Atelier Aterui: Depicting Dublin with Israelite and Islamic Elements: James Joyce's Transnational Modernity

Depicting Dublin with Israelite and Islamic Elements:
James Joyce's Transnational Modernity

Eishiro Ito

Abstract

     As T. S. Eliot explained in “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” James Joyce wrote Ulysses in “the mythical method.”  However, Joyce did not merely describe 1904 Dublin in parallel with the Odyssey.  He interweaved many non-European elements into the text in order to trans-/inter-nationalize Dublin.  This paper aims to reconsider the Oriental motifs including some Jewish and Arabic elements in Joyce's works.  Particularly allusions to the Arabian Nights and the Koran are analyzed in separate chapters.
     Christians have been familiar with the history and folklores of Jews as described in the Bible.  Jews have lived in the area constituting the boundary between the Orient and Europe.  Since the Middle Ages, Jews have been seen in the Western world as both Occidental and Oriental.  To explore the Jewish and other Oriental elements can be a first step to understand Joyce's literary journey to the east.
    At the end of “Lotus Eaters” Bloom imagines himself reclining in a Turkish bath.  The Prophet Muhammed is mentioned three times and several stories from the Arabian Nights are alluded to in Ulysses.  In Finnegans Wake Shaun says of Shem: “I have his quoram of images all on my retinue, Mohomadhawn Mike” (FW 443.1-2).
    Joyce was influenced by George Russell and W. B. Yeats, and became interested in Theosophy and Oriental studies in Dublin.  Going into exile on the Continent, he became interested in Jews.  It is reflected in Giacomo Joyce and Ulysses.  Joyce’s Trieste library included some books on Jews and Armando Dominicis's Italian translation of the Arabian Nights.  In 1920 Joyce went to Paris where he could meet many non-European people who are unspecified.  Joyce’s Paris library (late 1930s) contained the famous Anglo-Irish Orientalist Richard F. Burton’s translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night and J. -C. Mardrus’s French translation of the Koran.  Living abroad, Joyce described Dublin in the transnational method throughout his lifetime partly because of his ambivalence toward Christianity and acceptance of other Eastern religions.

Keywords: James Joyce, Judaism, Islam, the Arabian Nights, the Koran

The full version is available in The Journal of Policy Studies, Vol.13, No.2. Iwate Prefectural University, May 2012, 89-102.