＜06/07/2014＞
■The Open Mind of Lafcadio Hearn (His Spirits from the West to the East)
International Symposium to Commemorate the 110th Anniversary of L. Hearn’s Death
Exoticism and Cross-Culturality on Lafcadio Hearn’s Fantastic Tales
(His Fantastic Spirits from the West Indies to the East)
Louis Solo Martinel, Waseda University
Lafcadio Hearn, an English writer of Greek-Irish parents, a kind of Homer or Proteus of the realm of oddness, a forerunner of a certain trend of World Literature, collected strange stories, fabulous legends and fantastic tales in America, the West Indies, Martinique and Japan. Therefore his works became the locus of passage and translation for European, American, Caribbean, Creole and Asian Cultures. I would say all those cultures run though him.
Born into a multi-cultural background, with an open mind and an uncanny feeling for diversity, later in his life he would encounter the most variegated cross-cultural topics. During his numerous voyages which always left a deep impression on him and always were the occasion for a never-ending thrill of amazed delight (le frisson) when discovering new countries and their people, he collected stories which are geographically distant from one another, yet poetically very close.
I want to express my gratitude to the organizers and everyone who made this symposium possible. I also want to tell you how delighted I am to participate in this symposium today, the objectives of which are so close to those of my academic, theoretical and theatrical researches in connection with Hearn’s works and life. Today, within the framework set by the organizers of this symposium, I shall try to illustrate the open-mindedness of Hearn from various points of view. I shall reconsider his cross-cultural flexibility and his legacy in a global context. I shall try to shed a somewhat new light on Hearn and re-contextualize his works and life. And I shall point out the significance of his Open Mind for today’s reader. And I shall ask myself how his Open Mind can stay meaningful and inspiring in the future? It is advisable from now to show his open-mindedness, to reconsider his Cross-Culturality and his Exoticism in the wide context of "Aesthetics of Diversity", a concept developed by the French traveller-writer Victor Segalen, and in the context of "Poetics of Relation", a concept developed by the Martinican philosopher-writer Edouard Glissant, to ponder its esthetics in all its meanings, to be inspired by these in the future.
Over the last few years my work has been devoted to reconsidering and re-contextualizing Hearn’s legacy with new critical views and with modern tools in order to understand the exoticism and cross-cultural flexibility contained in his great works.
I myself consider him one of the first collector-writers of Creole tales, well, I can say a forerunner of a certain Creoleness. And, he was a lover of French Belles Lettres and devoted the last part of his life to introduce the Japanese culture to the West. Well, I can look him as a master of Diversity and Relation, the first Exot and one of the fathers of World literature.
You might say that this is too high a praise for an author like Hearn, but in my opinion this praise is rightly deserved. It is indeed a question of how to make possible the updating of the reading of Hearn’s works in the light of new tools of the theory of culture and of new critical looks into his works with regard to recent studies of contemporary cultural history.
We need to reconsider Hearn’s work in its global ethics and its aesthetics. His work is diffracted into resonant periods (American, West Indian, Japanese), connected by diverse themes (Exoticism, Otherness, Diversity, Creole Identity), covers several domains (literary, social, ethnological, historic), reaches out to several objectives.
To illustrate the cross-cultural flexibility and the open-mindedness of Hearn, it would be commonplace to start with the fact that he was born here on this Island of Lefkada in Greece, of a Greek mother and a father who was an Anglo-Irish doctor, thus a cross culture product. But it would be rather original to say that first he was endowed with an uncanny capacity to feel Diversity. Later he will encounter other cultural scatterings/crossings and fell Exoticism, journey after journey.
My approach consists in saying that his travel stories offer Exotic perspectives, his unusual stories are ethnological inquiries, his fantastic tales are filled with wonderful Cross-Culturality and Trans-Culturality.
Hearn, travelling from Lefkada (Greece) his native island to Tokyo (Japan) his final destination, observed minutely places and faces (people). His curiosity was enthusiastic and without limits. He follows his desire to know more, because he always wanted to satisfy his thirst for new discoveries and new encounters. Isn’t this the same sin which plagued Dante’s Ulysses: Curiosity? Dante put Ulysses in his inferno, Hearn found in the Caribbean and in Japan a peaceful heaven.
Some spiteful tongues among the critics say that he looked at all Places and Faces with too much exteriority, that is with the typical attitude of the outsider, and with a kind of nostalgia for an exotic past. On all the journeys he went, he was interested in anthropological facts, the oral and written literature, myths and legends and traditional and popular customs. He had keen powers of observation, especially a keen eye for the exotic detail. In Cincinnati, his job as a journalist allowed him to approach various cultures. In the metropolis of New York, he explored the districts of black people in search of traditions. In the West Indies, he invested a lot of time in collecting the traditional tales and tried to translate them in order to get to the essential elements of Creole culture. He painted portraits of people from very humble backgrounds: carriers, washerwomen, children's nurses (Da). Eventually, in Japan, he will go to the heart (Kokoro) of the Japanese civilization by searching deeper for tales, legends and religious traditions.
To reconsider Hearn means also to reconsider the concept of Exoticism. The concept of exoticism to which I am refering here goes back to Victor Segalen. His ambition was to make us accept the concept of Exoticism as a defining element of what he named him self "An Aesthetics of Diversity".
He imposes several conditions: Exoticism should reconquer its original purity, deprived of its rags and its old clichés, "having stripped it of its innumerable scoriae, flaws, stains" (EE p.19).To reconsider Hearn means also to reconsider the figure of the Exot. Segalen gave his own definition. "The Exot is a born traveler, someone who senses all the flavor of diversity in worlds filled with wondrous diversities" (EE, p.25) Moreover, in a marginal note which he joins to the manuscript of his Essay on Exoticism, Segalen did not hesitate to qualify Hearn as a better Exot when compared to Pierre Loti and other Exotic writers whom he calls severely pseudos-exots. "Others, pseudo-Exots, the Lotis, tourists, had an effect that was no less disastrous. I call them the Panderers of the Sensation of Diversity (EE p.29). With this authorization from the master of Exoticism I feel entitled to look at Hearn’s Exoticism as something different from touristic Exoticism, i.e. a surpassing of traditional Exoticism. If the father of the reconsidered modern Exoticism, in his reconquered original purity, names Hearn the first Exot, there has to be a good reason.
More than an exotic investigation, it is the investigation of the Exot himself that begins with Hearn, the Exot as understood by Segalen. I call any possibility which arises from an authentic experience of a journey, an Exotic perspective. What is the opposite of Exotic : Endotic ? It is an ugly term, you may say, but all the dictionaries I have consulted I could not find a more opposite antonym of Exotic and Exoticism.
The French Writer George Perec, literary affiliated to the group founded by Raymond Queneau called Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle - Workshop for Potential Literature), uses the neologisms "infra-ordinary" in opposition to "extraordinary" and "endotic" in opposition to "exotic" (SSOP, pXii, p205, 207). We can say after him, Endotic retrospective would be on the other hand (in return, I should say) the look at oneself, the internal journey, the dive in the abyss of the memories, the possibility of implanting a little more in oneself. With this approach, I would say Exotic perspective is a drive of curiosity (desire to know and to take care of). And, if so, Endotic retrospective could be the dive of memory (desire to look at oneself and to implant in oneself). Encounters with somewhere else, someone else, the other, the foreigner (people and countries), the strange or strangeness are in fact encounters with Diversity. Discovering Exoticism is also discovering oneself (external and internal journey). After his philosophical exploration of the concept of Exoticism in his famous and ambitious Essay on Exoticism Segalen shows us, with another essay Equipée, how exposure to radical difference (exotic) is a positive dysfunction for the oneself, the self-same subject. The lost and found subject facing the new and old encounter with otherness and strangeness, discovering the other and discovering oneself, diversities and memories. "I, myself and the other, We meet up here, At the farthest extent of the voyage" “Moi même et l’autre, nous nous sommes rencontrés ici, au plus reculé du voyage” (EQ, p.38). This quotation illustrates magnificently the experience of Hearn: leaving in search of somewhere else, it turns out to be a search for oneself. Segalen said also: On a spherical surface, to leave one point is already to begin to draw closer to it! The sphere is Monotony. The poles are but a fiction (EE, p.43). The shiver he felt in front of a new environment in the Caribbean and Japan and the resonances of childhood-memories create a confusion of sensations. These are great Exotic perspectives and Endotic retrospectives. Segalen defined Exoticism as an aesthetics of Diversity: "Diverse" everything that until now was called foreign, strange, unexpected, surprising, mysterious, amorous, superhuman, heroic, and even divine (EE, p.67). Hearn’s books about Japan and Martinique are filled with Gods and Spirits. Segalen and Hearn are on the same wavelength about Exoticism and Diversity.
I.Exotics Perspectives and Endotic Retrospectives in his travel stories
I based my paper mainly on two of his travel stories: Two Years In French West Indies and My First Day in the Orient. But I could have easily refered to other texts too. In his travel stories about the Caribbean archipelago as in those about the Japanese archipelago, he found excellent parallels between Japan and Caribbean (the mentality, the topography, the sea and their literatures of the fantastic). The Caribbean and the Japanese archipelagoes are situated on the opposite side of the earth to each other, separated by oceans and continents, but poetically we can move them closer together.
Before landing in Japan (1890), Hearn had stayed in Martinique for two years (1887-1889). He takes us on a tour through old Saint-Pierre with all its peculiarities and its particular atmosphere, through a world new for him and his readers. A world which sometimes seems to him naïve, childish, often tragic and fragile. Wherever he goes, he is always on the lookout for impressions and shivers, for example when he saunters for the first time in the foreigner’s district of Yokohama. In Japanese Sketches, Kwaidan, In Ghostly Japan and My First Day in the Orient, he confronts us with his experiences through travel stories, fantastic tales, anecdotes and descriptions. In Two Years in the French West Indies, he tells us that on one occasion the view of the city of Saint-Pierre, which he poetically renamed Pompeii of the tropics, imparted such an emotion on him that he felt a faint shiver. The experiences on his voyages to new Exotic places revealed to him an Endotic retrospective. He had the vision that he was in a city of the antiquity. Saint-Pierre appears as a mirage.
In front of a new Exotic spectacle, he had the sensation of an old spectacle he could never really have known, except from old pictures. In My First Day in the Orient, describing his first day in Yokohama, the same emotion and a similar evocation of the past come to the fore. Hearn is overwhelmed by illusions in both places. Here too we have an Exotic perspective which builds itself up in a same way. His first impressions on his arrival in the Orient stem from an Exotic perspectives and a corresponding Endotic retrospective which brings back memories of the picture books of his childhood.
II. Sacrifice as a positive tasting of Diversity in his novels
Right from the start as a writer-journalist, Hearn dreamed of becoming a famous novelist. He said that he would wait for a powerful and challenging subject so that he could show his talent as a novelist. Would this powerful subject be a feminine figure? During his West Indian period he wrote Youma, a novel about a black nursemaid for white children (1st sacrifice) who died during a slaves’ revolt by opposing herself to her lover and her slave brothers (2nd sacrifice). The slaves were furious. They refused to save the girl whom she had to protect. Hearn wrote to his friend Mitchell McDonald "The story is substantially true. (…) The girl really died under the heroic conditions described - refusing the help of the blacks, and the ladder. Of course I may have idealized her, but not her act.» (WLH, XV, p.79). During his Japanese period he wrote Kimiko, a novel about a geisha. She was a victim of the Meiji restoration and the economic decline of samurai families. She was sold as a geisha (1st sacrifice) and had to disappear (2nd sacrifice) and to sacrifice her love.
What fascinates Hearn in this story is the complete oversight of the "me" and the fertile character of her sacrifice according to Buddhist morality.
I tried a comparative study of these two feminine figures in which I approached the concept of the sacrifice with Segalen’s Aesthetic eyes "a positive Tasting of Diversity" (EE, p.60). I presented this study in communications at several international symposiums in Japan France and Martinique. I pointed out for comparison the historical framework, the destiny of the feminine figures and the narrative structure. The figures of Da Youma and Geisha Kimiko in their respective roles follow a fate imposed by a historic situation which turns out to be an alienation from which they cannot escape if not by a fatal distance.
The tragedy described by Hearn becomes poignant in the light of the historic events. The sacrifice of Kimiko and the dedication of Youma which he observes and describes are positive tastings of Diversity. In both cases, it is about sacrifice. They give up love and freedom. The heroines of Hearn, in order to accomplish what they are destined to do, are endowed with ideal traits of character: beauty and kindness. Their beauty and kindness transfigure them: for Youma it reads "The young bonne was universally admired: she was one of those figures that a Martiniquais would point out with pride to a stranger as a type of the beauty of mixed race" (WLH, IV, p.268) and for Kimiko, it reads, "An exceedingly wonderful girl (…) To win any renown in her profession a geisha must be pretty or very clever, and the famous ones are usually both, (…) if only that beauté du diable (in French in text: the beauty of the devil) which inspired the Japanese proverb that even a devil is pretty at eighteen. (note :Oni mo jiuhashi azami no hana) But Kimiko was much more than pretty" (WLH, VII, p.500). Kimiko was also perfectly endowed for her job "she had been perfectly trained for the profession" (WLH, VII, p.502)
Besides the description of the idiosyncratic behaviour of the heroines, both narratives are full of heroic actions, bravery and courage. Youma will go as far as facing a snake and will become the center of admiration in her community. "From that night Youma became the object of a sort of cult" (WLH, IV, p.300). Kimiko will refuse any advances by admirers, even by those who cut off their little finger as a proof of loyalty and eternal affection. "some rich folks who offered her lands and houses on condition of owning her, body and soul, found her less merciful.
There is a foreign prince who remembers her name: he sent her a gift of diamonds which she never wore." (WLH, VII, p.503) What is it that fascinates Hearn in these two women’s behavior? Is it the beauty and the power of their actions or simply the character of Diversity, or even the Divine? We can see that he idealized their characters to match their gestures. With Segalen, we learned to distinguish the real pleasure from the disinterested act. Segalen was the one who considered the sacrifice as one of the most beautiful acts of Diversity. Because the sacrifice is profitable to the other one. In this regard Hearn and Segalen see no reductive or negative character in the act of sacrifice.
III. Cross-Culturality and Trans-Culturality in Tales of the Fantastic.
Why did I give my paper this subtitle: His fantastic spirits form the West Indies to the East? It is because Hearn, a kind of Homer or Proteus in the realm of oddness, was a forerunner of a certain trend of World Literature, collecting strange stories, fabulous legends and tales of the Fantastic in America, the West Indies and Japan. Some stories are geographically distant from one another, yet poetically very close.
This similarity between stories is so surprising that I sometimes think the author himself had collected these characters to conform to the same theme and guides us through these wonderful stories. I had these feelings for example during two performances that I directed for the Theatre Company Fuji Scène Francophone with which I managed to celebrate Hearn in Japan : The odyssey of the oddness (2009) for the 150th anniversary of Yokohama Opening port festival and The eater of shiver (2004) for Centennial of Hearn’s Death. An international casting (English, French, Creole, Japanese) assured the full authenticity (linguistic, gestural, aesthetic, …) of the tales and made the audience shivered with pleasure and fear. In a embroidered montage, we have gathered american macabre stories "skulls and skeletons", strange tales and fabulous legends from Japanese sketches, Martinican sketches, Kwaidan, In Ghostly Japan, Tropics’ tales and Contes Créoles n°2. All these collections of stories are summaries of feelings, laughter, fear and make us cringe with shivers. The grotesque, comic, horrifying, strange, foreign and divine, all coexist in these strangest of all stories. Characters of the Japanese tales find themselves side by side with characters of the Martinican, American stories and some French stories of the Fantastic translated by Hearn. He invites us to share the shiver, which he refers to in French : Frisson. This long shiver of stunned enjoyment which inspires the first contact with the world in its wonderful diversities. Hearn’s tales of the Fantastic are suited for comparison. Such as La Diablesse, a fatale beautiful, a she-devil of the Martinican green sugarcane fields who suddenly shows herself in total silence only in the middle of a very hot day, and Yuki Onna, a fatale female ghost from the Japanese coast covered with white snow, who suddenly appears on a quiet and shivering night. We have also Oshidori, the sacred duck from the Japanese red marshes and Soukougnan an ominous enchanted bird from the Martinican green undergrowth. It was very exciting for me to compare Hearn’s Japanese and Creole tales in a theoretical and theatrical approach. Next to the universal aspects of the tales, we can appreciate the flavor of their Original aspects (dressing, frame, code, aesthetics, ethics).
Segalen used the term Diverse. Glissant went farther by using the neologism Diversal to confront the notion Universal. These aspects give to the tales the exotic stamp of Diversity and their cross-cultural origins. Some Japanese tales are derived from Chinese and Indian sources. Some Martinican tales have European, African and Amerindian sources. All the tales of the world are alike, all have universal functions and universal morphology according to V. Propp and some other specialists. Myths, tales, legends are the expressions of primitive complexes and the unconscious according to B. Bettelheim. They are also the projection of fantasies and traumas. They are the supports of folklore and culture. They are the complex spaces of preservation of the mechanisms of the primitive mind, the terrifying mythology. Hearn had no doubt about their ethnographical character.
Once upon a time (in English), Mukashi, mukashi (in Japanese), il était une fois (in French), Téni an fwa (In Creole), Miā Forā Ki Énan Kéro, (in Greek), all the tales of the world begin with this opening, already used by Apuleius in The Metamorphoses : Erant in quadam civitate rex and regina. An opening which on one hand plants the decor of poetic space-time, when the oral was master and agent of the secrets and was devoted on the scene of the square to verbal sparring matches at this fabulous time before the writing arrived. On the other hand this opening shows the orality as boatman of cultures and languages of borders of time and space. This formula shows by its universality of the passage, transit, translat, a shape of cross-culturality.
Conclusion
Hearn’s initiative, whether it is under the angle of a spiritual quest or a quest spontaneously under Exotic influence, or still when he searches for genesis for his papers, becomes allied to his simple search for affections to take a human dimension. His exotic vision is conscious and aesthetic. In search of the Other one, of the Diversity, he found himself. Any encounter (face, figure, history, story, dream, nightmare, genesis) livens up his fantasies, which give him momentary or permanent satisfaction. They are necessary conditions for his balance, for the blooming (self-fulfillment) of his genius, and for the revelation of his sensibility. He found his lost paradise in landscapes, on beneficent faces. What favors the transfer and the sublimation of the memories? Everything connects him with the old continent, everything transports him to his native homeland, in the antique legends. The Marvelous West Indies delivered him fantastic legends, the legendary Japan transferred to him the myths. Born into a multi-cultural background, with an open mind and an uncanny capacity to feel diversity; the scattered stories and cross-cultural topics crossed his life and work. His experiences of voyage, influences, his translation of many French authors and some Creole sketches, his reading of diverse stories from Europe (Greece, England, Ireland, France), America (USA, Caribe, Martinique), Asia (Japan, China, India), … how did all of this flow through him? We do not have an answer yet but we know all those passages, transits, translations made him a master of diversity and one of the great fathers of World literature. His exotic perspectives, literary vocation and ambitions achieve his traveller-writer's destiny. He wrote to Krehbiel: “I would give anything to be a literary Colombus, to discover a Romantic America in some West Indian or North African or Oriental region, to describe the life that is only fully treated of in universal geographies or ethnological researches. (…)“ (LHW, XIII, p. 289) I would like to end with a perfectly suited quotation from Hearn’s text "Dust" witch seems to contain curiously but fortunately the spirit of concepts that we just presented: (0pen mind, Cross-Culturality, Exoticism, Alterity, Creoleness, Aesthetics of Diversity, Poetics of Relation, …)
“I am individual - an individual soul! Nay, I am a population - a population unthinkable for multitude, even by groups of a thousand millions! Generations of generations I am aeons of aeons! Countless times the concourse now making me has been scattered, and mixed with other scatterings. Of what concern, then, the next disintegration? (LHW, VII, p.73)
Louis Solo Martinel, Waseda University, Fuji Scène Francophone
Lefkada, Greece, July, 6th, 2014
Bibliography (In Text)
Glissant, Édouard
Poectics of relation, Tr by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan, 1997 (PRE)
Hearn, Lafcadio
The Writing of L. Hearn, Volume I-XVI, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973 (WLH, I,II, …)
Trois fois bel conte, from Creole original man, French Tr by Serge Denis, F-de-F: Désormeaux, 1977 (TBC)
Contes Créoles (II), from Creole original man, French Tr by Louis Solo Martinel, Paris: Ibis Rouge, 2001 (CC)
Perec, Georges
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Ed/Tr by John Sturrock, London: Penguin, 1977, 1999 (SSOP)
Segalen, Victor
Essay on Exoticism, An Aesthetics of Diversity, Tr/Ed by Y. Rachel Schlick, Duke University, London, 2002 (EE)
Equipée, Paris: Gallimard, 1983 (EQ)
LAFCADIO HEARN, MONTE AU CIEL
RÉSUMÉ
Lafcadio Hearn en terres francophones et créoles. La réception d’une œuvre
Communication pour le centenaire de l’éruption à St Pierre, Cycle de conférences internationales (2002, St Pierre, Martinique)
Communication pour centenaire de la mort de Lafcadio Hearn (2004, Tokyo, Matsue, Japon)
Article paru dans la revue (International Perspectives, Program of Comparative Literature and Culture) University of Tokyo
Entre querelles et venelles
La réception de l’œuvre de L. Hearn en terres francophones et créoles est prisonnière de querelles entre anciens et modernes, entre ambiguïtés et doutes, préjugés et fantasmes. Du coup, notre auteur, maître de la Littérature mondiale, précurseur de la créolité, de la relation, premier exote, est privé d’une entrée méritée dans la modernité. « Lafcadio Hearn, Monte au Ciel », intitulé-pastiche de « Faulkner, Mississipi » d’Édouard Glissant est une relecture de l’œuvre de Lafcadio Hearn et de la critique qui s’y rattache.
Plan
Je propose alors de survoler la chronologie de cette réception (I), de relire les propos de L. Hearn qui provoqua la critique, ceux qu’elle a choisis de retenir, ceux qu’elle a omis de lire (II). Il faudra cependant tourner ces pages vieillies, évitant les écueils, établissant des postulats. Premièrement, si L. Hearn n’est pas condamnable totalement, il n’est pas non plus excusable totalement. Deuxièmement, si la querelle a autant d’arguments en sa faveur, c’est que L. Hearn n’a pas échappé aux préjugés raciaux de l’époque qui avaient aussi tant de discours en sa disposition. Il faudra alors proposer d’autres lectures, relectures plus modernes, loin des fantasmes et des amalgames, loin des querelles et des venelles (III).
Les étapes de ma démonstration
1/ D’abord dépoussiérer la critique notablement instituée, confortablement installée. 2/ Ensuite reconsidérer l’œuvre de notre auteur dans son éthique et son esthétique globales. Car elle est diffractée en plusieurs périodes (américaine, antillaise, japonaise), branchée en thématiques divers (exotisme, altérité, diversité, créolité), étendue sur différents domaines (littéraire, social, ethnologique, historique, …), tend à certains objectifs, relève de diverses tentatives, révèle différentes approches abouties, inachevées, abandonnées, égarées (traductions, romans, essais philosophiques, récits de voyages, recueils de contes, de proverbes, de recettes de cuisine, de chansons …). 3/ Puis, retrouver l’auteur, admettre l’expérience sincère de son voyage, comprendre son projet. 4/ Enfin projeter sa vision depuis les fabuleux lointains de ses odyssées dans une démarche insolite de retrouvaille avec lui-même. “Moi-même et l’autre, nous nous sommes retrouvés ici, au plus reculé du voyage” disait Victor Segalen