Leopold Bloom’s Journey Through the Orient
“In short, Orientalism [is defined] as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient…. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have [during the post-Enlightenment period] that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism.” - Edward Said, Orientalism, 1979
**Author’s Note**
This topic started out as a single post but has ballooned to require the space of two posts to fully support its weight. As such, this is part one of two. In this post, we’ll explore Orientalist motifs in the episodes “Calypso” and “Lotus Eaters”. Part II focuses on Irish Orientalism as a concept and how it influenced James Joyce’s worldview prior to writing Ulysses.
To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here.
Grafton St., Dublin
Ulysses is a snapshot of Dublin in the year 1904. At that time, Dublin was a small city in a vast empire. Some Dubliners of the day happily identified with the British colonizers (Hi, Mr. Deasy!) while others chafed at their lowly political status (Dia duit, the Citizen!). On one hand, the Irish were oppressed by the colonial government (1904 is only 12 years from 1916), while on the other hand, aspects of British culture were part of everyday life for most Dubliners. The culture of the day reflected the expansiveness of the British Empire around the globe, an Empire upon which the sun never set. The Orient, in particular, held a special allure in the imaginations of British and Irish folks. Since Ulysses is couched so firmly in this time period, it’s no surprise that an Oriental motif runs throughout the novel.
As this is one of the most complex topics Blooms & Barnacles has taken on so far, let’s start out by defining terms.
First, what is “The Orient”? This term encompasses a vast swath of geography and culture, potentially referring to East Asia, India, the Islamic World, Israel, North Africa, and in some reckonings, even Spain, Greece, and other areas of Eastern Europe. It becomes an unwieldy term very quickly because it’s not terribly descriptive of anywhere in particular. The vast majority of people on Earth live in the Orient, so applying a single term to such a large area, home to hundreds of cultures and languages, and dozens of religions, can’t possibly describe everyone and everything in that region of the globe. If one wanted to be glib, it could be said that “the Orient” simply means “those guys over there” from the point of view of Western Europe. What the term “Orient” does describe is a difference to the “Occident,” or the West. The term “Orient” implies “East,” but only in relation to Europe. In keeping with the imprecise nature of the term, the places labeled “Oriental” don’t necessarily have to be east of Europe, they just need to be not-Europe. This is due to the term’s roots in European colonialism.
Orientalism, then, is the exocticisation of the peoples and cultures found in “the Orient.” The idea of a far away place populated by mysterious and inscrutable inhabitants is at the core of Orientalism. The East takes on a mythical quality - a land full of monsters (remember pards?), or an Edenic paradise full of bounty, or perhaps virgin territory waiting to be explored (or exploited). The only limit is your imagination! Orientalism as a concept is laid out in great detail in the 1979 book Orientalism by Edward Said. The key to understanding Orientalism, as emphasized by Said, is “difference.” What lies in the Orient is “other,” for better or worse, than the familiar (“normal”) experiences of the West. The Orient, then, is an invention of the colonial mind, since it only exists in opposition to the Occident.
I couldn’t help thinking of the 1993 Disney film Aladdin while working on this post. At one point while researching this topic, I realized I had abandoned my “serious” reading and was just watching clips of Aladdin on YouTube. It’s just such a perfect example. Set in the fictional Agrabah, a city that’s kind of Arab but not too Arab, Aladdin and the other characters encounter fanciful citizens that are sort of Middle Eastern or maybe Indian, in a magical/ mythical land. Additionally, the lyrics of one of the songs had to be altered because they weren’t exactly flattering to Middle Eastern people. They did leave in the line, “It’s barbaric, but hey it’s home,” though.
OK, back to the serious reading. Said emphasizes that Orientalist views of the East are a product of European colonialism. We’re going to pick on the British in particular in this post since Ireland was part of the British Empire in 1904 when Ulysses takes place. The British Imperial worldview held that British culture was on the upward end of a curve of progress, having embraced a rational mindset that led to superior science, industry and technology, ensuring its superiority in the world generally. In this worldview, colonized people were not as advanced as the British. Their cultural inferiority and uncivilized manner had to be corrected and improved by the technological and intellectual superiority of British culture. Colonialism, then, carried a moral component - a drive to civilize the savage people around the world, especially those in the Orient. (“We’ll be greeted as liberators!”)
Portrait of Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, Thomas Phillips, 1813
Edward Said saw the Orient, as it exists in the minds of Westerners, as the focal point of the dream state - a far-away utopia where Westerners can feed their spiritual needs, find themselves, and satisfy their adventurous spirit, free from the restraints of “civilization.” This spirit can be found in the poetry of Byron as well as contemporary books and movies like Eat, Pray, Love and The Darjeeling Limited. The Orient is a land of heightened sense and experience, a place better than real life.
Speaking of books, let’s finally talk about our favorite book. Ulysses is full of such Oriental fantasies, but if we look closely, they are only that, fantasies, and not terribly sophisticated ones at that, built out of the era’s popular culture rather than reality. Joyce had abundant source material to pull from, as Irish popular culture of the time was filled with images of the Orient, especially Arabia.
R. Brandon Kershner described Ulysses as “a compendium of Orientialist clichés,” stating that the novel contains more allusions to A Thousand and One Nights than The Odyssey. In his view, Stephen and Bloom are more likely to frame their Bloomsday journey in terms of Sinbad the Sailor than Odysseus. They even meet an Irish Sinbad the Sailor in the form of Sailor Murphy in the cabmen’s shelter in “Eumaeus,” though by the end of “Ithaca,” we can view Bloom as the true, Sinbad-the-Sailor-returned-home (or Tinbad the Tailor or Jinbad the Jailor, etc.) During Stephen’s prophetic dream in “Proteus,” he encounters Haroun al-Raschid, a recurring character in A Thousand and One Nights, transforming Dublin into an Irish Baghdad for the unconscious mind, full of daring and danger for a young, bohemian poet.
Bloom’s daydreams in “Calypso” and “Lotus Eaters” build on this theme, perhaps more potently as they occur in his conscious mind rather than in a true dream-state. His flights of fancy rescue him from the drudgery of day-to-day errands as well as the crushing pain of Molly’s infidelity and his crumbling marriage. Bloom’s life may be slipping from his control, but he can cobble together a mysterious, Oriental fantasyland from odds and ends cluttering his memory - stage pantomime characters and half-remembered travel writing. Yes, he does ponder the economics of a real model farm in Palestine, but his Oriental daydreams have a distinctly indistinct atmosphere. These sensual fantasies center Bloom as the Julia Roberts in his own, personal Eat, Pray, Love - a curious wanderer, a pilgrim in an Eastern land that is exotic yet oddly welcoming and comfortable, with just enough menace thrown in to thrill.
Here’s a sample from p. 57 of “Calypso”:
“Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel, sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among the pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly's new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.”
The Rock of Gibraltar
Bloom’s Orientalist daydreams are usually triggered by something in his memory or environment. This particular tangent is inspired by thoughts of Molly that begin subtly but become more explicit towards the end, when he compares her new garters to the color of the night sky in Agrabah or wherever this scene is set. Just prior to this little reverie, Bloom’s mind is flitting through random thoughts when he spies “Boland’s breadvan delivering trays of our daily” and then recalls somewhat cryptically, “she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.” “She” is Molly, and it’s only natural that Bloom would think of her breakfast preferences as he is on his way to buy a breakfast kidney. He has already reflected on her girlhood in Gibraltar and her father “old Tweedy” and his connection to Plevna, a city in northern Bulgaria and site of a siege during the Russo-Turkish War. A loosely defined Orient includes both Gibraltar and Bulgaria, so Bloom is connecting these Orientalist dots. Notice old Tweedy shows up again just before the quoted passages, only a moment before Bloom plunges into total fantasy:
“…old Tweedy’s big moustaches leaning on a long kind of spear…”
Molly and her father are the symbolic connection to the East.
Molly’s Gibraltarian origin is a turn-on for Leopold, who finds her “Moorish” qualities rather exotic and sexy. Mysterious Eastern women certainly figure into Bloom’s various fantasies, which at times involve Molly dressed in Turkish garb. From “Circe”:
“Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her lace dark eyes and raven hair.”
Bloom sees Molly as a Moor, which would suggest she’s Muslim, because of her upbringing in Gibraltar, which was once part of Moorish Spain. He thinks in “Nausicaa”, “That’s where Molly can knock spots off them. It’s the blood of the South. Moorish.” There’s no textual evidence that Molly has a Muslim background, though there’s some debate as to whether or not her mother was Jewish. She was raised Catholic at any rate (Bloom even converted to marry her). Molly is exotic and Oriental enough for Leopold, though, and that’s all that matters for our present discussion.
Sinbad the Sailor, 1947
Once he gets into his daydream full-tilt, we begin to realize that Bloom’s view of the Orient, of “carpet shops” and “dark language,” is more suited to a child’s adventure story or comic book than to real life. More precisely, we can tell he was influenced by pantomimes of the day. A pantomime is a play featuring acting, singing, dancing, and other types of stagecraft to loosely tell a fairy tale or other story. Such plays in Joyce’s era featured Orientalist characters like Sinbad and Turko the Terrible, famously portrayed by actor Edward William Royce. Stephen recalls his mother laughing at Royce’s portrayal of Turko in “Telemachus.” Turko also pops into Bloom’s Oriental fantasy in “Calypso” - “big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled pipe.” As “Telemachus” and “Calypso” take place at roughly the same hour of June 16th, Turko could represent the gradual hypostasis, or merging of minds, of “father” and “son” Bloom and Dedalus. Both men reach for a symbol of the Near East and come up with a pop cultural figure.
Bloom’s fantasy in “Calypso” is also influenced by F.D. Thompson’s travelogue In the Track of the Sun, which recounts the author’s journey from New York through Egypt and Palestine, India, and China, Japan, and Ceylon. We will catch Bloom dreaming of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the opening paragraphs of “Lotus Eaters.” Bloom thinks:
“Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track of the sun.”
So, Bloom is aware, just as we readers are, that all that Turko the Terrible stuff is kind of silly. In “Ithaca,” we learn that Bloom owns a copy of In the Track of the Sun, though his copy is missing its cover. Bloom’s reference to a girl with a dulcimer is likely based on the title page of this book, which features a young woman in traditional Japanese clothing playing a Japanese stringed instrument called a samisen. By confusing the samisen for a dulcimer, Bloom may be alluding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”. In this dreamlike poem inspired by A Thousand and One Nights, Coleridge describes Kubla Khan’s paradisiacal palace Xanadu, a land “Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree” and where you might hear a “woman wailing for her demon-lover.” It ticks a lot of boxes on the Orientalism check-list. More to the point, Coleridge also describes:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Mount Abora: not a real place. Mark that off the checklist, too. Maybe we should make an Orientalism bingo card?
Whether the inspiration is Thompson or Coleridge or an early-morning, pre-kidney mish-mosh of the two, Bloom’s vision of the Orient has been romanticized and filtered through an Imperialistic point-of-view. His Orient is vague and expansive, offering him a glimpse of a world of robbers, strange music and demon-haunted women. Bloom’s vision of the Near East, as seen in “Calypso”, is very much tied into the travelogue vision of the Orient, fueled by his attraction to “Moorish” Molly. His understanding of Oriental women, whether a shadow in a fantasy or his own wife, is the product of bourgeois British culture.
As we transition into Ulysses’ fifth episode, “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom slips into a more Coleridgean vision of the Far East, triggered this time as he window shops at the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company. He is distracted by the heat of the late morning:
“So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved: and read again: choice blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in dolce far niente, not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves.”
Coleridge was very much in the Lotus Eater mindset when he wrote “Kubla Khan,” telling a friend in a contemporaneous letter, “I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna, to float about along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotos, & wake once in a million years for a few minutes – just to know I was going to sleep a million years more …” I don’t know that Leopold Bloom or Joyce himself would have read this snippet, but the humid, languorous atmosphere of an imaginary South Asia hangs over both “Kubla Khan” and “Lotus Eaters.”
Dermot suspects Coleridge was “out of his gourd on laudanum.”
Turkish Baths, Lincoln Place, Dublin
Beyond just being an allusion to a dreamy poem, this passage and its cousins in “Calypso” really drive home that Bloom’s Orientalist fantasies are primarily driven by his immediate emotions. While he was thinking of Molly, he imagined a bit of derring-do in a faux-Arabian bazaar, ending in thoughts of Molly’s garters, which is what he was really, really thinking about the whole time. In “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom has to kill a few hours before Paddy Dignam’s funeral. He’s digesting a heavy breakfast while walking around wearing all black in the heat of day. He feels warm and sleepy, so he conjures a daydream of a hot, steamy tropical paradise where the locals engage in a bit of the ol’ dolce far niente: “Those Cinghalese [archaic spelling of Sinhalese] lobbing about in the sun, in dolce far niente. Wonder is it like that. Sleep six months out of twelve.” His view is stereotypical and a bit racist, but it is clear he at least hopes it really is like that. It’s his idea of Eden, “the garden of the world” as he says. Add it to the Orientalist bingo card!
The biggest example of Bloom’s emotionally-driven daydreams also comes from “Calypso.” After leaving Dlugacz the Porkbutcher, Bloom contemplates the Agendath Netaim pamphlet, his thoughts meandering through various adjacent topics until, “A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly. Grey. Far.” And with that, Bloom plunges into a nightmare vision of Palestine, displacing both his Turko the Terrible fantasy and his economic musings on Agendath Netaim:
No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.
Desolation.
A cloud momentarily darkening the sky is enough to send Bloom into a spiral, transforming the formerly sumptuous land of Palestine to a poisonous, barren landscape. The cloud that crumbles Bloom’s imagined promised land is the same cloud that passes over the sun as Stephen stands atop the Sandycove Martello Tower, transforming Dublin Bay into “a bowl of bitter waters” and reminding Stephen of his mother’s painful death. The cloud subsides for both Bloom and Stephen. Bloom, for his part, recalls again the “grey metal, poisonous foggy waters” of the Dead Sea in “Lotus Eaters,” though in this episode, they appear as a pleasant oddity rather than the symbol of desolation:
Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt.
What a difference a couple hours makes.
Bloom is self-aware enough to know that his fantasies are b.s., quickly rejecting his thoughts of both the Turko the Terrible sequence and the Dead Sea sequence in “Calypso.” While this Oriental motif arises in various forms throughout the course of the novel, none of the characters in Ulysses have ever been to the Orient (the closest is Molly in Gibraltar). Their “knowledge” of the East is based entirely on words, hearsay, and stereotypes. Even worldly characters like Stephen Dedalus and the mystic Æ Russell have never experienced the Orient directly, relying on the same second-hand information as the rest of their Dublin cohorts. This experiential gap includes their creator, James Joyce. An intellectual fantasy is a fantasy nonetheless.
Bloom’s complex identity as an Irish Jew sets him at the crossroads of the cultural conflict caused by Orientalism. Many commentators are quick to point out Bloom as the epitome of the Oriental man due to his Semitic heritage, and within the text of Ulysses, he appears symbolically to Stephen as Haroun al-Raschid, a central figure of the pop culture Orient. Pay no mind to the fact that Haround al-Raschid was not a Jew, but the “close enough” attitude of this portrayal shows the way the Orientalist worldview blurs the edges of cultures. Bloom, who casually imagines adventure in a generic “Orient” and surmises his wife’s personality is a product of her “blood of the South,” is orientalized in turn by the denizens of Dublin throughout Ulysses. In “Nausicaa,” Gerty’s infatuation with Bloom is based on him being a “foreign gentleman.” How exotic! In “Circe,” J.J. O’Molloy defends Bloom by claiming, “His submission is that he is of Mongolian extraction and irresponsible for his actions.” Even Molly gets in on the act, thinking in “Penelope,” “[He sleeps] like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare St….” Add to this that Bloom is ethnically Hungarian. It was once erroneously believed that Hungary was founded and named for Attila the Hun, an invader from the East. Hungarian ancestry made Bloom Oriental as well.
As surprising as that may be, from some viewpoints, Bloom’s Irish ancestry also ties him to the Orient. Not just because in some stereotypes and literary portrayals (think of Celtic Revivalist literature), Ireland becomes a magical land full of mythical creatures, spiritual people, and wild women, an untamed Eden ready for exploitation by more civilized folk. Ireland was a colony of the British Empire, as well, though Ireland’s relationship with its colonizers is and was distinct from British colonies in the East. However, some people, including James Joyce, believed that the Irish were literally descended from Oriental people. You’ll have to read Part II to find out what the heck I’m talking about.
Further Reading:
Bannon, B. (2011). Joyce, Coleridge, and the Eastern Aesthetic. James Joyce Quarterly, 48(3), 495-510. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/23342956
Bongiovanni, L. (2007). “Turbaned Faces Go By”: James Joyce and Irish Orientalism. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, (38) 4 (2007): Retrieved from https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/31180
Bowen, Z. (1974). Musical allusions in the works of James Joyce: Early poetry through Ulysses. Albany: State University of New York Press. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/books/edition/Musical_Allusions_in_the_Works_of_James/srr_rtOEx5YC?hl=en&gbpv=0
Gifford, D., & Seidman, R. J. (1988). Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/vy6j4tk
Herring, P. (1974). Lotuseaters. In C. Hart & D. Hayman (eds.), James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical essays (71-90). Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/wu2y7mg
Ito, E. (2008). Orienting Orientalism in Ulysses. James Joyce Journal, 41(2), 51-70. Retrieved from http://p-www.iwate-pu.ac.jp/~acro-ito/Joycean_Essays/U_Orientalism.html
Kershner, R. (1998). "Ulysses" and the Orient. James Joyce Quarterly, 35(2/3), 273-296. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/25473906
Lennon, J. (2008). Irish Orientalism. Syracuse University Press. Retrieved from https://www.google.com/books/edition/Irish_Orientalism/nnbRKOsmyJIC?hl=en&gbpv=0
McKenna, B. (2002). James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Reference Guide. Greenwood Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y2oth7lc
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Books.
Shloss, C. (1998). Joyce in the Context of Irish Orientalism. James Joyce Quarterly, 35(2/3), 264-271. Retrieved July 14, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/25473905