ULYSSES

Content
T.S.ELIOT ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH
THE USE OF MYTH JOYCE AND HOMER
CHARACTERS
SETTING AND STRUCTURE
PLOT SUMMARY
NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
THEMES

T. S. ELIOT: Ulysses, Order and Myth

Eliot thought that the classical tradition was fundamental,

he was the first to praise this device of imposing a myth on

a contemporary experience.
It is a way of controlling, of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history.
Mr Joyces parallel use of the Odyssey has a great
importance. It has the importance of a scientific
discovery.
Instead of narrative method we may now use the mythical
method.

Basic Principles
Any moment may represent the whole life of an individual -

Everything is worth writing about, everything is important

Traditional novel (Defoe, Richardson etc.) followed the

characters from birth to death, now we get inside the

consciousness of the characters.

Consciousness preserves memories of the past,

impressions of the present, anticipations of the future

Sometimes, we experience a sort of revelation (epiphany =

sth apparently unimportant that turns out to be crucial in our

life)

THE USE OF MYTH JOYCE AND HOMER

Joyce based the framework of his novel on the structure of one of

the greatest and most influential works in world literature, The

Odyssey, by Homer. In this epic poem Homer presented the journey
of life as a heroic adventure. The protagonist of this epic tale,
Odysseus (Roman name, Ulysses), encounters many perilsincluding
giants, angry gods, and monstersduring his voyage home to
Ithaca, Greece, after the Trojan War.
In Joyce's 20th Century novel, the author also depicts life as a

journey, in imitation of Homer. But Joyces Ulysses is different and

his activities parallel in some way the adventures of Homer's
Ulysses.
The Odyssey was used as a parallel text, creating

correspondences between the Homeric poem and the novel

 It was meant to be a sort of guideline to organise the plot

and not to get lost in the modern world and in the peoples
mind
This enabled Joyce to give to his book a symbolic and

universal dimension suggesting that his character

(L.Bloom) is a modern Ulysses, the man who can stand for
humanity, a sort of modern Everyman and the setting
(Dublin) becomes symbolic of the whole world and to his
characters who come to represent an eternal mankind

CHARACTERS
Stephen Dedalus
A young Latin teacher and aspiring writer
Already the protagonist of A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man

He represents:
the artist
Joyces alter ego
Joyces fictional projection of himself

Stephen-Joyce thinks of himself as a victim of

incomprehension in his own land

He has rejected the Catholic faith of his
family
He decides to leave Ireland to follow art
= Also Joyce rejected Irish life, condamned
Irish provincialism (paralysis), wanted to find
out his own identity choosing a voluntary
exile becoming the most cosmopolitan of Irish
writers, open to the influence of other
cultures and intellectual traditions

Leopold Bloom

A middle-aged man of Jewish origins

He has rejected the Jewish faith of his father and

feels guilty
He feels lonely and powerless because of his
wifes infidelity, his fathers suicide and his sons
death
He represents the citizen, the middle-class man
He wanders around Dublin as Ulysses wanders
around the Mediterranean but his adventures
consists of getting breakfast, feeding his cat,
going to a funeral, doing his job, visiting pubs or
restaurants, and thinking about his unfaithful wife.

Molly Bloom
Normal middle-class person
Good-looking, sensual woman in her

maturity
She is chronically unfaithful to her
husband
She is ironically alluded to as Penelope

SETTING AND STRUCTURE

Set in Dublin on a single day - 16 June
1904
18 episodes divided into three sections:
1.

(Episodes 1 3) Telemachia (adventures of Stephen-Telemachus)

dominated by the figure of the Son This section presents Stephen's
life on a typical day in which he finds Dublin depressing. He is
pessimistic about realizing his dream to become a published
author.

2.

(Episodes 4 15) Odyssey (adventures of Leopold-Ulysses)

dominated by the figure of the Father This section presents his
voyage through an ordinary day in Dublin. Joyce describes in detail
both Dublin and Bloom, presenting his free-flowing thoughtsmany
of them either about his unfaithful wife, Molly, or other women.

3.

(Episodes 16 18) Nostos (Bloom returns home to Molly-Penelope)

Dedalus goes to Bloom's home and talks with him for several

Each episode corresponds to a section of the

Odyssey
1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus
4. Calypso
5. Lotus Eaters
6. Hades
7. Aeolus
8. Lestrygonians
9. Scylla and Charybdis
10.Wandering Rocks

11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

Sirens
Cyclops
Nausicaa
Oxen of the Sun
Circe
Eumaeus
Ithaca
Penelope

PLOT SUMMARY

-The following summary presents only the highlights of Joyce's

long, complicated novel. The book is too complex to include all
the significant details.

-Leopold Bloom leaves home at 8 oclock on Thursday

morning and returns at 2 at night
-In his wanderings he meets Stephen Dedalus, an artist
-Few incidents occur. Stephen quarrels with some
friends and leaves the place he lived in
-He wanders the streets of Dublin in search for a father
and a home

-Bloom buys breakfast, attends a funeral,

goes to his office, visits the National Library,
meets various people
-Molly commits adultery in the afternoon
-Bloom comes across Stephen several times
during the day; he comes to know Stephen
has quarrelled with his father and tries to
help him. At midnight he rescues him from a
brawl in a brothel and adopts him by
taking him home and offering him a shelter

-They talk about various subjects. When

Stephen leaves Leopold goes to bed
-Molly asks him questions about the day
-He asks her to serve him breakfast in bed
the following day and falls asleep
-The book ends with Mollys meditations as
she lies half asleep in bed

STYLE AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

Ulysses is an experimental novel in the modenist tradition.

New experimental techniques

William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)
Consciousness a river or a stream are
metaphors by which it is most naturally
described... let us agree to call it the stream of
thought, or consciousness or of subjective life

Stream-of-consciousness fiction is concerned with the area which is

normally beyond communication:
Speech level

vs

Pre-speech level

The novelist has to explore:

what the mental process is started by and what it consists of

(memories, dreams, impressions, sensations, intuitions)

how it works (symbols, association of ideas, juxtaposition of images)

In stream of consciousness, a term coined by American psychologist

William James (1842-1910), an author portrays a characters
continuing stream of thoughts as they occur, regardless of whether
they make sense or whether the next thought in a sequence relates
to the previous thought.

Interior monologue: the literary instrument used to translate that

phenomenon into words
- Direct interior monologue
- in first person
- sudden shifts from thought to thought
- no apparent connection of subject, verb etc.
- no evident intervention of the ordering mind of a narrator
- direct access to the mind of the character
- often no punctuation
- This exposes a characters memories, fantasies, apprehensions,

ambitions, rational and irrational ideas, and so on. In the last chapter
of the novel, Joyce omits punctuation entirely in order to reproduce
the uninterrupted flow of thoughts. Joyce also uses numerous
sentences and phrases from Latin, French, German, Spanish, Russian
(transliterated), Italian, and other languages. In addition, he uses
refined language, vulgar language, slang and even coined new words

THEMES
Every human goes on a journey, just as the mythical Odysseus

(Roman name, Ulysses) did in his heroic adventures in Homers

Odyssey.
Life as journey
But in the real life of modern man, this journey is generally
uneventful, as in Joyce's Ulysses, rather than heroic.
Characters as heroes or anti-heroes
Classical heroes were strong, brave, corageous, loyal, respected
and often of high rank (Queens or Kings)
Leopold Bloom does not share any of these features, the idea of L.B.
as an epic hero is laughable, he represents the average modern
man, a 20th century hero
He is able to face everyday problems with his rich humanity in spite
of his sense of loneliness and diversity His is a modern battle
against the lack of values, the emptiness and futility of our society

The plot has been interpreted as illustrating the main theme of a

father looking for a son and a son looking for a father

Bloom has an adolescent

daughter; his only son
died 11 days after birth

Stephen: a surrogate for

his missing fatherhood

Stephen has abandoned his

choleric, alcoholic father
He cant live with his family
any more
He is momentarily in
search of a paternal
figure

They are representatives of two opposite ways of life:

Leopold - the citizen
characterized by patience, a sound attitude to life,
tolerance, intellectual curiosity; a reliable person
the average modern man, an anti-hero, the modern Ulysses
most episodes are seen from his point of view or directly
through his practical mind
Stephen - the artist who desires freedom above all
like Daedalus, he is a rebel, he struggles against authority,
his family, he looks for ideals and his own identity
he also has the defects of the intellectual: he is selfish, selfinvolved, not interested in the rest of the world
He thinks in highly philosophical terms

The novel presents many other themes, or sub-themes:

Religion
Guilt
Infidelity and sexual temptation
Anti-semitism