Jewish Orientalism and Irish Nationalism in James Joyce’s “Calypso” Oscar Williams College

For decades James Joyce has been canonized as a high modernist writer, and Ulysses as the archetypal modernist novel. However, as Emer Nolan observes, attempts to assimilate Joyce into the predominantly metropolitan modernist tradition habitually “undermine the representation of Ireland in his texts as a marginal and colonised country … [and] Joyce’s status as an Irishman writing from the perspective of a colonial subject” (6). Nolan argues that “Joycean modernism and Irish nationalism can be understood as significantly analogous discourses” and that Ulysses is both “an aesthetic and politically engaged text” (57). Whilst categorically defining Joyce as a nationalist writer wilfully overlooks contradictory factors, such as his disapproval of the “essentialism that drove Celtic and Sinn Fein varieties of nationalism … and their submission to the Catholic Church” (Davison 119), by moving away from the Poundian tradition of focussing exclusively on myth and form critics such as Nolan have made reading Joyce in the context of Ireland’s colonial and postcolonial history more orthodox. I argue here that in “Calypso” Joyce deploys an extended analogy, imbued in Orientalism, between the marginality and exclusion experienced by European...