Abstract
This article attempts to examine and compare the presentation of the Orient in two separate texts by Joyce, the short story “Araby” and Ulysses. Whereas the attitude towards the ‘East’ in the young Joyce is essentially Romantic and almost transcendental (the Orient as a kind of afterlife where everything will be better), in Ulysses we see a more intelligent awareness of the Orient as a Western construct – a gallery of exotic images which has little to do with reality. Where the semantic emptiness of the Orient in “Araby” produces a sense of woe and melancholy, the author of Ulysses affirms the emptiness and appears unpertubed by the absense of any reality behind the various Buddhas, camels and bellydancers that appear in the novel.I have seen Mankind in various Countries and find them equally despicable, if anything the Balance is rather in favour of the Turks. – Byron, “Memorandum”, May 22nd 1811
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