American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century

4. The Twentieth Century I: From Aesthetics to Modernism

4 121 The Twentieth Century I From Aesthetics to Modernism The Yankee experience in Japan repeats the presuppositions of the fin de siècle and the aesthetic school but with significant variations: yes, beauty exists for the sake of beauty, and art is mostly an end in itself; at the same time, however, the aesthetic sphere has the potential to affect the world at large—not in an immediate social sense but in some obscure, protracted, abstract fashion. Ernest Fenollosa, John La Farge, and Percival Lowell were men of their time who found in the Japanese an intensity of aesthetic experience they had rarely encountered before. But they had, in fact, encountered it before; otherwise they would never have been able to recognize the recrudescence of such a highly developed aesthetic society as the one they saw in Japan. Whether in earlier synthetic cultures like Byzantium, where the Roman West met the Orthodox East, or Venice, where Europe fused with the Islamic world,Americans in Japan found precedent for a society where art was a part of daily life. In the late nineteenth century, Weir_MAIN_Pgs 1-256.indd 121 4/21/2011 9:31:49 AM 122 T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U R Y 1 Fenollosa, especially, felt himself witness to a second Oriental Renaissance in the Far East that matched the first awakening of the West to the Hindu culture of South Asia in the late eighteenth century. But Fenollosa is a transitional figure insofar as he did not understand the East solely in “renaissance ” terms as a recovery of aesthetic energies that had existed at other places and at other times in the past; he also understood the Orient as an opportunity to move forward, as the means to a higher cultural synthesis with the West which would produce a new kind of culture altogether. This forward-looking sensibility was part of Fenollosa’s appeal to the modernists of the early twentieth century. For Ezra Pound, especially, the Japanese and Chinese traditions that Fenollosa introduced to the West were among the means of making American literature anew. But the aesthetic appeal of Asian traditions to the artistic avant-garde in the early twentieth century is only part of the story. Fenollosa’s Hegelian dream of the fusion of East and West also had a racial element that became horribly disfigured as the modernist era unfolded. In this regard, Fenollosa was not simply idealist; he was idealistic: his vision of a world culture where a new “race-sympathy” would bridge differences between East and West was an illusion. In fact, the modernization of Japan that Fenollosa was enlisted to support had results that he could hardly have imagined. Far from pursuing policies of synthesis and fusion, the powerful nations of the twentieth century asserted the superiority of their own national cultures at the expense of the weak. What became of Asiatic cultures during the age of modernism is in some wise paradoxical: avant-garde authors did not look to the future as Fenollosa did—they looked to the past.The role of tradition in modernist culture is a complex one anyway, but the orientalist element in modernism complicates the meaning of tradition even further. Like their nineteenth-century precursors in Japan, American modernists were mostly antimodern, the break with tradition largely limited to aesthetics alone.The combination of advanced aesthetics and regressive politics is a well-known element of modernist culture, especially as exemplified by such figures as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Amy Lowell. But what is perhaps less evident is the extent to which those authors and others enlisted Eastern culture to perpetuate Western traditions and Western ideologies. I The permutations of Ezra Pound’s understanding and misunderstanding of Asian culture is a story in American letters that has been told many times. The usual arc of that story takes Pound from aesthetics to politics, from imagism to fascism, as his poetic career traveled from japonisme to ConWeir_MAIN_Pgs 1-256.indd 122 4/21/2011 9:31:49 AM F R O M A E S T H E T I C S T O M O D E R N I S M 123 fucianism. Hence, Pound’s “Oriental” career appears to have fallen into at least three phases: first, an early Japanese period that was concerned solely with poetics (the...