Zen and the art of James Joyce

By retrieving the relatively unknown domain of Zen (Ch'an) Buddhism that may be called "kynicism," Cheu demonstrates how James Joyce's literary works function as kynical critiques in the light of Zen koan practice. The term "kynicism" follows Peter Sloterdijk's usage in Critique of Cynical Reason, which, as Slavoj Zizek summarizes, "represents the popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm." The application of the concept of "kynicism" to Zen and Joyce leads to an examination of the political as well as the aesthetic development of both the Eastern philosophy and the modernist writer's works. Unlike Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats, Joyce never identified himself with the Far East Fever of the 20's; he knew little about Zen, and he did not allude to the writings of the Zen cynics. Nevertheless, from his esoteric mediation of epiphany in Dubliners to his ironic treatment of Stephen Dedalus's art in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the jocose parody in Ulysses and finally the hysterical usage of puns and riddles in Finnegans Wake, Joyce's fictions are increasingly humorous and sarcastic. This progressive pattern seems to be compatible with the evolution of Zen koans to such an extent that both Zen and Joyce eventually cultivated kynical-grotesquery as a method to evoke the voices of the repressed and to deconstruct social ideology and, in Joyce words, "the very troublesome burden of belief." Zen and Joyce meet in their acts of deconstruction.