'I Suppose They're Just Getting up in China Now': Joyce, The City, and Globalization

Ulysses is one of the most local of great books, unfolding within a small city whose peripherality and intimacy are constantly stressed. It is, to use a phrase from James Joyce's brother, Stanislaus, a book about the 'lying, untrustworthy, characterless inhabitants of an unimportant island in the Atlantic'.¹ Yet, faraway China drifts unbidden into the thoughts of ordinary, relatively uneducated Dubliners. Leopold Bloom, in Glasnevin cemetery for Paddy Dignam's funeral, suddenly thinks that 'Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium' (U 6.769-70). At another time in the same day, he muses that 'I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse' (U 6.982-3). Later, this book is listed in Bloom's library: 'Voyages in China by "Viator" (recovered with brown paper, red ink title)' (U 17.1379). Again, he thinks of the 'Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue and green again' (U 8.869-70). In the cabman's shelter the loquacious sailor tells Bloom that 'I seen a Chinese one time [...] that had little pills like putty and he put then in the water and they opened up and every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house, another was a flower' (U 16.570-3).

These far-flung thoughts expand the sense of space in the novel, undermining the feeling of Dublin as a bounded entity. But they also expand the sense of time. While Ulysses is defined, in part, by its careful plotting of journeys through a single day, this framework is also subverted by the awareness that there is another side of the world, where the day is unfolding differently. The utterly mundane sight of Boland's bread van delivering fresh loaves causes Bloom to think of time being relative to geography: 'Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep it up for ever never grow a day older technically' (U 4.84-6). And Molly Bloom, late in her day, is struck by the thought that 'I suppose they're just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day' (U 18.1540-1).

We tend to think of globalization as a recent phenomenon and there is indeed much that is new in the pace and intensity of the global connections we experience today. But there is much that is not new, and we have to be careful not to exaggerate the differences in this regard between our world and that of James Joyce. We tend to think, for example, of any kind of relationship between Ireland and China as being of very recent origin. Joyce reminds us, however, that imperialism, trade, advertising, and the mass production of exotic imagery had already created an idea of China in ordinary Western consciousness by the beginning of the twentieth century.

The references to China in Ulysses are linked with the dreams of Asia that play in the minds of Joyce's people. Bloom thinks of '[t]he far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that' (U 5.29-31). But these dreams are not generally so abstract. They inhere in objects of desire, in the possibilities of a global capitalism that makes the exotic available, and lends to that availability an erotic, even spiritual, force. There is the fair in 'Araby', a commercial bazaar that has been given an outlandish allure by the power of what we would call marketing: 'The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me' (D 23.105-7). There is the boy in 'The Sisters' who dreams of 'long velvet curtains and a swinging lamp. I felt that I had been very far away, in some...