Jinan Ashraf’s Joycean journey from Kerala to Dublin
My first encounter with James Joyce was by chance. The local library in my hometown of Kannur in India was a bit chaotic, with almost all titles uncatalogued, database non-existent — which meant that finding a book you were looking for was a game of chance. I wasn’t looking for Joyce, but I found a copy of Dubliners lodged in a dusty bookshelf. Though in recent years the library has been centralised, I remain fascinated by the idea that I could just as easily not have had a thin and battered old volume of Dubliners leap out at me on that day. I remember reaching the end of the first story in the collection, “The Sisters”, and wondering if the trailing off was part of the deliberate literary effect, or if the library’s copy was so battered that parts of the book were missing. Making a mental note to check at the understaffed front desk, I read on.
The Cannanore Public Library in Kannur. Built 1929.
The appeal of the Joycean text for me lay in other areas too, besides: its purported difficulty; its disruption of traditional, linear storytelling (beginning, middle, and end); its representation of hyperreligiosity as dividing the Irish home in the twentieth-century, and leading to the birth of the free-thinking artist. More significantly, as someone who was sensitive to the politics of narrative and story-telling, Joyce’s texts made me wonder how often we fail to question the underlying motives of story-tellers. The ‘novel’ as we know it has been read ravenously for its plot and for its rationalisation of causes and effects. We have traditionally leaned heavily on the story-teller to tie up loose ends in the narrative for us; taking their word as final. The search for meaning is a motivation that has long determined readers’ attitudes towards the literary text — generally, readers have looked to the text, even quite deferentially, for meanings that we assume are readily available or directly communicated. As an adolescent, I was increasingly becoming aware of how much power one gives away in letting someone else finish the story, or worse, one’s own story, by claiming to speak on one’s behalf. No wonder, then, the ellipsis in Joyce’s work made a world of sense. Joyce’s work often trails off, giving an impression of being unfinished, or abandoned half-way through. These literary silences became increasingly noticeable as I engaged more deeply with the Joycean text. From an adolescent enjoying (but not fully appreciating) the subversive quality of Joyce’s texts to growing up into a researcher interested in Joyce’s texts as a lasting document of racial politics and whiteness, I look back on the parallaxes in my own reading, visible in how much escaped me as a young reader, and in how I return to the same passages with new insight each time. This is particularly true of “reading” Joyce’s own misogyny as well as the misogyny penetrating most of the male characters populating his storyworld, something I have only fully recognised as I matured in my reading.
Several years have passed and I am still reading and studying Joyce, but now professionally. Reading Joyce in the local libraries in my hometown as a young girl may have drawn untoward attention and criticism, but it has taken me to other wonderful libraries since, in Ireland and the United States respectively — worlds unimaginable to me at the time as a young Indian Muslim girl from Kerala. Devika has pointed out how the public sphere in Kerala is masculinist and mostly male. There has long been a tradition to privilege upper-caste narratives to maintain social hierarchies as well as to control discourses on the ‘untouchable’ body. Women have traditionally been relegated to more private or domestic roles, away from the masculine sphere of public exchange, as keepers of socio-cultural and religious tenets. The opening lines of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which begins with fear being instilled in the mind of a young Irish Catholic boy by his religious aunt resonated deeply with me. ‘Subservience’ has long been designated as the code of conduct for many women in lower castes and religious communities in India, who encounter entrenched misogyny from the upper-caste, from their own communities, as well as the elitism of mainstream feminism. For me as an adolescent, encountering the concept of ‘non serviam’ (Latin for “I will not serve”) in the fiction of this culturally distant writer became a source of deep, regenerative energy, drawing me more toward his subversive writing, and finding delight in his predilection toward heretical philosophy.
The American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad, India
If reading Joyce as an adolescent has shown me anything, it has been to reflect on the ‘business’ of interpretation as being opened up beyond the male scholar and the male clergy to include the modern reader. Here we encounter the text for the first time as refusing to offer signposts to lead us through the narrative. The Joycean text appears to replicate a labyrinth, which is often how one encounters the enigmas of life. Since encountering the Joycean text for the first time as a young student in Kerala, one of my most memorable encounters with Modernist archives and library infrastructures has been the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad, India. The constant deliberation on the Joyce text, which began as an adolescent obsession, had by then flourished into the desire to be a scholar. The library infrastructure was my first real encounter with the concept of the ‘archive’. It was my first time travelling away from my insular hometown to stay in the old city of Hyderabad, away from home to “forge” myself as a scholar. Joyce provided a smooth transition from being reader to scholar because there was so much close reading to do, and along with it interpretive work I had only superficially attempted as an adolescent.
The commute to the archives and the daily encounter with special collections trained me to develop a good hand with engaging with library catalogues and manuscripts, making notes on index cards, and filing away relevant entries on the indexes of the critical texts I was examining. The feeling of running my eyes over the signatures on the “Due Date” list on the front page of the borrowed book and being dazzled and amazed at scholars and experts on Modernism who had issued books before me was indescribable. Reading, writing, and thinking in my chosen spot in the reading room (my sanctum sanctorum) eventually led me to evenings where I would browse graphic novels based on Joyce’s legacy at the British Council. Later, while waiting for my train home, I would buy myself a newspaper cone filled with bhel puri (a popular Indian street food) as a reward for all the papercuts of the day. At home, I would read my copy of Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, a coming-of-age narrative, and marvel at parallels between the lives of Joyce scholars with Joyce and gender politics across these transnational contexts.
The main Reading Room in the National Library of Ireland
The years of working with rare collections did not prepare me for the emotional overwhelm of reading and working on my thesis drafts in the National Library of Ireland as a Ph.D. student. Between reading James Joyce as an undergraduate in Kerala and pursuing a Ph.D. on Joyce in Ireland, what has emerged is conducting research into avant-garde sensibilities for writers from the peripheries: how have writers from India, for instance, received Joyce’s ideas, and how might they have used it or overcome it to decentre Eurocentric or Brahminical perspectives in developing their own narratorial tradecraft? What do I know about narratives now that I did not know before picking up a book by James Joyce? British Indian novelists such as G. V. Desani have often been compared to Joyce: All About H. Hatterr is a “portrait of a man, the common vulgar species, found everywhere, both in the East and in the West” and, as Anthony Burgess has pointed out, “[I]t is not pure English; it is, like the English of Shakespeare, Joyce and Kipling, gloriously impure”. Desani’s work has since been followed by other experimentations in fiction by Indian novelists. Salman Rushdie and Geetanjali Shree transcend borders in experimental South Asian literature. Joyce’s own concern with the postcolonial condition and his relationship with the English language is double-edged. James Joyce taught me how language could be used to ambush the opponent, to write back to dominant or oppressive systems, and to conceive of one’s soul as ‘smithy’. Joyce also helped me graft myself into homes away from home. Finding myself in the vast expanse of the National Library of Ireland, I was glad that I had made a fortuitous encounter with a thin volume of stories set in Ireland not so long ago in India.
Jinan Ashraf is the recipient of the Editing Press Laura Bassi Scholarship for research on neglected literary traditions and PhD Fellow at the School of English at Dublin City University. Her doctoral study situates itself in the comparative colonial contexts of Irish and Indian Modernisms, focusing on James Joyce, the body, and the domestic novel.