How forms and tensions in Eastern culture mirror 'ours'

CULTURE SHOCK

IF YOU GO to see the marvellous exhibition of Chinese paintings, Telling Images of China, at the Chester Beatty Library, you will pass, on your way through Dublin Castle, the so-called Record Tower. In a fascinating and illuminating recent book, Disorientalism, the Tokyo-based Irish scholar Ciaran Murray muses on the fact that it was once occupied by the influential 18th-century writer Joseph Addison. Addison was close to Jonathan Swift. Swift’s old employer, William Temple, had brought back from his previous embassy in The Netherlands an account of the gardens of Japan, which were startlingly “natural” and irregular as opposed to the formal and geometrical English ideal. Addison discussed these notions in Dublin with his friend – and fellow keen gardener – Swift.

From this chance connection, Addison became the most important proselytiser for the Japanese or Chinese garden. As Addison later wrote in his magazine, the Spectator, “Writers who have given us an account of China tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line; because, they say, anyone may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to shew a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct themselves . . . I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure.”

If all this seems rather tangential to the Chinese paintings at the Chester Beatty, and if readers begin to wonder whether the gardening column has been misplaced, consider for a moment the significance of what was happening here. It is nothing less than a revolution in aesthetic and, by implication, political values. The garden – especially for the English – had long been far more than a collection of plants. It was the image of civility, or order, of superiority. (In Richard II, England itself is “our sea-walled garden”.) To suggest that this order is wrong, that its careful artifice is not in fact aesthetically correct, is deeply subversive. The opposition of Chinese and Japanese naturalness to stale European regulation is, as Murray points out, at the root of Romanticism, of the Gothic revival, of the Celtic Twilight.

There is a certain serendipity in the fact that one passes Addison’s old lodging on the way in to Telling Images of China. It reminds us, firstly, that the cultural globalisation in which we can view Chinese masterpieces in Dublin is not a new phenomenon. The East has long been an important elsewhere in Irish culture. The first great Irish philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena (readers of a certain age may remember him from the old £5 notes) translated Dionysius of Byzantium, who in turn drew on ideas that originated in India. Addison, Goldsmith, Wilde and Yeats invented their own Asias. (So too, of course did the weird racist writer Sax Rohmer, otherwise an Irishman called Arthur Ward, who gave the world Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril.) And it worked the other way around, too. Murray points out that the Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn (little known here but a big figure in Japan), invented Japan as a “Celtic Otherworld”.

And the other thing worth remembering is that a part of this process is the configuration of the East as the Other (in the case of the Irish, perhaps as the Other’s Other). “China” or “Japan” or “India” are whatever “we” are not. There is a very long European tradition of viewing the Chinese – inscrutable and thus either enormously virtuous or the epitome of evil – as fundamentally different to ourselves. Whether praised as alternative exemplars or loathed as an alien menace, they are to be understood as our opposites.

Thus, it takes a while to see the paintings at the Chester Beatty not for their Chineseness but for their artistry. The surface images – the temples, the rocks, the blossoms, the willows, the shimmering mountains, the bearded monks and dainty, round-faced women – appear to us through the veil of 19th-century chinoiserie. We have to cut through this decorative otherness in order to see the stylistic dynamism, the vividness, the boldness and the humour.

It is true, of course, that the many-layered significance of most of the images on view is hidden to western viewers. Although the paintings date from the 15th century onwards, the subjects often go back hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, to the legendary era of the Warring States from which Chinese imperial culture emerged and to the mythologies of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. The cultural continuity at work here is such that it is possible even for very old images to themselves refer to even older ones. Huang Shen’s superb Night Excursion to the Red Cliffs, for example, was created in 1759 and shows a scene from 1082 in which the great poet Su Shi, banished to the wilderness, is isolated at night in his boat under the looming cliffs. But Su Shi is himself contemplating a battle that took place at the same spot 1,000 years earlier. These resonances are obvious to educated Chinese viewers but have to be explained to the rest of us.

But the distance between such a work and the Irish eye can be exaggerated.

Even without the significance of the scene, we can sense the tensions that give the quick, stark delineation its magnetic power. And the broader idea of a range of more or less fixed traditional images on which individual artists exercise their personal visions is not, of course, alien to western culture. The mythologies at work in the Chinese paintings are hardly more static than the Christian and classical ones that dominated European art.

While the sense of difference is always there, when you stop looking for it, you are struck by the similarities. Breughel, Durer, Goya and the early Picasso come to mind at various times. The same tensions between form and anarchy, between tradition and individualism, between realism and expressionism, are evident – often within the same work. We can see that, contrary to Swift, Addison and the whole Orientalist tradition, the great contradictions exist, not between cultures, but within them.