By Corentin Jégou
James Joyce and the Chinese writer Lu Xun are not often studied in tandem.(1) Yet, the parallels between them abound. They were not just contemporaries – Lu Xun was born in 1881, one year before Joyce. In many respects, Joyce’s Ireland and Lu Xun’s China confronted both writers with similar political challenges at the turn of the century. Having left Ireland in 1904, Joyce dissected the country in unsparing terms from his continental exile. The deleterious effects of British colonialism and the tyranny of the Catholic Church accounted, he thought, for the moral paralysis that plagued his countrymen. Upon his mother’s death in 1904, he blamed “the whole present social order” that had led her to her grave. As a consequence of his animosity towards the conditions prevailing in Ireland, he would not take part in such a system, “except as a vagabond.” As this pronouncement suggests, his posture as an exile was a politically motivated choice. “No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland”, he famously pronounced in a lecture on Ireland, in Trieste in 1907.
Although continents apart, Lu Xun addressed the condition of late Qing China in very similar terms. His father had died at the hands of a village charlatan, for lack of access to modern medicine. In the 1922 preface to his collection of short stories A Call to Arms, Lu Xun recalls the sense of shame and indignation occasioned by his father’s death. Leaving behind the “weak and backward country” that was China, Lu Xun went to study medicine in Japan. However, he soon gave up that pursuit in favour of writing. What his countrymen needed, he thought, was a moral remedy. In his stories, he produced scathing accounts of spiritual degradation, not unlike Joyce’s clinical examination of the paralysis that plagued the characters in Dubliners.
My suggestion in “Joyce’s Politics of Displacement: The View from the Periphery” (included in The Wanderings of Modernism), is that the similarities between Joyce and Lu Xun are the index of an underlying dynamic obtaining in the semi-peripheries of the world-system at the turn of the century. The imperialist stage in capitalist globalisation meant that the “backward” countries were forcibly geared to the circuits of capital accumulation. The collision between discrepant temporalities – between the backward and the modern – was part and parcel of the experience of imperialism.
What are the implications of this process at the level of form? How does the conflictual nature of capitalist globalisation manifest itself in narrative terms? It seems to me that Joyce’s fascination with displacement, skewered perspectives and temporal quirks, can be read as an engagement with the fractious geography of imperialism. Joyce’s manipulations of space and time, I would argue, testify to his coordinates as a semi-peripheral writer. That position enables him to grasp the workings of what the Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant refers to as the “Whole-World.”(2) My argument is that Joyce devises a politics of displacement which registers the advent of a world-totality welded together by the logic of imperialism. The geography of imperialism, Glissant argues, is inextricable: no single location can remain isolated from the whole in which it has been forcefully integrated. When carried to its ultimate consequences, this logic has the potential to upend distinctions between the local and the global, the internal and the external. Joyce’s writing is replete with such geographical incongruities and perspectival paradoxes. It abounds with intimations of a world in flux, where distances can be collapsed at will, and where seemingly disparate localities turn out to align in unsuspected ways.
An obvious case in point is Bloom’s obsession with parallax throughout Ulysses. Parallax is the phenomenon which causes a change in the position of an observer to affect the perceived position of the object under observation. While this phenomenon has the potential to distort our perception of a given object, it can be virtually cancelled by the effect of distance. For instance, the position of the stars in the sky appears to remain stable, when in reality the motions of the earth orbiting around the sun actually modify our vantage point ever so slightly. The illusion of fixity and the unacknowledged reality of motion should alert us to the precariousness of any geographic coordinates. When read in the light of Ireland’s anticolonial upheaval while Ulysses was being written, such optical phenomena become political commentaries in their own right.
Bloom’s meditation on the timeball on top of the Ballast Office, next to O’Connell Bridge, is particularly remarkable in this respect. The timeball was a big bronze sphere perched on a pole on top of the building. It was designed to enable the ships in the harbour to synchronize their chronometers accurately. Every day, the ball would slide down its wooden pole at one pm. In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom observes the timeball and conjectures that it must be after one, because the ball is down. Yet that may not quite be the case: it immediately occurs to Bloom that the reference time for the ball is set according to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), while the time in Ireland was set by the Irish observatory at Dunsink, which was twenty-five minutes later than GMT. Dunsink time served as the standard for the clocks on all public buildings in the country until 1916. Bloom therefore remembers that there is a lag between GMT and Dunsink time, between the timeball and the clock on the façade of the same Ballast Office. The incident captures the fractured temporality which is inscribed in the very texture of Dublin’s public space as a colonial metropolis. Bloom’s passing observation effectively points at the politicisation of time in the colonial metropolis that is Dublin, and the uneven texture of history in the semi-periphery. The multiple instances of such bizarre phenomena in Joyce’s writing call into question the validity and stability of any geographic positions. Ultimately, then, Joyce’s manipulations of time and space, which have come to be associated with modernist writing, bear witness to the paradoxical geography of the world-totality in the making.
Notes
1. Jerusha McCormack’s 2016 article “Lu Xun and James Joyce: To Heal the Spirit of a Nation” is a notable
exception. See Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 10, no. 3 (2016): 353–391.
2. Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020
[1997]).
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