{"id":5648,"date":"2025-10-23T14:21:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T14:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/?p=5648"},"modified":"2025-11-07T21:31:32","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T21:31:32","slug":"james-joyce-and-lu-xun-in-tandem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libraries.clemson.edu\/press\/2025\/10\/23\/james-joyce-and-lu-xun-in-tandem\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Post: James Joyce and Lu Xun in Tandem"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Corentin J\u00e9gou<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 Lu Xun was born in 1881, one year before Joyce. In many respects, Joyce\u2019s Ireland and Lu Xun\u2019s 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\u2019s death in 1904, he blamed \u201cthe whole present social order\u201d 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, \u201cexcept as a vagabond.\u201d As this pronouncement suggests, his posture as an exile was a politically motivated choice. \u201cNo self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland\u201d, he famously pronounced in a lecture on Ireland, in Trieste in 1907.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, Lu Xun recalls the sense of shame and indignation occasioned by his father\u2019s death. Leaving behind the \u201cweak and backward country\u201d 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\u2019s clinical examination of the paralysis that plagued the characters in Dubliners<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"My suggestion in \u201cJoyce\u2019s Politics of Displacement: The View from the Periphery\u201d (included in The Wanderings of Modernism<\/em><\/a>), 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 \u201cbackward\u201d countries were forcibly geared to the circuits of capital accumulation. The collision between discrepant temporalities \u2013 between the backward and the modern \u2013 was part and parcel of the experience of imperialism.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s fascination with displacement, skewered perspectives and temporal quirks, can be read as an engagement with the fractious geography of imperialism. Joyce\u2019s 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 \u00c9douard Glissant refers to as the \u201cWhole-World.\u201d(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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

An obvious case in point is Bloom\u2019s obsession with parallax throughout Ulysses<\/em>. 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\u2019s anticolonial upheaval while Ulysses<\/em> was being written, such optical phenomena become political commentaries in their own right.<\/p>\n

Bloom\u2019s meditation on the timeball on top of the Ballast Office, next to O\u2019Connell 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 \u201cLestrygonians,\u201d 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 fa\u00e7ade of the same Ballast Office. The incident captures the fractured temporality which is inscribed in the very texture of Dublin\u2019s public space as a colonial metropolis. Bloom\u2019s 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\u2019s writing call into question the validity and stability of any geographic positions. Ultimately, then, Joyce\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Notes
\n1. Jerusha McCormack\u2019s 2016 article \u201cLu Xun and James Joyce: To Heal the Spirit of a Nation\u201d is a notable
\nexception. See Frontiers of Literary Studies in China<\/em>, 10, no. 3 (2016): 353\u2013391.
\n2. \u00c9douard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World<\/em>, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020
\n[1997]).<\/p>\n

This blog post was made in partnership with Liverpool University Press. Find out more about the Liverpool University Press blog here<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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