Behind the Veil: James Joyce and the Colonial Harem

Abstract

When Leopold Bloom rummages through his own locked desk drawers late on the night of 16 June, he finds two erot ic photocards that, we are told, he "purchased by post from Box 32, P.O., Charing Cross, London, W.C." (U 17.1813). They lie there in the midst of coupons, foreign coins, and advertisements for "Wonderworker," but in spite of their furtive location, they provide the answer to one of the next questions that the text puts to Bloom: "What possibility suggested itself? The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in the company of an elegant courtesan of corporal beauty" (U 17.1849-52?see Figure 1). Locked up, hidden away, kept from the eyes of intruders as if they were the very women they represent, these postcards offer a frag mentary glimpse of some of the master texts that have buttressed Bloom's fantasies for the entire day. From his early walk to the post office until his phantasmagoric experiences in Nighttown, Bloom's imagination has been guided by clich?d images of the Orient as a place of key for ultimate fulfillment. These fantasies first surface in Westland Row (West Land) as he goes to inquire about Martha Clifford's letter, and from this syn chronicity, we can see that Bloom associates the East (Land) with secretness, with fertility, with luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality, with deep, generative energies. That he has never been there is irrelevant, for, as Edward Said notes, Joyce uses the Orient less as a place than as a topos?a set of references, a group of charac teristics,1 a place of Otherness and of, in Bloom's own language: "strange customs" (U 5.294). Walking between the post office and the druggist, Bloom conjures an impressively detailed image of the colonial harem at least as it might have appeared to western travelers in the late nineteenth cen tury. He thinks of Ceylon as the "garden of the world," where odal isques bathe with "big lazy leaves to float about on" (U 5.30). The