'The Retina of the Glance': Revisiting Joyce's Orientalism

'There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror [... ] he beholdeth himself'

(U 14.1044-5)

How did James Joyce portray the 'Orient' in his works? The question may initially seem simplistic if we think of Ulysses. It is well known that not only did the author choose a Jewish man of Eastern European origins as the central character of the book but that he also made multiple references to Turkey, India, China, and other Eastern nations in it. This in turn might suggest that Joyce's portrayal of the Orient is intricately woven with the wider themes of Ulysses: homecoming, history, language and literature, and is delimiting as a category to be analyzed in isolation. To an extent such a reading has some truth behind it. Joyce's innovative narrative technique displays cultural heterogeneity even as it reconciles major binaries like Occidental and Oriental civilizations: 'Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet' (U 15.2097-8). Joyce's Orient, at least in Ulysses, could be construed as nothing more than a useful trope. The Orient in such analyses may initially be seen as a signifier of difference which ultimately seeks resolution in an acknowledgement of possible similarity through a 'tolerant cosmopolitanism'. In the process, not only Jewishness but also the more distant cultures of the Indians and the Chinese may be harnessed.¹ Often this democratic spirit of extremes reconciling is hidden behind larger themes. For example, Stephen Dedalus in 'Proteus' explicitly correlates the Orient with the Garden of Eden. Yet his reflections overall seem to be existential in import: 'Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting' (U 3.41-4). However, Stephen's commentary on the cyclic repetition of existence combining the motifs of birth and death, beginning and end, also enunciates an overt Orientalizing of existence; the Orient itself stands as a synonym for 'immortal'.² Its usage as a noun here is reminiscent of the word's etymological roots connecting it with the terms, 'daybreak' or the 'rising of the Sun' (OED). But its polysemous reverberation with other notions of the East is made evident. A closer analysis suggests that Joyce here is partly parodying the Cabalistic and Theosophical traditions of envisioning Eve's body as being without a navel. Such a description is given in H.P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled, a book which Joyce read. Scholars have noted how Joyce's Orientalism relates to his encyclopaedic vision: to write a Book of the World, encapsulating all available information, symbols, and images which will serve as a mirror and a hypertext of Being. Thus Ian Almond writes: '[In Ulysses] Averroes [is] an Islamic Thomas Aquinas, Buddha an Indian Christ, Sinbad an Arab Ulysses'.³

However, another point universally acknowledged about Joycean Orientalism is that he had little time for the ephemeral East; he rejected this attribute which European Orientalists repetitively used to describe distant lands like Arabia, India, and China since the seventeenth century. These repetitions, while they were ultimately complicit in creating imperial versions of native civilizations as primitive, also served to create a template for fanciful and Romantic European literature. Joyce's criticisms of the alleged transient quality of the Orient, its everlasting insubstantiality, and the resultant soporific Western imagination are notable at various points in his writings. While in the passage above the parody of pseudo-religious organizations like Theosophy (which based its theology on supposed Oriental religious authority, and further claimed to provide an authentic representation of it in the West) may be seen as sub-textual, the criticism of such Orientalism is overt in other sections of the book. For example, Joyce returns to the homology between Eden and the Orient later but adds a caveat: 'A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting' (U10.816-7). This critical sensibility towards the construct of the Orient, and its cultural, religious, and literary counterpart, Orientalism, co-inhabits Joyce's larger aesthetic ambition...