Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (review)

Joseph Lennon's Irish Orientalism does scholars of Irish literature and society an enormous favor by collating several centuries of writing about the perceived affinity between Ireland and the Orient. This is a timely project, since it arrives as students of Edward Said's classic argument find themselves fending off a new attack on Orientialism (1978) spearheaded by Robert Irwin. Working with and against the Anglo-French model, Lennon's regional history of oriental writing ought to abet that defense. Demonstrating the particularity of Irish approaches to the Orient, his book mandates a similar attention to variation in such writing from other locations. Irish Orientalism encourages us not to dump Said's account, but to bolster it with more satisfying analyses of the diversity within the discipline of oriental poetry and prose.

Readers of Irish writing will likely know some of the material Lennon reviews, such as Thomas Moore's 1817 romance Lalla Rookh, with its tales of Gheber "Fire-worshipers" resisting Muslim and British invasion, and its author's observation that "the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East" (qtd. in Lennon 157). Lennon also analyzes W. B. Yeats's dramatic poem Mosada (1883–84), which chronicles the fate of its eponymous Moorish heroine and her double-crossing lover Gomez during the Spanish inquisition, as well as the obscure yet remarkable woodcuts capturing the resemblance between Irish and South Asian "round towers" that were produced for Charles Vallancey's turn-of-the-nineteenth-century antiquarian volumes and that appear alongside T. C. Clifford's 1819 portrait of a hirsute Mirza Abul Hassan Khan on the dust jacket of Lennon's book. Fans of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) and Rabindranath Tagore's Gora (1910) are aware that both follow the lives of Irish orphans passing as Indians, and imperial historians know the substantial part Irish soldiers played in the Indian army: nearly fifty percent of recruits listed in the Bengal register from 1825 to 1850 were from Ireland (173). Few readers, however, are qualified to range as widely as Lennon does amidst canonical and less-known tomes, meaning few writers have heretofore presented a big picture to explain Celtic and Oriental connections.

Lennon's scope enables him to render key disciplinary and rhetorical shifts in a textual history that runs from eighth-century Irish grammars such as Auracepit na n-Éces (The scholar's primer) to Sam Rexhorn's twentieth-century creation of Fu Manchu. Prior to the eighteenth century, language studies of "Celto-Sythian" identified Irish as a tongue reconstructed out of linguistic fragments transported from Babel. Philology and etymology underwrote origin stories in which "Scythian Irish ancestors departed Egypt and wound up, eventually, in a land analogous to the Jewish 'promised land'" (11). In the 1700s, as the Irish came to be identified as the oldest and most authentic of Celts, "the semiotic mantles of Scytho-Celtic and Phoenico-Celtic theories . . . transferred to these 'ancient Celtic' cultures" and the modern Irish "became regarded as living relics of ancient cultures" (69).

Lennon argues that philology may have given way to literature in the nineteenth century, but the likes of Thomas Moore and Lady Morgan continued to cite antiquarian scholarship in their footnotes. Victorian science, meanwhile, relied on myths of the Irish as a "leftover of a remote, premodern East-West culture" in its delineation of Celtic race (139). In the early decades of the twentieth century, theosophy reworked this intellectual inheritance further. Mystical writing narrated the migrations of a "Keltic" wave and the exploits of the "Tuatha-de-Danann . . . a race of gods who ruled Ireland during a golden age" (211–12). Theosophy's significance for the Celtic Revival, for James Joyce, and others is an increasingly well-referenced corner of the modernist archive, and Lennon gives his reader much to mull over. In later chapters on Yeats, George Russell (AE), and James Stephens, Lennon does his most extended interpretive work. He argues...