Ulysses Explained

How Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare Inform Joyce's Modernist Vision

David Weir

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137482877
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

When it comes to James Joyce's landmark work, Ulysses, the influence of three literary giants, Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante, cannot be overlooked. Examining Joyce in terms of Homeric narrative, Dantesque structure, and Shakespearean plot, Weir rediscovers Joyce's novel through the lens of his renowned predecessors.

Chapter 1

Homeric Narrative

The title of the book is Ulysses, not Odysseus. Joyce’s choice to use the Roman name of the Greek hero for an Irish book is clarified by the last word of the first chapter: “usurper” (1.743). The Roman name was also the one favored by British writers in the nineteenth century (as in Tennyson’s celebrated poem) so in a roundabout, associative way, Joyce establishes a parallel between Roman usurpation of Greek culture and British domination of Irish culture. This meaning circulates throughout the book in one form or another. In the first chapter of Ulysses, the Englishman Haines acts the part of the suitors usurping Odysseus’s possessions and Telemachus’s patrimony. An Oxford-educated gentleman who speaks Gaelic, Haines has come to Ireland to collect the culture of the locals; later, he literally usurps Stephen’s place at a literary soiree at the home of the novelist George Moore (see 9.306), possibly Ireland’s most celebrated literary figure in 1904. Haines’s usurpation of Stephen’s cultural patrimony is really a form of British colonialism, a fact signaled by Mulligan’s comment about Haines’s father: “His old fellow made his tin selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other” (1.156–57). The material imperialism of the father in southern Africa makes the son’s cultural colonialism in Ireland possible, a situation that is fairly reversed in the case of Stephen Dedalus, the Telemachus figure, whose “old fellow” (9.614) provides no material patrimony at all to support his son’s cultural and artistic interests.

This last point needs emphasis: in the early chapters of the Odyssey, Telemachus is literally on a quest to find his father; in Ulysses, Stephen must be on some kind of metaphorical father-quest, since he could easily find his father Simon Dedalus if he really wanted to—by looking for him in any of the pubs he is known to frequent or by going to his house. The last option Stephen rejects outright (“Home also I cannot go” [1.740]), so the Odyssean parallelism that makes Stephen a Telemachus figure must involve some set of alternative meanings that, in fact, make the modern character significantly different from his Homeric counterpart. The following discussion will explore more fully what happens when modern characters enact a classical narrative, but, for now, it is enough to note that the book itself seems to take account of the difference. On the first page of the novel, Buck Mulligan says to Stephen: “Your absurd name. An ancient Greek!” (1.34). What Mulligan means is that the name Dedalus is an absurd one for an Irishman to have, but, at the same time, the book may mean that the name Telemachus is also absurd because the actions of the modern character do not conform to those of his ancient Greek prototype.

This much is suggested by another comment Mulligan makes in the first chapter: “O shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!” (1.561; one of Mulligan’s nicknames for Stephen is “Kinch, the knifeblade” [1.55]). Here, Stephen is imagined to be on a father-quest, only now the father is the drunken, naked Noah, whose sons Japhet and Shem cover with a garment (but without looking at him; see Genesis 9:20–23). The Old Testament story of Noah combines with the Greek narratives of Odysseus and Daedalus to produce a “Telemachus” figure in Ulysses who seeks a substitute for his real father, who resembles the drunken Noah, in the mythical father Daedalus, who is an archetype of the artist. This meaning carries over from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which ends with a line from Stephen’s diary: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” (P 253). The “old artificer” is the mythical Daedalus, whom Stephen takes as a model father instead of his actual father, Simon. At the same time, Joyce’s diction implies how hard it might be to make the substitution since “stand” is a word that connotes a context more in line with the drunkenness of Noah (as in the phrase “stand a round of drinks”). In Ulysses, Stephen-as-Telemachus seeks a father who can stand in for his biological father, Simon Dedalus.

This does not mean, however, that the quest for the surrogate father is necessarily a search for an actual human being (although that is a reading favored by many, who understand the alternative father to be Leopold Bloom).1 Rather, the quest involves not so much a search for a person but more a query into the meaning of fatherhood. This meaning involves a comparison of artistic creation to sexual reproduction: Stephen is a literary artist who seeks to “father” works of art, but so far, he has had only limited success. As a character later says to him, he will merit recognition as an artist only when “something more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father” (14.1118–19). In other words, Stephen does not seek to find a father so much as he tries to become one in a special artistic sense. The Homeric narrative needs the Shakespearean plot to convey this meaning, and while the reader does not become fully acquainted with Stephen’s Shakespeare theory until chapter 9, it is hinted at in “Telemachus” when Mulligan “explains” the theory to Haines: “It’s quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father” (1.555–57). Haine’s confusion is instructive: “What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?” (1.558). Mulligan means that the theory makes Shakespeare the ghost of his own father, but Haines thinks the meaning is that Stephen is his own father’s ghost. This Shakespearean identification of son with father helps establish the metaphorical nature of Stephen’s Homeric role as Telemachus, but it also shows just how curious and complicated the Homeric correspondence can be.

For all its complications, the Homeric narrative is useful to a first-time reader of Ulysses because it provides a certain ground for the action of the novel, so the reader can find meaning in the modern text by making comparisons with the ancient one. But one discovers early on how variable the Homeric parallels can be and how they differ in meaning from chapter to chapter. The purpose of the following sections is to explain these differences and their importance to an understanding of the novel. In a way, reading Ulysses is an Odyssean adventure in itself because, like Odysseus, the reader must navigate his or her way through episodes that are as different from one another as the various perils the Homeric hero encountered.2 And, just as the strategy for dealing with the monsters Scylla and Charybdis cannot be applied to the encounter with the Cyclops, so the reader must make adjustments to the demands of each new chapter in order to make his or her way home and reach the end of the book. Like Odysseus, whose epithet is polytropos (lit. “many turnings”), the reader must be myriad-minded to deal with a book that takes so many figures through so many tropes and turns.3

Homer’s Odyssey has come down to us as a volume of 24 books and 3 parts: the Telemachia (books 1–4); the Odyssey proper (5–12); and the Nostos, or homecoming (13–24). The 18 chapters of Ulysses are likewise divided into a Telemachia (chapters 1–3), an Odyssey (4–15), and a Nostos (16–18). This structural comparison suggests that any attempt to read James Joyce’s Ulysses as a modern Odyssey is doomed from the start. Homer’s Nostos is half the epic, whereas Joyce’s is about a fifth of the novel. Most of Joyce’s narrative concerns the odyssey or wanderings of his “Odysseus” figure, Leopold Bloom. A chapter-by-chapter comparison of the two books is therefore impossible; in fact, a single book of the Odyssey, book 12, furnished Joyce with the Homeric titles of four chapters: “Scylla and Charybdis” (chapter 9), “Wandering Rocks” (10), “Sirens” (11), and “Oxen of the Sun” (14). Likewise, Homer’s book 9 provides the germ for “Lotus Eaters” (5) and “Cyclops” (12). Despite the maddening lack of pattern, however, helpful parallels emerge when the two books are compared: both the Odyssey and Ulysses organize their episodes around a larger narrative of departure, wandering, and return. Telemachus may leave his tower with a greater sense of purpose than Stephen Dedalus does his; Odysseus’s wandering is mostly out of his control, whereas there seems to be a method to Bloom’s meandering; and Odysseus assuredly returns to his home in a more heroic fashion than Bloom does his—but both books organize their vast, disparate materials into similar narrative sections: Telemachia, Odyssey, and Nostos.

1. Telemachus

A basic reading of the Homeric parallel in chapter 1 has Stephen approximating Telemachus at the outset of the Odyssey, when the young son of Odysseus is threatened by the usurpation of his father’s home on the Greek island of Ithaca by the suitors of his mother Penelope. The goddess Athena appears to Telemachus in the guise of Mentes, a family friend, and urges him to search for news of his father. If Stephen is the modern Telemachus, then the milkmaid is “maybe a messenger” (1.399–400), a rather unwise Athena figure, but a stimulus nonetheless for Stephen to leave. Mulligan and Haines fulfill the role of suitor-usurpers in different ways. Haines belongs to a nation that has literally usurped the Irish, while Mulligan, either in the symbolic role of priest or in his literal role as scientist, usurps the high position traditionally given to the bardic poet in Irish culture. Significantly, Mulligan refers to Stephen as a bard, albeit ironically, when he borrows Stephen’s handkerchief to wipe his razorblade after shaving: “gazing over the handkerchief, he said: — The bard’s noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen!” (1.71–72). Stephen is sensitive to the compromised status of the Irish artist in modern Ireland and is acutely aware of his own diminished role in contemporary culture. This role is dramatized in the encounter with the old woman who delivers milk to the three young men on the morning of June 16, 1904. Since Joyce himself identifies the milkwoman with Athena in the schema he devised for this chapter, the episode merits a closer look.

We know from the Portrait and from Stephen Hero (the first draft version of that novel) that Stephen hopes to produce literary art out of ordinary, everyday experience and not, say, out of the distant mists of Gaelic mythology. He is sensitive to what chance events might signify, ever alert to some “sudden spiritual manifestation” that might emerge from “the vulgarity of speech or of gesture, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (SH, 211). In Stephen Hero, Joyce uses the ecclesiastical term epiphany for these moments of sudden illumination: just as the Magi were made aware of the divine significance of the Christ child, so the artist might become aware of some deeper significance to ordinary events if he attends to those events with “extreme care” (SH, 211). On this morning, Stephen suddenly invests the milkwoman with symbolic meaning or, rather, understands that she is a bearer of meanings that he has not noticed before. The woman has been delivering milk to the tower for at least ten days, a pint a morning for the first seven days and a quart for the last three, a detail that lets us know that the houseguest Haines has been staying with Stephen and Mulligan for three nights (see 1.442–43). As Stephen watches her measure out the quart of milk, he starts to think that she might be a “messenger” (1.400, 406) who brings meaning as well as milk. He refers to the milkwoman as “[s]ilk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old days” (1.403–4). The “her” in Stephen’s interior monologue refers to Ireland (G, 21), and, in this newly personified role, the woman goes about “serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer” (1.405)—that is, Haines and Mulligan—while ignoring Stephen: “me she slights” (1.419).

Stephen’s interpretation of the milkwoman at first seems ponderous and overdetermined: after all, the woman is just delivering the milk. But, in a way, Stephen’s “reading” of the character is, if anything, underdetermined because she also bears meanings related to the Shakespeare plot and the Dante design (see chapters 2 and 3), not to mention the Homeric narrative. That narrative is implied when Stephen thinks of the milkwoman as the “lowly form of an immortal” (1.404), which, in a way, she is if we think of her as Athena, come to the Martello Tower to prompt the Telemachus figure to find his father or, in Stephen’s case, to find the means within himself to become the cultural father of his nation. The episode recalls in some ways a passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where Stephen reflects on his artistic responsibility. Near the end of the novel, Stephen imagines “the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland” and wonders how he might “hit their conscience or cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters before their squires begat upon them that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own” (P, 238). The passage shows that Stephen feels a sense of urgency about the need to establish a new cultural patrimony to supplant that of the Protestant patricians.

The milkwoman is obviously not a daughter of the Protestant patrician class but of the Catholic peasant class; nonetheless, she embodies that quality of Irish ignobility that Stephen seeks to counter culturally with his art. But, curiously, Stephen has something in common with the milkwoman: ignorance of the Irish language. This ignorance is signified by a gap in the text when Haines says something in Gaelic. All Stephen hears when Haines speaks is “the loud voice,” after which he asks the milkwoman, “Do you understand what he says” (1.422, 424). She guesses that Haines is speaking French: a telling error in a way, since it sets up a contrast between the backward culture of contemporary Ireland that Stephen rejects and the continental culture he is attracted to. But, by and large, the “Athena” figure in this chapter is mostly ironic, a messenger who delivers wisdom and instruction to “Telemachus” by means of ignorance.

2. Nestor

A similar reversal of Homeric meanings occurs in chapter 2, which bears the Homeric title “Nestor.” In the Odyssey, Telemachus leaves his home in Ithaca for Pylos, seeking news of his father. Athena in the guise of Mentor instructs him to “[g]o to old Nestor, master charioteer, / so we may broach the storehouse of his mind. / Ask him with courtesy, and in his wisdom / he will tell you history and no lies” (O, 35). Nestor gives Telemachus a brief history of the events following the Trojan War but no information about Odysseus; instead, he urges Telemachus to make inquiries of Menelaus. After sacrificing a heifer, Nestor fits Telemachus out with a chariot so he can make his way to the home of Menelaus, traveling eastward. Joyce parallels Homer by having Mr. Deasy, the headmaster at the boys’ school in the village of Dalkey where Stephen teaches, hold forth on Irish history.

The headmaster is quite explicit in his linkage of Homeric narrative and Irish history: “For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and her leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low” (2.390–94). In this instance, the Homeric narrative actually has the effect of distorting Irish history, since the first “faithless wife” Deasy has in mind, Devorgilla, was married to Tiernan O’Rourke, not Dermot MacMurrough (1135–71), and while MacMurrough did run off with her in 1152, she would appear to have had little to do with MacMurrough’s petition to Henry II for aid after he had been deposed as King of Leinster in 1167 or with the subsequent Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland two years later (G, 39).4 Likewise, Charles Stewart Parnell’s mistress, Katherine O’Shea, is hardly the Helen figure Deasy imagines since her husband, Captain William Henry O’Shea, had full knowledge of the affair and tolerated it for ten years before filing for divorce in 1890 (G, 4). Other, less problematic Homeric parallels include Deasy’s horse pictures as an echo of Nestor’s reputation as a charioteer and his letter on hoof and mouth disease as an echo of the sacrifice of bulls and heifers to the gods. But specific parallels are less important than the broader irony: if the Homeric parallel likens Telemachus’s literal quest for his father Odysseus to Stephen’s figurative efforts to establish his cultural patrimony, then Deasy is the least likely person to support those efforts because of his Anglo-Protestant sympathies.

Deasy’s account of the past is fraught with error, but the main point of the history lesson he delivers to Stephen is clear: “All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God” (2.380–81). The formulation justifies Anglo-Protestant rule in Ireland and establishes the political status quo as something outside the realm of human control. In the first chapter, the Englishman Haines subscribes to a similar view when he tells Stephen, “We feel in England we have treated you [Irish] rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame” (1.648–49). Stephen recalls Haines’s words in the midst of his colloquy with Deasy (see 2.246–47), making the link between the two characters’ colonialist ideologies clear. The chapter also takes up the theme of usurpation from the previous chapter, with the colonial subjection of Ireland to Great Britain being likened once again to the imperial subjugation of Greece to Rome. At the beginning of the chapter, Stephen is in the midst of a history lesson about Pyrrhus’s costly victory over the Romans in his defense of the Greek colony Tarentum in southern Italy. The military engagement is the source of the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” since the battle so depleted Greek forces as to lead to ultimate defeat (G, 30). “That phrase the world had remembered” (2.15), Stephen thinks, and one of his concerns seems to be how the reality of past events is diminished when it is reduced to a narrative account; this much is suggested by Stephen’s reflection about the boys in his class: “For them too history was a tale like any other, their land a pawnshop” (2.46–47). History changes depending on who tells it and how, so no single narrative can be adequate to its conveyance. In Ulysses, Joyce employs Homeric narrative to convey two rather different Irish narratives. In the first chapter, his “Athena” represents the Irish peasant class, and in the second chapter, his “Nestor” embodies the Protestant ascendant class. The first group makes intellectual progress impossible through its unquestioned acceptance of Catholicism, while the second makes political progress impossible through its absolute embrace of the British state. In chapter 1, Stephen takes stock of his historical circumstances when he tells Haines that he is “a servant of two masters, [. . .] an English and an Italian”—namely, “The imperial British state, [. . .] and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church” (1.637, 643–44). Joyce signals the parallelism of the Greek and the Irish narratives by singling out for correspondence (see Appendix B) critical characters in the Odyssey who become, in Ulysses, distinctive representatives of key social classes in turn-of-the-century colonial Ireland.

3. Proteus

The first-time reader of Ulysses inevitably finds the third chapter, “Proteus,” more challenging than the first two. “Telemachus” and “Nestor” both offer fairly naturalistic accounts, respectively, of Stephen’s home life and his work life. His intellectual and emotional life is also represented in those chapters through his interior monologue, which is fairly easy to distinguish from the dialogue and from the narrative voice. The Homeric narrative in both chapters also appears to be quite understandable: Athena and Nestor both wear the mask of irony which distorts their features and turns them into the milkwoman and Mr. Deasy, characters who reverse the roles of their classical prototypes but nonetheless succeed in hel...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Homeric Narrative
• Chapter 2: Shakespearean Plot
• Chapter 3: Dantesque Design
• Afterword
• Appendix A: Synopsis of Ulysses
• Appendix B: Consolidated Schema
• Appendix C: The Odyssey and Ulysses: Episode and Chapter Comparison
• Appendix D: Modernist Sexuality in Exiles
• Notes
• Bibliography