Anti-Semitism in ULYSSES?
I once wrote a story where a character makes a racist joke about a customer she is serving in her Iowa coffee shop. My intent was to characterize this woman as a person flawed by prejudice, but my workshop colleagues tore into me, accusing me of being racist. This exercise in political correctness was quite an eye opener. (And I shouldn’t have been surprised by Kirkus’s negative review of my novel THE FLAME TREE, which sternly took me to task for the audacity of portraying a few Muslims as bigoted and violent).
So I’m not going to jump all over Joyce when one of his characters (the Britisher Haines) says, “Of course I’m a Britisher…and I feel as one. I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of the German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.”
This is probably just Haines. One musn’t try to reverse engineer the author from his characters. In fact, maybe Joyce, being Irish, was taking the mickey out of the British by making a Britisher brutish.
On the other hand, this was written at the opening of this century, when racism wasn’t even a concept yet, although its practice was much more casually out in the open and culturally acceptable. So I do wonder whether Joyce was exposing something of himself here. I repeat, I don’t know. The rest (the great unread rest) of the novel might tell.
So I’m not going to jump all over Joyce when one of his characters (the Britisher Haines) says, “Of course I’m a Britisher…and I feel as one. I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of the German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.”
This is probably just Haines. One musn’t try to reverse engineer the author from his characters. In fact, maybe Joyce, being Irish, was taking the mickey out of the British by making a Britisher brutish.
On the other hand, this was written at the opening of this century, when racism wasn’t even a concept yet, although its practice was much more casually out in the open and culturally acceptable. So I do wonder whether Joyce was exposing something of himself here. I repeat, I don’t know. The rest (the great unread rest) of the novel might tell.
posted by Richard Lewis at 6:46 PM
4 Comments:
Hmmm, now Dedalus's employer Mr. Deasy makes anti-Semitic remarks, and Dedalus's introspection on such a comment is at best ambiguous.
BTW, I find Dedadulus's introspections are the most difficult passages to understand.
I'm referring to an earlier passage, the one which starts "On the steps of the Paris Stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting their prices n their gemmed fingers..." That's Dedalus, right?
Sometimes I'm confused: is this Dedalus thinking or Joyce providing commentary?
Joyce's use of "sinning against the light" is meant to mock their prejudices -- not justify them. The entire idea of white=good black=bad is turned on its head through out the novel; this is just one more instance of it.
I have been reading DECADENCE and other essays...by Remy De Gourmont. In the first chapter he talks about disassociations/association. I see this man's influence in Joyce's work. The only connection that I have that their might have been some influence is that Ezra Pound admired him. Ezra Pound was Joyce publisher...right?
Remy was part of the Symbolist movement.
Wiki:Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysse
Remy-703
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Remy_de_Gourmont.aspx
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