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

Abstract

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