As Zhaoming Qian states in his introduction to this collection, modernist scholarship has been slow in coming to acknowledge the formative impact of interaction with China and Japan on Euro-American literary modernism. Modernism and the Orient is a welcome addition to this burgeoning field. There are essays on the major players, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and of course Ezra Pound, while its purview indicates scope for wider investigation.
When modernism erupted in the prewar years of the twentieth century, European artists already owed a debt to other civilizations. J. M. Whistler abandoned the mimetic narrative of Western realist painting for the asymmetric perspective and atmospheric mood of an Eastern aesthetic in the 1870s. Whistler discovered Chinese porcelain at the same time as Japanese prints, sparking the fin-de-siècle craze most famously attested to by Oscar Wilde's lament, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” Zhang Longxi's opening essay prompts a reconsideration of this seemingly flippant remark in the light of Wilde's serious philosophical engagement with the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu in an unduly neglected review, “A Chinese Sage” (1890). Suburban householders familiar with depictions of the Chinese philosopher on their tea trays and fire screens “would tremble” if they “really knew who he was,” wrote Wilde. “Chuang Tzu spent his life in teaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all useful things” (p. 31). Herbert Giles's translation provided Wilde with a radical critique of Victorian values and political institutions that he would develop in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).
In the second of two essays that identify precursory modernisms, Sabine Sielke discovers continuities in the way the Orient/al functions in producing gendered subjectivities in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, “foremother” (p. 39) and the “media-specific aesthetics” of Marianne Moore (p. 51). She also considers the cultural motivations of our critical “turn towards the Orient” in the light of globalization and China's economic rise. While Sielke raises important questions about the theoretical implications of this remapping of modernist terrain, Daniel Albright demonstrates the interdisciplinary delights of such work in a provocative disquisition on the pivotal role of the flute in early-modernist music, drama, and dance. Equally stimulating is Christine Froula's excavation of Proust's historicist deployment of Chinese things in À La Recherche de Temps Perdu (1913–27). The chinoiserie clutter of Odette's “very odd little house” holds clues to the structural aesthetic of Proust's narrative (p. 74). His correspondence with art historian Jean-Louis Vaudoyer informs Froula's reading of Proust's Oriental allusions as a chronology of dynamic global exchange that actively informs the work's temporal vision and underpins its formal design. A similar relation to the Oriental can be claimed for modernism's other epic odyssey in the spatiotemporal unity of Ulysses (1922), envisaged as “Cathay cyrcles” by Joyce (p. 142). Ira B. Nadel surveys Ulysses for instances of Joyce's multivalent engagement with China. Nadel compares Jesuit and Confucian education, identifies pantomime orientalisms and chinoiserie fashions, and argues for the influence of the Chinese ideograph on the textual graphics of the Joycean page.
Rather more speculative essays on Robert Frost and Virginia Woolf, by Qiping Yin and Fen Gao respectively, read their poetics in the context of popular Taoism, prevalent in the West since the first of hundreds of translations of the Tao Te Ching in 1868. While T. S. Eliot was predominantly concerned with Western religious traditions, Christian Kloeckner argues that Buddhism's rejection of the self informs Eliot's poetic theory of impersonality. Kloeckner assesses the ethical consequences of Euro-American poetic impersonality for Far Eastern subjecthood during a period of legislative exclusion.
Moving into the later twentieth century, it would appear that Ezra Pound's fascist turn was accompanied by a reverse of the critique he made in Blast 2 when he accused Laurence Binyon of “constantly trying to justify Chinese intelligence by dragging it a little nearer to some Western precedent” (July 1915). Ronald Bush shows how Pound in his Pisan Cantos of the late 1940s invokes a symbolic synthesis between the benevolent Chinese goddess Kuanyin and the Christian Madonna.
Qian's essay returns to Marianne Moore, her discovery of Taoism in the 1950s, and her creative friendship with artist and writer Mai-Mai Sze. The collection concludes with essays that extend poetry's encounter with the Orient into ongoing modernisms: Richard Parker on Objectivist poet Louis Zukovsky's American Zen and Tony Lopez on contemporary British poets Lee Harwood and Harry Guest, who situate their work in a Poundian tradition of poetic interaction with Oriental aesthetics.
Qian holds a wariness of “Saidian orientalism” to blame for the critical avoidance of modernist engagement with the Far East (p. xv). For those who still worry about distinctions between what might be “genuine Chinese and Japanese motifs” rather than imaginary constructions or fanciful projections of mythic or utopic Orients, he reminds us that “no single model of orientalism can be appropriated to account for all modernism-Orient relationships” (p. xvii). In its assertion that “East/West interconnections in the modernist movement must be interpreted case by case and interval by interval,” Modernism and the Orient offers us a lively model for future scholarship (p. xvii).
