Atelier Aterui: “Bonzour” “Mousoumeselles”: Joyce and Japonisme

“Bonzour” “Mousoumeselles”: Joyce and Japonisme

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

     This paper aims to explore a possible influence of Japonisme on James Joyce's works.  Although Chinoiserie had been already in fashion in the late seventeenth century, Japonaiserie or Japonisme is a style of art remarkably developed in the late nineteenth century after the introduction of “ukiyo-e” (Japanese wood-block prints) and other Japanese arts.  Japanese participation in the Second Paris World Exposition (1867) and the Vienna World Exposition (1873) made a great impact on European artists who struggled to build a new style of art free from traditional European arts.  In the late nineteenth-century some people who could fairly evaluate non-European arts awakened the attention of Europeans to Japan and their culture.  With lack of information but full of imagination, French artists misunderstood and distorted traditional Japanese culture as they wished, in order to use it as an Oriental motif for their art, which later contributed to establish Art Nouveau and Cubism.  In the same age, some composers wrote operas set in Japan like The Mikado (1885), The Geisha (1896) and Madame Butterfly (1904), which are alluded to in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
     As Arthur Power's Conversations with James Joyce reports, Power tried to send Waley’s translation of Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji to Joyce, who, however, almost ignored the suggestion (Power 1999, 100).  Still, there are also some direct descriptions of Japan in Ulysses, which reflect the popularity of the Japonesque at that time: see U 6.357; geisha; U 17.1531-32: “three banner Japanese screen and cuspidors”; U 17.1570-71: “an exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle gatebell affixed to left lateral gatepost,” etc.  In “Circe” Mrs. Cunningham appears in merry widow hat and kimono gown and “glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily” like a geisha girl (U 15.3856-58).  Finnegans Wake also has some descriptions of Japonaiserie/Japan as well as those of Chinoiserie/China.  The most frequent Japanese word used in Finnegans Wake is “bonze” (a Japanese Buddhist monk).  St. Patrick, transforming into a Japanese Buddhist monk (Patriki San Saki), appears with a French-Japanese girl (FW 339).  The list of ten Japanese words all of which mean “I” is inserted on FW 484.  The two French-Japanese compounded words of this article title “Bonzour” “Mousoumeselles” are borrowed from Finnegans Wake: FW 199.14: “Bonzour” < Jp. bonze (Japanese Buddhist monk) + Fr. bonjour; FW 339.16: “Mousoumeselles” < Jp. musume [girl or little lady; “mousme” as spelled in Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysantheme (1887)] + Fr. mademoiselle.  Both Japanese words were very familiar to Vincent van Gogh.
    The artistic movement of Japonisme began to fade or assimilate into modern paintings like Art Nouveau in the early 1920s when Joyce published Ulysses and then into Art Deco from 1925 until 1939 when Joyce composed Finnegans Wake.  Numerous refined artistic products were born in Paris through Orientalism, including Chinoiserie and Japonisme, as many contemporary writers such as Joyce described in their works.

Keywords: James Joyce, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Japonisme, Chinoiserie, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Orientalism

The full version is available in The Katahira: Studies in English & Literature, Vol.47. The Katahira Society, March 2012, 33-50.