Cultural Appropriation or Cultural Appreciation? Decoding Yeats’ Noh-Influenced Dramas
The critical elements of Noh that W. B. Yeats missed in his original Noh plays
****Read my previous article if you are not familiar with Noh.
When Japonisme hit the Western art scene in the late 19th century, many Western artists were enamored by the innovativeness of Japanese art. Japanese materials of obscure origins circulated among curious intellectuals, creating a distorted image of Japan, which was already obscure and elusive.
W. B. Yeats was just such artist who had a highly idealized view of Japan. Yeats, in defiance of the growing rationalism, resonated with Japan’s sensuous approach to art, which perfectly aligned with his idealistic orientation. In other words, the traditionalist, Yeats, found solace in Japan’s pure artistic expressions untouched by science and technology.
It was only natural that when Ezra Pound came around with one Noh book, Yeats was completely hooked on the intricacies of Noh theatre.
In particular, he gravitated toward Noh’s stage, which offered intimacy between the actors and the audience. Through centuries of development, stages for Western theatre had become so large that they caused detachment from the audience. Yeats thought he could bring back the lost intimacy by incorporating Noh’s minimalist approach.
The result of this encounter was Four Plays for Dancers, a set of four plays strongly influenced by Noh. At The Hawk’s Well, the first play from Four Plays, is probably the only one ever performed on stage. In other words, despite my keen interest due to their cross-cultural nature, these plays were incredibly unpopular.
Tsukioka Kōgyo, circa 1910 (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Luckily, I was not entirely alone in this extreme niche of comparative literature. There was an Irish scholar named Eileen Kato, who examined Four Plays as a first-hand Noh expert. Her treatment of Yeats is hardly gentle, though, as she labels Four Plays to be a product of ignorance and impertinence. In her article, she accuses Yeats of having exploited Noh, implying that modern Western intellectuals often appropriated Japanese culture.
The Noh is unquestionably one of the great arts of the world, and it is quite possibly one of the most recondite. –Ezra Pound
Why is Kato so angry? At first glance, Yeats seems to have gotten it right by incorporating many elements from Noh. Like Noh, the key characters in Four Plays wear masks to produce theatrical effects. The slow and primitive music also resembles that of Noh, and the story is somewhat reminiscent of Aoi-no-ue and Izutsu (both major Noh plays written by Zeami, a prominent Japanese playwright).
Perhaps more obviously, Four Plays is bleak in motion. The speed of the performance is painfully slow, so that, like Noh, it might cause actual pain to an impatient audience.
In sum, Four Plays is impressively close to Noh, at least in a superficial level. Hat off to Yeats, who never saw Noh in person. All he had at his disposal was one book and word-of-mouth knowledge about mythical Japan. You have to applaud his literary genius.
But Kato is not satisfied. She points out crucial details Yeats missed, exposing numerous flaws in Four Plays from an expert’s point of view. Her argument is so convincing that I came to believe Four Plays is pseudo-Noh, a mere cultural appropriation, and Yeats just a bandwagoner, no different from Kim Kardashian and her Kimono Brand.
But I also couldn’t shake off the other thought: isn’t the actual difference the absence of visual cues? Did Yeats truly believe that reading a single book was sufficient to comprehend the essence of Noh?
It is a bit obvious, but Noh involves a lot of non-verbal communication with the audience. Since Noh’s dialogue is nearly completely unintelligible, visual cues — costumes, choreography, props, and masks — are essential to tell a nuanced story.
What Yeats did is the complete opposite. He removed many visual elements from Noh, particularly choreography. His script only mentioned the actors’ movement to be “puppet-like” and nothing more. Instead, he focused on crafting a powerful and compelling story. Despite his motive, his approach to producing Four Plays was surprisingly conventional.
But why no choreography? Yeats must have known that Noh is a comprehensive art form and that none of its elements could be removed. Kato points out the lack of trained dancers, but my guess is that Yeats didn’t realize the importance of choreography, as the script-based approach was the norm for Western dramatists.
In modern Western society, literature was thought to be of supreme importance as it reflected the deepest of human nature. Western theatre, therefore, treated the script with reverence, while set design, direction, and acting were regarded as mere ornaments.
Sometimes, staging was even thought to be detrimental to the script. For instance, drama critic William Hazlitt criticized Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by saying that “a delightful fiction” was turned into a dull pantomime when staged.
The Japanese have a slightly different view in this regard. While the West gravitates towards engravings — something that remains forever — the Japanese like to capture the fleeting moments of exaltation. This explains the Japanese attraction towards festivals and school events.
Naturally, they gravitate towards acting, which is ephemeral yet offers much excitement due to its transient nature. This is not to say the Japanese discard writing, nor is Noh’s script unimportant, but the culture has a more balanced approach similar to that of ancient Greeks.
Aristotle thought singing and acting as important as the script, emphasizing that a balanced approach is necessary to create the best theatrical experience. The Japanese certainly don’t hold the Olympics to celebrate physical beauty, but they agree on the point that what is beautiful is revelatory of universal truth. Even today, the Japanese maintain their focus on the appearances of things, preferring superficial beauty to inner sophistication.
Beauty and ethics are one and the same. Creating a beautiful work of art and becoming beautiful oneself are identical.
–Yukio Mishima
This is deeply embedded in Noh, as it demands the audience to follow the story by the look of things. To facilitate non-verbal communication, Noh also incorporates a lot of exaggerations, which Yeats missed yet again. The ostensible “crying” gesture (hands over the mask) is a prime example of such exaggeration.
It is hard to imagine Yeats was aware of this cultural background. What would he have thought had he known Noh actually started from simple impersonation? In its infancy, it also involved comedy sketches, the part which survives today as Kyogen (a comedy play performed by itself or as a comic interlude during Noh).
Noh, in essence, is entertainment. It aims to entice the audience rather than make them think. Its balance of music, acting, and script is a calculated acrobatics to gain maximum effect with minimal effort.
So Yeats, removing choreography from Noh, did not recreate Noh. Instead, he gave birth to a Frankenstein of Western and Eastern ingredients, allowing such criticisms as cultural appropriation to arise. Was it inevitable? As Kato points out, Yeats had the tendency to construe his own versions of facts without thorough investigation. I think both the difficulty in acquiring information and his personality are to blame.
Either way, there is no doubt that Yeats contributed to popularizing Noh. Four Plays was effectively the first adaptation of Japanese drama by any Western artist. It is now re-adapted into a proper Noh production, making it a truly unique case of a “Japanese adaptation of a Western adaptation of the Japanese original.”
All things considered, Yeats’s cultural appropriation can be justified as cultural appreciation, as Four Plays is definitely not Noh, nor did its creator claim so. These Western interpretations of Japan always fascinate me. The Mikado, Kill Bill, Van Gogh, Neuromancer — some got it right, the others didn’t, but all are good to me.
