Orientalist Revulsion: A Joycean Tryst with Modernity in Ulysses

Abstract

In Ulysses, published in1922, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have shared a dream of the Middle East in establishing a mysterious psychological negotiations between them. Bloom’s continuous references to Mrs. Moll with red slippers from ‘Turkey trunks’, ‘white yashmak’, ‘toerings’, ‘fetterchain’, and Prophet Muhammed with Stephen’s re calling of ‘street of harlots’, and ‘Haroun al Raschid’, the Caliph of Baghdad a principal character in many of Scheherezade’s tales of the Thousand and One Nights are the pur ported tool of the instrumentalisation of the Other for maintaining the hegemony of the Self with a tendency to insulate Islam as a convenient Other. The collective fantasy of the two characters Bloom and his father are engaged in this Orientalist project that Otherizes the Arabic Islamist of the Middle East. The Twentieth Century European modernity in the same way posed a permanent challenge by castigating the views of Islam’s defective rela tion to modernity with the form of essentialism deeply rooted in the general conception of ‘religion’. This paper aims to look at how James Joyce’s project of modernism in Ulysses is enmeshed within a Orientalist fantasy of the Middle East that essentializes the Islamic Other of Turkey and elsewhere with Christian European and Islamic Middle Eastern thought in a more mystical orientation. Joyce’s representation of the Jew in Ulysses is im plicated in the anti-Islamic and Arabophobic proclivities of European neo-imperialism and its aesthetic registers in the high modernist milieu of 1922. The pro-Jewish nationalist pro ject in this geo-political schemata bears a hatred towards the Arabic Islamists of the Mid dle East, and posits Islam’s confrontation with modernity (Islam’s alleged insufficient ca pacity to supersede traditions) which set the genesis of European pattern of modernity apart from alleged ‘alternative modernity’. Islamic modernism comes to be viewed as sui generis rather than associated to a Western centred category. The paper explores specific insights into recurring patterns of Western appraisal of Islam vis-à-vis modernity that were cumulatively built over time across various disciplines, even more importantly, the focus will be on the understanding of Joycean critique of Orientalist genesis of modernity in the Muslim world with allusions to The Arabian Nights in Ulysses. Joyce showcases how he and his countrymen were awfully vulnerable to the Orientalist images picturing the cus toms of strange lands that were alluring in their utter deviation from Dublin’s paralyzing and stifling social codes.