- A Dublin Bloom: An Original Free Adaptation of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” by Dermot Bolger, and: A Journey Round James Joyce by Andy Arnold
This spring saw the staging of two Joyce-themed dramatic productions in China—part of a program of events arranged under the aegis of a bilaterally agreed “Year of Cultural Exchange” between China and the United Kingdom. The plays came to the People’s Republic from Scotland, where Yi Liming, the director of Beijing’s Xinchan Theatre, first saw a production of Dermot Bolger’s Ulysses at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.1 This year’s Literary Theatre Exchange is in large part the fruit of the collaboration that followed between Yi and Andy Arnold, director of Bolger’s adaptation and artistic head of Glasgow’s Tron Theatre.
The first of these plays, entitled A Journey Round James Joyce and staged in Beijing and Shanghai, was written by Arnold with Chinese audiences specifically in mind.2 The second, staged in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, and Jinan, is a revival of the Tron’s production of Bolger’s Ulysses.3
“Ten copies to Peking!”—such was Joyce’s delight on hearing, through Shakespeare and Company, that orders for his newly published book had been placed in the East.4 As the exclamation suggests, Joyce was keenly aware of the distances—linguistic and ideological as much as geographical—that his book had already begun to overcome by sparking interest in Beijing. As Ulysses makes clear, he was a sharp and witty observer of the clichés on which conceptions of far-flung countries are based. In one swift-moving paragraph of “Lotus-Eaters,” Leopold Bloom thinks about the Chinese as recipients of charity (“Save China’s millions”—U 5.326), targets for religious proselytizing (“the heathen Chinee”—U 5.326-27), eaters of opium, and worshippers of Buddha, also musing about the suitability of chopsticks as a Chinese counterpart to Ireland’s shamrock (U 5.327, 328, 330). Molly, for her part, thinks of China as a place where the day begins with the “combing out [of] pigtails” (U 18.1541).
If such examples comically show how decontextualized snapshots can come to stand for entire cultures, China’s rejection of Joyce for much of the twentieth century involved a similarly drastic process [End Page 210] of synecdochic simplification. For decades after its publication, the country’s official line on Joyce (as well as on many other western artists) was one of straightforward condemnation. A rare review published in Shanghai in 1935 referred to Ulysses as both “notoriously obscene” and “notoriously abstruse”; with “its empty content” and “bizarre formal features,” it was dismissed as having “nothing to do with literature.”5 It is salutary to remember that such positions were by no means limited to China in the 1920s and 1930s: after all, China, unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, never imposed a legal ban on the book. But in China, such adamantly derogatory views endured for decades. The keynote speaker at the first Chinese celebration of Bloomsday in 1982 called Joyce “a master who has left a lasting mark in modern Western culture” but qualified the acknowledgement by stating that his sole “epistemological value” to Chinese readers resided in his diagnostic depiction of “the progressive deterioration of the bourgeois hero in the novel”; “Bloom’s world,” she continued, “is shocking in its pettiness, obscenity, ugliness, and confusion”: Ulysses should be studied, she maintained, but only as a vivid example of western failure and depravity.6
Joyce’s image in China has only recently begun to recover from such denigration. The first momentous change came in the 1990s when Ulysses finally became available to the country’s readers in translation. Since then, China has been making up for lost time. In this context, the staging of A Journey Round...