Chinese Ghost Stories. Lafcadio Hearn

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      Where got I that truth?

      Out of a medium’s mouth,

      Out of nothing it came,

      Out of the forest loam,

      Out of dark night where lay

      The crowns of Nineveh.

      —Yeats: “Fragments,” The Tower, 1928

Lafcadio Hearn was a thief of myth. Born in 1850, into a time when the British Empire reached around the globe, he raided the world’s archives. Epic narratives, sacred recitals, ancestral prayers: all were fair game for his declared ambition: “I would give up anything to be a Literary Columbus.”1 Hearn wanted to recalibrate the literary voices he knew, to create a “universal literature.” Western storytelling had ossified, he claimed. “Naturalism”—with its solid portraiture of the minutiae of daily life—was narrow and dull. His “universal literature”2 would be a hybrid of Western realism and “Eastern Literary growths.”3 “Left to itself,” Hearn said, “every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the contributions of a foreign one.”4

      It is unlikely that such a grandiose plan could have been anticipated for Hearn. Unprepossessing of figure, Hearn was, if not deformed, then disfigured; blind in one eye, he walked with a pronounced limp, both injuries suffered on the unforgiving playing fields of a Victorian childhood. Nor did the circumstances of his birth and childhood presage such learned ambitions. The operatic nature of his parentage, however, may have shaped his intelligence; his parents yoked the extremes of the British colonial landscape, and his childhood reads like a ballad.

      His mother was a nineteenth century primitive. Rosa Antonia Kassimati was tribal, illiterate, beautiful and charismatic, born into a proud Cerigote clan on the Greek Ionian island of Cerigo. His father was Charles Bush Hearn, Anglo-Irish, a medical man from Dublin, with a chain of Protestant ministers in his lineage. He was dispatched as Surgeon on the British Army Medical Staff to Cerigo, where he met Rosa. The two fell in love and managed to carry on an affair. Learning of this injudicious insult to local mores, the men of Rosa’s clan attempted to murder Charles, but Rosa nursed him to health. They were married in a ceremony (one later held inconsequential by the Church of Ireland), and the romance continued. After two years in Greece she traveled to Dublin, to live midst her middle class in-laws. She lasted another two years, and returned alone, never to see her husband or sons again. From this cataclysmic mating of two nineteenth century polarities Patrick Lafcadio Hearn was born.

      His life was worthy of fiction. He was a restless fantasist who lived his life in decades, moving across the globe like a figure on an antique game board. Born in Greece, taken then to Dublin, he then journeyed across the Atlantic to middle America where he stayed for eight years, then almost a decade in New Orleans: a short move eastward to the West Indies, and finally on to Meiji Japan, where he spent the last fourteen years of his life—a span of fifty-four years. He died in 1904.

After his youth in Dublin, Hearn began the life of a writer; but he began as any good protagonist does, by being cast from his family. In his last year of public school when he was eighteen, his family suffered a catastrophic financial reversal; and from this solidly middle class arrangement, he was dispatched to distant connections in the United States, with hardly a whisper of help from the adult realm. The Cullinan family—fellow Irishmen, now in America—gave him short shrift. Handing him a bit of money, they threw him out, forcing him to survive by his wits: “I was told to go to the devil, and take care of myself,” recalled Hearn; “I did both.”5 Hearn then took, perforce, his first step as the “Literary Columbus;” he became—from Greece, via Dublin—at the age of nineteen, a journalist in Cincinnati.

The year was 1869, and the docks of this new American city were bursting with steamship trade, black citizens from the war ravaged South, and the high-minded rich engineering a trading hub. Hearn found his métier as a writer: becoming a literary omnivore, a prodigious author of anything publishable. He was a reporter, a poet, a fiction writer, folklorist, historian, travel writer, ethnomusicologist and essayist; and the borders marking the different forms were, for him, blurred. He was the Daniel Defoe of nineteenth century letters. Likewise, for this cacophonous imagination, no subject was too foreign, too local, too arcane or too low. Hearn spent eight years in Cincinnati, then ten years in New Orleans, and landed finally in Japan in 1890. He never stopped narrating. His accounts of markets, murders and show trials, fires and dissections, aberrant rituals and famous priests, folk practice and folk stories, local cooking, dialect and music—indeed local scenes and local worthies of every cast and character—are justly famous. “I have pledged myself to the worship of the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.… Enormous and lurid facts are certainly worthy of more artistic study.”6 He earned a living on these “Enormous” facts.

But if he was a man of lurid imaginings he was also a nineteenth century intellectual. Critics have noted that he came of age in Dublin, when Yates, Sheridan and Bram Stoker revived interest in Irish mythologies.7 Nor were they alone in their interests. British writers—Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, William Morris, and popular writers such as J.M. Barrie and later, J.R.R. Tolkien—were enthralled as well. They staked out myth in its various forms, from medieval epic and ancient ballad, to Arthurian romance, Celtic mythologies and Persian legend.8 It was something of a club, in fact; for as exotic as Hearn’s experiments were, they were familiar to the connoisseur. Hearn himself wrote a letter to Keats concerning Keats’s poem about fairy legend, “Host of the Air.”9 And one critic compared one of the tales in this book—“The Story of Ming Yi”—to Keats’s treatment of the Lamia myth.10 Hearn was part of an informal circle of Victorian writers who retrieved the mythic from outside the orthodoxies of the age.

And thus he landed in the world of this small collection of tales, Chinese Ghost Stories [a.k.a. Some Chinese Ghosts]. Like other Victorians, Hearn was dedicated to the exotic. He wished to create a “weird beauty,” citing the expression of his intellectual ally, Sir Walter Scott. With this collection Hearn took an early step in his eastward explorations.11 This literary landscape is clearly for him an exotic world; the tales have the feel of an experiment, bookish in style, arch in language, based on material he referred to as “curious.” For unlike the reportage of New Orleans life, and the accounts of folk practice he will ultimately write in Japan, he was a world away from his subject. Two of the tales are extraordinary fusions: “The Tradition of the Tea Plant” mixes oracular meditative prayer with a Gothic sexual encounter. “The Tale of the Porcelain God” blends filial piety with European notions of the madness of genius.

It is not surprising he was experimenting on the margins, however. From his outpost in New Orleans gaining knowledge of “Chinese ghosts” would have been perplexing. He had his “tolerably extensive library of exotic poetry and legend;”12 but it could hardly have been very extensive. These were early days, when even the romanization system was not stabilized. Early Sinology tended to follow hard on the establishment of foreign trade СКАЧАТЬ