The Thousand and One Nights of Ulysses: Joyce's Empathetic Intertextuality

Abstract

In discussions about intertext in James Joyces's Ulysses, few critics focus on The Thousand and One Nights, even though copies of the text in its Antoine Galland and Sir Richard Burton translations made their way to his bookshelves from Trieste to Paris and characters like Sinbad and Haroun al-Raschid appear throughout the novel. My readings of the two texts demonstrate that the Nights emphasizes the global implications of the storytelling techniques in Ulysses and underscores the colonial frameworks in which both texts were produced. Despite the Nights' role as a hybrid cultural epic both within the Middle East and throughout Europe in translation, I argue that Joyce's use of the text reveals a struggle with these exact modes of cross-cultural translation, circulation, and knowledge production. The engagement of Ulysses with the Nights establishes a connection between Joyce's Irish heritage and its colonial history under the British and the imperial relationship between Persian and Arabian cultures that produced the earliest written editions of the Nights. Using the Nights, Joyce employs what I term an empathetic intertextuality that suggests parallel if not shared histories across wide geographic and temporal divides. The Nights allusions highlight Joyce's understanding of constructed cultural lineages at a moment when he was living outside of Ireland, conceiving of Trieste as an extension of Ireland and part of a global community. Empathetic intertextuality asks readers and writers to engage in an imaginative practice that seeks relationships among disparate texts, traditions, and communities.