dance tune with an elegy for a lost love. In short, Yeats, slowly lured into this roadside ritual of music and dance, finds himself participating in a kind of spontaneous community wake. The crossroads have become a site and sanctuary for social expressions of grief and loss, the affect of mourning put to melody, in an open-air performance of ancestral recall. This vignette’s emphasis on choral speech, musical tradition, and Yeats as both participant and bystander, fittingly summarizes much of The Celtic Twilight by concluding in this scene: “The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men” (CT 153). The tragic meaning of twilight, as the occultation of the past and the

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vanishing of a heritage, comes to the forefront, through the intergenerational phantasmal. In such a moment, Yeats witnesses the art of ancestral recall: in the twilight, the multiplicity of voices and the cultural memory relayed in their oratures come to intermingle as a public act of self-recognition. The Celtic Twilight thus examines how folk arts interpret the space of twilight as identifying its kind of transgressive alternative to economic rationalism. In doing so, the folk arts sometimes ally themselves with environmentalism and shamanism, for whom enchantment is a form of rhetoric that acts in opposition to corporate technology and urban institutions. Twilight, which would become the crucial theme in Japanese evaluations of Yeats, is often understood as both liminality and disappearance: the intermission between light and dark, the threshold spectrum in which immateriality and reality coexist, the realm of shadows, and so forth. In keeping the twilight from turning entirely to the dark of night, The Celtic Twilight seeks to substantiate the people who circulate the heritage, as they are also carriers of the heritage from those who preceded them. As in “Lapis Lazuli” (CP o 300–1) the emphasis is on the handling of creation and transcreation, rather than the mere material value of the artifact itself. Cultural events are not valued for their correlation to a museum’s sense of ethnic unity or social documentation of that which is gone. Instead of trying to perform a uniform assessment, The Celtic Twilight rallies resistance through a multitude of portraits, focusing on the dynamic of speech that keeps culture alive in the competition with history. There is no oblique endorsement here of Irish as a homogeneous political identity. The Celtic suggests the diverse senses of Irish life, while passing into a state of twilight, which can be lost altogether to an assimilating global culture and its new world order. A typically capitalistic assessment views rural traditions and the old ways as affectations that, under the pretense to authenticity, affectively prioritize environments and abandoned cultures ahead of economic sustainability and shared wealth for future generations. Regionalism, in such a view, is counterproductive to the communities it pretends to serve, since its efforts inhibit growth, development, and prosperity. This is precisely the debate now being played

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out in an increasingly Europe-skeptical Ireland whose economic sovereignty is determined in Brussels. The provincial, in its quest for protection, becomes frozen in a kind of subservience to itself and cannot imagine anything beyond what has already taken place. In its most extreme form, this sensibility can lead to the politics of a Jean Marie Le Pen in France, or other figures in a Western Europe shifting far to the right, with appeals to tradition as an argument against change. Now, I do not believe that Yeats is entirely averse to progress. However, he understands the assumptions that underlie the market forces that define progress and modernization. History does not always move in a progressive direction; and technological revolution does not always entail benign influences. These same market forces, using the rhetoric of freedom and convenience, assign value solely on a chart of an emerging neo-liberal appraisal of profit according to identity. As Mary Douglas (1986) analyzes, political categories, based on definitions of poverty as a lack of specific manufactured goods, are frequently misleading and, in fact, reinforce capitalist agendas. The Celtic Twilight moves across the many problematic responses in service to the Irish national cause, the means they had at their disposal to respond to the transitional period in which they operated, and the ongoing policy of British rule that influenced every detail of daily governance. In terms of creating a consensus of resistance in the nation, Gregory Castle’s (2001) extensive study of the Irish Literary Renaissance as ethnographic praxis demonstrates compellingly that the fieldwork of Yeats, and many others, undertook a kind of exploration that neither science nor politics could accomplish. Yeats does not index the rural society in totality. He, as would others, investigates alternatives to Victorian imperial demographics: “Yeats’s ethnographic imagination combines the desire for accurate cultural description with a reluctance to achieve the kind of distance that would allow for the separation of observer and observed” (63).22 Castle’s analysis helps to return Yeats to the circumstances of the Irish ethnographic movement, with the understanding that the nationalist narratives being analyzed had a pressing situational context unique to Ireland; however, on this account, they could fail owing to their lack of scientific rigour. The Celtic Twilight’s narrative approaches take on many

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different frameworks of storytelling, adopting both realistic and non-realistic narrative approaches to thematically depict an interaction with heritage, against the inroads of globalizing topographies. This is not to say that the Celtic Revivalists were without a critical temperament that could interpret in an active way the array of social expressions around them, and the predicaments that shaped them. This was always one of the qualities of Yeats’s style, both as poet and senator: later in his career, fearful that Irishness would become the probate of a select few or, worse, by yet another external imposition, Yeats warned in the Dáil in 1925. Speaking in regards to the Vatican’s ability to shape Irish policy making, and therefore Irish civil society, he told the senate that “it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive” (Major Works 450). In context, Yeats is talking here about the bill aimed at outlawing divorce in the Free State. In this speech, and more generally, Yeats acutely diagnoses those juggernaut powers that cause rapid, irresistible changes: he wants Irish laws for Irish people, not laws centred around foreign institutions and their decision making. The deliberate unsettling of formal, axiomatic pronouncements is a crucial feature of revivalist movements away from Victorian antiquarianism as well as modernist hegemony. The Celtic Twilight, “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time” (CP o 27), and many other early poems exhibit this incredulity toward material promise if such only exists as a dislocated item, understood only through retrospect. Likewise, later poems repeat the same distrust, emboldened by the crisis of current circumstances: consider “Adam’s Curse” (CP o 78), “The Second Coming” (CP o 189), or this passage from “Meru” (CP o 295): Civilisation is hooped together, brought Under a rule, under the semblance of peace By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century … that before dawn His glory and his monuments are gone. (1–5, 14)

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Skepticism is normally thought of as a necessary maturity to confront the phantasmal. Yeats reverses this prejudice: the phantasmal is an ontological strategy of spirit and apparition that highlights, with its shadows, the occultation of the past. Without the phantasm and the ancestral, one cannot mature as a society, as there is no comprehensive understanding of the past and the future. The phantasmal influences the perspectives of The Celtic Twilight by perceiving ancestral realities of time and space, ones that enable through the unworldly a counter-reality to the modern world. In examining the plight of real communities being transformed into mist, The Celtic Twilight opens up to varying ontological domains, represented by different forms of physical and temporal existences that interact to create reflexive points of view. The phantasmal, although apparitional, does not remain removed from the material. The phantasmal exerts influence and refraction against the mundane political and social, of a twilight community, disfigured, uncertain, and seeking to be reconfigured along its own terms. For this reason, the un-world of the Fae results from ruthless myths of consumption that ignore climate, environment, and folklore. The Celtic Twilight’s deliberate casting of fairies as the discourse of the vanishing acutely demonstrates the unique Revivalist strategy of phantasmalizing the trauma of the past, the trepidation of the cultural present, and the necessity of a sovereign future through the interplay of twilight and temporal uncertainty. This is this strategy that would open up the Celtic Revival so compellingly to a Japanese audience. The paranormal interlocutions of Revivalists act as banshees of warning, phantasms between present and past in the recall through twilight. In “The Stolen Child” (CP o 16) the hidden “fairyvats” have something of an ecological sensibility: the ancestors take back through the theft and stockpiling of raw resources. In describing a rural world under erasure, Yeats claims that symbols extracted from landscape are useless if disconnected from the sites of harvest and production. If historical sites must be removed to make room for a motorway, their restored presence in a museum is distorted through dematerialization and decontextualization.23 By Yeats’s time, fairies had already developed a satirical bite as figurative distortions of political sanctimony. Robert Kirk and Andrew

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Lang’s book The Secret Commonwealth (2006 [1893]) presents a legislative and civic discourse for interpreting the esoteric societies of the Fae. Yeats, in his preface to The Celtic Twilight, anticipates a more comprehensive book on the subject. Kirk and Lang’s is an attempt to describe the fairy world as a kind of onto-political entity, a phantasmal civilization, which they idealize as a justiciable utopia. W.Y. Evans-Wentz (1988), inspired by Yeats, describes the fairy realm not just in anecdotal terms, but as a comprehensive society with rules of governance and hierarchy.24 Exploring the potential of the fairies as alternative, Yeats can make assessments of civic responsibility and governance in Ireland, with the Fae as a kind of refractive comparison. The murky glance of the supernatural actually enhances pointed political critiques. Noenoe Silva (2004) assesses the role of orature in the anticolonial struggle for identity in the case of the islands of Hawai’i. Silva observes a conflict of narrative that indicts the program of story-enforcement, in the language of English and through the colonial education system, in which a mandated amnesia is inflicted on the local: “When the stories told at home do not match up with the texts at school, students are taught to doubt the oral versions” (3). These oral versions are typically assigned the unworthy value of the insubstantial, the superstitious, the backward, and the best-leftbehind. The Celtic Revival offered an antidote to forgetting in the form of recall and remembering. W.B. Yeats, in particular, manipulates the colonial strategy of reducing a respect of the local past to the primitively pantheistic by using the voices of that pantheism to act as counter-example to the dominant narrative of English society and order. In The Celtic Twilight, ancestral recall acquires a decided unevenness through the address of the fairies who seem to be the previous citizens of an older Ireland, denizens of a dissipated past who exist in half-lives connected to ruins and auras of trauma. Yeats in The Celtic Twilight utilizes the phantasm as a dialectical rejoinder to enact skeptical observations concerning the legal status of his own modernist society. For example, “Regina, Regina, Pigmeorum Veni” depicts two sets of beings who occupy different epistemological realms: the mortal, and its uncertainty principles about past and future, and the Fae, abjectified but granted a more

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comprehensive view because of their vantage point. When brought into juxtaposition, one of metaphysical misalignment, fairy sovereignty exposes what is lacking in the human (Ireland/Irish) situation. The Queen in this story insists on using her own language of civic authority. She defines judicial boundaries according to self-affirmations of who is a citizen of her world and the citizens’ rights to privacy and freedom of activity. Self-contained rules, the epistemological boundaries that shield her commonwealth, thus preclude unlawful knowledge (intrusion and interference) from outsiders. In defying their human curiosity, the Queen creates a sociological confrontation. In declaring (to Yeats), “It would not be lawful for you to know” (CT 80), she delivers a proclamation with potent political bite: she asserts that real autonomy lies in the ability for members to control their independent existence against the investigation of threatening outsiders. The Queen further discloses that, even when the Fae emigrate into the human world, they may retain the right to confidentiality over their true status and resist the program of forgetting. They are human, but may retain their dual-citizenship in the fairy world by remembering their source. The Queen simply cannot understand the mortal-centric notion, so inscripted into the shame of colonial survivors’ guilt, that the Fae’s very nature is sustained upon the whims of human fancy. Yeats, in this passage, suggests that she and her kind are only illusions, projections born of mental functions only. This runs so against the grain of the Queen’s thinking that she responds with total bewilderment. Yeats has attempted to dethrone her by denying both her ontological right to exist, as well as her governance over her own formative nature. Actually, Yeats tries to do to fairies what Matthew Arnold attempted to do to the Celtic. The idea that society exists only due to whims and fancy does not hold true. Fairies are independent from such external definitions of fairy as a label that would subjugate them. This is ultimately possible because the Queen’s parallel land has not been colonized. She retains separation from external meddling that would assimilate her kingdom. The Queen and her realm are not subjected to any justification through another nation’s disclosure of judgment. Instead, she can, much to the envy of Ireland in that day, issue abiding pronouncements from her own jurisdiction. The Fae

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are a self-defining society that retains presence, however displacing into the vanishing they have become, by insisting on the affective intersections of their stories with the land. In this section, as in others in The Celtic Twilight, Yeats has been drawn into a political fable: Representatives of two nations have met in free association. However, those of the phantasmal, whose sovereignty is intact, act as ambassadors who expose the colonial status of marginal Ireland. The Queen, the adjudicative authority of her commonwealth, issues rules of engagement from her own lex loci. Uncomfortably, this makes for a reflective contrast to Ireland’s own disfigured constitutionality. The Irish countryside, as a culturally independent but politically occupied space, does not have such formal privilege of autonomous decision making. The occupier’s own queen, Victoria, splices from afar her constituencies with edicts, limiting Ireland’s own boundaries of exchange. Yeats here begins to develop his sensibility of the phantasmal in that, rather than an aesthetics of daydreams, the phantasmal represents an alternate existence, one that threatens commercial materiality through its ghastly relationships to social events. These phantasmal apparitions, discarnate but still connected to the human world, have arisen consequentially from a predicament of physical disappearance. The Queen implies that her kingdom contains citizens who were once human, and who might become human again. Under her dominion are both ancestral and forthcoming generations of those who will live in Ireland. Yeats regards such phantasms as enacting a necessary performative agency that counters the enforced common sense of modernist social formation and its contexts. Their power counteracts the monocular view enforced by some utilitarian, forward-thinking agenda. To recall or to interact with the twilight – to actively intersect with it – destabilizes oppressive frameworks of predictability and normalcy. The Celtic Twilight, in the form of literary ethnography, enacts in a social dynamic of Irish society this concept of twilight that had been explored in stanzas through Yeats’s earliest lyrics. In the twilight, Oisin’s dialogue with St Patrick, in The Wanderings of Oisin, contests and exposes both of their respective temporalizations. Oisin becomes the wraith because his battle staff has been negated, his past erased, and his phantoms act out against the crosier, the new material power.

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Oisin, as a kind of vanished character, must somehow negotiate both his being, and his being-in-time, according to a landscape that has been rendered anachronized by St Patrick. Oisin senses, through his phantom state, that the Irish land has been massively altered through dynastic interference and has become uninhabitable, much like the lost isles of fancy. St Patrick lords over a new conditionality that he had instituted, by either expunging or converting the old society. This political evangelizer of Ireland has redefined the social networks and geographical landmarks of the country. However, because the phantasmal dimension persists in the form of Oisin as twilight, St Patrick was not able to totally exorcise the wraiths of the previous age. Oisin, as the spectralized past, persists to adjudicate this changed space through a possibility for ancestral recall, the recovery of memory into the cultural landscape. However, as displaced within allegory, the erasure of geographical effects and social communities finally becomes enough to cause Oisin’s total dissipation, literally both form and spirit evaporate.25 On this account, the interchanges of storytelling investigate the phantasmic – in the form of humans who turn into ghosts – as the result of dislocated or traumatized moments in the processes of transition in Irish history. The intensely locative sensibility of this imaginative approach to the discourse of cultural formation offers that alternative viewpoint to suggest an Irish self-awareness. What is evident, however, is that spaces of perception cannot rely upon purely empirical claims, since these fail to approach the broader question of communal history as having been made spectral. Reflective of this condition, certain Irish place names, indeed, denote this sense of vanishing as, paradoxically, marking the landscape. For example, Poolaphuca, in County Kildare, means hole of ghosts. In the previous chapter, I examined how Beinteinsson had made the same point (1985), with a similar poetic apparatus, regarding Old Norse and the contemporary Icelandic understanding of the vanishing past as totem spirit of fairies and ghosts. In this way, like Beinteinsson, Yeats argues for a belonging within the continuity of time in a place. In pursuing this attachment of twilight value as traces of the ancestral in place, Yeats may not be in the same class, socially, as Patrick Kavanagh (1964), and his form of realism. Nevertheless, it

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is worth briefly noting how distinctive The Celtic Twilight is from the more overt forms of Celtic romanticism in his own era. Though Yeats has been drawn into that setting in The Speckled Bird, he contrasts strongly with the more overt practitioners of that style in The Celtic Twilight. Montague Summers (1880–1948) or Edward Plunkett (1878–1957) exhibit that Celtic-Gothic stylistic akin to H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) and other modernist practitioners of occult fantasy and literary horror. Generally, Celtic Gothic concerns itself with attaining a transcendence, an emergence into a utopia of druids, which the Irish landscape suggests but does not represent. Summers and Dunsany have more in common with the Atlantis of Donnelly than the Kerry of Dinneen. The former ignores the social world as the domain of the bestial and material. To better understand those qualities that make The Celtic Twilight revolutionary, and distinct from the Celtic-Gothic formula, the works of such authors as Arthur Machen offer an instructive contrast. Machen, once a colleague of Yeats in the Golden Dawn, mixes in his writing elements of ceremonial magic with his own variations of Celtic Christianity. In every way, Machen’s autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams (1907) lacks the versatility, polyphony, concern for real communities, and skepticism that makes The Celtic Twilight such a complicated investigation of muintir, the people as localized community. The Hill of Dreams describes, quite prominently, the Celtic as an ethnicity with an innate magical aptitude, a quality that, in fact, defines the culture’s universal temperament. This work differs substantially in tone, voice, and themes from The Celtic Twilight, or even The Speckled Bird, because even the latter still at least concerns itself with actual geographies. Machen, instead, is looking for wormholes into imaginary kingdoms. Thus, his sense of the Welsh landscape is one of mere appearances that, to the keen of spirit, contain openings to transcendental, Celtic worlds. In terms of oral tradition and local culture, Machen’s sense of speech is nowhere near as honed as Yeats. When locals speak, only vague aphorisms and pseudo-incantations come out. But this does not matter. The only real truth comes from the cosmological, the kind of transcendent other-worldliness that exists away from people, customs, and cultures. Like the mobile phone Quirke mocks in my

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epigraph to this chapter, Machen has his ears fixed to his own aerial, listening to the heavens, the kind of distant isles of Oisin. Machen’s hill, where the dream is found, is not an actual spot of earth, but a garden of a redeemed Eden, and his flight into the astral journey of the soul is a journey into the realms of Neoplatonic beauty. In contrast to this more escapist view, a work such as “Enchanted Woods” (CT 87) shows Yeats’s social concerns for twilight as cultural vanishing, for real people and their predicaments, fiercely political in a way that Machen is not. This work reveals Yeats’s efforts to abandon conceptual frameworks and facile genres for ethnography. To do this, he turns to the irrational as a kind of intuitive capability that does not deny materiality nor social circumstances, but seeks to appraise them from competing perspectives of time. The phantasmal is not an imaginative ploy for daydreams, but complexly fluctuates in various modes of speech. This episode represents a young poet’s defence of the imagination, a bit of homage to Shelley, but follows through on its interrogation of “the true nature of apparitions” (CT 85). Yeats tries to find a middle ground between Kavanagh’s realism, a sense of the “common opinion” (CT 85), with recognition for enchantment as something in-between. Not altogether unlike Machen, Yeats sees beauty as a “gateway out of the net,” but what The Celtic Twilight emphasizes is that this net is fashioned out of intersections of “man’s misdeeds” (CT 86). To avoid being “swallowed up by the earth” (CT 84), one must be mindful of those intangible suggestions of “somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for” (CT 85–6). Such a phrase encapsulates the dilemma of narrating the elements that constitute a cultural landscape that resist facile classification. In terms of his own vantage point in comparison to the Faerie Queen, Yeats cannot absolve himself of his position as Anglo-Irish; however, through the act of listening he sheds the conventions adhering to his status. When Yeats speaks again of a net we were taken into at birth, the force that entraps with its “arguments” (CT 85), he is often understood as offering a gnostic viewpoint. Physicality is the trap of the higher self. On this idea, nets are a crucial symbol in Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters (1900) of ensnaring solipsism. In The Celtic Twilight, Yeats describes the net not as gross materiality in a

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Manichean sense, but the ensnarement that hoists people out of their situation in the landscape: he identifies this as the ignorant, lazy perspective that exists in disconnection, “to run hither and thither in some foolish sport” (CT 86). What the twilight offers is a broader, non-linear perspective on human activity than the mesh of netting, especially in how it repositions orientations to time and place. Shadows, Yeats quotes William Morris in The Celtic Twilight: “Foreshadowings mingled with the images / Of man’s misdeeds in greater days than these” (CT 86). This is Yeats’s commitment to cultural discourse as the enchantment of a place; and orality must become the political argument of The Celtic Twilight. The intermingling of persona instates the heteroglossia of multiple voices and experiences that share tradition through social comingling, against a landscape of ancestral continuity. The specific geographical region provides an ecological habitation in which story and geography collaborate, and this is an opposition to modernization.26 The eco-critical sensibility of The Celtic Twilight demonstrates Yeats’s appreciation of landscape, as formative to consciousness. This has parallels in twentieth-century philosophy, in both the East (as I will later discuss in Yeats’s connection to Watsuji Tetsurō) and West, as with Martin Heidegger (1967b), whose meditation on the unique enchantment of standing before a tree evokes the bio-cognitive exchange in which human thought becomes a form of shared habitation: We stand outside of science. Instead we stand before a tree in bloom, for example – and the tree stands before us. The tree faces us. The tree and we meet one another, as the tree stands there and we stand face to face with it. As we are in relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are. This face-to-face meeting is not, then, one of these “ideas” buzzing about in our heads … A curious, indeed unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we really stand. (40; original emphasis) Heidegger shows the experience of the tree, of being-in-the-landscape as the most natural and necessary foundation of ontology. Epistemology, the concentration or awareness, gives way to an energy of being

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that modernity sought as differentiated from the energy of progress. Yeats, by slipping out of rational epistemology into the paranormal, offers a kind of tree/person experience that erases the presumed dichotomy separating the two. A belief in this kind of reality, expressed through heterochronic perceptions, is not mere superstition or emotional retardation. The focus on the moods and forces in the landscape shifts attention from the utilitarian gaze that evaluates the local as equipment to be extrapolated and used. The paranormal represents the perspicacity to understand the soil of Heidegger’s tree, and that rational technology does not have “the right to decide what man’s place is” (1967b, 43). The enchanted sense of history arises out of that particular moment, as well as the ancestral penumbra along the cultural borderlines, connected to that tree.27 In Yeats’s essay “The Moods” (CP o 52) routine mechanisms of habitual thought can be overcome through strange impulses from the phantasmal domain. Thus, even at the level of the enterprise of commodified communication or an urban disconnect from nature, the moods can transverse time and space to disturb subjugation. Heidegger’s (1967a) theory of moods is not a fairy-tale vision. However, Heidegger argues for a cross-dimensionality that shows the unreliability of empirical data and affirms that there are intuitive forms of communication that arise from transferences of unique energies. In Quentin Smith’s (1981) analysis the Heideggerian sense of vision has a touch of the Oisianic phantasmic: “[Indifference] has the ecstatical meaning of an inauthentic mode of beenness. Indifference, which can go along with busying oneself head over heels, must be sharply distinguished from equanimity [Gleichmut]. This mood springs from resoluteness, which in a moment of vision, views the situations that are possible in one’s ability-to-be-a-whole as discarded in our anticipation of death” (211, original emphasis).28 Oisin’s original predicament had been a false disclosure of his findedness, of beingout-of-the-world, assuming the mood was an island unto itself. Only memory in concert with tangible object restored his sense of memory, through the crucial aura of enchantment, which arises from handling the object. The object is object-in-the-world to the mind through the touching of this object. Psychometry, the art of obtaining memory

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from a physical object, acts as a restorative to ontology. The accessed or recalled presence of memory in the object informs the appraiser of the object’s historicity in terms of the particulars of place and time. Memory, spirit, and physicality cooperate through total interactivity. Place becomes situational justification and preserver for a legacy potential. St Patrick knows this, and thus he had to destroy all associations of objects by erasing their situational landscape. Like Oisin, the objects become unmoored and adrift in the open ontological sea, without any form of memory to relocate them. In this way, St Patrick could forward his new agenda by overcoming the persistence of memory. Much of The Celtic Twilight explores Yeats’s belief in alternative epistemologies that negotiate the landscape through both direct and indirect perceptibility as means of locating folklore in ghostly traces.29 Such utterances, by their actions and even superstitions, query and unbalance the encroachment of conventional modes of thought and knowledge. What many had discerned was that the “old forms and customs … are being obliterated; the festivals are unobserved; and the rustic festivities neglected or forgotten,” as Sir William Wilde observed (CT 9–11). Aware of a rupture in the very continuum of Irish social life, but unconvinced that progressive modernity – so easily implicated in the very processes that created erasure in the first place – would provide a future that could compensate for the loss of the past. Arguing for the purposes of tradition, and opposed to the dominant utilitarianism, Yeats has enough philosophical muster in The Celtic Twilight to explore how a perceiver derives information from an array of possibilities, rather than by the monotony of normative stimuli. Thus, in The Celtic Twilight, the blurring of enchantment with the commonplace is a virtue: “I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and the supernatural very clearly” (CT 84). Such a description is, after all, a compliment. Forms of imaginative cognition can perceive timbres in the environs that are inaccessible to utilitarian norms and the market economies that drive them. Yeats is skeptical of urbanism as an accelerated form of Victorian progress: “In the great cities we see so little of the world” (“Village Ghosts,” in FLM 34). Yeats prefers those experiences that are produced through

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an awareness of ethos, and its attendant village ghosts, in the traditional sense of abode and place-dwelling. The advent of radio signals and other media disconnected the person from the aurality the landscape. Hence, The Celtic Twilight derives its forms of knowledge and experience through interactive storytelling, frequently outdoors, as pathways of energeia, energy, activity, and existing. Invention and Dissipation: The Irish Vernacular as Evidence The Celtic Literary Revival was thus picking up on questions of progress as generic collectivity. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (2003 [1891]) chronicles mass transportation as a violation of local communities. The financial agenda of the metropolis, seeking to gather cheap labour into its centres, extends its tentacles in the name of convenience. Part of the community itself dies, it seems, when an oncoming mail van kills the family horse. In Jude the Obscure (2003 [1895]), expedited communication and transport, rather than allaying hardships, create haste and confusion for the sake of capital gain. The guiding principle here is that the margins offer a culturality that the metropolis cannot reproduce, even though its markets desperately want to do so. Thus, when we think of Yeats’s attention to local modes of speech, we might compare with composers such as Bartók or Enescu who turned to ethnomusicology for transcribing the rhythms and melodies of ethnically isolated communities.30 Douglas Hyde (1986) laments that cataclysmic interventions resulted in a dislocated people who “lost all they had – language, traditions, music, genius, and ideas” (157). Turning to the superstitious, which Hyde sees as a form of knowledge that resists “the rapid decay of the Irish vernacular” and instead presents a repository of “vestiges” (1986, 157), the Revivalists were deliberately choosing to look into an unstable zone, an occult zone as Frantz Fanon might say, which is ethnopoetically significant. In terms of documenting the phantasmal margins in The Celtic Twilight, Yeats’s fairy lore, as lens for social observation, does not record data and anecdote about superstitions for their own sake. Years had

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already compiled several volumes on that notion, as had Andrew Lang and others. Likewise, Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology (1850) gathered forms of folk tradition, but as an anecdote collection that has little engagement with actual communities and their ways of circulating tradition. The Celtic Twilight works on a different principle. The narrative realism concerns itself with the people telling the story – their descriptive habits, patterns of speech, and hereditary forms of knowledge – as much as the actual story itself. For Yeats, to be attuned to the paranormal allows for multiple expressions of the temporal, as the paranormal acts as a conduit for subversive knowledge, even from different eras. This fantastic form of communication can, however, only be understood as it is connected to a specific environment and its related communities, to the locals and to their particulars. The Celtic Twilight, unlike Keightley’s work, concentrates on persons and how they perceive, as much as on what they perceive. Conversations about the “wee people” are, in fact, a rhetorical strategy, rather than a dogmatic belief or a form of amusement. The folkloric entails ways of representational thinking that champions the marginal, traditional, and acoustic. The Revivalist perspective is helping to establish new literary methods here – the folk art polemic, the genre of twilight: the folkloric acts in tandem with environmental and cultural minority issues. Paddy Tunney, like many Irish musicologists, recognizes that cultural survival entails concerted activism. His important memoir, “a journey into traditional song” – Where Songs Do Thunder (1991) – gives homage to Yeats on several occasions. Tunney, a troubadour gathering songs around rural Ireland, makes a declaration of fidelity to folk music, its traditional methods of circulating tunes, and the community-building power through its enjoyment as worthwhile anachronism. Tunney, ignoring the industry of pre-packaged television programs and disposable pop concerts, declares that folk music must be accessed directly as an existential acousticality. This is what the seisiún, the village pub session, should offer: intimate community, instruction, and an ethics for cultural location. “The Fiddler of Dooney,” for Tunney, best represents this ideal of music as learned by ear and exchanged person to person:

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“Wheesht!” he commanded. “Ah! That’s The Blackberry Blossom! By damn, but it must be the ‘wee people’ that’s in it. Would it be unlucky to dance to their music, do you think?” “Dance away,” I assured him. “That’s not ‘gentle music’ … When blackberry blossoms berried and ripened as black and shiny as sloe, there was a song to honour their maturing. It’s called Na Smeara, or The Blackberries, and was composed in the native tongue by J P Craig, a teacher in Saint Eunan’s College, Letterkenny, round the early decades of this century. It was taught to me by Hudie Devanney.” (8, 9) The tune’s validity is understood through the reliability of its transmission: place names, teachers, and connections are of crucial importance for the sustenance of the musical community and its heritage. Thus, the inevitable connection between folk music, geography, and history undergoes a Herderlike gestation. The music will act as an interface, a way to access a cultural and physical environment that, socially speaking, are both creative habitat and auditorium. Performed outdoors, the tune further exacts its themes from natural phenomena and the phantasmal merges with this process. Thus, Tunney can slyly mock the “gentle music” as the stuff of printed booklets for the home parlours of the bored and wealthy.31 Magic, really, becomes a metaphor for the glamour of something that technology cannot produce. The teacher of music, who is also a collaborator, brings his or her own personal heritage to the occasion. This concept has been explored in Derek Bell’s book on Ulster harp lore, which traces through a performer’s perspective the continuity of Irish music life through the Belfast Harpers’ Society, beginning in the late eighteenth century, as one of the few sources for Irish musical instructions. Bell explains through the example of the harp as iconic symbol in Ireland that continuity and tradition are the same in operation, in terms of understanding folk music as something diametrically opposed to disposable pop music (1999). Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (2000) references Patrick Pearse’s article “Traditionalism” as just this kind of endorsement: “the only arts which have survived to us from Ireland’s past are the peasant arts” (123).

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In paying such close attention to the rural as formative to a particular identity, the Celtic Revival has been accused of imagining a pseudo-stratum of Irish society broadly termed the peasant, who is attuned to the boggy hinterland and leads an upright agrarian life. To what extent did Yeats intend peasant to define the Irish people under colonial occupation? The word peasant, after all, has its origins in feudal society. Certainly, to continue to use this identifier, as collectively describing various segments of Irish society around a much broader gaeltacht in that time, is not anthropologically satisfying. Yeats’s point about traditional communities is that those who live “a simple and natural life” are better off, as opposed to the “hurried, troubled, unhealthy life” of the urban rationalists (FLM 252). The Celtic Revival’s use of peasant – as would Yanagita Kunio with jōmin [common folk] – has been thoroughly scrutinized for its inherent political biases. It is perhaps on this point that many critics have seen the invention of the Quiet Man of boggy Irish rurality. If the Revivalists are interested in the stories, then they must portray the storytellers, who are the interlocutors in the heritage milieu that circulates the traditions of the narratives. The evaluation of the agrarian cultures of western Ireland as being a distinct social entity has caused much consternation, then and now. In the push for Irish sovereignty, this Gaelic turn of Revivalism – which entails the risky if necessary ethnographic shift toward cultural description (if also prescription) identified and according to what criteria – has contributed effectively to the debate about the Irish during a period of national self-determination. Douglas Hyde expresses the optimistic mood of retrieval through Gaelic identification this way: “Thus it comes that the only arts which have survived to us from Ireland’s past are peasant arts; just as the only Irish speech which is living today is peasant speech” (quoted by Ó Giolláin 2000, 123). One problem is that those who actually were peasants, who did not, in fact, choose that label for themselves, felt that their lives were being converted into privileged people’s theories. Yeats, particularly in Patrick Kavanagh’s view, was not sufficiently class conscious to make any credible statements about the so-called country life. We need not avoid the many merits of this accusation. But it also helps

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to think of how readily Yeats broke class taboos, and so we can also appreciate him for being so class unconscious. The Celtic Twilight, in its variety of entries from different social positions, deliberately circumvents the hierarchical patterns of exclusive, class-based networks. One has only to imagine the initial embarrassment, for both parties, as Yeats and Gregory knocked on cottage doors, ignoring entrenched barriers about acceptable company or proper decorum. In The Celtic Twilight, at least, Yeats cares little for the supposed merits of elite society and its representative occupations; indeed, much of the brunt of his satirical thrusts and cuts are the urban middle classes, safely ensconced in cultural pretensions without the risk of social activism. In the early twentieth century, with all of its political entanglements, Irish authors were staking out in their art respective claims to political territory. Class distinctions inflected the relative claims to be speaking for independence movements, and these could be further subdivided by religion, district, income, and so forth. For the marginalized majority, living away from the metropolis, and dependent upon now-ruined means of pre-industrial capital, the options had seemingly been stagnant poverty or progressive industrialism. Much of the population of Catholic Belfast is derived from Donegal immigrants who had come for the linen mills and shipyards when the fields were no longer fallow or the crops indexed at low cost. As many political commentators at that time noted, Yeats’s Anglo-ness was a source of distrust. He was seen as occupying a privileged position, tied to the colonial history. Thus, Patrick Kavanagh unflatteringly alludes to Yeats in “The Great Hunger” (1942) as a kind of class tourist, perusing a decaying landscape with a full belly and plenty of sentiment. From such a lofty position, Kavanagh suggests one can regard the earthly tradition of the peasant abstractly, with no real dirt under the fingernails. Against this, Kavanagh’s poems claim the soil as a territory of rustic suffering that poetic affectations cannot mimic. The real voice of the agricultural society has the authenticity of historical trauma that is class-specific. Consider also Cathal Ó Searcaigh’s (2005) work, which often resonates with the Kavanagh viewpoint that soil is not sacred but is, rather, scandalous:

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Here I came from hill and bog, from small parishes of hypocrisy, from the gossipy towns, from the poverty and anonymity of my people, from the mossy nest of their kindness, the hedges and fences of their complacency. (105)32 Such a view is often positioned as an antidote to the presumed Yeatsian romance. Instead of storytellers and musicians, we have gossips and hypocritical priests, also a part of Irish society. Likewise, in trying to circumvent the Quiet Man, several Irish artists have been said to have played up a working-class upbringing for stylistic credentials: Brendan Behan has been said to have exaggerated his proletarian life in Dublin; and some say Colin Farrell’s accent has become noticeably more guttural as his global fame increases. It would thus be equally remiss to limit presentations of Irishness to urban realities, whether working-class or Dublin’s economic majesty of the D 4 district. Questions regarding how the Irish could unite across class boundaries inform much of the twentieth-century quest in Ireland and have, in fact, challenged the alleged mysticisms and mystifications of the Irish soil by redefining Irish realities according to labour, resources, and sovereignty in decision making over these issues. Overemphasis, however, of these tendencies to think of land as capital has created a contemporary situation very much anticipated in The Celtic Twilight: an Ireland that exists as an entity for the market economy, whose fortunes rise and fall on European imports and corporate investment. The potential of landscape to act as a repository of an irreplaceable history, as something other than a potential dual-carriageway for transporting consumer goods, had been the intention of the Celtic Literary Revival that has continued on in the eco-critical consciousness of contemporary Irish authors. Irish literature continues to struggle with the dilemma of national consciousness in the era of partitioned independence. For example, some readers have felt that Seamus Heaney, in preferring a pastoral mode for Ulster, has been too silent on the gritty issue of sectarian violence, or else feel he exploits them to the extent of perpetuating

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a violently tribal north where Christmas truces never come. Kavanagh attacks Yeats’s adoration of the soil as fixated on magical reverberations. This sort of disconnected dithering comes from the drawing-room Irish.33 The bourgeoisie are incapable of a realistic awareness of rural society, its hardship and labour, the bread and butter of people born into a dependency upon agriculture to eke out a living. But Ó Searcaigh (1993, 1995), interestingly, moves beyond Kavanagh by balancing a healthy distrust for drizzly Irish provincialism, while also promoting a commitment to ecological sustainability and organic farming as a positive aspect of the soil. That agriculture can operate according to its own ecologically sensitive tenets, respecting the earth as both sustainer and employer, challenges from a current market perspective those corporate forces that Kavanagh only partially addresses. Yeats’s relation to rural writing fascinates partly because of its split identity. As a resident of Dublin and London, Yeats does bring a certain degree of the city to his outlook. This provides useful information, in fact, as he is well positioned to know exactly both how the machinery of modernity works and those who are oiling its gears. From his mother’s side, the Sligo perspective, Yeats grew up with a point of view that recognized the uniqueness of these outlying communities, their distinctions and character, their ghost traces as culturally specific tropes that function in cross-temporal ways.34 Yeats begins The Celtic Twilight by employing, as does Ó Searcaigh in the above verse, the phrase “my people” (mo mhuintire). To whom is Yeats referring when he says, to introduce The Celtic Twilight: “My own people who would look where I bid them” (32)? For most of this work, it is Yeats who looks where he is bid.35 This broad notion of muintire is difficult to render in English, meaning both people generally, but also trenchant social units, such as community or households.36 As a politically charged but rhetorically vague term, people/muintire variously defines itself according to geographical place, geology of landscape, or cultural temperament. My people, in the Home Rule movement, described a process of organizing a group identity to be brought forward for a political goal. Clearly, the General Election of 1918 exposed the great strain among the diverse constituencies of the island – but a democratic consensus had been managed.

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Sometimes, however, it seems the only legitimate version of Ireland, as proposed through the shrill backlash of black mass satire, is one of Hibernophobia, which seems at present to be the nihilism of films such as Intermission or, at times, in the novels of Patrick McCabe, Frank McCourt, and other authors. Ireland is a desperately hilarious place to get away from, at all costs. While there is much room to examine Ireland’s many social ills, a rather arched tendency to establish one’s authentic Irishness by decrying it at every turn has become something of the new cultural voice. This ambience has coincided with urban sprawl, economic deprivation in a panEuropean market economy, and the betrayal of the Irish people by overly trusted institutions like the Catholic Church. Political ennui and social surrender in the voice of ethnic indifference has become the authentic way of accessing “Ireland.” Nevertheless, the rejection of all things that claim Irishness is, after all, another dogma: a master narrative of sarcasm to replace one of superstition. Emma Donoghue’s novel Stir-Fry (1995) interestingly explores the contrast between the rural and Dub points of view as a way to expose this tendency to devalue Irishness. Maria, from a small town, loves to vilify her upbringing through parochial exaggeration: “There’s a little statue of Our Lady with the hands chipped off, and a field out back full of cow shit.” Her Dublin friend sees this straight away as a political performance: “Look, don’t satirize it for my benefit,” Jael broke in. “I’m not a journalist … don’t try and be sophisticated by slagging it” (90). Jael points out that a quest for hyperbolic realism can just as easily justify itself through smug satire, in which the culchie becomes envisioned in a certain way backward to the jackeen, the Dubliner of the real Ireland, the nitty-gritty. Lady Gregory in “Ireland, Real and Ideal” (1990 [1898]) commented on this kind of cynicism decades earlier, noting that expatriates affected a disdain for the Irish language as a way of proving their urbane sensibilities: “Sometimes even emigrants affected to look down on the language of their childhood … But the people soon began to regret what they were losing” (250). As its fundamental concern, the Celtic Revival feared the trading of sovereignties, of loosening the grip of one dictatorial titan to welcome the clenched fist of another. Given the increasingly

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cosmopolitan quality of Irish society that had been the centre of colonial oversight, the need to assess heritage and ancestry had to look elsewhere, as in the Revival time. The Celtic Revival (as localized politic) and modernity (as European enterprise) were contested through the uprisings of Irish nationalist negotiations. But who are the modern Celts – as people, community, and cultural enplacement – that the nationalist jargon kept attempting to locate for analytical resistance? The Irish peasant was not invented out of whole cloth by the Celtic Literary Revival. Revivalists had anticipated the endgame that technological modernity has brought about in terms of cultural dissipation and homogenization of identity through global markets. The environment has, as Yeats predicted, been treated like an unlimited resource for consumption. Is this any more preposterous than an animism that directs respect and a saving delicacy toward ecology? Is a political agenda of a unified European Union with a single currency that benefits the larger export economies any more an imagined community, or invented tradition, than the Revival’s recording of local stories?37 Folklore, to Yeats, suggests a saner alternative to rampant consumerism. Irish society, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is now being rapidly forced to choose what to do with its relatively small terrain. One need only think again of the women in County Mayo, rosaries in hand in 2007, opposing Dutch Royal Shell who would transform their communities into refineries, dump sites, and halting sites for lorries. If, by inventing a tradition of Celtic, the Revivalists argue for an eco-critical sensitivity to landscape as the location of culture, then their attention to Irish language and voices can be better contextualized. With its incisive concern for pretensions to origins, Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the invented tradition has received widespread application, having been applied by critics to their presumptions of contemporary Haida art, to the artificiality of tea in China, or to false lineages in pottery schools in Morocco. If applied haphazardly, this term of invention may seem redundant: of course, traditions are in some way inherently ideological formulations, idea-constructs, as much now in current circumstances as they were in the past. One might make the same claim about everything that pretends to be reality itself: quantum mind-games.

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If all that tradition can do is draw up negligible patterns in the present and retroactively superimpose these templates upon a past, why care for them at all, except to debunk them? Ethically, we should critique the assertions of authority, situated on a claim to have the identity of the past; but, by the same measure, what might be displaced through heuristic devaluation and dismissal is incalculable. For post-colonial Ireland, the pressure to assert a counter-British tradition could entail assertions of historical fidelity to a pristine continuity with an idealized source. At the same time, authors such as Yeats sense that custom, or tradition, like a spreading laurel tree, is multiply suggestive. Tradition spawns countless leaves, or variables, many of which are hidden or dispersed. To account for the flexibility of these variables as symptoms of history, tradition for Yeats serves two purposes: to allow for re-narrativization, for altering personal and national relationships to what Slavoj Žižek (1989) calls the national Thing. Žižek famously argues that the thing is in fact a lack, a vacancy, whose emptiness needs to be filled. But, in doing this, one accords a palliative value to enjoying and experiencing the particularities of custom. The discourse of the vanishing is problematic on this issue of an inaccessible source; but the desiring for the source is what activates cultural awareness and sensitivity. The Revival practice correlates often with Yi-Fu Tuan’s (2001) appreciation that “feelings and intimate experiences are often inchoate and unmanageable to most people, but writers have found ways of giving them form” (202). Just how inchoate feelings are to most people no one can say; but that art has a distinctive power in the perspective of embodied experience had been why literary had been so effective in taking a leading role in the Celtic Revivalist movement. Moreover, Ireland can say, quite proudly, I think, that its writers had been at the very vanguard of social change and political liberation, as often as poetry has now been dismissed as too inclusive and personal to mobilize effective agency to revolutionary movements that did not seek to erase the past. It is certainly true that emphasis on tradition can lead to shrill parochialism. Likewise, the belief that the rural, and the people who live there, have a unique capacity for understanding beauty can lead to uncomfortably essentialist statements, many of the kind presumed to be offered by Yeats. The Celtic Twilight cannot be reduced to a

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metaphysical racism in which the Celtic stands for ethnic superiority. Also, Yeats is not codifying a tourist blueprint, from romantic adulation, into a sitcom of sentimentality, a manifesto of fascist purity, or a screenplay for The Quiet Man. (John Ford’s film, after all, was based on a Maurice Walsh short story.) We must not overlook the critical issue resulting out of Herder (and perhaps Yeats by extension) in the way that Yeats’s defence of the local seems to necessitate a kind of xenophobia. Yeats, at this stage of writing, had begun to confront the question of how to preserve the local while relating to the global. Indeed, his work from this period is very much concerned with the global, in that he rejects an insular cultural nationalism in favour of a more advanced form of nationalism that is attentive to “foreign models” of literature. The Celtic Twilight, however, does not drive away the other, something “non-celtic,” from the discussion. In fact, The Celtic Twilight allows for forms of cross-cultural dialogue that Herder did not develop. Based upon the communal activities of The Celtic Twilight, Yeats describes a twilight realm that through a diversity of cultural traditions can be accessed. Such a proposition elicited an exchange with Japanese authors, who considered an intercultural exchange with Ireland as conducive to investigating their own sense of the local. The Celtic Twilight, rather than pushing away debate, led to various locals and particulars whose sense of identity offered an alternative to the generic versions of modern nation-identities, whether “European” or “Asian.” This chapter is not intended to be an extensive examination of all the features of The Celtic Twilight. I wish to emphasize a key principle to it: The Celtic Twilight finds some of the flexible variables of nation that hint rather than inform. Tradition can take forms more as apparition than as substance, resisting the artificial genealogies of the present. The apparition of tradition might also include the voice of an ancestrality, one temporally deferred, or made dormant, to later reawaken to trouble the narrow designs for an Irish independence. Yeats candidly shows that, in attempting to preserve one local and particular, he would not have to hermetically seal Ireland from the world. Rather than a racial retreat, Yeats’s boldest move would be to continue the work of The Celtic Twilight in an intercultural per-

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spective. Generally speaking, the condition of local folk cultures in dialogue with one another has been a crucial theme in twentiethcentury artistic development, in Ireland and elsewhere. At the ground level, one can see the real effects of this in the most remote of Irish pubs. Certainly, the debate between insularity and fusion has been contentious, and will always be so. Indeed, many trad musicians have a story of being told not to play Donegal fiddle tunes in a Kerry session. They will also have reports of brilliant results from the rhythms created by a bodhrán and tabla playing together at the same table in Sligo, as I myself have witnessed. Anti-innovation, as an inflexible attitude, can quickly become racist. Folk music has often tried to manage the struggle between preserving local custom, while playing duets with other local customs: for example, shakuhachi and tin whistle together in a tune. When performed well, with musicality at its best, few would complain. Nothing has been lost, and the fusion can augment the timbres and concerns of each instrument. Both, after all, can be said to have legitimate worries about cultural forces that would break apart the necessary identities that transmit received tradition, as say, a musical convention of style or interpretation. Together, flute and shakuhachi do not negate each other; and, from a broader perspective, they may enhance an awareness of the plight faced by each tradition. After all, they share a commonality as sounds against the record industry’s machinery.38 Tradition, if effectively allowed to adopt without pursuing either survivalist exclusion or libertarian erasure, can operate on a transnational level. Modernism saw as its task the formative implementation of this principle on real levels of human interaction. Hinting toward this horizon of exchange, The Speckled Bird, which anticipates the polyglossia of The Celtic Twilight, concludes with something of a rather prescient prediction for an important step in the continued development about to occur in Yeats’s writing: “He was going to the East now, to Arabia and Persia, where he would find among the common people, so soon as he learned their language, some lost doctrine of reconciliation. The philosophic poets had made sexual love their principal symbol of a divine love” (SB 106). Hearne, here, describes a salient feature of Celtic Revival’s overall viewpoint: concentrating on the local and particular will lead to a greater sensitivity for

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other locals and particulars. A larger dialogue could be created not through imperial fusions, but through cross-cultural awareness. The important transition in Yeats’s literary sensibility, thus, was not romance to realism – but nationality to transnationality. Twilight, being paratemporal and possessing ancestral forms of localized knowledge, provided materials for exchange in an artistic way that mass trade could not. As a kind of reciprocal ancestral recall, the Celtic Revival’s invocation of twilight would become a space of ideological confluence with Japanese modernism’s interpretations of Irish folklore, and its cultural introspection.

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e

c ha p t e r f o u r

Airurando bungakukai and the Translation of Fairies To tell you the truth, rather than with Kawabata my compatriot who stood here twenty-six years ago, I feel more spiritual affinity with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature seventy-one years ago when he was at about the same age as me. Of course I would not presume to rank myself with the poetic genius Yeats. I am merely a humble follower living in a country far removed from his. As William Blake, whose work Yeats revalued and restored to the high place it holds in this century, once wrote: “Across Europe & Asia to China & Japan like lightnings.” – Ōe Kenzaburō, “Nobel Prize Lecture”

The purpose to this stage has not been to provide a thorough analysis of the Celtic Revival, its participants, and its methodologies. I have instead endeavoured to focus on specific facets of the Revivalists’ approach so that I can then proceed to show the intercontinental reach of these features. Shifting to the second but connected focus of this work, I consider Japanese interactions with Irish texts and authors, tracing in this chapter some of the reception history of the Revival in Japan and its reach into Japanese modernism, particularly through the efforts of the Airurando bungakukai [Irish Literary Studies Society]. Formed with chapters in both Tokyo and Osaka, this was a scholarly society dedicated to the translation and study of

Irish literature, the Airurando bungakukai facilitated conversations between artists, researchers, and translators that would place these communications about the works of Irish writers directly into ongoing debates about Japanese modernism. In the following chapter, I will develop the sense of interpersonal connections that these authors shared, and the literature they co-developed, as proceeding along definite themes and concepts, especially twilight. As outlined in my introduction, in a mode of modernist cultural turbulence, both Japanese and Irish authors engaged in a mutually referential narrative for the handling, or handing down, of tradition. My overall reading strategy here is to shift the Celtic Revival away from the domain of anglophone literary criticism by engaging in the heterocultural, interlinguistic complexities of this literature in transnational modernity. The Irish-Japanese intersection demonstrates the subtle and dynamic interplay of complex ideas of transnational modernism as they move across multiple languages and cultural discourses. My approach is not that of only hypothetical theoretical connections, but offers an exploration of how interpersonal dynamics, as a result of modernism’s push to have a global outlook, created artistic dialogue. Not merely a parochial experiment in national myth mongering, the efforts of the Celtic Revivalists translated into international contexts, receiving an enthusiastic response from Japanese audiences. Authors such as Fiona Macleod, J.M. Synge, and W.B. Yeats would be refracted through the interpretive lens of translators such as Matsumura Mineko (1878–1958), a Japanese scholar of fairy tale and folk traditions who translated Synge, Yeats, and Dunsany, and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), one of Japan’s foremost modernist authors and appreciators of Yeats’s writing, especially his fairy-oriented works. Matsumura, publishing actively in Japanese literary magazines, would be at the forefront of introducing a notion of the Celtic as a kind of socio-geographical narrative of folklore that could be transposed into local scenarios for critique and discussion. Her work, along with others such as Akutagawa, promoted a concerted interest in Japan for Irish literature, particularly in the form of the Airurando bungakukai. What becomes apparent in approaching the materials produced by this group is that Japanese authors, in configuring a

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sense of Keruto, the Celt or Celtic, based on Revivalist texts, posited all kinds of correlations between the respective ghosts that haunted their respective locations. They saw the translation of fairies, of finding cultural as well as linguistic cognates for Irish phantasms, as a procedure for evaluating cultural dispossession. Categorical terms such as yōkai [monsters] were generally reserved for autochthonous species of Japan. But synonyms such as mono no ke, less geographically precise, provided genealogical spaces for Celtic myths to be absorbed into a Japanese milieu. In Akutagawa’s and Matsumura’s interpretations of the Revivalists’ forms of cultural criticism, to name two Japanese examples of Yeats’s translators, a creature such as a bean sídhe [banshee] represents distorted forms of collective memory that perform within a rift between present circumstances and dislocated past. The Celtic Revival provided opportunities for international exchange, through the stylistics of their mythmaking and cultural narration. This activity is quite different from the common portrayal of a movement retreating into a nationalistic jingoism. To arouse such extraordinary attention from a range of Japanese authors, texts such as The Celtic Twilight must be offering dialogical possibilities of a wider range than have been generally assessed. The Celtic Twilight, as a text and a project, influenced Japan as part of a crucial network between Irish and Japanese writers not only for its investigation of Irish communal ethos, but for its critique of its loss and dissipation. Masao Miyoshi (2010) has critiqued the obdurate power of hegemony, particularly in Japan, for the promotion of consensus cultures that erase differences and diversity. But he is also equally concerned about transnationalism, in the corporate shape it usually takes. He sees an inevitable process in which “culture as a historical force is inexorably absorbed by consumerism” (13). Masao calls for rebellion against these forces: “we have serious work to do – to resist and survive, and to help our neighbors also resist and survive. For the only alliance that is needed now is the alliance of all the exploited regardless of the categories of difference” (204). But on whose terms, by what definitions, and upon what terrain, will these battles take place? Many modernist frameworks were in operation, ones that were enabling but also disabling, for possibility. And literary cultures

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investigated them for the promotion of interethnic and intercultural exchange in an increasingly globalized world. The often-heard thesis of Yeats and Japan – which, with only a few exceptions – is written about by people without knowledge of the Japanese language – has been unnecessarily reduced to a onesided affair. Rather, a comprehensive dialectic between nationality and transnationality emerged very early in the Revivalists’ defence of the local and particular, in relation to Japanese interpretations. Hesse claimed, as I quote in the first chapter, that deep engrossment with one’s own notions of nation should then productively lead to intercultural dialogue firmly established through the consideration of ethos. Conversion is not possible, but an informed grounding in the local can then allow for comparative dialogues with other locales. The Revivalists immersed themselves in a consideration of Ireland as a nation in transition, with folkloric receptivity as a way of considering origins; therefore, they became sensitive to broader continuities of fantasy, history, and nationality in other places. The same can be claimed for Japanese writers who turned to the notion of the Celt, and Irish folk literature, for investigation. The Revivalist model of The Celtic Twilight stands against its Irish and European contexts. The methodology it employs to address the Irish situation led to its reception in Japanese writings of the late Meiji and Taishō periods (1880–1925). Lady Augusta Gregory (1995) was aware that the Revival was inspiring transnational considerations. She writes: “Our Gaelic movement … is being sympathetically watched by the countries bordering encroaching Germany” (253). This chapter intends to show that the international sympathy extended in cooperative exchange on a transnational arc of circularity well beyond even what the Revivalists had anticipated. The formulation of Irish-Japanese literary exchange as a paradigm of transnational modernity, and the particular relationship between Nihonjin to Airurandojin [the Japanese and the Irish], often formulated in simplistic templates, can be accounted for as a convergence of similar insecurities: both are island nations [shimaguni], have similar folk practices, and share a sense of sacred sites and music. But none of these analogies are definitively satisfying. We need not repeat tired

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clichés about shared qualities that define either Japan or Ireland. It is more interesting to pursue the comparative discussions, initiated in modernism, that resulted from the intercultural exchange between Irish and Japanese literature. This subject has had ongoing appeal. Shiba Ryōtarō examined the cultural interrelationships between areas in Japan and Ireland through his thoughtful Irish travelogue written in the 1990s, Airurando nikki [A Diary in Ireland] (2006). Intrigued by the prevalence of Irish folksongs in the Japanese education system, Shiba seeks to understand the origins of this mutual harmony between these two cultures that would facilitate transmission of music (vol. 32, 192). As well as music, he finds a comparative landscape that he analyzes through contemplative essays much in the way Hearn did with Japan. According to Shiba, Ireland is rife with the fantastic populating the everyday, and he narrates a landscape as containing numerous spirits and superstitions. This makes for an interesting point of contact with Japan. His Airurando nikki contains a number of passages related to The Celtic Twilight as moments of local storytelling and orature that can coincide with Japanese parallels.1 Shiba pursues the Revivalists’ point that folklore orality must be connected with the particulars of the local: as Yeats described, “races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill” (CT 194). Generally, Shiba sees similarities in the ways in which Irish customs show an involvement in the landscape as perpetuating associations with the ancestral. As Shiba confirms in his essays, The Celtic Twilight takes up this theme ardently: even the displaced can become strategized sites of radical alterity; they can enact narratives that haunt the topography of Ireland and Japan. Otherworldly voices are not spawned from afar, but are the resultant miasma of evaporating heritages, and the communities and perpetuation of tradition that supported them. Japanese and Irish topographies are not the same: their distinctive, irreplaceable contexts were vastly different, and we need not claim similarities to make a dialogue comprehensible. In order to appraise how this dialogue occurred in interactive terms, I introduce here some of the major figures responsible for the IrishJapanese literary dynamic, and how their particular contributions developed the theoretical trajectory of their contrarian modernisms.

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Lafcadio Hearn: The Unwilling Celtic Revivalist Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) – born in Greece, raised in Ireland, relocated to America, and expatriated to Japan – exemplified the intercontinental life of one who, forever being on the outside, took advantage of the shifting vantage point that comes from with being the outsider. Described by the Irish Times in 2004 as “the most famous Irishman you’ve never heard of,” Hearn combined his talents for journalism, eccentricity, and good fortune in being adopted by whatever region he found himself in, eventually becoming one of the prominent travel writers of his time.2 Credited with coining “the Big Easy” in his writings about New Orleans, he left a prosperous career as a reporter to relocate to Japan, just as that nation was opening to outsiders in the late nineteenth century. There, eventually taking on the name Koizumi Yakumo, he taught at Tokyo University and lived in various areas around the country.3 Although never mastering the Japanese language, he nonetheless became a prodigious chronicler, if also a romantic interpreter, of Japanese customs, culture, and sensibilities at a time when most of the information being presented was superficial and second-hand. Whatever his faults at interpretation and translation may be, he nonetheless is held in high esteem by many Japanese people today, being widely read and recently appearing on a postage stamp as well as a manga series being written about his life. If one were to look for a quintessential bridge between east and west, a dynamic facilitator of ideas, information, and relationships, then Hearn would be that intriguing example who has received both praise and blame for his efforts. As the hub that linked Irish and Japanese authors, Hearn is a major reason for the popularity of Irish literature in Japan, and its encounter with the ideas and works of the Celtic Revival. Although there have been any number of expositors and explicators of Japan and the Japanese since him, Hearn, a journalist of cultural geography, began taking notes at a time of radical social adjustment in Japan as the nation re-evaluated itself for a global gaze. I call Lafcadio Hearn something of an unwilling Revivalist, at least as far as Celtic matters go, because he was an Irishman who seemed not very fond of Ireland. Rarely has he a kind word to say about his

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childhood there. Born with a visual disability (he preferred to be photographed in profile to hide this condition), his near blindness would be an enormous obstacle to overcome in his literary career. But some feel that what Hearn lacked in optical abilities he made up for in sympathetic insight. His genius for being taken in and welcomed by locals, especially in Japan, would be the envy of any traveller. And while critics have made vigorous praise and blame of his descriptions and depictions of Japanese society, Hearn was among the first wave of foreigners arriving in Japan to teach the nation the ways of the foreigner. He thus has some things in common with the larger contingent of o-yatoi gaikokujin who had monopolized multiculturalism in Japan. O-yatoi gaikokujin were government-employed experts brought in from abroad to advise the state on emulating the economic and military supremacy of the West. They represented a diverse set of specialties, including entrepreneurs, weapons experts, artists, scientists, missionaries, and economists. Their range of connections included an eager audience of elites, who had granted these hired consultants extraterritorial privileges throughout most of the late nineteenth century. Lafcadio Hearn can, indeed, be considered to be among this group, but his relationships with various Japanese peoples and their communities often went further than most of the other o-yatoi gaikokujin.4 That Hearn had, on occasions, conflicting attitudes toward his adopted country suggests an active mind, rather than a propagandist. Hearn should be placed among those contemporaries with whom he shared cultural appreciation as a means of cross-cultural literary investigation. For an example of how accomplished Hearn was, the underappreciated Doi Bansui (discussed in detail below) stands out as a fascinating figure under Hearn’s tutelage. Like Doi, many of Hearn’s students became informed translators; they worked with the Irish materials at hand, as well as documenting their own traditions contained in a disappearing materiality along the margins of society. They shared a fear of bland cosmopolitanism. Hearn’s teaching of Irish literature in Japanese universities, and the inspiration he gave to his students, would be an instrumental force in inspiring the Airurando bungakukai. As an educator, Hearn introduced a great deal of Irish and Greek literature to his students, nurtured their

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enthusiasm for comparative approaches to their studies, and utilized art as a means of transnational exchange. There are currently only a few books in English but a large number in Japanese detailing the life of Lafcadio Hearn and his prodigious output of travelogues based on his time in Japan. My purpose here is neither to offer a prolonged examination of his work, nor to take on the role of apologist for what he said. I do wish to draw attention to his strongly influential role on a generation of Japanese writers, as he acted as a conduit for Irish literary materials into a Japanese society eager for alternative notions of the foreign than those of the AngloAmerican conglomerate with which they were already becoming too familiar. In his role as an educator, Hearn appears less an isolationist and more a collaborative spokesman for whom comparative literature offered a resource that was pedagogical as well as artistic. Hearn, whatever his mistakes may have been, made every effort to step away from the Victorian ideal of the aloof expatriate and to integrate, to experience Japanese society more directly. He rarely employs his status as a foreigner to excuse the inevitable faux pas that come with living in a foreign space. As one well-known example, on his first day as a lecturer at Tokyo University, Hearn was not aware of the custom that everyone must bow to the picture of the emperor when commencing or closing a class. This breach of etiquette clearly upset his students. What did I do wrong, he asked? After all, a certain amount of gō ni ireba, gō ni shitagae [a very distinctive Japanese interpretation of the proverb, “When in Rome …”] was required. Hearn obligingly began his next day with the proper bow. Thus, he quickly exhibited a personal responsibility and understood that sympathy with the cultural situation required adopting the behaviour expected of him, with no allowances for his foreignness or appeals to former-life habits. Sensitivity to social mores may make an expatriate more compliant than his or her predispositions might wish. Hearn had no use for maintaining an abstract neutrality or the passive gaze of the tourist. In any case, Hearn had no desire to be a faceless functionary, like many of his expatriate contemporaries, ones insulated from people and guided solely by bureaucratic decrees. We can find in Hearn’s writings, personal and public, occasional prejudices and mistakes, ones that can be found in any extended dealings in the areas

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of multiculturalism, his interracial marriage, and the difficulties and prejudices of living in a country that has a reputation for accepting foreigners only in limited circumstances. What is harder to find elsewhere, even in the self-congratulatory travel literature of our time, is Hearn’s knack for being accepted into rather closed communities. What is of most interest to this study is how these qualities in Hearn enabled him to be a major contributive force in opening up Japanese education and artistic life to Irish literature. As this chapter examines, Hearn’s influence extended to both the Osaka and Tokyo chapters of the Irish Literary Studies Society, the two major centres of Irish studies in Japan that included many prominent intellectuals. Moreover, in regards to his university syllabi, Hearn can be considered a primary inspirer of Japanese interest in Yeats, and Irish culture, during his time. In approaching Japanese customs and traditions, Hearn suggested to the Airurando bungakukai that its members could do the same for Ireland. Hearn contributed to the Airurando bungakukai through intercultural example. Hearn had, most instrumentally, introduced Yeats to many Japanese academics, often teaching courses through draft copies of Yeats’s poems (Hirakawa Sukehiro 2000, 29). What becomes clear, from notes that his students took during this time as well as other documentation about his lectures, was the emphasis Hearn placed on Irish orature, mythology, and folk tales in his syllabi. This is not surprising, since Hearn had a consistent interest in local lore as a transgressive alternative to normative modes of history, politics, and collective identity. This was a hallmark of his American journalism, particularly in New Orleans. In one instance, Hearn had expressed dismay to Yeats, in a memorable letter, over his revisions that stripped out fairy-lorish elements from “The Host of the Air.” Hearn, teaching his Japanese students from an earlier draft copy of the poem, expressed his misgivings concerning some editing Yeats had made of his poems that seemed to take out elements of the fairy. Surprised by Hearn’s copy-editing, Yeats responded that that these cuts were based on rhythmical concerns. He went on to say that he would consider Hearn’s suggestions, to restore more of the fairy lore, but he never did incorporate them (Le2, vol. 3, 101­–2). Hearn’s university students, especially, found the reworked

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poems, as published, more deficient because Yeats had made them more realistic. That is, the revisions tended to sacrifice the forms and sensibilities that hearkened to an Ireland beyond its present moment. The implication here is that Yeats, eager to avoid the accusation of superstition, stripped the poems of the presences that had initially made them such compelling exploratorations of myth and culture. Hearn’s own literary projects argue that paranormal depictions need not be stripped in order to appease normative social conventions or the prevailing aesthetic for the rational. The paranormal, the aisling, was a socially minded space as well, and thus also real – of social formations that, although displaced, existed in amorphous terms that suggested their imminent erasure. For Hearn, in a view much like in The Celtic Twilight, the fantastic should not be dismissed as superstition, but maintained as an important element in narrativizing the past. In support of this view, Hearn’s collections such as Kwaidan [Ghost Stories] (1904) are part of this formative network of interculturality that took up twilight as a strategy for negotiating the aura of the past. Discarnate entities, or ghosts, become interlocutors for chronotopic heritages. Basically, a ghost presents forms of knowledge that link multiple times of diverse generations with the particulars of a local space. As Hearn’s most straightforward collection, Kwaidan resembles The Celtic Twilight in its resolute attention to orature and folk antiquity as that which resists the historically generic.5 Making an example to his students, many of whom would become renowned authors in their own right, Hearn introduced the problems and possibilities for relating a literary heritage through a non-native language. Folk tales became a common medium for instruction in Hearn’s lectures on society and literature: as a genre, they maintain very much a regional identity but nonetheless appeal to interpretations and understandings that are not demarcated geographically or by strict, limited political positions. As a way of cultural introduction to English readers about Japan, Hearn made accessible to English readers mukashibanashi [folk tales] such as “The Story of Mimi-NashiHōïchi,” a well-known classic. The tale does entertain in a fashion similar to a fairy tale, but like most narratives of this sort it also contains a degree of fabulistic admonition. The example of Hōichi exem-

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plifies the devotional practice of chanting the Hannya shingyō, the Heart Sutra shared by most denominations, as an important spiritual practice of different Buddhist schools. This Sutra’s formulas describe important ontological beliefs, including the inessential nature – in the way we might understand inessential from Derrida several hundred years later – of forms. Kwaidan shows a vast array of subjects and theme. Hearn’s selections do reflect ethical and ethnic sensibilities; and such was his purpose. For example, “Oshidori” [The Ducks] blurs species barriers between human and bird, promoting a Buddhist view supporting vegetarianism.6 As a point of cultural introduction, “Oshidori” depicts the birds’ love as monogamous and transcendental; hence, for this reason, ducks have been semiotically meaningful at Japanese weddings. What characterizes the majority of these stories is the ghostly as glossolalia. The phantasm becomes intelligible only through heritage procedures, in the present that can approach the ancestral Geist of previous generations. Kwaidan acts in a manner like The Celtic Twilight in its attention to speech and storytelling. Heritage simultaneously exists as presences of the past, continued now as practices in the present. Along the lines of endotic travel, Hearn’s concern for the ritualistic details of daily life increasingly required a deeply personal association with the local. To understand the voicings of a folk tale required activities beyond that of archival work. The tales themselves, as language, exhibited a kind of jidai no tsuya, Tanizaki’s expression for the lustre of time (which I examine in the next chapter), in the manner of an aged object shining with history. The crucial feature that marks Hearn as a revivalist is his insistence on plural temporalities: that objects pass along a cultural continuum, of embodied practices, as much as chronological time. His narrative view is chronoscopic, combining immediate observations with attention to the intervals of time that collaborated in the production of the context for present interpretations. This is, obviously, easier to describe in theory than in creative literary practice. How does one most appropriately depict those overlayers of variable time, to show the object as an artifact endowed with a sensibility beyond its immediate use? On whose terms does the past predicate the forms of reflection from a future?

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To Hearn and Yeats, the ruins and relics had to be thought of as behaving like a bakemono, or shape-shifting spirit. Thus, the locations and peoples that circulate the narrative exhibit the same processes of handling that give off a glow of familiarity, of reiteration in echoes of intangible predecessors. Tanizaki found a polish made out of sweat and fingerprints; this was, at least conceptually, comparable to the Revivalist mandate of shadows as historical residue. Like Yeats, Hearn emphasizes that accessing culture depends upon embodied interaction with what is tactile: in many of Hearn’s works we can find the aura of spittle, gob, and larynx in the folk practices of the everyday. As he often describes, the voices that convene in the rites and stories maintain the associations connected to a physical as well as a cultural setting. Thus, the handing down of stories has its own sense of its ancestral historicity. Hearn followed a principle that O’Donovan had decided upon in mapping Donegal, as described in the previous chapter: the internal ethos of a community, including how the people living in that community named and understood topography, defined itself along ancestral familiarity. Although not scientifically true, their value as identifiers, and the knowledge they contained, could not be readily dismissed. One of Hearn’s most-read collections of essays, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1976 [1894]), follows a multi-vocal, polyphonic format that is also the manner of The Celtic Twilight. Both texts take up the act of sympathetic listening as the principle of receiving, learning, and communicating with the past. To achieve this, Hearn, too, immersed himself in a community dynamic that required his personal investment. There was no such thing as impersonal or aloof participation. Hearn displayed the necessary willingness to be led into tradition, both oral and material. The wide diversity of utterances in Glimpses – the layering of metaphysics and geographies as interactive contexts – allows a flow of dialogism in which speech reflects forms of spatial contact. But this involved perspective, which integrates contemporary activities as folklore that, in living terms, intersects with the knowledge-archive of heritage, is not possible without a willing series of introductions from those on the inside. This was a crucial development in the network of scholarship and

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cultural activism in Ireland as well. Aside from Yeats, we might also consider how Alf Sommerfelt (1918) acknowledges in his study of the Torr dialect that his real understanding of the language (and community) came out of meeting with the people of Torr, where “every evening, an assembly of some 6 or 8 persons who answered readily my thousands of questions and who willingly told me their stories and songs” (2). So, unfamiliarity does not necessarily mean exotic, in the pejorative sense. Unfamiliarity is the initial state of coming face to face with the different; and thankfully this condition has a cure. Hearn, as he frequently stated, had intended to counteract those uninformed Western observations that had gained prominence as armchair evaluations of cultures and people. Whether or not Hearn accomplished this task in the best manner, especially in comparison with Anglo aristocrats such as Basil Hall Chamberlain, would be entirely subjective. But, certainly, Hearn had nothing but contempt for the presumptuous travelogues of the Victorian era, which were more missionary tracts than attempts to view a culture according to its own terms.7 Great scholars such as Monier-Williams, compiler of a Sanskrit dictionary still in use today, had claimed in an Oxford lecture that languages without complex declensions (such as Arabic or Japanese) could never achieve the philosophical sophistication of Greek or Latin. So Hearn’s implementation of unfamiliar need not imply strange, but rather an admission of a complex society, whose panorama of identities are but glimpsed through his diverse vignettes, and that one should hope to overcome unfamiliarity through experience. Unfamiliarity can also serve as a rebuke against the presumptive circulation of xenophobic prejudices enjoying the prestige of information. Hearn’s participatory witnessing – and we should remember it was welcomed and encouraged at every point – was a kind of communal intercession that no armchair will allow. Likewise, The Celtic Twilight hardly resulted from parlour musings. Both Yeats and Hearn examined regions that had, for various reasons, been pushed out of view by elitist perspectives. To go forth into the unfamiliar also requires humility. The willingness to be guided is a kind of humility that requires entering into the mindset of the pupil. Hearn, as teacher, is

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also Hearn, the student, of materials that are vanishing all around. Yeats takes a similar stand in describing the required contribution of art in a time of vanishing: Here, traveler, scholar, poet, take your stand Where all those rooms and passages are gone, When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound And saplings root among broken stone (“Coole Park, 1929,” CP o 246, 25–9) What can survive this mass evaporation that Yeats is describing? The rural alternative that Hearn and Yeats explored had an enriching effect in terms of a particular heritage that cosmopolitanism does not allow. From the point of view of local eyes, ancestry is neither a glimpse nor an unfamiliarity, but rather an intimacy and a familiarity with the experiential textures of landscape and tradition. To overcome one’s own unfamiliarity requires a difficult, but worthwhile, negotiation of spatiality, language, and other social filters. Hearn was, as Shimane locals will readily tell, the first Westerner to be granted access to the inner sanctum of Izumo Taisha, one of the three most important Shinto shrines in Japan. According to the Kojiki, Izumo was the birthplace of the first kami [gods, ancestral spirits]. Its famed importance relates to its spatial value; the shrine serves as the congregational meeting place where the land’s multitudes of gods gather in the autumn. As myth connected to architecture, Izumo Taisha provides both communal and mythological significance, and thus a frequent literary subject, especially in Koba­ yashi Issa’s verse: mizu abi[te] narabu karasu ya kami mukahi [A bath in cold water: the crows line up to meet the Gods.] (Issa zenshū, vol. 4, 506) That Hearn should be invited into such a hallowed space suggests the extent of the welcome he received. Most of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan concerns Hearn’s time in the regionally fascinating areas of

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Matsue and Izumo. Glimpses demonstrates his belief that regional customs and ceremonies shape the infrastructure of the legendary. Ongoing contact with a given place involves this juxtaposition of imagination, geography, and the people who are enmeshed within the resonances of cross-association. Prescribing a localized character, based on abstractions derived from such features, is impossible, but one need not go that far. Speech genres do accumulate patterns of acclimatized usages that give local dialects a particular shade and colour. Dinneen repeatedly found this to be so, as did Hearn. The conditioning of speech according to region suggests another way of considering Tanizaki’s sense of handling. Izumo, as Hearn learned, had a proud literary tradition, evidenced by the works of Irisawa Yasuo and others.8 The dirt of the fingernails, after all, arises from a soil of a real, dirty landscape, and the habitations established in such locales. Mapping such locations, through the patterns of heritage, also means to map the preceding generations in terms of received customs. Hearn and Yeats describe speech as a shape-shifter whose mechanisms of adjustment and alternation enable it to cross space and time. The core themes of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, like The Celtic Twilight, involve those places, performances, and rituals that enable ancestral recall: the talismans, hallowed sites, chants, and domestic artifacts that allow people to connect with ancestral presences. Their power comes from frequent, refined usage. Akira, one of Hearn’s guides, makes it clear that most of these sacred artifacts are not stored away, only to be used on rare occasions: the majority of the items are always to hand for daily use. Hearn experiences the time-space continuum that is crossed as part of every day’s negotiation with existence. Hearn’s authorship provides extraordinary detail about those everyday surfaces upon which the natural and supernatural are shown to be mutually interactive. In his view, ancestral recall occurs daily, as part of marking both the past and its relationship to the flow of current time. His examples of Shinto architecture include the most elaborate shrine, as well as the home hokora [small shrines], both equally deserving of respectful observance, and both equally part of daily practices. Grave stones [haka] also require frequent ablutions and commemorative rituals. Stone lanterns [ishidōrō] give off a kind

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of hallowed light in whose shadows cryokinetic effects and strange changes in ambient temperatures reveal ghostly presences. The soot from particularly haunted lamps is prized for the creation of calligraphy ink [sumi]. The intricate features of the butsudan [Buddhist altars] are emblematic of the care and regard given to their importance. Home butsudan are the seats of the departed, where ancestral tables rest and deserved greetings are made. The unfamiliar becomes familiar through interaction. Hearn’s encounters with familiarized spectrality are most fully realized in his noteworthy essay on O-Bon, one of the most important days in the Buddhist calendar. On this occasion, the village itself becomes a communal butsudan. On this day, ancestral spirits are completely free to return to their furusato [home village] to intermingle with the living. To erase this furusato, through the cascades of transactions that come with free market trade, is to excise a layer out of metaphysical continuity. Hearn knows that such claims will come off as sentimentality to the hard-nosed view of utilitarianism. However, he defends the sense and the spirit [kokoro] of these customs and ceremonies, grounded as they are in real human relationships, and knows that lay an obligation on past and future in all its human reality. One key feature Hearn notes in the rites of ancestral observance is that young and old cooperate together, in mutual understanding of each other’s place in the cycles of time and space: “He dreams that for him, as for his father, the little lamp will burn on through the generations … the children of his children’s children … the little dusty tablet that bears his unforgotten name” (GUJ 416). Hearn’s description of O-Bon – a Japanese Buddhist festival for honouring ancestral spirits, usually in August but with regional variations – makes for an interesting comparison with Yeats’s “At the Crossroads” in The Celtic Twilight: both texts stress that the interactive dimensions of ancestrality and the contemporary moment involve public ritual and collective veneration to effect the recognition of a localized cultural ancestry. In autobiographical accounts, these authors document the manner in which the dead continue to exert dialectical influence on the formation of the living condition of culture. Hearn recognized he was an outsider to the community in which he had been invited to participate. Hearn’s “From the Diary of an

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English Teacher” ruminates on his own role as instructor of youth, to provide them with community knowledge in the form of language and literature. Respect for the aged coincides with the stewardship of a new generation, which implies an ethics of continuity; Hearn turns his attention to this in the contemplative experience of “The Cave of the Children’s Ghosts.” Again, it is revealing how original Hearn’s work was in its time. This was the first carefully observed study of the Bodhisattva O-Jizō, and the Buddhist funerary rites performed in his name. O-Jizō is particularly known as a guardian of children, and little statuettes of his form continue to dot roadsides and school bus shelters in Japan. Even today, as anyone who has visited a temple dedicated to O-Jizō-san can attest, his image is still where bereaved parents gather to leave offerings of soft toys and baby booties. These shrines are, of course, open to ideological manipulation; and to account for why ideology should turn to these cultural features Hearn takes up his interpretation. In the cave, Hearn is shown that the shapes of the spirit-children, their discarnate quality, are not divisible from the ongoing context of life. A great deal of Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan thus concerns children, childhood, education, and filial obligations, as linked to the ancestral. The generational framework presents the accumulation of memory as both probate and inheritance. The observation of folk practices entails participation in the hands-on approach that proper etiquette toward the past requires. Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and The Celtic Twilight very much share this quality of communal ritual, and its scenic settings, as an interface for accessing twilight as ancestral presence. The unfamiliarity that Hearn describes relates to the shadowiness of twilight. Familiarity is gained through interaction. Continuity with twilight, in terms of generations, requires a passing on of knowledge; and folklore, for Yeats and Hearn, is the contested repository of this information. The Airurando bungakukai, as an intertextual literary phenomenon, allowed for one tradition of folklore to interact with another’s. In this case, Irish and Japanese folklore, through the medium of literature, came into conversation. Yeats was the primary figure who enabled this. The Celtic Twilight takes up major issues about how to negotiate the ancestral, but this question cannot be relegated, critically, to a younger Yeats. The Tower

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(1928), for example, is equally concerned with the phantoms of history, the cultural knowledge they represent, and the fissures being ripped by them into the present. Much like Hearn in Glimpses, Yeats turns to this question of how children inherit ancestry in his memorable poem “Among School Children” (CP o 286) This poem, in particular, questions how individuals might come into the cycle of time, and how an individual makes participatory contact with the force of the past in the imagination of the community. Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the imagined community sets up several theoretical issues in relationship to the continuum of cultural histories. What substantiates a claim to reality and what measures an imagined falsification? To identify something as too nostalgic or falsely idealized, one must suggest that there is some authentic standard against which to measure the nostalgia or idealism. That some authentic criterion exists, after all, often leads to the questioning and consideration of what that authentic criterion actually is. Hearn, as an extension of the Celtic Revival in Japan, argues that, in destroying physical evidence in the form of heritage, the matter can never be resolved on anything but immediate terms of desire. Industrial societies, too, are imagined communities that, in their own fashion, conjure up idealistic graphs that measure profit through resources along a utilitarian sine wave. In their view, landscape is authentic only when its profitability can be realized through turning it wholesale into a developed resource with future prospects. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight and Hearn’s essays on Japanese folk customs see imagined communities as a social condition in which mass production has run amok over the cultural landscape. Their writings are deeply concerned with pressing social issues and the escape velocity of the phantasm from the grip of rational determinism. Hearn, as folklorist, did not work in isolation; and his writings were in continual contact with both those localities in which he interacted, as well those transnational connections he maintained. Yeats figured prominently on the horizon. As Paul Murray (2001) extensively shows in his biography, Hearn was very familiar with Yeats’s collections of Irish folklore and, indeed, considers Yeats the “one representative poet” who could act as a figurehead for approaching modern Irish literature, especially in its attention to the terrifying paradox of the ancestral as disembodied spirit (33). Hearn once wrote in a letter 208 | Ancestral Recall

that “There is something ghosdy [sic] in all great art” (in Hirakawa 1997, 115) – a remark that Hirakawa notes was especially appealing to Yeats’s understanding of Hearn’s project in Japan. The tangible connections between Yeats and Hearn are a few letters and references, including examples of Hearn’s copy-editing of unpublished poems by Yeats.9 Hearn made use of Yeats in his lectures, and his efforts as a major initiator of Airurando bungakukai study groups coincided with his writings on Japanese lore. In the broader constellation of Japanese and Irish writers who engaged in folk writing, Yeats and Hearn share a common theme in recording communal practices, oratures, and their presentation of diachronic modes of perceiving cultural traditions. Thus, when Yeats discusses Hearn in his later introduction to The Resurrection (1934), a play dedicated to Satō Junzō, he states: “All ancient nations believed in the re-birth of the soul and had probably empirical evidence like that Lafcadio Hearn found among the Japanese” (in Wheels and Butterflies 96). In conceiving a return to the ancestral, this passage argues for a move away from Abrahamic teleology as well as Enlightenment rationality and into an understanding of human time as a cycle of repetition evidenced in daily encounters. The transmigratory soul, against linear time, suggests a kind of alternative ontology that is rebellious and resilient in the face of the progressive norm. It derives its knowledge from being able to successfully negotiate the twilight, in which a chronotope of cross-cultivation exists. The communications that the ancestral presents, through twilight, vacillate in amplification: the voices and messages fluctuate due to instability. But, hearkening to what has come before, twilight could be a domain for a kinetic conferencing of ideas in a way not relegated to the particulars of time. The twilight, as contiguous with a situated historical reality, enables multi-textual senses of the ancestral as circulatory traces of the past. It is astral, but also contiguous with the here and now.10 This will be a major theme in Yeats, Hearn, Kyōka, and recently is in the films of Miyazaki Hayao: twilight enables a continuity in which spaces and traces of the past can be addressed, if also possibly recuperated, through an interdimensional system of transference. Lady Augusta Gregory, developing a style influenced by medieval aisling [visionary] literature, positioned levels of interdimensionality within her works, which she saw as preferable to staid Victorian Airurando bungakukai and the Translation of Fairies  |  209

rationalism. Likewise explored by Japanese writers, the temporal differential of twilight presented an aesthetic for being and time that operated outside of modal naturalism. The fullest treatment of twilight as offering such a potential would be articulated later by Izumi Kyōka, as I will examine below. But first we find in Hearn an intermediary who provided contexts for twilight in both East and West. The literary communities had been committed to the idea that authorship, as representing trends in other cultures, brought a necessarily comparativist view to one’s own social situation. Literature enabled this trafficking of ideas in a way that other documents, such as political treaties, could not. Twilight was a freer place of exchange, one outside of oppressive social imperatives and offering a chance to espy a continuity with other times and places as opposed to a normative definition of the here and now. As materials were being uprooted out of context and stripped of their character, could this twilight, a lustre of time, act as preserver or buffer against modernities? The hobby of spiritism and parlour tricks was one thing, but necromancy as a dream language for apprehending cultural reincarnation was another. The latter was inexorably connected with the predicament of disembodied tradition. Shimokusu Masaya describes in Yōsei no Airurando [The Fairies of Ireland] (2005) that Hearn and Yeats had found an archive of cultural experience through the alternative source of the fairy. Shimokusu claims Hearn as an important contributor to minzokugaku [ethnography/folk studies] whose influence needs to be reaffirmed (159). Hearn had further interpreted, along a sensibility of twilight, the antidiscursive flow of ghosts and para-temporality as also very practical concerns for assessing the state of an endangered folk culture. That flow needed more than a shape: it needed an embodiment, in order to speak, however apparitionally. Thus, the ghostly reverberated with trauma from people and situations that had been erased, brokered, dismissed, or abjectified. Hearn was not solely responsible for the reception history of Irish literature in Japan, of course; but his influence in shaping how that reception history took place among so many prominent Japanese authors cannot be overstated, especially in relation to the Airurando bungakukai. Hearn, in promoting comparative literary understand-

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ings, was doing more than purveying Irishness or Japaneseness as categories of knowledge. Like any good professor, he challenged his students to unpeel the layering of history, to open one’s mind to the past, to art and history. As a result of this opening, modernity might mean something. Thus, Hearn’s achievement, as a communicator of literature, should also be seen in his impact as a teacher. It is worth remembering how Hearn’s approach to comparative culture studies differed strongly from the main trends of his time. His writing abounds with invectives against the missionary mentality of those who could perceive the encounter with the other as inferiors who could be “progressed” through evangelization. Their heritage may have merits, but only as much as they offer potential cognates to the best of Western civilization in order to develop the discourse of conversion. Hearn frequently describes the haughty manner of the priestly zeal of Christianity’s return to Japan in the late nineteenth century. But Hearn stands apart from that other extreme, the universalists, those who understood cultures as potentially equivalenct and all pointing to a singularity of source, a common origin myth that transcends difference and unites all the diversity of global expressions. A major exponent of this view – alongside the Theosophists and Atlanteans described in the first chapter – was Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the Indian-born mystic most known for his speech to the Parliament of World Religions in 1893. His view on cultural singularity, based upon a mono-religious reality, offered this conclusion: “If there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time, which will be infinite” (138). While there is much to admire about Vivekananda – his activist work for the impoverished in India, his tact in dealing with multi-faith dialogue, and his anti-imperialism – he nonetheless believes in a goal of transcendence. Hearn, on the other hand, would instinctively recoil from any discussion of religious cultures, as forms of cultural practice, which eschewed place and time – to Hearn, the very definitive qualities of embodied involvement. Hearn’s writing has that quality of first-person experiential ethnography that also marks The Celtic Twilight. Concerned not so much with religious truth but interpersonal involvement, Hearn immersed himself in varying communal dimensions, and his breadth of

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work suggests a more complex approach than ethnic jingoism that no doubt came across in his lecturing style. In considering Hearn’s legacy on this point, given the vociferous critiques, I wish to draw Englishlanguage readers’ attention to recent publications in Japanese. Many approaches have been taken in Japanese scholarship offer a more comprehensive portrait of the man than one finds in English: Consider Tanaka Yūji’s Gendai ni ikiru Rafukadio Hān [Lafcadio Hearn: Living in the Modern Era]. He regards the complexity of Hearn’s Irish and Japanese interests as distinct societal investigations that were shaped by his formative experiences of American racism and social malaise. Kudō Miyoko, in her collection of Hearn’s writing Kamigami no kuni: Rafukadio Hān no shōgai [Spirits of the Nation: The Life of Lafcadio Hearn] (2003), compellingly demonstrates that Hearn was highly aware of the distinct regional features of Kobe, Matsue, Kumamoto, Yokohama, and so forth. Rather than a pan-Japanese approach, Hearn was interested in regional variation. This analysis of Hearn and cultural topography, in effect, dismantles the common claim that Hearn could only think in manifestations of Japanese sameness.11 Hearn’s multifold experience of various Japanese loci established for him the contrast between the urban and rural, mountain and coast, peninsula and city. Different traditions expressed themselves in differing locales. What they had in common was the harmful encroachment of cosmopolitanism on these peripheries.12 In many works, and he resembles Yeats and Dinneen on this point, Hearn is intensely sympathetic to geographical variations, their particularities of dialect, customs, meibutsu [local specialities], and mythic etymologies. Hearn’s collections such as Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (JAI , 1904) seem to make that precipitous leap from cultural observation to cultural theorization, from descriptive to prescriptive. In such instances, Hearn’s interpretations act more like definitions. In this way, critiques of Hearn echo those of the Revival: the slippery slide from cultural apprehension to cultural prescription. Indeed, a feeling of pessimism – particularly regarding warfare and its relation to regional autonomies – pervades much of Hearn’s writing. The turn to cultural assertion is voiced with a sigh of inevitable abdication: the attempt at interpretation cannot mitigate the colossal speed

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of change that erases all autonomies. Likewise, The Romance of the Milky Way (1905), shows that his observational powers had not fully given way to dogma. We still see his emphasis on recovery of dissipating histories in the forms of nostalgia, as cultural traditions. In Hearn’s view, matsuri [festivals] in Japan enact the awareness of a reality being lost by rendering it, however lovingly, in the codes of performance. There is a paradox to the festival that, so adamantly based on reiterating through received custom the ways of a time no more, celebrates through enactments of an absent time that betrays modernity’s claims to progress. Concerning Tanabata, or the Star Festival, which was almost unknown to the West, Hearn analyzes Japanese poetry as it relates to this colourful, festive celebration in July. Not only does Hearn describe the customs of the festival, he presents an analytical history of how Tanabata developed out of Chinese tradition. Indigenous characteristics arose through a continuity of repetition of iconic patterns within Japanese society. The pursuit of literary legitimacy, however, is negligible if the public performance, the communal rite, is erased. The text as representative of embodied action has an experiential connection: the coming together of a community thus matches the annual mythic meeting of Orihime and Hikoboshi (deities represented by the stars Vega and Altair, respectively) that Tanabata celebrates. Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation is certainly Hearn’s darkest and most politically unnerved work, full of dread for a future of intercontinental uniformity; and it goes beyond, in nationalist tenor, what Yeats attempted in The Celtic Twilight. Here, Hearn moves away from his style of documenting cultural practices into overt analyses of what constitutes the national muse. Disconcertingly, Hearn seems to mirror Tokugawa period national-studies inquiries [kokugaku] as to what are the constituent elements of Japanese society. The context in which Hearn wrote, of course, was just before the launching of the Japanese annexation of East Asia. Read now with this historical imperialism in mind, the various articles in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation partially lament, and partially condone, the strategy of protectionism which Hearn assumed to be Japan’s only response to invasive presences from the West. Hearn finds evidence that aggressive nation-states, in this case European countries and the United

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States, compel Asia to reorganize itself into a coalition of equally assertive partners for self-defence. As a citizen of Japan, Hearn makes robust claims in favour of Japanese identity as a counter-claim to stand against declarations of superiority by the West, which had already annexed sections of Asia. Japan’s role, he implies, is to promote the oriental into a collective force so as to avoid complete dominance from colonialism. Hearn writes, “No: what remains of this elder civilization is full of charm, – charm unspeakable, – and to witness its gradual destruction must be a grief for whomsoever has felt that charm. However intolerable it may seem, to the mind of the artist or poet, those countless restrictions which once ruled all this fairyworld, and shaped the soul of it, he cannot but admire and love the best results: the simplicity of old custom” (JAI 458). And, progressively, Hearn adopts a more concerned rhetoric regarding the right to self-preservation against the inevitability of colossal change. China and Japan, as Hearn saw it, were under immediate threat of becoming composite sketches of their former selves, caricatures redrawn by Western might. Hearn has in mind general anxieties concerning industrial modernization as enforced participation in a global infrastructure. Swami Vivekananda, en route to the Parliament of World Religions, argued that the sensibilities and mannerisms of Japan both exemplified alternatives to an encroaching Western mandate. Japan, which he saw to be under intense duress from modernization, offered a global warning about how quickly culture can be converted into utility. Much of Hearn’s own cultural nationalism in Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation arises from a sincere dread of the influence of politics and religion in shaping and appropriating everyday life. For example, in “Industrial Danger” (in JAI ) Hearn decries the power accorded to corporations that abandon cultural materials in favour of technologies that poison the lives of generations. In response to such a prospect, almost all of Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation concerns Shinto, and ancestor worship, as a mechanism to maintain fealty with the past, for the preservation of non-market–driven values embodied in a cultural artifact as attachment and inheritance. Much of Hearn’s defensiveness becomes a polemic against Western evangelization, both in a nationalistic sensibility and as a metaphor for Western cultural imperialization. Shinto, he suggests, has 214 | Ancestral Recall

this in common with Irish paganism: both preserve a devotion to polytheistic tradition and ancestry in opposition to colonial monotheism. Hearn formulates all of his interpretations in the context of this problem: “Hitherto the subject of Japanese religion has been written of chiefly by the sworn enemies of that religion: by others it has been almost entirely ignored” (JAI 2). The concentration on literary and religious matters fights for a recovered space that resists political domination or superficial cosmopolitanism. But Hearn did not preach a doctrine of Japan-Alone. Throughout his teaching career, Hearn encouraged the transmission of Western literature. After all, this was also Nobel Laureate Ōe Kenzaburō’s hope: that literary space could be positioned outside of the violent collision of national identities. Art could engage in intercultural dialogue in ways that diplomacy does not. To appreciate Hearn, and by extension the Celtic Renaissance, as interpolating cultural narratives into hybrid contexts, I argue fundamentally that they anticipated the catastrophic loss of cultural and environmental habitats in the face of homogenization. Both Ireland and Japan, and elsewhere of course, are environmentally and socially disfigured by these effects. In an editorial entitled “Erin Go Faster,” published to coincide with the Irish general election of 2007, Paul Muldoon articulates the sense of amnesia that results from wilful cultural vandalism. The Revival had anticipated all of this cultural erasure a century ago. Muldoon is discussing the threatened bulldozing of the Hill of Tara, in particular, an incident that has become a landmark case of how willingly progress will pave over material history. Muldoon, as have others, argues that the representative geographies of the Tara-Skryne Valley engender an importance beyond their cartographic label of site. They are, experientially, a landscape, a network of associations, nuances, dialogues, ceremonies, and events. Landscapes such as this enable a form of ancestral immersion. The rituals, although performed by previous generations, leave touchable imprints of their participation. These are points of ancestral access. Wiping them away, through the present-tense denouement and infrastructure, permanently blots out both trace and shape. Yet, critics, following a narrow sense of Benedict Anderson’s (1983) sense of imagined communities, will variously claim that a personal or communal commitment to such places, on account of their mythic Airurando bungakukai and the Translation of Fairies  |  215

and historical value, is simply projecting an idealized image that has nothing to do with reality. If, however, Hearn seems romantic to be in opposition to this pursuit of utility, then he is so with a post-Victorian anxiety. Much of his thinking reflects T.S. Eliot’s sense of modernism and tradition: “When all have become the breakers of idols, the protector of graven images is the true revolutionary” (quoted in Bantock 1979, 109). If by small-r romanticism we mean an emotional, personal interest in the customs and practices of marginal communities, the sympathetic resonances Revivalism explored were against the utilitarian power of political centralization. Hearn’s dreamy styles of discourse rebelled against data-driven studies that indexed citizenship, and his painful nostalgia arises from the vaporization of communities on the edge of crisis. Hearn – and he readily connects to Akutagawa, Yeats, Yana­ gita, Kyōka, and many others on this theme – resorts to the discourse of necromancy for allocating a dream of ancestral voices in a manner that capitalist development would not. In the confrontation of the twilight, the personal reads a kind of language that can negotiate with ancestrality. Invoking the past as presence counteracts those organizational principles that industrialize communities and landscapes as mute commodities. On this understanding, The Celtic Twilight became influential on several Japanese authors and their critique of modernism as a potentially self-defeating historical conjuncture. Hearn saw the literary art of the Celtic Revival as potentially opening up a chiaroscuro dimension in which shadows, as the lustre of the past, informed an understanding of the present as light. The liminality of haunted performance, against local foreclosure, carried a form of protest that had global implications. Thus, twilight, variously figured in Japanese as chūkan, ryōshō, tasogare, is a set of terms for accessing the in-between and interacting with spaces of banished tradition. The poly-temporal must assume its anti-linear interface as a rebellion against the techno-progressiveness. The assemblage of Irish folk materials, the manner in which they confronted social fissures, had become a predominant influence on Japanese modernism. Hearn is a Revivalist in the sense that he promoted both Irish and Japanese culture and literature, as a distinctive tradition, when acting as a professor in Japanese universities. In such a network, Hearn was

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extremely well positioned to further orchestrate the flow of ideas moving in both directions. As a multinational, he was a first-hand witness to the various effects of maldistributed power, its free-for-all pursuit of the idealistic modern capital state that could, in fact, conflate distinct communities – New Orleans with the town of Matsue, where he became the first Westerner to enter the sacred precincts of the great temple at Izumo (Izumo Taisha) – given sufficient time, transnational investment, and corporate blueprints. But Hearn was not in search of an ideal modern state; on the contrary, he was in flight from modernity’s encroaching hegemony. So, he was far from being ignorant of locals and particulars; Hearn’s experiences of living in different regions highlighted the importance of those distinctions as cultural assets. Hearn, a multi-national character never really a local in any situation, was forever a gaikokujin, or an outsider. This was so everywhere he lived: whether Ireland, the United States, or Japan. But this hybridity allowed for forms of facilitation. His keynote role in promoting Irish literature in Japan helped to initiate the intercultural dialogue between Ireland and Japan, in which folklore acted as a living archive of pre-modern knowledge of the ancestral. As such, Hearn’s work needs to be placed in the extended network of literary interchange taking place at that time. The Celtic Twilight established at an early time for Hearn and Yeats a kind of supersensual epistemology. The sheen accompanying an object is the glow of human interactivity; the lustre bears witness to the extended space/time dynamic that enables cultural sympathies. Nostalgia, as virtue rather than vice, is a form of cultural telemetry: the mind measures something much larger and dynamic than itself through the ebb of these resonances. History as a time-being becomes protean and being in contact with the ancestral overcomes the tendency to narrow-mindedness. For Hearn, ancestral timekeeping did not mean to slavishly try to recreate the past, but to maintain the communal habits that offered traces of the past. Hearn, and Yeats as well, cannot be easily called fascistic, particularly with the horror with which we now must use this term. Modernity exhibited the sense that religion, culture, and social rituals in Japan and Ireland had been turned into vulnerable traditions threatened with disappearance. Against his own understanding of Catholic

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theocracy, Hearn sought in the multiplicity of polytheistic paganism a ritual sensibility that reflected varying cultural strata, continued experience, and commitment to place. The polyphonic ceremonialism, as he saw it, arose dialectically through the continued interactions of text and experience as a social interfacing that required an imaginative conduit for its realization. As Ribh put it to Patrick in Yeats’s poem “Ribh Denounces Patrick,” “Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are wed” (CP o 290). The symbiosis of spirit and matter is seen in the erotic subtext, of a carnal deity opening his loins to the energy of nature. In short, the narrative arose from the ground up, rather than being forced down from the top. Top-down transcendentalism is characterized, Hearn and Ribh believe, by dogmatic monotheistic theology that excludes local pluralities. This version of a canonical universality assimilates geographically varied people, unilaterally, into a new orthodoxy. The accusations of displacement and assimilation are those made by Yeats. The snakes that Patrick banishes are the sins of unorthodox variedness: “The mirror scaled serpent is multiplicity” (10). The abstraction of the Trinity, like the philosophers of “Among School Children,” is another form of rational prescription. In The Celtic Twilight, “A Visionary” tells of the anxiety when dogmatic theology contradicts communal folk beliefs.13 The Keruto [Celt, or the Celtic] provided a discursive space for interculturality, something not-West but having a sense of the West, and most importantly being Western but demonstratively dissimilar to British imperialism or American technology.14 Hearn had, at times, tried to counteract the hardening of presumptions and mob mentalities. One such attempt is the essay “The Japanese Smile,” in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, in which Hearn critiques the banality of general pronouncements: “Those whose ideas of the world and its wonders have been formed chiefly by the novels and romance still indulge a vague belief that the East is more serious than the West” (GUJ 656). Hearn presents, instead, a comical sequence of his social faux pas in language and etiquette. The humourous anecdotes, more than an essay could, disabuse the reader of the sense that one nation is somehow more serious than another. NHK television (Japan’s national public broadcasting organization) provides the same insight today, for those visitors who equate the Japanese mind with Zen aus-

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terity. The Tower (1928) is full of slapstick and buffoonery, and Yeats’s dramas would make a satirical performance out of obsessions with the serious. Yeats had been, by the same impression, annoyed by the Arnoldian depiction of the sombre, superstitious Celt. Superstition and sadness were present, but these qualities relate to the conditions of history, the story within it, rather than a genetically Celtic hard-wiring in the DNA , that the Irish gab innately contains perfect humour, and that the Japanese culture forecloses the joke for the sake of a stiff lip. Hearn argues for a more comprehensive, contextual sense of Japanese practices, and his work stands out from what many others attempted at the same time, such as what was offered in Percival Lowell’s Occult Japan (1894). In terms of enduring popularity and popular respect, Lafcadio Hearn has survived and thrived. For example, Kenneth Rexroth and Malcolm Cowley, in later efforts at Japanese-American literary dialogue, found in Hearn a formative explorer of Buddhism and Buddhist aesthetics. Although he personally despised Ireland, Hearn is said to have been unable to overcome its superstitions and stereotypes. Ōta Yūzō (1997), most notably, has described Hearn’s work as manufacturing typical Japanese exotica for Western delight. Without a kinetic trajectory behind his perceptions, Hearn can only toss out ready-made tropes for whatever diorama is at hand. But, undoubtedly, his understanding of Irish culture, and his ability to convey its sense of comparative relationships to Asia, appealed to Japanese students. From the point of view as a lecturer, Hearn quickly assessed what materials most aroused the attention and fascination of his students: his approach to comparative literature was to pose correspondences rather than define equilibriums. For Doi Bansui (1871–1952), one of Hearn’s first students, this actually worked against the stratification of cultural boundaries by taking neither an assimilationist nor a universalist approach. Nonetheless, the trend in English-language criticism now, reflecting an overall concern with modernism’s appeal to cultural investigation, sees in Hearn an ethnic supremacist looking to excise all that did not match the purity of the nation. These criticisms can certainly have their point, but they often verge on the ad hominem. For example, Takayuki Tatsumi (2006), although frequently appreciative in

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his interesting analysis of Hearn’s methods, dismisses Hearn’s marriage to a Japanese woman as a sham of convenience: one in a series of “pseudo-marriages” (80). Such a claim, quite frankly, is highly inflammatory, dreadfully speculative, and insulting to anyone in an interracial marriage. If anything, such comments show how highly charged issues of miscegenation remain in the postmodern era of cosmopolitan indifference. It is worth noting that, in putting his face on a postage stamp, popular Japanese memories maintain Hearn as a sensitive and thoughtful appreciator of Japan at a time of intense change. The main character of the manga series by Hagiiwa Mutsumi Ginyōbi no otogibanashi [Silver-day’s Fairy Tale] is a noticeable casting of a Hearn look-alike, mustachioed and with bad eyesight. This manga is an expression of homage. In quiet words, the protagonist holds long conversations with grandmothers and children and now and then bumps into local fairy phenomena. These lingering traces, phantoms that they are, upset those assumed modes of predictability on which institutional models rely. One of the most quintessentially Hearn passages can be found in this extract of dialogue, from “At the Market of the Dead” (originally published by The Atlantic in 1891), about his desire to participate in O-Bon, the festival of the dead and one of the most precious times of the Japanese cultural calendar: “To-night,” says Akira, seating himself upon the floor in the posture of Buddha upon the Lotus, “the Bon-ichi will be held. Perhaps you would like to see it?” “Oh, Akira, all things in this country I should like to see. But tell me, I pray you; unto what may the Bon-ichi be likened?” “The Bon-ichi,” answers Akira, “is a market at which will be sold all things required for the Festival of the Dead; and the Festival of the Dead will begin to-morrow, when all the altars of the temples and all the shrines in the homes of good Buddhists will be made beautiful.” “Then I want to see the Bon-ichi, Akira, and I should also like to see a Buddhist shrine – a household shrine.” “Yes, will you come to my room?” asks Akira. “It is not far – in the Street of the Aged Men, beyond the Street of the Stony

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River, and near to the Street Everlasting. There is a butsuma there – a household shrine – and on the way I will tell you about the Bonku.” (GUJ 101) The progression of verbs in this passage – see (glimpse), come (experience), tell (learn) – summarize Hearn’s approach to moving from foreigner to experiencer. O-Bon’s emphasis on cultural time is not simply palimpsestic, in which one layer peels away to be overwritten by the next, but an epistemological framework for multiplicity. The historical progress of the contemporary mood gives way to the shadows and possibilities of memory and the trace of what is passing. Doi Bansui: From Nationalism to Internationalism Of Hearn’s many students at Tokyo University who would later achieve literary fame in their own right, the poet Doi Bansui (1871– 1952) provides a particularly striking example of how Hearn’s comparative approach to literary modernity, through his lecturing style, would influence a generation of his students and their sense of Japan’s relationship to global societies. Initially, Doi had been a very conservative cultural nationalist, being an editor for the college journal Teikoku bungaku [Imperial Literature], published between 1895 and 1920, with its rather xenophobic literary slant. Although noteworthy for publishing the youthful efforts of several poets who would become prominent in Japanese letters, including Doi’s friend Ueda Bin (1874–1916), the magazine often promoted a supremacist attitude to Japanese cultural achievements in comparison with the foreign inferior. Prior to meeting Hearn, Doi had been an enthusiastic supporter of such a view. He was possessed of an unfavourable view of the West, one based on the reporting of Natsume Sōseki, the acclaimed novelist to whom Doi was a junior fellow at Tokyo University. Sōseki and Ikeda Kikunae, the chemist who invented MSG , travelled to London in 1902. Doi was shocked at the mental toll that life in England had inflicted on Sōseki. Recalling the experience in a 1928 letter to Natsume Kyōko, Sōseki’s wife, Doi confided his sincere concerns about the mental deterioration [mōretsu no shinkei suijaku] of his

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esteemed friend owing to the harshness of culture shock accompanying expatriate life (Natsume Sōseki jiten 35). Doi, as his writings prior to meeting Hearn suggest, had subscribed to the outlook that Japanese literature, when compared along universalizing terms against other traditions, exhibited superior qualities and depth of artistry. Doi’s youthful works, such as his first poetry collection Tenchi ujō [The Sentient World] (1899), as told in epic verse themes, displayed a kind of nationalistic mythology, one infused with allusions to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and praise for warriors whose deeds in combat elevated them to great stature. Doi was also especially critical of Western mythology, whose tempestuous titans and erratic gods seemed to document why the Western temperament was, emotionally speaking, immature. The Japanese literary world began to evidence an aggressive resentment toward the foreign as retaliation for the rapid engagement with the West and adoption of its technologies, and with that the perceived cultural recalibration of the Japanese landscape. The overall effect was to shut off any chance for appreciative exchange. A culminating statement of this view is Watsuji Tetsurō’s highly polemical Nihon kodai bunka [Classical Japanese Culture] (1920), which had unflatteringly compared Greek epics against the more accomplished Kojiki [An Account of Ancient Matters], the oldest extant chronicle in Japan: each legendary text was read, antagonistically, as a definitive summation of an inner spirit in the Hellenic versus the Japanese. Watsuji accorded ancestral stature to each tradition, but he recasts their representative foundation narratives as political manifestos, speaking in the here and now. Homer and the Kojiki define broad psychological typologies of Western and Japanese temperaments. An ongoing trend in the literary world of Japan, highlighted at that time, had been to prescribe national virtues, as exemplified by the classical canon. Accordingly, as Watsuji implies, the Kojiki demonstrates a more sophisticated mentality than the capricious behaviour of Olympian gods, and their cultural descendants. Rather than continuing on this trajectory toward cultural exclusionism, Doi developed, while a student of Hearn’s, a more compatibilist approach to comparative literature. While studying at Tokyo University, Doi took several courses with Hearn in 1897. Under such

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an inspiration, and exposed to Yeats and Irish literature through Hearn, Doi became active in the Airurando bungakukai, reading Yeats and other Revivalist figures, as well as translations of Old Irish texts that began appearing at this time through Matsumura Mineko, who I discuss below. In 1901, Doi furthered his studies in Irish and English literature in London. Disappointed by his experiences there, Doi returned to Japan and dedicated himself to translation and education, collaborating with Airurando bungakukai, becoming one of the foremost classicists of early twentieth-century Japan, a translator of and commentator on Homer. It is in these efforts that the shift in Doi’s thinking becomes evident. His innovative Homericism counteracted the myopia of his earlier works, with his new perspective as a scholar who promoted translation as a form of intercultural encounter. In such a way, Doi pursued an alternative against those self-proclaiming trends in certain Japanese literary magazines that saw their own literary tradition to be superior. Under Hearn’s tutelage, Doi’s translations and studies of texts, including works from the Celtic Renaissance and Hellenic classics, were influential in bringing a more open-minded mentality to members of the Airurando bungakukai. To many, and Sōseki’s trip to London seems to confirm this, the British metropolis was taken to be representative of Western culture in its entirety. Hearn, through examples in literature, reshaped and expanded Doi’s initial impressions of what constituted European arts and letters. The central element to the curriculum had been Yeats’s poetry, which was an important first step in moving from impression to immersion, and Doi acquired excellent English. In fact, as Akutagawa, whom I also detail more thoroughly below, had been the leading figure of the Tokyo-based Yeats study group, Doi became a prominent member of the Osaka chapter (Sōseki daijiten 35). Attention to Yeats would be a continual literary interest for Doi. Further under Hearn’s instruction, one of Doi’s lasting accomplishments would be the translation of the Homeric corpus from Classical Greek into Japanese. This was a humanistic intervention, in that it gave Japanese readers access to the foundational texts of Hellenic civilization, ones that had been disparaged in ultranationalist circles. As Eric A. Havelock famously proclaimed (1963), Homer

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had compiled an encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient legends as a founding ethos for generations. Thus, the Iliad and Odyssey suggested themselves as counterparts to the Kojiki, the crucial early text of the Japanese canon that contains a number of foundation myths and legends. Homer and the Kojiki, to Doi, both contained fundamental recordings of the earliest awareness of place, culture, and religion. Comparative study did not need to resolve apparent cultural differences, but offered instead spaces for discussion and contrast. From the epics of Ancient Greece, Doi would then go on to render versions of the formal verse forms of Byron, Milton, and Shelley. This activity led to interesting critical works that studied the implications of the sonnet form as transferable into Japanese. For his efforts, Doi was the first poet to be awarded the Order of Cultural Merit. 15 Becoming an educator himself, Doi received a professorship at Tohoku University, an institution of learning greatly affectedly recently by the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami (11 March 2011). Here he established himself as a compelling lecturer and sensitive interpreter of world literatures. Doi’s students thought well enough of him to rebuild his house after it was obliterated during the aerial bombing of Sendai, in 1945. Almost his entire library was destroyed, and now the Tohoku Library Collection contains the few items that survived the inferno.16 These small remainders nonetheless give the impression of Doi as an intellectually venturesome poet who combined interests in Eastern and Western writers. Buddhist Sutra in Chinese are set cover to cover alongside Homer and Victor Hugo on the Doi shelves. Also preserved, having been found among the charred rubble, was a personal letter from Albert Einstein. Doi always acknowledged, in regards to his accomplishments, the crucial mentorship that Hearn provided as the major inspiration for his life’s work. Doi always respected Hearn for his pedagogical prowess, which had educated his Japanese students with the diverse, undiscovered materials of Irish folklore, Girisha no minwa [Greek myths, folk tales], and legendary cultures. At a time when transnational oligarchies began assembling global trade blocs, the study of art provided a crucial alternative for approaching and appreciating the distinctiveness of other societies and their cultural heritages. Doi’s professorial attitude at Tohoku University replicated what he re-

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ceived from Hearn: comparative literature need be neither assimilationist nor universalist. For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Lafcadio Hearn, Doi composed a twenty-five poem waka sequence, each one dedicated to a different aspect of Greece and Hellenic customs and ancestry. Hearn’s life in Ireland and Greece, framed in the conventions of Japanese verse, became an interdimensional evocation of customs. In very personal terms, Doi’s poems offer thanks to the isle of Lefkada, to its climate in which the first breath of air was drawn by its internationalist son. Like the manner in which Satō’s sword was passed on in the Yeats family, Doi’s son, Rinkichi, willed out of his own pocket for a pedestal commemorating Hearn to be set in front of the Ueno Library. This plaque bears a relief of Hearn, his Japanese name etched in characters below; and a verse in the Chinese style by Doi: Literature guides people to feelings of beauty; The brush opens us to this brilliant realm. Yeats, through Hearn’s teaching, certainly had opened Doi to the possibilities of Western literature as more diverse than the AngloAmerican model. Hearn and others often worked against such categorical assessments, exploring through comparative appreciation (rather than competition) where might one situate cultural distinctiveness. Translation was a crucial activity in promoting this goal. Arthur Waley (1998 [1921]), a contemporary of Doi, provided this service for Japanese texts by making them available to English readers. While some have said that Waley unavoidably positioned himself in English colonialism in his role as a translator, and the political power involved in translation cannot be denied, we should also recall the educational services provided by Doi and Waley as facilitators of literature as global event and encounter. Waley produced editions of Genji monogatari [The Tale of Genji] and Man’yōshū [literally, Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves], the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry, for English readers. Waley did not find in these works essential statements of national selfhood, defined by representative models that are unchanging and readily reproducible in current political situations. It is not necessarily fair to implicate

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either Doi or Waley in these extreme interpretations of Japaneseness, or the subsequent politicization of the translated work. In a time of inevitable self-questioning, encounters with other cultures and their literatures enabled more diverse registers for accepting otherness. Certainly, Hearn, Doi, and Waley take on differing approaches to the negotiation of intercultural modernism, between East and West, that erected barriers of concretized literary sensibility, or just outright appropriation, in which competing totalities were on a collision course, one that mirrored geopolitical confrontation. In addressing what he saw as an inevitable economic clash played out in politics and art, the modernist philosopher Miyake Setsurei (1860–1945) was at the vanguard of compiling notions of the total Japanese spirit as patriotic counter-claim to an expansionist West. On the principle that literary magazines had to be politically instructive, Miyake launched the journals Nihonjin [The Japanese] in 1888 and later Nihon oyobi nihonjin [Japan and the Japanese] as the ramparts from which to fly the flag of literary (as racial) loyalty. These magazines followed an editorial code promoting Japanese xenophobia at the expense of suspicious foreign influence. However, to be fair, Miyake allowed for a dynamic forum of debate that most others did not. Notably, he recruited Hasegawa Nyozekan (1875–1969) in 1907 as a column writer. Hasegawa would later become one of the most outspoken proponents of liberal democracy. Hasegawa’s economic opinions favoured forms of pan-Asianism, but his Nihon fuashizimu hihan [A Critique of Japanese Fascism] (1932), remains one of the primary texts against totalitarianism and the co-opting of national sympathies for fascist ideals. Miyake had also tried to broaden his own views with Uchū [The Universe] (1908), which attempted a complimentary depiction of Eastern and Western philosophies. In terms of those oppositional prejudices in which they worked, which often defined the discourse of East against West, Hearn and Doi were very much a part of this debate in comparative literature between political exclusion and transnational dialogue. In promoting informed reading and critical response, the Airurando bungakukai network of chapters was a tremendous force in this project, with the Celtic Revival as its focus, and individuals such as Akutagawa, Hearn, and Doi as their communicators. Their research and schol-

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arship complicated the view that the Japanese, unlike other nations, uniquely resulted from a peculiar obsession with the supernatural. Irish folklore, in Yeats, also disproves claims that the Japanese have a singular devotion to ancestry and tradition. Although I am not arguing that Doi directly imitates Yeats in his most famous lyric “Kōjō no tsuki” [The Moon over the Ruined Castle],17 the emphasis in this song on nocturnal phases of light, collective social practices – the drinking of the sake – and its mournful question “mukashi no hikari ima izuko?” [where is that old light gone now?] presents the figure of the ruins in a manner similar to that deployed by Yeats and his depictions of towers. “Kōjō no tsuki” was inspired by the physical landmarks of Aizu-Wakamatsu Castle and Aoba Castle. Doi read in their ruins a form of cryptic cultural legacy. As David Lloyd (2008) notes about these presentations in Irish literature, “A landscape of ruins, if not in ruins is … intensely readable” (22). Comparative studies and multi-faith dialogue, preliminary as they were, had legitimately kept open, through study and conversation, spaces of interpretation. They saw art, literature, and folklore as common (although distinct) grounds, ones that globalization either commodified or consumed in pursuit of a common global culture. There is no real conversation when the terms of the conversation are homogeneous. Hearn’s works confronts this tricky question of defending the local and particular, while still addressing other locals and particulars. A way out of the Herderian cul-de-sac of isolation could be found through an informed interplay, one that kept cultural continuity as a form of communication, rather than reaching for universals. A rooted virtuosity, combined with a musicality of openness, allowed John Coltrane to jam the blues with several shakuhachi masters.18 As Roy Starrs (2006) points out, Hearn sympathizes with this will to exclusive sovereignty, insofar as he saw it to be a response against the wholesale assimilation of peoples (205). Hearn dislikes any form of mass acculturation in which cultural identity is, in effect, assimilated into another’s standards through forced conversion.19 On this note, there is a famous anecdote about Hearn berating a Mormon missionary in Matsue. Hearn, for the same reasons, sympathized with the Boxer Rebellion and the Chinese revolt against colonization. As

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he writes in “Reflections,” an invasion of “uncompromising attitudes” will promote a response of inflexible violence, especially when one’s home and family are at stake. The forms of ideological and material encroachment, working together, are the monomaniacal force of the jaws closing in on continuity: “Never will the East turn Christian while dogmatism requires the convert to deny his ancient obligation to the family, the community, and the government, – and further insists that he prove his zeal for an alien creed by destroying the tablets of his ancestors, and outraging the memory of those who gave him life” (“Reflections” 480). Evangelism had become another economy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in describing how collective subjectivity can seize with artificial logic in the name of stability, warns: “Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained” (quoted by Canclini 1995, viii). Regardless, this was very much the political approach of much bureaucratic nationalism in the modern period. As Gerald Figal (1999) describes, Japanese bureaucracies were determined “to redirect the sentiments of the masses away from heterogeneous complexes of local beliefs in the supernatural and toward a homogenized belief in a unique kokutai [national polity] (199).20 The Japanese motivation toward imperialism, as it has been variously excused, was self-defence in the midst of a European land grab across Asia. This sort of centralization of cultural structures meant the disassembly of more localized traditions. The effects of these policies included shrine mergers, which conflated the multifarious forms of worship and interpersonal relationships of local intimacy into broad, municipal districts. The imposition of formulaic definitions of people, places, and the qualities that unite them became the official national narrative, presented against an international contest of wills. Given the will to shore up these processes of abstraction, one can observe how in the modern period this rhetoric would, in Japan and elsewhere, turn into the sterility of obstinate fascism. Lafcadio Hearn was angered equally by Anglo-American industrialism and Christian evangelism, and his writings can veer in the direction of vehement protectionism. But, taken as a whole, his

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personal notes are far more concerned with the commonplace rituals of Japanese daily life that produce effects that Kawano Satsuki (2005) describes as “many layers of embodied and emplaced meaning … orderliness in everyday bodily and place-related practices” (114). Hearn, like Yeats in The Celtic Twilight, does not find that these rituals automatically smooth over stratification within the society, especially in relationship to wealth and urban residency. In both of their cases myth and reality is a false dichotomy created by modernist progressivism that was erecting Enlightenment value systems of rational capital against outmoded superstition, as Adorno and Horkheimer found – the consolidation of power over resources, including first and foremost the landscape. Yeats cannot be said to have been a great admirer of Hearn, as his library did not contain any of his volumes. The discourse of multi-temporality, of soul as a figuration of experience that can move across landscape in forms of inversion and distortion, was one of the strategic ways that the Celtic Revival deployed memory as an amorphous, adaptable agency. On this theme, the Revivalists’ intersectional approach to folk tales, heritage, and local spaces would be the activity of most interest to their Japanese admirers in the Airurando bungakukai. In this regard, Doi Bansui, as one of Hearn’s first students, took the lessons of his teacher and expanded them into a discourse of interculturality. Matsumura Mineko: Resonances of Translated Shores Early twentieth-century Japan saw a remarkable rise in the number of female translators who took advantage of the print culture of serialized publications to gain a wide readership for their efforts. Matsumura Mineko was the pseudonym adopted by Katayama Hiroko who, according to Kawamura Minato (2005), claimed the name when she saw it written on an umbrella carried by a small child (58–62) while searching out a pseudonym to use in entering a poetry contest. She would make use of this pen name until 1931. Along with her own works of fiction, poetry, and scholarship, Matsumura Mineko produced well-regarded translations of Celtic Revival literature during an impressive period of work between 1931 and 1941. She was also

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a tremendous enthusiast of Celtic languages and cultures, particularly intrigued by Ireland’s seemingly conflicted status as a Catholic nation, yet also somehow pagan, colonized but fiercely independent. Matsumura was deeply curious as to why so many Japanese authors expressed an affinity, even if rather fanciful, of the similarities between Irish and Japanese life. Kikuchi Kan (1888–1948), in particular, an enthusiast of Synge’s dramas, had promoted the idea of comparative sensibilities between the two countries (see Katayama Hiroyuki 1997, 214–15). And so Matsumura wondered – what were the likes of Yeats and Synge saying that struck so many of Japan’s most innovative writers? By pursuing an answer to such a question, Matsumura (formerly Katayama) was among the foremost translators of Irish literature into Japanese at the beginning of the twentieth century, and an innovative scholar of Celtic folklore and folk tales just as mass popularity for Irish legends and fairy tales began to take on the shape of a literary movement in Japan in the network of the Airurando bungakukai. Bilingually educated by missionaries at the Methodist Tōyō Eiwa jogakkō [School for Girls] (1885–95), Matsumura acquired both a knowledge of the Bible and of English literature and language. An aspiring tanka writer from a young age, Matsumura published early and prodigiously, benefitting from a marriage at age twentyone to a man who did not try to stunt her poetic activities. In 1913, adopting the pen name Matsumura Mineko permanently, she won a prestigious prize for her novel Akai hana [The Red Flower] and with it literary fame. During the period from 1914 until the early 1930s, Matsumura began studying Irish literature in earnest, with particular attention to Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge. In Matsumura’s time, translations of Irish literature appeared not too long after their publication in Ireland. With access to so much contemporary Irish writing, and a booming enthusiasm for its writers, study groups began to form in Japan for the express purposes of studying Irish literature: these were the Airurando bungakukai. They were organized as local chapters primarily: for example, in the Kyoto chapter there were Japanese authors such as Ueda Bin, whose student Kikuchi Kan became a foremost scholar of Synge’s plays. Simultaneously, in the Tokyo chapter, Akutagawa joined Yeats admirers

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such as Sangū Makoto and Saijō Yaso, as I detail below. Matsumura’s great esteem for Celtic Revivalist writers is evident in her commentary throughout the period, particularly with an admiration for Lady Gregory’s impact as a woman on Ireland’s new national literature (Katayama/Matsumura 2004, Tokasetsu zuihitsu 309–15). In acting as translator, researcher, and facilitator of knowledge, Matsumura also acted as an educator, introducing important texts and authors to Japanese readers, framing these works with useful cultural background and explanatory annotations. Storytelling was among her assets. The entirety of her output concentrated on authors more or less connected with the Celtic Revival: W.B. Yeats, Lord Dunsany, Fiona Macleod, J.M. Synge, and Seamus O’Kelly, with particular emphasis on their published folk tales and plays. Matsumura also translated a single play by Shaw, Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, as she had an avid interest in the emergent forms of Irish drama. As her biographer Imura Kimie notes (2005), Matsumura did not accept payment for her translations, considering it a pro bono act of artistic collaboration; she was, however, fond of receiving cakes in lieu of money. Although not having a direct relationship with Lafcadio Hearn, Matsumura nonetheless acted as a pivotal figure in the development of the Airurando bungakukai by making Irish authors accessible for discussion. Matsumura compiled the materials in a manner that makes them more accessible to Japanese readers uncertain how to read Irish folklore and, therefore, by extension, how to interpret the Irish people. Matsumura, not wishing to codify the Celtic but rather to offer a survey of Celtic storytelling style, does not so much synthesize Irish fairy tales under a rubric of interpretation as presents them as transparently as possible. As Naoki Sakai (1997) has amply documented, translation in Japan intersected intimately with the formation of cultural identity by positing Japan against the characterization of the foreign as received into Japanese. Matsumura Mineko, in providing so many of the translations that the Airurando bungakukai studied, interestingly recasts the ethic political entanglement of how “collective identity is posterior to the formation of the discourse that posits this identity,” as Sakai notes (181). In short, the discussion of identity precedes the identity itself, since the questioning presumes the existence of an answer. Not satisfied with this

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rather unidirectional process of discussing national self-consciousness, Revivalist authors turned to twilight as a more fluid space in which identity and discourse about identity could productively exist in a space of multi-directional contacts. Takahashi Matsuo (2006), in a travelogue documenting his journey to Ireland, notes the extensively similarities between Lady Gregory and Matsumura as women authors who collaborated, through translation, in the navigation of language and folklore (57–61). Matsumura shares this spectral sensibility and turns to tales of ghosts and fairies as an alternative to catechetical modes of national self-analysis of stable origins and methodical descriptions of those origins. In light of Yeats’s question why do they dream the same dream, Matsumura analyzes in what ways the Irish came to feel there was a shared consciousness about their own regional character in the collective life of their colonized experience. That Irish was all invented to shirk off the British was neither a satisfyingly documentable claim, nor could it speak to the continuity of Irish literary activity, which was what interested Matsumura so passionately: that Irish literature existed as a tradition, not an entrepreneurial enterprise. Matsumura’s friendship with Beatrice Suzuki, whom she met in 1916, exposed her to concepts of channelling, mediumship, and the discourse of the ghost. By 1917, Matsumura’s output is almost exclusively focused on Irish writing. Aside from linguistic help, Suzuki would be Matsumura’s informant on a number of questions concerning Celtic literature, as well as a witty conversationalist. The voice of the discarnate, therefore, had thematic implication in invoking an identarian pluralism into the modernist situation of subject becoming object, of imminent lapsing into intangible. Ireland and Japan share a similar emphasis on this theme in their early twentieth-century literatures. Ichiya­nagi Hirotaka (1994), in examining different themes of early twentiethcentury Japan, argues that the general faith in modern rationality had many apostates. Even those with mainstream, urban sensibilities had a taste for communing with the uncanny. Various forms of Western divination, in particular, had been imported for evening entertainment. Foreign-style séances and Ouija boards rattled and breathed with all kinds of arcane pronouncements and foreign accents. When thinking of the tomfoolery of the Theosophists, it is well to remem-

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ber that similar psychic clubs, tarot cards, psychic healers, and palm readers were also popular in Asia, as Ichiyanagi and others have described. Curiously, Western interfaces with the dead became new mechanisms for communicating with one’s own ancestors in the Orient. The Tokyo salon activities of psychics combined telepathy and clairvoyance with Eastern spiritualities. Seiyō kijutsu [Western magic] had an innovative potential for invoking two strange worlds at once: the astral realms of both East and West. If urban spaces were quickly absorbing mutual correspondences as new world cosmopolitanism, then their threshold spaces also contained cultural relationships that collapsed into each other so readily. This kind of modernist magic was a syncretic borrowing and blending, ravenously opportunistic, usually for personal gain or entertainment, and lacking the folkloric approaches of Yeats or Hearn. Seiyō kijutsu, in describing paranormal activity, was more broadly understood by theorists and poets as a kind of literary strategy as well. Matsumura saw her work as a magical art. As her notes emphasize, she understands the translator as having a performative dimension in the transmutation of experience into the voice of the other, a sort of cultural séance through the art of translation. She divined from a translated text an Irish-Japanese portal through which Celtic twilights could be channelled, and intercultural ancestral recall performed. Matsumura’s folkloric clairvoyance was both imaginative and scholarly: translation involves the negotiation of heritage by making its meanings protean and cross-cultural. The ground shifts through the questions that the translator asks in her traversal of contexts. Imura Kimie’s essay on Matsumura, “Airurando bungaku hon’yakuka: Matsumura Mineko” [Matsumura Mineko: Translator of Irish Literature] (2005), documents the personal connections Matsumura had with Irish and Scottish literature. Imura, who has written extensively on Celtic legends herself, notes particularly that Matsumura had to rethink the translation praxis of her time, with its focus either on hyper-literalism or florid recreations, at the semantic level. To translate fairies, Matsumura’s Japanese renditions could not rely on dictionary cognates to substitute for the original. Fairies, ghosts, twilight – these insubstantial categories were not incoherent to a Japanese readership, but they no doubt acquired recontextual

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characteristics when framed along the lines of Japanese mental imagery. A sídhe, or fairy, may bring to mind a particular image to an Irish reader, whose literary inheritance is based on cultural tropes, whereas yōsei [a Japanese fairy] could conjure up a rather dissimilar apparition. In short, Matsumura confronted the question of not just reading another country, but remapping the intangible phantasms of the literary imagination of that region. Yet, that fairies and twilight were so abject in their resistance to stock, sovereign depictions and territorial demarcations was what drew her so intensely to the writings of the Celtic Revival. In somehow being so remote and phantasmal, the fairy lore in fact could be more accessible, trans-regional, and multi-temporal – and thus a more intriguing portrait of otherness. For a Japanese audience keen to discover what those similarities might be, a kind of cultural dynamic, through translation since travel was so difficult, needed to be created. Seeing lore as a kind of repository of memory, Matsumura published Lady Gregory’s plays, as depictions of Irish rural life, beginning with Mangetsu [The Full Moon] in the periodical Kokoro no hana [The Heart’s Flower] in 1914. Imura Kimie (2005) describes in her assessment of this first effort that Matsumura was developing a lyrical ear for rendering into Japanese the various oral registers of spoken Hiberno-Irish, with a particular focus on markers of class and social habitat (285–6). Continuing with versions of Fiona Shaw and J.M. Synge, Kikuchi Kan, who was developing his own dramatic style under the influence of Synge, credits Matsumura for her renderings of the particulars of Hiberno-English [Airuran-fu no eigo] with nuanced fidelity (in Imura 286). Matsumura and Kikuchi would consult with each other frequently on matters of Irish literature and translation, him interviewing her for the literary journal Jiji shinpō [Current Events] in 1917. Kikuchi Kan very much describes a popular feeling in Japan at the time in his assertion that Celtic cultures offer a particularly evocative similarity to the Japanese as a kind of narrative contrast for consideration (see Katayama Horiyuki 1997, 214–15). Particularly noteworthy features of Matsumura’s translations are her efforts to create representations of Ireland that are neither purely fantastic nor stubbornly realistic. Although showing a strong preferential enthusiasm for mythology and Irish legends, Matsumura

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strove in the presentations of her work to link the more otherworldly elements to the practice of the contemporary Irish imagination. In this regard, she found J.M. Synge to be an ideal representative of an embodied reality in which communal practices and mythic memory coincide in the practice of everyday customs. These intersections would no doubt be strongly meaningful to a Japanese audience, whose own relationships to festivals and local lore had very physical circumstances. In collaboration with Kikuchi, Matsumura completed her translation of The Playboy of the Western World in 1917, originally calling it Itazura-mono [A Practical Joke] but later revising it to Nishi no ninki-mono [A Popular Guy of the West]. Recreating dialect, the particular music and nuance of spoken Hiberno-English, troubled Matsumura. Aware that she could never produce a Japanese equivalent to what was concurrently taking place on the Abbey Theatre stage, she worried that her efforts might be, ultimately, peripheral if they entirely lacked the atmosphere or ambience of Irish phrasings. Translation could also lead to a reversal in enchantment, and in her opinion the intrinsic qualities that marked the distinctiveness of Irish legends and folklore were intimately connected to the storytelling practices of oral speech. In short, an accent was impossible to recreate, and the loss of that marker caused her to think that her translations were too far removed from the source. A voiceless legend, which is what translation became in her view, had lost its performative ontology by being removed from the contexts of its utterance. Noguchi Yonejirō (1998), the Yeats enthusiast, discusses how much this worried Matsumura, noting her response to the critic Tsubouchi Shōyō’s complaint that her dialogue in Synge was too mannered [jōhin sugi], that her attempts to present an Irish voice in Japanese diction resulted in affected and arched phrasings to denote cultural distinctiveness (438–42). Matsumura really had no access to Irish accents, but she researched as widely as she could, frequently attending lectures at Tokyo Imperial University, where Hearn’s teaching had established a lively consortium of Irish literature enthusiasts that continued after Hearn’s death. Matsumura also routinely consulted with Suzuki Daisetsu’s wife, Beatrice Lane, who claimed a modicum of Gaelic knowledge from her Scottish-American mother. Lane had been a member

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of both the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society, which may render her information suspect, but nonetheless these societies did enable further links between Lane and those of Yeats’s circle. Another influence on Matsumura was the lectures of Ichikawa Sanki, who had spoken extensively on Synge (Imura 287). What Lane and others could not provide, Matsumura sought out from local embassies, and received it from the Gaelic-speaking wives of local diplomats (288). Matsumura, no doubt was hindered by a lack of resources that we now take for granted. Nonetheless, she discovered in the Celtic folk tales a realm of interplay to offset Japanese literary isolationism. Matsumura, whose work remains underexplored by scholars, did much to encourage literary and social encounters with the Keruto [Celtic]. She helped to present Keruto as a sensibility that provides a challenge to growing prejudices toward a monolithic West, in a post-Perry era of the Anglo-American military complex. Her annotated studies of literature and folklore from Ireland and Scotland undermine blanket understandings of the “Westerner” [seiyōjin] as presented to a Japanese audience. This required, however, a concentration on folk tales as unique communications of cultural antiquity and experience. By their nature marginal, they operate outside of the pressing political rhetoric that had so rapidly defined geographical isolationism. Matsumura’s methodology distinguishes itself by its commitment to the intangibles of translation, the paradoxical séance-like effort to transpose not only words but also cultural attitudes, including inflections of accent, memory, and collective identity as operants through cross-historical referencing. Her translations of the complete plays of J.M. Synge [Shingu gikyoku zenshū] appeared in 1923. A later reprinting, published after her death, would include a brief preface by W.B. Yeats. Striking a note of sympathetic resonance with Matsumura Mineko’s translations Yeats observes, “Once or twice when I have read some Japanese poem or play I have wished that Synge were living. How like it is, in its story or emotional quality, to something he has recorded in his book on the Aran Islands or in his Well of the Saints or in his Riders to the Sea, or that Lady Gregory or I have found in Galway or Sligo” (Prefaces and Introductions 145–6).

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Matsumura’s cultural presentation of Keruto through her translations and studies of folklore, renowned for her expertise by the Airurando bungakukai, provided many literary versions of Irish legends, promoting further study. In translating the complete plays of Lord Dunsany in 1921, Matsumura demonstrated her commitment to popularizing a variety of Irish dramatists. Matsumura’s essays on Irish and Scottish customs would be some of the earliest investigations of imagination and the fantastic as qualities that shaped Irish modernism. Matsumura’s depictions of Irish societies as localized collectives of history, lore, and customs emphasize the influence of haunting as the unassimilated past that still intervenes against its eradications by the present moment. Her emphasis on this crucial feature of Celtic Revivalist sensibility enabled a broader critical and theoretical reception of the Celtic Revival to Japanese writers keen to reconsider their own development through modernism. As both annotator and translator, Matsumura provided further texts and concepts as introductory materials to the network of the Irish Studies Society to which she was a prominent contributor. Her emphasis on the Revival suggests that fairies travel freely in time, taking up new appearances and performances while keeping the traces of their situational origins. Matsumura’s final published volume is a collection of her essays and personal reminiscences entitled Tokasetsu [Candlemas or Im­ bolc] (1953) – an allusion to 2 February as an important Irish festival day with complex associations to Christianity, Celtic folklore and customs, and the feast day of the syncretic St Brigid [Lá Fhéile Bríde]. Matsumura wrote a brief appendix that states her purpose in gathering together her writings was to pass them on to her son. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: The Irish Fairy Is an Ancestor in Pain Of all the Japanese authors I bring to my discussion, many of whom I recognize are unfamiliar to critics of European modernism, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) probably requires the least biographical introduction. Regarded as a revolutionary who in essence created the

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genre of the modern short story in the Japanese language, his legacy extends into many areas of Japanese culture, including a major prize in his name, as well as Kurosawa’s film Rashōmon, much seen in the West, which is based on two of Akutagawa’s stories. Although it is difficult to label an Akutagawan style, primary qualities of his work include a gloomy intuition for the force of time as a process of forgetting, a semi-spiritual attraction to Buddhist allegories, critical examinations of the state of Japanese art, and a sense of the paranormal that was driven by a powerful moral force, a supernatural that maintains tenuously interactive connections with the material. Akutagawa’s mixture of skepticism and imaginativeness make him, at least in a broad comparison, an interesting colleague of Yeats. The autobiographical story Aru ahō no isshō [A Fool’s Life] (1927), one of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s last works, relays a very personal account of his own declining mental health, his struggles to keep up an active literary workload, and the comfort he found in his sudden friendship with an intellectually vivacious woman who informed his scholarly interests. Most critics (e.g., Kawamura Jirō 1985) have identified this person as Matsumura Mineko, who met Akutagawa in the summer of 1924, in Karuizawa (43). Somewhat older, her reputation as a translator of Irish literature impressed the young author: Akutagawa had been established as a leading researcher in the Tokyo branch of the Airurando bungakukai since around 1914, and he was also one of the foremost prose authors of Japanese modernity. Kiyobe Chizuko (1997) analyzes the series of encounters followed from that first encounter: Akutagawa admired the established woman for her critical knowledge of Irish traditions, particularly contemporary literature of the Celtic Revival. Clearly, the two shared a profound interest in Celtic writings and bonded intellectually over this topic: as Imura Kimie has proven, Matsumura Mineko gave Akutagawa the edition of Fiona Macleod that she worked from in order to compile her collection of translations Kanashiki jō (1925) (Imura 302–3).21 Matsumura and Akutagawa had a very close friendship in which the Irish Revival figured prominently. Her memoir of their relationship, which she published after Akutagawa’s suicide entitled Akutagawa-san no kaisō [Remembrances of Akutagawa: My Gospel of Luke] (1929) in the magazine Fujin kōron, describes in deliberately

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detached prose the passion Akutagawa had for Yeats, which she herself had done so much to impart to him.22 It would be wrong to cast Matsumura as the stand-in for an archetypal muse, although critics such as Indra Levy have argued for the pervasive eroticism of culturally hybridized women – embodied as Japanese but acting in Western sensibilities – that gave them the allure of both femme fatale and myth-spinning muse. Matsumura saw her activity as a translator – to provide core materials to a wider readership throughout the Irish Studies Society in Japan, to promote discussion, and create a common ground for scholarly dialogue. Akutagawa notes her intellectual prowess as well as linguistic indefatigability in his comments on their relationship. Matsumura has become source material for speculative feminist writing in Japan in its redeployment of hybridized mythologies, combining materials from Yeats and the Kojiki, as particularly evidenced in the novels of Ogiwara Noriko (1959–). The connection between Akutagawa and Yeats, however, like those of all the authors under discussion here, is not one of abstract comparativism or contrived relations. Akutagawa, in many ways, was an important enthusiast for W.B. Yeats’s work and Irish Revival literature in general. As a leading figure in the Tokyo network of Irish literature enthusiasts, which he joined in 1912, Akutagawa did much to introduce Yeats’s writings, and his Revivalist sensibilities, to his colleagues. In the 1920s, as a friend and colleague to Matsumura, Akutagawa was a consultant in her translations of Fiona Macleod. Akutagawa’s fascination with Irish literature is largely credited as having begun with Sangū Makoto (1890–1967), the literary critic. Sangū was a student at Tokyo University (Tōdai daigaku) when he wrote a review of Izumi Kyōka’s Kōgyoku (1913), which recommended Yeats’s plays for their style of dramaturgy for comparison, three years before the writing of At the Hawk’s Well (1916). Kyōka’s position in relation to Yeats, in terms of dramaturgical theme and style, will be discussed here in chapter 6. Sangū championed Yeats’s works and their relationship to Japanese literature all of his life, particularly in his biographical Yeats to Nippon (1949), where he argues emphatically for the particularized importance of Yeats to Japan. Sangū, who collaborated on various works with Lafcadio Hearn, also encouraged

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an enthusiasm for Hearn’s writings as offering a perspective that, as non-Japanese, could in fact inform Japanese literature. Sangū also composed a brief summary of Lafcadio Hearn’s impact (“Lafcadio Hearn in Japan,” 1959), and helped edit Hearn’s editorial writings from newspapers (1960). Sangū’s impact on Akutagawa was immediate: intrigued by this respected scholar of Irish literature, Akutagawa began his efforts with the Airurando bungakukai collectives with a translation of excerpts from Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight. Akutagawa, most interestingly, had detected how this theme of twilight also operates in the Revival, particularly in The Celtic Twilight, as evidenced by the lexical selections he makes in his translations. Akutagawa translated three tales from The Celtic Twilight in 1914 for the magazine Dai-sanji shin shichō [New Currents of Thought (3rd Series)]. These are among his very earliest literary efforts and thus highly suggestive of his formative interests and influences. Appearing were versions of “The Eater of Precious Stones” [Hōseki o tabefu mono], “The Three O’Briens and the Evil Fairies” [San-nin no ōbiyurun to ashiki seireitō], and “Regina, Regina, Pigmeorum Veni” [Jo’ō yo, waijin no jo’ō waga kitareri], under the translated title Keruto no hakumei [The Celtic Twilight]. In doing so, he helped to bring the concept of hakumei [twilight] into Japanese literary vocabulary as an important event in Airurando bungakukai activity, and as a definitive feature of revivalist stylistics. Akutagawa was only thirteen when Hearn died, and they never met personally. But, inspired by Hearn’s legacy as an educator and a thinker, Akutagawa made a trip to Matsue specifically to visit Hearn’s former home. Akutagawa, according to what Akutagawa says in many of his letters, was impressed by Hearn’s reputation as an excellent teacher, and refers to him exclusively with the honorific of teacher, “Hān-sensei,” throughout his personal writings (Sukehiro Hirakawa 2000, 8–9). Akutagawa always uses polite, deferential language when speaking of Hearn, suggesting the sense of indebtedness he feels to Hearn’s legacy. Through such channels of introduction to Celtic Revivalist writing in Japan, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke took on both administrative and research roles in organizing an important hub for networking: the Airurando Bungakukai in Tokyo. As Doi had organized activity in the Osaka (Kansai region) chapter, Akuta-

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gawa would provide an equally active forum for publications, discussions, and scholarly conversations for Irish literature enthusiasts in Tokyo. As president of the Tokyo chapter of Airurando bungakukai, Akutagawa had a particular need to not only translate Irish literature, but to promote an international discussion of Irish culture. The development in Japan of Airurando bungakukai, and the study of Irish society and its folklore, is an important aspect of Japanese modernity. The geographically widespread popularity of the chapters of such a club – with major concentrations in both Tokyo and Osaka – and the proliferation of translations and newsletters accompanying this project demonstrate the seriousness of its participants. The names of people among its membership include some of the foremost writers of their time. The Tokyo chapter of the Airurando bungakukai had, along with Akutagawa, Hinatsu Kōnosuke (1890–1971) and Saijō Yaso (1892–1970) at its organizational helm. Hinatsu was known for his neo-Gothic poetry, informed by his fondness for Catholic aesthetics. Saijō was an immensely popular writer noted for his influential work on min’yō, the manner of folk songs and singing. Hinatsu and Saijō had collaborated on the literary journal Kamen [Mask], where some of Akutagawa’s short stories would appear, including “Kumo no ito” [The Spider’s Thread]. I also note, in anticipation of the last chapter’s discussion of Noh, that Osanai Kaoru studied over a long period of time with these societies and their considerations of Yeats. Not coincidentally, he was also a leading proponent of innovative Japanese drama, having adapted Yeats’s play The Hour-Glass (1926) for Japanese audiences. This example is suggestive of how Yeats’s socalled Noh dramas carry similarities to certain movements in the Japanese avant-garde rather than its classical drama. Akutagawa was an admirer of Matsumura’s translations of Irish literature, writing an enthusiastic review of one of her collections in which he lauded their contributive effect to Japan’s own changing literary mindset (1995, vol. 1, 203–4). Indeed, their shared appreciation for Irish literature probably served as the catalyst for their meeting in Karuizawa, two years after the publication of his review, in 1924.23 Akutagawa and Matsumura met while they were both on holidays in the same region, and struck up an immediately close familiarity

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through their shared passion for Irish literature. Kiyobe Chizuko (1997) describes the depth of their friendship, despite the wide gap in age – Akutagawa was thirty-two, and Matsumura was forty-six – and differing stages in their careers as authors (54–6). According to Kimura, Matsumura presented to Akutagawa the source text from which she based her translations of Fiona Macleod (302). Matsumura and Akutagawa would meet for the last time in June 1927, shortly before Akutagawa took his own life on 24 July. Akutagawa shared with Matsumura Mineko the dynamic translational praxis of interpreting for Japan the Celtic as a cultural logic of a distinctive other into Japanese modernity, an other that could be read as similar in ways that Anglo-American hegemony had failed so greatly in creating any sense of cultural resonance for dialogue with the Japanese. Akutagawa’s versions of The Celtic Twilight, discussed below, contributed to the increasing a wave of interest in Yeats and Irish folklore and its particular ethno-political approach to the present consciousness of Ireland pressed upon by the ruins of myth, the nostalgia amid destruction, and its imaginative dedication to alternatives to predetermined colonial futures. Matsumura argues that Irish mythology needed to be understood as continuously relevant to cultural circumstances and conditions of the present. Jeffrey Angles has documented extensively how ryōki, or stories of the “bizarre, ridiculous, irrational, or fashionably odd” had become a major component of Japanese modernist culture. Translating ryōki as “curiosity hunting,” as Angles does, the term can encompass many topics from occultic experiments to the eru, guro, nansensu [erotic and grotesque nonsense] of the period. Akutagawa’s writings can certainly be fit into this general trend of a faddish framework. But clearly his writings stand apart from the genre fictions of the period. The way that he deploys the strange or the paranormal, as uncanny figurations of intercourse between modernity and the penumbra of history, is particularly deft. Moreover, the manner in which this technique was informed, in part, by Yeats’s writing is noteworthy. Akutagawa’s personal reflections as an author document his own sense of relationship to Yeats’s poems. Early in his career, he wrote in his diary that “The Secret Rose” had deeply affected his literary development, encouraging him to translate first “The Heart of Spring”

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and “The Curse of Fires and of Shadows” (Akutagawa shinjiten 28). As well as in the same year working on preliminary notes about J.M. Synge, some of Akutagawa’s very first publications included his translations from The Celtic Twilight in the aforementioned Dai-sanji shin shichō (1914). This popular literary magazine also included the works of Kume Masao, Sangū Makoto, Osanai Kaoru, and Kikuchi Kan. Writings of the Celtic Renaissance, including works by Lady Gregory, were regularly featured, and future issues became forums for discussions on Celtic themes. What is generally clear from their discussions is that Irish literature was not simply fascinating in and of itself, but the ways in which its distinctively Revivalist features could open up parallel lines of enquiry intrigued the mindset of many Japanese modernists. Irish Revivalist literature exhibited strongly an anti-naturalist point of view in privileging the paranormal as operative in their stories, letters, and essays that engaged inventively in social commentary. This is a hallmark of Akutagawa’s writing, as he likewise blends fantasy and critique. Kappa (1926), for example, is a compelling satire of modern life seen through the eyes of folkloric denizens. This novella could be compared to passages from The Celtic Twilight, in which demons and fairies are skeptical foils against the humdrum assertion of progress and enlightenment. “Hell Screen” [Jigoku hen] (1918) takes up the challenge put forth in “The Eater of Precious Stones”: how does the artist paint or write the hell of artistry? This work exemplifies Akutagawa’s ability to fashion a tableau out of Japanese aesthetics while playing with Western narrative techniques that he acquired through the art of translation.24 I also think of Akutagawa’s Buddhist homiletic of “Kumo no ito” [The Spider’s Thread] (1917). At face value, the plot follows ethical value systems, part Buddhist and part Christian perhaps, that result in salvation. “Hell Screen” possesses the same kind of dangling spirituality for which “Happy and Unhappy Theologians” finds respite. Heaven or Hell expand or recede according to the manner in which one grabs for them. Akutagawa, in his choice of vocabulary for importing Irish cultural idioms, as evidenced in his rendering of The Celtic Twilight, as described below, gives his sense of how he understands the nature of twilight to be a movable dimension, one that haunts the ruptures

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and fissures created by accelerated change. Not only as a translator, Akutagawa’s prominence in the Tokyo Airurando bungakukai helped to establish Yeats as an exciting, Western contemporary. Yeats distinctively presented the notion that the lore of respective countries need not be relegated to the literary shelf of distant events, but could be remoulded as critical lenses for evaluating temporal circumstances now. This is not to say that Akutagawa’s landscape of relics and ruins is merely derivative of Irish materials, nor that he could not have developed from his own locality and its residual, ancestral fragments of Japan. What is of interest to this study, however, are the potential modes of investigation that Akutagawa appreciatively found in Revivalist writing. That he had such interest in The Celtic Twilight has many suggestive resonances for the relationship between Irish and Japanese modernity. Like the Revivalists, Akutagawa is not formulating a conventional gothic out of either an exoticized homeland, or an imported Ireland. There are more nuances and perspectives here than in, say, Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw. Akutagawa, through The Celtic Twilight, began a consideration of how Japanese folklore surfaces, contentiously, in the shifting contexts of the modern age. Through Matsumura and others, Akutagawa was familiar with the influx of Irish legends, folklore, and ghost stories that Japanese literary magazines were keen to publish. And the Akutagawa oeuvre contains numerous spaces in which hauntings and enchanted items convene to give forms of knowledge that the empirical cannot, in a fashion similar to the methods of the Celtic Revival. Quite famously in the short story “In a Grove” [Yabu no naka] (1922), the presence of ancestral voices, insubstantial and contested in their nature, are confused and conflicting in their accounts of the past. Critics have previously linked Yabu no naka to Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, in which testimony at a murder trial entails various witnesses. But what seems more reminiscent of The Celtic Twilight is how contrasting testimony gives evidence in the form of speculative history, of modernity questioning identity. This is accomplished through narration, rather than through the social science of documented facticity. More in keeping with Yeats than Browning, Akutagawa incorporates a medium who delivers the voice of the ghost, Takehiko, in order to spectralize the perspective on the historical record. The

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ghost represents an identity of disappearance and reappearance that emphasizes the tensions of ancestral recall. Akutagawa’s ghostly sense of transitional materials opens up an interrogation of a shadowy ancestry by competing ideologies of modernity, just as in the manner of The Celtic Twilight. Thus, Akutagawa grapples with how the energies of enchantment are just as often manipulated by curio seekers, politicos, or antique dealers. Yeats’s own indignation took issue with those “leaders of the crowd” that appropriate formulations of a neglected countryside to gain political clout. Hearn had argued for an argumentative domain that favours kokoro, or sentiment and spirit, as a necessarily immeasurable inheritance of feeling. Akutagawa was critical of how all around him modernity was taking the shape of ignorant investors and greedy collectors seizing upon anything Japanese for a market value nostalgia to be exported. This indexing of globalized sentiment, though, is not the same as how an individual cherishes those items that possess an indefinable sense of historicity. To depict this, and to establish a sense of how Akutagawa shared Yeats’s twilight sense of the relic as revenant who gestures at an impossible return, I first examine how Akutagawa draws a stark contrast between how different points of cultural politics valuate worth as a contemporary indexing of either current or emotions, as they turn heirlooms into tropes in the short story “The Doll” [Hina] (1923). Hina is difficult to translate, since hina refers to the specific artworks, usually heirlooms, which are displayed for the O-hina-matsuri, or annual Girls’ Festival. In Akutagawa’s tale, a young girl tries to articulate what the doll represents, as her inheritance, personal treasure, and connection to a dissipating past. Because of globalization and market demands, however, the hina becomes denuded of her own historical narrative by the process of displacement and foreign acquisition. Her incalculable value as relic has, through a market appropriation, become truncated because present circumstances have inflicted upon her an attitude of exploitation. This is a crucial theme for both the Revival and the Japanese modernists under examination: past and present are in fact co-dependent, and ancestral recall requires a contemporary interlocutor in order to maintain a contextual connection. An ignored or forgotten past slips into neglect and

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then annihilation. Hearn had observed this when documenting the religious acts of ancestral observance in the O-bon rituals of honouring the spirits of the past. The doll itself seems poised to speak, but unable to be heard. As relayed by an elderly storyteller, thus emphasizing the temporal act of distance and recollection, the narrator laments the gradual dispersal of a family’s inventory of relics that provided tangible connections to their ancestry: folk items, many generations old, were pawned to foreign buyers after the advent of modernity led to the financial and social ruin of the family. That the antiques’ value is indexed and capriciously predicated by bargain hunting most distresses the narrator. What had been cherished as priceless sites of domestic ritual and ancestral recall have become marketplace commodities for the greedy, the ignorant, and the opportunistic. Cultural heritage becomes converted into globalized trinkets for the curio collector, who has no emotional investment in the object but only a desire to access the other through purchase power. The foreign collector is the invasive faux connoisseur of the story. He sees her festival doll not as crucial to cultural context or collective memories, as represented by the hina matsuri [girls’ festival], but instead as an export commodity. He enjoys Japanese culture insofar as it can be bought, displayed, eaten, or resold. He recognizes a pawnshop opportunity, and targets the impoverished family who must relinquish ownership of irreplaceable artifacts to even the lowest bidder. (It is as if Satō sold his sword, the one mentioned in Meditations in Time of Civil War, to a token hunter rather than bequeathing it to a poet as thanks for a meaningful friendship.) The narrator also notes that, perhaps as a kind of karma, the family members themselves have descended through a genealogy of moneylenders, their own wealth acquired at the expense of others, as they exploited the financial disparities of the shogunate eras for their own profit. In the distant past, their own acquisitions had been obtained out of the old dynasty’s systems of vulture commerce. The flow of power has shifted, however, now that the family has been destroyed financially through the reform of the Japanese commercial infrastructure and Western know-how. Unable to sustain themselves even

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as shopkeepers, they begin to barter away, piece by piece, the precious archive of their ancestry in a buyer’s market of museum mentalities. The two children in the story, however, do not realize the financial factors in play. The pair of them articulate, Januslike, contrary viewpoints as how to best face the crisis of modernity, or turn away from it. The brother seeks a radical cosmopolitanism that would abandon anything suggestive of Japaneseness altogether, in pursuit of a superior (and unsentimental) Western rationality and enlightenment. Culture is a regressive superstition, in his view. The sister, in contrast, looks helplessly backward into an oblivion of denuded enchantment, as heritage recedes into obsolescence and the relegated relics are pawned. But she is helpless in articulating why the hina, the handcrafted dolls, can have emotive value. She cannot rationalize why her beloved dolls should not remain hers to treasure, to pass on to her daughters, to continue the interconnections of tradition. The discourse of trade requires an economic determinism to evaluate what is to be kept and what is to be discarded. Against such calculations, her nostalgic sentiments are readily dismissed since she cannot assert that her antique doll, a unique creation with its own cumulative fingerprints, deserves a place on the future’s shelf. The selection of the hina as more than a trope, as a tactile keepsake of the cultural continuum is a strategic choice by Akutagawa. The story emphasizes that the hina has a more comprehensive context than that of a simple ningyō, or generic toy doll. The hina’s purpose requires the particular interactive format that is specific to domestic Japanese space, as supported by broader cultural placements of festivals, tradition, calendars, and repetition of generations within Japan. The hina’s dwelling spot, as defined by generations of practice, is within the sociocultural framework o-hina matsuri, the festival that represents a persistence of form and practice through shared reiteration, chronologically specific to a year, the matsuri, but timeless in repetition. This is the value the daughter cannot pronounce or explain: not that the hina is, indeed, preciously personal to her, which it is, but because it had been treasured by all of the girls that came before her. No dream, custom, or ceremony can truly evaluate the past, as continuum of investment and inheritance, in the cash-and-

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grab society, especially when the tangible object of cultural participation, and its lustre, become props for trade. This emphasizes the blitheness of the buyer in the story: he has no notion of the o-hina matsuri whatsoever, and no need to know. Purchase uproots the physical documentation and radically decontextualizes the object by denying it a formative, emplaced history. In the closing scene, the sister watches a raucous Western child twisting the head viciously from a similar doll. The trace itself has been dislodged from the circumstances that might situate its continuity. Reduced to the status of a novelty toy, the doll, once suggestive of festivals and ancestral ideals, is discarded in a bin along with lead soldiers. The past, indexed now as international market value, is primed for embezzlement: the doll’s value becomes exchanged as a collector’s token, taken from the context in which its true worth cannot be measured. When the short-term pleasure is exhausted, and the brief attention span turns to new trinkets, the artifact becomes another piece of rubbish in the bin of bought and trashed capitalist products. “The Doll” examined how voracious social trends devaluate personal investment in the past. Akutagawa’s short story “Hankechi” [The Handkerchief ] depicts the cosmopolitanism that promotes this process. In this case, the mass-manufactured hankechi is a foil to the hina, an inelegant, mass-produced item designed for consumption and disposal. Lexically, hankechi had been written in kanji, traditional Chinese characters, although as a recent English loanword it was also written in katakana, the alphabet used for foreign words.25 As a piece of vocabulary, it exists between naturalization and foreign nuance. It is not the traditional tenugui [a hand towel], and the textile craft associated with it, but a Western affectation donned by rote as an imitation of European ideals. Worn as a symbol of his progressive outlook by Professor Hasegawa Kinzō in the narrative – a specialist in both colonial policy as well as Scandinavian drama – the hankechi proclaims his tokenism and desire to divorce himself from what he perceives as Japanese insularity. Belonging to the elite sphere means adopting the trappings and ideologies of the foreign influence. Ingratiation through assimilation is a careerist strategy. This professor had advanced his social status through his ability to mimic Western conduct and make passing remarks about its drama

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(Strindberg) to enable his academic authority and cosmopolitan credentials. As a selfish educator, he sees his role as channelling the necessary foreignness into a narrow funnel of lectures to make global citizens of his students in terms of commodity. Eagerly, he assumes, they will absorb international policies as the next step in their professional development to turn Japan into a Westernized nation. When he advises one of his students to choose German law and economics over German philosophy, Hasegawa makes the implicit recommendation that dialogue is only enabled at the corporate level. This is the bridge of the future, with his students as the paving stones of currency exchange. The professor, childless himself in a rather allegorical manner, churns out the odd article and obituaries on a tradition he considers obsolete. Readers have rightly suspected that Professor Hasegawa is Akutagawa’s narrative incarnation of Nitobe Inazō, barely disguised. Certainly, the biographical details match: Hasegawa and Nitobe both studied in Germany, both had American wives, and both had no children. Hasegawa’s self-important purposefulness as an international bridge reflects the rhetoric in some of Nitobe’s more florid speeches. And, like Nitobe, he argues for a principle of bushidō, the rhetorical code of conduct for the samurai warrior. Unlike twilight, which resists canonical definition – bushidō became an ideological framework of static values and nationalist agendas in both Japan and the West (see Oleg Benesch 2014). “The Handkerchief ” also details Hasegawa’s internal (repressed) debate about the real costs of material progress. On the one hand, he desires a way of appreciation that allows heritage items to maintain a kind of thematic worthiness. Nonetheless, the policy aspect of his study totally overshadows the literary. In short, Akutagawa depicts Hasegawa/Nitobe as an abstracted way of experiencing comparative cultures, based on a limited set of values, determined to take aggregates from various places and fuse them together for social capital as well as financial profit. Hasegawa defines culturality according to the letter of international law, spiritless in the extreme. Opportunities of interculturality arise insofar as they are moments of acquisition to advance political prestige. Hasegawa’s first interest, after all, is colonialism: he makes literature serve this policy through its elitist

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cachet and pretense to worldliness. This professor, a title he relishes, jams together East and West as a convenience of theoretical fusion in order to pantomime culture without having to actually be involved in it. Safely set up in the hypothesis of his coursework, he speaks of culture only from aloof perspectives. Akutagawa implies throughout that there has to be a participatory encounter with culturality, more personal, immersive, and introspective than what Hasegawa offers by his handkerchief, his tissue of superficial pretensions. Akutagawa’s own investigations of Irish literature may offer a different example. Airurando bungaku, as Irish literature in Japanese translation, demonstrated a more informed pursuit, questioning the senses of marginality, folklore, and continuity of tradition, and acted as a tincture to the generic version of the Hasegawan “West.” Akutagawa wanted the Airurando bungaku to offer a different kind of intercultural project than the paradigm enacted by Hasegawa’s detached impersonalism, in which culture primarily exists to provide an expedient utility for social gain through international glad-handing. Literature provides a place for notes and explanations of the most perfunctory and pedantic sort. The Airurando bungakukai also was in pursuit of notes and explanations, of translation and interpretation, but its interest and involvement had a more activist slant: literature explores the potentiality of the past in relationship to the present, of culture as a moral force in dialogue with its own process of change. The Society cited images and artifacts that describe the complexities unlike those offered by the peripheral glances of rational commerce. How Akutagawa read the Revival as a symptom of Irish heritage and historical trauma reveals much about the zone of contact in the shared sensibilities as perceived by the Japanese in relationship to Ireland. One particularly intriguing feature is his translation of fairy to seirei [shōryō/deceased people] in his version of The Celtic Twilight. Matsumura Mineko had established yōsei as the standard Japanese term for fairy in Irish Revivalist writing. Matsumura attempted to find cognates recognizable to Japanese readers by drawing upon a communal lore of folk understanding: for example, in translating Seán O’Casey, Matsumura renders merman as kappa, the latter being a water-dwelling creature that has similarities, but also major cultural distinction, from O’Casey’s water fairy. Akutagawa’s innov-

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ation in his translation of fairy reflects his epistemological framework: the way of translating the word fairy speaks very much to the interstices of Irish and Japanese modernism. If, as considered in both Ireland and Japan, fairies are spectral remnants who speak in a discourse of the vanishing, how does one cross-culturally render not just appearance and nuance, but also context and resonance? Visually speaking, a pictorial sense as to what one of these creatures looks like in Ireland, as the popular imagination might construe its form, would vary greatly from that of Japan. Akutagawa intends instead for a conceptual principle in relaying, in a way that Dinneen sought, both the lexical character of the word and, more, its figurative performance in narrative. The Japanese language certainly has enough rough cognates for fairy – yōsei being among them, even if this term only has a vague semblance in fantastic terms, if not in actual appearance. Rather than take a literal approach, perhaps unnaturally conflating specimens of folklore, Akutagawa tries to duplicate for a Japanese sense of ancestral teleology the content of Yeats’s imagining of the fairy. Seirei, in essence, relays the Revivalist outlook that the fairy are, as interlocutors in a tension of partial return, a population of vanished ancestors and displaced countrymen. The ancestor is revived but in a changeling fashion, because latent interventions in the present moment have abjectified and distorted their memory. Their temporal dislodging in the past makes its configuration suspect, appearing in the present as a murky psychical presence on the margins to disturb the present condition. In a mindset that perceives the past as either intellectual hobby or economic inhibitor, the ancestral acquires the accusation of superstition, naivety, and the archaic. No wonder then, degraded to such a status, their discourse of disappearance responds in forms distorted and distanced, suggestive vaguely of human bodies but astrally altered into shapes partially known. This deliberate resetting of the sensibility carried by fairy as senzo [ancestor] would have wide appeal to many Japanese authors. As I describe in the next chapter, the literary ethnographer Yanagita Kunio, greatly influenced in part by The Celtic Twilight, would gradually shift his own personal terminology. His earlier uses of tengu [goblin] would become replaced with senzo [ancestor]. Translating fairies externalized the image of a

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haunted culture as spectres of vulnerability and instability that bind contemporary questions to ancestral precedents. Akutagawa’s ancestrally charged terms for translating The Celtic Twilight, with their overtones related to O-bon and Shinto and Buddhist senses of intergenerational linkages, reproduces, in the Japanese language, Yeats’s sense that many of the fairies are vanished figures of the past caught in a predicament of liminality. The nature of twilight as populated by disempowered and dismembered voices and languages becomes immediately apparent in their disjointed features; and therefore their bitterness reassesses the positioning of cultural values. Through such a suggestive vocabulary of fairies, Akutagawa draws a kind of comparison between the dim kingdom [yūan ōkoku] and Yeats’s commonwealth of the para-temporal Fae. In such a way, twilight is being marked not only as an aesthetic mood, but a poly-communal dimension in which alternative forms of representation and dialogue can occur. Whereas the hina has a mouth that cannot speak, the fairies speak but do not have mouths, at least not in a mimetically human way. Inevitably, the poetic ethnographer will resort to a manner of prosopopoeia in which the absent finds speech through the tangential present. Overall, Akutagawa’s interest in The Celtic Twilight pursues an interpretive sympathy that Yeats’s writing on fairies and monsters had immediate social implications, as well as critical retro-perspectives, that makes it very unlike the eerie entertainment and thrill-seeking in a generic ryōki sense. In broadly reviewing the three selections Akutagawa chose to translate, we can see a common theme readily: waking dreams are a form of knowledge gathering. Encounters at the peripheries of sensation allow for interactions of individuals, families, and ancestors. The folkloric, in its twilight closeness to human affairs, readily satirizes the pretensions of social behaviour. The folkloric, however, arises out of oratures that are a kind of interactive overlaying in which voicings from the past imprint upon the current moment. Such a concept would have striking examples throughout Japanese literature; and the activities of the Airurando bungakukai can be seen in accenting the discourse of twilight and shadows as a major trope of Japanese modernity. As another example, as my last chapter compares Izumi Kyōka’s drama with W.B. Yeats, we see in both authors how tasogare

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[twilight] would position twilight as a temporal differential between ancestor and present, converging in the mytho-cartography of place. The Airurando bungakukai, as a scholarly movement, were at the forefront of promoting intercultural exchange through invited lectures. Hirata Tokuboku, perhaps a touch too optimistic about bringing Yeats over to a country eager to hear him speak in person, wrote an essay entitled “Raichō sentosuru Yeats no fūkaku” [The Character of Yeats, Soon to Visit Us] (1920). Raichō, which suggests a visit to Japan, marked the collective anticipation in Japan that Yeats was considering a limited-term appointment of a professorship in Tokyo or elsewhere. This never occurred, sadly, and we can only wonder what Yeats’s first-hand impressions of Japan might have been. Hirata also had a profoundly influential role in the shaping of Fenollosa’s original notes on Noh and can be regarded as a primary source, later, for Yeats’s own sense of the genre. Another noteworthy Airurando bungakusha, or scholar of Irish literature, Noguchi Yonejirō, was well placed to act as a facilitator of cross-cultural traffic.26 A renowned poet in both English and Japanese, he was in frequent contact with Yeats and Pound through a series of letters. The friendship culminated in a visit by Noguchi to Stone Cottage in 1913. As Pound was compiling Hirata/Fenollosa’s notes at the time, we might count Noguchi as a further primary influence on the intellectual formulation of these source materials. As noted, several Japanese authors met with Yeats – most notably Yone Noguchi – with some travelling to Ireland, including Yano Hōjin. But the Airurando bungakukai’s activities were hampered by difficulties in terms of travel. Their scholarship, nonetheless, seriously attempted to bring Irish literature into focus for a wide readership. Japanese literary magazines developed emblematic approaches to Ireland through a Celtic-Christian imagery, as suggestive of cultural contrast. A major journal for Irish literature enthusiasts was Seihai [The Grail], whose title had deliberate Arthurian overtones. Its pages were an important space for publishing essays, travelogues, and other impressions of Irish culture. Some of its writers included Kobayashi Yoshio and Saijō Yaso. Ōshima helpfully documents his contact with several Japanese authors who knew Yeats. His research compiles information regarding Kikuchi Kan, a novelist and play-

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wright that Yeats admired. Kan had expressed strong interest in Yeats’s plays for dancers. Kikuchi, active in the Osaka chapter of the Airurando bungakukai, would later establish Bungei shunjū, Japan’s biggest literary magazine, as well as the Akutagawa Prize, named for his lifelong friend. It is worth remembering that Yeats had seen a performance of Kikuchi’s play Madman on the Roof [Okujō no kyōjin] in Dublin, at the Abbey Theatre. Yeats spoke of Kikuchi’s plays in comparison to Synge’s (Ōshima Shōtarō 1965, 103), and Kikuchi had credited Synge for inspiration (163). Yano Hōjin, another contributor to Seihai, sought out Yeats for a meeting during his visit to Ireland in 1927. Yano is credited with introducing Suzuki Daisetsu’s work to Yeats, as he describes in his work, Henrei [A Gift in Return] (1931). Saijō Yaso, a major poet who had a strong interest in Japanese min’yō [folk songs], translated and commentated upon Yeats’s lyrical verse, including “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart” (Saijō Yaso zenshū, vol. 1, 518). His own research on Irish folk music continued throughout his life. The Grail [Seihai] presented to a wider readership the Keruto no sekai [Celtic World], derived mainly from Revivalist literary materials, in a manner more descriptive than prescriptive: the Irish suggested an edifying experience of comparative otherness, not a massmarketed souvenir of Westernization. Its thoughtful considerations of Irish history, its contemporary political issues of sovereignty from England, and the modern development of its literature through periods of social strife showed to readers that the rhetoric of a panEuropean identity was suspect. It also offered a compelling modernist counter-example of heritage, and not in the Anglo-American form, as in the grips of modernity. Japanese writers themselves were struggling to combine literary traditional with imported innovation. As resolute as Tokutomi Sohō and others were in rejecting the West, Airurando bungakukai undermined their principles of ethnic exclusion. Retroactively, then, investigations of another’s space could complicate definitions of the East. Seihai’s willingness to follow the trail of an Irish text suggests that typical categories of native and foreign were not so myopically exclusionary in artistic circles. Overall, the Airurando bungakukai gathered together a group of scholars and

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authors whose interests in Japanese folklore, and its debated state in modernity, were expanded through the model that Irish literature provided. In mentioning some of the major figures involved, the mutual interests in research, heritage preservation, and orature are clear. The theme of twilight, and the ghost as the representative voice of twilight as ancestral presence, becomes clear through examining the major figures of the Airurando bungakukai. Thus, one of the overall effects of the Airurando bungakukai was to encourage Japanese to travel to Ireland and record the sights and sounds of the country, much in the manner that Hearn did in Japan. To use Yeats’s parlance, the dancers were continually seeking out new dances; one stage need not exclude other stages. We find a Hearn equivalent in popular writers such as Shiba Ryōtaro, whose own accomplishments included historical novels of Japan’s past. Shiba’s close friend, the painter Suda Kokuta (1906–1990), produced detailed landscape tableaux of the Aran Islands, despite his inability to afford the trip. Based on Shiba’s journeys, notes, and documents, Suda provided a series of illustrations (entitled Kaidō o yuku) to graphically enhance Shiba’s essays on Ireland. Suda’s own sense of the Arans had been informed by the practices outlined in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. Based on Dōgen’s advice for cultivating Zen, Suda argued that Inis Meáin’s rural lifestyle – routinely disparaged as poor and backward – in fact offered a possibility for environmental simplicity that Dōgen had advised for his monks. Miyazawa Kenji made similar claims about agrarian work. Certainly, Suda felt a strong attachment to Ireland and its literature; this could be dismissed as romance or nostalgia, but it is useful to keep in mind his outlook as a combination of Dōgen and Shiba. Suda believed that the Arans offered an experiential domain that ennobled the artistic eye as well as the ethical consciousness. Thus, Suda would say to Shiba Ryōtarō, Watashi no kokoro mo Aran-tō ni sunde irun desu. [My heart also abides in the Arans.] (Shiba, vol. 32, 64) The multicultural experience could be an empathetic panorama of the visual, sensual, imaginative, and interpersonal. And, with the

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popularity of Synge, Gregory, Wilde, and Yeats in Japan, the Airurango bungakukai found in Inis Mór a participatory environment of alterity, with its own repository of cultural utterances and social dances. The Keruto, Shiba’s investigation of what is Celtic, was not offered up as a ready-made cognate to Japanese folk beliefs. And Shiba references The Celtic Twilight throughout his essays on Ireland in a comparative, rather than assimilative, fashion. Shiba had no interest in mixing up a conflation of Lebor Gabála Érenn with Kojiki, respectively foundational texts of Ireland and Japan from the pre-modern era, nor did he wish to disparage one in relation to the other. If such had been the intention, then he could have stayed, like a caricature of Wilde’s Vivian, in the sitting room with a picture book. However, immersive access to landscape and ancestries offered, he felt, a far more legitimate social experience. His translational positioning of Keruto became a crucial signifier that was a rebuttal to the West as Anglo-American technocracies. Very noticeably, the Celtic Revival’s strategic deployment of twilight as an interactive concept, the zone of ancestral recovery and recollection, would become a subject for cross-cultural thematic engagement between Irish and Japanese literature. The Celtic Twilight, developed through Akutagawa’s choices in translation, presented twilight as an intercultural space. Twilight became a rallying point, a constitutive realm in which not only letters and ideas are exchanged, but localized traces of the ancestral and cultural can be retrieved as well. The relationship between the temporal and the spatial in the perception of cultural embodiment extends in a forward-moving direction, as confounded by these liminal entities. The figuration of the ancestor-fairy enable a phantasmic dimension to Pierre Nora’s (1995) description of collective experience as located in sites of memory [lieux de mémoire], which could be “material, symbolic, and functional” (639). As Akutagawa notes in his depiction of Nitobe, intercultural exchange is not without its pitfalls. Much criticism has been lobbed at figures such as Lafcadio Hearn, or Nitobe as a Japanese counterpart who thoroughly adopts a Western persona. On this point, Ōta allocates Nitobe and Hearn to the same Orientalist/Occidentalist project.27 And one might, perhaps too superficially, implicate the

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Airurando bungakukai as complicit in this trend. The pair of them promoted exaggerated cultural keepsakes as cosmopolitan equity. Culturally duplicitous, they were free to play up racial features to suit the tenor (and audience) of the occasion. Certainly, Hearn and Nitobe both used their command of English to articulate conditions of Japan and Japaneseness, in relation to the Occident – and vice versa. I do not intend to dismiss in any way the varying ways, positive and negative, that Hearn contributed to Irish and Japanese literary imaginations. However, I would like to note, in conversation with Ōta, that Akutagawa evidently saw differences – in practice as well as principle – between Nitobe and Hearn. The cultural and national definitions were variously phrased or suggested by Yeats and Hearn. Nonetheless, as in Ireland and Japan, contentious issues concerning description and prescription, in relationship to the discourse of documentation and the production of culture, challenge the critic. But Roy Starrs invites us to keep a balance in mind when evaluating their practices. In considering Hearn, Starrs (2006) argues that he worked for, and against, cultural codes that constructed translatability as an aesthetic virtue: “along with Ernest Fenellosa … Hearn encouraged the Japanese to reevaluate their own culture at a time when many held it in rather low esteem (and equated ‘civilization and enlightenment’ with the West)” (207). The Irish role in providing another perspective to this re-evaluation, and the way that twilight acted as a comparative theme, is a central concern of my discussion. The hazards of participating in another culture, as filtered through our own pre-conceived filters, are an unavoidable risk. Dissimilarities in cultural perception are the basic challenge of translational intercourse between different societies. Where does one go to not only read the culture but to live it? Is this another superstition? We see this debate in those who would compare Basil Hall Chamberlain, the erudite scholar, to Lafcadio Hearn, the venturesome journalist, in terms of who better interpreted Japan. In such a way, Hearn and Yeats both interrogated their dual roles as educators and historians, civil official and poet. Yeats addresses the relationship between teaching culture and experiencing culture in his meditation on educational formation in

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“Among School Children” (CP o 219): where historical knowledge is acquired by “cipher” and the “best modern way” of tidy, sewn-up versions of events (I .4–5). The poem thus contrasts the images of icons (VII .1), scarecrows (IV .8), and ghosts (VI .2) in depicting the way that hindsight has a retrograde effect in venerating or discarding its version of the past. Yeats, concerned with the implications of “heritage” and how it marks the body (III .5–6), maps the course of his own life in relation to the generations that preceded him (his parents) and those who will follow. This need not be an existential dread, but a complex understanding of how the energy of life is situated and transformed. But, before Yeats can perceive the macro-cosmic power of eros as a kind of telemetric impulse, he must disengage his own various egotisms. The first face to be dropped is “the smiling public man,” the didactic persona of the inspecting agent who enforces state authority. The next to go is the lover-poet, the self-centred whinging of one wrongly done by a vengeful scheme of love and loss. This inescapable condition seemingly arises from the curse of birth. Then, almost with self-reproach, one moment of self-forgetting, one phrase – “enough of that” – helps to cancel out the gravitational collapse of the previous roles. The poet sees that such aped personae are themselves puppets built of the stuff of scarecrows, fixed smiles drawn on top of straw faces. A marked shift begins in stanza V , with the personal witnessing of the real pain of viviparous birth. From the womb and into the world, the shape upon the mother’s lap (Yeats himself ) cannot be divided from the coming forth of birth, death and rebirth. The physicality of this claim approaches embodied experience in a more direct sensuality than the religion or analytical philosophy of the poem overall. Both religion and philosophy, in their way, are dogmatic formalisms that erect an oblique logic of abstraction. Their abstractions come in the guise of cohesive “presences” as identified in stanza VII : presences are categorical labels that turn “images” into codified systems. Yeats, by playing into their structural methodology, actually shows how simple and pat these categories are. By formulating lists of feeling in stanza VII – “passion, piety, affection” (6) – Yeats suggests that this list will, columnlike, match up with other similar lists in other

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sections. “Passion” connects to love, the awestruck poet persona. “Piety” suggests devotion to the institutional icon, the kind of love that the nun pursues. “Affection” suggests a kind of caretaking involved in motherhood, the birth in stanza V . Presences must somehow represent these diverse moments of experience. Clearly, Yeats finds such intellectual associations – nun/icon; mother/baby – insufficient. “Heavenly glory” is hardly symbolized by single vocations that supposedly define their own domain. In retreating from these patterns in the last stanza, Yeats wants to de-educate himself, to shed the limiting condition of the school’s enterprise. As he notes, Aristotle had been a sadistic headmaster, disciplining the bottom of Alexander the Great (VI .3). The world is not figured by a Pythagoras. Human thought is not the measure of all things. In pursuing this emphasis on the relation of eros to personhood, Yeats here follows a critique of Hegel’s “the suffering consciousness.” In terms of the pain of cultural disclosure, you may be able to conceptualize historical suffering, but that does not enable or satisfy the me who is suffering. Rule-governed schema cannot account for the spiky particularities of actual events, of actual suffering. In attempting to find non-technological sense of temporality, the dance of life perhaps relates to Yeats’s conception of Vedic philosophy or his Vision of cyclic continuity. Dancing, as a kind of cosmic trance in which movements separate the veils of space and time, a central theme in much of his poetry, would become a crucial performative act in his drama. Yeats posits an unchoreographed, organic energy that outmanouevres any labels placed on it. No one birth, no singular dogma, no one icon, can possibly be the standard. Thus, the carnality of consciousness coincides with the momentum of the experiential: one sees only the blur of movement, the dance(r): “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (VIII .63–4). The dancers are undifferentiated grammatically, conceptually, and metaphysically from the dances. Kinetic interplay of place, movement, and expression must precede any categorical imposition. The force of this generative dynamic can liberate the flow of bodies and the tide of generations from seemingly parallel trends in ideology. The tension, as Yeats sees it, is between the surge of life and its ebb,

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between rational speculation and religious “repose” against the initial, elemental “reverie” of twilight. A flexible recognition of the performance space enables the dancer to merge into the broader field of play, the dance. By this concluding metaphor, Yeats finds that adaptability, in the form of a dance’s transitional movements, had its form in the mutuality of contextual contents, with the platform of the stage providing an ideal performative dynamic. This has been a recognizable feature of modernism. Showing how this relationship between tradition and adaptation, Eliot made similar claims in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: the larger scene acts upon the individual catalyst. The artificial binary of discovery as opposed to invention gives way to a broader space, or stage, of creation. The problem is that, if the stage is destroyed – and this includes landscapes and communities – then both dancer (talent) and dance (tradition) disintegrate. The struggle over making rough equivalents and points of interaction, against the shallow museum mentality, was one definitive challenge for the multilingual, multicultural dynamic of modernism. The Japanese-Irish literary dialogue willingly questioned the interstices of parallel discourses, the gaps between speech and translated echo, of compassionate rapport between communities. Perfection in communication is unattainable, but the openings created by such dialogue offer a crucial alternative. What options are left us if authentic interactions between different societies are declared psychologically untenable? Learning another language, especially through contextual involvement, will at least open a wider aperture. Yeats, Hearn, and Akutagawa anticipated how many current crises we now face have resulted from that predatory utilitarianism that swallowed custom and ceremony in an unprecedented manner. There was an early warning system sounding in much modernist writing: the vanishing can become the vanished, and the cultural can become ephemeral and erased. Twilight, along with the cultural signposts to which it connects, faced extinction. Even the fantastic can be wiped away into featurelessness. Logarithmic expansion of political capital and resource expenditures could rapidly erase centuries of history according to facile market values. As Yeats saw in Ireland, the post-Herderian monster was the transnational behemoth of corporate power in the guise of intrumentalized reason. The heedless

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cosmopolitanism was the grave threat, not the meeting of different cultures, as in the conversation of shakuhachi and saxophone. Can twilight remain if everything has been paved over or digitized? The recent Save the Future series on NHK television, featuring prime-time debates and discussions about potential environmental catastrophes, makes the anxiety of the Celtic Revivalists seem very prescient.28

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e

c ha p t e r f i v e

Accessing Ancestral Houses Really, the lustre of time [jidai no tsuya], so associated with antique elegance, is a gloss derived from dirt. The Chinese word shutaku [dirt from handling] implies a beauty that arises from the touch of generations of handlers. In Japanese, nare [familiarity] implies an organic glow, an absorbed aura from the oil of the fingertips. Repeated contact, over the span of time, buffs this filth of the hands until a shine naturally surrounds the object. It is only dirt after all, dirt from human hands. – Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, In Praise of Shadows

The conflict over narrating the trajectory of cultural sensibilities produced opposing points of view in Japan and Ireland. The mood of The Celtic Twilight engendered a dichotomy of response. The following chapters will consider several important works of Japanese modernity – especially In’ei raisan (2002 [1933]) [In Praise of Shadows (1989)] by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Tōno monogatari [The Tales of Tōno] (1910) by Yanagita Kunio – and their relationship to the Celtic Revival. The shape of shadows and twilight in Japan assumed shapes that reflect the ideological debates of the time, reframing some of the Revivalist themes such as erasure, twilight, and discarnation. Although Tanizaki’s In’ei raisan offers a counter-example to the Revival in its overarching principle of cultural withdrawal, and cannot be said to be directly influenced by Yeats, its investigation of the relationship

between culture, embodiment, and spatial practice overlap with The Celtic Twilight in intriguing ways, if offering contrary statements and perspectives. Yanagita, conversely, is directly indebted to The Celtic Twilight and this impact is readily evidenced. All three of these texts can be said to be mapping historical practices as spatially specific in constituting a cultural landscape. Part of this investigation of referents was an encounter with the indefinable aura of the ancestral object, darkened by oils, as topography of fingertips and historical grooves. Likewise, the landscape itself exhibited hauntings of contact and continuity, the residual effects of culture and community – interactive and tradition-based. For this reason, twilight came to be understood as a resonant presence that marked physical objects and places. Walter Benjamin had, in various ways, postulated the same sense of touchable ancestry. Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968 [1936]), uses the word aura to allocate a sense of importance to the unique object as conditioned by the passage of time in human hands. The interfacing of the Gaelic Revival and Japanese modernity demonstrates how resistance to some aspects of modernity took on a transnational framework: the problems of such interfacing – and the successes or failures in response – are instructive for twentiethcentury processes of intercultural negotiation. Tanizaki and Yanagita, in various ways, shared Yeats’s emphasis on the relic as confrontational to the emergent modernist values of mass production, reproduction, and bulk distribution. Contrary to the industrial mechanisms of output, the relic retains a distinctive enchantment. Walter Benjamin famously described the aura as a “strange web of space and time” that, in an affective way, emanates a “unique appearance of distance” (1968, 285). Yeats, in The Wanderings of Oisin, emphasizes the tactile nature of the relic, that its aura – far from being a supernatural enhancement – attains its status through direct human handling, the transition of tradition involves the object passing from hand to hand. Satō’s sword demonstrates a legacy of the personal encounter between him and the poet, as well as national traditions and cultural legacies.1 It is this convergence of culturality that enhances the sword’s aura through a process of recontextualization through exchange, so

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unlike the hina [doll] of Akutagawa’s curiosity collector, owing to the efforts of two individuals, not consulates or corporations. Affection, not money, was the basis of this exchange. The sword’s continuous lustre, which comes from a sense of historical grime, depends on ongoing interpersonal relationships that carry an object from time to time, and maintain it from place to place. Satō Junzō was the Japanese consul in Portland, Oregon, during the period in 1920 when Yeats toured the United States (1920). The two met and Satō, a great admirer of Yeats and Irish poetry, presented an heirloom sword to the Irish poet. Our knowledge of their meeting largely comes from Ōshima Shōtarō’s interview with Satō, as well as from Yeats’s letter about the encounter to Edmund Dulac. Ōshima’s discussions with Satō Junzō provide helpful details of Satō’s relationship to Yeats (Ōshima 1965, 119–31). Initially, Satō had brought the sword abroad with him to fend off homesickness, to ease culture shock with a deeply personal item of familiarity:

OSHIMA – Then you had no intention of giving it to someone

when you left Japan, had you? SATO – No; I took it only to enjoy it myself. I thought it would console me when I felt lonely in strange countries. (121) Satō had chosen as a travel companion the finest piece of his family’s prized collection. Throughout the interview, he refers to the sword in honorific terms, as Motoshige, an appellation derived from the swordsmith’s family name.2 Indeed, Satō’s sword ranks many levels higher than a generic katana, the everyday prop of the samurai. Yeats’s description focuses on the circumstances of craftsmanship, as demonstrating a long tradition. Thus, many Japanese translators of “The Table” (CP o 206) restore the masterful nuance of tradition by using the powerful moniker meitō [famous sword] to denote its distinct status.3 Generations of the Satō line have cared for this sword, not only preserving its aura, but also intensifying its lustre further through repeated handling and polishing. Thus, noting the built-up echo of ancestry in its sheen, Yeats feels that the sword proves its own continuity of tradition. Time’s processes provide the glossy wear of fam-

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ilial longevity and communal interaction. The sword’s sheen evolves and changes by way of transference. The fingerprints denote friendship, sensitivity, and exchange. The effect is even greater at points of intercultural contact, where different social spaces merge and different historical times are woven together. Satō’s act of gift-giving extended what had been a brief, temporal encounter. This gesture expresses the best sentiments of the endearingly popular proverb of ichi-go, ichi-e: “one meeting, one opportunity.” What was exchanged between Satō and Yeats that day? Respect, payment of a personal debt, a gesture giving permanence to a momentary encounter? Whatever was exchange between these two individuals, we cannot know for certain. But Satō clearly had a deeper purpose than fulfilling some travel-book maxim that o-miyage [token gifts] are mandatory for doing business. Satō offered Yeats a cherished heirloom, passed hand-to-hand because of its personal value. The sword’s jidai no tsuya [lustre of time] is a value dependent upon cultural exchange: its worth cannot be indexed or monetized, but instead is to be appraised poetically and received emotionally. Moreover, the gift confirmed just how prominent Yeats and the Celtic Revival had become for a Japanese readership. Satō’s sword carries with it all of the activity of the Airurando bungakukai which had made Irish literature one of the more popular foreign traditions in Japan. Yeats specifically details his understanding of Satō’s gift as something more than a museum piece, abstract symbol, or a japonist trinket. Yeats wrote to Edmund Dulac, and his narrative of the events is worth quoting at length: A rather wonderful thing happened the day before yesterday. A very distinguished looking Japanese came to see us. He had read my poetry when in Japan and had now just heard me lecture. He had something in his hand wrapped up in embroidered silk. He said it was a present for me. He untied the silk cord that bound it and brought out a sword which had been for 500 years in his family. It had been made 550 years ago and he showed me the maker’s name upon the hilt. I was greatly embarrassed at the thought of such a gift and went to fetch George, thinking that we might find some way of refusing it.

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When she came I said “But surely this ought always to remain in your family?” He answered “My family have many swords.” But later he brought back my embarrassment by speaking of having given me “his sword.” I had to accept it but I have written him a letter saying that I “put him under a vow” to write and tell me when his first child is born – he is not yet married – that I may leave the sword back to his family in my will.4 (Le 662) The sense of inheritance, legacy, and heritage described here accords well with one of the registers of discourse in The Tower (1928), where the sword appears in Yeats’s Irish landscapes: it concerns who receives the historical past and who wields its purpose as a weapon. This poem, in particular, repeats legal terms of probate in describing how individual lives and communal histories intersect. Framed by multi-temporal perspectives, inheritance and debt are realized as personal, cultural, and ancestral concerns that relate to much more than the present moment. In his letter to Satō, Yeats explicitly acknowledges the ethical ramifications when there is an intermingling of real contexts and real ethoses. The sword as continuity needs to be recognized as an individualized artifact. That it now is a multicultural crossing-point in space and time heightens its importance. Yeats knows that the Herderian prohibition against intermixing localities leads only to barriers. There must be a way of reaching out and moving beyond locality. Cultures can be protected without resorting to isolation or purity as the only model. Satō’s gift is an enfranchising moment: two folk cultures relate to each other in a personal, non-exclusive way. The gift, although shifting contexts, still possesses an aura that hearkens back to its handing down through the imprints of continuous participation and valuation. Satō’s encounter with Yeats represented an alternative to Akutagawa’s depiction of the hina, and its free-trade zones and trans-national oligarchies that notice geographical distinctions only as part of global marketing strategies. Yeats’s poem cycle Meditations in Time of Civil War demonstrates through examples of material culture the extent of communication between Irish and Japanese letters at that time as founded upon

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such an exchange of tangible relics and transmitted auras. At the domestic centre of this cycle, there is a Japanese sword, a centuriesold piece of workmanship that enables physical contact in transferring familiarity with the ancestral. Strange, perhaps. The Tower often concerns itself with Galway as ­­ a refuge not to be breached by Irish politics, ideological histories, and European economies. Yet this short-sword – a wakizashi according to its giver – has crossed chronos and topos to turn up as a welcomed artifact in Connemara. The inertia of the past and the generosity of an individual have delivered it across time, generations, and geographies: Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword … A bit of an embroidered dress Covers its wooden sheath … When it was forged. In Sato’s house, Curved like new moon, moon luminous, It lay five hundred years … That when and where was forged … And seemed unchanging like the sword. (“My Table,” ll. 2, 6­7, 9­–10, 16, 21) Yeats leaves the blade sheathed, on a table, at the centre of his home, the most intimate space of The Tower. He does not situate its international importance within the archive of a museum, nor does he display the scabbard on the wall like a decorative trinket. The meditation confronts more than the material components of the weapon, but also the aura that accompanies it, a halo inseparable from the physical. Satō’s sword has an implicative nature, as an aura, that is both material and symbolic. Its radiance includes more than its surface material in its present condition. Thematic power arises from that glowing forge of a different tradition, the craftsmanship aligned to a different deity, extending across time and space. Friendship is the trajectory that takes the blade to Ireland. The formative contexts of families and cultures that created the sword and preserved its lustre have been transferred into a new encounter. Juxtaposition with a different cultural context is not a predicament, but an opportunity. Now, amid Yeats’s country-in-process, the sword balances on

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its edge dual attunements: a foreign import, received into the hands of an Irish beholder.5 The young man of The Speckled Bird may have turned his eyes to the East, but he could not have anticipated that extent to which the East would be glancing back at him. Yeats understands that a weapon, received during a time of civil war, becomes uncomfortably pretty as a talisman. Does it symbolize any nation, or embody any state’s ethos? Some would argue that admiring heritage is to be like Harun Al-Rashid, for whom the allure of tradition is an imaginary yearning for exotic distance, a “thirst for those old crabbed mysteries” (CP o 451). Perhaps we can compare Yeats’s consideration of the sword with Western connoisseurs of the subject. Victor Harris writes of the samurai sword’s appeal to the West in the catalogue Cutting Edge (2005), a handbook for the sword collection in the British Museum: “As well as being a deadly weapon and a unique work of art, the sword in Japan is imbued with a spiritual essence. With the jewel and the mirror, the sword is one of the three holy objects of the ancient Japanese imperial regalia. Swords are even venerated as the resident deity of some Shintō shrines” (8). Harris’s description resembles certain essays that had promoted the way of the sword as an exemplary discipline for spiritually perfecting the mind. The sword represents heroic literature in a nationally masculine way. Suzuki Daisetsu (1870–1966), a contemporary of Yeats, problematically comments on Japanese swordsmanship, and its presumed relationship to Zen, in this way: “The sword comes to be identified with the annihilation of things that lie in the way of peace, justice, progress, and humanity” (1959, 89).6 The Japanese sword’s expression is actualized through its employer, the samurai, to “approach Zen with the idea of mastering death” (72). The entire poem cycle of Meditations in Time of Civil War (CP o 204–10) has a rather conflicted attitude to weapons, and those who wield them. Let us note here that the troubled relationship between ethics, militarism, and historical ideologies had driven Ireland into its current predicament of a nation divided against itself. Thus, Satō’s sword has particular meaningfulness in a poem concerned with Irish civil strife and internecine conflict. Given the distinctiveness of this exchange, the moment shared between them, so representative of the Celtic Revival’s relationship with Japan, has

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intrigued Japanese critics. Suzuki’s sense that the sword exhibits a spiritual resonance clearly had an effect on Ōshima’s understanding (1965, 121), and one might suspect a lingering wistfulness in his comments, a yearning after the Second World War for perfected weapons that never draw blood. Satō, on the other hand, was an aficionado of physical blades themselves, having come from many generations of antiquarians. As a caretaker of antiquities, Satō was one of the individuals responsible for repatriating katana – swords – from the United States to Japan in 1960 (121). Satō’s interests are, therefore, more of a hands-on approach, rather than an abstract examination of sword as thesis in which Suzuki or Ōshima engage. Satō admires craftsmanship, and his gift represents a family lineage of art as well as the aesthetic of a particular national craft. Yeats’s tower is also precisely one of those points of contact. There coincide many phantasmagorias of past, present, and future – and a residential cast that includes muses, philosophers, and drunkards. Yeats beholds the kaleidoscopic interface of ideas and materials, coinciding in the blur of process. The poet wonders, “How the daemonic rage / Imagined everything” (“My House,” ll. 16–17). What does the imagination do to recover, or communicate with, lingering demons and ghosts caught between time and space? This theme, a long-standing tension in Yeats’s verse, questions the intersections of materials, memories, and interpretations that offer an accessible view of ancestry. On the one hand, there is an understanding that cultural lineage should not be dismissed as another false viewpoint trapped in a limited historical conjuncture. Yet, there is also an accompanying dread that, as the Irish Civil War showed, authorities who claim the ghosts of ancestry and tradition invoke a new cycle of demons into the future. Meditations in Time of Civil War deliberately transform spatial and temporal patterns to indicate that history is not a nascent series of step-by-step events. Rather, history is an ongoing dialogue of exchange in which various spaces and various times act upon each other. No matter where Yeats stores the gift, sweeping social processes intrude and tarnish the heirloom. Yeats’s reckoning, that this Motoshige was forged several hundred years before the composition of his own poem, would place this sword’s creation within Japan’s sengoku-jidai: the civil war

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period (from about 1467 to about 1603) waged between rival shogunate powers. Ōshima’s (1965) timing is different, noting that the third generation of Motoshige swordsmiths would be Bishū Osafune Motoshige, who “flourished in the Era of Ōei (1394–1428)” (133). This would date its forging only a few decades before the Ōnin War, a civil war fought over shogunate succession (1467–77). Regardless of which exact period of strife in which Motoshige was created in response, the suggestive parallels with the Irish Civil War remain. Satō’s interview shows his sympathy for Ireland’s estranging predicament of internal conflict. Satō, in particular, remembers the distress that Yeats felt when rust and discoloration had slightly marred the blade, due to its poor handling and storage during the violence and confusion. At that time in London, no one had the appreciative skill or knowledge to undertake adequate repair, despite Yeats’s efforts to correct the damage. But Satō expected no apologies, reimbursement, or payment. Instead, he made the following point repeatedly through his life: this gift was a spontaneous gesture, without premeditation and expectations in return. As recorded in conversations with Ōshima, Satō thought of that moment as an epilogue to a heartfelt conversation with Yeats over Japan, Ireland, and their respective literatures. Satō admired Yeats as a “man of broad observation” (Ōshima 128), someone who could set aside prejudice and appreciate another culture’s art. Satō was, after all, pleased to see Yeats’s interest in Japanese literature. He reiterates the point that Japan was equally fascinated by Irish literature, especially works by Yeats. And, as friends will see the larger picture in their actions, Satō’s gift was a kind of reciprocation, a recognition of the Revival’s growing intercommunication with Japan. Yano Hōjin (1893–1988), a noted scholar who held various academic positions, made two initiatives to bring Yeats on a lecture tour of Japan.7 Japan had already received much from Yeats’s poetic example. Satō’s sword confirmed the two-way participation of cultures in the development of literary modernisms. Understanding that Irish literature cooperatively intermingled with Japanese literature is important. The traffic flowed in cross-currents. This point deserves much consideration as, all too often in the critical accounts of Yeats’s

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relation to Japan, the flow is thought of as moving westward only, carrying a load of Orientalism along with it. On the sword balances history, difference, and the possibility of comparison. Ōshima’s met Yeats in 1938, recording Yeats’s interest in kabuki dolls, there had already been a wide range of interconnections between Yeats, Synge, and some of the most important writers and texts of early twentieth-century Japanese writing (Ōshima 105).8 By the time of The Tower’s publication, about thirty-five years had passed since The Celtic Twilight was first published. During this time, many of Yeats’s writings – along with works of Synge and others – had been translated and well received in Japan. Airurando bungakukai dedicated to Keruto kenkyū [Celtic Studies] had sprung up across Japan. Perhaps the single most dominant interest for these varied study groups was the sense that Irish literature represented a unique course of folkloric continuity. In their cross-fertilization of themes, the role of fushigi [mysterious] became a crucial feature of Japanese modernism, so enmeshed in the discourse of the vanishing, along the lines that the Irish notion of rún [mystery] had a likewise appeal. Where Twilight Meets Interpretation Twilight as an aesthetic medium enabled a portrayal of a crosstemporal realm through which links among the discourses of the vanishing could be detected within the modernizing landscape. As an eerie aura at a topographic level, twilight provides that web of space and time through which distance becomes dimensionalized in terms of proximity and accessibility. Irish ghost lore in the Revivalists’ writings presented the varied Irish dimensions of ghosts, phantasms, and the like demonstrating a sense of the folkloric as ancestral recall. In short, the turn to the spectral as a political counterpoint offered parallel examples to the kinds of questions being explored in Japan, as the contentious relationship between modernity and heritage urgently exacerbated the situation of enquiry. A shared aesthetic sensibility not only engaged two traditions in an extended dialogue, but also upset generalized definitions of East and West as opposing fronts of ideology. To a hardening view of Western as a general symptom of a

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monolithic European modernity, Irish literature’s imaginative range went against the grain of the usual depiction of the West as a domain of rationalism and materialism. The decline of community and the life-worlds substantiated by this decline, on both sides of the globe, found in each other not mutual identification, but rather comparative discourses of the vanishing. The dialogue of wraiths, as disembodied cultures, emerged from cross-cultural contacts in alternative forms of art and literature. New genres would appear, in Japan and Ireland, based upon these thematic correspondences, expanded through innovative exchanges fashioned from twilight/tasogare liminalities. The Celtic Revival dramatized in an exemplary way the methods and goals of Irish-Japanese literary networks. The presence of twilight, as the domain of the ancestral, allowed for a coinciding of style and perspective between these two national literatures. Negotiating the voices and appearances of spectral heritage, invoked into contemporary presentations such as contemporary Noh, became a technique of many Japanese modernist writers as well. These specific points of contact fashioned a comradely artistic dialogue, one involving aesthetic cross-fertilization that dealt with the predicaments of heritage and preservation. This is the significance of Satō’s sword. Yeats was conscious of what the gift meant, and Satō, in his turn, was aware of what Yeats had given Japan. Yeats’s Noh can then be understood for the context that best seems to relate to it: contemporary twentieth-century Japanese innovations in drama, with their own innovative negotiation of space, time, and the liminal apparitions. Intersecting exchanges between East and West, however, plainly reveal how the flow of cultural information and identities is vexed by complexity. How do you read another culture, especially when it is reading yours at precisely the same instant? Theoretically, it has become increasingly problematic to speak of ways in which coherent communal identities, rooted in a particular place, can be described or understood by the other. To avoid the issue entirely, a new form of dogmatic anti-essentialism has gained acceptance in claiming that all notions of tradition or heritage are entirely imaginary and beyond meaningful substantiation. There is, really, no supportable notion of Irish or Japanese, as a cultural or social collective of fixed and consistent values, except through artificial discourse and ideological ma-

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nipulation. And, therefore, multiculturalism means to swap flimsy, constructed ideas based on bad faith and illusory agency. Oscar Wilde, satirically, suggests this basic point of the view in “The Decay of Lying” (1913 [1889]). Vivian claims, not without a satirical edge, “In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people” (45). This statement, of course, comes with that rhetorical flourish and exposition through exaggeration that is a mark of Wilde’s style. But this claim, if taken literally in the sense of imagined communities or invented traditions as being the only way to access culture – “simply a mode of style” – leads to a quandary with painful political significance. If there are no Japanese people, then there are no Irish people. There are no Dubs, Tokyoites, or any remotely meaningful sense of one’s place within a human geography as something worth discussing other than to call out incorrectness. Meaningful space to discuss the differences between Tokyo or London and, therefore, cultural exchange of what pertains as particular to each, seems doomed to a shell game of expedients invented for profit and power. A hermeneutics of skepticism prevails, quite possibly at the expense of post-colonial expression. Perceived differences can be read as little better than fanciful tricks of rhetoric, as a commonly generic state must underlie all of the conceptualizing, and therefore, only radical suspicion can address the diversity of cultural expression. Moreover, taking this line of invalidation to its conclusions, there can be no sensible way of indigenous art either, for what would constitute the context from which a unique tradition emerges? As scholars of minority languages and cultures have indicated, if pushed far enough, one might as well tell the indigenous nations to disband and relinquish any notions of ancestral distinction. Excogitation, no matter how sincere, cannot deliver the goods. And what might be left to us is only another dogmatic sense that heritage is but an invention, after all, which it turns out, coincides with the dogma of the multinational corporation: Coca-Cola would love for us to buy the world a drink; fizzy drinks belong equally in the streets of London and Tokyo. The tabula rasa nature of the subject is easily overpowered by the industrial production of taste. No substantive alternative, in describing the identity of a specific place, can be held if an interpretation of Vivian’s claim is accepted as true in

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its non-essentialism. But if we allow for differences between cultures, for legitimate characteristics that result from differing cultural geographies, then we open up that space in which discussions of those differences will occur. Vivian may be lashing out at the delusion of ethnic purity, of pat identities that inculcate a superior sense of an eternal ethnicity and inimitable uniqueness. This purity is fashioned out of reductive predicates, of striving to be “more Japanese than the Japanese.” Vivian distrusts art as the artistry of eugenics, of postcard templates that fix ethnicity according to limited definitions. For example, he specifically mentions Hokusai as having fashioned an archetypal ideal of Japaneseness, more in line with a Platonic abstraction than actual people. He argues, “The Japanese people are the deliberate selfconscious creation of certain individual artists” (45). There are many problematic consequences if any sympathies or identifications with the particulars of geography, culture, and customs are reduced to incoherence of a cultural subject fabricated by its own nuances. Does a sense of the national invariably mean a declaration of inflexible essence, and the ideological brainwashing that goes with that? Is there a domain for a distinctive ethos that is the product of timespace relationships that produce differentiated but realizable patterns of identities? The negotiation of cultural materials, especially literary ones, does not enjoy the code of ethics that now binds anthropologists in the field. Ethnic stereotyping is a danger, and many bestselling novels present troublingly trite versions of Asia and Asians. As one example, Disney’s Mulan is certainly cringe-worthy; but, in feeling such, surely then we have some standard by which to measure our flinching? In wondering why Mulan rings so false compared with the reality of Asia, the question is opened: what constitutes authentic access to other cultures or representations. In feeling, or describing, how something is inauthentic, the alternative suggests its reality. But if culturality is denied any chance of coherent expression, the satirical nuances of Vivian’s statements become realized. Staying at home and perusing an art-book is then more or less the same dirt and sweat as travelling abroad. All is misapprehension and fancy. Why bother learning another language, if that’s the case? Or why invest in efforts

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to prevent a language from disappearing altogether? It is certain that, as comparative literature departments disappear from academia as a whole, administrators have decided comparative literature offers little of pragmatic value. The questions of the self-causality that is cultural identity are especially pressing for modernism, since we so clearly see a continuation of nineteenth-century missionary zeal as well as emergent disciplines of anthropology that would serve as a bridge to the current sensibility to the importance of cross-cultural exploration. Ireland, despite being a colonized country, has not been exempt from acting as a colonizer. Exposing the maltreatment delivered by cultural curiosity in Ireland, Joseph Lennon’s Irish Orientalism (2004) surveys patterns of Asian references that had surfaced in Irish literature, as artistic tokens. Lennon notes that the Celtic Revival, in perceiving in Japan “a traditional culture par excellence,” had a vested interest in presenting interpretations of Japan that venerated its purity and timelessness (282). There had been an inconsistent process of identification aligned along the more general arc of colonialism. The Irish example is distinct insofar that it, a colonized space seeking actuality, understood the other as also being under the imperial thumb. Literary Orientalism, as a theoretically charged term with broad applicability, concentrates on one-sided cultural mimesis: the mimicking, in art, of oriental representations. The poster-board set pieces are appropriated and reproduced by a society as distortions seen through a telescopic lens. So, cultural encounters are limited, and their social value restricted by a self-blinding toward gross misunderstanding. The terms of what constitutes authentic access to their cultures remain unclear, if impossible. Lennon’s understanding of oriental includes large swaths of geographical materials, from the fantasies of poems derived from elements of the Hebraic Bible to Yeats’s mishandling of Noh, the latter being a product of the exogenous wish-fulfillment of an Irish imagination. This has been a common approach in viewing Irish literature’s relationship to the Japanese. Orientalism enacted a governing principle for Western misappropriation and misrepresentation of the Orient, conceived as a convenient idea rather than an actual geography.

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Victorian Orientalism of Asia had invested interests in both colonization and appropriation. For example, a notorious figure, Edwin Arnold was, on the one hand, closely tied to the British management of colonial India. His supervisory role in the First War of Indian Independence (1857) entailed oppressive intervention. As a poet, Arnold’s presentation of Old Japan cannot be easily vouchsafed. But he did help to introduce Buddhism to the West – not on philological or evangelical terms – but as a religion in its own right. He described an ethical, historical Buddhism as a religion amont the world’s religions, neither more nor less dignified than the claims made by the Abrahamic traditions. The Light of Asia (1879), an enormously popular epic on the Buddha and his Dharma, can be seen as a positive contribution to the presentation of Buddhism to the West. It led to a number of multimedia projects, including a collaborative effort between German and Indian filmmakers to produce a film version, Prem Sanyas (1925). Arnold’s book went through some eighty editions. Scholarly investigation has revealed, as it should, the deficiencies of this work; however, its fundamental stature is one of exploration, of creating entire fields of intellectual enquiry from this initial effort. As Harry Oldmeadow (2004) recognizes, Arnold’s insistence that Buddhism is founded upon egalitarianism and ethical consciousness counteracted prejudicial European notions of a nihilistic faith bent on negation, misanthropy, and denial of reality (87). Buddhism, as Arnold tries to explain in his Preface, offers a world view based on “the eternity of a universal hope, the immortality of a boundless love, an indestructible element of faith in final good.” I am not saying that these interpreters are beyond reproach. Arnold, a resident in Japan, certainly exhibits japonistic excesses, such as the following verse (1891): The Musmee’s pocket-handkerchief    A square of paper! All day long, Gentle, and sweet, and debonair    Is, rich or poor, this Asian lass: Heaven have her in its tender care,    O medetō gozarimas! (Edwin Arnold 165)

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A relic of traditional girlhood preoccupies Arnold in a shallow way. The young woman displays yamato nadeshiko, the so-called feminine virtues of a traditional Japan, on the surface. The interspersed loanwords suggest a linguistic superficiality if also cultural deafness. Moreover, this vision implies a more general sense of cultural pride, yamato damashii – the spirit of Japan – that would become a troubling shibboleth for promoting all kinds of cultural chauvinism later. What is the musume [daughter] holding? Is it a piece of tradition, or a mass-produced import? Arnold claims through this simplified portrait a presentation of authentic, routine Japaneseness: the girl embodies, through narrative collateral, an affected cultural spirit. Rudyard Kipling (1899) also seeks definitive versions of a Japanese mindset, and in doing so makes confusing claims. However, Kipling descends more fully into the orientalist fog: “If you wish to know their costumes, look at the nearest Japanese fan. Real Japs of course are like men and women, but stage Japs in their stiff brocades are line for line as Japs are drawn” (From Sea to Sea, no. 13). Arnold sees a versified world of cartoon characters, a floating world scenario. Kipling, even though striking the pose of the informed observer, nonetheless denigrates even as he waxes appreciation: racial quips that diminish “men and women” to “Japs” and a rather blithe claim in acting as a voice to validate what is real and stage for the lives of others. Given these examples, one begins to understand the resistance of authors such as Tanizaki to the presumptions of Anglo interpretation of Japanese art and culture. Centuries of theatrical heritage in Japan can be reduced to stiff costumes and doodled caricatures in interpretation. As noted in the introduction, Tanizaki was quick to criticize Shaw’s assertion that he (Shaw) understood Japanese drama, even while admitting he could not understand the language. Tanizaki, as the concluding section of this chapter will elaborate, distrusted the Western eye of scholarship that, quick to show its sophisticated credentials, was becoming the judge of modernist astuteness in terms of a hermeneutics of suspicion that scoffed at cultural identities. Japanese modernists had reason to be concerned, of course. The remapping of the global sphere through new forms of warfare, through the economy as well as the military, required aggressive

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ciphers of nationalism in order to promote a collectivity in order to claim material wealth. The 1900 Paris World Fair had, in such a way, served as a competitive showcase of builders of nations, their policies proclaiming progress was taking place on a global stage. A general distrust in Japan for Caucasian power structures percolated throughout early twentieth-century Japan. The novelist Natsume Sōseki’s mixed feelings of the British metropolis were recorded in a series of memoirs, following his two-year stay as a government-funded scholar. His love of European literature did not assuage the general misery he felt living within Western urbanism. Yet where Sōseki found a kind of desolation, commercial enterprises found opportunity. Ikeda Kikunae, the scientist who invented monosodium glutamate, visited London around the same time as Sōseki was there, and he had a somewhat more favourable impression based on the principles of commerce. Kikunae’s research, and business travel, paved the way for the Ajinomoto Company (founded 1917) to become one of the world’s largest producers of MSG . While Sōseki debated in long notes the taste offered by Western painting, Ajinomoto Inc found a marketplace where the only merits that mattered pertained to the physical tongue. Growing eyewitness accounts, such as those of Sōseki or his fellow poet and novelist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), confirmed and cemented an impression that the West was a unified front, an Anglo-American conglomerate backed by technological skills, capital-producing classes, and militaristic know-how with global acquisition as its prime imperative. It is not surprising that this sudden competitive pressure between East and West prompted market societies of capitalist modernity into nativist self-defence, leading to facile definitions of national characteristics at the political level of targeted commerce. Emergent market forces mobilized nations as trade blocs, understood to be expedient hegemonies of racial perspectives whose tastes could be bought. Certainly, in this situation, artistic materials could be used for creating false senses of cultures, superficially summoned to aid and abet commerce. While Commodore Perry and his black ships [kurofune] became posters in Japanese art, the West had busily collected tableaux of their own – ukiyo-e prints, for example, became popular artifacts, valued as Japanese collateral. The develop-

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ing formulae of what constituted East or West were inevitable in a global face-off of encroachment and colonialism. The desire for representative definition remains strong today, even if East continues to be recast in geographical terms. If parochial interpretations of the other were to remain unchecked, then the deadlock of preconceived ideas at times would seem to be unending and intractable. Accessibility remains a matter of information as well as negotiation, but attempts at such seem indivisible from imperialism. Moreover, no one can say blithely that artistic exchange always produces encounters with a clean consciensce, or that literature cannot be listed within the general milieu of imperialism.9 The writers of the modern era confront in various ways the global powers that forcibly assemble diverse aggregates into broad collectives of national power. For many Japanese nationalists, the threat of assimilation appeared to be a possibility. After the Meiji Restoration, initial reports of Westernness – as a model of civilization – were not positive. Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s black ships had suggested a single agenda. They arrived at Uraga Harbour in 1853, loaded down with cannon balls and gunpowder. The implication was that further armadas were on their way. Generalizations of the West became easy to manufacture and circulate. Still, those initial fears of being overrun gave way to intrigue. The discomforting treaties opened up new markets for goods and exotica. Images of Perry, as the standardbearer of new military power and Western expansionism, became a chic collectible: a cornucopia of mementos commemorating his surprise visit were prized souvenirs. For example, the kawaraban [newspaper printing blocks] relating to the arrival of the kurofune served as displayable tableaux.10 The impression of a coal-smudged ship, at dock, was the definitive sign of historical change that initially aroused curiosity that soon evaporated into distrust. In terms of diplomatic relations, Perry’s visit was reciprocated in 1871 by the Iwakura Mission, which was part treaty negotiation and part fact-finding mission. First impressions count, and in this case the Japanese based on their initial arrival at frontier San Francisco defined the West. America, as they described it, had scarcely advanced past the bullets and dust of the Frontier West. One wonders what the reports would have been, what snap judgments made, had the Iwakura Mission

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first arrived in London. This delegation did make its way across the continent, and it did eventually reach England in 1872. By then, their observations focused on the West’s technological superiority, and on European intransigence when rejecting returning offers of more balanced treaties. In order for there to be a more comprehensive understanding of the cultural other, some modernist scholars began to take a more nuanced approach to themes of historical continuity and cultural traditions that, perhaps, might offer an understanding of attitudes and sensibilities that provide an overall ethos to a social demographic. Presumed glimpses of the legendary, as examined in chapter 2, could certainly be readily co-opted as anthemic elements of a national spirit in the most essential sense. But, at the same time, we see in the modern period more concerted efforts to approach multicultural spaces through mutual recognition of how a culture in general responds to those who are making gestures toward it. And the cultural dimension seemed, at least initially, the most productive area with which to start. While not disregarding the latent imperialism of modernist transnationalism, we might also note its development away from Victorian evangelism, and the beginnings of a more comparative approach that would be foundational for postmodernism’s emphasis on historical contingency in creating subject positions. The modern period produced scholars such as Arthur Avalon, Paul Brunton, and Lafcadio Hearn who, whatever their flaws an observance of our current perspectives enables us to detect, sought a form of engagement that wanted to take local traditions in their contexts, according to their own terms of framing. A modern development in the level of sensitive access, as part of advancing human relations, should be given credit for challenging and transforming the Victorian standard. As a nexus that enabled a flow of information in both directions, the IrishJapanese literary dialogue represented an advancement in such an aesthetic open-mindedness. But the Celtic Revival recognized that this progression required less tangible and more tactile forms of encounter in order to negotiate nuances of difference. Between retreat and assimilation, a zone of interconnectedness needed to be fashioned. As Michael Cronin (2012) notes on the

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necessity of this willingness to link, and its political importance in peace making, “Translation is all about making connections, linking one culture and language to another, setting up the conditions for an open-ended exchange of goods, technologies and ideas” (41). As the Irish-Japanese network of interculturality demonstrates, translation occurs at both a textual, interpersonal, and regional level, requiring first fluency in one’s own space before becoming comfortable in communication with the space of the other. The schemas for understanding one’s own spaces, as well as another’s, interrelate with bodies in their storied landscapes. Yanagita Kunio: From Sligo to Tōno So often has Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) been heralded as the father of Japanese ethnography, that this appellation has become a rather formulaic way of describing his place in Japanese letters. As critics have begun to note, however, this view is somewhat simplistic: the development of minzokugaku [folklore studies] in modern Japan included a variety of practices, not only literary ones, and certainly not limited to a particular area. Nonetheless, in terms of scholarship and readership, Yanagita’s Tōno monogatari (1972 [1910]) [The Tales of Tōno, 1910] retrains supremacy as the representative example of Japanese literary ethnography in the modern period. Frequently reprinted, and frequently cited, Yanagita’s narrative documentation of communal practices in the Tōno region of northern Japan provides inspiration for tourists and indigenous alike, as his technique, and its companion ideology, for describing a disappearing cultural lifestyle that continues to garner him both praise and blame. Yanagita’s innovative approach to Japanese folklore emphasizes the qualities of emplacement and the manner in which localized identities evolve through interpersonal engagement and through temporal development, dependent upon endotic factors. In particular, oral traditions, especially in the form of storytelling, best represent the polyphonic quality of narration that takes a broader perspective on past and present, as a social process, and operates beyond present circumstances. In such a view, Yanagita is not altogether dissimilar from European counterparts who were undertaking

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similar projects. Takagi Masashi’s Yanagita Kunio to Europe – Kōshō bungei no tōzai [Yanagita Kunio and Europe: Oral Literatures in the East and the West] (2006) draws ample comparisons along this line, noting especially Sir Laurence Gomme’s Ethnology in Folklore (1892) as an influence, with its emphasis on cultural survivability through documentation. Indeed, as scholars like Takagi have shown, Yanagita had a copy of Gomme’s work in his library, including marginal notes in his own handwriting. Yet Tōno monogatari does not read, in terms of a literary work, in the same kind of genre as Gomme. To appreciate the literary stylistics of Yanagita’s innovative method in narrative ancestry, it is important to note that Gomme’s heavily scientific method does not entirely account for the narrative territory expressed by Yanagita’s style. Where else might we look, then, in order to contextualize Yanagita’s literary ethnography and its narrative depictions of bodily practices as forms of cultural renewal as well as resistance? Yanagita had read The Celtic Twilight just prior to beginning Tōno monogatari, an underacknowledged but certain fact. This point is asserted by Gerald Figal (1999), who argues that Yanagita’s enthusiasm for “Celtic legends likely came from his recent reading of Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight, the probable model for Tōno monogatari” (115). I concur with this sentiment in terms of what work most informed the substance as well as the method of Tōno monogatari. While Gomme may well have aided Yanagita’s conceptual thinking, the completed Tōno monogatari in terms of content, context, voice, and framework far more resembles The Celtic Twilight. What makes Yeats as important, if not more important, an influence than Gomme is the narrative formulation of engaged storytelling as evidenced in The Celtic Twilight, a perspective that is apparent throughout Tōno monogatari. The strong Irish links of Yanagita’s mentality become quite apparent in this way: for example, in bringing Lafcadio Hearn into this dynamic of exchange, Takayuki Tatsumi (2006) emphasizes a common sense of “the marginal, the subaltern, the invisible, and the vanishing” between Hearn, Yeats, and Yanagita (84). Tōno monogatari helped to establish a mixed genre that blended poetry, folklore, and cultural anthropology in the same manner as does The Celtic Twilight. Yanagita himself, aware of the sort of radical perspective he was adopting in this work, cautions the reader

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in his introduction: “I think a book like Tōno monogatari will run against the current fashion [gendai no ryūkō]” (TM 56). But Yana­ gita had cause to believe in his stylistic advancements, since he had seen the success of this approach in Ireland. His connections to the Airurando bungakukai are evident. Like Doi Bansui, Yanagita also had been a student of Lafcadio Hearn. Encouraged by his professor, and motivated by the standard set in The Celtic Twilight, Yana­ gita conducted regional research in what is now Iwate prefecture, the Tōno area for which he sought a local share of twilight.11 Tōno monogatari, geographically specific, is thematically international as the text is a responsive counterpoint to The Celtic Twilight, a kind of companion piece that demonstrates the applicability of the Gaelic Revivalists’ sensibility in diverse international settings. Its creation of a dialogical structure for communal exchange stages a kind of comparative narrative interfacing through genre: “You showed me your ghosts and ancestors, so I’ll show you mine.” Yanagita’s method takes up on The Celtic Twilight’s textual hybridity in how its various modes for communication between the living and the twilight propose strategies for undercutting rational empiricism as a historical lens. Like The Celtic Twilight its guiding principle: involved listening requires a political commitment more complex than a passive receivership of impressions turned into notes. The project required risking personal investment in entering into the moral force of the community. One might see this as yet another nostalgia for the origins, a dreaming up of roots through supernatural speculation. Indeed, critics have detected this problem in Yanagita much in the same way as they have in Yeats, which is not unexpected given how iconic both authors are as emblems of literary nationalism. Yanagita considers those referents that distinctively mark a particular place as the site of a continued local tradition. Following Yeats’s example, orature becomes his primary form of transmission, since its performance inherently requires a multiplicity of voices, transference, and cross-temporal accessibility. The term monogatari, as both the aesthetic of Tōno monogatari as well as its method, has been troublesome for English translators. Monogatari’s nuances include both legend as well as tale. Likewise, the stories that Yanagita relays have the atmosphere of colloquial speech, contemporary voices, as

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well ancient patrimony and generational inheritance. In conflating legend and tale, Melek Ortabasi (2009) notes the quality of indistinct time in Tōno monogatari, and I believe her findings apply equally well to The Celtic Twilight: “a simultaneously contemporary and timeless flavor” (142). Yanagita makes this point himself when he says that “the monogatari of Tōno expose facts that exist right now before our very eyes [zame mae no shuttai koto nari].” The correlation between the evidence of history and the immediacy of experience is once more emphasized, as a sensory event in this same passage in the introduction: they are facts in front of us to see now, and that is their primary purpose for existing” (TM 57). Along this correlation between experience and perception, Yanagita would favour the verb mezame [目ざめ; to wake up] throughout Tōno monogatari as a principle metaphor for the moment of insight into the present moment as resonant of a historical framework in which we are co-participants of future creation. Yanagita wants to find a literary-sociological realm in Japan that is fashioned in ways similar to the Celtic Revival: a space in which alternative epistemologies, even clairvoyant ones, could become both a narrative of current experience and a cultural recollection of the past, simultaneously, accessing ancestrality as an alternative historical framework. Importantly, like The Celtic Twilight, the phantasmal acts as an intervening interlocutor in unsettling normative perspectives.12 Tōno monogatari and The Celtic Twilight both implement a narrative realism of observing communal life as embodied customs, but they note, through para-temporal frameworks, how the realm of everyday actions is infused with a peripheral energy of the past. Tōno monogatari does not withdraw into the generic mode of legend, of passively recounting the lore of “once upon a time” in regards to a time that is never more. Most emphatically, Yanagita reminds his audience of this point in the introduction: the monogatari of Tōno assert their relevance to present-day realities by virtue of tracing time as a pattern of reception. Contemporary orature, he writes, with some of the established texts such as the 900-year-old Konjaku monogatarishū [An Anthology of Tales from the Past], whose stories “took place in the past and are now old [ima wa mukashi no hana narishi ni]” (TM 56). Yanagita’s approach to monogatari as a storytelling reality seeks to emphasize both the legendary aspects of the

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tale and to situate them closely to current realities, to demonstrate the interdependency of ima [now] and mukashi [the past] as covalent bonding in the production of narrative meaning and experience. Yanagita conceives of monogatari as a map of interdependencies, of narrative tropes that connect with other stories, historical events, and multiple generations. He thereby aligns his observations with the production of regional characterization as identities brought about by connections: the local and particular have some definitive marks in relationship to the terrain of their people as representative of their communal interpretation of their heritage. By the modern period, Japanese writing already engages in various forms of kokugaku [native studies] analysis, often for explicitly nationalistic purposes, for assessing what and how something could be marked as Japanese, particularly when Japanese culture was receiving received so much in terms of foreign influence. Although Yanagita’s literary method is distinctive, he did have predecessors in terms of authors who sought to identify, through observation and argument, what creates the inescapable sense of the local as a specific place thought of as Japanese for Japanese culture. They drew upon a range of symptomatic materials and territorial assessments. Yanagita probably had in mind the influential Moto’ori Norinaga (1730–1801), whose study of Shinto examined patterns in grammar, toponymy, and religious observance, with attention to the interrelationship between texts and social habits of formation.13 Norinaga’s commitment to intuitive knowing, as a means for connecting to the legacy of place, looked first into the ancient texts of Japan as initiating a localized cultural framework that all future elements of Japanese literature and culture, to some extent, must hearken back toward. Norinaga’s evidentiary focus for this point of view is language. Nori­ naga’s Kojiki-den [Kojiki studies], which explores local linguistics, songs, and myths in forty-four volumes, has similarities in spirit and function to Patrick Dinneen’s attempt to create a lexicon of meaning that perceived semantics as culturally encoded speech acts. Dinneen’s own cultural annotations demonstrate that place names and legends graft themselves onto a landscape, through generations of communal activity in that place. Norinaga might also be compared to The Metrical Dindshenchas (1991), in that legendary place naming

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had explicit navigational value as a form of diachronically maintained knowledge.14 Interestingly, Shiba Ryōtarō frequently compares The Celtic Twilight to Norinaga in his Airurando nikki (2006). Shiba likewise maintains that Yanagita and Yeats must be understood as contemporary authors creating mutually complimentary practices while resisting the incursions and pressures of their shared era. Yanagita was very self-conscious of his connection to kokugaku, even going so far as call his own work shinkokugaku [new nativism]. What marks Yanagita’s difference from his predecessors, however, is his insistence on the body and bodily practice as the fundamental schema for perceiving and organizing culture as space. In trying to narrate the complex concept of rootedness, Yanagita wants to shift his attention away from the emerging power infrastructures of commerce and cosmopolitanism and to those areas not yet homogenized through invasive conduits of development and control. An important feature of both Yanagita and Yeats is that they both dispute the claim by Japanologists of Celticists, the intellectual elite, as being the only worthy arbiters of tradition, identity, or the lack of both. Both Yeats and Yanagita shift the attention to the margins from the centre. In this regard, Yanagita’s early conceptual emphasis on jōmin [abiding folk] seems to have the same imaginative slipperiness as Yeats’s sense of the peasant. Comparisons can be drawn between Yanagita’s conceptualization of jōmin, the abiding folk who best enshrine the continuous expression of Japaneseness, and the Celtic Revivalists’ attention to the peasant as having ancestral credibility, being fear gaeltachta [Irishmen] – that is, being Irish-language speakers. Critiques of both jōmin and peasant have followed parallel problems: both concepts, abstract in their significance yet asserting social legitimacy, are invented traditions for nationalizing an inheritance from the past. While I approach the nuances of fear gaeltachta in my next chapter, and the problem of converting observations of a specific community into indicative characterologies for the national whole, I would like here to mark a distinction between the Celtic Revivalists and Yanagita Kunio. This Japanese ethnographer’s forms of the practical implementation of cultural life, working with the mixed-genre format of observation and participation of culture as somatic phenomena – the listening and the speaking through communal inter-

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actions – tries to relocate culture in the active present. Yanagita’s desire to create a science of folk studies [minzokugaku], by focusing on Tōno as a locale in the manner in which Yeats approaches Sligo, reconceives of distinctions being made between scientific historical knowledge and literary cultural understandings. The Celtic Twilight both coincided with and put its mark upon Japanese modernist kokugaku nation studies writing through this relationship between Yeats and Yanagita. As a condition that results from threat, folklore reacts as much as it instigates in challenging imposed boundaries. As Antonio Gramsci (1985) directs us to remember, regarding emergent cultures and historical processes, “One must speak for a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality” (58). Gramsci argues that his distinction between immanent and nor­ mative grammars applied to cultural practices: between what happens in a more naturalistic fashion and what happens as reciprocal counter-effect, in terms of prescription, enforcement, and censorship. The challenge, as Gramsci notes frequently, is to believe in something natural without reducing it to yet another synthetic homogeny. We see this struggle through Yeats and Yanagita in terms of their positioning of peasant and jōmin, the abiding people, as a source for alternative discourse to cosmopolitan elitism and its reliance on normative grammars. Although later becoming one of the most crucial and contentious terms in his lexicon, Yanagita did not regularly employ jōmin as a consistent formulation until the 1940s. As Mitsuru analyzes, what makes jōmin such an elusive concept is that it is “everywhere and nowhere.” Yanagita feels the true personages of jōmin melted away due to synchronic social adjustments: the sense of being bound together as a locative collective in the more classical manner was giving way to modern conceptions of loss and dislocation. Nonetheless, the jōmin are everywhere in that the jōmin sensibility underscores the embodied traditions of culture as reiteration – indeed, motivating and sustaining these patterns. Yanagita’s later writing would thus take a more prescriptivist slant in defining just such elements of a sensibility. I do not think the Celtic Revivalists sought to reify, through such a singular sensibility of a rustic caste, a

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substantiation of all of Irishness, regardless of class, habitat, or other markers of social order. And while they found in the peripheries of Irish society in the west a lifestyle of an older sensibility, as did Yanagita in the rice crops and folk customs of the Japanese north, the Revivalists did not pursue the same degree of hypostatization as did Yanagita eventually try to persuade. Yanagita repeatedly utilizes the verb aru [在る] – to dwell or to exist, to be located within – to insist upon the emplaced nature of the cultural powers of belonging that he narrates. Although problematic to be sure, skirting essentialism in numerous ways, Yanagita, in likewise presenting and locating jōmin as a social realm that has its own narrative relation to macrohistory, is reacting against centuries of histiographic genres that privileged culture and politics as the manifest domains of aristocracies, warriors, and warrior aristocracies.15 Canonical accounts of nation such as the epic Taiheiki and gunki monogatari [war tales genre] generally exclude entire swaths of the population in their scope. Yanagita claims back the peripheries: the agricultural regions whose own religions and agricultural production have been excluded. Yanagita wants to show that society’s operational ability lies not in the elite alone. As is also the case with Ireland, both being island nations on the rim of their continental neighbours – and in ways whose cultures were affected by their geographical relationship – Japan’s modernization exposed the problematic cohabitation of modern and traditional, urban and agrarian, commodity and production. Yanagita’s agrarian context was a period in which the land itself – its cultivation and ownership – had been denied for centuries to the people who toiled on it. Moreover, the fight for basic residential rights produced a huge number of casualties, the redistribution of an indentured labour force, and an eventual emigration from Japan of the lower classes. This is especially true for northern Japan and its distance from political and economic authority. Peasant and jōmin are designations with real political edge. Yana­ gita and Yeats propose thematic strategies that shift the focus onto those communities that had been relegated to tenancy and disenfranchisement, yet were the ones whose cultivation of the crops provided the absolute basis for the dietary economy: potatoes and rice, respectively. There was an ecological sensibility behind this magnifi-

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cation of the soil’s discourse as co-participatory in the formation of cultural ideals and social intersubjectivity. The joining of environment and people cooperates in the production of milieu. Yanagita, in fact, first uses an Irish example to make this point: in “Tengu no hanashi” [The Tengu’s Tale] (185), published in 1909, Yanagita analyzes how the boggy Irish geography has had a climatic effect in generating Irish patterns of social connection, in terms of turf-cutting, weather, and cultural trends that respond to the conditions of localized dwelling in the specifics of an environmental habitat. The Irish, he writes, find structures for cultural knowledge in the disappearance and reappearance of relics preserved in bogs. Having argued for this possibility in an Irish example, Yanagita offers a similar exploration of Japan’s topographical features, Yanagita wants to understand how different landscapes have offered a diversity of poetic synesthesia. Arguing that an environment is a precious narrative effect itself, Yanagita, like Yeats, turns to ecological metaphors to defend organic space. Patrick Kavanagh and Yeats were also concerned with dirt and the soil, as the terrain upon which communities derive, develop, and negotiate their existence. They saw that the turf-cutter may represent inefficiency and obsolescence if compared with the factory; however, the turf-cutter represents both a whole way of life and a people who provide for the growth of the soil. In this way, Kavanagh, particularly in The Green Fool (1938), has much in common with Miyazawa Kenji’s essay on agronomical aesthetics, entitled “Nōmin geijutsu gairon kōyō” [An Outline of Agrarian Art] (1926), which argues for the legitimacy of rural artwork as more representative of actual lives than the more refined, prize-winning stylistics of published elitism. With the crop cycle in mind, as it relates to metaphors in Japanese literature, Miyazawa argues that labour and dirt do not preclude artistic ideals. Utilizing a spiritual perspective, a kind of liberation theology with a Buddhist slant, urbanism and the chattering classes are not the preserve of bukkokudo, the Buddha-Land. Thus, Miyazawa’s Buddhist morality feels that the realms of ancestry, and Buddha’s compassion in the cycle of earthly life, are irreplaceably bound up in these agricultural conditions. Miyazawa, like Kavanagh, is painfully aware of the brutal toil that comes with tilling the soil, and its susceptibility to oversight or exploitation. Still, the agrarian, with its proletarian

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overtones, offers a way of sustaining community that the metropolitan factory does not. Yanagita, whose academic studies focus on agriculture, also has a concern for farming systems in Japan, and those who depend on environmental sustainability for their livelihood, out of which his interest in folklore developed. In turning attention to the margins, Yanagita and Yeats sought an alternative spatialization for considering how cultural perception of rootedness reacts within and yet against a modernist society that imposes varieties of dislocation from the overall historical processes that produce that very same society. In trying to map out a recovery through alternatives, authors often adopt the rhetoric of nostalgia and sentiment in opposition to optimism and avarice. Critics have argued that both Yeats and Yanagita depend on wanton fabrications in order to imagine into existence a contrived nationhood conjured out of misconceptions but cemented through false authority. We may agree, as Edward Hirsch argues in “The Imaginary Irish Peasant” (1991), that revivalist concepts of peasant (and jōmin for that matter, thinking of how Yanagita sought a Gramscian discourse outside of the elite) are constructed out of polemical dichotomies within a bureaucratic republic, one that pits social identities against presumed transparencies such as “centre” and “urban.” These semantic labels are not satisfactory, especially if put to the test of social sciences in the manner that they evaluate anthropological data. But it seems injudicious to relegate any sense of rural reality to textual effects alone, as backdrops and props for an insular imagination. Undoubtedly, Tōno monogatari wants to relocate the reader’s imagination into a topography that is factual, but underrepresented by mainstream artistic entertainment. Tales 1 and 2, before the narrations begin, describes in a geographical manner the Tōno region, particularly its isolation due to geological features. But counteracting prevalent conceptions of this area as backwards, unsophisticated, and an obsolete remainder of a past best discarded, Yanagita begins to narrate the social lives that occur because of the regional features, informing his readers that the area has a great deal of distinctive liveliness. The performance of language as interconnected to the speech acts of localized identity situates much of how Yanagita relays his stor-

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ies. Like Yeats (Sligo locals), and Hearn (Koizumi Setsu, his friend in Matsue who acted as a guide), Yanagita relies on Sasaki Kizen as a liaison to channel cultural information. Tōno monogatari emphasizes experiential qualities to endotic travel – the bodily sensation of the cultural event and not just its encyclopedic retelling. Thus, all of the ghost stories – rather than being gothic tales that would appeal to a genre based on thrills – emphasize, instead, the social habitats of the spirits, how they reside, again returning repeatedly to Yanagita’s preferred verb aru [to dwell], a word he applies with equal strength to material and immaterial presences, such as his description of the zashikiwarashi [house-spirits] (73). The role of the fantastic in portraying these experiences of dissipation – of twilight, dissipation, and tasogare – is fundamental; and literature has a unique position to critique how the figurations of the everyday became artifacts, which were then turned into rhetorical tropes or psychological sentiments. The mode of fantasy or the fantastic in society can act as a kind of recovery as well as be symptomatic of the dematerializion of cultural identity.16 As Yeats saw the Irish language falling into lesser prominence, so Yanagita Kunio documents Tōno-ben, as a regional accent, as a discourse of the vanishing. At least in Tōno monogatari, Yanagita does not fully retreat into nativist puritanism. The mindfulness of European sources keeps the narrative framework both intensely local and dialogically extended. Indeed, as Yanagita discovers, foreign influences can be incorporated into the very particulars of a regional landscape, inscribing their own traces as they become part of the ongoing heritage. Yanagita explores this theme in Tales 84 and 85 (“Foreigners”). Catholic missionaries to Japan, mostly from Portugal, enjoyed only a brief period of tolerance from the shogunate bureaucracy. Eventually, they were driven underground as a pernicious influence.17 These hidden priests and their flock of crypto-Christians maintained secret worship. When caught, they endured crucifixion or other tortures. Yanagita documents this, how through local folk tales their cries still resound into the present time. Aurally, their experiences, as foreigners, are now imprinted upon the local soundscape. Their trauma became part of the collective associations that coexist with the physical terrain as

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interactive referential coordinates. In describing this paranormal event, Yanagita also notes, from a sociological perspective, how the gaijin [foreigners] entered into the communal order, including their miscegenated offspring. Yanagita shows that cultural purity is, ultimately, illusory. No place or time is free of external influences. The socio-historical will include changes that, in part, constitute the flow of community that interprets cultural plurality. Yanagita does not argue against the syncretic formation of cultural identities through diversity; instead, his concern is for singular futures that absorb communities and their affects through homogeneity. What Yanagita fears in Tōno monogatari, actually, are assimilated connections between diversified local practices. He, at least initially, is championing peripheries as a refuge from total obliteration of spirit and custom through urban sprawl and cosmopolitan homogeny. Modernity had made such a situation of ancestral vanishing, and economic lawlessness, entirely possible; and the limits of Herder’s point of view were permanently crossed. Recognizing that such a situation was coming into view, how can the local respond? As one such possibility, considered as a whole, Tōno monogatari documents the narratives of a region as a form of traditional content that carries across ancestral time, while managing the social realities of space. In Tōno monogatari, ghosts intercede to fill those gaps being dug out of collective memory. In studying both ghost and community as living personifications of the lustre of time, Yanagita follows Celtic Revivalist stylistics in narrating ancestral resonances. Overall, Yanagita does have more of a scientifically anthropological mind than Yeats, showing an influence from Gomme in the manner that he documents house architecture and the names for regional fauna. But, far more aligned with Yeats than with any contemporary ethnographer of his, Yanagita presents ghost legends not as curious anecdotes but as insightful forms of local communication that settle the observer’s dichotomic search for fact against fiction. Yanagita’s descriptions of spirits and goblins [tengu] emphasize the interactivity, and gaps in communication, between the spectral past and contemporary dwelling places, in how circumstances relate to their causative formations.

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An example of this occurs in Tale 90, when a mountain tengu appears to block the path of a young boy about to sleep after working in the fields. The youth immediately demands of the goblin, “O-mae wa doko kara kita ka?” [Where did you come from?], a question that receives no audible reply (99). Keen on a spot of wrestling, the lad attempts to grapple with the giant in an obvious contest of strength. Upon seizing the giant, preparing to throw him, the boy sinks into unconsciousness. Upon awakening, of course, the tengu has vanished, and the boy has only the memory, but no proof, to recount his experience. But the legend had been established. Again, Yanagita applies a word derived from aru to express the coinciding relationship between the memory of the tengu, and the locals who preserve the memory. Yanagita deliberately blurs again the words ima [now] and mukashi [before] to emphasize the coinciding of legend, as memory, and tale, as recounting. The region where this story occurred is still known as Tengu-mori or the Forest of the Tengu. Of the many legends about the fantastic, Tale 90 resonates very strongly with The Celtic Twilight’s usage of tropes related to forgetting, falling unconscious, appearances and disappearance, to demonstrate the alternative epistemology that is the discourse of the vanishing. The connection between Yeats and Yanagita remains strongly present in many Japanese literary conceptualizations. A recent issue of the Bungei shunjū (May 2007), still one of Japan’s top literary magazines, featured an article by Shinozawa Hideo of Gakushūin University. His column “Achira no kokoro to Nihon no kokoro” [The Spirit Over There and the Japanese Spirit] (2007) discusses Kerutojin [the Celt] as indicative of a spirit, half-vanished, of a tradition that continues to surface in Brittany and Ireland, despite the odds against it. The European Union’s policy, toward minority cultures, is to balance regional or national identities with a general Euro-culture. But this policy is at odds with economic realities. Shinozawa argues that Celtic suggests a compelling incentive to a wealth of music, literature, and art that defies mass conventionality. Shinozawa finds in the polytheism of pre-modern beliefs in Ireland a kind of variability that upsets the “catholicity” of the Catholic Church, as a crossgeographical Western institution. Christianized Ireland continues to

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exhibit pagan customs. With Endō Shūsaku’s novels in mind, he further notes the extent to which the Japanese language has not easily accommodated notions of a unified, entirely transcendental God. Thus, Shinozawa locates a point on which the Celt and the Japanese have a shared sensibility on mythic matters. He states, rather boldly, “Nihon no kokoro to onaji datta” (82–3) [The Japanese spirit is the same (as the Irish)]. Of course, such a blunt equation will set off essentialist alarm bells. Shinozawa is amused that, when he wears a piece of knotwork jewellery, Westerners automatically assume that it is a Buddhist symbol. In his personal experience, only Princess Michiko recognized that his necklace was, in fact, modelled from The Book of Kells. Fusion can mean confusion – especially when prejudices are fuelled by superficial assessments, especially when people do not make the effort to be informed. Shinozawa, after all, is not altogether without humour in making this point. But, his claim is clearly augmented by a strong criticism of US militarism as defining Westernness. Shinozawa is arguing, in fact, against an increasingly typified notion of the West as rational monotheism mixed with military technologies. Yanagita dedicated his Tōno monogatari to “gaikoku ni aru hitobito” [those dwelling in foreign lands]. Aru, as noted, had been Yanagita’s preferred term for existing or dwelling as when he describes how the tales of Tōno live or dwell in continuity with the present as well as the past in structures of association and ritual (56–7). Suggestive of both his friends living abroad and perhaps those foreign readers who would take up his book, Yanagita clearly sees his work as locally focused but internationally relatable, thinking outside of Japan even as turns his look most intimately to inside Japan. Yanagita, with Yeats as his forerunner, trusts that the performative voice functions as a tactile connection to the landscape, the body as being, that affirms the value of a communal attachment to place in the face of global modernity, with its commoditized geographies. In this way, his narratives enact vignettes of dwelling that intersect in various modes of time viewed, through the literary imagination, as contiguous. But he has no desire to retreat into an abstract mythscape of detached stories and ethereal figurations. Tōno monogatari takes as its premise that culture requires embodiment, that the speech acts and

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gesture compositions of cultural practice require an intersubjectivity of communities in contact. He makes this point in his introduction, by comparing the geographical features of the Tōno region to the Japanese syllabary, implying that the landscape has a language to be actively read by those who dwell within it. Yanagita’s consistently inferred argument is that folklore is site-dependent, crucially so, upon the embodied, performative voice. Yeats, through Japanese literary heritage, emphasizes this eco-critical dimension of the landscape as a principle text to be read: “Perhaps even these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent life, like those painted horses that trampled the rice-fields of Japan” (Autobiographies 194). The Irish Revivalists’ context, in relating the rural to the ancestral, concerned the traumas of history, oppressive legislation, and the profitdriven economic development that has alienated the countryside. Their legitimate experiences have been turned into mere semiotic signs, their reality expunged, under colonial occupation. The markers of real people are there. In Sligo, land development frequently turns up nameless famine burials. The number of anonymous bodies in the Hunger Graveyard, at the edge of Sligo Town, entombed without the benefit of semiosis and labels, are not literary make-believe. They are corpses in the soil.18 Terms such as peasant, although of varying (and competing) historical meanings, did not appear in the mindset of modernity as linguistic figments. The literary figuration cannot be entirely divested of legitimate experiences on the land. However, the practical consequences of such a theory, that the real materials of society could be valued and devalued at a whim, were among the most serious complaints of the Irish under colonial occupation. Much of the tension in efforts to give Irish culture a narrative entailed distancing its from colonial impositions and enforced forgeries that had been both inflicted and circulated. Absentee landlords, the deprivation of food during the famine, and penal laws that confiscated religious art were all examples of tradition being confiscated. Were the materials taken only imaginary, or valuable only through relative measure? Yanagita appreciated Yeats’s sense of craft and custom as oppositional to mass production and anonymity. Ireland, as a post-colonial

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project, had to recover value as a nationally immanent assessment. Under colonial rule, a sense of Irish culture as a non-entity that could be rendered valueless had been a function of imperial rule in Ireland, from efforts to erase the Irish Gaelic language to the dismembering of a localized economy. Jonathan Swift’s analysis of how Ireland in various ways was devaluated, in The Drapier’s Letters (1935), depicts the colonial manipulation of revenue as it relates to the conversion of Irish life into depreciated tokens of exchange. He attacks the mindset that arbitrarily assigns worth and value to cultural products, assigning worth based on contemporary exchange rates. The Drapier’s Letters takes up this issue in observing the pegging of Irish currency. The case that led to the composition of the letters began with a bribe. William Wood was granted a patent to produce inferior copper to make the new coin of the realm. Made of a cheaper alloy, the coinage was used for currency in Ireland, but was not legal tender – did not have authentic, sterling value – in the international market. Thus, the entire system of supply and demand, as controlled in Ireland, was based on counterfeit production, deemed as twaddle by the judgment of empire. A system of quasi-values manipulated legitimate goods and crafts produced by culture and labour. This economic policy, in turn, depreciated the material culture of the people. Literally, what was made and exchanged had its value equated with illegitimate tokens. Swift also explores this sense when, in “A Modest Proposal” (1729), human beings are described as commodities subject to inflation. The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), like this essay, is deeply concerned with moral issues regarding how communities are dehumanized through economic interference. The standard of measuring value has only a cursory relation to the materials and craftsmanship of the product itself. Swift, in the form of fake money, sees in tandem the social culture of Ireland degraded. Swift’s discussion is relevant to the topic at hand because it shows how Ireland had already witnessed its material culture reduced to trinkets downgraded by a foreign indexer. It is the imperial mindset that reduces folklore to another quaint, irrelevance. Authors or philosophers have been complicit with ethnic aggrandizement, through research in folklore, but there is also the story of how artists looked to such materials for a space in opposition to the

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market mentality. In particular, cultures under rapid change will turn to the knowledge of shadows, partly found in folklore, a knowledge that makes a space outside of the purely economic. Aware of the dangers of falling headlong into the flux of accelerated modernity and its philosophy of mass construction, early forms of eco-critical thinking began to take shape in Irish and Japanese authors, as they attempted to articulate gaia as an alternative to tekhne. The modernist philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) emphasizes that climate and environment are directly relational and proportional to a given culture’s standards of expression. His most notable work, Fūdo, written in 1929 and published in 1935 [Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study, 1961], argues for an ontological understanding of the relationship between environmental situation and culture as human response interfacing with the specifics of regional life, in which climate acts as the intermediary between nature and civilization. Indeed, in the initial draft, the work was subtitled Observations on National Character [ningengakuteki-na]. Watsuji, rather than seeing biodiversity as exploitable assets, argued for a sense of fūdo [climate] as a mutual convergence of the human subject enmeshed in biological spatiality. Atmospheric circumstances are inseparable from the communities who build themselves, over time, in response to their localized climatological processes. Yanagita had made similar points, utilizing an Irish example: in his essay “Tengu no hanashi” [A Discussion of the Tengu] (1982 [1909]) he emphasizes how the characterization of these creatures relates to the ambient factors that come from Japanese mountain life, comparing the conceptual figuration of fairies in Ireland as framed by the environmental features for which Ireland was renowned, its atmospheric gloom as well as its verdant landscape. Watsuji’s ideas permutated into a racial science of cultural typification according to environmental habitat, with little in the way of sociological data. He tends to describe regional specifics, in Japan and Ireland, surprisingly devoid of reference to actual persons. One could readily point out that there really can be no way to prove that a typhoon-prone climate would produce a particular form of folk ballad, as Watsuji wants to establish. Nonetheless, some of his basic principles of environmental determinacy have affinities with some

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current theory on climate and culturality: in her work on Inuit lifestyles, Do Glaciers Listen? (2006), Julie Cruikshank writes, “humans and nature mutually make and maintain the habitable world … Glaciers appear as actors in this book” (3). And to make this point she examines the particulars of voice, even at the grammatical level, of an indigenous culture dependent upon an icy topography for cultural coexistence. On a basic level, fūdo implies that an environmental dynamic must be acknowledged as a mode for influencing human existence. Conditioned behaviours correlate relationally to habitat. Scientists index climate change statistically; but we can also observe a direct impact on people’s lives. Yanagita and Yeats have a less definitive sense of fūdo in that they place particular attention on the variables of lifestyles particular to natural processes related to varieties of particular landscapes. One can easily see how rice growing, as agricultural necessity, influenced almost every aspect of Japanese culture from religion to nutrition. Unlike Watsuji’s strangely unpopulated climate, Revivalists in both Ireland and Japan attempted to find narratives through an appreciation of the aura of a landscape, a climate of twilight that arises from the imaginative interface between space and belonging, with attention on both individual objects and the cultural landscape as a flexible horizon.19 Yeats’s sense of communal memory being connected to cultural heritage has many components, including art, religion, and the environment. The practical point is that the present is governed by the past, in the form of accumulated influences, and this includes meteorological agency and geographical spacing. Despite Watsuji’s suggestion, typhoons may not directly cause a given modality for a regional ballad style. But, as famous enka songs such as “Kanazawa no ame” know, the rain in one place feels sympathetically different than rain in another place. Lawrence Durrell put it this way in Justine (1991 [1957]): “We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it” (41). In assessing a sense of regional relationships, food, as one example, has been accounted for as climatologically determined. The care and preparation of local delicacies exhibit knowledge refined through the trial and error of time. Japanese ethnographers noted

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that the cold Nagano weather produces a kind of soba whose texture is different from, say, that in Osaka. Add to this the fact that, generally, the people in Kansai prefer different sauces, and one can taste a wide variation in something as seemingly simple as a buckwheat noodle. The famous daikon [oriental radish] of Kagoshima, Sakurajima daikon, has a particular flavour owing to the volcanic ash that permeates the local soil. Eisai Zenji’s Kissa yōjōki had, many centuries previously, discussed climate variability as affecting the cultivation of tea leaves. Tea produced different health benefits according to where it was grown, or from the specific water source used to boil the leaves. Shiba Ryōtarō was quite taken with the quality of wakame and konbu that could be found in the West of Ireland. Similarly, Yanagita argued for the irrecoverable importance of dirt, soil, and landscape at a time of increased urban sprawl, particularly in his introduction to Tōno monogatari but also throughout his later work. To turn back to Tanizaki, writers questioned how different types of dirt, soil, or clay might condition experiences differently. Climate cannot be separated from human endeavour. Dinneen’s dictionary, etymologically, attempts to prove the relationship between habitat and linguistic practice in shaping vocabulary usage. The natural world provides outlets, rather than prescriptions, for human emotions. Myth, as a kind of ongoing examination of the physical record through communal story, need not be a domain of elitism or exclusivity. Cathal Ó Searcaigh (1993) continues to find in the traces left in dirt and habitat a domain for intersecting culture with the processes of the past. The landscape, marked by heritage, provides a kind of reference point for coherence. On the importance of landscape referents as interstices for human contact, many comparative examples can be made. The landscape provides sensory realization of one’s organic nature, one’s physical embodiment of thought and thinking. For Oisin, landscape cannot substitute for interpersonal relationships, but can act as an intercessor for lost memories. The living environment is an intercessor that networks the realm of human expression.20 These authors wanted to locate authenticity in terms of a continuity of place and in artifacts whose intangible value comes from regional interactivity. When the monuments and relics in a landscape

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are overturned, or forgotten, their existence is turned into auras and hauntings, shadowy outlines against the materialistic present. This diaphanous quality, easily dismissed as imaginary or non-substantive, leads to their devaluation and dismissal. Access to the phantasmal is itself phantasmal, which is the condition of the eponymous hero of The Wanderings of Oisin and the threat to destroy the twilight in The Celtic Twilight. As the ancestral becomes non-material, it thus assumes the non-existence that seems to prove the opinion that it never existed in the first place. Hence, the belief that all tradition is imaginary, as variously described, becomes predicatively true. “Ireland” and “Japan” have both been analyzed as being composed of a series of variously mythic claims to selfhood, ones derived from elusive senses of the past. For example, Declan Kiberd (1996) describes how the “past,” as a prerequisite to a sense of Irishness, allows for a re-creation of history in which the revolutionary present becomes the definitive point of view. The past itself is a prisoner of the present. Fantastic narratives are another way of inventing a pseudo-historical reality: “History thereby becomes a form of science fiction: in order to get a fair hearing in a conservative society, the exponents of revolution had to present their intentions under the guise of a return to the idealized past” (293). In this way, stories of the past circulate another false currency. Kiberd’s point might be read in a way that confirms Vivian’s claim that all of tradition is an inauthentic narrative, invented to meet current political and cultural needs. I am not suggesting that this is Wilde’s point in “The Decay of Lying,” however, as the context is highly satirical. Perhaps Wilde means, overall in this essay, that truths created by artists are really more authentic than prosaic reality, as Keats had suggested. However, the current prevalence of the theory of invented tradition might read Vivian as proof of this fabrication of the past. The invention of a preceding culture, and the claim to it, is thus based on a contemporary consensus that invents a past out of gimmicks and fantasies. In such a state of illusory beginnings, violence – as civil war or outward imperialism – becomes an anxious assertion of pride against a subconscious fear of a collective’s own rootlessness. This is a major theme throughout Yeats’s The Tower. For this reason, Lloyd (2000) advises caution

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about the dichotomy of idealized and organic in assessing tradition in a post-colonial frame such as Ireland: “We cannot dispense with the acknowledgement of discontinuities without disavowing the particular damage which colonialism everywhere inflicts on the cultural institutions of the colonized” (43). An eco-critical model of the Revivalist attitude to the pastoral puts into perspective the mythology of landscape as that which unites habitat with human narrative. In many ways, the attention to the organic restores a Benjamian materialism against the “differently homogenizing logics of the colonial and the national state” (ibid.). So much of twentieth-century Irish writing tries to find resources in the culturally ecological, where custom, ritual, antiquity, and ceremony intertextually work through the observance of community. Rather famously, Seamus Heaney’s Station Island (1984) is not only a retreat centre, but a temple of unbroken ritual, a circularity of communal performances in an organic order of memory, repetition, reception, and practice. Attention to folklore is not merely a Revivalist peccadillo. Irish poets continue to read history and heritage through the luminous ruins or the twilight remnants: in Irish voices, places, and eco-contexts. The praxis of the local that was established in the Gaelic Revival is not isolated bits of Romanticism, ones of the naïve pastoral, but are forerunners to contemporary Irish-language writers such as Cathal Ó Searcaigh, from the Donegal Gaeltacht, and those like him who continue to revise understandings of collective identity amid a changing set of cultural signs and locales. In Ó Searcaigh’s Irish-language verse, the landscape resonates through its symbiotic connection to human life and sustenance. The farmland is not metaphor, a terrain of agricultural Ireland, but a living organism of intense sensuality. Ó Searcaigh, especially in the collection Homecoming/ An Bealach ‘na Bhaile (1993), shows many influences from Eastern spirituality while at the same time providing a poetic geography of Donegal. Contemporary Irish language poets have been deeply concerned in presenting a vision of the lingual-cultural landscape as an affirmation of human interaction that sustains its ongoing traces. For example, Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide [Michael Hartnett] writes in “A Farewell to English”:

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For Gaelic is our final sign That we are human, therefore not a herd. (300) Importantly, the “farewell to English” that Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide understood as his poetic vocation was not only a linguistic turn, but a geographical one: his decision to write solely in Irish coincided with his relocation to Templeglantine, County Limerick – which was, as he saw it, an act of solidarity with a dying language. In discussing ways that cultures access their traditions, a predilection to calling upon the emotionalism of the past as a motivator in the present cannot be overlooked. Senses of history can function as histrionic monikers in the hands of despots. For this reason, Yeats avoided John O’Leary’s funeral in 1907. Observing the emerging patterns of iconic performance, he summarizes the Irish independence movements in a 1921 poem (CP o 186–7): Whatever their loose phantasy invent And murmur it with bated breath, as though The abounding gutter had been Helicon Or calumny a song. (“The Leaders of the Crowd,” ll. 4–9). In engaging the ghostly, the Celtic Revival explored a realm that is all non-material and difficult to concretize in an ancestral context. What snaps the delusion of vague ideation is the tangibly ancestral, which seems to leave its traces on places and objects. As suggestive imprints, these nuances are subject to fancy and miscomprehension. So, without a connection to the ancestral in physical and contextual form, as Oisin discovers, one becomes dislocated and history loses its referents and specifics. Loss becomes a relationship, either one of mourning for the irrecoverable or trauma of the inevitable. Tanizaki: Ourselves Alone If Yanagita Kunio resembles the storyteller of The Celtic Twilight, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s cultural melancholy, the cultural body in pain as it surrenders to irretrievable history, has certainly comparative qualities to The Wanderings of Oisin. Although not directly related

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to Yeats by discernible influence, Tanizaki wrote of darkness and twilight at contemporary moments of optical confusion and affective panic in the phenomenology of cultural participation. I approach Tanizaki with caution, as he is quite unlike the other Japanese authors I focus on in this study: he had no formal affiliation with the Airurando bungakukai, nor did he have any long-standing interest in Celtic Revivalist literature, although his debt to Wilde is well known. Tanizaki had more than a modicum of resentment for Shaw’s visit to Japan, with his claims to perceiving the inner life of Noh and his architectural plans for Marxist renovations to major shrines. I am not arguing that Tanizaki was in any way indebted to or a part of the movement in Japan to receive Irish literature. I do find, however, that his contrarian viewpoints speak directly to some of the identarian politics of that globalizing era. Although I wish to be careful to not falsely ascribe a direct influence of Tanizaki and Yeats on one another, my research found several curious connections that other Japanese authors have formulated between these two authors, as representative viewpoints and literary statements on the political in the modern era. Mishima Yukio argued vigorously for a domain of contact in the literary figurations offered by Tanizaki, especially in his essay In’ei raisan [In Praise of Shadows], and its similarities and counterpoint to The Celtic Twilight and the writings of Hearn. In a series of letters to Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima identifies the curious similarities that he felt were abundant between The Celtic Twilight and In’ei raisan, perceiving the texts to be a modernist dialogue on heritage, history, and the cultural body of the present: “Exactly the same thing, even in different countries, is this Irish twilight of Yeats and Tanizaki’s In’ei raisan … In the Nihon shoki, the gods hide their body during the daylight, but in twilight they come to life, dancing” (Ōfuku shokan 32–3). Tanizaki probably would not have understood his Japanese in’ei as cognate with Yeats’s twilight, as I will analyze below. But Mishima here describes a coinciding practice in both these authors, for the purposes of accessing the ancestral within the public and private spaces. Mishima argues that Yeats, Hearn, and Tanizaki all call for a turning away from the presumptuous luminosity of progress and toward shadows in order to assess processes of loss, sorrow, and

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trauma as haunting. Both Tanizaki and Yeats develop ideas of twilight and shadows as optical devices for apprehending the marginalia and peripheries of sensation and belief. According to Mishima, they both find a common ground in their defence of folklore orality as bearing witness to an ongoing story of cultural experiences. Tanizaki’s argument for the environmental and spatial dimensions of heritage arose from very complex motives and sources and is not at all the same as Yanagita Kunio’s interest in folklore. Nor does Tanizaki have the penchant for twilight as the occult, such as I will assess in Izumi Kyōka’s similarities to Yeats’s neo-nō in my next and final chapters. Indeed, Tanizaki, in arguing for the particularity of a Japanese culture, in In’ei raisan, seeks to avoid an essential claim to national character, preferring very tactile forms of definition. He describes a “Japanese secret” [nihonjin no himitsu] that, far from the result of supernatural powers, that which “Westerners call ‘the mysterious East’” [seiyōjin no iu tōyō no shinpi] is a specific atmospheric sensation [kūki] produced by the features of Japanese architectural spaces, their shadows, and the uncanny quietness [bukimi-na shizukasa] (23–4). Contemporary critics may well take issues with the facticity in which Mishima Yukio’s letters frequently interrelate Tanizaki, Hearn, Yeats, and Kyōka, all of whom he argues share a common aesthetic philosophy of twilight, shadows, culture, and tradition. But Mishima did not make his comments in passing. He describes in detail – through comparative references to Kyōka and Yeats – how Hearn created a hybrid space as Tōyō no girishajin [an Oriental Greek]. Mishima, with amazement, describes how Hearn tapped into notions of twilight as an interphase of spirit (see Kawabata and Mishima 1997, 32). Hearn and Kyōka, inspired by Yeats as Mishima argues, shared a devotion to evening as the stage for waking those alienated presences. Hearn, as Mishima makes clear in this letter, did much to interpret twilight, as a multi-temporal space of phantasm, that contrasts with the daylight of modern rationality. Whether or not Mishima can accurately claim direct influences between these Irish and Japanese authors, he nonetheless detects a thematic interface that interrelates them, and he shares this perception with commentators on Yeats in the Taishō period.

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Mishima’s sense of similarity between Yeats and Tanizaki is intriguing, not for its accuracy, but that Japanese authors would reframe the conversation of Irish and Japanese authors according to their own perceptions. Tanizaki certainly seeks an appreciation of regional aesthetics that depended neither upon some intangible claim to an inner spirit, nor an appeal to a national characterhood of racial memory in the cells. But he does want to disavow the possibility for appreciating aesthetics as locally shaped and evolving. His philosophy of material reflexivity, at least in In’ei raisan, is not altogether different from the cultural artifacts of Oisin’s sorrow, or the exploration of tangibility in heritage as with Tōno monogatari, when he says, “That thing known as beauty [bi to iu mono] always develops from the practice of everyday life [seikatsu no jissai]” in relationship to senzo [ancestor] (TM 21). I have privileged a Certeauian translation in my lexical choices for seikatsu no jissai, the realities of everyday life. Through the lens of Certeau, Tanizaki’s assesses the power of inhabited space as circumstantial referents encoded by the particulars of cultural emplacement that create the feeling distinctive of differing human societies. Tanizaki’s ideas recall Certeau’s claim to the power of place when he says, in Heterologies (1986), “A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning” (105). Tanizaki Jun’ichiriō (1886–1965) holds the stature of one of Japan’s foremost novelists of the twentieth century, and he is particularly noted for his complex depictions of Japanese self-consciousness as a protean flux that must both absorb and compete with the advent of the West as a contrarian figuration. Frequently, his plotlines utilize tropes of cultural masochism, rebellious bodies (tattoo artists and sex workers), and erotic tension to depict bodies in pain as representative of the sensual realm that is the contradictory experience of cultural enjoyment. As someone so concerned with the parameters of Japanese life as distinguishable from the contemporary generic, Tani­ zaki wrote several essays where he tries to argue, more philosophically, the masochistic affect of cultural grief in his novels. In’ei raisan, written the same year as Shaw’s attendance at the Noh (1934), has a tone that resonates with and diverges from Yeats’s complicated sense

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of the shadow, as the vanishing past of twilight, and its relation to the physical as the material remainder of that past. Tanizaki discusses the principles of architecture and ancestry in Japanese literature, demonstratively in its modernist condition. I emphasize once more that I am not claiming a definitive influence on Tanizaki from the Irish Revival; on the contrary, the argument of In’ei raisan contrasts very strongly against the more comparativist views of the Airurando bungakukai. Nonetheless, writers of the acumen possessed by Shiba Ryotarō in his Irish travelogue and Mishima Yukio perceived a form of dialogue taking place between Yeats and Tanizaki, and assessing on what terms that dialogue is occurring – and why they would make this juxtaposition in the first place – is a concern of this study. Tanizaki’s growing taste for the old, grimy, shadowed by patina, coincided with the politically restless mood of Japan in the 1930s; and his tone here, one of agitation and also mourning, coincides with that of many of his contemporaries who advocated a return to Japan during this period. Tanizaki, throughout In’ei raisan, pauses frequently to offer elegiac asides, admitting that his pursuit of cultural recovery exists more as a whim than a sustainable practice. Indeed, later in his career, he would abandon many of his former precepts as nostalgic fantasy. As Margherita Long (2002) describes, In’ei raisan can be connected to the Japanese genre of zuihitsu, or informal essay writing from a personal perspective, in which the author contemplates the conditions of his or her living environment. In’ei raisan, as its principle, meditates upon and, with some regret, adores [raisan] the shadows [in’ei] as a kind of art of darkness and gloom. By shadows Tanizaki initially has in mind how Japanese architecture, by its atmospheric construction, produces an atmospheric ambience of an umbra that always resides in close contact with daily life in Japanese societies. Utilizing shadows as a comprehensive sensory experience that is akin to an aesthetic sensibility of heritage, Tanizaki extends his sense of in’ei to collectively identify the experience of shadows as a continuum of connections and associations that gather and form around places of Japanese cultural habitation. In Tanizaki’s view, distinctive features of Japanese taste result from these continued relationships with the gloam that always seems to be at the peripheries of Japanese cultural embodiment. On this theme, Tani­

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zaki’s composition praises shadows not as mere quantitative data on customs. He asserts that the super-sensual nature of darkness surrounds object, place, and people as they participate in the production of a Japanese regional atmosphere, which attains the status of habitational characterization. Shadows and twilight are, in fact, habitations, metaphysical nodes and abodes of elegy that resist the hygiene of progress. Yanagita and Tanizaki both examine how the architecture of Japanese houses maintain those ancestral traces that, by nature, are both elusive and perpetual. At times both strongly elegiac and wilfully nostalgic – Tanizaki’s tone is rather doleful, a sort of farewell to a beautifully useless dream of darkness, lost sensibilities, and declining attitudes that is the gestalt of a cultural mindset giving way to modernizing incursions of homogeneity in the form artificial light. Tanizaki addresses in lyrical detail what is now one of the major topics of modernist scholarship: the incursion of technological innovation in altering and modifying the interfaces of cognitive perception. Utopic and escapist tendencies alternate as Tanizaki debates, with nostalgia and mourning, which of the growing influences of Western aesthetics converge and clash with Japanese theatrical models and sensibilities. The electric light, rather than casting luminosity on dark places, in fact, erases the comfort of diurnal patterns. Tanizaki’s discussion would immediately remind Mishima of his studies of Yeats (he had translated some of his dramas into Japanese) and of Celtic Revival sensibilities with their own preoccupations with Ireland as a nation whose identity is comprised of relics in a period of modernist transformation. Tanizaki and Yeats, while seemingly addressing the conditions of the past, as shadow or spectre, are at the same time critiquing the indifference of the present. Yeats and Tanizaki partially link on this theme, but diverge on its application: when source materials – communal, aesthetic, and such – are undergoing displacement and reconstruction, a process of phantasmalization occurs. Personal experiences and artifacts cease being a part of the present moment and are banished into amorphous realms of collective memory, nationalistic nostalgia, and the general dustbin of the past. I will not attempt to give a thorough analysis of In’ei raisan, as that is not my purpose in bringing this text into my conversation on Irish

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and Japanese interculturality. What interests me is unpacking exactly what impressions Mishima had of this text that he would so unequivocally link and compare it with the Irish Revival, and in particular The Celtic Twilight. Why did Mishima choose twilight as the centrifugal trope that linked Tanizaki, Hearn, and Yeats? Certainly, these three authors shared a contemporary mood of loss, cultural dissipation, and disconnection. Although in various ways they wrote of twilight and shadows, all of three of them were quick to assert that twilight, if spoken of as an abstract presence distanced completely from human activity, had no meaning other than the ethereally absent. And so all three authors were apt to locate twilight as an aura of immediacy, a fluctuating resonance that had as much to do with the dirty here and now as it did with ancestral memory. And, as another point, all three authors practised endotic narratives that document, explore, and participate in the argument that culture entails a sense of place and belonging, of interior dimensions the arise in distinctive continuity with regional specificity. As the epigraph to this chapter, I quoted a crucial passage from In’ei raisan that Mishima probably had in mind when making his links between Tanizaki and Yeats. Tanizaki’s jidai no tsuya [the lustre of time] describes the sense of awe by indicating that the beauty is not the product of one craftsman, but rather a legacy of heritage and time in the evidential texture of a smoky patina. In identifying the ancestral as inseparable from space and time, attested to by a tangible object, the lustre of time is a crucial theorization that, I believe, as does Mishima, coincided with the Revival’s promotion of twilight and shadows as a heritage aesthetic of previous presences. This is not to say that Tanizaki was directly influenced by Yeats; such a claim can be documented for Yanagita, but Tanizaki, who was not connected with the Airurando bungakukai, even if, quite possibly, he did read Yeats for his own edification. While not wishing to overstate the comparative qualities of these two authors, however, Tanizaki’s contribution to what had clearly been an ongoing literary discussion in Japan about heritage emplacement, as augmented by shadows, is evident. As connected to place, community, and intergenerationality, the lustre suggests a temporal differential, something that marks both past and present simultan-

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eously as inherited continuity. In pursuing this idea, Tanizaki refuses to dismiss or devalue the real feelings of investment and relationship that people have to local traditions, artifacts, and situations of living. He reacts most strongly to that which tries to impose an internationalist vision on the particular. Under such a grey erasure, people cannot help but try to preserve bits and pieces of physical connectivity as embodiments of the past. Thus, the central argument for praising shadows leads from the aura around materiality to the shadows as the vague silhouettes of cultural topoi. Tanizaki contemplates the schemes of those wraithlike presences in the shadows that resist global domestication. As a ring of dark matter around the peripheries of sensation, the ghostly is a half-embodied paradox of mythic time, the resultant echo of an ethos that is disintegrating. Likewise, my readings of Yeats’s early poems pursue his Tanizaki-like sense of the spectral as the lingering, as seen in The Wanderings of Oisin, as the ancestral voice negotiating with an altered topography. Marilyn Ivy’s (1995) theorization of “discourses of the vanishing” can connect to Tanizaki’s essay on many points. Tanizaki questions the predicament of modernist culture in Japan: the spectral, or phantasmal, exists as an enigma, an unstable entity between presence and absence. The lustre of time describes a situation in which, in Ivy’s words, “the surviving numinous became the romantic object of those caught up in the disenchantment of the world” (73). As an expression of anxiety regarding cultural transmission, the haunted is an abject dislocation resulting from enforced loss and disappearance. A ghostly trace only partially announces itself, or affixes itself, to a predicament of unrecognizable change. Tanizaki’s thesis posits that time gives an artifact its powers through the touch of many hands, which wear it down and make it shine with use. The oily sheen left by the touch of generations bears the imprint of a community’s ongoing emotional reality. Oisin’s sillelagh, washing ashore in the otherworld, dispelled the fantasy with its roughhewn touchability. Satō’s sword, likewise, arrives at the Tower, demonstrating a coherent continuity within Japanese craftsmanship and historical methods. The sword and the sillelagh possess an enchantment – the dirt of time and handling, as Tanizaki reminds us – that evades the jurisdictions of mass manufacturing. Satō’s sword is

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an important artifact in Yeats’s life, for it confirmed his own sense of heritage in Ireland, but also offered a parallel example from another heritage, a comparative ancestral context. An exchange took place that defied the Herderian sensibility that declared heritage needed to be isolated. In this instance, the sword, carrying a transmigratory sense of culture, coincides with that ongoing dialogue between Irish and Japanese literature: two distinct heritages came into conversation with each other in the twilight of modernity. The ancestral, whose presence permeates the wood and steel, asserts itself in a time of technology, trade, and mass manufacturing. Yeats would see that, for a post-Herderian model to take effect, local cultures would need to come into dialogue as a form of rebellion against nondescript identifies fostered by capitalistic cosmopolitanism. Jidai no tsuya [the lustre of time] provides a conceptual theme for defining, in Tanizaki’s sense, how shadows are not mystical substances but tangible aesthetics that inhere to the cultural world through contact, use, and circulation. This point of view is quite in agreement with what Yeats argues, through his literary development from The Wanderings of Oisin to The Celtic Twilight, about what engenders familiarity of the cultural identity. In The Celtic Twilight twilight and lustre are auras of communal investment becoming spectral as the material conditions disappear. In’ei raisan begins as a defence of positive anthropogenic contributions to the process and continuity of history and its material perpetuation. The human hand acts in consort with the material environment to imbue unique artifacts with the lustre of time. The objects, refined through intimate interaction, are thus connected to their local context through communal relations. Tanizaki argues that the feeling of enchantment that these objects acquire cannot be dismissed as whimsical caprice or cheap sentiment. The shine, as ancestral presence, is a kind of aura, one produced from a polish of elbow grease and grave dirt. This is, actually, the ongoing presence of antiquity. Tanizaki’s lustre of time thus resonates with the previously mentioned Benjamian sense of aura. For Walter Benjamin, photography usurped nineteenth-century aesthetics of painting. Benjamin was careful to qualify that aura has no supernatural quality, relegated only to a circle of highly specialized objects, but that a “genuine aura” can be found anywhere (“Proto-

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cols,” in 2006, 58). About what constitutes genuineness, Benjamin insists that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition” (“Work of Art,” in 1968, 217). Thus, as he assessed, what mechanical reproduction tends to interfere with is the presence of aura, because this system of creation collapses the sense of distance through which the aura achieves its distinctive charm. Benjamin’s progressive understanding of aura developed through the deepening of his concerns for technological media. And, while both Tanizaki’s jidai no tsuya and Benjamin’s aura are far more complex terms than can be adequately addressed here, they do share a common principle in their emphasis on touchability and distance, collaborating in an effect through which “the distance of the gaze that awakens in the object looked at” (“Work of Art,” in 1968, 314).21 In Tanizaki’s case, electric lighting destroyed the qualities of natural light and shadows, the aura of the pre-mechanical. Tanizaki’s sense of the lustre of time corresponds with Yeats’s tower that stands structurally in opposition to the machineries of mass production that quickly produce trinkets of culturality, the state of being in-cultured, out of hackneyed symbols. What Yeats is concerned with is the extent to which trinkets are pushing treasures to the edge of the peripheries. The shadows, the silhouettes of the past that Tanizaki praises, offer something that the contemporary cannot reproduce: as Yeats wrote, “Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, / The living seem more shadowy than they” (“The New Faces,” CP o 216, ll. 7–8). In this way, twilight becomes a kind of alternative historiographical strategy, one claimed for incarnating alternative spectres of the past. Irish and Japanese authors shared a suspicion of etiologies of the future, especially ones driven by an ideological momentum of erasure through consumption in the name of a vague, promised progress. In In’ei raisan (2002) Tanizaki makes this point in speaking about the difference in soundscapes between natural acoustics and amplification and the particularized mood or atmosphere [kibun hon’i] of Japanese music: “if turned into a recording, or amplified with speakers, the sound loses most of its charm [miryoku]” (11). Tanizaki perceives the mass reproduction of sound as an encroachment that renders the preciousness of the moment [aida] and its inherent tranquility,

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literally rendering it dead [shinde shimau] (11). In a rather concerned way, he writes that we are making devilish pacts by warping the conditions of art in order to accommodate – or cosy up, as geigō suru implies. With this verb Tanizaki describes the relationship between cultural epistemologies with machines and mechanisms [kikai] as one of flattery and ingratiation (11) for convenience. Jidai no tsuya might apply to any aura of handed-ness as a cultural artifact. But this theory of shadows as specifically Japanese is the cultural claim by which Tanizaki separates Japanese aesthetic uniqueness from the world. Tanizaki would not have seen his theory of in’ei as co-equal to Yeats’s twilight, at least as Mishima argues that they are. However, and this is crucial to his argument, Tanizaki incrementally maintains that an inclination for shadows and vagueness depends on traits peculiar to Japanese. He locates and ascribes this mentality to traditional Japanese wooden houses that have no glass windows to pass light directly into the rooms. Thus, as a kind of cultural exclusionism, In’ei raisan makes an important statement about those invasive processes that were transforming traditional Japanese living fixtures, through the cultural miscegenation of their habitat of Western imports, by which the new erases the old. An important issue in Tanizaki’s essay is how technological change, although welcome for the benefits it might bring, can also destroy organic qualities of beauty.22 While Tanizaki sees the benefits of having light, he mourns the price of utter convenience. Electric lights, for example, destroy the elegance of shadows, which are synonymous with the qualities of the past that have a distinct aesthetic in which the Japanese negotiate the phenomenology of cultural awareness. In considering those forces that are driving the issue of heritage loss to a crisis, and the loss of the preceding domains of beauty, Tanizaki perceives a potential collision in competing world views between East and West in terms of pleasure: “True to say that this elegance [gachi], which we so esteem, involves elements of the soiled and unsanitary. I stand to be thought of, correctly perhaps, as overly defensive in stating the following. Is it not true that – compared with seiyōjin [Westerners/ Occidentals], who stomp out and eradicate the smallest bits of dirt – the tōyōjin [Easterners/Orientals] thoughtfully preserve these bits, as they are, and glorify them [bika suru]?”23 (In’ei raisan 13). Such

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pronouncements on geographical mindset as a uniformly deterministic ethos, although frequently made at that time, are too general to be taken too literally now; but they were probably taken very seriously by Tanizaki’s contemporaries. His view is extremely binary in its oppositional sense of cultural differentiation. While Akutagawa sees twilight as locatable in any indigenous culture and its process of development, Tanizaki’s sense of the dark evening specifies a Japanese milieu, both cognitively and spatially. Tanizaki thus initiates this comparison of Japanese in’ei as a negotiation point that argues for cultural distinctions, as a way to define difference from the West. Evolving regions, owing to the particularities of their formative conditions, have their own ways of developing artistic temperaments. As noted, such a belief can be easily turned into essentialist proclamations about the Japanese mind or, conversely, “The Irish Mind.” But, rather than trying to assert a uniform definition of the Japanese, Tanizaki initiates a dynamic interrogation into how cultural differences are first established and managed. He continues from the above point by asking why Hellenic architecture might look a certain way, how it served polytheistic beliefs, or how Buddhist pagodas might enable another kind of observance and discourse. With this understanding, one can better appreciate Tanizaki’s consternation about Shaw’s plans for renovating Shinto shrines. Architecture, as the domestic shaping of personal lived space, is a central theme of In’ei raisan, in situating communal communication, and heritage presences, according to a physical setting of domesticity. Ancestral buildings shape the habitat of thought and the sense of belonging that extends over a long period of time. Tanizaki is concerned with Japanese traditional building designs and materials, how their wood panels seem to impair the entrance of sunlight. The Japanese aesthetic methods, Tanizaki argues, contrast with the Victorian edifices that had been built across Japan in the preceding decades. These were marks of Western political and cultural incursion, and, at a sensory level, the antithesis of Japanese architectural schemes. The US consulate in Kobe (1881), for example, is jarringly Southern Gothic, incongruously set against the traditional city planning of the area. The Holy Resurrection Cathedral, an Eastern Orthodox institution, and British-style railway stations, as well

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as other structures, implanted in landscape and cityscape were seen as statements of encroachment. Being edifices of a potentially colonial dynamic, their forms and configurations suggested the possible agendas of the nations that designed them. Meanwhile, the coal, iron, and steel required to build them, and to fuel the machinery to maintain them, had a glaring impact on the environmental scene of both the rural and the urban, as Yanagita Kunio notes. In this way, given the intensifying Japanese mood of cultural nationalism in the 1930s, Tanizaki’s contemporaries would have taken very seriously his assertions in his contrasts between a Japanese disposition and the Western tendency for a dichotomy between light and darkness as figuring disparate, and perhaps incompatible, sensibilities. Mishima, who positions In’ei raisan in direct relation to Lafcadio Hearn and the Celtic Revival, does not provide a definitive account of Tanizaki’s aesthetic view of Japanese art. Indeed, Tanizaki himself would change his opinions on art throughout his career. Even within In’ei raisan, frequently elegiac sighs occur in parenthesis as a nostalgic wishing to immunize tradition from an orderly mode of purified reproduction. Tanizaki derides his own arguments as the foolish daydreams of a novelist [shōsetsu-ka no kūsō] (9). The conclusion ends with a note of surrender, acknowledging that Japanese has no choice but to assimilate Western technologies and culture, to progress by hurrying forward [sōte ayumi dashita] and relegating-abandoning [okizari] the “old ones” [rōjin] behind (48). Tanizaki acknowledges, in a kind of psychoanalytical pain, that the colour of shadows is, in fact, the aura of inevitable loss and dissipation ruptured into unconscious national shame. In a peculiar shift from dark rooms to racial skin tones, Tanizaki directly equates this darker complexion that is typical of Japanese ethnicity with the occultation of the past with the eclipsing of Japanese culture. In such a way, the national body appears as a shadowed figure in liminal pain. This is a common theme for Tanizaki, to viscerally locate the corpus as the ultimate site of cultural enjoyment, while paradoxically linking that enjoyment to the subliminal awareness of the pain that it is already lost. As a product of 1930s Japanese nationalistic moods, In’ei raisan fits into schemes of modanizumu [modernism] about the wish to “return to Japan.”24 As noted in the introduction, Kobayashi Hideo – trying

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to bridge the gap between Tanizaki’s nativism and Shaw’s universalism – hoped that literature might offer a location for ideas to operate more freely. In Tanizaki’s writings, we find the complex views of his Japanese contemporaries not altogether unanimous about how best to approach the matter of cultural hybridization. Tanizaki, in fact, approved of the destruction of Tokyo after the calamitous Kantō Earthquake of 1923. He conceived of an infrastructural rebirth, a shining modernist metropolis in the mould of New York or Shanghai to be built on its ruins. His growing taste is for the old things that acquire the time-worn gloss that is grimy with patina [jidai ga tsuki, kuroi yakete kuru] (11–12). This taste is directly antithetical to what Tani­ zaki sees as the Western mindset of polish and lustre. But what kind of cultural recovery might In’ei raisan offer? Tanizaki himself more or less abandons the project in later pronouncements, or at best suggests it was all a nostalgic fantasy. Japanese modernism developed theoretical formulations based on national internality as a set of cohesive relations, positioned against an invasive externality, such as the West. The dilemma has been, as critic Naoki Sakai (1997) describes, that the construction of a unified, assertive state, as a discursive unity, was based on contemporary appeals that co-opted previous, illusory articulations of state selfhood. In short, the ancestral became both evidence and supposition. However, its real prerequisite is present-day authority as the agency of actualization. This is not connecting with the ancestral, but more like putting words into the mouth of the ancestral. These source materials are extremely diverse, but propagandists are notably selective in their constructions. Ireland, likewise, included a diverse complexity of independence movements, dedicated to the nuances of an ongoing sense of Ireland as spanning time and place. Yet the issue that links Tanizaki, Yanagita, and Yeats is about the enjoyment of culture, a pleasure of uncertainty in a personal mode of collective awareness through a gestalt of sensation. Experience connects sensation to the faculties of human imagination as needing to socialize itself in a communal setting. All three authors employ metaphors of dirt, soil, and touch as fundamental principles of localized experience that resist the globalizing world view of abstraction, which sees place as abstract space for future development.25 Yanagita and Yeats believed

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that twilight emanates from the cultural investments of local space, of regional cultures in their intersections of continuity. Tanizaki shared, to some extent, this sense as well – but his emphasis is on shadows meant to define a specifically Japanese trait, not an innate one, but a sensibility resulting from the particular conditions of embodiment in the habits of Japanese cultural life. Yanagita, like Tanizaki, does take an activist approach in sounding a warning about trauma and loss at the level of landscape that results from development. With a nod to The Celtic Twilight, in Tōno monogatari, Yanagita describes “the dusk of twilight” [tasogare wa omomuro ni kitari] that first hovers and then enfolds the communities of Tōno as the long-term residents begin to migrate from their ancestral homes (TM 56). That Yanagita situates this phrase of disappearance in his discussion of O-Bon, which as I described through Hearn in the previous chapter as the time of ancestral recall and observance of the dead, situates this discourse of the vanishing within the broader cultural history of generations and transitions. Twilight here resonate with Yeats’s sense of loss, as in the preface to the nocturnal period of dissipation. And the concept of tasogare-toki, the twilight time, was an important form of multi-temporal framing of their narratives as extending beyond the present moment. A comparable sense to Tanizaki’s sense of jidai no tsuya can be found in Yanagita’s sense of locating in spatial belonging the development of aura – twilight – as multiple halos that imbue the cultural landscape. What interests Yeats, Yanagita, and Tanizaki is how one, as an embodied subject, interfaces with the world of the dark and shadowy. Interventions are found in anomalous conditions. Yanagita utilizes a repetition of the verb for dwelling, applied with equal validity to both spirit and mortal, to emphasize the role of embodied interfacing with place as an act that creates the problem of participatory belonging to the transmission of culture. Yeats’s The Tower, where he gives Satō’s sword a new home, describes the architectural relics of Irish habitations as sensory markers of the invisible processes of time. In’ei raisan praises shadows, but does so by arguing that shadows exist through the dimensional properties of the space that houses them. Thus, Tanizaki’s essay ends with a dirge that literature may be the last residence for the “world of shadows” [in’ei no sekai] that is in

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the process of hopeless dissipation, of already being lost to house the memory of it within the territory [ryōki] of art. This, as Tanizaki describes it through metaphor, would be a house of eaves, walls, and resistance. Tanizaki wishes for one last house [ikken], stripped of frivolous decoration [muyō no shitsunaisōshoku] that is but modernist excess of pushing forward [maishin suru] (48). As well as the sense of dwelling, in the letters cited above, for Mishima to make his comparisons of Yeats and Tanizaki, along a theme of twilight, he turns to the theme of dancing, with a reference to the kagura ritual dances in which performers take on the roles of divine personages and ancestral spirits to enact, through gestures and music, mythological tales. Originally conceived of as involving an element of possession, these dances have an intensely ceremonial aspect by which the art form both entertains and provides a metaphysical function. As a dance of twilight, in which kami and mortal intermingle, as well as performer and audience, Mishima locates the importance of this theme in all of the above-mentioned authors. Mishima sees The Celtic Twilight to be rich in spontaneous dancing as community function in Ireland. Yanagita’s introductory chapters detail how local festivals feature dancing of a shamanistic nature. For Mishima, the dancing in the twilight enables an interpersonal confluence between different realms of metaphysical interchange, in the form of a dynamic connection. Mishima, a translator of Yeats’s versions of Noh drama, was very fond of Irish and Japanese drama (Nathan 2000, 58).26 Mishima further located how Tanizaki and Yeats had turned to Noh as an art form based on a principle of the shadows in the dramaturgy of incarnating cultural notions. The last section of In’ei raisan, indeed, is a critical tribute to this dramatic form and its living world of shadows [in’ei no sekai] that retains an atmospheric reality of a previous lifestyle [jisseikatsu] that acts as an alternative to modernism (31). Tanizaki had reached similar explorative conclusions about Noh as the stagecraft of shadows in which the ancestral can be ensconced. In’ei raisan, the essay in praise of shadows, concludes with an elegy for twilight, a space that tries to locate architecturally and regionally a domain that preserves cultural continuity. Noh, according to Tanizaki in this work, both as stagecraft and as tradition, conserves the shadow in

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the service of maintaining a trace of the past. His preceding subjects of time, architecture, culturality, and ancestry find their more conclusive articulation through the activity of Noh: “The darkness enshrouding nō is a nascent beauty arising from its depths. This quality makes for a distinct world of shadows [in’ei no sekai]. Now, in our day, such can only be found on a stage. Not to long ago, these aesthetics were near at hand and part of daily life” (In’ei raisan 31). In’ei raisan asserts a defence of heritage and critiques the modern trends toward neglecting the past. Tanizaki, although not interested in the language of folklore directly, does share with Yanagita a concern for how traditional types of dwelling create particular atmospheric effects that, in part, shape the cultural expression of Japan as a distinctive place. Tanizaki argues that Noh remains a space of art in which the alternative to forward-thinking modernity becomes recognizable. Although with a stronger emphasis on spirituality than Tanizaki personally possessed, Mishima postulates how the ritualistic origins of Noh, with its capability to bring different ontological dimensions into contact, has the power of ancestral recall – to go forth into the shadows. Fenollosa approached the theatrical conventions of Japan by first considering how the origins of Greek tragedy from within rites were based upon religious duties. In this, he follows Nietzsche in finding that the Hellenic notion of supernatural communication influences communal drama. Japanese critics have also argued for similar comparisons. Nogami Toyoichirō examined how Mishima sees theatre as a form of choreographed dance upon the architecture of cultural reconsideration in “The Monodramatic Principle of Noh Theatre” (1981). Likewise, movement and dance, as formative structures for the dialogue, were a central principle for Yeats. In terms of the links to ritual performance and ancestral presences, Fenollosa and Pound (1916) investigate the elements of Noh drama as having also evolved out of Shinto religious festivals and practices: “The most certainly Japanese element of the drama was the sacred dance in the Shinto temples. This was a kind of pantomime, and repeated the action of a local god on his first appearance to men. The first dance, therefore, was a god dance; the god himself danced, with his face concealed in a mask. Here is a difference between the Greek and Japanese beginnings. In Greece the chorus danced, and the god was

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represented by an altar. In Japan the god danced alone” (108). The incarnate dance that Fenollosa and Pound identify has been, as quoted earlier, the compelling feature that Mishima found as the similarity between The Celtic Twilight and the Kojiki, the classical Japanese text. With these comparisons in mind, Mishima identify the range of associations between Hearn, Yeats, and Tanizaki along the themes of dancing, dwelling, drama, and heritage. Also turning to Noh as a space of living shadows, Yeats summarizes a Noh play in this manner: “The adventure itself is often the meeting with a ghost, god, or goddess at some holy place or much-legended tomb; and god, goddess, or ghost reminds me at times of our own Irish legends and beliefs, which once, it may be, differed little from those of the Shinto worshipper” (Essays and Introduction 232). Dancing, for Yeats, has many practical and ceremonial implications: as part of communal festivities, as regional expressionism, or perhaps a metaphor for cyclical time, and so forth. The hypnotic trance of dance and chant brings the discarnate into a bodily presentation.27 The notion that, in ceremonial drama such as Noh, choreography represents an embodiment of a God-form or other vanished character, suggested techniques for emboldening twilight in a demonstrative way. Yeats’s ongoing project of actualizing the voice of the departed, how it communicates with the present, could be made attainable through this new genre that he was experimenting with. Noh techniques encouraged a method for implementing a polylogue on stage between the seen and unseen. Certainly, The Celtic Twilight had previously provided Japanese authors with the same mechanism. Twilight, as constitutive space, would be both atmosphere and element for shaping this presentation of the phantasm as interconnected with landscape. As Mishima directly notes, both Tanizaki and Yeats turned to the performance of dancing in the shadows as depictions of the modernist predicament of the discourse of the vanishing twilight, through which the stage becomes chūkan [the in-between], doubly exposes the physical and the phantasmal as equally apparent and intersected. In this sense, Yeats further develops drama as being in praise of shadows. The initial procedures for such a stagecraft can be found in the lyrical poems such as The Shadowy Waters and the communal dialogues of The Celtic Twilight. This innovative genre-space of twilight,

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explored early on in Yeats’s lyrics, became more dramatically realized through the plays. It is not that Yeats wished to copy Noh as a world literature project for replication, but he found, as other playwrights did, a space of para-temporal potentiality that this tradition had preserved and modernity might recover. I pursue in the next chapter how two playwrights, Izumi Kyōka and W.B. Yeats, both turned to innovative reformulations of Noh that would fully develop a shadowed stage as the tasogare-toki [twilight space] for spectral intervention. The separation of the long ago with the current day, or the shadowy ancestral with the organic present, is overcome through the practice of a multi-linear perspective, attuned by stagecraft. The received genre of Noh had been, historically, aristocratic, and Yeats had a degree of elitist notions about his audience, also in terms of intimacy. However, equally compelling was Noh’s representative force in contemporary social models as a sudden anachronism: this quality of the relic genre could be harnessed so as to conjure the mystique of the temporal differential. Tanizaki, as Mishima tries to argue, is not dissimilar to Yeats in describing Noh as architecture of time and space that situates being in a way unlike that offered by rational modernity. The dramatic form recasts the audience’s understanding of how to situate the ancestral as the communicative and performative, to be witnessed, perceived, and testified as ancestral recursion in the form of spectral return. As the lingering traces of cultural predecessors – twilight realm – the ancestral space becomes visible to the audience, who in turn are the ones that enable the prosopopoeia and proprioception of the past as bodily activation of twilight acts, an ancestral recall of presences, actions, and sensations in the sensation and affect of the cultural present.

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e

c ha p t e r s i x

The Stagecraft of Twilight This is why I am convinced about how Izumi Kyōka’s writing impacts people [hito ni inshō o ataeru koto] in a manner that is profound and lasting. When a single brushstroke renders skillfully the heart of a scene, a vivid and fascinating picture comes to one’s mind. To give readers a view of early summer rain or a moonlit night, to exemplify the principle feature – really, the core point – of the scene in an utterly interesting way [hijōmi ni omoshiromi aji ga aru] … this is the test of a writer’s talents. – Natsume Sōseki, Shizen o utsusu bunshō [On the Writing of Nature, 1906]

Twilight, as a spectral zone of disruption and asynchronic intervention, entered into Japanese modernist literature, in part, through Akutagawa’s translations of The Celtic Twilight and studies of the Irish Revival by Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962). In particular, Yanagita’s theoretical essay “Kawatare-doki” [Twilight Time] (1930) emphasized, through metaphysical and linguistic analysis, how the discourse surrounding the vocabulary for twilight theorizes the effect of indeterminacy in the spectral conjuration of a relationship to loss. In one of the more famous usages of spiritism in English literature, the first sighting of the ghost in Hamlet elicits the question “Who’s there?” As I have examined, the figuring of twilight in various Japanese and Irish

authors takes up the mode of the trace as one both familiar but uncertain. Yanagita links the words for twilight in Japanese – tasogare and kawatare – with the phrase ta so kare, “Who is that?” Yanagita points out that, regionally, this phrase can be used as a salutation toward an unknown person who cannot be identified because the twilight time does not lend itself to a clarity of images. Yanagita’s pairing of kawatare, as an atmosphere, with toki, as a specific temporal mode, has a lineage from the Japanese classics. Poem no. 4384, from the eighth-century poetry anthology Man’yōshū, makes specific reference to kawatare-doki as a space for vanishings and disappearance: “Of that boat which sailed forth in the twilight time [kawatare-doki] before dawn, I have not heard a word.”1 Yanagita elaborates on his etymological associations between twilight and indeterminate identities in his later essay Yōkai dangi [A Discussion on Monsters] (1977 [1936]) where he continues to assess kawatare-doki as an apparitional milieu in which the boundaries between human and monster, certainty and hallucination, become blurred and unpredictable (291–4). Yōkai, the monstrous, utilize twilight as a metaphysically habitative zone for communication and intervention. With the capacity to move freely, to comingle directly with human experience, Yanagita’s understanding of their spectral power coincides with Derrida’s (2006 [1993]) description of the fantastic as “a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible, or an invisibility of a visible X ” (6). As a radically experimental historiography, twilight-time blends “non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present” (xix). The possibility of twilight allows, rather than forecloses, the power of the questions “Who,” “Where?” and “Where tomorrow?” (xix). Perhaps one of the foremost crafters of twilight into a dynamic aesthetic and literary sensibility in Japanese modernism is Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939). Although not directly related to the Airurando bungakukai, nor having any contact with Yeats, this author’s similarities to his Irish contemporary are many and striking: both had a strong interest in the occult and both developed highly distinctive literary styles that fused elements of Romanticism with a modernist sense of apprehension and dread. Moreover, both writers would both turn to drama, particularly highly renovated departures from Noh, to cham-

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pion an alternative form of dramatics based on principles of ghosts, twilight, liminality, and ancestral recall. As Sōseki documents in the essay cited in this chapter’s epigraph, Kyōka develops a characteristic atmospheric twilightness of such vivid reflection that made his works very singular, even among his paranormal-minded contemporaries. Likewise, in a commentary on Kyōka’s works, entitled Kyōka zenshū: mokuroku kaikō [An Introduction to Kyōka’s Oeuvre] (1925), Akutagawa identifies what he calls the world of Kyōka [Kyōka-sekai] noted for its stylistic combination of colour and atmosphere. Likewise, Sōseki describes Kyōka’s highly memorable but idiosyncratic literary style, his capacity to paint chronotopic scenes of Japanese places where past and personages traverse the boundaries of the temporal and physical. Kyōka was probably Japan’s most ardent endorser of an atmospheric effect of tasogare, or twilight. Kyōka, like Yeats, describes twilight as a substantive reality, a zone for those portals from which the culturally ancestral could emerge still intact. One of his central theoretical declarations on this theme, as related in his brief but important essay “Tasogare no aji” [The Taste of Twilight] (1908), Kyōka describes the ways for making twilight into a tangible sensation. As Kyōka wrote, “It is my belief that there is certainly a singularly subtle world of the in-between outside of sensations that approach the two extremes of dusk and day-break” (quoted by Figal 1–2). Kyōka’s essay emphasizes that twilight exists as an experiential phenomenon: its vividly unsettling power has a flavour, a texture, and a purpose. As a necessary mode of critique, investigation, and interrogation, twilight blurs the categorical imperatives of black and white, past and present, invisible and visible, by creating tension through its distinctive atmosphere of in-between-ness. As is frequently noted, the Japanese word aji suggests taste, both as the sense of flavour and as a feeling or attitude. Kyōka asserts that twilight, as contiguous presence in the flow of history, demands our attention in a sensory capacity for there to be a transformative apprehension of the subject matter contained within the twilight. We must, consciously, develop our epistemological capacity to feel out the shadows, to detect the phantasmal connections in physical settings. This had been, of course, one of Yeats’s major strategies in writing The Celtic Twilight.

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Tasogare no aji contains many statements that Yeats may well have sympathized with, had he access to it in English. Yeats, unfortunately, did not. But Japanese critics, certainly, perceived profound similarities between Yeats’s and Kyōka’s plays, especially in terms of how their stagecraft interpolated themes of folklore and supersensory communication.2 Sangū Makoto, the great admirer of Yeats, refers to the Irish playwright’s dramas as a parallel in his review of Kyōka’s play Kōgyoku [The Ruby] (1913). Yanagita and Akutagawa brought twilight into Japanese literary modernism, as a thematic concept, and both of these authors were extremely familiar with The Celtic Twilight. Moreover, Sangū – another translator of Yeats, introducer of his works to Akutagawa, and a major figure in the influence of the Tokyo Airurando bungakukai – strongly perceives the similarities between Kyōka and Yeats. Kyōka, he judges in reference to a different play than Demon Pond [Yashagaike] (1913), would be more successful if he had “drawn upon myths and legends worth writing about, as Yeats does” (Poulton 2001, 163).3 Kyōka would pursue even further a literary formulation for the possibilities of twilight as a contrarian mode to critique modernist formulations. In order to answer the question “How does one taste twilight?” Kyōka turns his attention from folkloric stories to ghostly dramas. In a manner remarkably similar to Yeats, he develops a stagecraft of twilight in which the vanishing voices of the folkloric and the ancestral drift through a discourse of twilight, alongside the emergent field of a modernist stage. Yeats and Kyōka, with their perceptual distortions of form and figuration, utilize the ghostly in a way that Derrida (2006) identifies as the “visor effect”: “To feel ourselves seen by a look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the visor effect on the basis of which we inherit the law” (7). Derrida refers to a specific political formulation in which the human subject comes to acknowledge the overarching stare of a higher legislative authority. Kyōka and Yeats do not quite have the same legalistic sense, but what is apparent for them is that ancestral ghosts haunt the scene, gazing upon the contemporary with their temporally distant eyes, as revenants who come with the judgment of memory and history. Twilight in Yeats and Kyōka is the domain in which the vanishing voices take form and locate themselves as liminal agents of intervention.

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But how to give sound to the voice, and a face to the eyes, and the locative knowledge behind those eyes – it is not just who but from where are the ghosts who form the discourse of the vanishing? And through what means can they be addressed, if not truly known? The answer for both Yeats and Kyōka, as is this chapter’s focus, is their reinvention of Noh as a stagecraft of ancestral recall. This chapter examines the strongly parallel developments between Izumi Kyōka and W.B. Yeats as both authors became exponents of a contemporary dramatic form that adapted and revolutionized the static forms of received Noh into a reinvented stagecraft of twilight. To be sure, Yeats’s relationship to classical Noh has been a rather consistently examined topic, but it constitutes the limit to which most have addressed his relationship to Japan. However, my purpose here is not to once more relate, in the established scholarly conversation, Yeats’s interest in classical Japanese drama. Rather, I wish to resituate Yeats’s innovations of the Noh alongside his Japanese contemporaries who were engaged in very similar stylistic efforts, for very similar goals. An interesting cross-continental shift in these respective playwrights establishes the later forms of twilight as a consciousness form of a ruinous past addressing a present in transition. Certainly, Yeats and Kyōka owe some of their concept of twilight stagecraft to traditional Noh. In particular, mugen Noh, the style of Noh associated with dreams and visions, provides a rich, realized sensibility of twilight ambience as a predecessor. Classical Japanese drama includes, of course, a vast variety of themes and depictions of alternative realities that hearken to shadows and ambiguity, which the critic Konparu Kunio (1980) roughly divides between genres of the phenomenal and the phantasmal. Mugen nō is a form of phantasmal Noh that operates according to alternative agencies: spirits, god-forms, ancestors, and such can operate within and without of normative space and time, and thus be accessible for both recall and revelation. The breadth of Noh categories concerns, of course, more matters than the topic of ghosts. However, the sub-genres that incorporate a framework of twilight clearly appealed to playwrights of a particular temperament. These distinctions for twilight preferences had always been a consideration for scholars. Japanese critics in the modern period, such as Haga Yaichi and Sasaki Nobutsuna, editors

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of the three-volume collection of Noh, Kōchū yōkykoku sōsho (1913– 15), also emphasize the spectral quality of Noh in their commentaries and annotations. Yeats had a strong interest in Japanese literary culture. As my monograph has so far documented, this interest was not an isolated dabbling but a natural consequence of a vigorous, circuitous exchange of aesthetics between Ireland and Japan in the early twentieth century. Yeats, was a frequent museumgoer, and he made use of the preliminary materials being assembled in the British Library’s print room. When that was no longer available, due to a closure, Yeats took it upon himself to make a collection of photographs, posters, and postcards as his research. These materials are now contained in the National Library of Ireland, mistakenly compiled under the label as Noh Theatre, but in fact containing mostly examples of classical kabuki, and other contemporary dramatic arts of Japan, such as modern kabuki, the sentimental melodramas of shinpa [new school], and the heavily Western influences of the realistic shingeki [new drama]. Japanese theatre was undergoing a massive revolution in its forms and sense of production. And so Yeats’s curiously hybrid amassing of images tends to conflate what were, eventually, quite distinctive dramatic art forms, from both past and present. Ultimately, Yeats’s understanding of dramatics – as was Kyōka’s, for that matter, was remarkably out of step with the vision of many playwrights in Japan. True, Kyōka wrote mainly for the shinpa stage, but the major producers of his time had no interest in his more Nohlike plays, which were so unappealing to an audience keen on emotional extravaganzas. This is to affirm, then, that Yeats was greatly hampered in his ability to develop a more comprehensive understanding of these Japanese materials, and dramatists in Japan themselves were revising, renovating, and re-evaluating the aesthetics of the stage. Importantly, I am not claiming that modern Japanese letters played an important role in the creation of the Irish Revivalists’ turn to Japanese themes and formats for plays. Unfortunately, Yeats could know nothing about the productions of Kyōka’s works, or the avant-garde movement of Japanese theatre. However, that is not to say there are not perceptible congruencies in Kyōka and Yeats, especially in their drama, a similarity that some Japanese critics have noticed. Given the framework of transnational interplay that

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I have described previously, these emergent congruencies, while not perhaps directly relatable, nonetheless exhibit profound similarities that suggest a broader conversation in action. What I am exploring, in light of the highly developed reciprocal dynamic of interfluences between Ireland with Japan, is the simultaneous artistic development in the emergence of neo-Noh arose. That the two major proponents of this turn, both Yeats and Kyōka, were theorists of twilight is a powerfully concurrent similarity. Satō’s sword, as well as conversations and invitations from Japanese academics, demonstrated to Yeats the global appeal of the Celtic Revival. The young man who anticipated a fusion of horizons at the end of The Speckled Bird now found himself to be one of the foremost facilitators of international literary relations. These pathways of exchange functioned in mutual, reciprocal ways, evidencing a degree of interfacing not normally accounted for in Orientalist critiques of transnational modernism between East and West. The Airurando bungakukai, or Irish Literature Society in Japan, coincided with intensified mutual interest across the Pacific. This would also result in the preliminary work of Ernest Fenollosa, and the Noh discussions between Yeats and Ezra Pound at Stone Cottage. This interactivity as commenced here resonated throughout the twentieth century: as Yasutaka Maruki (2010) has demonstrated, Japanese playwrights interpreted many plays by T.S. Eliot into Noh arrangements, just as previously had been done to Yeats’s drama. Yeats, through his public profile, was well aware of the extent that Celtic had entered into the Japanese modernistic vocabulary. Retroactively then, the Revivalists would re-evaluate their formulations, in light of how they were being interpreted abroad. A vivid example of this process is the cross-development between W.B. Yeats and Izumi Kyōka in designing a contemporary Noh genre. Rather than being attempts at replicating pre-modern sensibilities, their interpretations of the format were intended as innovative stagecraft of twilight. Yeats and Kyōka both employ a dramatics of shadows to critique and interrogate the art of ancestral recall and folklore. Thus, the Revival-Japanese interrelationship enabled forms of cultural interaction not as readily achieved in Eliot’s studies of Indic philosophy, nor Pound’s interpretations of Confucianism.

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Izumi Kyōka and Mishima (1925–70) developed dramaturgies that were derivative of Noh formats, and need not be understood as replications of the classical genre. Likewise, there is no need to describe Yeats’s plays as Noh drama at all. Irish Noh, Celtic Noh, such terms will invariably disappoint, mislead, and indeed misconstrue the innovations, and agendas, that Yeats and his contemporaries pursued. In fact, the argument that Yeats had intended any of his plays to be a genuine fusion of Celtic Noh has become something of a red herring that diverts too much of our attention.4 Yeats employs the term “Noh” in reference to his works only on a limited number of occasions, rather breezily, in his personal writing. Yet the phrase “Celtic Noh” or “Irish Noh” has become utterly prevalent in English language criticism in assessing Yeats’s failure to match early modern standards of Japanese drama. The fraught usage of Noh has led to all kinds of attempts to read in Yeats a justification for purity or authenticity. Unquestionably, Yeats found inspiration, and development, from classical drama in a way entirely similar to Japanese playwrights. But Yeats’s neo-Noh had no more intention of obeying regulatory prescriptions than did Mishima’s kindai nō [modern Noh] or Kyōka’s Noh-influenced works. Indeed, rather than classical Noh, those in Japan who were most appreciative of Yeats’s drama were also champions of new styles of drama being developed concurrently in Japan.5 In terms of probing the possibilities of contemporary art, the literary traffic was going both ways, in particular, between Ireland and Japan. The Gothic-influenced Hinatsu Kōnosuke (1890–1971) developed a kind of Japanese Romanticism from Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe. The previously mentioned poet Saijō Yaso (1892–1970) found in the Irish folk song a format for developing modern min’yō [folk song] lyrics. Much of Kyōka’s theorizations of twilight, discussed below, reveal noteworthy similarities to Yeats. That The Celtic Twilight coincided with the nuances of other modernist works like Tanizaki Jun’ichiriō’s In’ei raisan, or Yanagita Kunio’s sense of twilight-time in Tōno monogatari, should thus be no more curious or questionable than that shadows and liminality also stimulated the creative vision of contemporary Revivalist authors. With these examples in mind, Yeats acted prominently and critically to foster intercultural trans-

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missions that brought attention to all kinds of observable patterns of modernist development in Japanese literature, and vice versa. Yeats had been adamant that his dramatics were more of a departure than a reinvention. He states in Essays and Introductions, “with the help of Japanese plays … I have invented a new form of drama ” (221). In my view, a much preferable approach to “Celtic Noh,” if by that we mean that Irish texts can somehow perfectly imitate Japanese drama, would be a description that locates Yeats’s drama in its proper innovative context: those conceptual theatrics that combined anachronism with contemporary twilight into new formats of performance that addressed modernist concerns. Many of the features of these dramas, however, developed in first in Yeats’s earliest poetry and his promotion of bodily performance as found in The Celtic Twilight (1893). Noh, particularly yūgen nō, provided a dramaturgical framework for the enactment of the twilight in an interactive setting in which the taste of twilight, and the difficult cipher of the multi-textual who of twilight, become apparitionally tangible through the power of drama. Yeats and the Noh: A Theme Sought in Vain? There is already a fair amount of research on Yeats and Japan; however, the vast majority of it in English, with only a small amount in Japanese. The approaches evidenced in these works reflect just as much the disciplinary and institutional prejudices of monolingual academic scholarship as they do the merits or faults of Yeats’s encounters with classical Japanese theatre. It is undeniable that Yeats’s interactions with Noh were a crucial feature of the stylistic innovations of his dramatics, from his reading of Marie Stopes’s Plays of Old Japan (1913) at Stone Cottage, to his productive collaboration with Itō Michio, the Japanese dancer whom he credits for making his plays possible (EI 224). While reviewing some of the preceding discussion of Yeats and the Noh, I have sought to move away from the existing scholarship on Yeats and Japan that confines itself to either basic studies of his debt to Noh drama or scattered indictments of his supposed Orientalism, such as argued by Joseph Lennon (2004) and John de Gruchy (2003).

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The preceding chapters have situated the Irish-Japanese intertexual dynamic as a facet of transnational modernity, through a historically interrogative assessment of Irish and Japanese folklore as symptoms of modernist unease. I would like to move away from the customs of comparing and contrasting Yeats to classical nōgaku, as has been the critical habit when this subject is raised. Yeats’s plays need to be understood in comparative relation to contemporary neoNoh drama being written in Japan, as opposed to the usual point of comparison, traditional Noh. Yeats’s dance plays are the product of a cross-cultural exchange that prompted him to develop a theatre of the phantasm. There develops, as very much a decidedly modernist project, versions of a theatre in which the ghost, embodied and given voice through the mask, serves to mark a sense of ancestral disconnection by what the mask represents but also refuses to disclose. To my knowledge, the scholarship on Yeats’s relationship to Japanese drama only evaluates Yeats as hoping to configure a “Celtic” Noh, one replicated entirely from a static Japanese template and a patrilineal iemoto [household system] tradition. Classical Noh has, of course, both of these qualities, established modes of performance and institutional operators who preserve them; but many contemporary Noh actors in twentieth-century Japan, too, did not feel constrained by older rules. Yeats need not have had a definitive intention to mimic Noh formulae entirely, or even correctly, or that he even thought such a reproductive transaction was possible. Whether or not Yeats wrote authentic Noh very much begs the question whether he intended to write Noh as faithful facsimiles in the first place. Influence does not readily mean confluence. Noh conventions were suggestive, and, as many Japanese critics have observed, Yeats did indeed have a strong admiration for classical Japanese literature. But his own attention to the locals and particulars of Ireland, as well as the matrix of his Revivalist imagination, led to his own style. In appreciating that Noh did suggest influential aesthetics to twilight modernists, I am arguing that the useful comparison is not the actor and dramatist Zeami Motokiyō (1363–1443), but someone like Izumi Kyōka, whose twilight interphasings in drama suggest a Japanese avant-garde whose concerns for cultural landscapes matched with Yeats. Kyōka’s neo-Noh are similar to Yeats’s drama

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for a number of reasons. Both had in mind the rapid transformation of the local, regional landscape as reconstituting the collective memory and its relationship to the cultural continuum. They both demonstrated that a contemporary playwright, working through anachronism, lore, and local myth, does not have to slavishly follow the formalism of previous, generic conventions. It is clear that Kyōka and Yeats, with their phantasmal inclinations as well as modern stylizations, found that elements of Noh could be reinterpreted into the performance of ancestral recall as twilight dramaturgy. Undoubtedly, Yeats’s concept of the theatre underwent considerable evolution during the period of 1913–17. Major influences on him during this time did include the traditional dramatics of Japan, as understood and presented by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound (1916) and others. The interest in non-Western theatre traditions pervaded much of the avant-garde drama, throughout the early modern period, in such authors as Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). Like these contemporaries, Yeats had limited access to cultural information and observation of Asian performances. Their archaeology of dramatic performance could not attain any scholarly completeness.6 Kyōka, too, was also aware that something more than mere imitation of the classical Noh canon was required. Responsive innovation was more important than duplicating, exactly and mechanically, the older conventions. The developments of twentiethcentury twilight drama did what Pound required: it made it new. And, while invoking the traces and methods of the past, this classical sensibility becomes remediated and re-narrativized through the contemporary avant-garde. The perceptible voicing of movements of cross-metaphysical relationships could be staged in such a way as to make necromancy a testimonial encounter. Anachronism acted as a strategy for staging the blend of ancient and contemporary: the drama of a classical present, ancestral and modern in negotiation. The Celtic Revivalists found a phantasmal potentiality suggested by the classical canon of both Irish and Japanese literature. Yeats found a precedent existed in immram, the wonder voyage or fantastic journey genre examined in chapter 2. Noh offered a performative milieu for the ghostly to be made accessible as an experiential possibility. The medium of drama could be an apostrophizing project, one

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that names and restores speech to the dispossessed. As activating this power, the ghost plays [mugen nō], a specific sub-genre from the broader category of Noh, was most appealing, not just to Yeats, but also to Kyōka, as offering a dramatic ambience that did not have to be stylistically imitated in a faithful way, but as a strategy of purpose in which the spectral functions as a twilight-positioned agent of interruption and return, the visible and the ancestral. At least insofar as suggestive influences are evidences, phantasmal Noh suggested to Yeats and Kyōka how the architecture of theatrical choreography opens up portals for the discarnate to appear. It seems more than merely coincidental that both Yeats and Kyōka, the premier developer of twilight drama in twentieth-century Japan, had initially started with the folk tale as the platform for the shadows. The voice of the ghost, as pre-sentiment connected to the lore of locality, was always for them a rebellious articulation against models of rational authority. Yeats often describes apparitions as a rhetorical strategy, for example, in his poem “The Apparitions” (CP o 352): Because there is safety in derision I talk about an apparition, I took no trouble to convince, Or seem plausible to a man of sense. (“The Apparitions,” ll. 1–4) The phantasmal, in its ancestral seriousness, stands against the mockery and rejection of utilitarianism. But folktales operate on their own genre principles. Twilight drama recontextualizes the lore by acknowledging the original location, presented through the emplacement strategy of the representative stage. The chronotropic attributes of the fantastic stage not only talk about an apparition, but also allow the apparition to talk, from its vantage point in the past. The multi-metaphysical stage removes some demarcated periphery that separates rational cognition. The zones of the natural and supernatural are represented as contiguous and continuous, exactly the same metaphysic that The Celtic Twilight pursues. But, in general, the current scholarly discussion on Yeats and Noh, as emblematic of Orientalism, has focused on his drama as mimicry

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of classical genres as opposed to modernist reinvention, a reinvention that coincided with similar theatrical renovations by Japanese playwrights crafting works at the exact same time as W.B. Yeats. In pursuing this single direction, critics immediately must confront a prejudicial question instituted by their own focus of enquiry. If Yeats engages in rote mimicry, then his relationship to Noh is an inauthentic one, and then the discussions must primary deal with his mishandling of the materials he is presumed to be attempting to revive. Certainly, as it pertains to Orientalism, this issue needs to be addressed, as it connects to overall theoretical issues about East-West dialogue in the modern period. A typical hermeneutical gesture of a compare-and-contrast critique sets Yeats’s works directly against classical Noh as a false circularity of Japaneseness. To accomplish this comparison of authenticity and forgery, a critic might first offer a cursory overview of what constitutes classical Noh, with Zeami as the model. This is then followed by a strictly genre-focused consideration of Yeats’s plays as implementing, or not implementing, this standard. The verdict follows quickly. Yeats, invariably, falls short against true tradition, and becomes another casualty of japonisme. As an example of this method, which has been used repeatedly, Sylvia C. Ellis (1999) shows how “an analysis of the characteristics of this genre [Noh] will act as reference and yardstick with which to measure the poet’s [Yeats’s] own writings” (113). Ellis’s own yardsticks, however, are Englishlanguage translations and English-language commentaries. Like many commentators in the West evaluating Yeats, Ellis makes no use of Japanese-language materials.7 Thus, while appreciating Yeats’s plays and offering much in the way of insight, she must evaluate them as being less pure than the Japanese models. Of these critical voices, Ishibashi Hirō (1966) does have a command of the Japanese language and brings these linguistic source materials forward in questioning Yeats’s aesthetic. Ishibashi demonstrates that the dialogue structure of Yeats’s plays is a poorer simplification, as a kind of false replication, of legitimate, institutional Noh speech arts. To criticize Yeats’s dance plays as weak mimicry of Noh, Ishibashi relies on a concept of “Japanese beauty,” a term he uses frequently, that exists in the original but cannot be reproduced

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beyond the Japanese language. Thus, Ishibashi’s lexical study develops a comprehensive analysis of the stylistic mandate that defines the original Japanese libretti of Noh. The Irish “Noh,” in the English language, betrays the standard set by the source material through its clumsy attempts at translated duplication. Importantly, as Ishibashi reminds us, we must keep in mind that the ways in which Yeats (and others such as Kyōka) understood Zeami do not accurately reflect how Zeami understood his own art form, and its particular functions within the social conventions and audiences specific to his era. Moreover, to be sure, if we compare the style of language between Classical Japanese and twentieth-century Hiberno-English, gaps and slippages will appear. But we need not be overly fastidious in demanding faithfulness to the classics: Yeats does not position himself as an authority on Zeami. And while acknowledging the slipperiness of transmission, Yeats’s plays can be treated according to models of performance that were being produced, contemporaneously, according to lines of development commensurate with his own. In terms of reformulation, Yeats’s plays demonstrate innovation, rather than passive redactions of a received form. If we do not acknowledge this sense of invention, then we again lose sight of the intercultural context in which Yeats worked, one based on contemporary influences and current cultural predicaments as developmental rather than static. An intertextual outlook allows us to avoid also the other extreme in how Yeats’s relationship to Japan has been perceived, in which Noh is viewed as having little impact on Yeats in the long term. Critics such as J.L. Styan (1981), side-stepping issues of appropriation, argue that the Noh influence on Yeats was entirely minimal. Plays such as At the Hawk’s Well (1916) should be thought of as another example of European symbolist drama. But this also overlooks the continuum of literary exchange between Ireland and Japan in the early twentieth century. Genre and convention are important tools of analysis, but to my mind, it is thematic concepts and cultural predicaments from which the plays arise that seem to be the strongest links between Yeats and Japanese literature. There are important points to be made about classical Noh, of course, as influential in the stylistics of both Kyōka and Yeats. We might even thank Yeats for helping to instigate the ongoing inter-

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est in the West. But, not surprisingly, rather maverick aesthetics that both Yeats and Kyōka championed would have had little success in being in any way accepted by the Noh establishment of theatre at that time, built as it was on lineages and closed membership. After all, the question of what constitutes the pure or authentic, in the insular world of the Noh households, has been a subject of intense debate. Eric C. Rath in The Ethos of Noh (2004) documents the conflict over genealogy that has been a crucial motivation in the social-historical development of form. Which school, or which headmaster, has the true spirit of Zeami? Even among Noh specialists, debate is emerging about how lineages are constructed and reaffirmed to defend claims of cultural capital and artistic inheritance. There is no clean yardstick to ascertain which hiden [secret tradition] most fully maintains the knowledge of the original source. Perhaps the most thoroughly charted set of comparisons can be found in Sekine Masaru and Christopher Murray’s Yeats and the Noh: A Comparative Study (1990). They show, with sensitive attention to stagecraft and theatrical conventions, Yeats’s various debts to Japanese drama, which they find to be almost point for point in some of his works. First, Noh as a historical tradition is introduced, its constitutive terminology explained (waki [supporting actors], shite [main actor], etc). Then, Yeats’s plays are arranged categorically against a particular Noh as his formative model. This is informative, certainly, and Masaru and Murray’s research shows much care in considering the conventions of classical Noh as reimagined by Yeats. Many similarities do exist, and influences and emulations can be traced. But in their study little or no reference, unfortunately, is made to contemporary Japanese drama of Yeats’s time. On this point, I wish to expand the discussion. I am not arguing that Yeats extends knowledge of contemporary Japanese playwrights like Kyōka, or of the massive changes taking place in the Japanese theatrical world. His resources and contacts were limited. What is of interest here is the similarity in developmental contexts of modernist playwrights in Japan and Yeats in the production of derivative Noh that evidences modernist approaches – ones that critics in Japan noticed comparatively as operating in both Kyōka and Yeats. I would like to retextualize the discussion away from classical Noh, and to situate Yeats in

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comparative relationship to a contemporary who, like him, sought to fashion a stagecraft of twilight. More generally on the question of access and appropriation, we do need to keep in mind, in positing the stature of tradition, how cheap knockoffs trivialize complex art, ones that have enormous cultural meaning. As Harry Partch (2000) says of his own Noh-derived compositions, “It would be senseless of me to follow a path of superficial duplication” (251). What is duplication, and what is received tradi­ tion, has been under increased scrutiny in twenty-first-century Japan and Ireland. Technological facsimiles have intensified the tension between claims to a legitimately authentic paradigm from the past, and facsimile anarchy in which copies enable copies, and forgeries lead to more forgeries. Just where can the standard of the authentic be found? What is custom, as something inherited that denotes a continued tradition, and what is costume-playing, which is just impersonation based on superficial accoutrements? The simulacrum of cultural appearances challenge the means in which copy overwrites originality, however one might construe where one ends and the other begins. Consider how miko [shrine maidens] and maiko [apprentice geisha] have become weekend simulations for some. One needs only a bit of instruction and the money to hire a kit and acquire the veneer of pageantry. But does this prove that all of tradition is easily photocopied, and therefore constitutionally superficial to begin with? In a recent article on the rigorous training of miko, a priest at Kanda Myōjin stated, “Kosupurei dewa zettai mane no dekinai miko no utsukushii kokoro o shite moraitai” [Cos­ players cannot do it. They cannot imitate the beautiful refinement of the miko spirit] (Yomiuri shinbun, 24 June 2007, 25). In terms of ritual practice and proficiency in form, Noh, similar to the duties of miko, demands incredible dedication and attention – which requires arduous training, mentorship over an extended period, and absolute mastership of prescribed forms. Its actors attune themselves to an intense shugyō [strict training] that requires utmost perseverance to master the intricacies of the form. Forgeries of this art form, to a culturally knowledgeable audience, seem quite easy to spot. But, in comparison to custom and ceremony in these art forms, I do not regard Yeats’s drama as “Noh” cosplay; and I believe he was fully aware that

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his drama could never replicate nor repeat, in some Hibernian way, the classical dramas of Japan. Yeats is different from the other preliminary Noh enthusiasts of his time (such as Arthur Waley, B.H. Chamberlain, or Noel Péri) in that he is a playwright, rather than an academic scholar. Yeats’s work, then, needs to be repositioned as neo-Noh: the intercultural theatre scene that represented expanding literary knowledge of East and West from the perspective of artistry rather than academics. If a clean break is then made from the classical art of Noh, as well as the purpose of being faithful to it, the modernist agenda of make it new becomes apparent. In this, Yeats was a pioneer, who augmented Waley and Péri’s efforts to present Noh textually. Richard Emmert, a Western Noh performer and researcher, has found sufficient power in Yeats to produce At the Hawk’s Well in Japan, following a classical format. Further pursuing Yeats as a model example for stylistic progress, Emmert instrumentally prepared a recent performance in a “Canadian Noh,” written by Daphne Marlatt, in collaboration with Emmert and Matsui Akira. Under their collaborative efforts, The Gull was staged for several performances in Richmond, British Columbia, in 2006. The Gull, as Marlatt saw it, was about both adherence to and departure from classical Noh. As a contemporary play, an interactive product of Japanese and Canadian artists, the performance benefits through the development of cross-cultural modulations. Marlatt, interviewed in the March 2006 issue of the Japanese-Canadian magazine The Bulletin, found that cooperation leads to invention: “i’ve [sic] written this in a more naturalistic and less stylized way – after all, these are Japanese Canadian fisherman in the 50s, not classical warrior poets” (26). Matsui Akira, in the play’s performance program, sees such neo-Noh as important achievements of interculturality: “I hope the art of Noh will serve to foster a greater friendship between the two cities and that it will further teach the people in Japan about the hardship suffered by the Japanese who immigrated to Steveston.” Thus, Emmert also states, “It is my wish that Noh too will prosper outside of Japan. I feel that the possibility has increased with this performance of The Gull.”8 The viability of the Steveston Noh Project, and its noted success, came from the inclusion of Japanese, American, and Canadian performers. The Steveston Noh Project

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builds upon, not overwrites, such traditions. The Gull is a product of that cross-fertilization of dramatic evolution that has enabled new takes on traditional style, responding to diverse historical issues. In this case, The Gull addresses the initial generations of Japanese who worked in the British Columbia fish industry, their homesickness, and their new legacy in their adopted home. In terms of possibilities for adaptation, the two major source books for Japanese dramaturgy during Yeats’s time were the annotated translations of Noh drama by Ernest Fenollosa (as edited by Ezra Pound, 1916), and the edition by Arthur Waley (1998 [1918]).9 However, we should remember that Yeats had both interest and knowledge of Japanese aesthetics prior to Stone Cottage. Sylvia C. Ellis’s (1999) research provides a helpful number of interesting examples published in the Times that concern Japanese aesthetics and the popularity of the subject. Certainly, side effects of consumerist japonisme could be seen in museum exhibitions and other forms of increased scholarly attention to Asian art and religion. Preliminary studies were becoming increasingly available to the non-specialist; one example of this is Henri Doré’s important study La lecture des talismans chinois (1913). We should also keep in mind that, while Waley and Pound tend to get the most attention, rendering Noh into Western languages had been seen as a crucial challenge for a growing group of Japanese translators. There were, in fact, at least a dozen such attempts within the span of Yeats’s lifetime. Noel Péri’s work was very prominent, including two studies on the subject: Cinq No (1929) and Le No (1944).10 Other versions include B.H. Chamberlain in The Classical Poetry of Japan (1880), Beatrice Suzuki, Nōgaku: Japanese No Plays (1932), Wolfgang von Gersdorff, Japanische Dramen für die deutsche Bühne (1926), and Noguchi Yone, Ten Kiogen in English (1907).11 In this variety of renderings, we can see that the developing area of Japanese studies at the time required a tricky balance: between meeting the strict, but insular, standards of a handful of specialists, or creating texts that would enjoy wider popularity and enthusiasm. Waley found Fenollosa’s source materials to be incomplete. Increased discussions have confirmed this: the plays in the ItalianAmerican’s work do not qualify as authoritative translations, according to scholarly opinion. Pound himself was not entirely satisfied with

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the methodology of Fenollosa’s field notes: “Many facts might be extremely interesting if one had enough knowledge of Noh. Many names might be rich in association, which are, at the present state of our knowledge, a rather dry catalogue” (Fenollosa and Pound 1916, 251). Ernest Fenollosa was well placed to act in a pioneering role. Living in Japan, he had more access to performers and stages than Waley, and he cultivated friendships with actors that Chamberlain could not. Fenollosa also represents that effort to take Japanese poetry beyond the clutch of aficionados, for whom translation was a cliquish affair, and introduce the dramatic form to a general readership who might find the conventions arcane and impenetrable.12 Because of this ambassadorial role, Fenollosa had a large degree of influence on Japanese playwrights as well. For example, Tsubouchi Shōyō (1859–1935), his student, wrote several dance plays partly under Fenollosa’s encouragement, including O-Shichi kichiza [The Romance of O-Shichi and Kichiza], as well as translating Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. Tsubouchi took from Fenollosa not an obsession with the past, but a commitment to contemporary genres that intersect with the cultural past. He was thus associated with shingeki, or new dramatic movements. Tsubouchi was also one of the pre-eminent translators of Shakespeare, producing innovative versions for Japanese audiences. He may have provided Kurosawa Akira (1910–1998) inspiration, as seen in such films as Ran and Throne of Blood [Kumonosu-jō]. So, like Yeats, Fenollosa did not have a slavish fascination for an imagined past. When looking at whom they associated with and the influences they produced, we find through Fenollosa all sorts of links to a network of innovators rather than fantasists. Fenollosa and Waley were committed to presenting classical Noh in an accessible format, for the purposes of introducing a theatregoing public to its style and beauty. But the appeal was chiefly to the poetry, as any attempt to render a fully theatrical experience (including music, for example) would have been too challenging. Nonetheless, by 1925, Waley had established his purpose with selections from major Japanese poetic classics, including Man’yōshū, Kokinshū, as well as an edition of Genji monogatari. Arthur Waley’s The Nō Plays of Japan (1921) shows his prowess with pre-modern drama. This work is generally regarded as the finest translation of this subject until the

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end of the Second World War. Waley, by no means a spiritist, shows an interest toward some exegesis of the supernatural qualities in these plays, as being contrary to the Victorian stage. Drawing attention to these features, he states in his introduction to The Nō Plays that the “theatre of the West is the last stronghold of realism” (17). While not necessarily committed to mugen Noh, he indicates the likelihood of a new Occidental movement that “would like to see theatre that aimed boldly at stylization and simplification, discarding entirely the pretentious lumber of the 19th century stageland” (17). And Waley asserts that this new movement can look to Japan for a venerable example for a variety of possible non-realist dramatic forms. Waley, in discussing the possible influence Noh might provide a range of modernist playwrights, encourages intertextual study. The more developed the artistic interchange between East and West, he suggests, the more catalysts could be produced to spark revivals and reconsiderations of what constitutes an aesthetic heritage. Ongoing reinterpretations of Noh have often been performed throughout the twentieth century, incorporating many kinds of unforeseen developments in technology and translation. However, the most successful of these have usually included a collaborator who holds expertise and training in the classical form, such as Emmert. Yeats, unfortunately, did not have access to the kinds of human resources, in terms of expertise and experiences, that Marlatt had. One of his major informants, Itō Michio (1892–1961), indeed is often suggested to have been a very poor conduit for knowledge of the Japanese theatre, even being termed a “charlatan” by one critic (Lennon 2004, 423).13 It is crucial to keep in mind some basic facts about this aesthetically revolutionary, but culturally controversial, artist. Itō’s  brothers, Senda Koreya and Itō Kisaku, played a major role in modern shingeki theatre in Japan through much of the twentieth century. But Itō himself spent his formative years abroad and was, until his expulsion to Japan shortly before the Pacific War, very much an outsider to Japanese theatre. As a proponent of the avantgarde, Itō was more effective as a transnational collaborator than if he had been immersed in Tanizaki’s insular world of Noh’s shadows. In his time, there was little crossover between the classical and modern

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theatres in Japan and much dispute over the direction modern theatre in Japan was supposed to take. Other than by virtue of nationality, it is quite tenuous to speak of Itō as a Japanese dancer. Itō was forthcoming about his lack of knowledge of Noh, confiding in Ezra Pound that he found Noh rather boring (Longenbach 1988, 198). In his memoirs, Itō describes his own background and that, if he did know a great deal about Noh, then he may well have been unable to develop the improvisational style of modernist dance he preferred. Itō was well aware that nōgaku schools at the time were intensely formalized, rigid in maintaining custom and presentation, and adverse to change and internationalization. Given his younger age and apprentice status, and his commitment to development, Itō did not believe that the theatrical milieu in Japan would been openly reception to his innovative visions. But this is not say that Itō was ignorant of Japanese theatre arts in general, nor that he had not experienced the actor’s world of Japan. His rudimentary understanding of classical forms coincided with his preferences for contemporary innovation. Such a combination was probably far more useful to Yeats than trained traditionalists would have been, they being likely to be inflexible and suspicious of Western interference. However, Itō as collaborative internationalist supplied Yeats with a necessarily forward-thinking stylistic.14 But Itō was very cognizant of his position as an outsider in both Japan and Europe, of himself as a threshold figure working in a space outside of national traditions. In one of this personal reflections, he mocks a fatigue with Japanese tradition that he felt he was constantly being called upon to represent (Utsukushiku naru kyōshitsu 25). Fatigue only begins to explain the mixture of culture shock, second-language difficulties, and general exhaustion he felt in life abroad: in a moment of linguistic collapse and mental strain, he depicts the challenge of communicating in a foreign language, utilizing kata kana, the Japanese syllabary for foreign words imported into Japan to imitate his own heavily accented English: “Ai amu bêri taiado,” he exclaims, the foreign words of the expatriate breaking into his Japanese-language narrative (25). Perhaps this is why he was so drawn to Yeats’s plays, where for the most part he danced, masked and silent, without having to work

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through second-language operations. Moreover, Yeats did not require that Itō simply replicate staged expectations of what a Japanese actor must look like, and how he or she should speak. Buseki Midori in Itō Michio no Nihon-teki buyō [The Japanese Dance of Itō Michio] thus stresses that Itō’s training provided a specialist kind of performer who, although marked by hybridity, possessed forms of corporeal expression through dance that more restrictive kinds of education would have eliminated. Familiar as he was with official accreditation and the iemoto [household] hierarchies that govern Japanese performance groups, Itō throughout his life seems both enchanted and repulsed by Europe’s christening of him as the Japanese dancer. The press lauded him, and yet simultaneously installed a Japanese atmosphere around him, with the Times remarking that “he has studied his art in both East and West, and has constructed a style of dancing which attempts to combine the two ideas” (11 May 1915). Donning samurai armour for portraits by Mary Evans, Itō’s Japaneseness was a marker category for the European expectation always demanded. But in private, as he autobiographically notes in Utsukushiku naru kyōshitsu, he felt some distress at playing the part of the oriental guy as well as the aspiring European. A species of Japanese society performing for Lady Cunard and other high-society figures, Itō felt consternation about how his performances were only being appreciated in how they fulfilled a curiosity with pre-fashioned expectations of a Japanese atmosphere (Carruthers 1976, 38). His memoirs thus detail, in very personal terms, the personal alienation one felt during this era in trying to break out of nationalist fixations and to take on more comparative approaches to artistic exchange. One can imagine then the relief he felt at the freedom of interpretation that a partnership with Yeats would allow. Although his collaboration with the Irish author would come to an end, he would continue to champion his works throughout his life, and his produced versions of Yeats and Kyōka are very telling in his manner of interpretive similarities. Although the foremost informant on Japanese drama, Itō was not Yeats’s only source of detail about Noh. It should be remembered that Noh chanting has been a popular exercise, and many amateurs were capable of delivering fine enough renditions. While Itō was not

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a complete instructor – nor did he aspire to be as such – his emphasis on contemporary Japanese dance arts in other ways made him an ideal collaborator. In London, Yeats and Pound benefitted from the presentations of Kōri Torahiko and Kume Tamijurō, who chanted utaibon [Noh texts] for their edification in 1915.15 Itō, being ultimately a proponent of modern drama and experimental choreography, provided a catalyzing influence on Yeats that a more dogmatic Noh performer could not have. Itō believed in alternative theatrical possibilities in comparativism, and so arranged Western and Japanese elements into a new aesthetics that, in some ways, anticipated the development of butō dance, an avant-garde style, in postmodern Japan. Since Itō had knowledge of tradition, but was not entrenched in any overly orthodox codes, he helped Yeats in matters of creative departure. In his productions of Yeats and Kyōka, and it is telling that he studied both playwrights, Itō employed innovative techniques of movement to convey a haunting atmosphere. He, too, shared in the stagecraft of twilight. Itō may not have been an expert on Noh, an insider with a lineage to certify him; however, Itō’s versatility as a performer was exactly the kind of support most useful to Yeats’s and Kyōka’s own spectral experiments. As his biography shows, Itō Michio produced the premier of Tenshu monogatari [The Legend of the Castle Tower], one of Izumi Kyōka’s most renowned plays. Staged in 1951, this occurred long after the deaths of both Yeats and Kyōka, but it is demonstrative of the extent to which Itō perceived dramatic similarities in their stagecraft. Moreover, Itō’s use of unsettling costumes, and unorthodox choreography, can be seen to be a predecessor to what would become the angelogy of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–1986) in his concepts of surrealistic dance. Another important aspect of Itō’s aesthetics that Yeats encouraged was his sense of the dance poem, in which stylized movements articulate, through gesture, a kind of verse narrative. Itō’s production of At the Hawk’s Well in New York gave Yeats mixed feelings. On the one hand, as he wrote to John Quinn on 23 July 1918, the conventional American theatre did not match his ideal of a venue (Le 651–2). But, Yeats adds, “Ito and his Japanese players should be interesting” (Le 651). Edmund Dulac, who photographed Itō in theatrical garb, provided a brief review of the performance,

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noting that “rightly or wrongly” the Japanese cast inspired a certain kind of confidence (see Caldwell 48–50). Itō’s At the Hawk’s Well, neither endorsed nor forbidden, aroused Yeats’s curiosity with the possibility of his drama being adopted interculturally, arranged innovatively, and therefore further adopted by contemporary aesthetics, even at the expense of his own personal views. Clearly, Yeats and Itō share a common point of view on this subject; and Ito’s choreography helped to stage the kind of motions Yeats describes only textually. What becomes apparent then is how a shared motivation, based on folklore and avant-garde theatre, further enhanced the linkages between Japan and Ireland. Itō deserves recognition for bringing contemporary technical expertise, through his knowledge of the stage, to enhance those concepts of performance that Yeats had been experimenting with since the early 1890s. The Celtic Twilight, as previously discussed, relies on a public staging for locating listening and speech in the landscape. Through the inspiration of Noh, these sensibilities would be elaborated into the speechdance of physical drama, also attuned to geographical particularities. Yeats’s emphases on masks and movement, as well as folklore and setting, develop a ritualistic style that takes the discourse of the vanishing away from standard European symbolism. Yeats is a groundbreaking designer for a form of modern theatre, in English, that has grown continuously over the past century. Because of its difficult conceptual figurations, Japanese writers and critics have found such plays as At the Hawk’s Well extraordinarily interesting. Mishima Yukio, while working in an aircraft factory, translated At the Hawk’s Well into a kind of classical Japanese and considered this project as one of his most useful during the war years.16 The renowned Noh scholar Yokomichi Mario (1917–2012) developed two adaptations of this play to demonstrate the intricate dimensions of its performative ambience and that the works can indeed be fit into a classical Noh paradigm. Yokomichi’s first version, Izumi (1949), staged the play in a faithfully Noh production according to all of the rubrics of the tradition. The later version, Takahime (1967), in a freer format, explores the play’s equally suggestive versatility and avant-garde possibilities. From Yokomichi’s examples, we see that Yeats’s “Noh” contains real-

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izable elements for both classicists as well as modernists in Japan and elsewhere. While conscious of the aesthetic and politic ideologies of nation, translation, transmission, and power, the argument for faithfulness as the measure in modernist innovation can only proceed so far. We might readily find that Mishima fails to incorporate legitimate French decadence into his play Sado kōshaku fujin [Madame de Sade],17 or that kabuki versions of Medea fail to adhere to the classical theatrics of Euripides. But it seems that, following Tony Harrison’s (1988) way of reshaping Greek tragedy in his own dramas, a kabuki Medea offers a reinterpretation, a re-narrativization, rather than a quintessential accuracy. The negotiation of the ancestral voice, as speaking in the here and now, constantly challenged any attempt to either stabilize a view of the past, or to reject it. Mishima, in praising Kyōka, argues that it was his venturesome avant-garde tendencies that made him “ahead of his time” (Kaisetsu [Commentary] 553–4). Yeats and Kyōka share this predicament of eluding classification as modernist playwrights neither entirely innovative nor entirely anachronistic. On the one hand, we see Yeats appreciating and valuing traditional theatre. But we might see him within the burgeoning field of new-style drama that developed in Japan – under the influence of Chekhov, Wilde, Ibsen, Yeats, and Maeterlinck. In Japan, European symbolist drama has, at times, coincided with traditional myths and classical drama to create a multi-layered space of non-realist performance. Of the many writers engaged in this sense, Izumi Kyōka may or may not be incorporating symbolism into his work. But he does bear a striking resemblance to, if also a degree of influence from, some of Yeats’s earlier formulations on the situating of liminality as the zone of twilight. With a sensibility that has perceivable similarities to his contemporary W.B. Yeats, Kyōka would also develop twilight as a kind of esoteric hermeneutics for framing investigations into folk history as a secret archive of alternative knowledge. Kyōka formulates his understanding of these practices in his essay “Tasogare no aji” [The Taste of Twilight], an essay that contemplates the ways for making twilight into a tangible sensation. Like Yeats, Kyōka sought through dramaturgy a way of staging twilight in a manner that subverts the

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norms of realistic theatre. Rather than engaging with the occult through abstract theory or scholarship, they both advanced a performative sensibility of occultic stagecraft. Through this medium, staged necromantic principles involve the audience in an observatory relationship of narrative as ancestral recall in the form of a half-seen, half-recovered presentation. Kyōka’s Demon Pond [Yashagaike] (1913) precedes At the Hawk’s Well by four years, and there is no concrete proof to show a direct influence in terms of one piece of dramatic literature on the other. The similarities between these works, however, are striking, and demonstrate that some Japanese playwrights were developing stylistic forms out of Noh along the same strategies that Yeats was also pursuing. To summarize briefly, Demon Pond concerns a wanderer who approaches a haunted, secluded site: a belfry at twilight. Like At the Hawk’s Well, the geographical setting is given precisely: “Kotohiki Valley, village of Shimaki in the county of Ono, Echizen Province” (see Poulton 2001, 119). There, the traveller, Gakuen, swaps old stories with the vigilant bellkeeper, Akira, and his wife, Yuri. Akira relates a local legend to the traveller about the demon pond, a nexus of mystery, which draws in travellers with a gravity like a black hole might have. Gakuen responds with his own fantastic tale, heard along the road, which unwittingly happens to be about Akira. Thus, the bellkeeper says, concerning the relationship of storytellers to stories, “I’ve gone a step further. I myself have become one of those [folk] tales” (129).18 One important similarity of features between At the Hawk’s Well and Demon Pond is the emphasis on the traditional as a communal practice of collective observance, ancestral recall, and embodied connection. The occultic stagecraft eventually leads to the unifying of the various times, realms, and personages who have been fragmented through neglect and narrow-mindedness. The character Akira says: “I went on about the legend [densetsu] the old man told me, how their ancestors had commanded [senzo no yuigon] it and such like. The villagers burst out laughing” (Poulton 1998, 132; Yashagaike 602). The phrase “senzo no yuigon” has a sense of ghostly probate to it: the term implies an ancestral request that has been enshrined as a will and testament. Akira describes the maintenance of the bell as

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tradition [densetsu], while the mocking villagers deride the custom as mukashi banashi, or mere folk tale (Kyōka 1973, vol. 25, 602). There is a deliberate contrast here in attitude and perception. The general psychical indifferences to the abiding presences, the genius loci of the region, will eventually leads to the massacre of the villagers – symbolic of the self-defeating nature of obstinate rationalism in identity formation – in the play’s concluding apotheosis. The dual symbols of Demon Pond, the bell and the lake, both operate as ancestral relics whose power, if properly accessed, controls fertility and famine for the countryside and its populace. Meanwhile, acting like an ai-kyōgen – the comical interlude in a Noh sequence – a group of nearby goblins give their version of events, non-plussed as yōkai [monster] beings who were pushed off to the peripheries. The final act depicts how the multiple folk elements of the play conclude in an ontological conflation of monster and human, legend and present. Akira and the his wife Yuri experience a narrative metempsychosis: their personal stories are transfused into a new generation of legends. Akira and Yuri both experience discarnation of personhood. However, this leads to a sort of rematerialization into new ancestral forms, even being born again [umarekawaru] as the legendary. The belfry remains intact, the story continues in a new form to be rung, and the resonance remains as a sign of lastingness. Kyōka’s entire body of work demonstrates that time, language, and place are themselves species of bakemono, fantastic changel­ ings caught between quasi-empirical states. Manifestations of oni or yūrei, spirits and ghosts, are shifts and disturbances in the substance of experience. Kyōka can draw upon, in the name of tradition, stylistic conventions from Japanese aesthetics and religiosity for his methods. These precedents can include a number of terms to describe how artists envision the fleetingness of the spectral: go-ryōe festivals for communion with departed spirits; or mono no ke, spirit possession, which has been the subject of paintings and literature, including Genji monogatari. Zeami may have codified and canonized mugen nō as having specific, stylistic expectations. However, with modernism we can see a further development of twilight dramaturgies that negotiate tradition through and working with its figurations. Hence, necromancy, reckoning with ghosts as ancestors, had

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a practical, contemporary agenda. Retro-cognitions, therefore, were conversations with the ancestral past, an interrogative intervention against pressing questions of the present. These conversations between different strata of metaphysics were facilitated through the strategy of theatrical masks, which connote the access of alternative persona. Kyōka does not employ masks, though Yeats’s versions of Noh does. Through this device of appearance and voice, Yeats found the interface for the meeting of mortality and eternity, between flesh and disembodiment, and the restoration of face to faceless forms. The mask mouths as the interactive prosopopoeia: the spirits have voices only because human ears are there to listen. This necromantic power, in which the ancestral and the contemporary are co-dependently situated, is what Paul de Man (1984) finds most compelling: “It is the figure of prosopopeia, the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply, and confers on it the power of speech” (75). For both Kyōka and Yeats, liminality is neither immediately coherent nor eternally inaccessible, but a mediated intertextuality of ancestral past to culturally dissipating present. Yeats and Kyōka, through a dramatic recasting of the temporal, challenge the linear-dynamic that Walter Benjamin (1940) in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” identifies as the capitalistic, rationalistic logic of homogeneous empty time as a force for rendering a sense of chronology as synchronous, complete, dependable, and categorizable (261). Ruptures, interventions, and challenge this illusory always-sameness and the structures it buttresses. The asynchronous nature of necromancy rejects this sense of how knowledge and information are transmitted. As an atmospheric concept, twilight – conceived of as a liminal space between the seen and the unseen – allows a concept of in-between-ness for a form of staged interphasing between varying metaphysical states. In their neo-Noh dramas, the twilight stage reinvents a cultural landscape upon which time and space coalesce in mysterious and disruptive fashions. In order to enact such a paranormal mode, one that outright rejects the norms of Aristotelian realism, Yeats and Kyōka rework elements of classical Japanese Noh, especially those sub-genres that in particular emphasize ghosts, according to their more contemporary innovations.

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These two dramatists thus develop twilight [tasogare] from a theoretical ambience into a stagecraft of phantasmal stylization. Following Ezra Pound’s modernistic exhortation to “make it new,” Yeats’s and Kyōka’s broader strategy for twilight dramaturgy includes aspects of ritual performance and mytho-poetics as a means of summoning the dislocated spectres who haunt the local spaces of a nationalizing landscape. We thus can recognize the modernist trend in Japan and Ireland for a staged dialectic between the ancient and the modern, as intersecting trans-temporal entities into a kind of intervention against normative forms of history.19 Both playwrights invoked trans-temporal entities, as ghosting figurations that retain traces of vanished discourses, to have them intervene in the schema of the present. In order to give mouth to the voice of the disappeared, and therefore to create a prosopopoeia of twilight, Yeats and Kyōka need a stagecraft that could be entirely chronotopic – more technically, they need a space that gives a framework for sustaining temporal and spatial networks that are heterogeneous. There is a political edge to these recollections of the dead, for they act as relay sites for spectres of regionality and folklore to be encountered and negotiated with, as the performance of ancestrality fading from the audience’s view on stage and in community. The phantasmal – the spectralization of the actor into a phase of twilight – is an important conceptual framework that both Yeats and Kyōka carry from prose into drama. Kyōka – especially in prose fiction such as Uta andon [The Lantern Song], which was originally a novel – did not himself adapt it for performance: this was done by the cinematographer Kubota Mantarō (1889–1963) in 1943. (Classical Noh might suggest a ceremonial, if also liturgical, relationship to space and time; and its origins in agrarian rituals of the countryside continued as folkish components in theme and scenario, even as the art form became the entertainment for warrior elite.) Kyōka represents a reclaiming of the fushigi [mysterious] from those socio-historical situations that had turned folklore and mystery into a pastime for an exclusive club. Kyōka explores the ontological multiplicity that hints of Noh could emphasize. This became another element for a thematic twilight/tasogare that employs the oneiromantic as a contrary strategy.

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In thinking of Yeats’s use of staged twilight, and its influence and confluences with other Japanese dramatists in the intertextual relationships of Ireland and Japan, we have a fresh way of appreciating the accomplishment of his drama. Noh was not so much a set of conventions, but could be a form of suggestive twilight ambience in which Yeats’s sense of the ancestral might be made visible in a para-temporal stagecraft. Japanese scholars have identified this atmospheric sensibility of Noh as shadows and spirits. In detailing how Noh links varying time periods to the singularity of place, Konparu Kunio (sometimes transliterated as Komparu Kunio) has shown that the actors can be situated in a complex stagecraft of multipledimensionality. Noh, as a staged metaphysic, suggested thematic textures for encountering the paranormal, as voicing the vanishing or displaced, that could be brought into the present. To some extent, and this is what placed them in a position between anachronism and innovation, Yeats’s and Kyōka’s neo-Noh derive technical and thematic mannerisms from the contemporary as much as the classics. In terms of ancestral recall, of negotiating and discussing with the phantasm, trends in Noh provided spatial apparatus and dramatic techniques to create a theatrical transmutation of the time-space continuum. The actors and audience both participate in this emergent space of alternative realities. Using the descriptive category of phantasmal Noh, Konparu (1980) analyses certain plays as based upon distorting phenomena: oscillating time, reversed time, soul-body ruptures, and so forth. Not surprisingly, Yeats was drawn to the Noh categories that included mysterious interactions and shadowy textures most often with a genius loci. These same elements and considerations coincided with formative atmospheres as developed in The Celtic Twilight, The Wanderings of Oisin, and other earlier works by Yeats. But dramaturgy could take the uncanny landscape of the poetry, or the anecdote of a short story, and place it on a stage, endowed with a theatrical aspect. Noh, as phantasm, contained multiple intervals of spatial distance, chronological relationships, and geographical references. These became an informative schematic for rethinking stagecraft. Komparu’s terms for the metaphysical dynamics of Noh thus follow closely some of Yanagita’s, Yeats’s, and Kyōka’s own theories for realizing in-between-ness [chūkan]. Kyōka’s

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chūkan, like twilight, deliberately transgresses and violates with their heterotopic and multi-temporal atmospheres, spaces of apparitions and, in keeping with Yanagita’s etymologies, identifies under the contest of discernment. The twilight stage enables a performative aspect to what had been, previously, theoretical. In a sense not altogether different from Yeats’s gyres, Kyōka theorizes in his stories a kinetic model of time and space as overlapping circles. For him, the theoretical design of the neo-Noh stage seeks to address the fissure that separates the past from the present. Yanagita, working with a Yeats-like sense of kawatare-doki [twilight time], conceives of cultural history as residual frequencies whose messages become available for accessing the ancestral. Kyōka likewise develops his aesthetic of tasogare no aji [the taste of twilight]. The earlier theorizations of twilight as concept, twilight as practice, and twilight as reality become most fully realized in drama. Because, for both Yeats and Kyōka, the stage interfaces with a twilight phasing, the spectrum of linkages between shadows and light, as well as the ancestor and the contemporary. Heritage and modernity comingle in ways that are a reclamations of space and time as colonized by imposed historicity. But to unsettle conventional sensibilities, neo-Noh exemplifies the chiaroscuro domain as the interplay between the supernatural and the natural, chronos and topos. Twilight, for Kyōka and Yeats, is neither metaphor nor metonymy, but a magnitude of in-between-ness. As Kyōka describes in Tasogare no aji, twilight is “the phase which exists as neither darkness nor light … the space of darkness emerging from light … it is a shame of our time and place that people think and do with no acknowledgment of a place besides darkness or light” (vol. 28, 683).20 Recalling previous discussions of the lustre of time, Kyōka’s taste for twilight connects with Tanizaki’s lament for disappearing shades or shadows, or Yeats’s many statements on the perceptibly ghostly as ancestrality. The persistence of cultural memory exists in the numinous traces of exchange. The aura they conjure up of damage and disappearance perform as figurations of recovered presences. A theatrical performance, then, might transliterate and transcribe this twilight mode into a visible facility of balanced light and darkness. Similar to Kyōka, Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) understood the

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difficulty in manifesting atmosphere as a metaphysical strategy: “the most intense atmosphere of grayness, the most suggestive color in all Japanese art, which is the twilight soared out of time and place” (in Hakutani 2001, 17). To taste the twilight, and have an affinity for its spectrum, is to enter into a non-empirical sensitivity for the murky nuances of the peripheries of place and community. So much of Yeats’s work on the ancestral involved the circumstantial metaphysic of the changeling, the fairy as a transformed entity cast away into twilight as a dynamic possibility. Yeats neo-Noh continues on from his earliest essays on twilightism. His drama further develops alternative topographies, exploring the same dynamic of non-linear time and interdimensional contact that filled The Wanderings of Oisin or the wanderings of Aengus. Twilight, as temporal rebellion, locates blurred points within chronological modules or cartographic modernity. The imagination, the aji, intervenes to uncover the vanished. Yeats’s early lyrical poems, and his later drama, are hermeneutics as well as performances of shadows and ancestry as interchangeable species, interfacing with space and time. At a recent lecture and performance by the Uzawa Noh Troupe in Vancouver (2010), Uzawa Hisa emphasized the phantasmal semiotics that constitute the Noh stage as a ritualized space.21 The architectural framework is intentionally reminiscent of a Shinto architecture. The bridge leading onto the Noh stage [hashigakari] demarcates a transition into a liminal world in which time behaves more freely. The entryway, sometimes said to resemble the gate found at the entrance to Shinto shrines, is a portal through which phenomenon and phantasm can cross freely. Bridge and gate mark off the stage as metaphysical in-between-ness. This is not to say that Noh automatically entails the paranormal or the occult; certainly, it includes a number of sub-genres. Classical Noh was entertainment for the elite, not really having anything to do with peasants or folklore. And, while Yeats has some air of snobbishness in his sense of a preferred audience, admission was not based on caste. Kyōka and Yeats, clearly, were interested mostly in the mugen category of Noh, which is defined in part through its emphasis on the metaphysical performance of the spectral, and thus able to re-

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store a kind of folk element for contemporary audiences. This was not the purpose of classical Noh. For neo-Noh, however, the denizens of ghostlore – jibakurei, ikiryō, and yūrei – are common characters with equal stature to their mortal counterparts. Mugen nō is more than its cast, however. Both plot and character are realized through phantasmal mechanics that create this chūkan [in-between] space. Kyōka also, in his appetite for twilight, finds in mugen nō a stage-space for folkloric epiphany, the ancient becoming the present through the gates of shadow and light through which social order loses clear sight of its assumptions. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight helped to establish in Japan the notion of twilight as a performative ontology and as an imaginative dimension. Conversely, Noh later provided him with analogous concepts for developing a theatre of the phantasm. There are demonstrable similarities between Kyōka’s Demon Pond [Yashagaike] and At the Hawk’s Well that can be traced back to the ideas generated through artistic discussions at that time between Ireland and Japan. Kyōka and Yeats are examples of modernist authors turning to the twilight stage to further explore the predicament of the trace and the enigma of anachronism. Drama further optimized what Yeats’s and Kyōka’s prose first examined: threshold dialogues, ones between the present and the ancestral, as located in spaces of between-ness that modernity continued to erase. I do not wish to deny either author his individuality; however, compositional methods between them reveal interesting similarities. The Celtic Twilight enacts the sense of a haunted time and space; drama would situate the discourse of the vanishing as a theatrical, spirited encounter. With these preliminary discussions in mind, the tasogare mechanisms of Yeats’s neo-Noh become apparent and compelling as performative necromancy, between Irish modernity and the fought-over legacy of heritage. With this revised sense of Yeats’s aesthetic purposes, and its modernist overlaps with Kyōka, I turn my attention to the twilight stagecraft of three of Yeats’s neo-Noh. My selections are based on Yeats’s own program: he believed these three plays would function as an evening’s cycle of performances; and I construe his choices as building thematically and dramatically through staged relationships.

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At the Hawk’s Well (1916) いや疑は人間にあり。天に偽なきものを。 No, suspicion is of the human world, In heaven there’s no deceit. – Hagoromo

Yeats’s dramas invoke the folkloric personages, lyrical narrations, and situating of place to history that are characteristic of his earliest poems. As in his verse, the heroic personages of his plays appear as an absent-made-present to refashion associations between memory and event. The central concerns of The Celtic Twilight – metaphysical banishment and a form of mediumship to negotiate the resultant ghosts – emerge now in a stagecraft of twilight. To examine this continuity between the so-called younger and older Yeats, At the Hawk’s Well makes a useful case study. The overall design represents Yeats’s initial attempt to consciously interpolate formulae partially derived from Noh as well as the Ulster Cycle legends. As such, this first effort is the most noticeably syncretic, as combining Japanese theatrical conventions with Irish figures. The Noh-esque qualities are most apparent in At the Hawk’s Well’s stage schematics. The sparse design is intentionally reminiscent of bare, unadorned hinoki [Chamaecyparis obtusa] wood used for the classical Noh stage. The architecture of the Noh theatre suggested to Yeats a space both enclosed yet atmospherically uncluttered. The audience’s point of view and the actors’ performance are aligned to the same centring effect. In At the Hawk’s Well, the well defines the apex of sight and action, representing both a real well in the Irish landscape, as well as a channel for the spectral. Narrative description informs us of both the well’s legendary importance, as a sacred site, and as marker of mytho-cartography of the Irish landscape. Movement and speech accord value and importance to it, so its artistic resemblance to a real well is not required. Indeed, early productions used a prop more suggestive than mimetic. Performances of At the Hawk’s Well require a small cast of musicians and actors, seated on the stage, in a visual arrangement similar to a Noh performance. The musicians share the stage space, and furthermore act in the role of choral commentary. Yeats has swapped the

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traditional ensemble set of nōkan [flute], shoulder and hip drums [kotsuzumi, ō-tsuzumi] for gong, Western drum, and zither. Thus, Yeats incorporates a harp or zithers as Celtic surrogates, somewhat replicating the Noh example of percussion matched with solitary melody. The folding of the cloth acts as a ritualistic invocation. In this twilight-phased drama in which the word shadow appears six times, Yeats resets the optical textures by first getting away from the figurative Western theatrics of an opening and closing curtain. Of course, the folding of the cloth cannot be claimed as having a parallel in Noh; however, as an ontological reshuffling, its nuances are obvious enough. Time and space are being creased, bent, and unpackaged. This space is now a redefined domain in which the variable dimensions of imagination and imagining will be given freer licence for varieties of cognition. The area can have the visual as well as structural sense of a space that is in-between. As Konparu describes (1980), the Noh stage evolved from agricultural rites in which areas within the countryside were roped off for sacred purposes. As Hearn and Yana­ gita documented in shamanic practices, natural terrain was encircled and marked out as consecrated, requiring particular etiquette and other forms of observance. This is not sentimentality, but religiosity. These demarcated areas, distinct but still contiguous with the general social landscape, were venues marked out for a hallowed presentation. Yeats’s important stage direction – OLD MAN enters through the audience – maintains this sense that the communal transforms into the ritual through a people-originating power of interpolation. The stage is neither a hermitage nor an otherworld, but a peripheral dimension detected in this world, confirmed through communion with spiritual-imaginative presences and settings. Twilight has been released. Assumptions about what is a realistic character or scenario are distorted. The phantasmal atmosphere produces spectral effects that situate the conceptual shadows as physical and temporal in-between-ness:          Night falls; The mountainside grows dark; The withered leaves of the hazel Half choke the dry bed of the well. (HW 298–9)

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This is the language of the vanishing: suffocation, parched environment, a neglected hillside, and an incoming dusk. Eventually, Yeats’s stage directions become almost unspoken themselves, italicized gestures and undeveloped suggestions of movement. The experiential conversion of stage into shadowscape makes material those elements and those phantasms, and the situation locale of their contested origins that Yeats’s prose describes. A primary feature of Noh that matched Yeats’s own literary practice is the preciseness in naming geographical settings. Modernist authors were intrigued with the ways in which Zeami chose his settings with exacting precision. Certainly, Zeami’s understanding of space and meisho [famous cultural locations] respond to the socio-historical conditions of his era, including the kind of noble audience who attending Noh. Yeats’s and Kyōka’s revisioning of Noh reflects the biases of their era, identifying a kind of topographical folklore in a manner different from what Zeami intends. Twentieth-century playwrights, in reformulating stylistic qualities that Zeami represents to them, bring their own considerations of space and folklore to their interpretations. They set their plays, descriptively in toponymic locations chosen specifically for their allusive power, rather than, say, a generic focus. In their reinterpretation of Zeami, neo-Noh could draw upon a collective cultural knowledge through the allusive qualities of a specific site of cultural memory. Yeats, in particular, believes that such inferences and associations sound resonances that surround topography with folklore. To him, this feature is particularly important in the atmospheric calibration of a twilight-infused drama, in which dramatic tension, and spectral articulation, are amplified through the uniqueness of the location. Scenery, in the form of material props, is secondary to the appositional effect of specific location and its cultural references. Mugen nō achieves rich, ambient nuances by drawing upon the thematic relevance embedded in the mythic topography of a place. Although seemingly rudimentary, the setting is very much concerned with the soil of environment. A tree, well, altar, or bridge may be implicative when a specific ancestral landmark has a tale attached. It acts as a nexus for narrative auras supported and shared through a folkloric collectivity. In this matter,

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soil and land become enacted, alongside narration and performance, as sites of memory, image, and knowledge. For example, Izutsu [The Well Cradle] begins with a monk announcing he is on pilgrimage to Hatsuse, the site of the Hase Temple, dedicated to the Bodhisatva of mercy, Kannon-sama. En route, the major activity occurs at Ariwara Temple, said to have been built by a character whose misdeeds are the source of the play’s premises of betrayal and guilt. The specific setting, and specific destination, are imbued with meaningful circumstances and legendary content. The location is itself a character with whom negotiations must be conducted. Thus, Zeami circumscribes the dramatic stage with a geographical imagination through which the audience participates. The mind’s eye sees a staged landscape marked by thematic correlations. Yeats develops a format in which minimalist staging becomes semiotically valid through a theatrical presentation of local knowledge. The spatial setting of the drama connects to mythic content, co-creating a vivid kind of topopoesis: “the form I am adapting for European purposes may excite once more, whether in Gaelic or in English, under the slope of Slieve-na-mon or Croagh Patrick, ancient memories; for this form has no need of scenery that runs away with money nor a theatre building” (EI 236). Landscape is a heightened sensitivity in the arrangements of power and survival. Yeats’s endotic purpose included a communal strategy, as Andrew Parkin (1978) has described: “Yeats wished to celebrate the haunted landscape of Ireland” (118). The haunting that Yeats saw was more than a Gothic thrill; haunting entails those resonant traces of ancestral voices to be recalled, so as to know what investments have made place what it is. In Japan, volumes of Zenkoku reijō daijiten [Dictionary of Sacred Places throughout Japan] document thousands of shrines, temples, and natural features that have supernatural connections, festival importance, or other manifestations of legend. Folk beliefs imbue topography with specific meanings and allusions: mountain ranges become feared because of the wandering dead. Certain sites require ceremonial observances to offset diabolical influence. Folkloric significance transforms a set of rocks, a hillside, or a specific cherry tree as poetry. This can be seen in Japan in collections such as the

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Man’yōshū, in which temples are imprinted and positioned with legend and other narrative associations. The mytho-poetry of folklore denotes the landscape. Akira, the hero, attempts to access the secret history of the area first through folkloric narrative, and then later through figurative encounters with the phantoms. So, although the play is thoroughly modernist in its staging, the script can recodify neo-Noh features to enhance a sense that there are multiple time periods operating, contiguously, through the demon pond, say, as a portal. The occultic stagecraft eventually leads to the unifying of the various times, realms, and personages who have been fragmented through neglect and narrow-mindedness. Thus, one reason that in At the Hawk’s Well the Second Musician states “I am afraid of this place” is the haunted pedigree of the location, which serves as a conduit for the disturbing energies of the vanishing. As discussed previously, Yeats selected Sligo locations for his Oisinic verse. Once more this county offers local particularities to give Yeats’s drama a Nohlike effect of the folkloric mise-en-scène. The actual, geographical Hawk’s Well (Irish: Tubber Tullaghan) sits atop Tullaghan Hill, having a long, chronicled history from early historical manuscripts.22 Associated with many things, including a beheading, this well is renowned for the peculiar taste of its waters. Alternating between bitter and sweet, the water has curative powers, instilling youth and health in the drinker. The well relates to the natural environment, with supernatural qualities, that serve to vitalize the body. For this reason, traditionally, Tubber Tullaghan was a favourite spot for celebrating Lughnadsadh, the Gaelic name for a festival held at approximately mid-summer. In terms of setting, the jutting form of Hawk’s Rock nearby matches the cartographic attributes that the play describes. The rock protrudes from gnarled hazel and drifting leaves, the scattering of scree and wind. Hawk’s Well, as an Irish reijō, a spirit-site, has a number of connotative meanings. And today, the theatre in Sligo Town, mindful of Yeats’s attention to the local geography in his plays, is named the Hawk’s Well. Haunted entails liminality, the performance of in-between-ness. Haunted is the potential for ancestral access. Yeats’s drama works with multiple layers of not just space, but narrative connections that span time. Thus, in specifying a Heroic Age for the modern audience

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of At the Hawk’s Well, Yeats enables a sense of the folkloric present. The actions and situations suggest someone or somewhere ancient, culturally remembered but too distant in time. They occur, however, at a specific location that, for now, can still be accessed in the present. Heroic Age thus is not a chronological isolate, but is perpetuated through resonances still grounded in place. To use St Thomas Aquinas’s term, the Heroic Age in Yeats’s plays is an “aeviternity”: a temporal node that exists in-between eternity and normative time. It is not something to be recovered, but something that recedes into the irrecoverable. The ancestral becomes epistemologically refracted through the haunting’s aura, as resonating from a specific event-site of trauma of which the drama seeks awareness. The ghostly aura continues through prolonged witnessing, an ongoing legacy of interactions between the seen and unseen in twilight. This has material connotations to culture and heritage, vested in ruins, shrines, and wells, as ancestral monuments. Destroy these, and the aura goes with them. That penchant for destruction had been a crisis in modernity and has worsened in postmodernity, as community activists in Ireland will attest. Kyōka, likewise, scried in these remnants of the past as experientially suggestive: ruined stone, relics, sacred sites, bits of statue, abandoned shrines, all of these reverberate with individual character. The landscape acquires a lustre of time through an imprinting, a process occurring in broader geography in the same manner Tanizaki describes for physical objects. When Tanizaki uses the word kahō [heirloom], he emphasizes that this word combines the characters for home with treasure. As individual objects can acquire such a gloss through domestication, so on the larger scale do localized areas. The lustre of time is the grit of continued accessibility. Thus, topopoesis requires community as continuity. The features of a haunted landscape arise from the appositional relationship of individuals who are, in fact, reading the legacy of the terrain. Yeats in his play notes sets this work in a multi-temporal framework known as “Heroic Time.” The manifestation of the ancestral, its ghostly voices as representative of preceding eras, occurs through stylized masks. The means through which twilight time allows for the articulation of the ancestral, as personage, is a crucial theme for At the Hawk’s Well. Yeats finds in Noh concepts for the multiplying of

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selfhood, for reviving variations of a legendary character. Although not realized as naturalistic persons, emblematic characters such as Oisin or Cú Chulainn are interlocutors who occupy a unique perspective on history and heritage. Yeats finds suggestive in Noh the ways in which a heroic personage acts as a paradigmatic point of view.23 Heroic ancestry, as embodied in the atmosphere of a haunting, acts as a cultural interrogator whose lineage draws cultural knowledge from geography. The face of the old appears against the state of the present. On such an account, the Arthurian myths – through one modernist interpretation, Tolkien – have enjoyed a great deal of ongoing popularity, reconceived in various forms contingent upon the temporal situations of reinvention. Japanese literature has its own examples of recirculated heroic characters, the re-narrativization of whom is a kind of prosopopoeia. For example, the semi-historical Yoshitsune has been the origin of a corpus of writings that could be called Yoshitsunean due to their breadth and longevity. The incidents of Yoshitsune’s life provide indicative scenarios that have been adopted into many genres as means of interpreting the ethos of the past.24 A comparison between Yoshitsune, as a popular figure for Noh dramatics, and Yeats’s sense of Irish heroes as heterotemporal personages helps to make sense of how Japanese drama suggested to Yeats the power of literary lore as adaptation. A figure with a wide body of materials examining the meaning of his heroic personage, Yoshitsune is the representation par excellence of the nullifying defeat inherent in the warrior’s life. Certainly, one aspect frequently touched upon is how the repetitious spiral of violence defines the periods of historical strife and ultimately destroys the warrior’s heroic code. Ireland has its own sense of a legendary canon, one in relation to its own equally turbulent history, and Yeats knew how to make use of it. His Cuchulain, like Yoshitsune, is trapped in a seemingly limitless cycle of civil wars that will define the future of his nation. As with Oisin, Yeats reimagines the mythic personal of Cú Chulainn on multiple occasions for various purposes. Yeats composed a cycle of plays based on him: The Green Helmet, The Only Jealousy of Emer, At the Hawk’s Well, and The Death of Cuchulain. Poetic examples range from the early to late works: “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” (1892)

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and “Cuchulain Comforted” (1939).25 Yeats, however, is not interested in repeating verbatim already archived versions from classical Irish literature. His recontextualized Irish sagas have strong political bite in depicting national struggles and violence of the modern era. But the figuration of the ancestral emphasizes the continuous flow of history in place. Today, in both the Protestant and Catholic enclaves of Belfast, Cú Chulainn is a favourite theme for disparately motivated political murals. In reference to Japanese theatre, both Richard Taylor (1976) and Masaru Sekine and Christopher Murray (1990) see At the Hawk’s Well as directly based on the Noh play Yōrō [Sustenance of Age] by Zeami, although no version of this work appears in either Waley’s (1998) or Fenollosa and Pound’s (1916) editions. Dorothy Pound produced a typescript based on Fenollosa’s notebooks, which Yeats had access to, but the text remained unpublished until Richard Taylor edited a version for an issue of Paideuma (1975). There are certainly enough similarities between Yōrō and At the Hawk’s Well to find analogous components. Another comparison can be made in that the Hawk-Woman, as animated combination of bird and person, has a certain resemblance to the feather mantle of Hagoromo. Animalhuman hybrids feature often in Irish and Scottish tales, including lost home narratives such as the selkie, the seal-women of Scottish folklore. These connections are suggestive, but need not be taken as exact correlations. Overemphasizing perceived similarities can also lead to missing out on the uniqueness of At the Hawk’s Well itself. The plot of Yōrō concerns the relationship between a god and the emperor, who receives from the heavens a drink of immortality. The beverage is a potent sake known as kikusui, which literally means “chrysanthemum water,” and is symbolic of the imperial throne. Cú Chulainn also desires a beverage of longevity; and, like an emperor, his legendary stature is related to his dynastic status. As chief hero of the Ulster Cycle, Cú Chulainn occupies a figurehead position as a personification of an ancestral Zeitgeist. So, before reading Yōrō, Yeats had long imagined the means in which the vanishing legend might resuscitate itself from degeneration and final oblivion. Much of Yeats’s earlier poetry, in which characters are a paradox of age, form, and time, explores this predicament of ancestral fragmentation.

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The twilight stagecraft of At the Hawk’s Well, like The Wanderings of Oisin, dramatizes the quest for revival and recovery. In evaluating who is Cú Chulainn, as the emblematic but amorphous voice of the departed, and what he will become dispersed through historical consequences, the audience must also confront who is the Guardian of the Well, and what/whom has taken over her body previously. The conflict in this play arises over cycles in which one epoch overwrites the former. The sídhe have possessed the Guardian of the Well, and they, too, are a species of legendary disappearance. Associated with ancient races that once occupied Ireland, they became metaphysically deported, made invisible, through a dynastic succession of newcomers, of whom Cuchulain is one. As vanished peoples, displaced communities who have been usurped through radical change, they prefigure Cuchulain’s own fate as the next to disappear. Cuchulain recognizes that he will also fall in this series of dissipations, in which one era conquers (and erases) another. He hopes, in spite of this, that the well water can offer an antidote to this fate of vanishing. The Old Man, to him, demonstrates how youth will come to decay: “You seem as dried up as the leaves and sticks, / As though you had no part in life” (HW 303). But the para-temporal well offers immortality. The well water restores the body, preventing the process of decay and transparency. What had been sought on vanishing islands in The Wanderings of Oisin is now perceived to be an element of the Irish soil. At the Hawk’s Well reiterates the theme of the dialogue in Oisin, the contest between generations – as conflicting dynasties – to not only possess time but to define the spirit within it as intimately a product of Irish nationhood. For this reason, that the actors and audience enter through the same doorway emphasized a theme of common origins in the relationship between phantasm and community, between the archaic and the contemporary. Itō played the Hawk, variously described as a woman and a witch, in April 1916, bringing out a choreography of performance that was not only cross-species but cross-gender as well. This potential for shape-shifting in the ancestral presence was, for both Yeats and Kyōka, the power in emphasizing the bakemono [changeling] nature of the phantasm. What motivates the Guardian of the Well, as com-

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bination of marginalized spirit and natural elements, to keep the next generation from achieving what the sídhe could not? Possibly, as in many Noh dramas, the answer is madness or jealousy. Yeats, recognizies sídhe as exiled ancestral spirits, and he perceives their potential as influential spiritual phenomena. In this case, this influence is harsh and retributive. Their status is of restless revenants and poltergeists who exact revenge on the present world.26 In At the Hawk’s Well, the soul-less quality of the sídhe results from banishment, not birth. Yeats’s poetry attempts to find a kind of soteriology of the fairy. How can fairies, being entrapped discarnateness, be revived or exorcised? Do these fairies have souls, or are they accursed children of Cain? Trapped in their liminal predicament, how are fairies redeemed? Cuchulain becomes distracted by the danse macabre of the Guardian of the Well. The hypnotic rhythms of her possessed state arise from the traumatic mania of covariant spirits in a single body. The dance depicts the fought-over interstices between lost time and disappearing present. Being in the sídhe’s presence causes feelings of amnesia and effacement in the audience. Likewise, Cuchulain’s own identity turns into confusion. When the young man announces his name, he is met with confusion:

OLD MAN. I have never heard that name. YOUNG MAN. It is not unknown. I have an ancient house beyond the sea. (HW , in CP 300) But can the ancient house, the ancestral house in Meditations in Time of Civil War, survive? Without the beverage, Cuchulain returns once more to the cyclical flux of destructive history. He will be crowned king of Ulster. He will be tricked into murdering his own son. He will be disposed of and displaced, like Yoshitsune, by an ignoble betrayal. A blind man will behead him for twelve pennies. Without the taste of the immortal water to sustain him – and to sustain the Ulster Legends – the encroaching powers of progress will overwrite his body and spirit. The well bubbles up, occasionally, but distractions cause the waters to go by unnoticed or undrinkable.27 Food, as intimately tied to agricultural production and thus material soil, is connected to

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physical sustenance. Hungry ghosts or mischievous fairies have previously stolen what they themselves cannot consume. Cherries for the “The Stolen Child” are hidden and hoarded, but never swallowed. Yeats’s ongoing hermeneutics of the shadows investigate the contentious communications between the ethereal and the tangible in relation to communal order in spatial contexts. The uncanny in The Celtic Twilight, and in Yanagita Kunio’s Tōno monogatari, are figurations of the fushigi [mysterious] as resultant textures that are forms of character which/whom inhabit a special, local place. Lady Wilde, in Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), repeatedly shows the necessary connection between the oral tradition and the spatial specific: “Near the great mountain of Croagh-Patrick there is a lake called Clovencagh, or the Lake of Revenge, to which evil-disposed persons used to resort in order to imprecate maledictions on their enemy.”28 The haunted does not need to be an unmoored, vague principle of eeriness. Local historical sites radiate very particular kinds of genius loci that are particular to visible features, and folkloric attunements, of their social conditions. A staged recreation, as representative of culture knowledge for a local geography, can emphasize how that landscape contains a lustre of time, the bodily interactivity of handling and process through touch and action. Drama can re-enact how centuries of interaction enhance a legendary site. Iseki [ruins, relics], as Tanizaki shows, are distinctive on account of the direct associations that shaped their tactile, and thus also ambient, properties. However, twilight, as the atmospheric content for the stage, is a strategy for drawing attention to mythic auras as realizable presences. Elements of nature can attain the same power of significance. A twilight performance, which uses reflections of communal ritual to establish its dramatic feeling, reminds an audience of those ancestral attributes that are outside, meaningfully embedded into the terrain. As often as such feelings are described, cynically, as nostalgia or weepiness (“tree-hugging”), one cannot dismiss out of hand the enduring allure for the cartographic imagination. Bernard Shaw could write of Skellig Michael in 1910 in this manner: “I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world” (Collected Letters, vol. 2, 942). The

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point is that Shaw did not visit an Oisinic otherworld, remote as Skellig Michael may be. This is a real place, one built through human investment, of hermits whose personal involvement negotiated terrain and territory to establish places of worship and contemplation. The island seems anomalous, but obviously is part of a continuity of geography. Skellig Michael testifies to the labour and faith of a band of monks who built architectures of observance on the precipices of Ireland. Skellig Michael’s power as relic is one of reclamation that spans both the natural and dreamlike, remote but attainable. Shaw’s “John Bull’s Other Island” (2000 [1904]) had made a prominent criticism of rapid development of the countryside into property and goods, especially as its capitalist logic found convenience in dismissing environmental awareness as cheap sentimentality. But, as Shaw’s play suggests, the relationships between romance, landscape, and land development, and the necessary assertion of the past, acts against the rush to erasure.29 Keegan, the defrocked priest, summarizes the ruthless ambitions of capitalist colonialism and its modus operandi: The conquering Englishman, sir. Within 24 hours of your arrival you have carried off our only heiress, and practically secured the parliamentary seat. And you have promised me that when I come here in the evenings to meditate on my madness; to watch the shadow of the Round Tower lengthening in the sunset; to break my heart uselessly in the curtained gloaming over the dead heart and blinded soul of the island of the saints, you will comfort me with the bustle of a great hotel, and the sight of the little children carrying the golf clubs of your tourists as a preparation for the life to come. (165) Broadbent, the “conquering Englishman,” believes that hotels and golf courses are a triumphant thing, representing forms of wealth capable of producing even more wealth. Wealth trumps nostalgia. Keegan counters this assumption, that expansionism and growth necessarily lead to well-being, by positioning a language of sentiment (religion, relics, environment) against the supposed payoff of rapid manufacturing. For many Irish writers, a poetics of custom and its

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connections to place act as an uprising against the rhetoric of heedless consumption. Dramas such as At the Hawk’s Well, as part of its political argument, refocus attention on these sites that Keegan references as the unique power of place, owing to heritage. Considering today’s increasingly endangered habitats and threats to ancient houses, I do wonder what the Revivalists would make of a motorway running through the Skyrne Valley. As a further point of similarity between Ireland and Japan, the Bórd Fáilte have duplicated the kinds of exploitation that Marilyn Ivy (1995) documents in regards to Japan. The dislocated monument, without morality or memory, has been repackaged and rebranded. The “Discover Japan” campaign, intentionally or coincidentally, has been duplicated as “Discover Ireland.” As the multi-media displays and glossy brochures tell us, discovering Ireland really means hiring a car and driving quickly around the Ring of Kerry. According to the barrage of television advertisements, discovering Ireland is when a North American barrister imbibes – well, discovers – his first pint of St James Gate Guinness. The Revivalists’ folkloric sensibility sees the ruins left in the wake of progress as the return of character-possessing spectres who exert distant twilight onto the present. Yeats would go so far as to view their resonances as a trace of half-faded ancestry, attaining the status of real literature: “what I have called the ‘applied arts of literature,’ the association of literature, that is, with music, speech, and dance; and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design?” (Au 194). The Yeatsian kokugaku, or sense of nation studies, developed the Abbey Theatre for the promotion of the national self-questioning, including a view to the past: to remind, particularly an urban elite, of that “dream world” currently under threat. The fantastic, so interwoven with the historical, feels threatened by modernity. The implication is that the twentieth century is also a process in which a Guardian of the Well will be once more displaced by the coming of a conquering tribe. The rapid technologies of modernity could deliver such a frightening epochal shift: technological investment now, in an unprecedented way, was bent upon exhuming landscapes wholesale for expansive development. The stakes

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are even higher, now: the new juggernaut runs roughshod over both well and guardian. The Swedish poet Anders Österling, via Bramsbäck’s (1984) commentary, declares that Yeats’s “‘reverence for folklore …’ must to a large extent be attributed to his ‘fundamental susceptibility to every kind of mystical suggestion’” (1). Shaw’s attribution of “our dream world” to Skellig Michael restores legitimacy to feelings that are often dismissed as fantasy or nostalgia. Shaw returns to the bare elements: the aura is constituted by composite factors of history, legend, folk cartography, and physical monument. Equally important is the viewer who is audience to the allure. Shaw takes on “reverence” as susceptibility based on a natural inclination; to reject the awe is to be trapped in the present, the world in which one “lives and works.” Without the sensory capacity for wonder, people lose the imaginative potential for appreciation and respect for a continuum to which the landscape is enchanted. On these principles, the twilight trend in Yeats has a degree of eco-critical forbearance to it: “All these stories are such as to unite man more closely to the woods and hills and waters about him ” (“A Literary Causerie,” in FLM 88). Legends can be both referential and motivational. Superstition, tutelary spirits, ghosts – as entities configured by cultural situation and geographical setting – have relevance, and presence, to modern society in Kyōka and Yeats. At the Hawk’s Well and Kyōka’s Demon Pond share in a sensibility of the folkloric present: the “heroic age,” represented through rebellious anachronisms, should not be temporally separated from the current landscape. Material relics link with the revival of memory, and in this sense ruination connected to the performative affect of melancholy and remembrance. But how does one stage such a phantasm relation to the forgotten? Takahashi Matsuo (2006), a noted adaptor of classical Noh, has staged versions of At the Hawk’s Well that resituate Yeats’s play in more quintessentially Noh staging. In these examples, At the Hawk’s Well has been successfully produced as both conforming to the classical traditions as well as permitting the imaginative freedom of twentieth-century avant-garde. As described, Yeats could not have benefitted from a direct influence of contemporary Japanese dramatics, but the broader implications of the Irish-Japanese dynamic

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certainly enhanced his approach to Japanese theatre in general, especially what he knew of Noh. However, this is not to say he was attempting to recreate the form through recontextualization. What becomes apparent however, as noted by critics like Sangū Makoto (1959), is the striking comparisons between Yeats’s stylistics and neo-Noh playwrights in Japan: while the influences are not direct, a general precondition of shared sensibility and aesthetics, through the general theme of twilight, created what are strongly identifiable congruency in approaches. This might be somewhat unfair, as a worthy legend would require appraisal from artistic as well as political grounds. Certainly, Yeats’s choices reflected the increased sense of Irish independence. Kyōka’s choices are no less meaningful, addressing as they do overlooked regions of Japanese geography. Kyōka and Yeats are both interested in re-narrativizing folkloric material so as to show their influence and impact on contemporary circumstances. A drama derivative from phantasmal Noh, not as a replication of the old form, permitted forms of ancestral intercommunication, of recalling tales and ghosts connected to place, as a modernist practice. Many critics have argued that Demon Pond develops along the plot progression that typifies the pace and development of a plot found in Zeami (see Muramatsu 1974, 7). But Kyōka’s relationship to Noh does not need to be evaluated according to its degree of fidelity. The modernist impulse to innovation could interpolate Noh texts and conventions as a conceptual strategy. Kyōka’s chūkan [in-between-ness], in dramatic form, utilizes Nohlike sequences for twilight effect: inverted time, dream interpretation, and the meeting of the legendary with the contemporary. Yeats’s shadows recreate, on stage, the powerful realm that Shaw describes. It is the rational, rootless world that thus becomes dim. The peripheries restore what the centrifugal centre has been shuffling away, and the interlocutors of in-between-ness are masked spectres of historical ambiguity. The mask situates a form of confrontation between alternate epistemologies. Tony Harrison describes its potential function this way in “Facing up to the Muses” (1988): “The mask reinforces that primacy [of language] by continuing to speak in situations that ‘normally’ or in realistic or naturalistic drama would render a person speech-

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less” (27). In mugen nō, this primacy of language is an amplification of vanished discourse, chanelled through the mediumship of the mouthpiece in the mask. The theatrical incarnation of Cú Chulainn is enabled through that en-facing that shapes an animate face out of the blurriness in twilight. The mask can have the effect of memory and embodied temporality. Yeats’s masks were a kind of mono no ke [spirit possession] for allocating presentational form to the legendary. For Yeats, the ancestral comes into temporary presence through the mask’s instillation of figured ancestrality. Yeatsian prosopopoeia not only speaks for the ghost, but returns a mouthpiece so the ghost can speak for itself. The immaterial becomes performable, through the reinscribing or reviving of the ancestral inscription, marked by the mask against a twilight stage.30 More generally, Yeats develops a theory of mask that is psychological, as he outlines this in several places, including his Autobiographies. But the performative sensibility of the masked marvel can be a form of agency within a cultural multi-spatiality, in the chronotope created through mugen nō. Thus, imbedded in the psychology, a theatrical premise is apparent: “the mask … is linked with another age, historical or imaginary” (Au 152). The themes of Yeats’s neo-Noh need not be seen as chronologically, formatively, or autobiographically split from Yeats’s overall approach to literature and culture. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” (CP o 238) picks up on themes, and repeats some of the images, from both “Ancestral Houses” (CP o 204) and The Shadowy Waters (the early lyrical poem as well as the later play of the same name). Modes of ancestral appearance act as a visible darkness that hangs over any notion of the present state of things. The well-like “basin” in At the Hawk’s Well, a receptacle for legendary energy like the Demon’s Pond, also spills over in “Ancestral Houses.” Both Kyōka and Yeats in the staging of their plays were committed to the belief that bodily practices must connect an epistemology of tradition to an experiential awareness of cultural cause and effect that interrogate the “accursed shadows” that “delude” (CP 305). For Yeats, without these processes, the mask acts only in a stylized guise of representation. Prosopopoeia enacts the mask’s stylization as emblematic of its culturally historicized distance, and through

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living speech allows the voice of the past to traverse into the dramatic moment of the immediate. Is it the mere act of seeking that makes the sought come into being? Critics have observed that the ghost is not so easily claimed: Alice Rayner (2006) notes, “If words are successful in naming the ghost, there is no ghost” (xxiii). The mask both names, by identifying through features, but also hides, since those features have been placed upon its actual, dissipated face. The restoration is a co-dependent act, one always doomed to be an incomplete encounter. Yeats wonders in his preface to Four Plays for Dancers (1921) (in The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats, 2001), that, perhaps, in the end one would write plays specifically for a type of mask. In such a way, the figuration of plot, defined by the mask, would depict only a broken relic, decontextualized by disregard. Beneath the mask, one can find “hateful eyes / among the desolate places” (CP 306). The Cat and the Moon (1924) Yeats conceived of a performance program for three of his dance plays, modelled, in part, from a traditional Noh cycle. At the Hawk’s Well would be first, followed by a satire, and then conclude in a final work that reflected the preceding themes. The Cat and the Moon, he felt, would act as the second performance, the comical interlude. This is not unlike how Kyōka incorporates paranormal comedy into Demon Pond [Yashagaike]: “I intend my play to be what the Japanese call a kiogen, and come as a relaxation of attention between let us say, ‘The Hawk’s Well’ and ‘The Dreaming of the Bones’” (The Cat and the Moon, in CP 36). The local legend that Yeats refers to in his introduction – “some story, which I have half forgotten” – involves two pilgrims, one blind and the other lame. At their pious destination, they chance upon Colman’s mother, who is awkwardly trying to baptize her child with no water at hand. They put their prayers to the task, asking divine blessing, a bit of rain for the ceremony. Then, suddenly, a nearby ash tree erupts into a geyser of water. The child is baptized and the hermits healed. The Cat and the Moon is also one of these flashpoints, being neither slavishly “Irish” nor “Japanese” in either content or method. As its own kind of Yeatsian stylization, The Cat and the Moon presents

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interesting interpretive versatility for a director. Yeats clearly states that he modelled this play on a sense of kyōgen as mirth.31 At the same time, Yeats connects this farce to his symbolist exegeses concerning the hermetic soul, particularly through the introductory namesake poem, which seems to make use of formulae from Yeats’s non-fiction work, A Vision (1925). So, on the one hand, the satire-playlike format allows Yeats to exhibit some of his most underrated qualities, foolishness and sarcasm. Yeats’s own notes remind us of Minalouche’s Vision symbolism (Plays 896), although he voices allusive potential in an uncommitted way. So, as well as being a comedy of saintly errors, a serious occult cosmography is being pedagogically delivered. The two forces, as Yeats exposes, cannot be balanced as a performance. Kyōgen, in its own domain, wins the contest of mood. Comedy and mystery are deliberately left unresolved and asymmetrical. Any sacred cow can be milked: religion, occupation, and Yeats’s own beloved occultism. The playwright develops a repertory, organized so as to follow the thematic succession of a Noh/ai-kyōgen sequence, although in a more extended fashion. Yeats’s study of Japanese drama went beyond just ghost tales or fallen heroes. As a platform to showcase his humour, a neo-kyōgen could divest itself from the high solemnity and ritual prescriptions of the preceding play. Humour and farce are operative modes that counterpoint the thematic seriousness and dramatic presentation of the anteceding At the Hawk’s Well. Like Hearn’s essay “The Japanese Smile” (1893), Yeats introduces genres of Japanese comedy that help to dismiss the dour stereotypes. While the theatre of Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), it is fair to say, would strongly be in the minds of Yeats’s audience, The Cat and the Moon defies that symbolist condition by refusing to provide stable patterns of meaning. The burlesque execution intentionally undercuts any metaphysical presumptions. And, like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889), the play drives on recklessly through indeterminate nuances of belief or situation. What the stage reveals is that the symbolic praxis of the prose-ish A Vision cannot be sustained in the dance. This has the effect, as in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” of turning away from transcendental Truth to the raw impact of theatrical elementalism. To make an entirely symbolic reading of

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this play, as F.A.C. Wilson (1958) finds, requires that elaborate, multiple allegories be enshrined in the written text. The performance aspects – speech, dance, slapstick – then are overlooked for the sake of intellectual frameworks. Rather than a kabbalistic allegory, Yeats had in mind an alternative conclusion for the satire in this work. He did not include this work in Four Plays for Dancers, as originally planned, because The Cat and the Moon “was in a different mood” (CP 896). In functioning as a kyōgen-like discombobulation, the mood works because of its difference as a rather sardonic counterpoint to At the Hawk’s Well. There may be symbolism here, but the performance elements upset it through a clowning manner that tempers the audience’s frame of reference. The Cat and the Moon contains some of the wildest comical action in all of Yeats’s oeuvre: haphazard gestures, clashing cymbals, and piggy-backed saints. Their dialogue is a highly exaggerated Hiberno-English, a stream of pseudo-patois of “Kiltartanese.” As often as Yeats has been accused of mangling local dialects unwittingly, here the effect is clearly intentional and hyperbolic. The contrived syntax is a much more exaggerated form of the speech habits that Yeats ethnographically recorded previously. Excessively clichéd syntax acts as a metaphor for confused national identities. Their ancestral voices sound off gibberish. The following exchange typifies their slapstick repartee:

BLIND BEGGAR. Look well now, can you see the big ash

tree that’s above it? LAME BEGGAR [getting down]. No, not yet. BLIND BEGGAR. Then we must have taken a wrong turn; flighty you always were, and maybe before the day is over you will have me drowned in Kiltartan River or maybe in the sea itself. (CP 445–6) This passage has a resemblance to a comedic aside from The Tower: Music had driven their wits astray – And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone. Strange, but the man who made the song was blind (I .31–3)

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This poetic passage takes a swipe at the legacy of Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin (O’Carolan; 1670–1738) or perhaps the County Mayo bard referenced earlier, Antoine Ó Raifteiri (Raftery), both of whom were sightless poet-composers. Cloone derives from the Irish word cluain [meadow] rendered into English-language phonetics. Drowning in the Cloone bog or the Kiltartan River entails the same topophilic hazard: one chokes on his or her hunger to digest the landscape. A musician or poet can get lost trying to navigate a map that either has no bearings at all, or only disproportional ones. As Yeats conceived, the audience would have, less than an hour earlier, seen Cuchulain leave the well thirsty. Now, the rebuttal – one can be so overwhelmed by the land as to gag on it. Even in farce, psychogeography is crucial to the thematic ambience of Yeats’s plays. The Cat and the Moon exhibits a kind of warped cartography of myth, one that undercuts the lost ancients of At the Hawk’s Well’s Heroic Age. This kind of reflective mockery demonstrates Yeats’s capacity for critical reflection. For this, Yeats exhibits a tolerance for ridicule that sets him apart from much of the Edwardian occult revivalists. Noted occultists such as Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) were also capable of playful nonsense, but rarely would they so visibly debunk their own macro-narratives of gnosis. Others, such as Eliphas Lévi (1810–75) and G.R.S. Mead (1863–1933), were so obsessed with Masonic formulae that their conceptual writings never leave the realm of rites and initiations. Now, I am not suggesting that the occult can be set aside from Yeats’s plays or poetry, or that it was a minor interest. On the contrary, I have read Yeats as a crucial formulator to an intercontinental movement of the fushigi as a response to modernity. I agree with Leon Surette, who shows that occultism (understood in diverse ways) had an important role in the creation of modernism. This can be documented and observed in Japan and Europe. Occultism includes diverse methodologies for exploring and interpreting spirits, ancestry, and twilight. As such, this theme very much goes to the heart of the story: the ghost, channelled as the imaginative other, as the paradoxical implication of an absence taken on the apparitional option of presence. Theatre, for both Kyōka and Yeats, was very much the natural progression for offering a space for performative bodies of ancestral spirits that was initially mapped out in prose.

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As spectres of the chūkan, they occupy multiple spaces and transverse the achronics of time. And this, I argue here, had a necessary prominence in the practice of Yeats’s anti-naturalism, as it did for Kyōka: the ghost as the haunted marginalia that returns, bidden or unbidden, to overturn the orthodoxies of time and space with irresolvability and indeterminacy. By allowing the prankish nature of the otherworld, Yeats enables a counteractive satire and skepticism, and the targets could include his own necromancy, including the forms established in At the Hawk’s Well. Yeats had a fine talent for blasphemy, as his mage’s moniker Demon est Deus Inversus suggests. In setting itself up as the retort to the brawny Celts of At the Hawk’s Well, The Cat and the Moon contains also mild rebukes of Theosophy, Catholicism, land worship, and the convoluted codes within A Vision.32 The play confounds both orthodox religion and the hermetic spirit. If the dancing cat’s duet with the moon is somehow a depiction of universal equations, it remains a sideshow poem to the carnivalesque circus of saints and beggars. The Cat and the Moon, as a theatrical performance, cannot maintain the mystical focus that the pursuit of gnosis requires. As a failed hagiography of displaced saints, the roving cat is a species of time breached of certainty. In a dramatic form, Yeats depicts in his neoNoh a spatio-temporal enactment of what Giorgio Agamben (2007) describes as frustration: the “attempt to conceive of time differently must inevitably come into conflict with this concept, and a critique of the instant is the logical condition for a new experience of time” (110). This sensibility is realized in that the dimensions of Yeats’s neoNoh spaces are deliberately erratic, paced in hectic and head-turning directions, as a means to disrupt the claim to history. This is very much in keeping with the Revivalist thinking: an ancestral recall that, in recovering the past, becomes less alienated from the demand for resistance in the present. Such a revolutionary perspective becomes most apparent in The Dreaming of the Bones in my next chapter. The two beggars of The Cat and the Moon, satirically, are never certain of the reality of their destination or their origins, thus they forfeit neither authenticity of their communication, nor the condition of their own bodies and souls. Everything remains in an indeterminate

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mood. Religion and salvation, faith and healing, are found through whim rather than belief:

LAME BEGGAR. That is a lost soul, Holy Man. FIRST MUSICIAN. Maybe so. (CP 452) And, moments later, this conditional mood is reiterated, with no further degree of certainty or resolve:

FIRST MUSICIAN. Aren’t you blessed? LAME BEGGAR. Maybe so. (CP 453) The Cat and the Moon’s staging could make use of the same well that appeared previously in At the Hawk’s Well. The pagan font now becomes an ecclesiastical holy well; the Christian dynasty has replaced the Cuchulainic one to the audience’s perspective. Yeats, even in his farce, works from a cartographic specificity. He uses the visual and suggestive dimensions of exact sacred sites, reproductively, for theatrical enplacement. As Yeats identifies in his introduction to The Cat and the Moon: “The well itself is within a couple of miles of my Galway house, Thoor Ballylee, and is sacred to St Colman and began a few years ago to work miracles again, rejuvenated by a Gaelic League procession in its honour” (VP l 805). The political overtones of this statement are subtle, but pronounced: nativist movements, in their assertion of place and pride, were apparently reviving the dormant magic of the landscape. St Colman’s well is indeed a picturesque reality, prominent in a rustic landscape – although one of many such holy wells to be found in this diocese. Indeed, Colmán [Irish: woodpigeon, derivative of columba, dove] is the name for almost two hundred saints in early Christian Ireland.33 According to local oral traditions, the Colman in question at this site is one Colman Mac Duagh. And these well waters, near Corker, Galway, were the site of his baptism. This story is a point of pride for the village’s Catholic church, where displayed relics support the legend with tangible evidence. One can find there the miraculous stone that St Colman and his mother used

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to float out upon, so great were the rushing waters. All in all, according to the church’s version, this story is a moral tale of faith, nature, and divine transcendence. As holy travellers in quest for a cure, their faith has healed them: “Go; your faith has made you well” (Mark 10:52). According to this official, standard version, the pilgrims were pious monks, summarily blessed by the baptismal waters, not at all the backbiting beggars in Yeats’s version. But Yeats rejects this line of homily of St Colman and its Trinitarian message. His play, instead, concludes with an inconclusive miracle. Why can the lame beggar suddenly dance – is it divine agency or self-hypnosis? Why does the First Musician, St Colman, prance off stage singing a show-tunelike song about a black cat? The conclusion of the play provides neither closure not redemption: the saintly encounter remains irresolute and irrational, rather than religious or redemptive. The plot does not deny that a sacred site is present, only that this time the mythictopography is mocked. The Cat and the Moon’s staging assumes the suggestiveness and allusive purpose of the specific location, but corrupts the ancestral recall of the religious tale for comical effect. Chronologically, this play takes place in a post–Cú Chulainn era. This deliberately Catholic epochal play transforms, visually and historically, the pagan well of At the Hawk’s Well into a Christian baptismal font, much as the coming of Christianity renamed ancient sites with new beliefs. An uncomfortable Oisin-into-Patrick-like shift has occurred. The Cat and the Moon takes place at twilight; however, the greys are different, reproducing and also rewriting, the rough beauty of At the Hawk’s Well’s setting. Natural landscapes still suffer from neglect and drought, not the flood narrative in the official story of the monks. And, as parenthetical image, why is the dancing cat a vision of playfulness? The insertion of the dancing cat, at the beginning and end, but totally removed from both plot and stage directions, is enigmatic. It is hard to see how, in this play, either the cat or the saint fulfils what Yeats describes in the preface: “The saint may touch through myth the utmost reach of human faculty and pass not to reflection but to unity with the source of his being” (VP l 806). Minalouche, the moonstruck cat, has lunar inclinations that do suggest A Vision’s phasal workings, but how does this become imparted on stage? Yeats

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acknowledges that Minalouche does relate to the tinctures, but just as quickly backs off by saying, “It all grows too faint to me” (VP l 806). As an independent play, The Cat and the Moon more readily lends itself to some occultic content, as in the manner of “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid.” But used parenthetically for a kyōgen, the gnosis becomes warped. To maintain a symbolic reading of this work requires tremendous stretches to consistently read the theatrical action as connected to the lunar phase of ontological change. Is this cat really a model of lunar phases in zoomorphic form? Possibly. But the stereotypical casting is suspect. The black feline, after all, is famous enough as the witch’s familiar, and Minalouche happened to be the name of Maud Gonne’s pet. It is just as possible that the animal provides a satirical perspective that the human does not, as Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) famously did in Wagahai wa neko de aru [I am a Cat], in which the cat is the heroic perspective of the outsider upon a modernizing Japan. Yeats had made a large white cat the demonic force in “Village Ghosts” from The Celtic Twilight. But the black cat has a disconnected feeling from the action. Minalouche’s interspecies intervention is the ability to dance among the quest and conquest cycle of cultural history. Thus, when Yeats describes Minalouche’s behaviour as “tired of that courtly fashion,” he also is making a claim for the nature of kyōgen as the possibility to parody what might be elitist pretensions. The Cat and the Moon, like At the Hawk’s Well, demonstrates the adaptive matrix of Yeats’s dramatic vision, as one informed by, and departing from, pre-figured models of genre heritage. His stagecraft still assumes a degree of local knowledge from his audience for maximum effect. National farce still requires folklore. And this characteristic, in part, leads to that air of elitism that surrounds Yeats’s neo-Noh plays. Quotes from Yeats, like the following, further strike an exclusivist stance: “I want to create for myself an unpopular theatre and an audience like a secret society, where admission is by favor and never to many” (EI 254). Reconciling the “secret society,” such as in The Speckled Bird, with Yeats’s vigorous work in creating a public Irish National Theatre suggests two contrary motivations. “Admission is by favor” implies a selective screening process, an exclusivity that has also dogged classical Noh for centuries. Noh’s origins were

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quite humble, but by the Edo period (1603–1868) the theatrical form had been developed into an artificial world of privilege and power, one that culturally contrasted with the more populist kabuki. During a recent performance in New York, kabuki master Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII bluntly stated: “Noh has a history of patronage by those who hold power. It is the common people who have always supported Kabuki. Noh and Kabuki have nothing in common” (quoted in Gurewitsch 2007, Arts 6). I do not wish to mount some defence of Yeats regarding aristocratic assertions, which surface in many aspects of his life and work. I do see, though, how some comments also relate to his overall wish for a theatre independent of popularity and media culture. By getting away from the masses, Yeats had in mind a theatre independent of fads and advertisements, one that “had no need of mob or Press to pay its way” (“Certain Noble Plays,” in EI 221). Yeats, as I have noted, felt a deep distrust for the contortions of newspaper presentations. He writes quite victoriously about detecting a press photographer who had infiltrated a production: “I remember, however, with a little pleasure that we found a newspaper photographer planting his camera in a dressing-room and explained to him that as fifty people could pay our expenses, we did not invite the press” (ibid.). And, Yeats adds with a Tanizaki-like distaste for how electrical lighting affected the stagecraft of Noh stage, “flashlight photographs were not desirable for their own sake” (CP 691). In terms of privacy, Yeats wants a Noh-esque intimacy for the twilight dramas, a smaller setting of closeness and familiarity. He wants to move away from the grand productions of opera and European showmanship. Yeats states that the most appropriate lighting for his variant drama is “the lighting we are most accustomed to in our rooms” (CP 297), which bears a likeness to Tanizaki’s (1933) description: “The darkness on a Noh stage is the same darkness within a household [“domestic architecture,” 26] of that time” (31). Yeats wants to maintain the nearness of shadows, to keep the stage low and visually accessible as an intimate connection to the audience, a performative apparatus of light and dark (meian). He also, for the Abbey Theatre, produced dramas designed for larger audiences. But small-scale stagecraft was intended to develop the twilight sheen necessary for the twilight atmosphere of a vanishing discourse: “I had a different feeling about [the] stage when I wrote it – I would 378 | Ancestral Recall

not now do anything so remote, so impersonal … it is almost religious, it is more a ritual than a human story” (SW 425). This required experiment, adjustments in format, and other reformulations. Yeats made directorial suggestions; actors should behave in the manner of a “marionette” (HW 210), a trend well underway in Europe thanks to the conceptualizations of Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966). In his essay on “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” Yeats states that the Japanese actors to achieve style “found their movements upon those puppets” (EI 230), the still gestures of bunraku. Æ Russell (1867–1935) had suggested that the suitable presentation of this play would require an alternative stage “an old hall in a castle” as well as paradigmatic costume “an ancient robe” (Le2, vol. 2, 175). The theatrics of restraint and sparsity enacted dreamlike spaces of participation for the minds of the audience. Landscapes, both legendary but accessible, and characters, both anthropomorphic and astral, operated together to intensify the metaphysical multiplicities of a work. Yeats was open to trial and error. The unavoidable hostility between ancestral stylization and the presence of the modern demands experimentation and the encroachment of failure. The Cat and the Moon demonstrates, however, that a variety of narratives modes, including satire, produce an attention to the ancestral that resists the superficial collusion in what the official tale might didactically enforce. In “A Dialogue between Self and Soul” the basin, like the Hawk’s Well or the Demon’s Pond, collects the run-off of a shifting history and acts as a kind of receptacle for ancestral energies (CP o 239, I.34). Also in this poem, Satō’s sword appears again as a symbol of physical continuity, one that survives transference through time and bears witness to the compositional experiences that forged and marked its nature. The debate between self and soul is located within “the winding ancient stair,” an architecture of twilight that must be “summoned.” But, like The Tower, the halo of this shadow surrounds a crumbling, neglected monument (CP o 238, I .3). The tongue itself might become another stone stair upon which a lost tale is dumbly told. The Soul and Self cannot make sense of the attainability for this ancestrality under poor conditions: the past is persuasive in its emblematic appearance, but unreliable due to its materiality. On the one hand, the Soul in Yeats’s poem has looked for an ancestral talisman that has both the veneer of heritage as well as the applicability of The Stagecraft of Twilight  |  379

engagement in the astral. The Self wants the ancient, but practically and physically so. Satō’s sword provides both, being “emblem of the day” while still keeping the heritage of “the night.” In dividing Self from Soul, Yeats allows for a pervasive instability that keeps categorical notions of I unsettled. What or who inhabits the body, what motivation is acting through it, creates unbearable tension in the Well Guardian’s character. What is the personality who can “think of ancestral night that can / If but imagination scorn the earth” (CP o 239, I .20–1). The Soul scorns all of this, viewing the crime of death and birth as an ouroboros to be avoided. The Self thinks of experiential encounters, seeing instead a cyclic return that restores vitality. Oisin has taken a similar position: the physical artifact bears witness to continuity and exchange. In terms of drama, we should also keep in mind, Nietzsche and Greek tragic drama influenced Yeats as much as did Noh.34 From Nietzsche, Yeats exhibits a sense that the tragic aspects of drama attempt to rise above the limited and often myopic circumstances of the social condition that created its pain. For this reason, the Revivalists sought material connections in which twilight, however obliquely, has moments in which its amorphous condition becomes some how perceptible. The Eastern merchants in the play The Countess Cathleen (1892) offer various caveats about the paradoxes of trying to distinguish time, culture, and narrative in remnants, relics, and residue of that which is passed along: For there’s a vaporous thing – that may be nothing, But that’s the buyer’s risk – a second self, They call immortal for a story’s sake. (CP 36–7) As a force of material culture, Satō’s sword cuts through the gnostic predicament that the Soul insists on making, in effect uniting the bifurcated spirit/matter split that the Soul maintains. The second section of “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” describes the Self ’s intensely personal project of building anew in the shadow of the past: I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! (CP o 240, ll. 25–8)

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This poem ultimately argues that the Self cannot perform its role in the world without the contact of pleasure and memory that the Tani­ zakian aura provides. A necessarily kinetic energy keeps the flesh from turning into another kind of forgotten stone. The sword balances, neither ignoring the twilight nor being sheathed entirely by it either. Sensuality must be maintained in the daily encounters. The emblems of the night infuse the performance of day, refined through a greyness of twilight. In combining the measure of the individual against the length of Satō’s sword, the Self thus comes to a dancer/ dance conclusion. The flow of history, and its tangible story, carries both Self and Soul along with it, as a flux that permits a traceable flow of continuity that is the shadows and twilight of the “ancestral night.” Both Kyōka and Yeats depict, however, that ancestral recall is not an unmitigated good, that the collision of presences produces a synthesis of reconciliation. The third play in the cycle, The Dreaming of the Bones, deliberately critiques a kind of passive nationalism that, in reckoning the present, would absorb the spectre of the national past as a process of rote observance. This third play, discussed in the next chapter, depicts not only how the present retroactively reifies the ghosts of the past, but how those same phantasms reify the future anterior of the cultural-to-become. As Diana Taylor (2003) describes it, “the ghosts, the tropes, the scenarios that structure our individual and collective history. These specters, made manifest through performance alter future phantoms, future fantasies” (143). Where does the phantom end and the future begin? For Yeats, the problematic national self-consciousness, much like the eager dramatist, prefers the immediacy of representation to the facticity of the distantly historical: “Players and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of ” (“The Circus Animals Desertion,” CPo 355, ll. 23–4). As The Dreaming of the Bones dramatizes in a collision of temporal performances, the emblems may become very unruly and dissatisfied familiars. The haunting of nation resides in a twilight mourning that cannot overcome the betrayal of historicism.

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e

c ha p t e r s e v e n

The Cursing of the Bones It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody. – Brendan Behan

For over a century, Rostrevor, a predominately Catholic village in County Down nestled near the Mourne Mountains, exhibited symptoms of a localized haunting. Across decades, residents and visitors alike swore adamantly that they could hear the eerie ringing of a phantasmal bell. So persistent was this sound, and so ongoing were its chimes, the ghost-ringing took on the proportions of folklore and legend, from the parish of Kilbroney to beyond. No one could locate its clapper, or where the sounds were coming from, so doubters began to make noises. But the numbers of witnesses were extensive, so blaming the phenomenon on auditory hallucination, nostalgia, or whatever else did not put the matter to rest. Then, during one particularly nasty storm in 1855, a terrific wind uprooted a large oak – in which, among its branches, an ancient bronze bell had lain hidden for ages. Here was the fantastic belfry, intact, dislodged from its perch in the tree. The phantom bell had a physical location after all. But how did a large instrument of the church end up in a tree? One likely theory as to its strange concealment is that, during the era of

the Penal Laws, a priest from St Bronagh’s hid the parish’s cherished treasure, lest it be confiscated or melted down to make ammunition, as was frequently done to Catholic sacramentals. Slavoj Žižek (1989) has remarked frequently on how ideology permeates the perception of fantasy: the political performs “a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” (21). The forms of twilight and necromancy under discussion offer ways of uncovering this non-essence posing as essence: the ghost and the bell together as one. Folklore as a condition of mytho-historical storytelling fascinates in its anecdotal situation of imaginative interpretations comingling with the received versions of history. Folklore and communal orature cooperate in the construction and reception of this story as local narrative that documents not only the materials but also the affects of trauma. The bell is a real artifact, as well as a perceived spectral effect, heightened by the poignancy of local circumstances. The haunting of Rostrevor demonstrates that a folk tale, atmospheric circumstances, and legitimate historical events all coincide dramatically in producing the phantasmal within the local space. The supernatural is not so otherworldly, but concomitant to human activity. But the supernatural, as the investigation of traces and margins, allows for the reconstitution, through apparitions, of the ruptures that underlie its own presumptions to sources and origins. In this way, its power of fantastic depictions to go against must coincide with the untenable claim to access the hidden and dislocated. In eschewing the normative commands of history and linearity, the supernatural goes against symbolic determinism, but in doing so must concede the irreducibility of any new and contrary symbol to be partial, incomplete, and irrecoverable. For the Celtic Revival, this is the preconditioned strife of the ghost as a communal affect, in the form of imaginative story, which reveals the limits of historical progress as uniform, determinable, and linear. The Revivalists’ method, as I have explored, puts into practice a contextual response, in the form of Irish nationalism, to the predicament of modernity that Walter Benjamin (1968) warns as a “concept of historical practice of mankind that cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time” (261).

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Revivalist modes of supernatural speculation in the form of folklore, alternatively, critique this progress, arguing for forms of contiguity that capitalistic, imperialistic progress tries to cover up. As a form of nationalism, the supernatural does retain political affects, yet they also expose, through phantasm, this basic absence that ideology covers up through prescriptive nationalisms. Yet, in enacting this absence in spectral terms, the drama of the fantasy must ultimately collapse under its own untenable claims. Just as the trauma of colonialism in Ireland took on the haunted sound of a bell in Rostrevor, so would Yeats’s later plays, mindful of traumatic moments of social conflict that institute the nation-state, paradoxically uncover the betrayal that is the moment of foundation. The ghost, in a lack of essence, is a hole disguising a lack. The Dreaming of the Bones represents one of Yeats’s most fully conscious political engagements with how historical narratives converge uncomfortably in the contemporary condition of national selfconsciousness. Wayne K. Chapman, the editor of this play for the Cornell Yeats series, documents how Yeats tinkered, through manuscript revisions as he did with The Wanderings of Oisin, with the right geographical setting to situate his themes. Originally set in the Wicklow Hills, much closer to the 1916 violence, Yeats finally chose a more reclusive spot in the bleak and windswept area of County Clare. The ancient battlefield of Corcomroe (Corco Modhruadh),1 in the area of the Burren, furnished the ancestral nuances that thematically link landscape to theatrical action. Yeats was drawn to the Corcomroe Abbey partly because of its surrounding natural milieu, a combination of desolate limestone and green fields. However, Lady Gregory’s own field notes on this area’s myth and history, intended as an introduction for a play in the same location, provided Yeats with the research that determined his eventual choice for setting. The cast of characters in The Dreaming of the Bones does not relate to Corcomroe directly, but Yeats found situational correspondences in deeds connected to location. As St Colman’s story is connected to the site in Galway, the misdeeds of Donagh O’Brien, who invited the Normans into Ireland for his military goals, infect the terrain of Corcomroe. The situational guilt is thus contextually receptive to the

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similar actions of The Dreaming of the Bones’s poltergeists, Diarmuid and Dervorgilla. Diarmuid and Dervorgilla relate to Corcomroe not through factual history, but by symmetrical cause-and-effect relations that create an ontological trap, one that captures their roaming spirits. The Dreaming of the Bones will, more fully and problematically than any other of Yeats’s plays, dramatize the historical and cultural quandaries that ancestral recall brings about as rupture in the present conceptions of cultural continuity. As much as one may or may not be obligated to invoke the heritage of the past, there will be distressing encounters when some of those ghosts are summoned into the present. Accepted interpretations of a historical narrative may not square up with the adaptation required to serve a current order of business. Diarmuid kidnapped Dervorgilla, a daughter of the King of Meath, in 1152. In some versions, they elope together, departing from Dromahair, County Leitrim, a village to which Yeats frequently travelled. In response, Dervorgilla’s husband, O’Rourke, organized an invasion into Diarmuid’s kingdom, located in Leinster. (Arguing against republicanism’s ourselves alone – Sinn Féin – historians will thus point out that Ireland had not been, historically, a united island, but rather the scene of violent contests among power-brokers and warlords.) However the Irish understood themselves as a cohesive identity, this also had the markings of an internal dispute. O’Rourke’s incursions resulted in the dethroning of Diarmuid, and his exile to England. Desperate and driven by vendetta, Diarmuid – in what is considered to be one of the earliest and most gratuitous acts of Irish collaboration – invited the sasanach [Englishman] into Ireland for military and financial support. Colonially keen, Henry II obliged and offered to restore Diarmuid’s position, for a price. Some of his Leinster lands would become a settlement for the English army who accompanied him. England made its foothold in Ireland, on account of this invitation. And Diarmuid’s name, like Benedict Arnold’s, became an epithet for national betrayal. The play explicitly makes the association between Donough and Diarmuid as linked by the same crime: “The King of Thomond was his rightful master. / It was men like Donough that made Ireland weak” (DB , in CP 439). And, as the play’s current

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situation of an occupied Ireland in 1916, the twilight setting combines current politics that reflect the ancient topography of a collaborationist Thomond. Yeats’s understanding of Irish literatures and languages was inhibited by a number of conditions. His sources were secondary, and their accompanying commentaries often had strong political motivations. Fundamentally, Yeats lacked knowledge of the languages. In short, he was not a professional scholar. Although he supported archivists, translators, and medieval codicologists, he did not position himself as a scholarly authority. Yeats acquired most of his concepts and depictions not from manuscripts, but from orature – versions of stories as circulated in the street and in the fields. This kind of community-based information entertained both as retellings from an earlier source and as contemporary lore adjusted to the present. Revivalist folk materials – symbols, stories, and images – were evolving and adopting themselves in response to external and internal stimuli. Thus, Yeats’s versions and re-narratives have their own kind of roots in the speech of Western Ireland. Further redactions for a received heritage of myth need neither reject nor perpetuate a standard version. As Yeats said earlier, in A Vision (1925), “I have brought the harp-strings into ‘The Shadowy Waters,’ where I interpret the myth in my own way” (Vi 188). Irish literature abounds with the practice of working innovations and derivations from prototypical models from the classics. As Dáithí Ó hÓgáin points out in The Lore of Ireland (2006), authors of medieval texts concerning Cú Chulainn “took great liberties with pre-existing material of the Ulster Cycle” (145). They reshaped the legends in many ways, to make more romance-friendly genres, or by adding their glaring substitutions or alterations for narrative purposes. But these authors, as does Yeats, do not treat the materials as purely inventive and disconnected from a genealogy of storytelling that had brought folkloric materials into their hands. Mythic poetry acts necessarily as an ongoing zone of exception, in which the local keeps a vestige of the ancestral myth, transmitted through a continuity that both preserves and adapts. Necessarily, the storytelling must perform both duties, preservation and adaptation, in order to speak against the encroachment of social forces that impinge on minority

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histories.2 Old tunes in new tricks had been the motivation for Yeats’s poem “The Fiddler of Dooney” (1899). Scenes in The Celtic Twilight such as “By the Roadside” depict how the knowledge distribution of folk music requires a community of performance, a face-to-face relationship of exchange and instruction. The oral referents find their bearings in locale: Ballysodare, Cooldumman (the site of the infamous Battle of the Books between Saints Colmcille and Finian), the Hungry Rock, and so forth. Thus, as we see in his Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth (1993), edited by Robert Welch, Yeats admires the organic quality of storytelling and storytellers as the real commerce of culture: “the economists should take their measurements not from life as it is, but from the vision of men like him” (FLM 63). The Dreaming of the Bones, however, stages a crucial debate on the relationship between current versions and the ancestral model, between foundation myths and contemporary issues of revolutionary statehood. What happens, face-to-face with the half-vanished, when the local legend is a curse of history that the modern would rather do without? What does a minority culture do when, fighting off its occupation to reclaim both past and future, it actually owes its ongoing predicament to the sins of its heritage? Ancestral recall influences the national narrative of current events with a negative reminder, one perhaps best left, disregarded, to the past. There is ambivalence to the national past: “praying in Irish” – but what prayer and what words? Unclear. The Irish militant speaks almost entirely in English throughout the play, not even conversing with the spirits in the language, presumably, they knew. In the present moment of prosopopoeia, these shape-shifting ancestors now speak in the colonizer’s tongue. The smidgen of praying in Irish, with unspecified words, enacts the dying language spoken before the dead. This is a central theme that cannot quite announce itself: the heteroglossia of prayer and violence in which the dying language, spoken in the contemporary accent, awakens the original speakers of the same tongue, but in the ancestral speech. Will they understand each other? The dialectic of death and survival occurs in the semi-incarnation of the past’s accounting for the present. Like the texts discussed in the previous chapter, as a kind of phantasmal Noh, The Dreaming of

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the Bones combines the mytho-topography of Irish history and saga with atmospheric elements from the Noh, in particular the usages of ghost lore as the dramatics of a phantasmal aesthetic, or yūgen. Arthur Waley (1998 [1921]) discusses a sense of this concept, variously translated as mystery and depth or the subtle and the profound, as a characteristic of Noh (22).3 The two characters of this word both suggest mystery, spirit, grace, although in combination yūgen is a sensibility. The term is much older than Zeami’s sense of refinement and elegance. The twelfth-century poet Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114–1204) wrote extensively on its varying nuances, many of which developed from religious sermons that had dark and penitential overtones (Fujiwara, Jichin oshō jika’awase, vol. 2, 312). Shunzei argues for a broader sense that included a formal appreciation for eerie beauty, the presence of the fushigi as a force of the apparitional. The modernists’ perspective, of course, has its own sense of yūgen that distinguishes them from both Zeami and Shunzei. The Dreaming of the Bones’s most poignant decision involves whether or not the soldier, as a figure of revolutionary politics, will make amends with a heritage that suggests Irish duplicity. To see how the soldier reaches this crisis of involvement with the dead, it is important to remember that the theatrics of The Dreaming of the Bones commit to an accessible reality that is paranormal and to the para-temporal. Kyōka and Yeats, utilizing modern kinds of yūgen, critique a social predicament in which industrialization or other forces might overrule a long-standing regard for the mysterious. The actuarial basis of Enlightenment, and elements of science, made “superstition,” “foolishness,” and “mystery” cognates. A counter-strategy develops, one in which superstition becomes intentional and resistant. The Celtic Twilight contains all manner of deliberate phantasms as perceptible: topographic animisms, natural elements as potential talismans, ablution rites, and necromancy. The chimeric power in Kyōka’s Yashagaike [Demon Pond] follows a similar trajectory. Overcoming utilitarianism and temporality means to turn, partly, to the archaic as a rebellious aesthetic and alternative ethical mandate. The mystery, however, has a communal outline for presences as traces that are in the process of disappearance.

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In terms of how a modernist literature interpolates folkloric materials, Yeats parallels Kyōka in that they both work from their deep interests in forms of literary mediumship as a means to negotiate ancestral voices and symbols. Neither was limited in his approach by a parochial commitment to his own national literature. However, the mythology of place and landscape provided bearings for communicating with the local genius loci. Yeats drew upon varied repositories of Irish fairy lore, and Kyōka worked out of a familiarity with Chinese ghost legends, as well as Japanese examples such as Ueda Akinari (1734–1809). It is useful to think of Yeats’s multicultural, composite approach to ghost lore as a research tendency, very much a modernist technique shared by other yūgen authors of that time in Europe and Asia. Yeats takes an intercultural approach to the fantastic: “Certainly I find it in old Irish literature, in modern Irish folk-lore, in Japanese plays, in Swedenborg, in the phenomena of spiritualism, accompanied as often as not by the belief that the living can assist the imaginations of the dead” (Vi 221). By “it” Yeats is referring to methodological examples in which ancestral recall is an existential obligation of assistance. Reibaisha, or mediums, are not necessarily the preserve of Gothic novels, crystal balls, tarot cards, or the I Ching. The Irish Revival finds an ethical motivation, a spiritual purpose, to the past. Necromancy claims and recalls a particular glimpse of the vanishing and the previous to peer into the cross-temporal phantasms who leave traces in the twilight present. But The Dreaming of the Bones shows Yeats’s willingness to complicate the issue of both ancestry and recollection. In this play, the lustre of time can be, in fact, a curse. The abbey contains numerous effigies, many of which seem better left to their private purgatories. Folk history cannot be swallowed whole as a pristine capsule of undefiled truth. In portraying the condition of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla as vanishing characters who have become entrapped, Yeats draws upon Japanese depictions of jibakurei, traumatized spirits fettered to place through psychic debts, to further elaborate on the vengeful characterhood of the sídhe [the people of the mounds] from At the Hawk’s Well.4 In The Dreaming of the Bones, the jibakurei are “angry ghosts who wander in a wilful solitude” (in CP 440).

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As negative spiritus loci, jibakurei are inverted ancestral presences, ones vanished yet still affixed to a specific location as karmic prisoners. In The Dreaming of the Bones, the punishment is the result of a rupture caused by national psychomachia, of which they were the instigators. As species of discarnate history, the curse of dreaming is that one can never achieve re-embodiment. At most, ghosts might transverse time in order to take on a mouthpiece, provided something of flesh is present to activate their communication. In The Dreaming of the Bones, there is nothing lastingly beautiful, as history replaces culture, and culture is condensed into a time vacuum, dislocated from purpose and potential. The afterlives of trauma do not readily yield to propagation or propaganda. The Dreaming of the Bones (1919) The Dreaming of the Bones’s similarity to Nishikigi, the Noh play by Zeami Motokiyo (1363–1443), is well known. Yeats makes the degree of conceptual influence clear on several occasions. For example, in his essay “Swedenborg, Mediums, and Desolate Places,” Yeats provides an extended summary and description of the plot of Nishikigi (EI 334–5).5 But, aside from outlining the plot, his commentary on the thematic material explains the role for folklore in modern drama as interrelated with phantasmal history. New trends in stagecraft can still extrapolate from heritage materials – indeed, show their relevance rather then leave them behind in dusty stasis. The Dreaming of the Bones takes up this predicament of how the modern, the living, assist the imagination of the dead. Nishikigi also resonated with the local storytelling, striking a note of sympathy for Yeats: “I remember that Aran story of the lovers who came after death to the priest for marriage. It is not uncommon for a ghost, ‘a control’ as we say, to come to a medium to discover some earthly link to fit into a new chain. It wishes to meet a ghostly enemy to win pardon or to renew an old friendship. Our service to the dead is not narrowed to our prayers, but may be as wide as our imagination” (Later Essays 71–2). J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands notes the prevalence of ghost lore as functioning in a way beyond hapless superstition, but a way of commemorating a sense of connection to those lost at sea. Just as this

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restless couple is freed by a priest’s sacrament, in Nishikigi a wandering yamabushi monk offers an o-harai purification to free the spirits from a karmic blockage. Of course, Nishikigi is not a Catholic story of indulgence and redemption, but one of intercession and release. However, while sharing different religious dogma, The Dreaming of the Bones and Nishikigi have much in common. The imaginative present, operating in the in-between-ness of twilight, can intercede and communicate with the ancestral past, even so far as to revive, release, or redeem it through metaphysical intersections. The physical remains interactively contiguous with the immaterial. Much of the world’s literature exhibits archetypes of crossing a bridge, or other symbol of a liminal threshold, in which spirit and person come into contact. Ghosts regularly intercede in human affairs, and vice versa. Such depictions are particularly noticeable in Irish and Japanese writing in early modernity. The visual arts of Uta­gawa Kuni­yoshi (1797–1861) depict various demons and wraiths interconnected with the activities of a human agency. For this kind of phantom art, Kuniyoshi could draw upon a massive inventory of the spirit world found in Buddhism. Hungry ghosts [Japanese: gaki or jikininki; Sanskrit: preta] are a common motif in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jainist preaching. Allegorically, they suggest how desire can transmute the soul after death into a ravenous phantom. Kuniyoshi worked out of both innovation and ancestral conception. As a classical literary example of the ancestor in the otherworlds, Kyōkai penned the influential Nihon ryōiki in approximately 823 CE .6 This work is an anthology of miracle tales of matters pertaining to the intercessional relationships between the living and the dead, and how these can produce beneficial and harmful karma in the transformations between being into next-being. Also, the Ketsubonkyō [Blood Bowl Sutra] describes the damned being sent to a blood-pool hell. On a recent bus tour I took of the Kunisaki Peninsula, Ōita, the guide earnestly invited all of us on the coach to chant the “Hannya shingyō” for the repose of any angry spirits in this region’s many haunted temples. A crucial moment during the annual memorial service in Nagasaki, for atomic bomb victims, is the presentation of sacred buckets filled with water. This kensui offering originates from witness accounts of how the streets were filled with screams, “Mizu nomitai!” [Water, I

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need water!]. Many people, of all ages, did not die immediately, but slowly over several days from burns and radiation. “Mizu nomitai!” Every year, in the summer heat of Kyushu, schoolchildren offer now what was not available then, that this drink might give succor to any suffering spirits still in the vicinity.7 One of Yanagita’s other essays, “Senzo no hanashi” [About our Ancestors] (1945), examines in great detail the practical meanings of senzo in relation to cultural practices, as cross-influential. Countless examples of psychogeographical connections between terrain and tale can likewise be found. We can also think of Yeats’s interests in Japanese depictions of intermediate states [chūin], which was Kyōka’s focus at times as well, and the Revivalists’ concurrent portrayals of limbos and purgatories. The Catholic belief in Purgatory, one shunned by almost all Protestants, has been found faulty because its theology requires a liminal soteriology. Such a domain of in-between existence demands a kind of ancestral recall, in the form of indulgences and offerings. Prayers for the dead have a circularity of retroactive effects. As Yeats writes at the conclusion of his play named after the place of purgation:              O God! Release my mother’s soul from its dream! Mankind can do no more. Appease The misery of the living and the remorse of the dead. (Purgatory, in CP 544) But Yeats strongly differs from Catholic teaching in that his belief in pre-Christian traditions holds that the sídhe are not children of Cain or other soul-less devils. That the sídhe have been assimilated into Catholic theology, instead, proves the point he made in The Wanderings of Oisin in St Patrick’s claim over the Celtic hero. For Yeats, far from being devils, the Fae seem to include former humans, sent into ontological exile, from neglect or banishment by mortal influence. As mentioned previously, Akutagawa strongly detects this sense in Yeats when he selects the word seirei [deceased persons] rather than yōsei [fairy] for translating the word “fairy” from parts of The Celtic Twilight. The shades represent forces of alterity that, out of jealousy, consume the human spirit out of apparitional hunger. Yanagita would,

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in his writings, gradually replace more general words such as yōkai [monster], including tengu [hobgoblins] with senzo [ancestor]. This emphasis on the contextual (socio-religious) shaping of the accursed spirit was as important as the spectral effects produced thereafter. Both the Noh and kabuki canons have many examples of exorcism and purification for restless spirits. As limited as Yeats’s access was, plays such as Aoi no ue [Lady Aoi], sometimes attributed to Zeami, depict ikiryō, a projection of a living person’s spirit into a spiteful astral form. Only an exorcist can nullify its power. Noh developed a pantheon of ghost-spirit masks for depicting the various entities that interact with the protagonist. Thus, a common plot device involves a traveller figure – usually a cleric – who encounters a paranormal presence. The meeting of form and spirit leads to repairs in the space-time continuum. Such literary, as well as metaphysical, situations were suggestive to Yeats as well as to Kyōka. The latter’s Kōya hijiri [The Holy Man of Mt Kōya] has a Noh-like feeling but is in prose: a young man enters into a liminal world, typified by twilight and phantasm, and undergoes an interaction with the ancestral to heal his own emotional dissatisfaction. Ghost lore, as a kind of folklore, further connects literature to the orature of the peripheries. Both Yeats and Kyōka prefer poor country priests rather than celebrated ecclesiastical scholars or other authorities. Kyōka’s depictions of the lowest castes and outcasts of Japanese society, similar to Yeats, reveal elements of society that had been marginal and disregarded. Still, in terms of production and audience, Yeats’s plays remain more aristocratic, in a sense, than Kyōka’s. What Yeats also found through his comparative paranormal studies were varying accounts of how a site or object can be attuned to negative ancestral memories. In some cases, this can take the form of a hex. Superstitions might prevent the purchase of antique kimono sold after the Second World War for food money. A grudge [onnen] becomes a resonant attachment, one that bedevils an object. In this sense, then, what if Tanizaki’s aura (see his In Praise of Shadows, 1989) is an angry one, in that the sentience of the disappearing dark holds a grievance against the presumptuous progress of artificial light? The discourse of the vanishing in twilight exacts a black shadow on its former materiality, returning envy for what had been destroyed,

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displaced, or assimilated into hostile contexts. The revenant hovers in interventional liminality [chūkan] as the present nation tries to return, somehow, to a sense of its collective self. Yeats’s own depictions of devouring shadows, of being spirited away into non-being, demonstrate this sense of a malevolent revenant on many occasions. So, if the element of yūgen in this kind of neo-Noh turns necromancy into a contravening act against time and rationality, can it also ritualistically intervene to heal the trauma of the past? Could a priest remove the curse on a patch of féar gortach [hunger grass]? Can the mad spirit of King Goll or the Guardian of the Well be assuaged? The stagecraft of The Dreaming of the Bones does not recreate a Heroic Age as a substitute for the contemporary. The dramatic conflict arises from the interfacing of a stylized, masked legendary apparition with a youthful, unmasked Irish insurgent, existing in the forward motion of the rebellious present. The two faces, mask and flesh, meet and speak in a colloquy of past and present, but they do not resolve the temporal and national split that divided present politics and ancestral legacy. The stagecraft represents this ideological separation by having flesh confront mask, the former speaking out of the present, and the latter articulating through the astral. Previously, Yeats had experimented with intertwining the legendary with contemporary voices, paratactically through stanzas, as in “Baile and Aillinn” (CP o 403–9). This poem’s textual mechanics rend the verse into patterns of plain type and italics. The former narrates the action according to mythic time, while the latter, as a kind of metred interruption, puts the romantic storyline into the perspective of a skeptical present. The Dreaming of the Bones takes this stanzaic format of divisions and turns it into the conflicted dialogue of the stage. The young soldier behaves as a foil to the heavily restricted motions of the ghost-actors who perform with a rigid degree of grandness and precision. Dervorgilla and Diarmuid are affixed to this spot because their actions exhibited the same fault O’Brien battled. Both guilty parties invited intervention of a foreign army that, in the continuity of history, led step by step to the violence of 1916. Were Yeats to be typologically following Noh, the role of the soldier in The Dreaming of the Bones should be, instead, a kind of monk

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or cleric, one who balances the seen and unseen through an absolving touch upon phantasmal predicaments. If Yeats were trying to produce a Celtic Nishikigi, then the present would heal the past, and the past would teach the present. The priest proxy would cleanse the ancestral lovers of their sins. But Yeats is not writing verbatim Celtic “Noh,” or copying Nishikigi. The bones of Yeats’s Ireland are dreaming within a critical interrogation of the ancestral spectres and their afterlives within geopolitics and memory. Ireland’s nativist origins and historical antecedents are exposed as confused and irreconcilable with the present. The soldier, on the run, rejects communion with the corrupt heritage and the national narratives they represent. The gun in Yeats’s play replaces the love token of Nishikigi.8 Certainly, as a visual motif, the red wand had abundant folkloric associations of union and passion. In the Noh source, the talisman changes from an abandoned love charm into fusion into a harmony with the tones of late autumn. Nishikigi is a play of seasons and colour: the teardrops on the sleeve are chilled into the snow of winter, ejaculated in the dance of reunion: “How glorious the sleeves of the dance, / That are like snow-whirls!” (Pound and Fenollosa 48). The Dreaming of the Bones’s dull greys of cursed twilight are corpselike in contrast to Nishikigi’s chromatic hues. Armed and trained, the soldier refuses to perform a priestly function, and there is no salvific miracle for the boney ruins and effigies of this abbey. Thus, as geographical synesthesia, the landscape reflects the protagonist’s blank encounter. Nature becomes an anti-dream of the heroic past, a crumble of grey neglect. The play’s conflict asks the audience, should the soldier offer a spiritual intervention necessary to free the stasis of the ghosts? The staging of this play in Ireland directly puts a moral onus on the nation builders of the post-1916 era. To do so would amount to a truce, a nationalist reconciliation and closure to collaborationist history. Or should the soldier uphold the sense of ourselves alone as temporal as well as geographical fact? Yeats has taken the metaphysics of Nishikigi – its spiritual and romantic moral of transformation through votive offering – and transposed a political revolt. It is not that the ancestral does not exist, or is invented. If either case were true, then they could be safely ignored. Rather, the force of their story

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as heritage and history is so beguiling and meaningful that lore confounds the revolutionary agenda of the present. The soldier describes the divisive effect, addressing his abandoned ancestors: You have told your story well, so well indeed I could not help but fall into the mood And for a while believe that it was true, Or half believe (DB , in CP 443) Crucially different from The Cat and the Moon or At the Hawk’s Well, The Dreaming of the Bones takes place not at twilight, but at dawn and the break of a new day. The soldier’s obligation is to stand watch for the future by, in a sense, curating the ruins of the past: “I am to lie / At daybreak on the mountain” (DB , in CP 309). The young man prays in Irish, but he refuses to converse in a resolved way with the ancient speakers of that language. As a reinvention of the Oisin predicament, he recognizes all too well the shape and strata of modern culture and geography; it is the legendary that has become the unrecognizable habitat. According to his model for the nation, revolutions must overcome the deepening of the fissures and crevices within a colonial society, ones that ancestral allusions alone cannot fill. The dreams of the bones are disconnected from the surge of political action: “let them dream into what shape they please” (310) means to be made of the same substance as when “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / it’s with O’Leary in the grave” (“September 1913,” CP o 107–8). The jibakurei of modern Ireland, the spirits of revolutionary martyrs, are leaders such as Roger Casement or Patrick Pearse. The soldier thus has no duty to centuries old jibakurei, but is obliged to a contemporary geis, or command, to armed revolt. In this regard, the drama is more Nietzsche than Noh.9 In this space of in-between-ness, the ancestral exist, but they are stuck in twilight, incapable of moving into the new Easter, the “horizon to the east is growing bright” (DB , in CP 314). In refusing to aid the trapped spirits in rejoining Ireland, the soldier reverses the kamikakushi [spirited away] model of a mortal kidnapped by the Fae. This time, the mortal does not release the phantasmal hostage. By turning away from the ghosts – by declining the prosopopoeia of restoring the dignity to their faces – the

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young man claims that physical erasure is, in fact, caused by the ancestral, not the modern: The enemy has toppled roof and gable …           That town had lain, But for the pair that you would have me pardon. (DB 314) Revolutionary nationalism, in this case, is not activated by a recollection of a romantic heritage. On the contrary, this refusal to engage the spectral has a sectarian quality, a commitment to solidarity with the present. Instead of repeating a Buddhist parable of enlightenment, or a Catholic tale of absolution, The Dreaming of the Bones castigates twilight in favour of the growing dawn of nation building. In Nishikigi, love and intercession conquer all: It is a good service you have done, sir, A service that spreads in two worlds, And binds up an ancient love That was stretched out between them. (Pound and Fenollosa 140) Militarism, instead, trumps some moment of ancestral-cultural apotheosis. The political tensions are too inherent in nostalgia; and so as the young soldier says, “I had almost yielded and forgiven it all – / terrible the temptation of the place!” (DB , in CP 315). Putting aside exoneration, the young man closes the door on history as a wraith whose unrequited legacy cannot find forgiveness within contemporaneous fragmentation. There is no olive branch to replace the nishikigi [brocade tree]; there is no sacrament of reconciliation from mortal to ancestor. The contemporary confusion of warfare shows how laying claim to ancestry leads to fraternizing with misleading revenants. Better to look forward then – homeland security takes precedence over homeland necromancy. The contentious panorama of twilight passes into nightfall, emerging into the configured dawn of movement and change. The Dreaming of the Bones is a challenging accomplishment of Yeatsian neo-Noh. The playwright combines his interests in Japanese

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drama with his concerns for Irish history as well as for the current political situation. The characters of this play are demarcated citizens, ones split by chronological time. To be masked, or unmasked, codifies these manifestations of apparitional history in juxtaposition to political combat. The ghosts wear the frozen guise of the heroic, while the soldier faces both past and future exposed as the skin of violence. The Dreaming of the Bones puts insurgency as the force that might find the Easter tones of redemption. Therefore, consider the impression this play would make, if only two hours previous or so the audience had seen Cú Chulainn leave the well parched and cursed. And, next, a farcical romp in which saints – inheritors of Cú Chulainn – twaddle their way toward a miracle. Chronologically progressive, the pre-modern Ulster Cycle becomes the Christian era, and then finally the modern, 1916. A single stage, representative of landscape, has been three times reinscribed within one evening’s cycle of theatre. Eras have moved at breakneck speed to rapid modernity. Those spatial auras that denote residency within a mythic-geography have been first uprooted and displaced by Christianity, then the English, and now by the armed founders of twentieth-century statehood. The vanishing entities on the rim become increasingly layered symptoms of the traffic of time. Twilight assumes so much vanishing, at such a dramatic pace, that most people, things, and places are hurled to the edge by the forthcoming gyre-cyclone. Modernity, then, as a speed of movement, outpaces the models of space and distance that the neo-Noh represent. The mobilization of the modern Irish nation emblematically hearkens to tradition but is institutionally mandated to occupy the future. Wolfe Tone, the Irish revolutionary (1763–1798), espoused nativist assertions of multi-social unity that sought a common name of Irishman for any Protestant or Catholic. To break the connection with England, the flags and identities of the past had to be dissolved and made anew. The military voice becomes the anthem of nationalism. The play calls up images from “The Road at My Door”: in this poem, Yeats himself becomes a Diarmuid figure, an apparitional dream at the sidelines of young men at war: “And turn towards my chamber, caught / In the cold snows of a dream” (CP o 208, ll. 14–15).

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Yeats also, through the unresolved actions of The Dreaming of the Bones, makes predictions about the new militarism of the Irish cause. What will this soldier do in a free and independent homeland? Some of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion, as well as the civil war, would make careers out of military causes. General Eoin O Duffy, blessed by bishops, would sail with his brigade of Blueshirts from Galway to Spain on a Nazi oceanliner. Their next port of call was Madrid in a civil war that Father Paul O Sullivan, rector of a church for expatriates in Lisbon, called “the holiest war that was ever waged on this earth” (quoted in the Irish Post, 21 July 1979). O Duffy apologists are quick to point out that he had also been a technical adviser in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and eventually chief of staff for the Irish Republican Army, in 1922. What will the dream of his bones be: a blue-shirted supporter of Franco, or an important builder for the fledgling Free State, its police force, and a pro-treaty supporter of Collins? The wounds are still fresh, the bones not yet settled. Ken Loach’s film The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) has shown the dramatic call that the Irish Civil War had, already near the legends and twilight, its title taken from a folk song.10 Kobayashi Hideo’s essay “Literature of the Lost Home” [Kokyō o ushinatta bungaku] (1933), with echoes of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), argues that waste now had more prominence than land. The flotsam and jetsam of global markets has buried geographical distinctions and invoke, through their clutter, the disorientation of homelessness: without markings and reminders, one cannot become in-placed anywhere at any time, since cultural signposts have exploited or rebranded as other things. This had been the Urashima Tarō complex: Urashima Tarō like Oisin returns from the otherworld in a state of spatial-temporal confusion, but now on a global scale. Kobayashi argues for national autonomy as a necessary bulwark against the encroachment of global trespass. The actual ancestors had died – the past was a lost country, but some souvenirs of its presence remained. The lustre on those artifacts – cherished talismans rather than shallow postcards – could be a primary space for recollection, even if limited by space and time. These must be distinctive from the industrialized production of souvenir trinkets. David Lloyd (2000)

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comments on this topic: “Kitsch is congealed memory that expresses simultaneously the impossible desire to realize a relation to a culture only available in the form of recreation and the failure to transmit the past” (91, original emphasis). Lloyd adopts a nuanced approach, however, to this problematically unstable art of ancestral recall. Kitsch retains a certain melancholy due to its clearly dislocated condition of production and representation, becoming an “emblem of cultures that have been cast from the futurity of the state” (100). In the 1930s, there was everywhere an enhanced sense of time’s urgency, in which futurity trumps archive; and the process of converting national sentiments into hegemonic authority was underway in both East or West. As noted in the introduction, Tanizaki’s “Geidan” (1933) provides the rather schematic view that he held in the early 1930s, that Japanese artists pursue inner cultivation while Europeans seek craftsmanship and fame. Kobayashi Hideo would take the phrase lost home from Tanizaki’s essay, gesturing toward indigenous spaces of lost national characteristics and a generalized dissolution of place into time. Kobayashi is known for his literary criticism, but he also acted as a wartime propagandist. In these hardening of attitudes, intercultural communication was not always smooth, and the growing global crises and hardening of nationalist sentiment, prefacing the Second World War, was finding expression in literature and art. Political warfare became the central terms for estranging the other, to the point of American atomic weapons and many Japanese massacres of citizens throughout Asia. The Dreaming of the Bones suggests that ancestral recall causes painful interpolations of a violent and conflicted past that confuses, rather enables, nation building in the present. The Dreaming of the Bones chooses the weaponry of the Armalite rifle over the text of the archive, and the revolver over the rose. Had, then, transnational modernism failed to provide sufficient grounds for mutual understanding, to promote peace and dialogue instead of war and exclusion? The Irish-Japanese literary nexus, through the Celtic Revival, sought a different procedure for situating cultural interrelationships, ones formed from literary exchange rather than retreating into artistic incompatibility. The Revivalists straddled the intense debate between ancestral recall and progres-

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sive anticipation. Their most apparent concerns were for vanishing voices, dissipating heritages, the auras and landscapes erased into cosmopolitan indeterminacy. Most prominently, Yeats, through the diversity of his works, toggles the variables in the equation of people, nation, and the traces of whatever may account for their heritage. What now constitutes a lustre of time for the postmodern enquiry, where the fingerprints of the previous handlers have been wiped clean? The Revivalists’ results, like their methods, were varied and complex. The ancestral bobs and weaves as a spectre, whose face has yet to be read. Under its mask are both tradition and deceit, as in Paul Muldoon’s “Hopewell Haiku LXXVII ”: Is that body bag Cuchulainn’s or Ferdia’s? Let’s check the dog tag. (2001, 433) We can continue to read the legacy in the inscriptions, perhaps. Irish literature, most curiously, abounds with interpretations of Japanese classical forms. Irene De Angelis surveys what she calls “The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry” (2007), which, according to her readings, can be found in many Irish writers in the 1960s and after. If by “Japanese effect,” we speak broadly of English-language haiku, references to Zen, memories of Hiroshima, and forms of naturalistic imagery, then this is certainly so. What I have attempted in my own considerations here is to think, beyond the trappings of genre and stylistic tricks, about the unexplored vectors of cultural exchange, between Ireland and Japan, that would have created the conditions for the interlinguistic and heterocultural literatures that we now see so commonplace in Ireland. Japan and Ireland in modernity developed parallel discourses of the vanishings that, as a theme, as a shared theme, became productive points of contact for cross-referenced discussion in a transnational mode. This cross-cultural theme of endangered folklore, its connections to a social dynamic of a community negotiating its heritage, enabled a common principle out of which an international conversation was staged. Yeats argues that the vanishing re-emerges as the folkloric spectral, as attached to landscape. The trauma of erasure

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creates the predicament in which creatures like a sluagh [spirits of the restless dead] or bean sídhe [banshee] find themselves disconnected from the order of the landscape but still interactive with it. The Oisin or Selkie paradox – of a being topographically displaced through the disorientation of the social setting – had practical meaning to communities on the verge of dissipation. Thus, in “Kidnappers,” from The Celtic Twilight, Yeats uses the spirited away trope, as representative of real communal orders being ejected into the phantasmal: “Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had died out of his village in his time” (CT 96). Like the liminal funeral at the crossroads, a community witnesses its own dissolution, as social substances turn into the poltergeist’s air. The rapid material development of the countryside creates such vexing contradiction: social relationships, once enmeshed in custom, now retain disclosure of their past only as hangovers of superstition. This is an important aspect of the Revivalists’ depiction of the fairies, and their pursuit in drama for a kind of soteriological model for redeeming the marginal condition of ancestral twilight. In questioning the souls of the fairy kingdom, Yeats discovers that their world is populated with former humans (the ancestral): “There is hardly a valley or a mountain-side where they cannot tell you of someone being pillaged amongst them” (CT 96). Ancestry, the network for understanding generations as cultural transmission, is banished into the speculative. The trace is further removed, and their conversation has been turned into the phantasmal, half-vanished and half-forgotten. Likewise, in “The Prisoners of the Gods,” Yeats explores “the countless stories told of people who meet ‘the others’ and meet friends and neighbours among them” (FLM 156). Twilight, as ancestrally conversational space, opens a dimension for partially circumventing both the limits of time, but also the limit of place. Twilight, as described by Yeats, helps to create a transnational discussion, and helps to confront the dilemma of cultural isolationism. According to a post-Herderian model, if one is conditioned by his or her own cultural upbringing, attuned as it is to the particulars of place, how is authentic appreciation of another’s cultural position (place) possible? A possible solution is that diversity does not need to be transcended in favour of a universalist framework – such as the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) eventually en-

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visaged. Diversity can meet diversity, and both can retain their distinction, through a mutually shared praise of shadows. Shadow is a point of communicative contact and intermingling, preserved by the qualities of the phantasmal domain. As Mishima suggests in his letters to Kawabata, the twilight dimension had breached political rhetoric and allowed for an artistic exchange between Tanizaki, Yeats, and many others. Real objects, such as Satō’s sword, were enabling sites of sensory contact – touch seems to communicate a kind of information from the past. One could realize the lustre of time, its relational meaningfulness to its testimonial qualities. Hermann Hesse had explored this in his Buddhist themed novels – and later his ideas would become one of the main principles underscoring Hans Küng’s Global Ethics Foundation – namely, that a capable awareness of one’s own cultural continuity needs to be in place so as to resonate with another’s cultural continuity. The kind of psychometry, of touching cultural experience, does involve the risk of personal attachment. Of course, this imaginative capability goes against the grain of rationality, the systematic posturing of internationalist politics. But shadows are substances that resist the pedestal lamps of museums. The twilight is ephemeral but still clings to its formative context. Thus, shadows and twilight, although in some ways the epiphenomena of the vanishing, can also be an interliminality for mutual consideration. The twilight-shadows dialogue permits an appreciative, perspicacious insight that is an option out of Herderian isolationism. Yeats cautions against straying from literature and into politics. The combustible mixture of territory and community would be ignited through a critique of culturation as defining national selfhood. Folkloric sentiments, and literary representations of these, could readily become part of institutional machinations in producing a new social order. For these reasons, the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran chastised Yeats for his activities in the Irish public sphere. It is dangerous, Gibran said, to be a poet of both spiritual and political aspirations. When a poet adopts the role of social organizer, he or she makes a supplication to a secular program.11 Art and propaganda become even more blurred. Generally, in questioning who were the people under the control of potential oligarchies, certain labels, such as volk or peasant, had

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been affixed onto patterns of communal practice or expression, so that then certain poetic forms could be said to be a voice of the volk. Often, the purpose of such a tactic was to present a unified front. In Ireland’s case, some measure of faith in the Home Rule movement had to be maintained. To justify itself, as often happens, the sociohistorical impetus of the political agenda developed all manner of categorical terminology for reifying heritage: formerly dynamic, undefined forces of cultural reality became archived according to analytical screens of interpretation. I have previously examined this quandary in the works of Dinneen and others in the Irish context. Similar activities can be generally seen in the institutional orderings of folk content in Japan, with a variety of consequences. For example, minzoku, which had a sense of the folkways, became nativist ethnography, now the standard translation of this word. Minzokugaku can mean ethnography or folklore studies, depending on the kanji used [民族 or 民俗]. But coining or theorizing a term does not solve the problem of how the paradigm, post priori, describes the behaviour of the actual contexts. Historians, such as H.D. Harootunian (1988) and Carol Gluck (1985), for example, have analyzed how Japanese folk arts were contested over as possibly contributing to new political identities in the twentieth century.12 The issues at stake are often a question of who has the right of defining, and thereby clarifying, what constitutes tradition. Labels, in fact, do organize the amorphous past into current political cachet. But often, the debate can seem trivial: for example, what criteria differentiate a minwa [folk tale] from a densetsu [legend or tradition]? One could devise many terminological phrases, and write many books assessing such questions, but what impact would these have on the actual usages, as stories and legends, under scrutiny? These questions applicable to Japanese modernism also apply to Irish modernism, as authors such as Yeats and Yanagita recognized. Where does folklore end and the more anthropological Volkskunde [folklore studies or folk life studies] begin? What, or who, is the instrument of transmission, and what is the formula for presentation and reception? What is gained or lost when living patterns are subsumed by the terminological nebulosity of kokugaku [national studies]?13 Do studies of the nation require nativist specifications at

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its core? When does folk observation become didactic prescriptions? Can local customs automatically enable state mandates? One could also theoretically speak of the Japanese pursuit of Kerutojinron, as studies conducted on the nature of the Celt. Assertions have long been made about the constitutive forces that allow for a sovereign sense of a thirty-two–county Ireland, as the blueprint for a one-island unity. The materials to ground these claims, in appealing to a sense of longevity, come from much older times and ancestries. Japanese translations of Yeats, and assessments of the Keruto, arrived during a time of intense internal debate. This proved to be entirely useful. Exploring concepts of other folk traditions could, in fact, offset the insulation that comes with the hardening of xenophobic rhetoric. Lafcadio Hearn was struggling with and against a national rhetoric that defined a larger regional formation at the expense of smaller localities, whose identities were props to be subsumed for propaganda value. This tension between centre and periphery had broad implications for modernist writers. Doi Bansui’s had originally taken up a view of East and West as being permanently estranged and beyond negotiation. But his involvement in the Airurando bungakukai led to a conception of the location of culture as addressing and adapting the pressures of modernity, thus opening rather than disabling appreciation for the other. As such, he is quite exemplary of how the dynamic interplay of complex ideas across multiple languages and cultural discourses can lead out of national chauvinism. Akutagawa and Yanagita, also associated with the Airurando bungakukai, found in the Celtic Revival an informed model for an alternative narrative fashion that had the power of cultural introspection through multi-temporal means, ones that addressed both modernity and dissipation, tradition and emplacement. Yeats has been thought of as proto-fascist at times, even though he very much disagreed with Pound’s politics, for example. Most notably, he felt very uncomfortable with the politicization of Wilfred Owen as national elegist and voice-of-the-nation poet of war. About excluding Owen from an edited anthology, Yeats wrote to Dorothy Wellesey in 1936: “I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous

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poem in a glass-case in the British Museum” (Le 874). The Revivalists did not think of nationalism as a static thing. On this account, much can also be said about how Yeats disagreed with many individuals, overwhelmed as they were by various regimes of conservative essentialism, who attempted to appreciate heritage patterns by compiling a database of us and them dichotomies. Revivalists, as did many architects of the new Irish Republic, used national self-questioning as to how we distinguish one territory from another, or one heritage from another, as inevitable in periods of rapid change. However, these inquiries need not lead inevitably to proto-fascism or apologetics for eugenics. The interplay between Irish and Japanese literatures is an instance of conversations of an intercultural encounter that sought to work independently of the rhetoric of state power. Folklore, rooted as it is to a given place, directs attention to the local and particular; its first conversation is with the traces of tradition that operate in communal discourse. This requires a kind of ground-level communication that political forms cannot comprehend at this level of cultural practice. Violence and anxiety are everywhere in the work of the Celtic Renaissance, either historicized as Fomorian conflict, or – especially in Yeats – acknowledged as contemporary crisis. Much of Meditations in Time of Civil War analyzes those motivations, which manufactured ammunition from art. The sword, of course, is a crucial symbol of this, but so also is the gun in Irish hands: “As though to die by gunshot were / The finest play under the sun” (“The Road at My Door,” CPo 208, ll. 4–5). Meditations in Time of Civil War interrogates the civic enterprise of nation building, as a process inherited from the past, as well as an inevitable project in the present. The poems that comprise it repeatedly lead to a contemporary question – is Ireland, after all, only a territorial fiction, easily swept away by those in power? If one wants to appeal to continuity, to ancestrality as a sense of a historical context of situational contiguity with the past, then those linkages between legend and contemporary circumstances must be examined. “Twilight” became in both Ireland and Japan that figurative zone of confused and diffused contact. Meditations in Time of Civil War is therefore chronologically split between the mythic time explored in the earlier poems and the crisis

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of the present civil war. The aspects of the landscape are suggestively positioned to touch upon both the ancestral as well as the immanent. The “ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,” site of previous tumult (“My House,” CP o 205, l. 1), now is marked by civil war. A continuing question of sovereignty, for a particular group of people, remains the issue that will not dissolve. These liminal moments of The Tower (1928), the collection of which Meditations in Time of Civil War is a part, permit a figuration of twilight that reawakens the status of the ancestral, and thus frames the ongoing conflict of the present. Enquiries into nation, as being something more than fiction but contextually rooted to the soil, are informed by Yeats’s acts of necromancy with the voices of the past. The escape from temporalization, and its surrounding social circumstances, follows an aesthete’s journey into despatialization. The pilgrimage concludes in a destination of stasis and non-placement. In this sense, “Byzantium” (CP o 252), in Yeats’s parlance as the pseudoancestral, is inclined to a sense of spatial transcendence entirely different from the pilot’s. The Irish airman, foreseeing his death, would willingly strip off his uniform in exchange for a moth-eaten coat. The artiste, however, shrugs off the ragged coat and the stick, the elemental reality, to escape into the essence of artificed eternity. The impossibility of this is shown by the fact that this otherworld, achieved in the last stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” (CP o 197), retains reflectively an ironic duplication of the environs from which the poet fled in the opening stanza. Imagistically, Yeats reproduces the first stanza in the fourth. The dirt is recast as mosaic tiles of icons. The social menageries of the first stanza are inverted as cadres of nobility. Thus, the “young in one another’s arms” are replaced by courtly lords and ladies. The salmon and bird, species of air and water, become the gold and yellow pigmentations of Byzantine artwork. The old man, keen as he was to leave, now takes a seat as a drowsy emperor. That which is born, begotten, and dies – the cycle of life – becomes bland phases of what is past, or passing, or to come. The mechanical bird, the hollow version of the energetic chirping in the first stanza, lacks the Tanizakian “lustre of time,” which is warmth and touchability. The bird chirps inorganically, offering no peace to its frozen listeners. Its perch is not a sign of continuity, but a remote abstraction,

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reminiscent of the hollow symbol. Its birdsong is a false, hypnotic buzz of the kind that Oisin had rejected in the otherworld. The active liveliness of the first stanza actually is the true Byzantium, in that its dance is not mechanical. Oisin reaches this conclusion when he discovers the wind-fallen tree branch, from his former ancestral home now far behind him, which still bears the marks of the lustre of organic touch. This living sap seeps into the synthetic glamour of the fantasy realm. But the living sap is sticky, not readily yielding to the formal entrenchment of totalization that elite histories appropriate or denigrate. The ghost has no pulsing blood, however. Its condition of partial effacement and failed assimilation testify to its insubordination. Yet its immateriality symptomizes discontinuity. In traditional depictions of yūrei or ghosts in Japan, the spectre appears with a misty lower body, feetless, with no solid connection to the ground. A triangularshaped headpiece sits on its head, showing the ritual practice of ancient Buddhist funerary rites. The yūrei, as a discourse of the vanishing, suggests by its partially discarnate state the paradoxical amalgamation of vapour and form, of the present suggests the outline of that which had been the past, of travellers without feet, of beliefs without soil. The Irish-Japanese cultural exchange sought to understand, comparatively, how both soil and imagination are needed in the constitution as to how folklore plays in the ongoing, fluid process of constituting a heritage. But what is exactly under interpretation in the onus that survival takes in the form of a recursive consciousness? “Lapis Lazuli” (1936) Much of what tends to be called comparative literature, as both a methodology and a pedagogy, bases its perspectives on comparisons, often abstracted ones, that liken together diverse geographically located texts through thematic connections. Fourteenth-century French court literature can be paradigmatically aligned with the diaries of noblewomen in pre-modern Japan through, for example, the critical tools of feminist thought and life-writing. These versatile ways contrasting difference while pursuing similarity demonstrate that literature is a global event, and that the scholarly tools of research allow

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for the opening up of intellectually venturesome critiques of history, authorship, and society. Haun Saussy (2006) emphasizes the virtue of this approach as leading us “to adjust to multiple frames of reference and attend to relations rather than givens” (34). “Transnationalism,” as typically practised in modernist studies, is not necessarily comparative. On the contrary, the perimeter of its framing can be decidedly narrow, monolingual, and not at all multicultural. This has certainly been a situation in much modernist scholarship, despite the incredible international literary output of the era. Christopher GoGwilt (2010) laments the “largely Anglophone coordinates of modernist study” that “consolidate a conventional model of periodizing” (5). I strongly concur with GoGwilt’s assessment and offer that more expansive explorations, supported by multilingual research, will provide a pluralized approach in support of GoGwilt’s sense of respatializing the scholarly field. Certainly, modernism, as a historical period so concerned with globalization and cosmopolitanism, provides compelling examples of how the reconstitution of the imaginative map of the global configuration of the world has influenced all aspects of human societies. My discussion of “Lapis Lazuli” is meant to situate how compellingly the transnational mindset of some modernist authors enabled the growth and exploration of culture through comparison and interaction. Yet so much of modernist scholarship on transnational themes, working in a single language and providing unidirectional scholarship, has not always provided a comprehensive view of how interculturality has profound effects when operating as a dynamic. Unfortunately, many studies of a Western nation’s relationship to the Orient, as Orientalism, pay no attention to scholarly and artistic works written in Asian languages. In thinking about the vectors of cultural exchange and production in the modern period, this study emphasizes the heterodoxical conditions through which, complexly, culture acts as an estuary space, flowing in multiple directions, enabled by the efforts of contact and dialogue. To conclude with a reflection on how W.B. Yeats came to perceive intercultural conversations as the crossed roads of heritage, tradition, and transition – I turn to Yeats’s later poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” which offers a vision of diverse but complimentary cultural interactions as the antidote to both closed borders and cataclysmic bombs.

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Geologically speaking, lapis lazuli is generally not thought of as indigenous to China. First originating from the quarries of Afghanistan, it is more reasonable to assume that the stones in this poem reached the Chinese carver’s hands after a long caravan journey across Asia. Taxonomically, lapis lazuli conflates Latin, Arabic, and Persian elements, reflecting contributions from geographically and culturally broad ranges of scientific knowledge. How this bit of lapis lazuli reached China, from Afghanistan, is the poem’s aesthetic (and ethical) narrative of trade, travel, and social commerce: the inertia of creation out of elemental movement and intellectual dialogue. This splice of rock reached the Chinese sculptor after a metamorphic journey of places and conversations: haggling, caravanning, bartering – no doubt, endless exchanging across hands along what is now popularly known as the Silk Road. The poem’s image of the final statue is a product of a local folk art tradition, but one using imported influences that are physical, spiritual, and cultural. The localized artifact has depended upon an extensive network of technique and materials that define its process as much as the destination itself. Glittering from the glossy touch of many hands, lapis lazuli is marked by what Tanizaki Jun’ichirō theorized as jidai no tsuya, the lustre of time, an important concept that I take up in relationship to the Celtic Revival in my earlier chapters. As I document, Yeats’s methods in The Celtic Twilight have interesting connections to Tani­ zaki along this notion that tradition, through touchability and transference, acquires a distinctive resonance that could overlap across the time and space of generations. To conceptualize this process of cultural transference, the second half of “Lapis Lazuli” invites the reader to imaginatively shed the limitations of personal space and time. One has to envision, instead, a vast chain of cartographic movements that link up wide swaths of socially diverse peoples. The rock is quarried in Afghanistan. Perhaps from there, under banner and on horseback, it is brought to the great interlingual hub of Kokand, a lively crossroads of religion, art, and science. The large chunks of rock are there split into smaller units of currency. A sliver of stone is traded for yak butter or a brick of tea, for winter hides or cooking pots. By camel, caravan, or horse-trot the lapis lazuli now splits variously along the crossroads of central

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Asia. Eventually, a Byzantine mosaic will feature a piece as a glint of bright blue shine, contrasting with darkly sainted eyes. Centuries before, a funerary room for pharaohs was also adorned by rounded nubs of this rock. Temples as far as Nara, Japan, will enshrine in art what once had been in a miner’s sweaty hands. The Tibetan Medicine Buddha, Bhaisajyaguru, the great healer, is known as the lord of the lapis lazuli–coloured light. And, at some time, through Anxi, across the Mongolian plateau, and into eastern China, a smallish lump, a fraction of the originally struck rock, will come into the possession of a sculptor. Trade along the Silk Road involved cultural activities as well as economic processes. Transactions were done face to face, usually prefaced by the sharing of tea or the like. Although weary from travel, the torch-lit spark of night would ignite storytelling, poetry recitals, religious debates, and the sharing of stronger drink. Passed along in the handling of the lapis lazuli were multilingual forms of information, ways of life, and philosophical points of view. Ideas, as well as stones, traded between fingers. Stanzas form through inter-genre exchange, musical modalities became adopted, and sculptural techniques moved along the dust and mud roads. Religious iconographies evolved and transitioned. Kumārajīva (313–413), the great translator of Sanskrit into Chinese, acquired his learning from the opportunities this network provided. Marpa the Translator, teacher of Milaraspa (1052–1135), brought the Buddhist Sutras from India into Tibet along these routes. Civilizations, as well as individuals, were in a process of contact and transmission. For Yeats, the power of lapis lazuli is that it accommodates and relates the continuities of times and places, but transformationally so. The rock maintains its basic outward properties but reshapes into varying contexts. Its physical component becomes uniquely expressive according to what local imaginations shape out of the stone’s features. Yeats is describing a multi-directional process of transferences that can be marked along a map that extends through the directions of diverse cultural topographies. The rock, not at all magical but somehow artistically infinite, reacts and remodels according to historical situations and cultural interactions. As an object of multi-socialized time, the surface cracks and marks are formed through the physical

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and interpersonal. The physical texture of the stone coincides with the topographic features of the journey the gem has just undertaken: Every discolouration [sic] of the stone; Every accidental crack or dent Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or lofty slope where it still snows (CP o 301, ll. 43–6) The lapis lazuli displays a microcosmic geology that documents the abrasion of touch, travel, and culturally conceptual artistry. The faces of the landscape, the faces of the trade and art, and the face of the lapis lazuli all coincide together, sympathetically, symbiotically. This rock is thus a testimonial account of the places and persons that conducted its transformation across a connected series of localized handlings. Lapis lazuli, from quarry to glittery eye, is thus inscribed by the physical processes of its cultural handling. As such, it possesses the somatic sensibility that Certeau, in Culture in the Plural (1997), calls “the relic” and its relationship to creative societies: “fragments of rites, protocols of politeness, vestmental or culinary practices, codes of gift giving or of honor. They are odors, quotations of colors, explosions of sounds, tonalities” (Culture in the Plural, cited by Conley 158). Tom Conley, commenting on this quote, elaborates further by explaining, “Certeau advocates a tactical use of history. A lost place of the past that would otherwise be given to mourning must be turned into an active space of fiction capable of being reinvented over and over again” (158). Thus: Samarkand, Thessaloniki, Malacca, Rome, Mumbai, Baghdad, Constantinople, Mashhad, Kabul, Ceylon, Seoul, Xi’an, Nara. Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Sikhism, Islam, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, folk beliefs, sects, hermits, scientists, philosophers. Kingdoms, dynasties, empires, and eras. Heritage, memory, innovation, art. Yeats was always concerned, as “Lapis Lazuli” depicts, with the web of associations within tradition, as well as the extent that these merged and influenced other traditions. Tradition is not readily established by a foundation myth, nor by claimants in the here and now who assert sole ownership of the continuum through monological

412 | Ancestral Recall

control. Tradition, for Yeats, is a fundamental unfolding through collision, in which certain aesthetics and ideas are circulated and revived through a network of complex connections across generations. Rather than idealize a particularly famous artist, a statue of the cultural canon, Yeats in this poem focuses on the anonymity of these carvers. They can neither affirm some foundation myth, nor can they be named so as to enshrine the prestige for some present personage who acts as inheritor. Exchange and continuity, as the forces that form and transmit tradition, fascinated Yeats by creating the interdependent sheen of handing-on, of tradition, of a dirtiness of touch that is the lustre of time. Anonymously, in the Chinese sculptor’s hands, carving Taoist symbols of longevity, the lapis lazuli becomes realized as the alchemy of the multicultural creative impulse. In contrast, the first half of “Lapis Lazuli,” the poem, lists a number of perfunctory doomsday scenarios, a hegemonic apocalypse figured by biblical typology as well as aerial bombing that flattens the earth. The tragic declamations of a Hamlet describe the theatre of annihilation, in which ghosts demand revenge and entire monarchies fall in one swoop. Contrastingly, the prosaic simplicity of the stone, touched by the carver’s cloudy identity, grants the virtues necessary to outlast the hysteria of self-destructive societies. Its primary earthiness, which excites the spiritual and artistic temperaments, extends beyond the momentary encounter of ownership and possession. “Lapis Lazuli” offers a multi-handled vision of transference, through change and movement, similar to the dance(r) in “Among School Children” (in The Tower). Yeats’s most memorable poems often conclude in a powerful positivity. The carving has attained, through sweat and time, a fundamental embodiment of the energies in creation and building, rather than desecrating or destroying. As a stone in a state of transference, lapis lazuli performatively acts in many roles: as musician and sage, dancer and dance. A diversified vision of artistry has aligned its textures over geographical divides. Some nameless spirit of culture and creativity proves to be indomitable, something that will endure beyond the eponymous posturing of a King Lear or a Prince Hamlet (“Lapis Lazuli,” l. 10), or beyond the nationalism of the Boyne or the zeppelin’s smashing bombs

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(6–7). “Lapis Lazuli” pays homage to those forces that drive ancestral currents into contemporary creation, powers that move and shift steadily across barriers – between cultures, arts, generations, and peoples. Stones become space and time, which become encounters that become artists that become cheerful eyes. The stone takes on discoloration thereby, and thereby enlivened, by the oil of hands: the passing along through tradio is reflected within the sculpture’s glittering, immortal gaze. Perhaps this is why “Lapis Lazuli” culminates in the image of the eye, the culturally reflexive orifice through which minds, ideas, and materials recognize each other – as in “Sailing to Byzantium,” and the corporeal event of music to the ear, the emperor or the dance. “Lapis Lazuli” references the history of culture as well as material geology: the action and reaction of human conversations. In attempting to not only define culture, but to locate its circumstantial agency as historical, Gramsci develops the following point of view: Culture is something quite different. It is organization, coming to terms with one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality. It is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one achieves an understanding of one’s own historical value, one’s function in life, one’s own rights and obligations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous evaluation, through a series of actions and reactions which are independent of one’s own will – as is the case in the animal and vegetable kingdom. Above all, man is mind. He is a product of history, not nature. (quoted by Crehan 74) In this way, the cultural practices of multiply situated encounters and sensory awareness contribute to the dissemination of cultural ideas. Art changed, the world changed: what had been before, what is being now, and what will have been. Jan Morris (2004) illustrates the Dublin humour for an ambivalence of history and progress when she records a conversation she had with a local, regarding the new Spire monument in O’Connell Street. Morris – a Welsh trans woman, language activist, and renowned travel writer – tries to navigate the local accent, local pronunciations, and local history; she initially mis-

414 | Ancestral Recall

interprets, but in doing so gets to the heart of the matter through conversation: “Why, they’re to demonstrate that the object has been pulled out, dragged out, so it has, from the very soul of Ireland.” “The soil, did you say, or the soul?” I queried. “Ah, sure, you’ve hit it on the head there, right on target, full marks – the soil or the soul, that’s the be all and end-all of it …” (73)

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notes

Cha pter O n e 1 This issue of the magazine, in a curious sense of framing, also featured reports from former prisoners of war in Japanese labour camps. 2 Airurando bungakukai translates as Irish Literature Association, or less directly as Irish Literary Studies Society. I prefer the latter version, as it emphasizes the collaborative, scholarly approach of the participants. Originating in the late nineteenth century, the airurando bungakukai were a comprehensive network of Japanese writers, teachers, and general enthusiasts, with distinct chapters located in the Kansai and Tokyo regions, although nationally they were linked through Society magazines and other publications. Their interests in Ireland extended beyond literature, including also music, folklore, history, and heritage. In this sense, they were also understood as Irish cultural studies societies, with individual members researching and presenting their findings to other members. 3 Oldmeadow (2004), following J.J. Clarke’s arguments, offers a robust assessment of post-colonial critics who use Said’s theories in a pandemic fashion, assessing an American journalist in Tibet with the same blueprint for evaluating Israel and Palestine (7–16): “Nonetheless, the Saidian thesis has given birth to many lop-sided and reductionistic works in which the hermeneutics of suspicion and malice aforethought have blinded the authors to the many positive aspects of orientalism” (11). Orientalism has not become an unsalvageable moniker, but other

terms might also be preferable, ones that reflect the mutuality of intercultural exchange, as well as the potential for reciprocal benefits for such persons and communities, including human rights, communal artistic endeavours, and peace movements. 4 This review (27 October 2002), and others, was accessed on Calum Colvin’s homepage: http://www.calumcolvin.com/media/ossian/ reviews/index.htm. 5 One of Hearn’s strongest detractors is Ōta Yūzō. In “Lafcadio Hearn: Japan’s Problematic Interpreter” (1997), he labels Hearn something of a fraud who circulated counterfeit notions of Japaneseness. For similar reasons, Ōta also critiques cultural heroes such as Nitobe Inazō. In a discussion of haiku (16–17), Ōta demonstrates Nitobe’s pandering duplicity on the subject. On the one hand, he describes the genre, in English to an American audience, as being filled with “spiritual truths” and “cosmic consciousness,” while, around the same time, he penned an article, in Japanese, proclaiming that the philosophical value of haiku is less than that of Spinoza’s little finger. This kind of cultural ambivalence and sermonizing is also felt to be a foible of Hearn’s. Ōta quotes from Hearn’s journals to say that Hearn himself was aware of his own excessive glamorization of Japan and literary inability to create anything other than nostalgia. An ongoing debate about who was the better interpreter of Japan, Hearn or Basil Hall Chamberlain, has been argued by Ōta, Hirakawa, and others. My approach is that, unlike Chamberlain, Hearn had an intercontinental impact on the development of literary traditions in Japan. 6 Ōshima and Naitō have both established through painstaking documentation that Yeats’s personal library contained a sizable collection of works on Asian philosophy, many of which are filled with Yeats’s handwritten notes. This book will consider, in the light of this scholarship, the various ways that Japanese religion influenced Yeats’s writings, as well as ways Yeats represented more general trends of japonaiserie. 7 Other critics who have broken new ground in multilateral studies of cultural contact also include studies like Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Displacement, Transpacific Imagination (2002), or Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson’s anthology Inside/Out as new work that seeks to present heretofore unexplored vectors of twentieth-century literary and cultural production. 8 There are many useful comparisons between Christianity and Buddhism in this important work that contrast and analogize these two faiths without creating an exaggerated sense of co-identity.

418  |  Notes to pages 17–47

9 This practice severely complicated certain topics such as Yeats’s relationship with (Zen) Buddhism. The real question is not to what extent did he receive impressions or influences from this tradition. Rather, how did Japanese critics – for the purposes of gaining national prestige by connecting a claim to native tradition by linking it to an internationally famous name – invent a relationship between Yeats and (Zen) Buddhism? An analysis of this theme is beyond the scope of this monograph, but it is one I intend to explore in the future. 10 See http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/ 1994/oe-lecture.html.

Cha pter Two 1 St Patrick rebukes Ossian’s attachment to the past: “O ancient man, who have perverted your reason: you make little account of their being alive no more: all those hosts of past time shall be, and already are, but mist” (Duanaire Finn, vol. 2, 215). 2 The many variants in the spelling of this name increase the risk of confusion. I use Ossian when referring to this mythic hero in his broader contexts: the body of folklore, literature, and so forth appended to this namesake. I employ Yeats’s Oisin when referring to his particular representation of this hero in WO and other works. Oisín is the standard Irish spelling. Yeats’s Oisin is a common Anglicization. 3 In Cavafy’s time, attention shifted toward Egyptian dialectical forms of Arabic, over the somewhat artificial Standard Arabic, which itself is a derivative of Classical Arabic. This renewed interest, likewise, coincided with nationalist agendas in North Africa. In fact, broadly speaking, so much of the linguistic politics of the late nineteenth century involve the overturning through diaglossia: the prestige of the government language is displaced by an insurgence of the vernacular. Thinkers such as Salama Moussa argued that formal Arabic acted as a barrier for an underclass struggling with illiteracy, and a recognition of Egyptian Arabic in print and media would improve the situation. His efforts greatly influenced Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate, whose novels thrive in the language of alleyways and coffee shops of Cairo, as, for example, in Midaq Alley [Zuqâq al-Midaq] (1947). These examples are meant to emphasize the shift toward vernacular, spoken languages away from the prescriptions of pure language. The purpose is to claim communitarian uniqueness, and culture as located in the throat. Thus, my sense is that the Revival’s interest in the problematic “Kiltartanese” or rural speech

Notes to pages 48–60  |  419

can be contextualized against broad, pressing trends of his time, ones not limited to ethnicity or geography. 4 Hiberno-English takes many regional flavours in Joseph O’Connor or Roddy Doyle’s (1994) form of Dublin slang, Deirdre Madden’s representations of Belfast Catholic tribal speak, and the peculiarities of Kerry vocabulary in John B. Keane. 5 John P. Anton (1995) describes Cavafy’s experiments in Romanticism and Symbolism as measurements of “intellectual scope or the ideological vision” (96). Anton takes up Robert Liddell’s reading of Cavafy as one who had “felt the torturing impact of the great modern city upon the lonely individual” (106). Cavafy, in such a reading, is a break from Baudelaire and a modernist kinsman to T.S. Eliot. 6 For a full treatment of Camden’s project, see Parry (2007). 7 Gabhra – now Gowra, County Meath – lies near an area faced with serious destruction because of the proposed M 3 motorway. 8 O’Kearney actively contributed, edited, and translated for the Ossianic Society. His translation of Cath Gabhra or the Battle of Gabhra (1854) included the original Irish text as well as his interpretation. Whitely Stokes, in his rendition of “The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel,” credits O’Kearney with launching a new interest in classical Irish literature. On occasion, however, O’Kearney based his research on contemporary versions given by storytellers, as opposed to working from historical manuscripts. See, for example, “The Story of Conn-eda” (originally in Cambrian Journal, 1855), which was “translated from the original Irish of the story-teller Abraham M’Coy.” 9 For details of these revisions, see Bornstein (1994) for manuscript examples, compiled for the Cornell Yeats. 10 For more information on this incident, see Liam Swords, A Dominant Church (2005), 242–5. 11 Quoted in R.F. Foster (1998), vol. 1, 71. 12 See The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Electronic Edition. Volume 1 (1865­–1895). IntelLex Past Masters, 85. 13 For a discussion on Yeats’s reading of Lawless, see Cahalan. 14 The mobilization of commercial art served the diverse purposes of gender, nationality, and sovereignty. The Irish-language tradition had its role, as evidenced by the reception of Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheadhon Oidhche [The Midnight Court] (1909). The increasing attention critics have given to Thomas Moore documents the interconnections between nationality and musical idiom. From my point of view, Yeats participates, keenly, in the developing forces of Home Rule, but always main-

420  |  Notes to pages 62–95

tains a certain distance, a kind of skepticism that prevents him from keeping to a single contingent, a single sect, for extended periods of time. This is certainly true in the poetry. 15 Damien Murray has outlined the coalescing of agendas in “The Ossianic Society, Romanticism and the Revival of the Irish Language, 1853–61,” ACIS Limerick, July 2000. 16 “Oisin,” likewise, is the pen name for a political cartoonist with the Andersontown News. In the Belfast context, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oscar, Diarmuid, these epic heroes are reframed as murals and other politically ethnic declarations that haunt, imagistically, the scarred terrain of division. 17 The Urashima Tarō [浦島太郎] story is one that Yeats would later become familiar with through the writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo). Urashima Tarô, seeing some youths tormenting a turtle, offers them a fish in exchange for the reptile’s freedom. Grateful for his intervention, the turtle offers to carry Urashima Tarō, on his shell, to a splendid enclave under the sea. Their destination is the Sea-Dragon King’s palace, ryūgū (竜宮城). After several days (centuries, actually, in mortal time) of enjoying the royal family’s hospitality, Urashima Tarô becomes intensely nostalgic and asks to be returned home. The queen bestows a bejewelled box as a gift, but with repeated instructions never to open it. Once home after so long away, he finds the landscape – his native village, the countryside – utterly changed. He is now a man at once in and out of time; memory of the past cannot navigate contemporary geography. Nostalgia cannot find anything commensurate with reality. By the seashore, where his act of charity led to his current predicament, he opens up the box. A puff of white smoke, the material manifestation of his true physical age, overtakes his body and he crumbles to dust. 18 Robert O’Driscoll (1975) argues for a comprehensive implementation of symbolist methodology in Yeats’s poetry, especially as channelled by his ideas on Blake and the occult. While there is much practical truth in such an approach, I suggest that at no time Yeats’s method – which shifted considerably – should be affixed according to a particular inherited symboliste format. In the same way, Cavafy (1976) is said to be under the shadow of nineteenth-century Symbolism, but nonetheless departs from it in a way equally worthy of study. 19 [47] Is recht a úabuir i m-bith ché cretem dúle, dormant n-Dé, tróithad n-galar, ocus áiss, apthu anma tría togáis. (22–3)

Notes to pages 95–101  |  421

20 Assessing the extent of massacres and war crimes by such men as Raleigh or Oliver Cromwell has become an increasingly contentious project. Recently, Tom Reilly garnered very mixed reviews with his study, Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy. Reilly’s central thesis maintains that Cromwell’s actions in Ireland, particularly during the sieges at Drogheda and Wexford, were not particularly heinous. Instead, according to Reilly, waves of political disinformation and emotional nationalism have distorted the historical record in the service of republican mythmaking. Whatever one makes of Reilly’s arguments, and many scholars have been troubled by them, his statements do connect to a very sensitive, contemporary issue: the claim that the Irish, in reviewing the broad past, are more apt to blame the British than to acknowledge the collaborationists who were in their mist. 21 See Patrick White, “Irish Entrepreneur Hits Paydirt in America,” Globe and Mail, 21 November 2006, A 3. 22 From the book Die Neuen Hexen, by Gisela Graichen. An English translation of this interview can be found online at http://www.angelfire. com/nm/seidhman/beinweb.html (accessed 2 Nov. 2006).

Cha pter Th r ee 1 Original emphasis. This anecdote was recorded in an Englishman’s travelogue while passing through Sligo Town. Michael Quirke is a local artist, a butcher who later turned to wood carving, using figures from Celtic mythology as his models. Quirke is a wonderful repository of knowledge concerning Irish legends, as well as an uncanny wit for Sligo and its ambivalence for Yeats. In this passage, Quirke rebukes the almost omnipresent use of mobile phones in Ireland as a response to this popular notion of disapproval toward Yeats’s work. 2 See O’Driscoll (1975) and Hirsch (1983) for a more detailed discussion of this text as mystical program. 3 As will be discussed later, Seihai [The Grail] was an important Japanese journal of Celtic studies. 4 Graham’s essay, “Blame It on Maureen O’Hara: Ireland and the Trope of Authenticity” (2001), debates the persistent assumption of Irish identity as being a product of media propagation. 5 Terry Eagleton (1995) states that this nation “had not leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity. Instead, it presented an exemplary case of what Marxism has dubbed combined and uneven development” (274).

422  |  Notes to pages 102–35

My contention is that, while not necessary following a Marxist situating of Ireland’s identity politics, Yeats understood the changes in his country as based upon variable and spasmodic tensions between the character of the folkloric and traditional, circumscribed by rurality, and the expanding metropolis, Dublin, the stepping stone to Europeanization. 6 Herder (1966) introduced the concept of volk in an initial, political sense that ethnicity was a primary factor in determining political identity. However, later, volk has been more associated with the distorted principles that Hitler used to define his ideals for a purist Third Reich. 7 The Grimms were quite prodigious and venturesome in their output, but there is nonetheless a distinct configuration to their scholarship which exhibits nationalist feelings. Among the Grimms’ collected works are Altdeutsche Wälder, essays on linguistics and folklore; Der arme Heinrich von Hartmann von der Aue, an edition with commentary of this old German poem; editions of early Icelandic literature; and a German translation of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. Folklore, linguistics, and ethnography were coinciding interests for the Grimms. 8 Concerns of the actual authenticity of this work, in terms of it arising from ancient sources, have arisen in the twentieth century, reminding that issues of legitimacy and political intentionality cannot be avoided when discussing folklore. Whatever the final verdict, Lönnrot, who was attempting to make a literary archive, a collection of manuscript documentation of traditional poetry that would act as a repository of cultural identity and language, was among many such activists in the nineteenth century. Among other examples, not as controversial, is the Swede Esaias Tegnér, a noted poet of war who became famous for his Frithjofs Saga, which was also assembled from fragments of an early epic cycle. 9 Therman’s book, Stories from Tory Island, and Joe McGowan’s Echoes of a Savage Land (2001) compliment the work of local historians, often priests, who write histories of their dioceses, including such examples as Toraigh na dTonn (1971) by Father Eoghan Ó Colm and The Diocese of Elphin (2000), a volume edited by Father Francis Beirne. 10 Celtic retains an emotive appeal to culture, as in the form of the Welsh Eisteddfod or in community-oriented names for numerous North American newspapers. Celtic League refers to a rugby competition between Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Geographical possession of the term Celtic continues to be a contentious gesture: the so-called Celtic

Notes to pages 136–40  |  423

Tiger, referring to Ireland, declares through zoomorphic imagery a cash influx that has nothing to do with art or culture. The market roars in a Celtic fashion, despite minimal economic management in Dublin. 11 As has been the subject of much scholarly attention, various media put forward suppositions of Celtic identity, not just in Ireland, but in Scotland and Wales as well – going back to the eighteenth century in particular. The print culture of Celtic identity is routinely featured in the island politics between Scotland and England, in parliamentary records, as well as in popular works of literature such as those by Robbie Burns or novels like The Wild Irish Girl. Siân Rhiannon Williams has discussed the rhetoric of the Welsh woman in periodicals from the nineteenth century. 12 For a comprehensive discussion of the exaggerations and misrepresentations of Irishness in Victorian England, see Curtis (1996), who questions the political motivations behind the intentional dehumanization of the Irish by various policy-makers. 13 Many modernist authors, examining the loss of cultural contexts, minority languages, and culturally specific knowledge, raised similar alarms. One need only look at I.B. Singer (1973) and the vanishing of Yiddish writing and theatre as another example. The short story “The Kabbalist of East Broadway” describes the process of a scholar turning into a spectre. The dissolution of his cultural homeland has rendered his niche knowledge obsolete, and he now roams anonymously through New York, disconnected from the community that has literally vanished. “The Kabbalist” also exemplifies what Marilyn Ivy (1995) means by the phantasm as something material, but in an identifiable process of vanishing. The phantasmal is “an epistemological object whose presence or absence cannot be definitively located” (22). The twilight is the ontological condition of such an in-between character. Thus, the irony of Singer’s story is that the Kabbalist dissipates, or vanishes from view, not because he is spirited away by arcane knowledge, but because his arcane knowledge is made irrelevant with the loss of the tradition that created the knowledge in the first place. 14 Translated by Paul Muldoon as “asking me to come to the Isle of Enchantment … ‘Come to me, come to me, all who are tired.’” Hy-Breasil is also the name of a coffee shop on Bridge Street in Sligo. 15 These former kingdoms now operate as economic prefectures: Leinster, with Dublin at its core, achieves overwhelming prominence. Agricultural Connacht, not able to demarcate itself monetarily, possesses on its margins a potential form of transaction, through the marketing of dis-

424  |  Notes to pages 141–51

appearing cultural assets. This is the Galway-Dublin tension, the former asserting itself through a Gaelic affiliation to the European-leaning marketplace of Dublin. The metropolis will accept, with provisions, the national cachet that folk traditions can present. Usually, however, they are absorbed as forms of partisan politics and institutional heritage. 16 A copy of this lecture, as well as other materials relevant to Dinneen, may be found on the Irish Texts Society’s website: http://www.irishtexts society.org. The ITS has recently published a collection of essays and assessments, Dinneen and the Dictionary: 1904–2004 (ITS Subsidiary Series 16, 2005), edited by Pádraigín Riggs. 17 Dinneen’s Scottish counterpart, Edward Dwelly (1911), published the original edition including woodcuts for illustrative purposes. Dwelly published the edition under a Gaelic pseudonym, Eoghann MacDhomhnall, presumably fearing a receptive prejudice against an Anglo name. He also paid attention to etymology, but as practical impact in community discourse, attuned to cultural practices spanning centuries. 18 Although the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which posits that languages convey unique distinctive world views, has received much criticism, neuropsychology has begun to offer revised versions in defence of linguistic relativism. Lera Boroditsky, in particular, provides research that shows how the specific mechanics of a language do, in fact, shape reality. 19 In Scotland, likewise, Margaret Bennett (2000), a native of the Isle of Skye and professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, has engaged in a project of the same magnitude. Equipped with a tape recorder, she travelled extensively through Scotland’s rural areas conducting interviews with elderly villagers, recording their observations and memories. She has compiled and organized these interviews as they relate to traditional customs associated with rites of passage. Being able to present an auditory copy of these conversations, Bennett does not need to affect a rural dialect in text, as these stories speak for themselves in their own accents. Bennett’s work has received much praise in Scotland. 20 Like Yeats, these writers chronicle folk customs, based upon recorded conversations with local residents. Nikos Kazantzakis, in composing his sequel to the Odysseia, collected a massive (and unpublished) glossary of Demotic Greek, including diction from the private cant of fishermen, farmers, and ferrymen – the sort of living language that he wanted to incorporate, not as idiom, but as vivid and realistic speech that exists contemporaneously in his imaginatively defined text. Kazantzakis’s

Notes to pages 156–60  |  425

notion of the Cretan Gaze implies that community involves shaping a ritual space defined by its geography. Hence, the confluence of emotionality and festival in Zorba the Greek culminates during the Easter festivities. Kazantzakis was aware that barbarity could also ensue out of these moments of communal susceptibility. 21 Gregory describes Raftery’s poetry this way, in her introduction to Poets and Dreamers (1903): “It is hard to say where history ends in them and religion and politics begin” (10). 22 Gregory Castle’s Modernism and the Celtic Revival (2001) argues compellingly that the Irish Literary Revival should also be understood as an engaged sociological study. Castle states that he does not view the Revival as ethnographic in character, at least as we might think of it as a discipline within the academic social sciences. However, the Revivalists had “an historical opportunity to create (through strategies of appropriation and resignification) new representations of Irish culture and to resist the misrepresentations generated by British colonialists and anthropologists and Irish-Ireland nationalists” (11). 23 Consider the selection of the Inuit inukshuk as the symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. This symbol was chosen based on a desire to represent British Columbia with a First Nations marking, regardless of its (ir)relevance to the physical location of the event. Local First Peoples argued that, actually, inukshuk reflected nothing of the living tradition of area tribes. West coast tribes note that there are many talented, innovative artists who could have provided an appropriate logo that would honour local customs but also welcome the international visitor. Inuit elders, whose tribal jurisdiction is nowhere near Vancouver, stated that they had not been consulted at all. Displacing a territorial landmark such as the inukshuk reveals the crude marketing ploy at issue here. The Vancouver Olympic Committee avoided the issue, showing a chilling insensitivity to cultural-geographical issues. The stubborn motivation behind their graphical design is clear: First Nations symbols belong on souvenirs and t-shirts, and not in the physical landscape. The relevance of myth, artifact, and location is completely effaced. That the purpose of the inukshuk was to guide and mark a journey through the particularities of Inuit culture and topography had been rudely misconstrued. 24 This book, and its notes on legal procedures, has a different quality than other books of fairy lore during that period. Compare it with the text by J.G. Campbell, Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1902). Both books, however, rather than merely being rec-

426  |  Notes to pages 160–9

ords of bizarre superstitions, act as documents that record storytelling and other oratures from remote regions of the Scottish countryside. 25 In Japan, the Urashima Tarō paradox arises when the hero returns to a home, so profoundly altered that no referants remain for orientation, and therefore memory loses the meaning of itself. The faculty of remembrance, as a condition of having engaged the landscape, becomes transferred into the spectral, as the physical link has been lost, or severed. When the spectral fails to locate itself physically, it may give up, or be given up, entirely to oblivion. 26 See Matthew Spangler’s “Haunted to the Edge of Trance” (2006) for another discussion in which haunting and trance denote peripheral perceptibility. In much of Yeats’s writings, altered states of consciousness relate to moments of twilight access. 27 Fleming (1995) applies a Jungian reading to Yeats’s concept of the great memory with the notion of the collective unconscious (66). As the primordial archive that holds essential images and symbols shared by humanity, Jung’s theory coincides with Yeats’s notion that magic and folklore express most effectively primal imaginative patterns. Jung and Yeats might both extend their parallel notions, as Fleming notes, to appreciating the need for a mythological heritage. Thus, for Fleming, “Irish peasants as Yeats and Synge created them embodied the collective memory of the nation and the timeless memory of the world; their imagination was necessary for the preservation of Irish culture. Free from materialism and ambition, they lived close to nature and in the old ways” (67). 28 I quote Smith’s (1981) translation and commentary, for he usefully summarizes Heidegger’s theory of moods as “a unique and primary way of disclosing Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, and disclosure that is prior to the ‘cognitive’ disclosure of the so-called ‘faculty of reason’” (211). In regards to disclosure, the materiality of da [there] of dasein equals the condition of the revealed state of being-in-ness. 29 Perceptual ecology now argues that the multi-dimensionality of nature, our creative access to it, allows for a cognitive liveliness. 30 Musical ethnographers such as Margaret Fay Shaw and her study of folk songs have shown how dialects encode centuries of memories and traditions in that region, creating a sense of identity in small communities against the eroding pressures of expanding foreign influences. 31 Irish trad music now has its own institutional spokes-forum. Comhaltas’s agenda, according to their website, is “passing on the tradition of

Notes to pages 172–80  |  427

Irish culture.” They see themselves as both instructors and promoters, to increase globally the promotion, identification, and preservation of Irish music. They are organized according to a hierarchical series of exams and fees and codified instruction, although in a non-profit manner. Many still learn tunes the old way, by ear, in local sessions. Some may have distrust for the commercial nature of many Irish fleadh (festivals). Off the record, some refer to the Eisteddfod as a “middle-class jamboree.” 32 Tháinig mé anseo ó chnoic agus ó chaoráin, Ó pharóistí beaga beadaí an bhéalchrábhaidh, ó bhailte an bhéadáin, ó bhochtaineacht agus beaginmhe mo mhuintire, ó nead caonaigh a gcineáltais, ó chlaí cosanta a sorachta. 33 Peter Kavanagh, a relation of Patrick, was a folklore collector himself, publishing a small book entitled Irish Mythology: A Dictionary (1988), containing numerous observations of rural life in the west of Ireland. Patrick Kavanagh, in his introduction to that volume, makes several interesting observations including “this book did something … landmarks in my memory appeared” (1). Building on the notion that landscape and unique human cultures are inseparable, Kavanagh continues by describing his friendships with various local personalities, including Jack Hamill, who had “quarried out forts and other gentle places and his luck was none too good. Sickness and cattle losses dogged him till he grew wise in the way of the fairies” (2). Kavanagh’s descriptions are not altogether unlike CT . Kavanagh’s list of memories continues and he laments the passing of the countryside. He argues, from a point of view very similar to Yeats, that books provide some, if distant, recollection: “Perhaps that whole world of imagination is crumbled now. It was destroyed by the raw consciousness of compulsory education whose expression is the illiterate newspaper, but echoes of it still linger in the crannies of the people’s minds turning erstwhile savages into men of sensibility” (5). Yeats himself was keenly sensitive to Kavanagh’s point here: that this paradoxical, and supposed, amelioration of the peasant, the conversion of savagery through mass media and early globalization, was in fact a destructive kind of enforced uniformity that demolished the local in its efforts toward international discourse. Yeats criticizes in CT the mechanisms of this new society – generic newspapers and hegemonic education systems. 34 Howards End provides another example of how Edwardian economics, advancing capitalist culture, overwrite a dissipating rural tradition.

428  |  Notes to pages 183–4

35 The notion that this text is, in fact, multi-faced is crucial as a counterargument to the view that Yeats presents a fascist fantasy in this work. CT was part of that line of thinking that begins in the late eighteenth century and culminates in a number of different ways across Europe, not always in the same way in any one place. Hence, the difference needs to be established between De Valeran nationalism – his political manifesto of maidens dancing at the crossroads, as his infamous speech encouraged – and Yeats’s own varieties of national self-consciousness. I think the point that needs to be made is that in CT Yeats does more than promote ethnic nationalism. There is a sense of skepticism here that protects him from either the milder green variety of Oirish fascism, or the toxic kind that developed east of the Rhine, which also uses Herder as a foundation. Yeats’s multitude of articulations confounds the text in a way that resists its coordination with aggressive national politics. CT is not a fascist document because it is double-voiced. Fascism silences the other voice, either by stuffing its mouth with clover or by cutting its throat altogether. 36 Dinneen’s orthography, muintear: “household, family community, religious order, tribe” (1996, 769). 37 Issues concerning language, identity, and the formula of independence continue to be played out in political agendas within Ireland. In 2005, the Dáil passed a law banning the use of English in road signs – which previously were bilingual – as well as on state-produced, official maps. This law applies to the west of Ireland, particularly gaeltachtaí and their environs. Language activists consider this a triumph of patriotism over tourism: visitors will now have to navigate their itineraries around such favourites as Cill Airne (Killarney) and Dún na nGall (Donegal). Corporate mapmakers are expected to follow this law. It is difficult to say what effect this largely symbolic justification of the Irish language will have. 38 The extent that technology augments, or inhibits, folk practice is a complex issue. Contemporary institutions, such as the Internet, for example, allow mail-lists such as IRTRAD -L to take advantage of the global electronic community, but they still hang on to the trappings of knotwork and fiddleheads in digital form. My sense, though, is that Yeats predicted how difficult the issue would become if left in the hands of governing authorities. Irish television programs such as The Pure Drop, the title of an RTÉ series, made clear the politics of choosing the most undiluted forms of musical performance.

Notes to pages 184–9  |  429

Cha pter F o u r 1 In a recent article for the Guardian, Seamus Heaney made the claim that the haiku of Buson, Issa, and Bashō bear a strong resemblance to Old Irish verse, based on a shared sensibility of “the economy of means, the sense of a huge encircling stillness.” Available at http://books. guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2216007,00.html. Heaney’s haiku-influenced poetry appears in Our Shared Japan (Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods 2007), an anthology of Irish poems that have, in variously loose ways, taken Japan as their subject matter. It is only conjecture to make such comparisons. Western literary criticism, with its interest in these three haiku poets in particular, could seemingly relate haiku to any genre of poetry, given sufficiently imaginative leeway. Heaney, however, emphasizes the Irishness of the premodern verse as coinciding with a Japanese viewpoint. This demonstrates the continued perception of a shared Japanese-Irish literary sensitivity. Moreover, Yeats’s active engagement with contemporary Japanese authors seems even more important. Rather than making abstract equivalences, he went further in actively promoting the arts and literature, as intercultural dialogue, in his own era. 2 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-most-famous-irishmanyou-ve-never-heard-of-1.1158389. 3 For a biography of Hearn in English, see Paul Murray (2001). For Japanese, see Hirakawa (2004). 4 Some of the most influential cultural ambassadors were a part of this movement. They include figures such as Ernest Fenollosa who helped educate a new generation, and Josiah Condor, a prominent architect who trained Japanese designers, including Tatsuno Kingo, as well as cultivating friendships with noteworthy artists such as Kawanabe Kyōsai. 5 Note that Hearn uses the orthography of his day for Kwaidan. Transliterated now as kaidan, this literary category includes various genres of ghost stories. Frequently anthologized, they have a long history as the preserve of orature. They also allow the author’s imagination an alternative space for social critique. Hearn had a forerunning example in Ueda Akinari’s Ugetsu monogatari (1776). Akinari had a larger vision than composing typical gothic vignettes. Akinari worked from Chinese models of folk tales, reframing them according to Japanese social situations and local ancestral utterances. The literary format of ghosts, thus, did not have to be a static template. Dennis Washburn (2006) identifies

430  |  Notes to pages 195–200

an important quality to ancestral recall: “Moral fables” enable “recognition of the spiritual qualities of art” (55). Ueda’s interest in the details of local philology and storytelling methods align him with kokugaku learning. Like Hearn, he struggled with a lifelong visual disability. 6 Another renowned interpreter of Japanese literature was R.H. Blyth, who was interned in Japan during the war; he was an outspoken pacifist, as well as arguing that Buddhist morality necessitated a vegetarian diet. His influence is especially recognizable on the Beat Generation. 7 Modernism was aware of this problem. For example, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View contrasts his experience of Italy, as cultural landscape, with the version provided in Baedeker’s guidebook. 8 See Richard Torrance (1996) for an extended discussion of Izumo’s sense of itself as literary regionalism amid policies of institutional education and collective land management. It would be interesting to measure Hearn more closely against modern Izumo literature, including Miyazaki Koshoshi. The right to claim regional specificity involved, as Dinneen notes, the connectivity of dialect with the continuity of customs. The local offers a particular palette of associations that the urban model cannot replicate. Donegal or Izumo writers can demonstrate a particular affinity for the importance of the imaginative geography that shapes a literary regionalism. Thus, claims to local colour, of regional specificity, had an anti-integrationist strategy. 9 Hearn’s lectures covered a range of English literature, including Tennyson and others. In recorded form, the important anthology of Hearn’s work (Murray 2001) contains several examples of his comments to Yeats, including about the folkloric dimension of Irish society. 10 Of Hearn’s relationship to Yeats in terms of occultism, see George Hughes’s “W.B. Yeats and Lafcadio Hearn: Negotiating with Ghosts,” which explores the relationship of these two writers based on a shared Theosophist interest in séances. See also Ciaran Murray’s “Japan as Celtic Otherworld: Lafcadio Hearn and the Long Voyage Home” (2003), which sees Hearn as conflating Tír-na-nÓg with Buddhist otherworlds. For Murray, Jung provides a trans-historical, universal origin for both Irish and Japanese spiritualities. This, to me, does seem rather limiting of Hearn’s breadth of comprehension. 11 At least two or three book-length studies on Hearn have appeared in Japanese each year over the past decade. Titles have included Nishi Masahiko’s Mimi no etsuraku: Rafukadio Hān to onnatachi [The Pleasures of the Ear: Lafcadio Hearn and Women]; a collection of his educational

Notes to pages 201–12  |  431

materials, Kyōikusha Rafukadio Hān no sekai [Lafcadio Hearn as Educator]; and Nishikawa Morio’s Rafukadio Hān: Kindaika to ibunka rikai no shōsu [Lafcadio Hearn, Modernity, and the Comprehension of Foreign Cultures in Transition]. 12 Hearn’s later writings and beliefs do, to an extent, coincide with the rhetoric of Meiji state nationalism, and its assertive policy-building based on kokugaku [nation studies]. As Starrs (2006) also argues, there is diverse reasoning behind the shaping of Hearn’s concept of nation, and offers a balanced depiction of how crises and anxieties encouraged Hearn’s sense of impending social disaster. The fraught progression from culture, to observance of culture, and then to the nation-state requires many intermediary steps. Hearn’s attitudes toward emerging nationalisms are, after all, incomplete. Claims that he would have endorsed the Pacific War or imperialist atrocities are, at best, conjectural. 13 Gregory Castle (2001) reads this chapter as posing the central question at issue: “that is at the heart of Yeats’s Revivalist project: to what authority, aesthetic or ethnographic, does one appeal to succeed in redeeming an authentic folk culture?” (66). The answer, in part, entails moving outside of the roundabout debate of authority and invention and into what the community is saying about itself. 14 In a fundamentalist reading of Edward Said’s (1979, 1994) initial claims, imperialism is predestined. It seems almost impossible to evaluate the respective multiculturality of individuals. Historical power precludes any legitimate access to the foreign. Cultures remain indomitably inscrutable. Learning one word of another language means to corrupt it with the entirety of your own. Orientalism/Occidentalism are shambles of faulty cultural mimesis from a distant gaze. There seems no way to step out of the Disney diorama. English monolingualism, as the global lingua franca and scholarly coin of the realm, can go unchallenged. How can we get out of racist predestinationism? Oldmeadow (2004) identifies a mood of superciliousness that has become a rather uncritical form of judgment, “the study of comparative religion based on rootless humanism” (173). Optimistically, more critics are forwarding other theoretical understandings of how peoples emerge and relate to each other across varying impediments (artistic, social, religious, linguistic). Timothy Weiss’s (2004) “translational register” is one such possibility, in which words are embodied in intertextual, horizontal dimensions of mutual implication (6–7). Weiss explains his theories through both Husserl and Buddhism (203–16).

432  |  Notes to pages 212–18

15 Aside from Doi, many of Hearn’s students became important scholars of European literature. For example, Ueda Bin, another one of Hearn’s favourite students, became a translator of Verlaine. Ueda Bin, Kikuchi Kan, and Yano Hōjin were active in the Osaka chapter of the Irish Literary Studies Society. The Tokyo chapter of Airurando bungakukai centred around Akutagawa, Saijō Yaso, and Kobayashi Yoshio. Ueda Bin is credited with introducing the writings of Synge to Kikuchi Kan when he was a student of Ueda’s at Kyoto Imperial University. Kan would frequently refer to Synge’s introduction to The Playboy of the Western World to articulate his own theories of modern drama. See Katayama Hiroyuki (1997) for a discussion of Kan’s debt to Synge (203, 218–19). 16 The library at Tōhoku University was also recently damaged in the 2011 Great Eastern Japan Earthquake, the year that marked the centennial of the library’s founding. 17 Many versions of this song are available on YouTube. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUDOW8N7Bo. 18 John Coltrane visited Japan in 1966, studying traditional musical instruments with several teachers. See Leonard Brown (67–8). 19 For a sense of the contrasting evaluation of Hearn in English-speaking societies, it is worth comparing the different emphases contained in two articles, one from the Irish Times, “The Most Famous Irishman You’ve Never Heard Of ” (20 September 2004, 12), by John Moran, with another in the New York Times, “Honoring a Westerner who Preserved Japan’s Folk Tales” (20 February 2007, 4), by Martin Fackler. For an amusing anecdote about a Hawaiian storyteller who, mistaken for a famous Hearn expert, receives great hospitality while visiting Japan, see Glen Grant (1994). 20 See also David L. Howell (2005), who describes in detail the manner in which Meiji authority exercised control over the social order in ways that actually exceeded the Tokugawa regimes. 21 Akutagawa and Matsumura would speak warmly of each other in public for the remainder of their lives. Matsumura was very particularly heartbroken by the news of Akutagawa’s suicide, writing a brief memoir entitled: Akutagawa-san no kaisō: watashi no Ruka den [Remembrances of Akutagawa: My Gospel of Luke]. The biblical allusion underlines Matsumura’s sense of not actually knowing Akutagawa as a person, but relaying a document of experiences about a Christ figure in Japanese literature, a self-crucified artist at the prime of his powers, and those describing his life from momentary recollections.

Notes to pages 224–38  |  433

22 See Mori Mayumi for a discussion of Matsumura’s commemorative essay on Akutagawa. 23 This encounter is described by Tsuruoka Mayumi (1953, 765–6) in her essay on Matsumura Mineko, “Hirugaeru nishoku: Hiroko to Mineko” [Two Fluttering Colours: Hiroko and Mineko]. 24 This technique of adaptation – of adjusting traditional folk tales with modern notions of plot and plotlessness – has been evidenced in a range of Japanese writers, including Dazai Osamu and Murakami Haruki. 25 Besides kanji, Japanese has two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, the latter utilized to represent foreign words in Japanese pronunciation. Thus by writing handkerchief in katakana, Akutagawa emphasizes the imported, foreign quality to the item. 26 Another important figure in this context is the Keats scholar, Taketomo Sōfū, who was a frequent contributor of Irish-related materials to Eigo seinen [commonly referred to as The Rising Generation in English], a popular student magazine dedicated to English-language literature, particularly featuring Irish poets, beginning in 1898. 27 For more on this debate, see Hirakawa’s Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, which argues that Loti, Chamberlain, and Hearn do not fit neatly into the same category of exoticist. There had been, of course, many interpreters of Japan at that time, including W.G. Aston and F.V. Dickens, as well as writers in German, French, and other languages. Hearn, arguably, has left the strongest legacy. 28 Many interrelated programs based on this theme, Save the Future, were broadcast in June 2008. The format alternated between panel discussion and short documentaries on community-centred environment activism, land reclamation projects, and other efforts to counteract climate change.

Cha pter F i v e 1 Consider, as a counter-example, that The Mikado was composed when “an old Japanese sword that, for years, had been hanging on the wall of his study, fell from its place. This incident directed his [W.S. Gilbert’s] attention to Japan” (1914) (Cellier and Bridgeman 186). 2 A striking feature of Ōshima’s conversation with Satō is the contrast in their sense of the sword. Ōshima often turns toward a Suzukian mysticism, while Satō remains more grounded in discussing its metallurgy. 3 See, for example, Kobori Ryūji’s translation (2003) of this poem. He renders Satō’s “sword” as meitō [名刀]. This is an epithet reserved for

434  |  Notes to pages 263–4

weapons of the highest quality, fame, and noteworthiness of craftsmanship and denotes a value at the opposite end of the spectrum from cheap, machine-made costume swords. For more information, see Yokota, Sengoku jidai to meitō. 4 George Yeats attempted to fulfill this condition of Yeats’s will, writing to Satō and offering to have the sword returned to Satō’s son in Japan. Satō refused in a letter, writing, “I did not present the sword with the intention of having it sent back to Japan. I shall be very happy to give it to your son” (David Ross 168). 5 In Japanese, Irish, and English, proposed connections between the Celtic and the Japanese have enjoyed much speculative attention. For example, see Kamata Tōjo and Tsuruoka Mayumi, eds, Keruto to Nippon (2000). A recent poetry anthology, edited by Irene De Angelis and Joseph Woods, entitled Our Shared Japan (2007), assembles a variety of Irish authors who have explored, imaginatively or experientially, cross-identification between these two shimaguni [island countries]. 6 D.T. Suzuki’s impact on Ōshima’s sense of cultural comparison is quite pronounced. Suzuki’s notion of sword-mind, and its potential relationship to Japanese imperialism and militarism, should be noted here. This has been a subject of an increasingly emotional controversy. Robert Sharf (1995) identifies problematic passages in Suzuki’s writings to implicate him as a propagandist for Japanese ethnocentrism, and the conquest of Asia during the Second World War. Brian Victoria (1997) documents an account of the collaboration of Zen, as a religious institution, for the colonial project, including quotes from Suzuki. See also Harry Oldmeadow (2004, 168–73). Investigations of Suzuki’s compliance with state militarism have usefully taken the sheen off his Western hagiographies. But that the entirety of Suzuki’s project can be positioned within the milieu of Japanese militarism has not been satisfactorily defined. Suzuki’s ideals of “pure Zen,” as the supreme revelation of Japanese culture, are open to debate. Nevertheless, his philosophy overall should not be parlayed as a subscription for the fascist agenda. Suzuki’s statements after the war have been contradictory, and his lack of a formal acknowledgment of Japan’s war crimes – several Zen sects have also refrained from acknowledging their role –remains an issue. From the 1940s Suzuki’s views seem to have changed considerably, and he did express regret for some of his previous writings, particularly his comments on poet-warrior ideals. The relationship of modernity to authoritarianism as a whole is a contentious issue, and Yeats is part of the debate.

Notes to pages 266–8  |  435

Brian Victoria’s research should give all of us, and our affiliations, pause to consider. At this time, what relations, complicities, and participations do we have with ongoing human rights violations in East Asia, and everywhere else? 7 Yano Hōjin has written two important accounts of Yeats’s relationship with Japan. Yeats to Nippon (1948) contains numerous anecdotes about his own friendship with Yeats, the two having met in Ireland. Yano had first proposed that Yeats have a speaking engagement in Tokyo. A second offer, some years later, had increased the offer to an adjunct professorship. Eibungaku yawa (1955) another personal series of observations and musings, contains more information on the sword; it was written before Ōshima’s interview with Satō. Yano was an introductory figure in linking Japan to Yeats: a connection that Ōshima (1965) pursues vigorously. Yeats wrote to Yano, in January 1928: “Since I have met you I have felt a door open into Japan; you have told me so much, and given to me the means of further knowledge” (23). Yeats, unfortunately, never took up the position in Japan, citing age and ill health. 8 Ōshima first published his notes on this interview to accompany a collection of his translations of Yeats: Yeats shishū [Yeats: Selected Poems] (Tokyo: Hokuseidō, 1958). 9 On this note, John Walter De Gruchy (2003) examines how Waley’s translations act as an extension of the British imperial project. 10 There had been precedents: porcelain and manju [bean cakes] can be found throughout Kyushu, emblazoned with St Francis Xavier and other religious themes commemorating the 1549 arrival of Portuguese missionaries. 11 Many areas of Iwate suffered massive damage during the earthquake in the Tohoku region on 11 March 2011. 12 Ancestral transmissions, as informative communication via spectral forms, have been a crucial narrative device in contemporary terebi dorama [TV serial dramas]. Examples include Dae Jang Geum, Imotako nankin, Aguri, and Kaze no Haruka (narrated by the kami of Yufudake mountain, near Beppu). Indeed, in Sakura, the entire narration is given through an ancestral spirit, a grandfather, who repeatedly intervenes with commentary on his granddaughter’s transition from life in Hawai’i to Japan. Through the same technique, the central narrative in Junjō kirari is provided via a deceased mother, and in Asuka through a ghostly grandmother. The appearance of ghosts and demons in anime and manga is superlative. An interesting example of the cultural dynamics of ghosts is

436  |  Notes to pages 270–84

the video-game series Perappa the Rappa. The original Japanese version includes levels that involve a descent into jigoku [Hell]. The player then has to appease the gaki with a vigorous hiphop performance. These scenes were removed for the game’s American release, presumably to avoid offending Christian sensibilities. 13 For an interesting, multi-media overview of his life and work, see the Moto’ori Norinaga Museum online: http://www.norinagakinenkan.com/. Tokugawan kokugaku, and its debate on what constitutes authentic culture, had definite impact on the Meiji ideologies of restoration, although Susan Burns (2003) shows that the progress was not simply one of progression. Yanagita, like other modernist writers, repositions received texts into the political situation of the moment. He is neither simply reviving old ideas, as if they had not changed, nor inventing them as ad hoc components of culture. His writings are informed, necessarily and problematically, with and against an accumulation of claims to the historical. Hearn, particularly in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, references his discussions alongside Hirata Atsutane’s early work as an expositor for Shinto. 14 Eric Havelock on Homer, makes similar claims. His discussions on how the poet attempts to document history do much to provide an analysis of the poet-historian’s method. 15 Yeats brandished Satō’s sword as a response to an Indian professor’s concern about India at the time of a growing independence movement. Yeats yelled in reply, “Insistence on the antinomy” and “Conflict, more conflict!” (in Ōshima 1965, 119). 16 A previous version of this monograph included an extended discussion on the channel of influence from Yeats, to Yanagita, and eventually to Miyazaki Hayao’s film Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi [Spirited Away] (2001) as an epilogue chapter. I have since decided this topic is beyond the scope of this monograph, although the subject matter demonstrates resultant channels of thematic development from the patterns of interfluence that I document here. Therefore, this is a subject I would like to discuss in more detail as a separate article in the future. At this time, I do note the importance of kamikakushi, in how Yanagita, in a manner very similar to Yeats, brought kamikakushi into popular twentiethcentury discourse providing an allegory of temporal and geographical displacement as a modern symptom of loss and environmental trauma. 17 For a discussion of the treatment of Portuguese clergy, and early Kirishitan [Christians], in early modern Japan, see Nam-Lin Hur (2000).

Notes to pages 285–91  |  437

18 For a discussion on how these sites are preserved and their importance as communal memory, see “Tobercurry – Keeper of the Flame,” in the Sligo Weekender (5 April 2005). Available at http://archives.tcm.ie/ sligoweekender/2005/04/05/story22394.asp. According to local reports, when ground was broken for an extension to Sligo General Hospital, the builders turned up a number of unmarked famine graves. 19 This line of questioning can lead into the “forty Inuit words for snow” type of misconceptions. But, for another example, we might think of how cedar or salmon contribute to coastal First Nations in British Columbia. A Watsujian reading might see this as an instance in how the influential fūdo of the coniferous rain-forest helped to shape a culture. Julie Cruikshank’s (2006) work provides a compelling analysis of how linguistic features of Inuktitut arose to negotiate the specifics of their environment. 20 Interesting intersections between Irish and Japanese authors continue to be fashioned. For example, Takahashi Mutsuo, after a visit to Ireland, composed a series of poetic meditations that frequently respond and interact with the works of Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, particularly on the themes of gender, sexual orientation, and the contexts of cultural landscapes. For a bilingual edition of these poems, see Takahashi’s On Two Shores (2006). 21 Thomas Hardy’s poem “Old Furniture” (1917) bears a resemblance to Tanizaki’s theory of jidai no tsuya [the lustre of time]: I see the hands of the generations That owned each shiny familiar thing In play on its knobs and indentations, And with its ancient fashioning Still dallying. 22 As has been recently documented, the constant diffusion of electric light by major cities in Japan has had environmental impacts. Cicadas, for example, have had their natural rhythms upset as they can no longer distinguish daylight from darkness. 23 Thomas Harper and Edward Seidensticker (1989) have produced the authoritative version in English of In Praise of Shadows in its entirety. Tanizaki’s essay has had a long-standing impact, asserting certain characteristics of Japanese tastefulness, through which he conducts a meditation on the irrecoverable effects that come with change. In’ei raisan contrasts with Kuki Shūzō’s Iki no kōzō [The Structure of Iki] (1930) in

438  |  Notes to pages 295–312

that the latter attempts to summarize the Japanese taste according to a single (supposedly untranslatable) essence. Tanizaki describes shadows as a kind of terrain, rather than an aesthetic label. In all of the Japanese authors under discussion, twilight was not used as a uniquely Japanese aesthetic, such as Kuki posits for iki. On the contrary, twilight enabled an intermingling of different cultural notions, places, and eras. For a discussion on how various discourses haves formulated a Japanese uniqueness, see Peter Dale (1990). 24 Alan Christy (1997) and Uchida Ryūzō (1995), among others, have considered the ideological frameworks behind nativist studies and anthropology in Yanagita Kunio and other folklorists in Japan in a way that is similar to Gregory Castle’s (2001) approach to the Celtic Revival. 25 Margherita Long (2002) also sees in Tanizaki regard for the pleasure of the old object as a question of evenness: “culturalism struggled to balance the perceived evenness of tradition with the unevenness of global capitalism” (432). Long, however, locates Tanizaki’s discussion of nare [familiarity] in a psychoanalytical understanding of the pleasure principle in traditional aesthetics, exacerbated by an emergent national psychosis. 26 Mishima (1954) reworks the classical play Aoi no ue in a contemporary milieu under the same title. Yeats, also drawing inspiration from Aoi no ue, incorporated elements into The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919). 27 For a study of ritual dance in relation to ceremony and theatre, see Irit Averbuch’s (1995) study on yamabushi kagura.

Cha pter Si x 1 http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man20Yo.html. 2 The relationship between Yeats and Kyōka has not been comparatively explored, however, in Japanese or English. While one cannot with certainty posit direct influence, one does, nonetheless, find thematic confluence given the range of interchanges as described in this work. Kyōka’s work is not well known in English. Several volumes of his prose have been translated by smaller publishers. Cody Poulton’s Spirits of Another Sort (2001) remains one of the best explications and translations into English of Kyōka’s drama, as well as Charles Inouye’s anthology of Kyōka’s prose, In Light and Shadows (2004). 3 As first cited by Sadataka Muramatsu in Izumi Kyōka kenkyū (1974, 312). Poulton is suggestively sympathetic to a Yeats-Kyōka link, being one

Notes to pages 314–24  |  439









of fortuitous correspondences. Along with translations of Yeats, Sangū Makoto also published a brief account of Hearn in English: “Lafcadio Hearn in Japan” (1959). 4 In private correspondences, as in a letter to John Quinn (23 July 1918), Yeats casually refers to certain plays as “Noh” (Le 651). See also a letter to Lady Gregory (8 September 1917). But this does not necessarily mean he saw his drama as point for point pure reproductions. Yeats would use the word “Noh” only a few other times in reference to himself, again to Lady Gregory (e.g., 10 April 1921), and lastly to Edmund Dulac (14 October 1923): “perhaps produce a Noh play if Civil War does not start again” (Le 700). Thus, Yeats only applied Noh suggestively to his drama in limited, private usage. After only a brief period of imagining with this conceptual label, Yeats seemingly abandoned any further self-references to his work as Noh from the early 1920s. 5 Shinpa, more technically, was a modernist movement that combined elements from kabuki with more contemporary developments in drama. As a transitional development in twentieth-century Japanese drama, shinpa notably combined the classical tradition with contemporary innovations. These often involve decidedly non-Japanese conventions, including influences from the European nineteenth-century stage. 6 P.G. O’Neill remarked in a book review that the analysis of Yeats and his relation to Japanese dramatics “must have been the subject of more graduate theses than any other single topic” (452). 7 Curiously, Ellis (1999) seems to think that Koizumi Yakumo/Lafcadio Hearn are two different people: “the latter being a fanatical Japonophile who left the United States of America to set up home, married a Japanese wife … without, however, ever directing his attention to her [Japan’s] theatre” (125–6). Hearn, in fact, was aware of Noh, and found it quite intimidating. Writing to a student, he described “the enormous labour that would be required to prepare a few of these for western readers” (Ichikawa 1925, 250). Recently, Sakate Yōji has composed several neo-Noh dramas that are based on Hearn’s texts. For production notes, see http://www.alles. or.jp/~rinkogun/e.kamigami.html. 8 For a discussion of Emmert and Matsui’s dramaturgical collaboration, see Vellino and Waisvisz. 9 In Japanese scholarship, Noh texts are usually organized and compiled into edited and annotated anthologies, similar, for example, to a Norton

440  |  Notes to pages 328–38

edition of Jacobean drama. Noh texts in this form are usually known as yōkyoku, which simply means the recitation of Noh, but thus also refers to the text from which this performance is derived. Two of the most popular sources of this sort of material are found in multi-volume anthologies within the authoritative Nihon koten bungaku zenshū and Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei series. Individual playgoers’ editions, utaibon, of a single play are designed to be used for performance study, or for the once popular hobby of amateur chanting. These contain more intricate subscript symbols that indicate suggestions for rhythm and intonation, similar to the dynamic markings on a musical score. As a nod to tradition, utaibon are often written in the elegant style of script called kuzushiji, a cursive style of brushwork. There are also actors’ handbook editions, which include the exacting conventions established by a particular school, or house, of Noh thespians. 10 A wide variety of European playwrights influenced Japanese authors in the early twentieth century, including such diverse styles as Ibsen, Maeterlinck, and Wilde, whose Salome was extremely popular. Conversely, Japanese dramatics influenced many Westerners besides Yeats, including Bertolt Brecht, Paul Claudel, and Benjamin Britten, as various scholars have demonstrated. Critical writing has increasingly shown that the Japanese-European artistic exchanges were complex and multi-dimensional, not easily summarized by categorical depictions. For a Japanese-language account of Ernest Fenollosa’s contributions to the promotion of Japanese classics, see Yamaguchi Seiichi, Fenollosa: Nippon bunka no senyō ni sasageta isshō (1982). 11 A recent anthology of scholarship, edited by the Institute of Nōgaku Studies at Hosei University, considers the unique difficulties Noh poses to a translator: Nō no hon’yaku: bunka no hon’yaku wa ika ni shite kanō ka [Noh in Translation: How is the translation of culture enabled?]. 12 For an example, Tsukui Nobuko’s Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh Plays (1983) demonstrates Pound’s textual failures by providing vigorous contrasts between the historical texts of Noh, as preserved by the Kanze house of performers, and the inaccuracies within Pound’s version. However, considering the relative privacy of the iemoto tradition, it is not surprising that Fenollosa did not have complete access to Kanze archives at that time. Like Hearn, however, Fenollosa did enjoy a greater degree of admittance than others. He was, of course, one among a general movement. Just as Yanagita was not the sole creator of minzokugaku, Fenollosa need not be regarded as the forefather, or founder, of Noh translations.

Notes to pages 338–9  |  441

13 Itō was, by all accounts including his own, prone to fanciful exaggeration. Perhaps his biggest tale, specifically designed to tantalize the home-bound Japanese readers of his autobiography, claims an extended journey through Egypt, which never actually occurred. Itō was very fond of Egyptian imagery in general, and – rather like Lord Byron – he was fond of being photographed in attire suggestive of the Near East. 14 Some of Itō’s autobiographical details can be found in Ōshima, and a full version in Japanese, Utsukushiku naru kyōshitsu [A Classroom for Beauty’s Becoming] (1956). Helen Caldwell has written a biography of him in English, Ito Michio: The Dancer and the Dance (1977). In Japanese, see Fujita Fujio’s Itō Michio: Sekai o mau [Dancing the World] (2007). A translation of Caldwell has also been published: Itō Michio: Hito to geijitsu (1985). 15 See Kodama Sanehide for a collection of Kume’s notes and essays about his friendship with Pound and Yeats (1984). Kume had a considerable knowledge of classical Noh, and evidently assisted Pound in translation and other editorial matters. 16 Mishima, a great admirer of Yanagita, Kyōka, and Yeats, perceived the similarities in their methods. Mishima, partially influenced by Yeats, would compose his own neo-Noh [kindai nō], sometimes with Western themes. Ueda Munakata is a prolific actor and playwright who has translated and thoroughly adapted Shakespeare into a Noh style, including arranging the iambic metres into a suitable format of chant. He has lectured often on Yeats and Eliot, and adopted Murder in the Cathedral into a kind of traditional Noh stylistics. For more information, he has a personal website, including several pictures of performances: http://www002.tokai.or.jp/noh/english.html. 17 Compare, for example, the findings of two P hD dissertations: Linda Sue Grimes (1987) sees Yeats as ignorant of Eastern religions, while Chiba Yoko (1988) reads Yeats’s “Noh” drama as explorations of Suzukian Zen. 18 See my essay “Irish-Japanese Necromancy: W.B. Yeats, Izumi Kyōka, and the Stagecraft for Shadows” for an extended discussion on the points of similarities between At the Hawk’s Well and Yashagaike (Aoife Somers 2013). 19 I engage in these discussions to explore the established limits of the compare and contrast scholarship that measures Yeats against classical Noh: although the critical discussion has been extensive, perhaps this is a straw man argument after all. This body of analysis has nonetheless brought needed attention to the subject of Yeats’s relationship with

442  |  Notes to pages 340–9

20

21

22

23 24

Japan. Tutorial terms such as shite and waki, technical vocabulary for understanding Noh in relation to Yeats, are useful for understanding similar formats for actors as working from specific roles. Yet such terms can also limit our expectations of how Yeats’s drama functions uniquely. The idiomatic aji ga aru expresses this meaning of a tinge or feeling, as a taste. For example, a piece of calligraphy may convey a certain dignity, even if its technical qualities are poor. Figal (1999) found Tasogare no aji of such critical importance that he uses this essay as the overture to his study on Japanese modernity (1–7). Uzawa Hisa, leader of the Uzawa troupe, is one of the few female Noh actors in what had been, for centuries, a male-only profession. Uzawa represents how Noh today can be absolutely faithful to the model of tradition, while still incorporating innovation and adaptation. As such, she is a passionate promoter who has staged performances across North America as well as Japan, as well as lectures and educational workshops. Jim McGarry wrote an interesting description of this area in The Sligo Weekender newspaper of 8 April 2003: “On the right-hand side going from Coolaney to Skreen is Tullaghan Hill with the Holy Well attributed to St Patrick, known as the Hawk’s Well, listed as one of the mirabilia [miracles, wonders] of Ireland by writers from the ninth century onwards. The reason is because of the tradition that the water in the well rises and falls with the tide although the Ox Mountains lie between it and the sea. A short distance further on the same side is the striking Carraig na Seabhach, the Hawk’s Rock, referred to in the works of W.B. Yeats and the origin of the name of the Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo.” Shimazaki Chifumi’s translations of Noh include the categories Warrior Ghost Plays and Restless Spirits Plays. For an introduction to the classical theatre of Japan, see Karen Brazell (1998). The youthful Yoshitsune (known as Ushiwakamaru at the time) was ensconced in the temple of Kurama-yama near Kyoto (for his own protection). Nightly, he sneaks out into the mountain wilds to pray and mourn at a waterfall for the loss of his parents, particularly his murdered father. His solitary excursions are, however, interrupted by the visitations of an elderly ghost. In most versions, but not all, this spirit is the Tengu King, Sōjōbō, who instructs Ushiwakamaru in the way of budō, or way of the warrior. During the final lesson, the tengu ancestor preaches the morals of shinrabanshō, a Buddhist concept which explains how all living beings come to intermingle within each individual’s spirit. Thus trained, Ushi­ wakamaru takes on the mature name Yoshitsune. He leaves the static serenity of the monastery and pursues a lifelong quest for justice, col-

Notes to pages 351–60  |  443

lecting numerous deshi [disciples] along the way. One famous follower of his, the disgruntled monk Benkei, became his devotee after losing a contest of arms on a bridge. This incident became the subject of many artworks and plays, including the Noh entitled Hashi Benkei. In another memorable episode, the ghost of Tomomori attacks Yoshitsune’s ship, but tragedy is averted as Benkei, being a monk and knowledgeable of the other realms, knows how to speak to the spectre. Yoshitsune would come to lead armies that would one day overthrow the Taira family dynasty, and with them the age of ancient nobility. Cultural markers across the Japanese landscape document the places referenced in the text. More broadly, these many Yoshitsunean incidents have become the subject for paintings, epics, several Noh drama, and gunki monogatari [war chronicle literature], including Gikeiki. Moreover, there is also a puppet play by Izumo Takeda (Yoshitsune senbon zakura, 1747), Shin Heike monogatari [The New Tale of Heike] (1950–7) by Yoshikawa Eiji, and a novel by Miyao Tomiko Yoshitsune (2004), which became the basis for a recent NHK taiga dorama [TV historical drama]. At the end of each episode, a short documentary provides travel details and regional insights on how locations depicted in the series match up with real physical places, and provide the situational materials, as referenced to specific sites in Japan, for future artists. Shizuka Gozen, the love of Yoshitsune’s life, is one of the most famous female characters in classical Japanese literature owing to the continued attention given to her personality. Like many heroes, Yoshitsune is done away with through an act of betrayal following the battle at the Koromo River. Undeterred, he would become an onryō, a kind of revenant carrying his grudge into the spirit world, paying visitations to his treacherous older brother. The famous epics Heike monogatari [The Tale of the Heike] and Gikeiki depict some of these. 25 Birgit Bramsbäck (1950) offers an extensive consideration of Cú Chulainn as a reccurring character in Yeats. See also Skene (1974). 26 Yeats did not develop a systematic definition for fairies or ghosts. He explores a variety of depictions, including the aristocratic, mischievous, evil, and violent. I do not view these contrary descriptions as contradictions, but as a presentation of a spectrum that spirit presences take in relation to human imaginations, showing that they can coincide with social shifts in collective imaginations. Kappa, in Japan for example, have been depicted as terrifying creatures in Edō tales, as a satirical device for Akutagawa, or used in cucumber advertisements, as well

444  |  Notes to pages 361–3

as soft toys for children. The ways in which the folkloric bestiary, as mirroring society, can be both friend and foe informs much of Yeats’s writing. 27 Tober n-Alt [Well in the Cliff ] in Sligo, an important religious and heritage site, is famous for its delicious waters and curative powers. A popular site for devotions on Garland Sunday, the well probably has also been a site of pagan observances, as evidenced by the practice of tying wishing rags nearby, which hearken to earlier traditions of observance. Sadly, during recent land development in Sligo, a septic tank used by builders broke open and contaminated both the ground and spring waters. Water sources were frequently employed through Irish prehistory in religion as symbols of various beliefs. Lore surrounding these areas has been an important device for enculturating the local territory through communal storytelling. 28 From Lady Wilde’s important work Ancient Legends, Mystical Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887, 199), which concerns the interactivity between these legends and superstitions as specific connections to local spaces. 29 Yeats commissioned this work for the opening of the Abbey Theatre, but later rejected it owing to concerns for its length, production requirements, and perhaps its controversial content. 30 In a recent online interview, Slavoj Žižek offered his views on Japanese characteristics and customs: “the Japanese are well aware that something which may appear superficial and unnecessary has a much deeper structural function … Surfaces do matter. If you disturb the surfaces you may lose a lot more than you think. You shouldn’t play with rituals. Masks are never simply mere masks. Perhaps that’s why Brecht became close to Japan.” Available online through C -Theory: http://www.ctheory. net/articles.aspx?id=79. 31 Kyōgen, literally means mad words, and refers to a style of play which was intended to complement Noh. As a kind of farce, this genre emphasizes comedic action, everyday circumstances, and bawdy conduct. Often presented as an interlude between two plays of that more serious genre, kyōgen could both relax the attention of the audience, as well as surreptitiously mock the emotional pretensions to which it contrasts. 32 Yeats scholars tend to be sheepish about their subject’s vast complexes of superstitions; Kyōka scholars, however, seem to delight in them. In the Japan Times of 15 July 2001, Donald Richie offers a typically Kyōkian

Notes to pages 363–74  |  445

anecdote: “Rough drafts were offered before a photograph of his mentor, Ozaki Koyo, and then burned. The ashes were then eaten as a talisman against cholera, a disease of which Kyoka was in mortal fear.” Kyōka shared with James Joyce a phobia for dogs and thunderstorms. 33 Colman is used descriptively in Baile Bricín: “co ngnūis colman câdha, co cridi seboic” [… a noble wood-pigeon’s face] (Dictionary of the Irish Language 1990, C 328.26), noting his brown complexion. 34 In pursuing a thesis of symbolic hermeticism, F.A.C. Wilson (1958) sees At the Hawk’s Well as an alchemical mixture of Shinto and Western mystery traditions. Noh masks are objects of contemplative iconography, a product of religious meditation. Although, the mask’s purpose remains elusive: “The least we can say is that Yeats’s imagination caught fire from the Noh masks, and that this largely accounts for the elaborate stylisation of his characters” (32).

Cha pter Se ve n 1 Corcomroe is a Cistercian abbey, known as Sancta Maria de Petra Fertilis, Saint Mary of the Fertile Rock, principally thought to have been founded by Donal Mór Ua Briain, King of Limerick, in 1194 (or 1180). According to Annals of Innisfallen, a battle occurred here in the thirteenth century between the O’Briens and their enemies: An army was led by Conor na Siudaine, the son of Donogh Cairbreach O’Brien, to Kinel-Fearmaic, where they were joined by O’Dea and O’Hehir at the head of their forces. They went to the upper Canthred to bring the inhabitants thereof to submission, and they burned the country north of Duibh-Gleann, and proceeded northwards to Béal-Clogaidh, near the sea, where they were met by Conor Carrach O’Loughlin and his allies and a battle ensued in which Conor na Siudaine O’Brien together with a great many of his people were slain by O’Loughlin and the race of O’Donnell Conachtach O’Brien, and he (Conor na Siudaine) was buried by the monks in the Abbey of Burren. University College Cork provides the entire texts of the Annals online as part of their ongoing Corpus of Electronic Texts project: http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T100004/. The Annals of the Four Masters also detail the warring chronology of Corcomroe (2000). For a detailed history of the abbey, see Michael Mac Mahon, On a Fertile Rock. A version of this tale appears in Thomas J. Westropp’s article, “A Folklore Survey of County Clare” (1912).

446  |  Notes to pages 375–84

2 Michael Powell’s 1937 film The Edge of the World dramatizes the events of St Kilda, an isolated island in the Shetlands, the residents of which were forced under government order to leave. This event was seen as evidence of how rurality is being sacrificed for the sake of economic modernism. 3 幽玄 – an important aesthetic term in Japanese arts and culture. Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner (1988) established the preferred translation, mystery and depth, in their study Japanese Court Poetry. Yūgen has the connotation of shadows, depth, mystery, or mysterious elegance. Kawabata Yasunari produced a famous calligraphic scroll of his own brushwork with the phrase shin’ō yūgen, translated as subtle and profound mysteries by the Kiseido company, who manufacture board game equipment. They use this description to emphasize the nuances of go, a board game, and Kawabata’s scroll hangs in a room reserved for play. The calligraphy can be viewed online at the Kiseido Company, Japan, website: http://www.kiseido.com/go_equipment.htm. 4 Jibakurei are spirits bound to the earth, who, because of an emotional attachment, a physical object, or another sort of fetter, cannot fully transcend the material plane and so exist partially among the living in an unrequited state of incorporeality. Somewhat like the analogous poltergeist, jibakurei are often vindictive and jealous toward the living. As in Nishikigi, they can also be pitiable and languishing in their condition. Both Buddhist and Shinto liturgies contain prayers and services designed to help free these trapped entities. Ancestral observance requires one to be careful in areas of jibakurei, to be conscious and cautious in areas where they are thought to be dwelling. Reports of jibakurei were regularly featured in Thai newspapers after the tsunami disaster. In Okinawa, devout Buddhists conduct an annual search for bones and other remains from the battlefields, so that they may receive proper funerary rites. Komatsu (1982) offers an extensive discussion of the historicalreligious foundations of this spectral phenomenon in Japanese legends. 5 Donald Keene’s anthology would include a more authoritative version of this play, in Twenty Plays of the No Theatre. According to Itō Masa­ yoshi’s (1988) annotations, Mount Shinobu, in Fukushima prefecture, has a long-standing reputation for lovers as a useful place for romantic interludes (vol. 3, 29). 6 Also read as Nihon ryōiki, the full title of this work is Nihonkoku genpō zen’aku ryōiki [Miraculous Tales of Karmic Retribution of Good and Evil in Japan].

Notes to pages 387–91  |  447

7 I observed this ceremony during the annual Nagasaki memorial service, on the anniversary of the atomic bombing [genbaku kinenbi], 9 August 2007. 8 Nishikigi means brocade tree, a symbol and gesture of romantic interest in the Michinoku region. Saigyō’s Travelling Tales documents another literary example of this custom (see Gustav Heldt, 1997). Paul Muldoon (2001) may have both Yeats and Nishikigi in mind with this poem: The yard’s three lonesome pines are hung with such tokens. A play by Zeami. (“Hopewell Haiku XXVII ”) 9 See also Michael Valdez Moses (2005), who invites readings of Yeats’s effort to shape a style of drama in which the imaginative power of pre-modern location operates in symbiosis with contemporary circumstances. 10 Another interesting area for research is the use of Irish poetry and songs in relation to the memory of war in Japan. For example, in the program Sokoku [Homeland], Irish folksong acts as the principle musical theme. Tokutai, a conscripted pilot who could not follow through on his kamikaze mission, returns sixty years later to Japan, not to an emperor’s anthem, but to Irish folksong, a Japanese translation of “Danny Boy” (“Londonderry Air”). The song was originally brought to Japan through Irish missionaries in the early twentieth century and became enormously popular. The Japanese lyrics are markedly different from the Weatherly original, including this phrase: 祖国に命をあずけた

おまえの無事を祈る

To your homeland dedicate your life, while for your safety I pray. The renowned writer of yūgen manga and ghost researcher Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922) is an amputee from the Pacific War. He attributes his interest in the supernatural to eerie experiences of soldier-ghosts on battlefields. 11 This incident is recorded by the biographer William Shehadi in Kahlil Gibran: A Prophet in the Making (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995). Gibran met Yeats in 1911, a time when he was at work on his first English-language manuscript, The Madman. Gibran took this opportunity to draw a portrait of Yeats, a man with whom he was very much impressed, but about whose nationalism he had reservations.

448  |  Notes to pages 392–403

12 Historians and critics have been increasingly sensitive to how modernity in Asia, as shaped by emerging post-colonial nation-states, had resulted in increased domestic anxiety within East Asian nations surrounded by topographical incursions. See also, Leslie Pincus, Authenticating Culture in Imperial Japan: Kuki Shūzō and the Rise of Nationalist Aesthetics (1996). Pincus uses Kuki (1888–1941) as a case study of a modernist philosopher who evaluates pre-modern aesthetic ideals as demonstrative elements for not only a continuous literary sensibility, but also constitutive elements for a collective, eternal Japaneseness. Western authors had posited this as well, including R.H. Blyth or Basil Hall Chamberlain, particularly in Things Japanese (1905). Kuki, however, clearly positioned his ethnic pride in support of Japanese imperialism, aligning literary vocabulary with military pride. Currently, Kobayashi Yoshinori (1953–) has published many bestselling books of war apologetics. This highly controversial writer and manga artist has critiqued the depictions of Japan’s role in the Pacific War. Kobayashi calls for gōmanizumu [resurgent pride] in considering Japanese history in opposition to Western pronouncements. 13 Many book-length studies have examined kokugaku and its operations as discourse as representing different implications within different historical frameworks. A monumental work on the subject of nativist strategies in Japan is H.D. Harootunian’s Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (1988). Mark McNally’s Proving the Way: Conflict and Practice in the History of Japanese Nativism (2005) is a rebuttal to Harootunian, and certainly shows the considerable debate concerning the discursive strategies of communal collectivity. Western participation in unpacking nativism has forced the internal debate to turn outward. Susan Burns (2003) analyzes the development of kokugaku in the early modern period as a multivalent genre that enabled a great range of debate and interpretive viewpoints in considering mytho-historical materials and their ongoing influence on social formation. Burns thus reminds us of the complex, rather than prescriptively straightforward, debates that kokugaku inspired. Intertextuality was a key feature for extending the format of the debate. Kokugaku in the modern period [Meiji jidai], as Burns finds, led to a conflation of culturalism with national polity. But Burns also shows that this development was not a unilateral transition from one era’s ultranationalism, the Tokugawan, into another, the Meijian.

Notes to page 404  |  449

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e

index

For works by William Butler Yeats, see Yeats, W.B., plays by and Yeats, W.B., works by. Abbey Theatre, 151, 366, 378 Acallam na Senórach [The Colloquy of the Old Men], 77–8 “Achira no kokoro to Nihon no kokoro” (Shinozawa), 293–4 Adams, Gerry: “The Mountains of Mourne,” 113 Adorno, Theodor, 129, 229 Ælfric of Eynsham, 71 Agamben, Giorgio, 374 agrarian life, 182–4, 255, 289–90, 299, 315. See also jōmin; peasants; rural society and traditions Airurando bungakukai [Irish Literary Studies Society]: introduction to, 11, 191–2, 417n2; and Akutagawa, 22, 50, 223, 230–1, 239–41, 250, 433n15; attraction of to Irish literature, 50, 229, 271; and comparative literature, 226–7; and Doi, 223, 240–1; formation of, 230–1; and Hearn, 21, 197, 199; and intercultural exchange, 253–5, 327; and Irish and Japanese folklore interaction, 207; and Japanese modernity, 241; and Keruto

kenkyūkai, 46; and Matsumura, 231, 237; members in, 22, 241, 433n15; purpose of, 250; and Saijō, 50, 231, 241, 433n15; support for, 50; translation of name, 417n2; and twilight, 252; and Yanagita, 283 Airurando nikki (Shiba), 195, 286 aji ga aru [feeling as taste], 443n20. See also “Tasogare no aji” Ajinomoto Company, 278 Akai hana (Matsumura), 230 Akinari, Ueda, 389; Ugetsu monogatari, 430n5 Akunin no kuruma (Yokomitsu), 47–8, 53 Akutagawa Prize, 238, 254 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke: introduction to, 22, 237–8; and Airurando bungakukai, 22, 50, 223, 230–1, 239–41, 250, 433n15; attraction of to Celtic Revival, 405; categorization of writings, 242; and The Celtic Twilight (Yeats), 244; and comparative literature, 226–7; on fantastic figures, 193; ghostly in writings of, 242–5; and Hearn, 22, 240, 257; and intercultural exchange, 250, 256; and Japanese folklore, 244; and Japanese interpretation of Celtic, 242; and Matsumura, 238–9, 241–2,

433n21; and modernity, 245, 260–1; on Nitobe, 256–7; and Sangū, 240; translation of fairy, 30–1, 250–2, 392; and twilight, 22, 240, 243–4, 313, 321, 324; and Yeats, 192, 239, 242–5 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, works by: Aru ahō no isshō [A Fool’s Life], 238; “The Doll” [Hina], 245–8, 266; “Hankechi” [The Hankerchief ], 248–50, 434n25; “Hell Screen” [Jigoku hen], 243; “In a Grove” [Yabu no naka], 244–5; in Kamen [Mask] (journal), 241; Kappa, 243; “Kumo no ito” [The Spider’s Thread], 241, 243; Kyōka zenshū: mokuroku kaikō [An Introduction to Kyōka’s Oeuvre], 323; translations from The Celtic Twilight, 22, 240, 242–3, 252, 256, 321 Akutagawa-san no kaisō (Matsumura), 238–9, 433n21, 434n22 ancestor. See senzo ancestor worship, 206, 214, 447n4. See also dead, prayers for ancestral: as banished heritage, 402; as how tradition seeks to write itself onto present, 12; and modern nationalism, 315; for societal maturity, 168; and transnational dialogue, 25 ancestral observance. See ancestor worship ancestral recall: and Cavafy, 66; and Celtic Revival, 70; in The Celtic Twilight, 165; and collective memory, 53; contemporary interlocutor needed for, 245–6; as culture as felt absence, 22; as daily occurrence, 205–6; and discourse of the vanishing, 25–6; folkloric as, 271; and kitsch, 399–400; and Noh, 23–4, 318, 325, 350; in objects, 263, 302; in poetic historiography, 66; as problematic in present, 381, 385, 387, 393–4, 400; and Purgatory, 392; and resistance in present, 374; tensions of, 244–5 ancestral transmissions, 436n12

480 | Index

An Chomhairle Oidhreachta, 131 Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (F.S. Wilde), 364, 445n28 ancient religion, 141–2 “An Cíos Caitliceach” (Raftery), 160 Anderson, Benedict, 208, 215 Andersontown News, 421n16 Angles, Jeffrey, 242 animal-human hybrids, 361 anime, 436n12 Anthology of Tales from the Past, An [Konjaku monogatarishū], 284 anthropology, 275 anti-colonialism, 39, 126–7, 154, 158–9 anti-essentialism, 272–4 anti-innovation, 189 Anton, John P., 420n5 Aoi no ue [Lady Aoi], 393, 439n26 Apprentice Boys of Derry, 110 Arabic, 419n3 Aran Islands, 255 Aran Islands, The (Synge), 390 architecture, Japanese, 306–7, 312 Are the Irish Different? (Inglis), 128 Arnold, Edwin: The Light of Asia, 276; “The Musmee,” 276–7 Arnold, Matthew, 75, 141, 143–4, 170 art: commercial, 420n14; rural, 289; traditional, 5 Artaud, Antonin, 331 Arthurian myths, 360 Aru ahō no isshō (Akutagawa), 238 Asia: in transnational studies, 45 Aston, W.G., 434n27 Asuka (TV drama), 436n12 Atlantic Ocean, 77 atmosphere, 351–2 atomic bomb victims’ memorial, 391–2, 448n7 At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats): introduction to, 24–5; adaptations of, 337, 344, 367; articulation of ancestral through twilight in, 359–60; conflict in, 362–4; as continuity to Yeats’s

prose, 354; demarcation of space in, 355; folkloric present in, 359, 367–8; geographical setting of, 358, 443n22; heroic personages in, 360, 362; and Itō Michio, 24, 343–4, 362; masks in, 359, 369; Noh influences in, 354–5, 359–60; phantasmal atmosphere of, 355–6; quest for revival and recovery in, 362; similarities to Demon Pond (Kyōka), 346–7, 353, 442n18; as symbolist drama, 334; syncretism of, 354, 446n34; translations of, 344; and Yōrō (Zeami), 361. See also Cat and the Moon, The (Yeats); Dreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats); Yeats, W.B., plays by “At the Market of the Dead” (Hearn), 220–1 aura, 263, 310–11 authenticity: and Celtic Revival, 10, 34; and cross-cultural dialogue, 45, 260, 274; and duplication, 336; factors for, 182–3, 299–300; for landscape in industrial societies, 208; and Yeats and Irish identity, 128–31 authoritarianism, 435n6 Avalon, Arthur, 280 avant-garde drama, 44, 330–1 Averbuch, Irit, 439n27 bakemono [shape-shifting spirit, changeling], 202, 347 Bakhtin, M.M., 40, 52 banshee [bean sídhe], 193, 402. See also fantastic figures Banville, John, 111 Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (Morganwg), 73 Barnstone, Aliki, 66 Bartók, Béla, 178 Barzaz Breiz (Villemarqué), 73–4 Basso, Keith H., 8; Wisdom Sits in Places, 40 Battle of Gabhra, The [Cath Gabhra], 75–6, 420n8

Baudelarian Symbolism, 62 Baudrillard, Jean, 129–31 bean sídhe [banshee], 193, 402. See also fantastic figures Behan, Brendan, 183, 382 Beinteinsson, Sveinbjörn, 114, 116, 141, 172 Beirne, Francis: The Diocese of Elphin, 423n9 Belfast, 182 Belfast Harpers’ Society, 180 Bell, Derek, 180 Bellanaboy, Ireland, 112, 186 Benjamin, Walter, 91, 310–11, 383; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 348; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 263 Bennett, Margaret, 139, 425n19 Bhabha, Homi, 41–2 Bhagavad Gītā (Horne), 87 Bhaisajyaguru (Tibetan medicine buddha), 411 Black, Catriona, 17 Blake, William, 137 “Blame It on Maureen O’Hara” (Graham), 129–30, 422n4 Blau, Herbert, 115 Blood Bowl Sutra [Ketsubonkyō], 391 Blueshirts, 399 Blyth, R.H., 431n6, 449n12 bodily practices, 57, 117, 158–9, 282, 286, 369 bog bodies, 115 Book of Leinster, The, 76 Bornstein, George, 82 Boroditsky, Lera, 425n18 Bramsbäck, Birgit, 444n25 Brecht, Bertolt, 331 Britannia (Camden), 70–1 British Library, 326 Brittany, 73–4, 77, 293 Brower, Robert H., 447n3 Browning, Robert: The Ring and the Book, 244

Index | 481

Brunton, Paul, 280 buckwheat [soba] noodles, 299 Buddhism: E. Arnold’s introduction of to West, 276; and Christianity, 418n8; Zen and Japanese colonialism, 435n6; Zen and Yeats, 43, 419n9 Bungei shunjū (journal), 254, 293 Burns, Susan, 437n13, 449n13 Buseki Midori: Itō Michio no Nihon-teki buyō [The Japanese Dance of Itō Michio], 342 bushidō, 249 butō dance, 343 Byrne, Kate, 84 Caldwell, Helen: Ito Michio, 442n14 Camden, William: Britannia, 70–1 Cameron, Deborah, 61 Campbell, J.G.: Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 426n24 Canadian Noh, 337 Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (Ní Chonaill), 95 capitalism: and colonialism, 8, 163; homogeneity through, 36, 310; and Howards End (Forster), 428n34; “John Bull’s Other Island” (Shaw) on, 365; and linear conception of time, 91, 348; and nativist self-defence, 278; and past, 111; and political categories, 166; and rural traditions, 165. See also colonialism; cosmopolitanism; progress Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (Shaw), 231 Carleton, William, 145 Carlson, Marvin: The Haunted Stage, 43 cartography. See Irish Ordnance Survey Castells, Manuel: The Rise of Network Society, 8 Castle, Gregory, 38, 166, 432n13; Modernism and the Celtic Revival, 426n22 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth), 93

482 | Index

Cat and the Moon, The (Yeats): introduction to, 24–5; and ancestral, 379; chronological setting of, 376; comedy in, 371–2, 374; as comical interlude, 370–1; conditional mood in, 374–5; dancing cat in, 376–7; and Four Plays for Dancers (Yeats), 372; geographical specificity in, 375; inconclusive ending of, 376; and kyōgen genre, 371, 377; language in, 372–3; legend that is basis for, 370, 375–6; psychogeography of, 373; staging of, 370–1, 379; symbolic reading of, 371–2, 377; Yeats’s intentions with, 370–1, 377. See also At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats); Dreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats); Yeats, W.B., plays by Cath Gabhra [The Battle of Gabhra], 75–6, 420n8 Catholic missionaries to Japan, 291–2, 436n10, 437n17 Cavafy, Constantine: introduction to, 18, 59; compared to Yeats, 108–9; critiques of, 420n5; on experiencing the past, 65–6; and Greek language, 60, 62; as poet-historian, 66–7, 108; social context of, 108–9; and Symbolism, 62, 65, 421n18; use of reclusive gesture, 60 Cavafy, Constantine, works by: “Grecosyrian,” 65; “The Horses of Achilles,” 60; “In Church,” 65; “Ithaka,” 60; “Myris: Alexandria, 340 C.E.,” 66 “Cave of the Children’s Ghosts, The” (Hearn), 207 Celtic: as alternative to mass conventionality, 293–4; as against colonialism, 140, 142; as diversity of Irish life, 165; emotive appeal of, 423n10; Japanese approach to, 192–3, 242, 293–4; as other to Japanese modernity, 242; as pejorative, 141; and twilight, 147; Yeats on, 141, 143–4. See also Keruto Celtic Congress, 140

Celtic folk tales, 77–8, 86. See also Irish literature Celtic Gothic, 173 Celtic identity, 71, 74, 141, 424n11. See also Irish identity; pan-Celtic movement Celtic Literary Revival. See Celtic Revival Celtic Noh, 328–9 Celtic Revival: approach to, 6, 18, 56–7; and ancestral, 60, 302; anticipation of cultural loss from progress, 14, 36, 186, 215, 366; and Celtic, 103, 142; on collective memory, 41; concerns and results of, 185–6, 400–1; and connection to place, 20, 94; criticisms of, 10–11, 14, 20, 33–4, 39, 129, 181, 275; and cross-cultural exchange, 14–15, 189–90, 193–4, 327; and cultural preservation, 79, 139; on culture, 36; and discourse of the vanishing, 152; diversity of approaches in, 15–16, 40–1; as documentary realism, 57; as ecocritical movement, 42; as endotic, 11; as engaged socio-graphical study, 426n22; as ethnographic, 35, 38, 166; and fantastic figures, 20, 29–30, 402; and folklore, 8, 35, 39–40, 83, 195; and folkloric avatars, 57–9, 67, 96; and Herder, 39–40; and heritage and tradition, 18, 30, 52; and Irish identity, 14, 32–4, 59, 128, 287–8, 295, 307; and Irish modernity, 38; and Irish politics, 11–12, 35, 37, 69–70, 79–80, 105, 128–9, 144; and Irish vernacular, 62–3, 128, 154–5, 419n3; Japanese dialogue with, 6, 8–9, 11, 28, 56, 116, 192, 271–2, 327, 400; Japanese translations of, 192, 234; Japanese understanding and reception of, 10–11, 20–2, 34–5, 168, 229, 243, 271; on landscape as location of culture, 20, 92, 105, 186; and literary ethnography, 118, 133; lyrical cartography of, 116; and mass communications,

94, 109; methodology of, 40–1, 57–8, 163; and modernity, 20, 67, 383–4; on myth, 40–1; and nationalism, 14, 406; Orientalism of, 275; and paranormal, 168, 243; on past and present as co-dependent, 245–6; and pastoral, 301; and peasant identity, 181; precursors to, 70, 74; and public performance, 38–9, 110; and recall and remembering, 169; and Rhymers’ Club, 102; as romantic, 102–3, 135–6; on shadows, 202; source material for, 84; style of, 110, 134; and superstition, 178–9; and theatre, 23; and traditional Irish and Japanese literature, 331; and twilight, 232; and twilight of cultural landscape, 117, 298; violence and anxiety in works by, 406; and Yeats, 9–10, 56. See also Irish-Japanese interculturality Celtic Twilight, The (Yeats): introduction to, 19, 55–6, 118–19, 126–7, 135; and alternate epistemologies, 177–8, 293; ancestral recall in, 148, 169; authorial interventions in, 134–5; on belief, 133; and Celtic, 140, 144, 161; and Celtic romanticism, 173; central concerns of, 56, 354; and class distinctions, 182; and communal ritual for accessing ancestral, 207; and cross-cultural dialogue, 188–9; and cultural preservation, 138; dancing in, 317; devil in, 153–4; on displaced tradition, 26, 151, 195, 402; eco-criticism in, 175; as endotic, 139, 148; as ethnographic, 85, 134, 171, 174; fairies in, 168–71; on folk arts, 165; and Heroic Age, 147–8; and The Hill of Dreams (Machen), 173–4; on imagined communities, 208; indistinct time in, 284; and In’ei raisan (Tanizaki), 22, 303–4, 328, 410; introduction to 1893 edition, 148; and Irish identity, 128–31, 140–1, 150; Japanese reception of, 11, 56, 119, 188, 193, 216; and Japanese reception

Index | 483

of twilight, 353; on knowledge distribution, 387; and Kojiki, 319; and kokugaku, 287; landscape and consciousness in, 175; landscape and culture in, 163, 263; listening in, 149–50, 202, 344; local focus of, 105, 164; misinterpretations of, 187–8; multiple genres in, 110, 126–7, 133–4, 150, 166–7; multiple voices and perspectives in, 131–3, 151, 162–3, 165, 429n35; “my people” (mo mhuintire) phrase, 184; narrative realism of, 179; and nationalism, 429n35; nets in, 174–5; organization of, 161; and paranormal, 28–9, 179, 243; phantasmal in, 168–71, 174, 300, 388; political argument in, 127, 175; problematic aspects of, 133; reception of, 127; as resistance against modernity, 129, 152, 167–8, 428n33; social concerns in, 174; speech in, 154; as supersensual epistemology, 217; and superstition, 178–9; and Tōno monogatari (Yanagita), 282, 328; translated excerpts by Akutagawa, 22, 240, 242–3, 250, 252, 321; twilight in, 139–40, 145–7, 163–5, 171, 175, 256, 310, 353; uncanny in, 364; and unfamiliarity, 203 Celtic Twilight, The (Yeats), chapters in: “At the Crossroads,” 206; “By the Roadside,” 164, 387; “The Devil,” 152–3; “Dust Hath Closed Helen’s Eye,” 150; “Enchanted Woods,” 174; “Into the Twilight,” 146–7; “Kidnapping,” 402; “Regina, Regina, Pigmeorum Veni,” 169–71; “The Sorcerers,” 153–4; “The Teller of Tales,” 149; “Village Ghosts,” 177, 377; “A Visionary,” 218 Certeau, Michel de: Culture in the Plural, 31, 412; Heterologies, 305 Chamberlain, Basil Hall: The Classical Poetry of Japan, 338; compared to Fenollosa, 339; compared to Hearn, 203, 257, 418n5; compared to Yeats,

484 | Index

337; Hirakawa on, 434n27; and Japanese appreciation of own culture, 48; Things Japanese, 449n12 Chapman, Wayne K., 384 Cheah, Pheng, 94–5, 127 Chiba Yoko, 442n17 children, 207–8 Christianity: and Buddhism, 418n8; Catholic missionaries to Japan, 291–2, 436n10, 437n17 Christy, Alan, 439n24 chronotope, 40, 44 chūkan [in-between-ness], 31, 216, 319, 350–1, 353, 368 Cinq No (Péri), 338 Civilization and Monsters (Figal), 26–7 Clarke, J.J., 417n3 class distinctions, 181–3 Classical Poetry of Japan, The (Chamberlain), 338 Clifford, James, 40 climate [fūdo], 297–8, 438n19. See also environment Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves [Man’yōshū], 225, 322, 358 collective experience, 256 collective memory: and ancestral recall, 53; and banshees, 193; and cultural heritage, 298; and cultural recovery, 41, 67; and folklore, 57; and landscape, 82, 331; and neo-Noh, 356; and peasants, 427n27; persistence of, 351; and re-narrativization, 79; source material being displaced to, 307; and tradition, 36; and twilight, 29; and Yeats, 16 collective unconsciousness, 427n27 Collins, Michael, 105 Colloquy of the Old Men, The [Acallam na Senórach], 77–8 Colmán, 375, 446n33 Colman Mac Duagh, 370, 375–6 colonialism: and assessing tradition, 301; and capitalism, 8, 163; Celtic as resistance to, 140, 142; and folklore,

35; and Hearn, 214, 227–8; Ireland enacting, 275; Ireland under, 296, 385, 422n20; and Irish self-investigation, 128, 295; and Orientalism, 276; resistance to, 33, 37, 214, 227–8; Said on, 95; and Waley, 225. See also anticolonialism; capitalism; Orientalism; post-colonial theory Coltrane, John, 227, 433n18 Colum, Padraic, 37, 50; A Treasury of Irish Folklore, 40 Colvin, Calum: Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 16–17; Twa Dogs, 16 Comhaltas, 427n31 communal memory. See collective memory comparative literature: basis of, 408–9; disappearance from academia, 275; and Doi, 222, 225; exclusion vs dialogue debate in, 226–7; and Hearn, 198, 219 Condor, Josiah, 430n4 Conley, Tom, 412 Connacht, 424n15 Conroy, Gabriel (character), 151 Corcomroe Abbey, 384–5, 446n1 Cornwall, 78 cosmopolitanism: and “Hankechi” (Akutagawa), 248; homogeneity from, 12, 36, 178, 197, 212, 215, 260–1, 401, 428n33; resistance against, 139, 287, 292, 310. See also capitalism; globalization; hegemony; modernism; progress; technology cosmopolitan modernism, 12 Cowley, Malcolm, 219 Craíc, The (McCrum), 118, 422n1 Craig, Edward Gordon, 379 Croker, Thomas Crofton, 145, 423n7 Cromwell (Reilly), 422n20 Cronin, Michael, 11, 49, 280–1 Crowley, Aleister, 373 Cruikshank, Julie: Do Glaciers Listen?, 298, 438n19 Cú Chulainn, 360–1, 369, 386, 444n25

Cúirt an Mheadhon Oidhche (Merriman), 420n14 Cullingford, Elizabeth, 68 cultural history, 351 cultural hybridity, 7, 15, 315 culturalization, 8, 19 cultural melancholy, 302–3 cultural memory. See collective memory cultural nationalism, 39–40, 134, 188, 213–15 cultural preservation: in continental Europe, 136–7, 423n8; in Ireland, 138–9, 159, 403–4, 423n9; IrishEnglish Dictionary (Dinneen), 19, 155–8, 299, 425n17; in Japan, 404; questions regarding, 404–5; in Scotland, 425n19. See also kokugaku cultural recovery: approach to, 18; in Brittany, 73–4; for Celtic voices, 73; in England, 70–1; in Ireland, 74; in Wales, 73–5; and The Works of Ossian (Macpherson), 71–3 culture: and capitalism, 111; Celtic Revival on, 36; destruction of, 359; dichotomized views of, 16–17; embodiment of, 40, 86; enjoyment of, 315; Gramsci on, 8, 36, 414; influence of dead on, 206; and landscape, 117, 186, 263, 298, 428n33; as localized, 8; origins of, 414; in politics, 7; purity of, 292; as resource in modernization, 7–8; and tradition, 129; transference of, 411–13; and vernacular language, 136 Culture in the Plural (Certeau), 31, 412 Cumann na Fuiseoige (Gaelic Athletic Association), 114 Curtis, L.P., 424n12 Cutting Edge (Harris), 268 daikon (oriental radish), 299 Dai-sanji shin shichō [New Currents of Thought (3rd Series)] (journal), 240, 243

Index | 485

dance: butō, 343; kagura ritual, 317, 439n27; and twilight, 317; and Yeats, 259–60, 318–19 dance poem, 343 “Danny Boy” (“Londonderry Air”) (song), 448n10 Dazai Osamu, 434n24 dead, prayers for, 392. See also ancestor worship “Dead at Clonmacnoise, The” (Rolleston), 102 Deane, Seamus, 39 De Angelis, Irene: “The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry,” 401 De Angelis, Irene, and Joseph Woods: Our Shared Japan, 430n1, 435n5; “Decay of Lying, The” (O. Wilde), 273–4, 300 Decolonising the Mind (Ngũgĩ), 37, 154–5, 158 Deleuze, Gilles, 32 Demon Pond [Yashagaike] (Kyōka): comedy in, 370; Demon Pond in, 369, 379; folkloric present in, 367; occultic stagecraft in, 358; perceptible phantasms in, 388; plot progression in, 368; similarities to At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 346–7, 353, 442n18; summary of, 346–7 demons. See fantastic figures Derrida, Jacques, 201, 322, 324 despatialization, 407 dialect: and local culture, 154–5, 205, 427n30, 431n8; and modernity, 161; and nationalism, 62–3, 128, 419n3; translation of, 235. See also Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (Dinneen); Hiberno-English; Irish language; language Dickens, F.V., 434n27 Dictionary of Sacred Places throughout Japan [Zenkoku reijō daijiten], 357 Dindsenchas, 105–6 Dinneen, Patrick: on dialects, 205; goals of, 251, 285; Foclóir Gaedhilge agus

486 | Index

Béarla [Irish-English Dictionary], 19, 155–8, 299, 425n17; on Irish language, 37; on right to claim regional specificity, 431n8 Diocese of Elphin, The (Beirne), 423n9 dirt. See agrarian life diversity, 402–3 documentary realism, 57 Dōgen, 255 Doggett, Rob, 37 Do Glaciers Listen? (Cruikshank), 298, 438n19 Doherty, Gerald: Dubliners’ Dozen, 43 Doi Bansui: introduction to, 21, 221; and Airurando bungakukai, 223, 240–1; on culture and modernity, 405; and Hearn, 219, 222–5; and interculturality, 229; “Kōjō no tsuki” [The Moon over the Ruined Castle], 227; prior conservative cultural nationalism of, 221–2; and Sōseki, 221–2; at Tohoku University, 224; translations and scholarship of, 223–7; and Yeats, 223, 225, 227; youthful works by, 222 “Doll, The” (Akutagawa), 245–8, 266 Donegal, 92, 133, 159, 182, 431n8 Donoghue, Emma: Stir-Fry, 185 Doré, Henri: La lecture des talismans chinois, 338 Douglas, Mary, 166 Doyle, Roddy, 420n4 drama. See theatre Drapier’s Letters, The (Swift), 296 Dreaming of the Bones, The (Yeats): introduction to, 24–5; analysis of, 388, 394–8; on ancestral as negative reminder, 387, 389–90; and ancestral recall, 374, 385, 400; characters in, 384–5; dawn setting of, 396; geographical setting of, 384–5; gun in, 395; on historical narratives and national self-consciousness, 384; Irish heritage in, 395; and jibakurei, 389–90; landscape in, 395; most poignant decision in, 388; narrative

of, 385; on nationalism, 381, 398; as neo-Noh, 397–8; on new Irish militarism, 399; and Nietzsche, 396; and Nishikigi (Zeami), 390–1, 394–5; synthesis nature of, 387–8; temporal mirroring in, 80–1, 108; theatrics of, 388; twilight setting of, 386. See also At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats); Cat and the Moon, The (Yeats); Yeats, W.B., plays by Duanaire Finn [The Lays of Finn], 55, 75, 419n1 Dublin, 151 Dubliners’ Dozen (Doherty), 43 Dúchas, 131 Duffy, Charles Gavan, 145 Dulac, Edmund, 343–4 Dunsany, Lord (Edward Plunkett), 56, 173, 192, 231, 237 Durrell, Lawrence: Justine, 298 Dutch Royal Shell, 112, 186 Dwan, David, 129 Dwelly, Edward, 425n17 Eagleton, Terry, 422n5 Echoes of a Savage Land (McGowan), 423n9 echtra narratives, 76 eco-criticism: and Celtic Revival, 42, 186; in The Celtic Twilight, 175; in contemporary Irish writers, 183; and Irish and Japanese authors, 297; and Jack B. Yeats, 132, 142; and landscape, 295, 301; and W.B. Yeats, 161, 367 ecology, perceptual, 427n29 Edge of the World, The (film), 447n2 Edgeworth, Maria: Castle Rackrent, 93 Eibungaku yawa (Yano), 436n7 Eigo seinen [The Rising Generation] (magazine), 434n26 Eisai Zenji: Kissa yōjōki, 299 Eisteddfod, 73, 423n10, 427n31 Eliot, T.S., 103, 216, 327; Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 442n16; “Tradition

and the Individual Talent, 260; The Waste Land, 399 Ellis, Sylvia C., 333, 338, 440n7 Emmert, Richard, 337, 340, 440n8 Endō Shūsaku, 294 endotic/endotic travel: and The Celtic Twilight, 139, 148; definition of, 11; experiential qualities of, 291; and Hearn, 201; as narrative strategy, 308; and regionalized identities, 11, 19; and Tōno monogatari (Yanagita), 291 Enescu, George, 178 England, 70–1 environment: consumption of, 186; and culture, 288–9, 298, 438n19; and folklore, 111, 116; and food, 298–9; loss of, 139, 142. See also landscape “Erin Go Faster” (Muldoon), 215 “Essay on the Origin of Language” (Herder), 136 ethnic idealism, 96 ethnic purity, 274 ethnic stereotyping, 274 ethnography. See literary ethnography Ethnology in Folklore (Gomme), 29, 282 ethnomusicology, 178 Ethos of Noh, The (Rath), 335 Euripides: Medea, 345 European Union, 186, 293 Evans-Wentz, W.Y., 169 Expediency of Culture, The (Yúdice), 7–8 Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh Plays (Tsukui), 441n12 “Facing up to the Muses” (Harrison), 368–9 Fackler, Martin: “Honoring a Westerner Who Preserved Japan’s Folk Tales,” 433n19 fae. See fairies fairies: and discourse of the vanishing, 168; as former humans, 252, 392, 402; independence of, 170–1; Japanese

Index | 487

translations of, 250–2, 392–3; as satirical, 168–9; and Yeats, 352, 363. See also fantastic figures; seirei; sídhe; yōsei Fairy Mythology, The (Keightley), 179 fairy tales. See folklore familiarity, 207 Fanon, Frantz, 39, 41–2, 178; The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 25 fantastic, 26–7, 31, 291, 322, 366. See also fushigi fantastic figures: in anime and manga, 436n12; difficulty defining, 30–1; as disembodied performative voice, 20; as dislocated ancestry, 20, 30–1, 119, 147, 210; Figal on, 26–7; as figures of loss, 28; and folkloric as ancestral recall, 271; M.D. Foster on, 29–32; intelligibility of, 201; and Japanese authors, 20, 29–30, 168, 193; Japanese translation of, 233–4; and mainstream national agenda, 29–32; and marginalized communities, 28; as mirroring society, 444n26; in modernity, 29; modern relevance of, 367; in neo-Noh, 353; as reinvention of heritage, 29; as remnants of past, 26–7, 31; for societal maturity, 168; as unresolved trauma, 108; and Yeats, 444n26. See also bakemono; bean sídhe; fairies; fushigi; ghosts; ikiryō; jibakurei; kappa; mononoke; seirei; sídhe; yōkai; yōsei; yūrei fantasy, 291, 383. See also fantastic “Farewell to English, A” (Ó hAirtnéide), 301–2 Farrell, Colin, 183 fascism, 42, 127, 226, 228, 405–6, 429n35 fear gaeltachta [Irishmen], 286. See also peasants feelings, 187 “Felons of Our Land, The” (Gregory), 116–17

488 | Index

Fenollosa, Ernest: as cultural ambassador, 339, 430n4; and Hirata, 253; Japanese scholarship on, 441n10; and Japanese theatre, 318–19, 327, 331, 338–9, 441n12; students of, 339 Figal, Gerald, 228, 282, 443n20; Civilization and Monsters, 26–7 First Nations: activists, 37; symbols, 426n23 Fleming, Deborah, 144, 427n27 Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla [Irish-English Dictionary] (Dinneen), 19, 155–8, 299, 425n17 folio societies, 74 folk arts, 165, 181, 404. See also folk music folk culture, 137, 189, 432n13 folklore: as alternative knowledge, 116; as alternative to consumerism, 186; and ancestral purity, 137; as barrier against technological processes, 111; as condition of mytho-historical storytelling, 383; as dynamic repository, 39; and environment, 111, 116; as expressions of disembodied local communities, 44–5, 136; Gramsci on, 35–6; and Grimm brothers, 136–7, 423n7; and Hearn, 200–1; and heritage culture, 9; and Irish-Japanese dialogue, 10, 28; and Irish nation building, 129; and local, 8, 195, 406; and lustre of time, 201; and marginal communities, 32, 35–6; in modern drama, 390; resistance through, 40; seeking contemporary evidence for, 59–60; as site dependent, 83; and water sources, 445n27; and Yeats, 16, 39, 83, 131, 134, 186, 367, 389. See also fantastic figures; ghost lore; Irish literature folklore studies [minzokugaku], 281, 287, 404 folk music: collection of, 138; and cross-culture dialogue, 189; Irish,

254, 448n10; Irish trad, 189, 427n31; min’yō, 241, 254, 328; tradition expressed in, 164, 427n30; transmission of, 109–10, 179–80, 387. See also music folk tales. See folklore food, 298–9 Forster, E.M.: Howards End, 428n34; A Room with a View, 431n7 Foster, Michael Dylan; Pandemonium and Parade, 29–32 Foster, R.F., 103, 121 Foucault, Michel, 83 Frithjofs Saga (Tegnér), 423n8 “From the Diary of an English Teacher” (Hearn), 206–7 frustration, 374 Fūdo (Watsuji), 297 fūdo [climate], 297–8, 438n19. See also environment Fujiwara no Shunzei, 388 fushigi [mysterious]: and The Celtic Twilight, 28, 364; definiton of, 26; development of, 27; as a force of the apparitional, 388; and Kyōka, 349; and modernism, 271, 373; source of, 364. See also fantastic figures Gabhra, Ireland, 75–6, 420n7 Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA ), 114 Gaelic language. See Irish language gaia, 297 Gandhi, Leela, 140 garbage, 399 Geertz, Clifford, 13 gehenna, 117 “Geidan” (Tanizaki), 4–5, 400 geisha apprentice [maiko], 336 Gendai ni ikiru Rafukadio Hān (Tanaka), 212 Genji monogatari [The Tale of Genji], 225, 347 genre, 150 genuineness, 311

Gersdorff, Wolfgang von: Japanische Dramen für die deutsche Bühne, 338 ghost lore, 271, 388–90, 393. See also folklore ghosts: approach to, 7; ancestral who haunt the present, 324–5, 374; in anime and manga, 436n12; and chronotopic heritages, 200; as communal affect, 383; as culture on brink of disappearing, 17; hungry, 391; as interceding in human affairs, 391; in Irish lore, 271; in Japan [yūrei], 347, 353, 408; and Noh, 331–2; as resistance, 332; as unresolved trauma, 108. See also fantastic figures; mugen nō; paranormal; phantasmal Gibran, Khalil, 12, 403, 448n11 Ginyōbi no otogibanashi (Hagiiwa), 220 Glastonbury Cross, 70–1 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Hearn), 202, 204–5, 207, 218, 437n13 Global Ethics Foundation, 53, 403 globalization, 6, 42, 46, 227, 245, 409. See also cosmopolitanism; modernism; progress Gluck, Carol, 404 go (board game), 447n3 GoGwilt, Christopher, 409 Golden Age, 147–8 Gomme, Laurence: Ethnology in Folklore, 29, 282 go-ryōe festivals, 347 Graham, Colin: “Blame It on Maureen O’Hara,” 129–30, 422n4 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 35–6, 287, 414 Grant, Glen, 433n19 great memory, 427n27 “Grecosyrian” (Cavafy), 65 Greek diaspora, 60–2. See also Cavafy, Constantine Greek: drama, 318–19, 345, 380; language, 60–1, 425n20 Green Fool, The (Kavanagh), 289

Index | 489

Gregory, Augusta: and Asian audiences, 56; and Celtic, 75; and class consciousness, 182; and Corcomroe Abbey, 384; on cultural recovery, 105; editorial perspective of, 128; “The Felons of Our Land,” 116–17; on Hibernophobia, 185; interdimensionality in work of, 209–10; and Irish cultural identity, 97, 116–17, 158; and Irish Times, 94; The Kiltartan History Book, 97; and landscape, 111; as legend-teller, 97; on loss of shared past, 36; and Matsumura, 231, 234; and myth, 70; on Raftery’s poetry, 426n21; Takahashi on, 232; on transnationality of Celtic Revival, 194; and vanishing discourse, 152–3 Grimes, Linda Sue, 442n17 Grimm brothers, 136–7, 423n7 de Gruchy, John, 42, 329, 436n9 Guattari, Felix, 32 Guest, Charlotte: Mabinogi, 75 Gull, The (Marlatt), 337–8 gunki monogatari [war tales genre], 288, 443n24 Haga Yaichi, 325–6 Hagiiwa Matsumi: Ginyōbi no otogibanashi [Silver-day’s Fairy Tale], 220 haiku, 401, 418n5, 430n1. See also “Hopewell Haiku LXXVII ” hakumei [twilight], 240 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 321, 339 “Hankechi” (Akutagawa), 248–50, 434n25 Hardy, Thomas: Jude the Obscure, 178; “Old Furniture,” 438n21; Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 178 Harootunian, H.D., 404; Things Seen and Unseen, 449n13 harp, 180 Harper, Thomas, 438n23 Harris, Victor: Cutting Edge, 268 Harrison, Tony: “Facing Up to the Muses,” 368–9

490 | Index

Hartnett, Michael [Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide]: “A Farewell to English,” 301–2 Hasegawa Nyozekan: Nihon fuashizimu hihan [A Critique of Japanese Fascism], 226 haunted, 309, 358, 364 Haunted Stage, The (Carlson), 43 “Haunted to the Edge of Trance” (Spangler), 427n26 Havelock, Eric A., 223–4, 437n14 Hawai’i, 169, 436n12 Heaney, Seamus, 115, 183–4, 430n1; Station Island (Heaney), 301 Hearn, Lafcadio: approach to, 20–2, 198, 418n5; and Airurando bungakukai, 21, 197, 199; and Akutagawa, 22, 240, 257; on ancestral recall, 205–6; approach of to Japan, 197–9, 203–4, 212, 221; approach of to local, 217, 280, 405; approach of to vanishing, 202–4, 212–13; as Celtic Revivalist, 196–7, 216–17; and comparative culture studies, 211–12; criticisms of, 21, 212, 219–20, 256–7, 418n5; and cross-cultural dialogue, 56, 203, 210, 216–17, 219, 226–7, 434n27; and Doi, 219, 222–5; English critiques of, 198, 219, 433n19, 440n7; and fantastic, 199–200, 210; and folk tales, 200–1; Hirakawa on, 21, 434n27; on imagined communities, 208; impact of, 210–11; introduction to, 196; and Irish and Japanese spiritualities, 431n10; and Izumo Taisha (Shinto shrine), 204, 217; and Japanese cultural nationalism, 213–15, 432n12; and Japanese re-evaluation of own culture, 257; Japanese scholarship on, 21, 198, 210, 212, 219–20, 240, 418n5, 431n11, 439n3; on kokoro [sentiment and spirit], 245; library of, 224; marriage to Japanese woman, 220; on mass acculturation, 227–8; and minzokugaku, 210; and modernity, 216, 260–1; and neo-Noh, 440n7;

on Noh, 355, 440n7; Ōta on, 21, 219, 256, 418n5; as outsider, 217; on past and present as co-dependent, 246; and plural temporalities, 201; in popular culture, 220; ritual sensibility of, 205, 217–18, 228–9; and Sangū, 239; students of, 21, 197, 221, 433n15; on Tanabata (Star Festival), 213; as teacher, 197–200, 206–7, 211, 219, 221, 224–5, 431n9; and twilight, 200, 216, 304, 308; visual defect of, 197; and Yeats, 199–200, 208–9, 229, 431n10 Hearn, Lafcadio, works by: “At the Market of the Dead,” 220–1; “The Cave of the Children’s Ghosts,” 207; essay on O-Bon, 206; “From the Diary of an English Teacher,” 206–7; Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 202, 204–5, 207, 218, 437n13; “Industrial Danger,” 214; Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 212–15; “The Japanese Smile,” 218, 371; Kwaidan [Ghost Stories], 200–1; “Oshidori” [The Ducks], 201; The Romance of the Milky Way, 213 hegemony, 153–4, 193. See also cosmopolitanism; modernism Heidegger, Martin, 163, 175–6, 427n28 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 39–40, 137, 158, 188, 423n6; “Essay on the Origin of Language,” 136 Hereniko, Vilsoni, and Rob Wilson: Inside/Out, 418n7 heritage, 7–8, 16, 18, 359. See also ancestral; cultural preservation; cultural recovery; culture; folklore; tradition Herman, Judith Lewis, 164 Heroic Age, 147–8 heroic personages, 354, 360–1 Hesse, Hermann, 47–8, 53, 194, 403 Heterologies (Certeau), 305 Hiberno-English, 62, 420n4. See also Irish language Hibernophobia, 185

Higginson, Thomas, 78 Hijikata, Tatsumi, 343 Hill of Dreams, The (Machen), 173–4 Hill of Tara, 215–16 “Hina” (Akutagawa), 245–8, 266 Hinatsu Kōnosuke, 241, 328 Hirakawa Sukehiro, 21, 209, 418n5; Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn, 434n27 Hirata Atsutane, 437n13 Hirata Tokuboku: “Raichō sentosuru Yeats no fūkaku” [The Character of Yeats, Soon to Visit Us], 253 Hirsch, Edward, 125; “The Imaginary Irish Peasant,” 290 history, 269, 300 Hobsbawm, Eric, 186 Hokusai, 274 home, 32 Homecoming/An Bealach ‘na Bhaile (Ó Searcaigh), 301 Homer, 222–4, 437n14 Home Rule. See Irish independence movement homogeneity. See cosmopolitanism; globalization “Honoring a Westerner Who Preserved Japan’s Folk Tales” (Fackler), 433n19 “Hopewell Haiku LXXVII ” (Muldoon), 401, 448n8 Horkheimer, Max, 229 Horne, Charles Francis: Bhagavad Gītā, 87 “Horses of Achilles, The” (Cavafy), 60 Howards End (Forster), 428n34 Howell, David L., 433n20 Huang, Yunte: Transpacific Displacement, Transpacific Imagination, 418n7 human geography, 62 Hunger Graveyard, 295 hungry ghosts, 391 Hurrish (Lawless), 93 Huysman, J.K.: Là-bas, 63–5 Hyde, Douglas, 57, 108, 150, 178, 181

Index | 491

Iceland, 116 Ichikawa Sanki, 236 Ichiyanagi Hirotaka, 232–3 Ichiyō, Higuchi, 53 identity, 181, 231–2, 288–9. See also Celtic identity; Irish identity; peasants identity politics, 16, 32–4 Ikeda Kikunae, 221, 278 iki [Eastern disposition], 4, 28 Iki no kōzō (Kuki), 438n23 ikiryō [haunting spirit], 353, 393. See also fantastic figures “Imaginary Irish Peasant, The” (Hirsch), 290 imagined community, 129, 208, 215, 273 Immram Brain [The Voyage of Bran], 76, 101 Immram Maele Dúin [The Voyage of Maele Dúin], 76–7 immram [wonder voyage genre], 76–7, 85, 331 imperialism, 8, 228, 279, 432n14, 435n6 Imura Kimie, 231, 233–4, 238 in-between-ness [chūkan], 31, 216, 319, 350–1, 353, 368 “In Church” (Cavafy), 65 India, 163 individuals, 208 “Industrial Danger” (Hearn), 214 industrial societies, 208 In’ei raisan [In Praise of Shadows] (Tanizaki): introduction to, 262–3, 305–6; on architecture, 51, 313–14; and The Celtic Twilight, 22–3, 262–3, 303–4; domain of contact in, 303; on East vs West, 312–14; on electric lighting, 307, 311–12; English translation of, 438n23; impact of, 438n23; on inevitably of Western assimilation, 314; on Japanese culture, 304; on mass reproduction of music, 311–12; material reflexivity in, 305; Mishima on, 303–4, 308, 314, 317; and Noh, 317–18; on relationship of culture

492 | Index

with modern production, 311–12; on shadows, 50–1, 306–7, 316–17, 438n23; and zuihitsu genre, 306. See also lustre of time; shadows; Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Inglis, Tom: Are the Irish Different?, 128 Inis Meáin, 255 Inouye, Charles: In Light and Shadows, 439n2 In Praise of Shadows. See In’ei raisan Inside/Out (Hereniko and Wilson), 418n7 interculturality: and anti-essentialism, 272–4; awareness of own culture needed for, 47–8, 53, 194, 403; challenges of, 257, 260, 272; cultural dimension as starting point, 280; and Keruto, 218; and national chauvinism, 405; scholarship on, 418n7; superficial levels of, 278–79. See also IrishJapanese interculturality Intermission (film), 185 intuitive knowing, 285 inukshuk, 426n23 Inuktitut, 438n19 invented tradition, 129, 186, 273, 286, 300 In Wicklow and West Kerry (Synge), 127 Ireland: agricultural land tenure, 84; as Celtic Tiger, 423n10; civil war in, 269–70, 399; class distinctions in, 182–3; and colonialism, 296, 385, 422n20; cultural preservation in, 138–9, 159, 403–4, 423n9; cultural recovery in, 74; destruction of culture in, 111, 215, 359; Eagleton on development of, 422n5; emigration from and Famine, 149; and European Union, 166, 186; Galway-Dublin tension in, 424n15; historical political fragmentation of, 385; indigenous tourism in, 127; institutional heritage preservation in, 131, 159; Irish Ordnance Survey, 19, 92–3; landscape of, 42, 112–14; and market economy, 183;

perceived connections with Japan, 194–5, 271–2, 435n5; performance and nationalism in, 110; place naming in, 92–3, 113, 172; reforestation in, 157–8; tourism in, 366 Irisawa Yasuo, 205 Irish character. See Irish identity Irish Civil War, 269–70, 399. See also Irish independence movement Irish-English Dictionary. See Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla Irish folk music, 254, 448n10. See also folk music; Irish trad music Irish ghost lore, 271. See also folklore; ghost lore Irish identity: and Celtic Revival, 32–4, 59, 67, 128, 287–8, 295, 307; under colonialism, 296; defining, 128; and folklore, 129; gendered prescriptions of, 68; and Gregory, 97, 116–17; Gregory on, 158; and invented tradition, 186–7, 300; in Knocknagow (Kickham), 95; and landscape, 112–14; and media, 109, 422n4; resurgence of, 116–17; Victorian England misrepresentations of, 141, 424n12; and Yeats, 128–31, 143, 150. See also Celtic identity; identity; peasants Irish independence movement: and cultural revival, 11–12, 35, 90–2, 145, 404; diversity of groups within, 315; and muintire [my people], 184; trends climaxing in, 67; and Yeats, 302, 420n14. See also Irish nationalism; Irish republicanism Irish-Japanese interculturality: approach to, 6–7, 10–14, 56–7, 191–2, 195; during 1930s, 400; and Airurando bungakukai, 253–5, 327; and constituting heritage, 408; and contemporary literature, 401, 430n1, 438n20; and contemporary Noh, 327; as dialogue, 15; and discourses of vanishing, 401–2; and etiologies of future, 311; and folklore, 10; as

fusion of horizons, 46–7; grounding in local as path for, 189–90, 194; as independent of rhetoric of state power, 406; and Japaneseness, 48; Japanese reframing of, 305; and Japanese resentment of West, 222; from literary exchange, 400, 441n10; and Meditations in Time of Civil War (Yeats), 266–8; as model of cultural narration through international contact, 52–3; positive multiculturalism in, 15; promotion of by authors, 49–50; reciprocal nature of, 327–8; and resistance to modernity, 263; and shared qualities between Ireland and Japan, 194–5, 271–2, 435n5; Shiba on, 195; and translation, 225–6, 280–1; and transnational modernity, 330; and transnational sharing and interpreting of local culture, 9; and Yeats, 9–10, 326, 328–9. See also Celtic Revival; interculturality; Japanese modernists Irish language: and Celtic Revival, 62; under colonialism, 296; Dinneen’s dictionary of, 19, 155–8, 299, 425n17; and Gregory, 97; loss of, 36–7, 57; recent legislation on, 429n37; reform movements for, 155; as vernacular, 157. See also dialect; Hiberno-English Irish Language and Ireland’s SocioEconomic Development, The (Walsh), 36–7 Irish Literary Revival. See Celtic Revival Irish Literary Studies Society. See Airurando bungakukai Irish literature: Atlantic Ocean in, 77; contemporary Irish Gaelic poetry, 146; echtra narratives, 76; eco-criticism in contemporary, 183; ghosts in human affairs in, 391; global reception of, 51; Hibernophobia in, 185; immram, 76–7, 85, 331; Japanese influence on contemporary, 401, 430n1; Japanese translations of, 230;

Index | 493

and landscape and folklore in contemporary, 93–5, 301–2; legendary canon of, 360; lost home narratives, 361; and national consciousness, 183–4; and O’Kearney, 420n8; and Orientalism, 275; Ossianic, 78; political bite of modernist folklore of, 31; reshaping of classics in, 386–7; and social and political change, 187; and twilight, 146; vanishing islands in, 77–8, 87 Irishmen [fear gaeltachta], 286. See also peasants Irish modernity, 38, 53, 92, 404 Irish Mythology (Kavanagh), 428n33 Irish nationalism, 39, 85, 142–3. See also Irish independence movement Irish Noh, 328–9 Irish Ordnance Survey, 19, 92 Irish Orientalism (Lennon), 275 Irish pubs, 189 Irish Question, The (Mansergh), 146 Irish Renaissance. See Celtic Revival Irish republicanism, 83. See also Irish independence movement Irish Revival. See Celtic Revival Irish Studies Society. See Airurando bungakukai Irish Texts Society, 155, 425n16. See also Dinneen, Patrick Irish trad music, 189, 427n31 IRTRAD-L , 429n38 iseki [ruins/relics], 364. See also relic Ishibashi Hirō, 333–4 islands, vanishing, 77–8, 87 Issa (Kobayashi Issa), 204, 430n1 “Ithaka” (Cavafy), 60 Itō Kisaku, 24, 340 Itō Masayoshi, 447n5 Itō Michio: collaboration with Yeats, 24, 329, 340–1, 343–4; and Egypt, 442n13; exaggeration tendency of, 442n13; and At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 343–4, 362; and Japanese theatre, 340–1; outsider status of,

494 | Index

341–2; scholarship on, 342, 442n14; and Tenshu monogatari (Kyōka), 343; on translation, 48–9; in Yeats’s plays, 341–2 Itō Michio no Nihon-teki buyō (Buseki), 342 Ivy, Marilyn, 25–6, 116, 309, 366, 424n13 Iwakura Mission, 279–80 Iwate prefecture, Japan, 283, 436n11 Izumi (Yokomichi), 344 Izumi Kyōka. See Kyōka Izumi Kyōka kenkyū (Sadataka), 439n3 Izumo, Japan, 205, 431n8 Izumo Taisha (Shinto shrine), 204, 217 Izutsu (Zeami), 357 Jackson, Kenneth Hurlston, 33 Jameson, Fredric, 99 Japan: Catholic missionaries in, 291–2, 436n10, 437n17; and Commodore Perry, 278–9; contemporary practices of supplicating ghosts, 391–2; cultural preservation in, 404; electric lights in, 438n22; food in, 298–9; Hearn and cultural nationalism in, 213–15, 432n12; imperialism of, 228, 435n6; impressions of West, 278–80, 436n10; Iwakura Mission, 279–80; Meiji Restoration, 432n12, 433n20, 437n13; memory of war in and Irish poetry and songs, 448n10; missionaries in, 211; o-yatoi gaikokujin in, 197, 430n4; perceived connections to Ireland, 194–5, 271–2, 435n5; resurgent nationalism in, 449n12; topography and folk belief in, 357–8; tradition of as invented, 300; translation in, 231; Western interpreters of, 434n27; and Western occult practices, 232–3; writing systems of, 434n25; Žižek on, 445n30 Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (Hearn), 212–15 “Japan as Celtic Otherworld” (Murray), 431n10

Japanese architecture, 306–7, 312 Japanese beauty, 333–4 “Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry, The” (De Angelis), 401 Japanese literature: adaptation of folk tales in, 434n24; and ancestral recall, 53; female translators in, 229; ghosts in human affairs in, 391; gunki mono­ gatari, 288, 443n24; heroic characters in, 360; influence from European playwrights in, 441n10; kaidan category, 430n5; and kokugaku analysis, 285; and movement against West, 222, 226; Romanticism in, 328; ryōki genre, 242, 252; and twilight, 321; zuihitsu genre, 306 Japanese modernism: constructions of nationalism, 315; and fushigi, 271; and Irish studies, 241 Japanese modernists: and Celtic, 48, 51, 192–3, 294; and Celtic Revival, 10; and endotic travel, 11; and fantastic figures, 20, 29–31, 193; interest of in Ireland, 6, 11–12, 20, 34–5, 49, 188; and Japaneseness, 10; national consciousness of, 12; on past and present as co-dependent, 245–6; reception of Celtic Revival texts, 21–2, 271, 405; re-evaluation of own culture, 48, 257; and resistance to West, 277–9. See also Airurando bungakukai; IrishJapanese interculturality; Japanese modernism Japanese music, 311–12. See also min’yō Japaneseness, 10, 48, 286 Japanese Romanticism, 328 “Japanese Smile, The” (Hearn), 218, 371 Japanese spirit [wa no kokoro], 48, 226 Japanese theatre: kabuki, 326, 345, 378, 393; kyōgen genre, 371, 377, 445n31; shingeki theatre, 24, 326, 339, 340; shinpa [new school] theatre, 44, 326, 440n5; Western influences in, 345; Western source books on, 338; Yeats’s

interest in, 326; yūgen nō, 329. See also mugen nō; neo-nō; Noh Japanische Dramen für die deutsche Bühne (von Gersdorff ), 338 japonisme, 42, 333, 338 jibakurei [earthbound spirits], 353, 389–90, 396, 447n4 jidai no tsuya. See lustre of time “Jigoku hen” (Akutagawa), 243 Jiji shinpō [Current Events] (journal), 234 “Jimmy Mo Mhile Stór” (song), 164 “John Bull’s Other Island” (Shaw), 365, 445n29 Johnson, Lionel, 102, 104 Johnson, Samuel, 72 jōmin [abiding/common folk], 181, 286–8, 290. See also agrarian life; peasants journalism. See mass communications; newspapers Joyce, James, 103, 445n32 Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 178 Jung, Carl, 117, 427n27, 431n10 Junius, Franciscus, 70 Junjō kirari (TV drama), 436n12 Justine (Durrell), 298 “Kabbalist of East Broadway, The” (Singer), 424n13 kabuki, 326, 345, 378, 393 kagura ritual dances, 317 kahō [heirloom], 359 kaidan [ghost stories], 430n5 Kalevala (Lönnrot), 137, 150, 423n8 Kamata Tōjo and Tseruoka Mayumi: Keruto to Nippon, 435n5 Kamen [Mask] (journal), 241 Kamigami no kuni (Kudō), 212 kamikakushi [spirited away], 394, 396, 402, 437n16 Kantō Earthquake (1923), 315 Kappa (Akutagawa), 243 kappa [river spirits], 250, 444n26

Index | 495

Katayama Hiroko. See Matsumura Mineko Kavanagh, Patrick, 172, 181–2, 184, 428n33; The Green Fool, 289 Kavanagh, Peter: Irish Mythology, 428n33 Kawabata Yasunari, 447n3 Kawamura Minato, 229 Kawanabe Kyōsai, 430n4 Kawano Satsuki, 229 “Kawatare-doki” (Yanagita), 321–2 Kazantzakis, Nikos: Zorba the Greek, 425n20 Keane, John B., 420n4 Keats, John, 300 Keene, Donald: Twenty Plays of the No Theatre, 447n5 Keightley, Thomas: The Fairy Mythology, 179 Kemener, Yann-Fañch, 74 Keruto [Celtic], 56, 218, 236, 256. See also Celtic kerutojinron [studies on Celt], 405 Keruto kenkyūkai [Celtic Studies organizations], 46. See also Airurando bungakukai Keruto to Nippon (Kamata and Tsuruoka), 435n5 Ketsubonkyō [Blood Bowl Sutra], 391 Kiberd, Declan, 300; “On National Culture,” 39 Kickham, Charles: Knocknagow, 95 Kijiki-den (Moto’ori), 285 Kikuchi Kan: and Airurando bungakukai, 433n15; and Akutagawa Prize, 254; and Bungei shunjū (journal), 254; and Dai-sanji shin shichō (journal), 243; on Irish-Japan similarities, 230, 234; Madman on the Roof [Okujō no kyōjin], 254; and Matsumura, 234–5; and Synge, 230, 234, 254, 433n15; and Yeats, 253–54 Kiltartan History Book, The (Gregory), 97 kindai nō [modern Noh], 328

496 | Index

Kipling, Rudyard, 244, 277 Kirk, Robert, and Andrew Lang: The Secret Commonwealth, 168–9, 426n24 Kissa yōjōki (Eisai), 299 kitsch, 134, 399–400 Kiyobe Chizuko, 238, 242 Kleist, Aaron J., 71 Knocknagow (Kickham), 95 Knocknaskea, County Mayo, 84 knowledge, localized, 40, 190 Kobayashi Hideo, 314–15; “Kokyō o ushinatta bugaku” [“Literature of the Lost Home”], 5, 32, 399–400 Kobayashi Issa (Issa), 204, 430n1 Kobayashi Yoshinori, 449n12 Kobayashi Yoshio, 253, 433n15 Kobori Ryūji, 434n3 Kodama Sanehide, 442n15 Kōgyoku (Kyōka), 239, 324 Koizumi Yakumo. See Hearn, Lafcadio Kojiki [An Account of Ancient Matters], 204, 222, 224, 239, 256, 319 “Kōjō no tsuki” (Doi), 227 kokugaku [native studies]: and The Celtic Twilight, 287; and Hearn, 213, 432n12; and Meiji Restoration, 437n13, 449n13; and nationalism, 285; questions for, 404–5; scholarship on, 439n24, 449n13; and shinkokugaku, 286; and Ueda Akinari, 430n5; and Yanagita, 286, 439n24 “Kokyō o ushinatta bugaku” (Kobayashi Hideo), 5, 32, 399 Komatsu Kazuhiko, 447n4 Komparu Kunio. See Konparu Kunio Konjaku monogatarishū [An Anthology of Tales from the Past], 284 Konparu Kunio, 325, 350, 355 Kōri Torahiko, 343 Kōya hijiri (Kyōka), 393 Kubota Mantarō, 349 Kudō Miyoko: Kamigami no kuni [Spirits of the Nation], 212

Kuki Shūzō, 28, 438n23, 449n12; Iki no kōzō [The Structure of Iki], 438n23 Kumārajīva, 411 Kume Masao, 243, 442n15 Kume Tamijurō, 343 “Kumo no ito” (Akutagawa), 241, 243 Kumonoso-jō [Throne of Blood] (film), 339 Küng, Hans, 53, 403 Kurosawa Akira, 339 Kwaidan (Hearn), 200–1 kyōgen [mad words] genre, 371, 377, 445n31 Kyōka (Izumi Kyōka): Akutagawa on works by, 323; and ancestral recall, 381; and bakemono, 347; on bodily practices, 369; chūkan of, 31, 351; critique of modern hegemony, 388; difficulty classifying, 345; folklore sources of, 389; folkloric present in, 368; and fushigi, 349; and ghosts, 324–5, 332; and margins of society, 393; Mishima on, 304, 345; and modern Japanese theatre, 326; and mugen nō, 43, 332, 352–3; and Noh, 320, 322–3, 350, 393; and phantasmal, 349; plays by, 24, 44, 326–8, 330–1; and remnants of past, 359; Sangū on, 324; Sōseki on, 321, 323; superstitions of, 445n32; on theatre, 373; translation of work, 439n2; and twilight, 31, 44, 210, 304, 323–5, 328, 345–6, 348–9, 351; and Yeats, 23, 239, 322–4, 326–8, 439nn2–3 Kyōka (Izumi Kyōka), works by: Kōgyoku [The Ruby], 239, 324; Kōya hijiri [The Holy Man of Mt Kōya], 393; “Tasogare no aji” [The Taste of Twilight], 323–4, 345–6, 351, 443n20; Tenshu monogatari [The Legend of the Castle Tower], 343; Uta andon [The Lantern Song], 349. See also Demon Pond [Yashagaike] Kyōkai: Nihon ryōiki, 391, 447n6 Kyōka zenshū: mokuroku kaikō (Akutagawa), 323

Là-bas (Huysman), 63–5 La lecture des talismans chinois (Doré), 338 Land League, 90–2 landscape: approach to as natural resource, 111; and culture, 117, 186, 263, 298, 428n33; destruction of, 215–16, 365–7; eco-critical dimension of, 186, 295; existence of when forgotten, 299–300; and folklore, 59–60, 356–7; and identity, 112–14, 288–9; and industrial societies, 208; and Irish customs, 195; lustre of time in, 359, 364; as modern cultural topography, 112–13; as persistence of memory, 105; as reference point, 299; as repository for history, 183; and waste, 399. See also agrarian life; environment Lang, Andrew, 168–9, 179, 426n24 language: anti-colonial perspectives on, 158–9; and culture, 136; development of, 136; Greek, 60–1, 425n20; Hiberno-English, 62, 420n4; modernist interest in vernacular, 62–3; Monier-Williams on, 203; and nationalism, 61, 419n3; post-colonial theory on, 154; as shaping world views, 425n18; and verbal hygiene, 61. See also dialect; Irish language Laoi Oisín ar Thír n-Óg (O’Looney), 79 lapis lazuli, 410 “Lapis Lazuli” (Yeats): approach to, 409; analysis of, 413–14; critics on, 14; cultural transference in, 165, 410–13; doomsday scenarios in, 413; narrative in, 410; positive ending in, 413–14; and web of associations within and between traditions, 412–13 Larkin, Phillip, 65 Last of the Name, The (McGlinchey), 160 Lawless, Emily: Hurrish, 93; With Essex in Ireland, 93

Index | 497

Lays of Finn, The [Duanaire Finn], 55, 75, 419n1 Leader, The (newspaper), 143 Lebor Gabála Érenn, 256 Lefebvre, Henri, 19 Leinster, 424n15 Lennon, Joseph, 42, 329, 340; Irish Orientalism, 275 Le No (Péri), 338 Les passagers du Roissy Express (Maspero), 62 Lethaby, W.R., 78 Lévi, Eliphas, 373 Levy, Indra, 239 Liddell, Robert, 420n5 Life (magazine), 3, 417n1 Light of Asia, The (E. Arnold), 276 lights, electric, 307, 311–12, 378, 438n22 liminality, 348, 358. See also twilight literary ethnography: and Celtic Revival, 19, 35, 118, 133; and The Celtic Twilight, 171; and endotic travel, 11; example of, 28–9; Tōno monogatari (Yanagita) as, 281 literary Orientalism, 275. See also Orientalism literature: archetypes of crossing thresholds in, 391–2; and crosscultural dialogue, 210; and feelings, 187; ghosts in human affairs in, 391; as global, 408–9; and politics, 403. See also comparative literature; Irish literature; Japanese literature; modernist literature Lloyd, David: on assessing tradition, 300–1; and confronting ancestral past, 115; on homogeneity of style in Celtic Revival, 134; on Irish identity, 128; on Irish tradition, 38; on kitsch, 399–400; on landscape of ruins, 227 Loach, Ken: The Wind that Shakes the Barley (film), 399 Locating Irish Folklore (D. Ó Giolláin), 35 Long, Margherita, 306, 439n25 Lönnrot, Elias: Kalevala, 137, 150, 423n8

498 | Index

Lore of Ireland, The (Ó hÓgáin), 386 lost home narratives, 361 Lovecraft, H.P., 173 Lowell, Percival: Occult Japan, 219 lustre of time [jidai no tsuya]: and aura, 310–11; and Celtic Revivalist shadows as historical residue, 202; as grit of continued accessibility, 359; in landscape, 359, 364; and “Lapis Lazuli” (Yeats), 410; living personifications of, 292; meaning of, 308–9; and “Old Furniture” (Hardy), 438n21; and Satō’s sword, 264–5; and shadows, 310; and twilight, 308. See also shadows Mabinogi (Guest), 75 Machen, Arthur: The Hill of Dreams, 173–4 Macintosh, Alastair: Rekindling Community, 42 Macleod, Fiona, 108, 192, 239 Macpherson, James, 158; The Works of Ossian (Macpherson), 71–3 Madden, Deirdre, 420n4 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 371 magic, 180, 232–3 Mahfouz, Naguib, 419n3 maiko [apprentice geisha], 336 de Man, Paul, 348 manga, 436n12 Mansergh, Nicholas: The Irish Question, 146 Man’yōshū [Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves], 225, 322, 358 Mapmaker, The (film), 112–13 Marlatt, Daphne: The Gull, 337–8 Marpa the Translator, 411 Maruki, Yasutaka, 327 Masao Miyoshi, 193 masks, theatrical: function of, 368–70, 393; in At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 359; in Noh, 393, 446n34; and Shaw, 3–4; and Yeats, 344, 348, 369–70, 446n34

Maspero, François: Les passagers du Roissy Express [Roissy Express], 62 mass communications, 109, 152, 428n33. See also newspapers material reflexivity, 305 Matsui Akira, 337, 440n8 Matsumura Mineko (Katayama Hiroko): introduction to, 192, 229–30; and Airurando bungakukai, 231, 237; Akai hana [The Red Flower], 230; Akutagawa-san no kaisō [Remembrances of Akutagawa], 238–39, 241–2, 433n21, 434n22; career of, 230–1; and cross-cultural dialogue, 230, 236–7, 239; final publication of, 237; and Irish literature, 232, 242; and Japanese speculative feminist writing, 239; on Lady Gregory, 231; as psuedonym, 229; Tokasetsu [Candlemas or Imbolc], 237; translation of fantastic, 233–5; translation of Irish dialects, 235–6, 250; translations by, 223, 231, 234–7 Mattar, Sinéad Garrigan, 128–9 “Maura Du of Ballyshannon” (O’Conor), 102–3 Mayo, County, 112, 186 McCabe, Patrick, 185 McCourt, Frank, 185 McCrum, Mark: The Craíc, 118, 422n1 McGarry, Jim, 443n22 McGlinchey, Charles, 133, 159–60; The Last of the Name, 160 McGowan, Joe, 82, 138; Echoes of a Savage Land, 423n9 McNally, Mark: Proving the Way, 449n13 Mead, G.R.S., 373 Medea (Euripides), 345 Meiji Restoration, 432n12, 433n20, 437n13 memory. See collective memory Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 339 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 228

Merriman, Brian: Cúirt an Mheadhon Oidhche, 420n14 Metrical Dindshenchas, The, 76, 285–6 Mikado, The (opera), 434n1 miko [shrine maidens], 336 Miller, Nicholas Andrew, 53 mimicry, 39 Miner, Earl, 447n3 min’yō [folk songs], 241, 254, 328 minzokugaku [folklore studies], 9, 210, 281, 287, 404 minzoku [nativist ethnography], 404 Mishima Yukio: adaptation of Aoi no ue, 439n26; on associations between Hearn, Yeats, and Tanizaki, 304, 308, 319, 403; on associations between Yeats and Tanizaki, 50, 303–6, 308, 317, 319–20; on Celtic Revival, 307; on Celtic Revival and In’ei raisan (Tani­ zaki), 22, 50–1, 314; on The Celtic Twilight (Yeats) and In’ei raisan, 51, 303; on The Celtic Twilight and Kojiki, 319; on dancing in twilight, 317; and drama, 317–18; on Hearn, 304; on In’ei raisan, 317; kindai nō of, 328, 442n16; on Kyōka, 345; on lustre of time, 308; on Noh, 318; Sado kōshaku fujin [Madame de Sade], 345; translation of At the Hawk’s Well (Yeats), 344; on twilight and shadows, 303–4, 312, 403; and Yeats, 307 missionaries, in Japan: attitudes of, 211; Catholic, 291–2, 436n10, 437n17 Mitsuru, Hashimoto, 287 Miyake Setsurei: Uchū [The Universe], 226 Miyazaki Hayao, 209, 437n16 Miyazaki Koshoshi, 431n8 Miyazawa Kenji, 255; “Nōmin geijutsu gairon kōyō” [An Outline of Agrarian Art], 289–90 Mizuki Shigeru, 448n10 modernism: and ancestral authenticity, 13; appropriations of heritage by, 66; in Asia, 449n12; and authoritarian-

Index | 499

ism, 435n6; characteristics of, 19; and classical ideals, 67; cosmopolitan, 12; and cross-cultural exchange, 52, 189, 280, 400; and faithfulness in innovation, 345; fantastic figures in, 29; and globalization, 409; and heritage, 18; and loss of local, 26, 32; and occultism, 373; polarities of, 67; process of, 150; resistance to through place, 116; and struggle with cultural diversification, 8. See also capitalism; cosmopolitanism; globalization; hegemony; Japanese modernism; Japanese modernists; progress; technology Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Castle), 426n22 modernist literature, 138, 260. See also Irish literature; Japanese literature; literature “Modest Proposal, A” (Swift), 296 Monier-Williams, Monier, 203 “Monodramatic Principle in Noh Theatre, The” (Nogami), 318 monogatari [legend/tale], 283 mononoke [spirit], 193. See also fantastic figures mono no ke [spirit possession], 347, 369 monsters. See fantastic figures; yōkai Moore, George: The Untilled Field, 93–4 Moore, Thomas, 420n14 Moran, D.P., 142–4 Moran, John: “The Most Famous Irishman You’ve Never Heard Of,” 433n19 Morganwg, Iolo (Edward Williams): Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, 73 Mori Mayumi, 434n22 Mori Ōgai, 278 Morris, Jan, 414–15 Morris, William, 102, 175 Moses, Michael Valdez, 448n9 “Most Famous Irishman You’ve Never Heard Of, The” (Moran), 433n19 Moto’ori Norinaga: Kijiki-den [Kojiki studies], 285–6

500 | Index

“Mountains of Mourne, The” (Adams), 113 Mount Shinobu, 447n5 Moussa, Salama, 419n3 MSG (monosodium glutamate), 278 mugen nō [ghost plays]: ancestral spirits in, 43; for depicting twilight and spectral, 43, 107–8, 325, 332, 352–3; and geographical setting, 356–7; primacy of language in, and masks, 369; and Zeami, 347 Mulan (film), 274 Muldoon, Paul: “Erin Go Faster,” 215; “Hopewell Haiku LXXVII ,” 401, 448n8; translation of verses by Ní Dhomhnaill, 424n14 Murakami Haruki, 434n24 Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot), 442n16 Murray, Ciaran: “Japan as Celtic Otherworld,” 431n10 Murray, Damien, 421n15 Murray, Paul, 208 music: Belfast Harpers’ Society, 180; and cultural recovery, 74; ethnomusicology, 178; mass reproduction of, 311–12. See also folk music “Musmee, The” (E. Arnold), 276–7 “Myris: Alexandria, 340 C.E.” (Cavafy), 66 mystery [rún], 271. See also fushigi myth, 40–1, 70, 84, 299. See also folklore mythic poetry, 386–7 mytho-historicism, 66 mythopoesis, 59 Nagasaki, Japan, 391–2, 448n7 Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII, 378 national autonomy, 399 nationalism: and ancestral, 315; and Celtic Revival, 14, 406; cultural, 39–40, 134, 188, 213–15; in Japan, 213–15, 449n12; and kokugaku, 285; and language, 61–3, 128, 419n3; passive, 381; and seeking proof of origins,

70; supernatural as form of, 384; and Yeats, 188. See also cultural recovery national mythology, 137–8 national self-consciousness, 108, 231–2, 381 national Thing (Žižek), 187 National Tree Council, 157–8 nation building, 109, 129, 141, 406 native studies. See kokugaku Natsume Sōseki. See Sōseki Navigatio Sancti Brendani [Voyage of St Brendan], 77 necromancy: as act against time and rationality, 348, 394; for apprehending ancestral, 210, 216, 347–8, 389; staging, 331; and tasogare mechanisms, 353; for uncovering non-essence posing as essence, 383. See also fantastic figures; paranormal; twilight Nehru, Jawaharlal, 163 neo-nō (neo-Noh): approach to, 23, 327; for accessing ancestral, 50; The Dreaming of the Bones (Yeats) as, 397–8; and frustration, 374; ghostlore in, 353; The Gull (Marlatt), 337–8; and Hearn, 440n7; and interculturality, 337–8; and Kyōka, 44, 330–1; by Mishima, 442n16; and specificity of geographical setting, 356; and twilight, 348–9, 351; and Yeats, 328, 330–1, 337, 352–3, 374, 377 nets, 174–5 neuropsychology, 425n18 newspapers, 30, 94, 152–3, 378. See also mass communications Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Decolonising the Mind, 37, 154–5, 158 NHK television, 218, 261 Ní Chonaill, Eibhlín: Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, 95 Ní Dhomhnaill, Nuala, 146, 424n14, 438n20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 318, 380 Nihon fuashizimu hihan (Hasegawa), 226

Nihonjin [The Japanese] (journal), 226 Nihon kodai bunka (Watsuji), 222 Nihon oyobi nihonjin [Japan and the Japanese] (journal), 226 Nihon ryōiki (Kyōkai), 391, 447n6 Nishida Kitarō, 402–3 nishikigi: meaning of, 448n8 Nishikigi (Zeami), 390–1, 395, 397, 447n5 Nitobe Inazō, 249, 256–7, 418n5 Ní Uallacháin, Pádraigín, 138 Nōgaku: Japanese No Plays (B. Suzuki), 338 Nogami Toyoichirō: “The Monodramatic Principle in Noh Theatre,” 318 Noguchi, Yone. See Noguchi Yonejirō Noguchi Yonejirō, 12, 48, 235, 253, 351–2; Ten Kiogen in English, 338 Noh: and ancestral recall, 318, 325, 350; ancestral spirits in, 43; as aristocratic, 320, 352, 377–8; and authenticity, 335–6; Canadian, 337; categories of, 443n23; Celtic/Irish, 328–9; chanting, 342; and cross-cultural exchange, 327; demarcation of space in, 352, 355; and Eliot, 327; and encountering paranormal, 350; folk components of, 349; ghostly figures in, 43, 331–2, 388; The Gull (Marlatt), 337–8; Hearn on, 440n7; and innovation, 334–5; and Itō Michio, 341; Japanese publications of, 440n9; lighting in, 378; origins of, 318–19, 349; phantasmal elements of, 352; preciseness of geographical naming in, 356; qualities of Classical, 330; reinterpretations of, 340, 346; restless spirits in, 393; shadow in, 317–19; and Shaw, 3–5; and space and time, 349; Steveston Noh Project, 337–8; translations of, 48–9, 338–40, 441n11; and twilight, 319–20, 325–6, 329, 350; Yeats’s summary of, 319; yūgen, 329. See also masks, theatrical; mugen nō; neo-nō; phantasmal Noh; Yeats, W.B., plays by Index | 501

“Nōmin geijutsu gairon kōyō” (Miyazawa), 289–90 Nō Plays of Japan, The (Waley), 339–40 Nora, Pierre, 256 nostalgia, 217 O-Bon (Buddhist festival), 206, 246, 316 O’Carolan, Turlough (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin), 373 O’Casey, Seán, 250 occultic stagecraft, 346, 358 occultism, 232–3, 373 Occult Japan (Lowell), 219 Ó Cearbhalláin, Toirdhealbhach (Turlough O’Carolan), 373 Ó Colm, Eoghan: Toraigh na dTonn, 423n9 O’Connell, Daniel, 145 O’Connor, Joseph, 420n4 O’Connor, Noel, 156 O’Conor, Charles P.: “Maura Du of Ballyshannon,” 102–3 O’Daly, John, 96 O’Donovan, John, 92–3, 202 O’Driscoll, Robert, 421n18 O Duffy, Eoin, 399 Ōe Kenzaburō, 49–50, 191, 215 O’Gillan, Enoch (Aongus Ó Giolláin), 102 Ó Giolláin, Diarmuid, 129, 131, 134, 180; Locating Irish Folklore, 35 Ogiwara Noriko, 239 O’Grady, Standish Hayes, 145; Silva Gadelica, 77 Ó hAirtnéide, Mícheál [Michael Hartnett]: “A Farewell to English,” 301–2 O’hEochaidh, Seán, 159 Ó hÓgáin, Dáithi, 77; The Lore of Ireland, 386 Oisin: as pen name, 421n16. See also Ossian; Ossianic literature; Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats) O-Jizō (bodhisattva), 207

502 | Index

O’Kearney, Nicholas, 75–6, 79, 420n8 Okinawa, 447n4 Okujō no kyōjin (Kikuchi), 254 Old English, 71 “Old Furniture” (Hardy), 438n21 Oldmeadow, Harry, 15, 276, 417n3, 432n14, 435n6 O’Looney, Bryan: Laoi Oisín ar Thír n-Óg, 79 O’Neill, P.G., 440n6 Ōnin War, 270 “On National Culture” (Kiberd), 39 On Two Shores (Takahashi), 438n20 Ó Raifteiri, Antoine. See Raftery oral tradition, 126, 281, 364 orature: attraction of, 283; and Celtic Revival, 102; for cultural survival, 38–9; and folklore, 252, 393; in Hawai’i’s anti-colonial struggle, 169; and imperial oppression, 162; and kaidan, 430n5; as source for Yeats, 386; uniquely fashioned information from, 139; and Yanagita, 283. See also folklore; oral tradition; public performance Orientalism: and E. Arnold, 276–7; critique of, 417n3, 432n14; definition of, 21, 275; in Irish literature, 275; Literary, 275; and scholarship, 409; by Victorian England, 276; and Yeats, 42–3, 229, 332–3 Ortabasi, Melek, 284 Osanai Kaoru, 241, 243 Ó Searcaigh, Cathal, 182–4, 299, 438n20; Homecoming/An Bealach ‘na Bhaile, 301 O-Shichi kichiza (Tsubouchi), 339 “Oshidori” (Hearn), 201 Ōshima Shōtarō: D.T. Suzuki’s impact on, 435n6; on Itō Michio, 442n14; meeting with Yeats, 271; research on Yeats and Japanese authors, 253, 436n7; and Satō’s sword, 264, 269–70, 434n2, 436n8; on Yeats’s library, 418n6

Ossian, 419nn1–2. See also Oisin; Ossianic literature; Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats) Ossian: Fragments of Ancient Poetry (Colvin), 16–17 Ossianic literature, 77–8. See also Oisin; Ossian; Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats) Ossianic Society, 95–6, 420n8 Österling, Anders, 367 O Sullivan, Paul, 399 Ōta Yūzō, 21, 219, 256–7, 418n5 Our Shared Japan (De Angelis and Woods), 430n1, 435n5 Owen, Wilfred, 405–6 o-yatoi gaikokujin [Western government-employed experts], 197, 430n4 Pacific War, 432n12, 448n10, 449n12 pan-Celtic movement, 74–5, 140. See also Celtic identity Pan-Celtic Society, 140 Pandemonium and Parade (M.D. Foster), 29–30 paranormal, 168, 176, 179, 200, 243. See also fantastic figures; necromancy; phantasmal; twilight Paris World Fair (1900), 278 Parker, Matthew, 71 Parkin, Andrew, 357 Partch, Harry, 336 past. See ancestral; culture; heritage; tradition Pearse, Patrick: “Traditionalism,” 180 peasants: as alternative discourse to elitism, 287; as artificial construction, 290; Celtic Revival use of, 181; collective memory in, 427n27; critiques of, 186; and jōmin, 286–8; legitimacy of term, 295; political edge of, 288. See also agrarian life; folk arts; jōmin Perappa the Rappa (video game), 436n12 perceptual ecology, 427n29

Péri, Noel, 337–8; Cinq No, 338; Le No, 338 Perry, Matthew C., 278–9 personhood, sacrifice of, 58 phantasmal, 29; access to, 300; as alternate existence, 171; as apparition of the vanishing, 44, 168; and counter-reality to modern world, 168; functioning of, 174; as intervening interlocutor, 284; as material but vanishing, 424n13; process of becoming, 307, 402; and rejection of utilitarianism, 332; as spectralization of the actor into twilight, 349. See also fantastic figures; ghosts; paranormal; twilight phantasmal Noh, 325, 332, 350, 368 Pincus, Leslie, 449n12 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 235, 433n15 Plays of Old Japan (Stopes), 329 Plunkett, Edward (Lord Dunsany), 56, 173, 192, 231, 237 poet-historian, 66–7, 437n14 poetic historiography, 66 Poetics of Emptiness (Stalling), 46 poetry: contemporary Irish Gaelic, 146; mythic, 386–7; symbolist, 58, 60 politics, 7, 403 post-colonial theory, 37, 154, 162, 417n3 Poulton, Cody: Spirits of Another Sort, 439nn2–3 Pound, Dorothy, 361 Pound, Ezra: on Fenollosa’s Noh text, 338–9; and Noguchi, 253; and Noh, 48, 318–19, 327, 331, 338, 343, 441n12, 442n15 Powell, Michael: The Edge of the World (film), 447n2 Prem Sanyas (film), 276 Pre-Raphaelitism, 68, 101 progress: ambivalence of, 112, 414–15; and erasure of place, 44–5, 116, 215; as generic collectivity, 178; resistance to from shadows and twilight, 307;

Index | 503

ruins in wake of, 366; and “The Hankerchief ” (Akutagawa), 249; and Yeats, 166. See also capitalism; cosmopolitanism; globalization; modernism prosopopoeia, 41, 252, 348, 360, 369, 396–7 Proving the Way (McNally), 449n13 pseudepigraphy, 67–75, 158 psychogeography, 82, 373 psychometry, 176–7, 403 public performance, 38–9, 73, 110, 213. See also orature pubs, 189 Pure Drop, The (TV program), 429n38 Purgatory, 392 Quiet Man, The (film), 129, 188 Quirke, Michael, 118, 422n1 Raftery (Antoine Ó Raifteiri), 36, 160, 373, 426n21; “An Cíos Caitliceach” [The Catholic Rent], 160 “Raichō sentosuru Yeats no fūkaku” (Hirata), 253 Raine, Kathleen, 148 Ran (film), 339 Rashōmon (film), 238 Rath, Eric C.: The Ethos of Noh, 335 Ray, Rajat Kanta, 150 Rayner, Alice, 370 reclusive gesture, 60 Rediscovering Lafcadio Hearn (Hirakawa), 434n27 regionalism, 165, 431n8 Reilly, Tom: Cromwell, 422n20 Rekindling Community (Macintosh), 42 relic: aura of, 22, 263; Certeau on, 412; as confrontational to modernist values, 263; distinctiveness of, 364; and Irish identity, 307; as revenant who gestures at impossible return, 245; Satō’s sword as, 22, 263–6 religion, ancient, 141–2

504 | Index

re-narrativization: and Celtic Revival, 57; of fantastic figures, 29; in Japanese literature, 360; purpose of, 16, 35, 368; and tradition, 187; and transcreation, 79; in The Wanderings of Oisin, 79–80; and Yeats, 42 Repeal Movement, 145 Rexroth, Kenneth, 219 Rhymers’ Club, 102–4 Richie, Donald, 445n32 Rimbaud, Arthur, 98 Ring and the Book, The (Browning), 244 Rise of Network Society, The (Castells), 8 Rolleston, T.W.: “The Dead at Clonmacnoise,” 102 Romance of the Milky Way, The (Hearn), 213 Romanticism, 39–40, 68, 102–3, 137, 322. See also Japanese Romanticism Room with a View, A (Forster), 431n7 Rostrevor, Ireland: phantom bell in, 382–3 Royal Dutch Shell, 112 rún [mystery], 271. See also fushigi rural society and traditions: artwork of, 289; bourgeoisie disconnect from, 184; capitalist views of, 165, 428n34; contemporary protection of, 159; cultural richness in, 55, 204; and essentialist statements, 187; loss of, 14; as resistance to cosmopolitanism, 139; and Yeats, 184. See also agrarian life; cultural preservation; cultural recovery; dialect; peasants Russell, Æ, 379 ryōki [curiosity hunting], 242, 252 ryōshō [twilight], 216 Sadataka Maramatsu: Izumi Kyōka kenkyū, 439n3 Sado kōshaku fujin (Mishima), 345 Said, Edward, 38, 41, 95, 417n3, 432n14 Saijō Yaso: and Airurando bungakukai, 50, 231, 241, 433n15; and Kamen (journal), 241; and min’yō, 241, 328;

and Seihai (journal), 253; and Yeats’s poetry, 254 St Brendan, 77 St Colman’s well, 370, 375–6 St Kilda (Shetlands island), 447n2 St Patrick, 419n1. See also Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats) Sakai Naoki, 231, 315 Sakate Yōji, 440n7 Sakura (TV drama), 436n12 Sangū Makoto: and Airurando Bungakukai, 231; and Akutagawa, 239–0; and Celtic Revival, 51; and Dai-sanji shin shichō (journal), 243; and Hearn, 239–40, 439n3; on Yeats’s plays, 49, 239, 324, 368; Yeats to Nippon, 239 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 425n18 Sasaki Kizen, 291 Sasaki Nobutsuna, 325–6 Satanists, 153–4 Satō Junzō, 209, 264, 269–70, 434n2 Satō’s sword: approach to, 22; aura of, 263–6; damage to, 270; and “The Doll” (Akutagawa), 246; for enabling contact with past, 403; as example of material culture in cross-cultural exchange, 266–71; gifting of, 264, 270; and global appeal of Celtic Revival, 327; and India’s independence movement, 437n15; Kobori’s translation of, 434n3; origins of, 269–70; perspectives on, 434n2; as relic, 22, 263–6; return of to Japan, 435n4; significance of, 272, 309–10; as symbol of physical continuity, 379–80 Saussy, Haun, 409 Save the Future series, 261, 434n28 “Savorna Delight” (song), 164 Scotland, 73, 425n19 Secret Commonwealth, The (Kirk and Lang), 168–9, 426n24 Seferis, George, 65–6 Seidensticker, Edward, 438n23 Seihai [The Grail] (journal), 253–4, 422n3

seirei [fairy], 250–1, 392. See also fairies; fantastic figures seiyō kijutsu [Western magic], 232–3. See also magic Sekine, Masaru, and Christopher Murray: Yeats and the Noh, 335, 361 Self, and Soul, 379–81 Senda Koreya, 24, 340 senzo [ancestor], 30, 251, 305, 392–3 “Senzo no hanashi” (Yanagita), 392 shadows: for accessing processes of loss, 303–4; as alternative historiographical strategy, 311; as continuum of connections around Japanese cultural places, 306; and cross-cultural exchange, 403; dancing in, 319; and electric lights, 311; ghostly in, 309; as habitations, 307; inevitable loss of, 314; Japanese approach to, 262; and Japanese architecture, 306, 312–13; and literature, 316–17; and lustre of time, 310; and Noh, 317–18; as specifically Japanese, 50–1, 312–13, 316; as type of terrain, 438n23. See also In’ei raisan (Tanizaki); twilight Shadowy Waters, The (Yeats): on human ambition, 99; nets in, 98, 174; on seeking Irishness in past, 81; and Symbolism, 69, 98–9; and Yeats’s Noh dramas, 107, 319, 369 Shakespeare, William, 442n16; Hamlet, 321, 339; The Merchant of Venice, 339 Sharf, Robert, 435n6 Shaw, George Bernard: Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, 231; “John Bull’s Other Island,” 365, 445n29; and Noh performance, 3–5; on Skellig Michael, 364–7; Tanizaki on, 3–4, 277, 303, 313; visit to Japan, 4–6 Shaw, Fiona, 56, 234 Shaw, Margaret Fay, 427n30 Shiba Ryōtarō, 255–6, 299, 306; Airurando nikki [A Diary in Ireland], 195, 286 Shimazaki Chifumi, 443n23

Index | 505

Shimokusu Masaya: Yōsei no Airurando [The Fairies of Ireland], 210 shingeki [modern] theatre, 24, 326, 339–40 shinkokugaku [new nativism], 286. See also kokugaku Shinobu, Mount, 447n5 Shinozawa Hideo: “Achira no kokoro to Nihon no kokoro” [The Spirit Over There and the Japanese Spirit], 293–4 shinpa [new school] theatre, 44, 326, 440n5 Shinto, 214–15, 318, 352. See also Izumo Taisha Shirō Naitō, 418n6; Yeats and Zen, 43 shrine maidens [miko], 336 sídhe [fairy people beneath the mound], 31, 234, 362–3, 389, 392. See also fairies; fantastic figures Sigerson, George, 145 Silk Road, 410–11 Silva, Noenoe, 169 Silva Gadelica (O’Grady), 77 Singer, I.B.: “The Kabbalist of East Broadway,” 424n13 Skellig Michael, 364–5, 367 skepticism, 168 Sligo, County, 82–5, 295, 438n18 Smith, Quentin, 176, 427n28 soba [buckwheat] noodles, 299 soil. See agrarian life Sokoku [Homeland], 448n10 Sommerfelt, Alf, 203 Sōseki (Natsume Sōseki), 221–3, 278, 321, 323; Wagahai wa neko de aru [I Am a Cat] (Sōseki), 377 soul, 229, 379–81 Spangler, Matthew: “Haunted to the Edge of Trance,” 427n26 Spanish Civil War, 399 spatial production, 19 Speckled Bird, The (Yeats): introduction to, 119–20; and Celtic romanticism, 173; and cross-cultural dialogue, 189– 90; fusion of horizons in, 189–90,

506 | Index

327; and heroic age, 146; literary style of, 120; local focus of, 164, 173; narrative structure, 124; not belonging in, 122; and occultism, 120, 125–6; and oral tradition, 126; persona in, 121; romance in, 121–2; storytelling in, 122–5; as unfinished, 122, 125 spectral. See fantastic figures speech, 205 Spirited Away (film), 437n16 spirited away trope, 394, 396, 402, 437n16 Spirits of Another Sort (Poulton), 439n2 Spivak, Gayatri, 35 Stalling, Jonathan: Poetics of Emptiness, 46 Star Festival (Tanabata), 213 Starrs, Roy, 227, 257, 432n12 Station Island (Heaney), 301 Steveston Noh Project, 337–8 Stir-Fry (Donoghue), 185 Stokes, Whitely, 420n8 Stopes, Marie: Plays of Old Japan, 329 Stories from Tory Island (Therman), 138, 423n9 “Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi, The” (folk tale), 200–1 storytelling: and The Celtic Twilight, 127, 132; and people as interactive locators, 161; and phantasmic, 172; and polyphonic quality of narration, 281; as source for Yeats, 386–7; and twilight, 146 strategic essentialism, 35 Styan, J.L., 334 Suda Kokuta, 255 Summers, Montague, 173 supernatural, 383–4. See also fantastic figures superstition, 178–9, 388 Surette, Leon, 373 Suzuki, Beatrice, 232, 235–6; Nōgaku: Japanese No Plays, 338 Suzuki Daisetsu (D.T.), 12, 254, 268, 269, 435n6

Swift, Jonathan: The Drapier’s Letters, 296; “A Modest Proposal,” 296 sword-mind, 435n6 Swords, Liam, 84 swords, samurai, 268–9. See also Satō’s sword Symbolism: and Cavafy, 62; delirium of cognition needed for, 97–8; and departure from material, 99; Rimbaud on, 97–8; and Symons, 103; transcendental truth of, 115; and Yeats, 62, 68–69. See also Là-bas (Huysman); symbolist drama; symbolist poetry symbolist: drama, 345; poetry, 58, 60 Symons, Arthur, 102–3 Synge, J.M.: The Aran Islands, 390; and Kikuchi, 230, 234, 254; The Playboy of the Western World, 235, 433n15; translations of, 192, 234–6; In Wicklow and West Kerry, 127; Yeats on, 236 Taiheiki [Chronicle of Great Peace], 288 Takagi Masashi: Yanagita Kunio to Europe, 282 Takahashi Matsuo, 232, 367; On Two Shores (Takahashi), 438n20, 438n20 Takahime (Yokomichi), 344 Taketomo Sōfū, 434n26 Tale of Genji, The [Genji monogatari], 225, 347 Tanabata (Star Festival), 213 Tanaka Yūji: Gendai ni ikiru Rafukadio Hān [Lafcadio Hearn: Living in the Modern Era], 212 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: approach to, 303, 306; and body in liminal pain, 314; critiquing of present through past, 307; on cultural hybridization, 315; cultural melancholy of, 302–3, 305–6; on differences between East and West, 4, 50–1, 400; domain of contact in work of, 303; and enjoyment of culture, 315, 439n25; “Geidan,” 4–5, 400; on heritage, 304; on Japanese

aesthetic, 28, 314; on kahō, 359; Koba­ yashi Hideo on, 5; material reflexivity of, 305; and Noh, 317–18, 320, 378; on rebuilding Tokyo, 315; reputation of, 305; resistance to Western interpretations of Japan, 277; on ruins and relics, 263–4; on Shaw, 3–4, 277, 303, 313; on technological innovation, 307; and The Wanderings of Oisin, 302; writings of, 305–6; and Yeats, 308. See also In’ei raisan (Tanizaki); lustre of time; shadows Tara, Hill of, 215–16 tasogare [twilight], 23, 27, 216, 252–3, 291, 349. See also twilight “Tasogare no aji” (Kyōka), 323–4, 345–6, 351, 443n20 tasogare-toki [twilight time], 316, 320 Tatsumi, Takayuki, 219–20, 282 Tatsuno Kingo, 430n4 Taylor, Charles, 46 Taylor, Diana, 381 Taylor, Richard, 361 tea, 299 technology: and cognitive perception, 307; destruction from, 166, 312, 366–7; and folk practices, 429n38; kind of deafness from, 161; myopia of, 111; and power, 214; Tanizaki on surrender to, 314. See also cosmopolitanism; mass communications Tegnér, Esaias: Frithjofs Saga, 423n8 Teikoku bungaku [Imperial Literature] (journal), 221 Tenchi ujō (Doi), 222 “Tengu no hanashi” (Yanagita), 289, 297 Ten Kiogen in English (Noguchi), 338 Tenshu monogatari (Kyōka), 343 terebi dorama (TV serial dramas), 436n12 Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy), 178 Thailand, 447n4 theatre: and ancestral recall, 23–4; avant-garde, 44, 330–1; communal, 318; Greek, 318–19, 345, 380; overlap

Index | 507

between Irish and Japanese, 24; as performative space for ancestral, 373–4; role of folklore in, 390; symbolist, 345; and twilight, 331–2, 345–9, 351, 353, 364. See also Abbey Theatre; Japanese theatre; Kyōka; mugen nō; neo-nō; Noh; shingeki theatre; shinpa theatre; Yeats, W.B., plays by Therman, Dorothy Harrison: Stories from Tory Island, 138, 423n9 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 348 Thing, national (Žižek), 187 Things Japanese (Chamberlain), 449n12 Things Seen and Unseen (Harootunian), 449n13 Thomas Aquinas, 359 Thuente, Mary Helen, 145 time, 91, 209 Tober n-Alt [Well in the Cliff ], 445n27 Tohoku University, 224, 433n16 Tokasetsu (Matsumura), 237 Tokutomi Sohō, 254 Tokyo, 315 Tokyo Imperial University, 235 Tolkien, J.R.R., 360 Tone, Wolfe, 95, 398 Tōno monogatari [The Tales of Tōno] (Yanagita): introduction to, 262; and aru [existing/dwelling], 294; and The Celtic Twilight, 22, 263, 282–3; comparisons to European counterparts, 281–2, 292; criticisms of, 283; and cultural embodiment, 286, 294–5; dancing in, 317; dedication of, 294; and discourse of the vanishing, 291; on facing homogenized future, 292; focus of on margins, 286, 288–9, 292; focus on local and experiential in, 290–1; on foreign influences in regional landscape, 291–2; as genre-establishing, 282–3; indistinct time in, 284; Japanese predecessors

508 | Index

to, 285–6; and jōmin, 286–7; meaning of monogatari, 283–5; objectives of, 283–7, 290; orature in, 281, 283; paranormal in, 291–3, 364; as representative of Japanese literary ethnography, 281; and twilight, 316; uniqueness of, 286. See also Yanagita Kunio Toomey, Deirdre, 68 topography. See landscape topopoesis, 357, 359 Toraigh na dTonn (Ó Colm), 423n9 Torrance, Richard, 431n8 Tower, The (Yeats): on architectural relics, 316; comedy in, 219, 372; and Galway, 267; and global reception of Irish literature, 51; and phantasms of history, 207–8; and Satō’s sword, 266–7; and twilight, 407; and use of past, 266; on violence, 300 tradition: accessing through emotionalism of past, 302; and ancestral, 12; assessing in post-colonial frames, 301; as collective experience of recall and connection, 346; as culturalsituational knowledge, 132; and culture, 129; distinctive resonance of, 410; and duplication, 336; and folklore, 35; and heritage, 18; invented, 129, 186, 273, 286, 300; in Ireland, 38; loss of, 30; as multiply suggestive, 187; as neologism, 36; potential problems with emphasis on, 187–8; on transnational level, 189; web of associations within and between, 412–13; Yeats on, 12–13, 30, 187, 412–13. See also ancestral; culture; folklore; heritage; lustre of time; oral tradition “Traditionalism” (Pearse), 180 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 260 transcreation, 48–9, 79, 165 transhistorical escape, 63–5 translation: as activism, 97; and cross-cultural appreciation, 225;

of dialect, 235; in Japan, 231; Matsumura’s views on, 233, 235; purpose of, 281; and transcreation, 48–9 translational register, 432n14 translocality, 56 transnationalism, 9, 14, 193, 409. See also interculturality; Irish-Japanese interculturality transnational studies, 45–6 Transpacific Displacement, Transpacific Imagination (Huang), 418n7 Treasury of Irish Folklore, A (Colum), 40 Tsubouchi Shōyō, 12; O-Shichi kichiza [The Romance of O-Shichi and Kichiza], 339 Tsukui Nobuko: Ezra Pound and Japanese Noh Plays, 441n12 Tsuruoka Mayumi, 434n23, 435n5 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 157, 187 Tunney, Paddy: Where Songs Do Thunder, 179–80 turf-cutters, 289 Twa Dogs (Colvin), 16 Twenty Plays of the No Theatre (Keene), 447n5 twilight: adaptability of meaning, 25, 27–8; and Akutagawa, 243–4, 313, 324; and altered states of consciousness, 427n26; as alternative historiographical strategy, 252, 311; ancestral past in, 115, 117; ancestral recovery and recollection in, 209, 216, 256; and auras, 364; and Celtic, 147; and Celtic Revivalists, 70; and chronotope, 40, 44; as collective desire for ancestral source, 19–20; continuity in, 207; and cross-cultural exchange, 116, 190, 256, 272, 402–3; as cultural vanishing, 27, 139, 142, 145, 164–5, 174; and dancing, 317; as domain for past to address present, 200, 323, 325; as domain for vanishing to take form, 119, 271, 319, 324–5, 380;

and eco-criticism, 367; as ethereally absent, 308; experiential nature of, 323; extinction of, 260; as familiar yet uncertain, 321–2, 406; as felt absence of culture, 22; and folk arts, 165; and folk history as alternative knowledge, 345; and Hearn, 200, 304, 308; and identity, 232; as in-between-ness, 27, 115, 165, 323, 351; interacting with, 171; as interphase of spirit, 304; and Irish self-consciousness, 41–2; and Japanese, 20, 24, 115–16, 252, 262, 272, 321–2, 438n23; Japanese introduction to, 240, 353; Japanese terms for, 27, 216, 322; and kawatare-doki, 322; and Kyōka, 23–4, 31, 323–4, 345–6; as locatable in any indigenous culture, 313; and loss, 316, 321; and lustre of time, 308; Mishima on, 304, 308; and Noh, 23, 319, 325, 329; as occult, 304; origins of, 20; as phantasmafication, 147; physical traces of, 172, 263; as resistance to progress, 29, 163–4, 210, 307; staging, 331–2, 345–9, 351, 353, 364; as storytelling strategy, 146; and Tanizaki, 304, 308; tasting, 352; for uncovering non-essence posing as essence, 383; and unfamiliarity, 207; and Yanagita, 315–16, 322, 324; and Yeats, 20, 23–4, 115, 303–4, 308, 315–16, 319–20, 324–5. See also chūkan; necromancy; phantasmal; shadows; tasogare Uchida Ryūzō, 439n24 Uchū (Miyake), 226 Ueda Bin, 221, 230, 433n15 Ueda Munakata, 442n16 Ugetsu monogatari (Akinari), 430n5 Ulster, 110 unbelief, 133 unfamiliarity, 203, 207 universalism, 211 University of Stirling, 16–17

Index | 509

Untilled Field, The (Moore), 93–4 Urashima Tarō story, 399, 421n17, 427n25 urbanism, 177 Uta andon (Kyōka), 349 Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 391 Utsukushiku naru kyōshitsu (Itō), 48–9 Uzawa Hisa, 352, 443n21 Van Compernolle, Timothy J., 53 Vancouver Olympics (2010), 426n23 vanishing, discourse of the: introduction to, 25–6; as alternative epistemology, 293; and cross-cultural exchange, 401–2; and dancing in shadows, 319; and drama, 353; fairies as, 30, 168, 251; and fushigi, 271; and inaccessible source, 187; negative force of, 393–4; Tōno-ben (regional accent) as, 291; and Yeats, 129, 344; as yūrei, 408 verbal hygiene, 61 vernacular language. See dialect; Hiberno-English; language Victoria, Brian, 435n6 Villemarqué, Théodore-Claude-HenryHersart de La, 73–5; Barzaz Breiz, 73–4 Villiers de I’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 371 Vision, A (Yeats): on The Colloquy of the Old Men, 77; on Maeve’s cairn, 82; on paranormal, 120–1; phasal workings of, 376; and Symbolism, 69, 371, 374; on use of source materials, 386 visor effect, 324 Vivenkananda, Swami, 211, 214 volk, 39, 136, 403–4, 423n6 Voyage of Bran, The [Immram Brain], 76, 101 Voyage of Máele Dúin, The [Immram Máele Dúin], 76–7 Voyage of St Brendan [Navigatio Sancti Brendani], 77 Wagahai wa neko de aru (Sōseki), 377

510 | Index

Wales, 73–5 Waley, Arthur: and British imperialism, 436n9; criticisms of, 43; and Noh, 337–40; The Nō Plays of Japan, 339–40; as translator, 225–6, 436n9; on yūgen, 388 Walsh, John: The Irish Language and Ireland’s Socio-Economic Development, 36–7 Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats): introduction to, 18–19; as closet drama, 107; conflict between Oisin and St Patrick, 59, 78, 81, 91, 94, 107, 171–2; and cultural recovery, 75, 84–5; folkloric avatar in, 57–8; and geographical specificity, 81–3; and Irish Home Rule, 83, 90–2; landscape in, 85, 94, 105–7; on material reality vs dream world, 86, 89–90, 96–7, 100, 105, 149, 176–7, 263, 309, 408; and Noh, 107–8; Oisin as figure of vanishing, 59, 80–1; and place and community, 111; re-narrativization in, 80; search for localized history, 148–9; skeptical engagement of, 68–9; source material for, 75–7, 79; on spectral as the lingering, 309; and symbolist poetry, 58–9; and symbols, 97; teleology of, 87–8; and twilight, 108, 171–2; and vanished islands, 85–9; on when ancestral is accessed, 68, 300 Washburn, Dennis, 430n5 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 399 water sources, 445n27 Watson, George, 100–1 Watsuji Tetsurō, 48; Fūdo, 297–8; Nihon kodai bunka [Classical Japanese Culture], 222 Weiss, Timothy, 432n14 Well in the Cliff [Tober n-Alt], 445n27 Where Songs Do Thunder (Tunney), 179–80 Wilde, Francesca Speranza, 108; Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, 364, 445n28

Wilde, Oscar: and Tanizaki, 303; “The Decay of Lying,” 273–4, 300 Williams, Edward (Iolo Morganwg), 73 Williams, Siân Rhiannon, 424n11 Wilson, F.A.C., 372, 446n34 Wind That Shakes the Barley, The (film), 399 Wisdom Sits in Places (Basso), 40 Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Campbell), 426n24 With Essex in Ireland (Lawless), 93 women: culturally hybridized, 239 wonder voyage genre. See immram “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, The” (Benjamin), 263 Works of Ossian, The (Macpherson), 71–3 World War II . See Pacific War wraiths. See fantastic figures Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 25 Yabu no naka (Akutagawa), 244–5 Yamaguchi Seiichi: Fenollosa, 441n10 Yanagita Kunio: and agriculture, 290; and Airurando bungakukai, 283; and Celtic Revival, 321, 405; and The Celtic Twilight, 263; criticisms of for fabrication, 290; on cultural history as residue, 351; and eco-criticism, 297–8; on folklore, 295; and Hearn, 283; on impact of modern production, 314; on importance of soil and landscape, 299, 315; and jōmin, 181, 287; and kamikakushi model, 437n16; and minzokugaku, 287; and nativist studies, 286, 439n24; on Noh, 355; and received texts, 437n13; reputation of, 281; strategy of against modernity, 263, 290; terminology used by for fantastic, 30, 251, 392–3; and twilight, 315–16, 321–2, 324; and Yeats, 295 Yanagita Kunio, works by: “Kawataredoki” [Twilight Time], 321–2; “Senzo no hanashi” [About Our Ancestors],

392; “Tengu no hanashi” [The Tengu’s Tale], 289, 297; Yōkai dangi [A Discussion on Monsters], 322. See also Tōno monogatari (Yanagita) Yanagita Kunio to Europe (Takagi), 282 Yano Hōjin, 253–4, 270, 433n15; Eibungaku yawa, 436n7; Yeats to Nippon, 436n7 Yashagaike. See Demon Pond Yeats, Jack B., 132, 142 Yeats, W.B.: on ancestral and changeling, 352; and ancestral fragmentation, 361; on ancestral recall, 381; and ancient religion, 141–2; antinaturalism of, 374; and M. Arnold, 141; and Cavafy, 108–9; on Celtic, 141, 143–4; and Celtic Revival, 9, 56, 68; and class consciousness, 181–2; on communal memory, 16, 298; criticisms of for fabrication, 129–31, 290; and cross-cultural dialogue, 9–10, 15, 328–9, 430n1; on cultural appropriation, 245; and dancing, 259–60, 318–19; and decolonization, 69–70; distrust of rationality, 147; on dividing Self from Soul, 379–80; early poetry of, 68, 82, 100, 115, 167, 309; and eco-criticism, 298, 367; ecological and economic concerns of, 111–12, 114–15, 142; ethico-political readings of, 42; as ethnographic, 134, 166; and fairies, 169, 352, 392, 444n26; and folklore, 16, 39, 83, 131, 134, 186, 367, 389; and ghosts, 324–5, 332, 444n26; and Gibran, 403, 448n11; global-looking nationalism of, 188; great memory concept, 427n27; and Hearn, 199–200, 208–9, 229, 431n10; and heroic figures, 360–1; homogeneity of style, 134; on imaginative tradition, 12–13; and immran, 331; impact of, 401; on importance of materiality, 40, 86, 90, 96–7, 99–100, 104–5; on importance of soil and landscape, 289, 315; Irish assessment of, 34; and

Index | 511

Irish folk music, 109–10; and Irish independence movement, 68, 82, 302, 420n14; and Irish language, 37, 161, 386; and Irish modernity, 422n5; and Irish self-consciousness, 37, 151; and Irish source material, 79, 386; and Japan, 28, 42–3, 326, 418n6, 430n1; Japanese authors’ meetings with, 253–4, 436n7; Japanese invitations to, 5–6, 253, 270, 436n7; Japanese reception of, 192, 244; Kavanagh on, 181–2, 184; on Kikuchi’s plays, 254; and Kyōka, 322–4; and landscape, 111, 295; and language, 158; on Lawless, 93; and margins, 286, 288–90; and mass communications, 94, 152, 378; and Moran, 143–4; on myth, 84; and mytho-historicism, 66; on national self-consciousness, 381; and negative ancestral memories, 393–4; and occult, 373; orature as source for, 386–7; in organizations, 104; and Orientalism, 42–3; and peasants, 286–7; as poet-historian, 108; and politics, 403, 405–6; positivity in poetry of, 413; and Pre-Raphaelitism, 68, 100–2; on re-emergence of vanishing, 366, 401–2; re-narrativization in work of, 80–1; resistance against modernity, 144, 166, 260–1, 290, 307, 310–11, 373, 388; revisions of poems, 199–200; and Rhymers’ Club, 102–4; and rural writing, 184; Said on, 41; and Satanists, 153–4; satire of, 373–4; scholarship on Japan and, 329; as senator, 166; shift in work of, 110–11; on sídhe, 363; strategy for redeeming folk culture, 432n13; and superstitions, 445n32; and Symbolism, 62–3, 65, 68–9, 97–100, 421n18; on Symons, 103; on Synge, 236; on teaching and experiencing culture, 257–60; on technology, 429n38; on theatre, 331, 373; tower of, 269; and tradition, 30, 187, 412–13; and twilight, 20, 23–4,

512 | Index

44, 115, 303–4, 308, 315–16, 319–20, 324–5; and Urashima Tarō story, 421n17; violence and anxiety in works by, 406; on Wilfred Owen, 405–6; and William Morris, 102; and Zen Buddhism, 419n9, 442n17. See also Satō’s sword Yeats, W.B., plays by: and Abbey Theatre, 151, 366, 378; bodily practices in, 369; and classical Noh, 320, 334–7, 348; classification of, 43–4, 345; context for understanding, 330–1, 335–6; The Countess Cathleen, 380; critique of minimal Noh influence, 334; critique of rote mimicry in, 332–4; and cross-cultural dialogue, 327; dance plays, 24–5, 330, 370, 398; elitist sense of, 320, 377–8, 393; and Fenollosa, 44; Four Plays for Dancers, 370, 372; and genre, 150; ghosts in, 330; Heroic Age in, 147–8, 359; heroic personages in, 354, 359–60; innovation in, 44, 329, 334; and Itō Michio, 24, 340–4; Japanese adaptations of, 344–5, 367; and Japanese avant-garde, 241, 272; and Japanese theatre, 326, 338, 367–8; and kyōgen genre, 371; and Kyōka, 23, 44, 325–7, 330–1, 439nn2–3; lighting for, 378; and masks, 344, 348, 369–70; Moses on, 448n9; and mugen nō, 43, 107–8, 325, 332, 352; as neo-Noh, 328, 337; and Nietzsche, 380; and Orientalism, 275; and phantasmal, 349; and phantasmal Noh, 332, 350, 393; as praise of shadows, 317, 319; Purgatory, 392; references to own work as Noh, 328, 440n4; ritualistic style in, 344; satire in, 219; scholarship on Noh and, 42–3, 329–30, 332–3, 335, 440n6, 442n19; and specificity of geographical setting, 356–7; themes in, 369; and twilight, 320, 348–9, 352–3, 378–9; Yeats’s summary of Noh, 319; and yūgen nō, 329. See also At the Hawk’s Well; Cat

and the Moon, The; Dreaming of the Bones, The Yeats, W.B., works by: “Adam’s Curse,” 99, 166; “Among School Children,” 101, 208, 218, 258–60, 413; “Ancestral Houses,” 369; “The Apparitions,” 332; Autobiographies, 295, 369; “Baile and Aillinn,” 394; “The Ballad of Father O’Hart,” 106; “Belief and Unbelief,” 30, 133; “Byzantium,” 407; “The Celtic Element in Literature,” 141, 162; “Certain Noble Plays of Japan,” 378–9; “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” 87, 381; “Coole Park,” 204; “Cuchulain Comforted,” 361; “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” 360; The Death of Cuchulain), 360; “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” 369, 371, 379–81; “Easter, 1916,” 107; “The Eater of Precious Stones,” 240, 243; “The Evangel of Folk-lore,”, 132, 152; “The Fiddler of Dooney,” 109–10, 179, 387; “The Fish,” 101; “The Fisherman,” 115; “The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid,” 268, 377; The Green Helmet, 360; “The Happiest of Poets,” 100; “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” 101–2; “The Host of the Air,” 199; The Hour-Glass, 241; “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” 104; Irish Folk and Fairy Tales, 120; “The Leaders of the Crowd,” 302; “A Literary Causerie,” 117, 367; “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart,” 254; “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” 96; Meditations in Time of Civil War, 22, 266–9, 406–7; “Meru,” 166; “The Moods,” 101, 176; “My House,” 269, 407; “My Table,” 267; “The New Faces,” 311; The Only Jealousy of Emer, 360, 439n26; “Our Lady of the Hills,” 132; “The Prisoners of the Gods,” 402; “The Religion of the Sailor,” 132; Responsibilities, and Other Poems, 16; The Resurrection, 209; “Ribh at the Tomb of Baile

and Aillinn,” 80; “Ribh Denounces Patrick,” 218; “The Road at My Door,” 398, 406; The Rose, 69, 112; “The Rose of Battle,” 99; “Sailing to Byzantium,” 407–8, 414; “The Second Coming,” 166; “September 1913,” 396; “The Song of the Old Mother,” 101; “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” 68, 106; “The Stolen Child,” 83, 104–5, 168, 364; “Swedenborg, Mediums, and Desolate Places,” 390; “Symbolism in Painting,” 98; “The Table,” 264; “The Three O’Briens and the Evil Fairies,” 240; “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” 166; “The White Birds,” 89; The Wind Among the Reeds, 101; Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend, and Myth, 16, 143–4, 151–2, 387. See also At the Hawk’s Well; Cat and the Moon, The; Celtic Twilight, The, chapters in; Dreaming of the Bones, The; “Lapis Lazuli”; Shadowy Waters, The; Speckled Bird, The; Tower, The; Vision, A; Wanderings of Oisin, The Yeats and the Noh (Sekine and Murray), 335, 361 Yeats and Zen (Shirō), 43 Yeats to Nippon (Sangū), 239 Yeats to Nippon (Yano), 436n7 Yiddish writing and theatre, 424n13 Yōkai dangi (Yanagita), 322 yōkai [monster], 31, 193, 322, 393. See also fantastic figures Yokomichi Mario: Izumi, 344; Takahime, 344 Yokomitsu Ri’ichi: Akunin no kuruma [The Cart of the Evildoer], 47–8, 53 Yōrō (Zeami), 361 yōsei [fairy], 234, 250–1, 392. See also fairies; fantastic figures Yōsei no Airurando (Shimokusu), 210 Yoshitsune, 360, 443n24 Young Ireland movement, 145 Yúdice, George: The Expediency of Culture, 7–8

Index | 513

yūgen manga, 448n10 yūgen nō, 329 yūgen [phantasmal aesthetic], 388, 394, 447n3 yūrei [ghosts], 347, 353, 408. See also fantastic figures; ghosts Zeami Motokiyō: and Aoi no ue [Lady Aoi], 393; and geographical naming, 356–7; Izutsu [The Well Cradle], 357; as model for classical Noh, 333; and

514 | Index

mugen nō, 347; Nishikigi, 390–1, 395, 397, 447n5; Western misunderstandings of, 43, 334; Yōrō [Sustenance of Age], 361 Zen Buddhism, 43, 419n9, 435n6 Zenkoku reijō daijiten [Dictionary of Sacred Places Throughout Japan], 357 Žižek, Slavoj, 187, 383, 445n30 Zorba the Greek (Kazantzakis), 425n20 zuihitsu [informal essay] genre, 306