書評

David Vallins, Kaz Oishi and Seamus Perry, eds.,
Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient: CulturalNegotiations (London: Bloomsbury Academic,2013)
Ve-Yin Tee
It is much more difﬁcult to write a review on an essay collection than on astandard scholarly monograph. In the latter there is only one writer to consider,but in the former there may be a dozen holding widely differing views. For
example, with respect to Edward Said, whom David Vallins mentions (inthe ‘Introduction’) as ‘a constant presence’ over the subject of Orientalism,
he is variously—depending on the contributor—promoted, negotiated with,bypassed, even ignored entirely. Given this situation, the polemical natureof Said’s signature work, not to mention postcolonial criticism due to Said, Iwill foreground what I believe to be the issues at stake above and beyond theimpressive range of material that this book brings into play.
‘ The Orient ’ , much like the word ‘ Asia ’ today, encompasses a vast,historically variable geographical area inhabited by the majority of the world’spopulation. Under the influence of Said, ‘Orientalism’has become a byword
to criticize how the French, British and Germans understood this region and its
peoples:
For any European during the nineteenth century—and I think one can say
this almost without qualiﬁcation—Orientalism was such a system of truths,
truths in Nietzche’s sense of the the word. It is therefore correct that every
European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist,an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

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Romanticism and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations

121For liberal humanists who believe in the moral authority of literature—for theRomanticist in particular—the consideration that every Romantic (including ofcourse, Coleridge) might be ‘without qualification... a racist, an imperialist,
and almost totally ethnocentric ’ is a bitter pill to swallow. For leftwing
historicists however, like Peter Kitson, Said is an ally, and his chapter on ‘The
‘kowtow controversy’ and Representations of Asian Ceremonials in Romantic

Literature’, which headlines the collection, is a demonstration of his ease andfacility with Said as much as his broad knowledge of the Romantics in general.
Situating the kowtow in its contextual complexity, Kitson traces how the ritualwas gradually simpliﬁed in narratives, ﬁrst of the McCartney embassy, later inRomantic verse and prose, into a symbol of the racist stereotype Said labelled‘Oriental despotism’.

But Said is a hard taskmaster, whose uncompromising use results in a literaryinterpretation—especially when exercised by a critic with a colonial ancestry—that can seem, to say the least, a case of self-loathing or self-flagellation.
Indeed, the two writers that follow, Deirdre Coleman and Tim Fulford have afar greater problem with Said. Coleman’s ‘The ‘dark tide of time’: Coleridge
and William Hodges’ India’ never once mentions Said, but her use of Shaffer(‘all of Asia is present in one spot’ in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, etc) marks her
as not so much ignorant of Said as anti-Saidian. It is otherwise quite impossible
to flap a redder flag before the postcolonial bull: speaking as a Chinese
Singaporean, to think that not only my country but also the entire geography(‘Asia’) ascribed to me (as an ‘Asian’) might be represented in a single work,no matter how ‘great’, leaves me feeling miniaturized into one of Charles Lambor Leigh Hunt’s painted teacup people. Coleman’s thesis that Hodges’ textual
and visual work on India inﬂuenced ‘Kubla Khan’, pursued with élan and skill,adds as much as to our appreciation of the poem as it downplays the historicaldeprecation of the subcontinent: Hodges was, after all, a propagandist on theside of the rapacious colonial administration that was directly responsible forthe ‘decline and fall’ of India he ostensibly lamented in his work. Tim Fulford’s‘Coleridge’s Sequel to Thalaba and Robert Southey’s Prequel to Christabel’,122

I suspect, would please postmodernists and aggravate postcolonialists in equalmeasure. His clever, willfully paradoxical exegesis essentially of a lacuna—Coleridge and Robert Southey’s failure to write an epic poem on Prophet
Mohammed—invokes Said only to confine him within the most limiting ofpentagrams. According to Fulford, the orientalism of Thalaba and Christabel
was literary rather than classically Saidian because both poets never aimed‘transparently to portray veriﬁable historical events’. Moreover, Fulford seems

to suggest, Christabel escapes the Saidian critique because it is impossible totie its passages down to speciﬁc places in the Orient, due to their being not somuch about the Orient at all but ‘allegories of the poet’s creativity’.
If Said were alive, I can very well imagine him saying to this, ‘I am not
Saidian’. Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is not simply a misreading, but the developmentin the eighteenth century of a knowledge project in Britain, France andGermany to facilitatethe ideological and political will to power of one groupof people, identifying themselves as ‘European’, over another group of people
consistently and compulsively identiﬁed in the nineteenth century as ‘Oriental’.
Instead of trying to undermine Said, the next two writers, Seamus Perry andKaz Oishi, have chosen to focus instead on the reception of Coleridge in Japanin the early twentieth century, when cracks begin to appear (as Said himselfallows) in the lens of‘Orientalism’. ‘Coleridge, William Empson and Japan’is about William Empson’s teaching stint at Tokyo University, and how his
immersion in Buddhism and a life in Japan helped him write so resonantly on
the first published version of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’. I know Perry’s
droll piece has inspired one Chinese PhD student at the Romantic Connections
conference of 2014 to give a paper on Empson’s subsequent, wartime posting toBeijing National University. As for Oishi’s ‘Oriental Aesthetes and Modernity’,
it slyly turns the ‘Oriental’ lens back on the ‘Occidental’ by showing howJapanese scholars and poets exoticized Coleridge as a sensual fatalist.
According to Oishi, this was a combination of the inﬂuence of Lafcadio Hearn,
who also taught at Tokyo University, privileging the stranger, gothic poems,
and a nationalistic desire on the part of the Japanese literati themselves to assert

David Vallins, Kaz Oishi and Seamus Perry, eds., Coleridge,
Romanticism and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations

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their own modernity as a people from an advanced, industrialized society.
Oishi’s essay, seen in the wider context of diplomatic efforts on the part ofJapan to achieve parity with the leading nations of Europe, and to be consideredas ‘ white ’ for the purposes of immigration into America, highlights howlabels such as ‘Oriental’, ‘European’ (etc), are not only heavily ideological,
as Said perceived, but also how widely and uncritically they were acceptedby the nations who in the end repulsed these moves. More philosophicallyminded literary critics, however, tend to be unfriendly to Said. And this iscertainly the case with the four, more philosophy-centred essays that follow.
After all, isn’t philosophy as a discipline supposed to allow the philosopher
the detachment to perceive such ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ as the stereotypes ofOrientalism? The stakes are especially high, I think, with regard to Coleridge,
who was—as Andrew Warren’s ‘Coleridge, Orient, Philosophy’ states—‘British
Romanticism’s most systematic and wide-ranging philosopher’. Also, if thesestereotypes were as dominant ideologically as Said suggested, then how is
it that there were people in the twentieth century—as Said also suggested—
who were able to write in a markedly different way on people living outside
Europe? According to Warren, these stereotypes were never completely stablein the first place: Orientalism, as a discourse was a negotiation between ‘theOrient’ as object and as ontological source, was structured ‘by larger patterns
in the history of thought and the workings-out of empire’. While Said is never
far away from David Vallins’ ‘Immanence and Transcendence in Coleridge’sOrient’, he is really more of an intellectual obstacle to be surmounted than atutelary spirit. Vallins agrees with Said’s ‘Orientalism’ as a general rubric, andeven quotes Coleridge’s criticism of ‘the crass and sensual Cosmotheism ofthe Hindoos’ to underscore the point. But Vallins’ main objective is to uphold‘Kubla Khan’ as an exception to Orientalism: a work staged in the ‘East’ thatmanages to escape the racist, imperialistic framework of the times.
The next two philosophically orientated essays, Natalie Tal Harries ’ on‘Coleridge and Hinduism’ and Setuko Wake-Naota’s comparison of ‘Coleridge,

Schopenhauer and Japanese Esoteric Buddhism ’ , do not engage with the124

phenomenon of Orientalism at all. Harries takes a closer look at Coleridge’sview of Hinduism, convincingly distinguishing three distinct stages: positiveenthusiasm in the 1790s, ‘ balanced’ ambivalence in the early 1800s, andunconditionally negative after 1817. It is a change that she examines on an
entirely biographical level, unnecessarily—I think—missing out on the broader,
historiography offered by Said. To me, for example, the personal drama ofColeridge’s increasingly critical stance on Hinduism is in perfect tandem with
the intellectual current that was steadily and systematically demoting all things‘Eastern’ on the ladder of civilization. Wake-Naota ’s essay, which relates

Coleridge’s ideas of a moral disinterestedness with Immanuel Kant, Arthur
Schopenhauer and Kobo Daishi Kukai, is high philosophy in its attempt todraw philosophers from very different places and times together. While theirintellectual sympathies and coincidences in thinking are subtly teased out,
postcolonial literary critics will find her idealistic framework jarring. The
philosophical disinterestedness that Wake-Naoto ﬁnds in Coleridge might haveallowed ‘universal respect’ and ‘truer relationships with other people’, but thefact was—at least as far as their dealings with the peoples of India and China
were concerned—historically, he and his peers fell far short.
Coleridge ’ s ‘ Kubla Khan ’ is an even more ‘ constant presence ’ in thecollection than Said’s Orientalism, which is the single, most frequently returned
to work for biographical, historical and cultural resonances. The three essays
in the concluding section all have the poem as their starting point. Given how
heavily read ‘Kubla Khan’ already is, is there anything truly substantial left tobring to the table? Thus, it is perhaps understandable why, instead of looking at
the poem itself, Heidi Thomson chooses to focus on ‘the 1816 Preface’. While
the journey she takes us on is wide-ranging—from Coleridge’s childhood, hisbrother’s death in India, to Napoleon in Elba and Saint-Helena, Byron andthe marketing strategy surrounding the publication ofthe poem itself—oneor two of these connections should have been further developed. The searchfor something original to say on ‘Kubla Khan’ can be treated, of course, as
Dometa Wiegand Brothers evidently does, as an intellectual challenge. InDavid Vallins, Kaz Oishi and Seamus Perry, eds., Coleridge,
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this, Brothers ’ is surprisingly successful in her careful demonstration of
the theological and scientific resonance of the repetition of the number 5,
which I had barely noticed before reading her essay. The postcolonial critic
would however wish that she had more to say on the problematic ‘syncretistand essentializing tendencies’ she detects ‘in the Oriental study in general’,especially how they might relate to the very exotic representations of China that
she makes reference to. The ﬁnal essay of the collection, Kuri Katsuyama’s ‘The
Geopolitics of the Chinese Garden’, situates the ﬁrst 36 lines of ‘Kubla Khan’in the context of contemporary accounts of Chinese gardens, as well as thepolitical situation in England in the 1790s. Though Katsuyama never mentions
Said directly, the striking coincidences she notices between Coleridge’s ‘Kubla
Khan’ and Lord Macartney’s private journal entries, which Coleridge neveractually read, certainly reinforce Said ’s point about how ‘Orientalism’ wasincreasingly dictating how the ‘East’ could be read and written about.
Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient is without doubt a considerable

contribution to Coleridge scholarship. By writing consistently in the spiritof Said, by making plain my own understanding of his work, I hope I havesucceeded in conveying the preoccupations of each essay clearly enough for thereader to detect, quickly and efﬁciently, the ones that are likely to appeal to herfrom her own ideological standpoint.