Abstract
This essay reevaluates the British poet D.J. Enright’s mid-twentieth-century representation of post-imperial Japan. Enright should matter to us now because, in his poetic responsiveness to the foreign countries in which he lived and worked as a university teacher between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, he embodied a self-reflexively critical mode of engagement with the space of the Other, aimed at extending a version of the liberal res publica—a form of cosmopolitanism that deserves not to be dismissed tout court, even as its quasi-imperialist and generally self-interested aspects have to be acknowledged. Enright’s poetry formally and discursively enacts the dynamic, contradictory, and unstable nature of liberal interventionism. Through individual poems and the form of the poetry volume itself, Enright highlights the humanity of “bar girls” and other marginal figures in a way that demotes elite Japanese discourses—a (meta)poetic and partly feminist form of regime change that must be seen in relation to MacArthur’s interventions in the country, but also one that turns out to be forged by fetishizing hedonistic forces as well as moral and realist motivations. Enright’s writing career ultimately serves as an allegory of changing historical approaches within rich countries to foreign space—from a problematically hopeful liberal-humanist internationalism in his earlier work to a more self-protective, insular, and ultimately pessimistic attitude in the late-1960s onwards.
To the nineteenth-century internationalists … the future conjured up a new dispensation for mankind, a dispensation they looked forward to with a confidence based upon their control over a universe of facts: […] Governing institutions today have lost sight of the principles of politics rooted in the collective values of a res publica [state or commonwealth], even as they continue to defend the ‘civilization of capital.’ … The idea of governing the world is becoming yesterday’s dream.
—Mazower (426–27)
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Notes
- 1.
In Dew, Enright quotes the publisher of the magazine Haiku Kenkyū estimating the number of poets writing haiku at “easily four million” (69).
- 2.
For a considerably more extensive treatment of the tensions within liberalism, see Jahn. Developing her position on the Lockean suggestion that “the democratization of liberalism is only possible once the majority of the population has acquired a positive stake in upholding liberal institutions,” Jahn argues that, “far from being ‘illiberal,’ self-interest based on private property constitutes the core foundation of liberalism in general and a matter of survival for democratic liberal states in particular” (pp. 95, 97). For this reason, she argues, liberal humanitarian and other normative projects will inevitably be frustrated and the liberal world order is always doomed to fall apart again.
- 3.
For Enright’s own account of the anti-nationalist and anti-authoritarian intervention in Singaporean affairs, which he made in his inaugural lecture at the University of Malaya in Singapore on November 17, 1960, and the furious government response that followed it, see Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor, pp. 124–42.
- 4.
Most of this essay was written before the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. At the time of adding this footnote in the spring of 2020, it is not difficult to find examples of Western commentators and leaders—including UN Secretary- General António Guterres—appealing to 1948-style humanitarian principles of international cooperation and emphasizing the need to protect the human rights of people living in countries most vulnerable to the crisis. Some of these statements especially emphasize the moral obligation to protect women who are vulnerable to domestic abuse in the new internationally adopted condition of lockdown. But it is not clear how, if at all, these ideas will be put into practice. And the news of the ultra-nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s having granted himself, through the Coronavirus (or Enabling) Act of March 30, the right to rule indefinitely currently seems as predictive of the medium-term future as anything else we have seen in the first few months of the year.
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Deveson, A. (2022). “And No One Talks of National Rebirth”: Liberal Humanist Interventionism in the Post-Imperial Space of D.J. Enright’s Poetry. In: Banerjee, R., Cadle, N. (eds) Rethinking Place through Literary Form. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96494-8_9
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