Atelier Aterui: <i>Asia was, Laozi is, Plurabelle to be</i>: China and Japan through Joyce’s “Cracked Lookingglass”

Asia was, Laozi is, Plurabelle to be:
China and Japan through Joyce’s “Cracked Lookingglass”

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

     This paper aims to explore how James Joyce described East Asia, especially China and Japan: Joyce’s “cracked lookingglass” reflects the two countries like an inseverable pair.  Throughout Finnegans Wake, the pair of China and Japan is often seen probably because of “geographical vicinity, similarity of exotic flavor, and like appearance of the script” as George C. Sandulescu suggests in The Language of the Devil (66).
     It was probably in his Jesuit school days that Joyce began to be conscious of China and Japan.  In the retreat scene honoring St. Francis Xavier of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the rector tells about the missionary life of the saint who “wished then to go to China to win still more souls for God but he died of fever on the island of Sancian” (P 111).
     After the Russo-Japanese War, Joyce wrote to his brother Stanislaus that “Japan, the first naval power in the world” (6 November 1906; LettersII 188).  In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom remembers Simon Dedalus imitating Larry O’Rourke saying, “The Russian, they’d only be an eight o’clock breakfast for the Japanese” (U 4.116-17).  However, Joyce seems to have noticed that numerous Asians came to hate Japanese imperialism.  Sheldon Brivic argues in Joyce through Lacan and Zizek that “England and Japan have much in common as aggressive islands invading the mainland” (208).
     In the morning of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks “in the track of the sun” (U 4.99-100).  Bloom shows his interest in the Orient including China and Japan especially in “Calypso” and “Lotus Eaters.”  Later in “Ithaca,” readers recognize that it is also the title of the book he owns: F. D. Thompson’s In the Track of the Sun (1893).
     One of the highlights of Finnegans Wake is the dialogue between the Chinese Archdruid and the Japanese St. Patrick in Book IV (FW 611-613).  Joyce paralleled the relationship between China and Japan with that between the Celts and Christianity or George Berkeley and the English evangelist to Ireland.  This scene reflects the tensions between China and Japan around 1938.  Joyce finalized and published the novel in 1939 and died in January 1941.


Keywords: James Joyce, China, Japan, Orientalism, (Post-)Colonialism

The full version is available in Comparative Literature & World Literature, Vol.4. The Chinese Comparative Literature Association, Peking University Press, China, December 2013, 16-34.