ULYSSES
Content
 T.S.ELIOT – «ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH»
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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 Joyce’s 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.
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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 perils–including giants, angry gods, and monsters–during 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 Joyce’s 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 people’s 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
Joyce’s alter ego
Joyce’s 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
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guilty
He feels lonely and powerless because of his wife’s
infidelity, his father’s suicide and his son’s 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 freeflowing thoughts–many 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 hours. The novel ends
with a chapter on Molly. It consists of more than 30 pages occupied by
sentences (24.195 words) with no punctuation except for the period at the end
of the novel.
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. Sirens
12. Cyclops
13. Nausicaa
14. Oxen of the Sun
15. Circe
16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. 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 o’clock 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 Molly’s 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 character’s 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 character’s 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
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name, Ulysses) did in his heroic adventures in Homer’s 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
Stephen has abandoned his
Bloom has an adolescent
choleric, alcoholic father
daughter; his only son died
11 days after birth
He can’t live with his family
any more
Stephen: a surrogate for his
missing fatherhood
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, self-involved,
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