Irish Studies: Ireland has a complex historical relationship with the "Orient", that amorphous imperial fiction which once stretched, in Western minds, from Turkey to Japan.
Irish men and women studied Oriental languages and customs in Irish universities and colleges in the 19th century, often in the hope of becoming imperial civil servants. Some travelled to the Orient as missionaries, some as soldiers in the British imperial forces. Fewer went, primarily to India, believing that there was a solidarity of cause between Irish nationalism and the growing anti-colonial movements which brought together those cultures suffering under the British empire.
As Joseph Lennon shows, in this comprehensive and appropriately scholarly account of an essentially scholarly activity, Irish-Oriental comparisons have a long history. Lennon delves back as far Diodrus Siculus, who wrote of the Irish as "man-eaters and heavy-eaters". Lennon notes that both the Romans and the Greeks tended to think of all races outside of their control and knowledge as incestuous cannibals. On such shaky foundations of analogy are built centuries of crackpot theories and serious political thought. Lennon diligently describes the ways in which Ireland has gone through every possible form of comparison with the "Orient". This rage for analogy reaches its frantic height in Ireland, and the rest of Europe, in the 19th century, with a search for the origins of culture. As was the case with the Greeks, Ireland's geographical position on the margins of Europe allowed for a mirror-imaging of its culture in the mind of scholars. Thus old stories of the Egyptian roots of the ancient Irish were resurrected, and the linguistic provenance of the Irish language became a matter of Orientalist fantasy and some fact.
Lennon finds that Irish-Oriental comparisons bear little enough relationship to reality, but reveal much about the ideology of their time. In this Lennon broadly follows the thinking behind Edward Said's monumental Orientalism of 1978. Said showed Orientalism to be a scholarly activity linked to governmental action and imperial ambition. The "East" was studied so that it could be understood, and thus ruled more effectively. The irony for Said is that the Western powers made the Orient in their own image, understanding it poorly, but understanding and believing in their own superiority all the more confidently as a result. Lennon's adaptation of Said's thesis argues that Ireland was not quite part of the Western, imperial world. And since Ireland was a culture which was also under the subjection of a Western imperial power, it was as likely to be identified with the Orient as it was to be involved in the Orientalising process.
As Lennon reveals, the truth is somewhere in between. Ireland had its imperialists, and its Orientalists (including the scholarly type). From Lord Mayo and Lord Dufferin, both Viceroys of India with varying degrees of "success", to the Irish foot soldiers in the east and the Fellows of Trinity College who were teaching Sanskrit, Ireland fed the imperial machine with a gusto perhaps second only to Scotland. Lennon makes it clear that, looking back on these enterprises, there can be no neat division of Irish imperial labour on sectarian grounds. But Lennon's book is at its best when discussing the effects which this ambiguous form of engagement with the Orient had on Irish literature. The list of Irish authors whose work reflects some kind of Orientalist interest is startlingly long, and runs from Thomas Moore and Lady Morgan continuously through to the first part of the 20th century, stopping on the way to consider the major role which India played in the poetry of WB Yeats. Oliver Goldsmith, Lady Gregory and George Russell also feature, though the book draws to a halt just too early to discuss the novels of JG Farrell. Lennon's accounts of these writers makes clear that most of the Irish literature which involves a representation of the Orient does so primarily in the hope of achieving a better understanding of Ireland. Whether Irish writers hoped to bolster an argument for Irish independence or, on the other hand, to convince themselves of the globally benign nature of the British Empire, their Orients were likely to be Ireland in disguise. The reverse was true as well, in that Indian literature, for example, through writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, used the Irish Literary Revival as a model for an Indian national literature. Those who were genuinely able to cross the cultural barriers were rare and exceptional. Lennon rightly devotes a whole chapter to James Cousins, a minor writer of the Irish Revival and later an important player in the Indian Revival. In his own mind, Cousins's Ireland was a place "where the East and West are one". Irish Orientalism is a fascinating account of the cultural explorers who searched for the unified land Cousins inhabited.
Colin Graham is lecturer in English at NUI Maynooth and co-editor of The Irish Review