TLS on Irish Orientalism

on Irish Orientalism

by Gerald MacLeaN

Joseph Lennon. Irish Nationalism. A literary and intellectual history. 478pp. Syracuse University Press. Paperback, $26.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £24.50. 978 0 8156 3164 4

For more than a thousand years, Ireland and the Irish have enjoyed a peculiar intimacy with the Orient and its peoples. Origin legends recorded by Irish monks between the ninth and twelfth centuries tell of how Ireland was peopled in a series of settlements by migrants from Asia. First of all came the sons of Feinius Farsaid (or Fein), a Scythian from the Asian steppe and a linguist of rare ability who synthesized the Irish language following the fall of Babel. Others tell of the Milesians, also descendants of a legendary Scythian who travelled west across Asia Minor breeding sons who arrived in Ireland from Spain. Meanwhile, keen to keep the Irish inferior and apart, early British historians confirmed and quibbled with these legends. From Nennius and Giraldus Cambrensis to William Camden and Edmund Spenser, Britons told bullying tales of their own superior origins from the noble Roman Brutus: after all, they pointed out, the Scythians were primitive savages who, untouched by the civilizing influences of empire, feasted on the flesh of their dead fathers and knew their mothers carnally. The Scythians were barbarians - just like the Irish.

Notions of Ireland's Asiatic origins survived discoveries proving that all these stories were bogus. By the late seventeenth century, such fabulous tales of Asiatic origin had slipped out of learned history and been replaced by Celticism, but they remained sedimented in popular literary and political texts where they served the interests of Irish nationalism. In 1685, even as the academic world was waking up to Celtic and Oriental studies, Roderic O'Flaherty produced Ogygia, a work of "cultural mythologizing" that rescued ancient Irish culture from the taint of Scythian barbarity. Using the latest in linguistic theory, O'Flaherty showed how the civilized Phoenicians had settled in Ireland, thereby providing Ireland with an ancestry to be proud of that was more ancient than "Britain and its imperial forebear, Rome". A century later, John Boswell added the ancient Egyptians to the mixture of Ireland's earliest immigrants, discovering their handiwork in the construction of an Iron Age burial chamber.
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The Phoenicians continued to animate the imaginations of Irish cultural nationalists seeking to discount the insults of the imperial Brits: all those Irish pillar-towers were clearly of Eastern design. As the eighteenth became the nineteenth century, General Charles Vallancey deployed speculative etymology and imaginative archaeology to reconcile the Scythian and Phoenician legends, contributing to a peculiarly Irish Orientalism that, in contrast to Anglo-French Orientalism, valued hybridity and antiquity even as it sought common ground with colonized peoples in India and Egypt struggling against British rule.

The most renowned Irish writers found that the ancient Orient and the emergent field of Oriental scholarship provided a storehouse of tropes and images, narrative structures and devices for undermining the dominant rhetoric of empire. In works by Swift, Goldsmith and Edmund Perry - author of Letters from an Armenian in Ireland to his Friends at Trebisond (1757) - Joseph Lennon traces the development of a satirical strain within Irish literary Orientalism that linked Ireland and the Orient as sites of imperial oppression. During the nineteenth century, the novelist Sydney Owenson and the poets Thomas Moore and James Mangan shifted this "cross-colonial" discourse away from satire, preferring to celebrate Irishness by aligning it with Oriental figures and settings and advocating religious tolerance. But Irish attitudes towards British rule in India took "myriad forms" and for many, empire offered freedom from poverty. Oriental studies rapidly developed at Trinity College Dublin, opening a fast track for employment in the colonial administration. "Irishness", after all, "gave access to the Oriental mind", and for many, the chance of ruling others abroad compensated for being ruled at home.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Irish-Orient link shifted once again into political and mystical registers. Ever mindful of conditions at home, nationalist journalists reported on British misrule in Afghanistan, China, Egypt and India, exposing the lie that empire brought civilization. For Yeats and other writers of the Celtic Revival, the Orient was the cure for modernity. Oriental underdevelopment was not backwardness but the condition of the imaginative, spiritual and sensual freedom for which they longed. For Yeats, George Russell and James Stephens, Theosophy - that most cross-colonial of all pseudo-religions - offered mystical transcendence that fulfilled the agenda of Irish cultural nationalism without the messiness of class struggle or political reform. Taking the tower for his symbol, Yeats surely had its putative Oriental origins in mind.

Joseph Lennon interweaves this beguiling narrative with shrewd insights from Edward Said's Orientalism to reveal how, in the cause of Irish national identity, the politics of colonial settlement and empire shaped cultural production and imaginative creativity right from the start.