| From the Mediterranean westward to the Orient, Lafcadio Hearn led a wandering life. The first two years of his life were spent in the Ionian Islands, the next ten in Dublin. He was sent to Catholic schools in England, and later in France, and went to America at the age of nineteen after his guardian's financial failure. He had to seek his fortune in the New World just as many other young men from the Old World did at the time. He engaged himself in journalism and dreamed of becoming a writer. My study will focus on the making of Lafcadio Hearn as a writer who conceived of himself as an outsider and exile, and trace his career from his twenty-year experience as a journalist and writer in America, including two years in the French West Indies, to his following fourteen-year experience as a teacher and writer in Japan. His American period, I will argue, prepared him for his later writings in Japan. He constantly disciplined himself to mature the journalistic skills and literary taste he had acquired in America in order to render universal truths about human emotions as revealed through varied cultural practices. Early in his career in America, Hearn gained a reputation as an expose writer interested in the more gruesome and sensational aspect of news reporting. His experience in Japan awakened him to the importance of the past and the spiritual life: he became a writer with the spirit of a poet who imbued the supernatural with a moral concern for the welfare of future society. His work does not belong to any traditional literary categories such as poetry, fiction, or travel literature; rather, Hearn was a master of the philosophical essay. His aesthetics of organic memory and human psyche made him a unique literary figure who, at the same time, never forgot the journalist's commitment to address the common people for their own good. Literary narrative for Hearn served as a means to revitalize the forgotten past spirit in the present moment and also to critique nineteenth-century Western capitalistic materialism and colonialist power politics.*; *Originally published in DAI Vol. 61, No. 9. Reprinted here with corrected author name. |
