The Metropolis and the “Bloodless Characters”: A Comparative Study of James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and Yusuf Idrīs’s “Qāʿ al-Madīna” [“The Bottom of the City”]

Abstract

The current paper has been developed to examine the complexities of metropolitan subjects’ blasé attitude and bloodless life as portrayed in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and Yusuf Idrīs’s “Qāʿ al-Madīna” [“The Bottom of the City”] short stories. The paper aims at analyzing the impact of metropolis on its bloodless characters’ mental health and perception of self through the unpacking of the blasé attitude which emerges in Georg Simmel’s famous study “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Using Simmel’s study as a tool to analyze the two short stories, the paper will comment on and compare the manner in which the Irish and the Egyptian urban texts decipher the code of their modern metropoles to interpret in what ways Simmel’s insights illuminate our understanding of the dilemma of the metropolitan subject.  In this paper the urban and literary theory will complement each other in shedding light on the emergence of new forms of socialization. The paper reaches the conclusion that the overall image of the metropolis portrayed in the two short stories was constructed through the mutilated sensibilities of the metropolitan subjects that have become dispirited by the routine of their daily lives. The two protagonists – Mr. Duffy and Mr. Abdallah - end up living like strangers who maintain minimal comunication with others due the cold and unfeeling rationality they adopt to protect themselves against the overstimulation of their dehumanizing metropoles.