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Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/melus/33.4.45

1946-3170

Yu Tian,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

When Leopold Bloom first walks out into the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses, the reader is treated to a series of realistic details about this Irish urban landscape: street numbers, pavement, and the bread van from Boland's. But barely half a paragraph passes before Bloom begins to asso ciate this urban landscape with Someplace in the east (57). As Bloom walks, the landscape of Dublin is overlaid with that of an imagined oriental city: Walk along a strand, a strange land, come to a city gate . . . Wander through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, the terrible, seated crosslegged smoking a coiled pipe (57). Bloom's vision is, of course, built entirely on orien tal clich?s, as well as on images of imported commodities (carpet shops) and urban popular culture (the pantomime show of Turko the Terrible) that are less facets of the Orient than aspects of Dublin itself with oriental associations. Although Bloom's reverie may seem constructed from whole cloth, careful parsing of the allusions shows how the Western city itself is rich in oriental signifiers; Orientalism is already part of the European urban fabric. At the heart of the modernist canon, oriental tropes prove central to the construction of modernist urban space. But this oriental Dublin is also remarkable for its self-consciousness as a literary construction, as Bloom draws a distinction between his reverie and the actual East: Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. Bloom not only acknowledges the role of orientalist travelogue in constructing his vision of the city, but he even pinpoints his exact source: Frederick Thompson's In the Track of the Sun (1893). This image of the oriental sun is associated with fantasy and error: What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland (57). Thus Joyce's orientalized Dublin, while demonstrating the degree to which Orientalism already, at the beginning of the twentieth century, structures the Western city, exposes urban Orientalism as a literary fiction. The complex role of oriental tropes in such modernist imaginings of