“Odysseus is not a hero,” a Jesuit priest told James Joyce at Clongowes Wood College, but the young boy disagreed (O’Connor 1967: 104). All his life, he would admire the canny wanderer who survived challenges by a mixture of will-power and craftiness. He told Pádraic Colum that the Greek epics were “outside European culture” (O’Connor 1967: 77), a fact which left Homer free to experiment with new ideas of narrative and character. Much the same was true of Joyce’s own predicament: he was not yet “James Joyce” when he wrote Ulysses, but a relatively unknown artist from a peripheral country and so at liberty to attempt strange, unprecedented things without provoking choruses of disapproval. Over one hundred generations of humankind separated him from Homer, yet somehow the Odyssey, with its tales of travel and encounters with unfamiliar peoples, seemed the quintessentially modern story. Small wonder that Penguin Classics have sold far more copies of it than of the Iliad.
Through the centuries, the Odyssey had exercised a magical appeal over many authors, who wished only to retell it in poetry or in verse. But the chances of producing something worthy to stand beside the original were almost nil. “You are only a second-rate poet,” scoffed one journalist to Patrick Kavanagh on reading his sonnet called “Epic,” only to receive the amused rejoinder: “Since Homer, we all are” (O’Brien 1974: 64). But Kavanagh had his wisdom too:
I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin,
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: “I made the Iliad from such a local row.
Gods make their own importance.”
(Kavanagh 1972: 136)
Although as a child Joyce loved the Lamb version of the Odyssey, he was himself rather scathing about “feeble and second-rate” versions by many other artists: “there is little point in imitation on this scale unless it is a means of saying something new” (Jenkyns 1992: 53). He also realized that Homer had performed the repetition trick first, using the Odyssey to reduce its predecessor and rival the Iliad to the status of a mere footnote. Homer’s own travel tale provided perhaps the first major model of how a prior text could be trumped. Early in the narrative, he has Telemachus suggest that many people enjoy the latest version of a story far more deeply than they relish any of its predecessors.
A modern reviser of ancient texts must be like a good lover: faithful without seeming so. If it would be a sin for him or her to neglect a past work, the other great offence would be to repeat it exactly. Joyce felt himself animated by Homer’s own unfinished energies. “The spirit of Homer was always beside me to sustain and encourage me,” he said, “I believe that this was the first time that he did such a thing, since he could hardly have been concerned with all those feeble imitations that every second generation feels duty-bound to produce” (Potts 1979: 158). If the arts lie dreaming of what is to come, then Homer’s ghost may have been waiting for just such a translator, capable of taking a deeper x-ray of his narrative than any prior version could offer. For Homer would have known, as all writers must, that only the future has critical methods subtle enough to bring out all the vital elements of the original work. Being multi-plotted, epic must always contain within it all possible future narratives.
If Odysseus was destined to travel across space and time, so also was the Odyssey. It represents, in the words of Carol Dougherty, “not so much the story of a journey as the journey of a story” (Dougherty 2001: 75). With its layered structure of flashbacks, reveries, inscribed tales, and multiple narrators, it has an oddly modern feel to it. Odysseus is himself a recognizably modern kind of protagonist. His authority to tell a story comes less from the Muses than from the pressure of a felt experience. Like his later analogue, Leopold Bloom, he has learned his lessons in “the university of life” (U 17 555–6). When Calypso promises immortality if he will only stay with her, he says no, in what must be the first ever tale in which a human refuses such an offer; and his canny creator knew that there would be other, future Odysseys, even as Joyce humbly sensed that there would be later versions of his Ulysses, such as Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
Odysseus was hardly a conventional military hero – more a kind of modern conscientious objector. He knew that the official reason for the war – defense of the ancestral culture – was trumped up, since the real underlying motive was the search for raw materials and new markets. Accordingly, he tried to dodge the recruiting sergeant, but to no avail. Much as he rejected military heroics, he also refused the role of sexual conqueror. Circe, the Sirens, Calypso: these women take the sexual initiative in wooing their men, much as Bloom is given seedcake by Molly at their first lovemaking on Howth Head. Far from being a sexual predator, Odysseus seems rather like an absolute bourgeois, who knows how to be passive and vigilant, how to wait – a forecast not just of the modern intellectual, Hamlet, but of the secret charm of café society. He is supposed to be intent on returning to Ithaca, a journey which might have taken a couple of weeks but instead consumes many, many years, and, as he tarries, he anticipates something of the pleasures of the modern flâneur, something of the spectatorial delights of a Leopold Bloom. Bloom also knows the pleasures of delay, even as he sets out from Molly’s boudoir: “in the act of going, he stayed to straighten the bedspread” (U 4 308–9).
“Who will deliver us from the Greeks and Romans?” asked many a Romantic author, to which Joyce answered “I will.” The root meaning of “translate” is “conquer,” because the translator half-hopes to displace the original text, or at least to release the energies latent in it but as yet not fully expressed. It is as if one molecule, brought into contact with another, releases a new “third” energy after their collision. To remember any past work, one must agree to forget many of its elements, and so the involuntary memory, often triggered by associative mechanisms, will have not just an element of surprise but also the force of a revelation. In Joyce’s case, what is revealed is the modernity of Homer’s greatest tale. Joyce understood that the modern mind was attracted to primitive art not simply as a reaction against the dessication of the new order, but as an expression of the fact that his generation had yet to master the new technology. They were, in effect, still the primitives of the electronic civilization. T. S. Eliot said that Joyce used Homer’s story as a way “of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (Eliot 1923: 681). But Homer was himself using his tale in the attempt to impose a semblance of order on a chaotic world which had, in fact, been shattered by his hero’s travels and by what he had found on them. The Odyssey was “trying to construct a reading of the worlds and peoples of its own mythic past in order to make sense of a tumultuous and volatile present” (Dougherty 2001: 9) and so Homer decoded various alien cultures in order to recode them for his own, much as Joyce would turn Homer’s “then” into his own “now.”
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described the project of the Odyssey as an attempt to destroy mythical thinking and replace it with the rational order of a trading world. In the tale, Odysseus is treated often as a traveling salesman or barterer, and even taunted in Book Eight for being a profiteering merchant rather than an aristocratic athlete. His refusal to be seduced by the song of the Sirens is really a rejection of the mythical by a prudent rationalist (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 32). The bourgeois wins by doing nothing, by simply waiting, by deferring gratification: Odysseus refuses to eat the lotus-plant or the sacred cows and opts instead to be both sacrifice and priest, in an astonishing anticipation of the role of Jesus in the New Testament. In like manner Bloom offers Stephen Dedalus the inadvertent eucharist of coffee and a bun at the climactic meeting of Ulysses.
The bourgeois ego thus owes its existence to the sacrifice of the present to the future, even as the Odyssey deferred some of its gratifications until Ulysses. In the old story, Odysseus saves his life at one point by losing his very name, just as Jesus will offer a “new” code by which whoever loses his life will save it, and in Joyce’s book Bloom will eventually become simply “the man.” In all of these narratives, a passive but caring person achieves a sort of divine status, at once victim and god, by virtue of a sort of anonymous celebrity. Odysseus’ name was a compound of outis, Greek for “nobody” and zeus’ meaning a “god,” and his tale was a parable of how to use your ordinariness and anonymity to win a final victory. (This was the application of the same technique of the “everyday” by which Homer was trumping the war-driven Iliad.) Among the lotus-eating sybarites, Odysseus triumphs by just working hard; and, when faced with the one-eyed monster, he bribes him with a drink in yet another audacious anticipation of the words of Jesus consecrating the bread and wine: “Take, Cyclops, and drink. Wine goes well with human flesh” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 67). Bloom will offer his secular equivalents, coffee and bun, to Stephen, as a revised version. If sacrifice was once designed by humans to deceive gods, now it is designed by godlike humans as a sacrifice offered ultimately to themselves.
Joyce seized on this anti-mythological thinking behind the Odyssey, in order to free his own generation from old, useless myths. He knew that the First World War was not a battle for love and honor among nations but a pretext for the steel barons to seek new outlets and markets. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet would do, Odysseus feigned madness, in the attempt to avoid bloody battle. His visit to the underworld was important mainly for his triumphant return from Hades, by which the protagonist annulled the idea of death and the storehouse of myths which encoded it. That liberation, too, would be repeated in the life of Jesus (who “descended into Hell, but the third day rose again from the dead”), and of Leopold Bloom in entering and exiting Glasnevin Cemetery.
The notion of an underworld is as crucial to Joyce as his dramatization of the subconscious. If the Celtic hero Cuchulain might walk again through the streets of Dublin, as Yeats suggested, then so also might Odysseus. Yeats simply put on plays rendering ancient Ireland in his contemporary theater, but Joyce felt that a truer way in which to evoke past people might be to imagine them in our space, not us in theirs. Louis Aragon beautifully captured the underlying concept in his Paris Peasant: “our cities are peopled with unrecognised sphinxes” (Aragon 1994: 27). So, just as the rebels of the 1916 Rising used the underground passages of Dublin for communication and escape, so did Joyce expose the life beneath the city’s surface, not only in the story of how Tom Rochford rescued a man from an underground gas chamber (“He’s a hero,” U 10 492), but also how the underground passages in the tale of Cuchulain might insinuate themselves back into the city’s story. The man, like Tom Rochford or Cuchulain, who comes back safe and hale from his foray underground is the true and only hero of the spirit.
If the Odyssey was arguably the first major assault on mythological thinking, then Ulysses, by lacerating the earlier, now-sacred text, is guilty of nothing more than an application of Homer’s underlying logic. The modern translator is never merely an aggressor, for he or she also helps to create the aura of the original. But by setting a new text into vibration with the ancient one, they also serve to decanonize the original. Homer, in this scheme, becomes a botched, incompletely imagined, ur-version of Joyce, much as Simon Dedalus is presented in Ulysses as an unsatisfactory father of Stephen. Every major work of art contains and reinforces our sense of the strangeness of its original, even as it shows how elements of the modern may be found latent in the prehistorical. The converse is also true. Elements of the prehistorical may sometimes be found in the modern, which is forever in danger of lapsing back into mythological mentalities, as in the anti-Semitic outbursts against Bloom in the “Cyclops” chapter. (Autocratic nationalists have often hated and despised travelers and seafarers, who are notoriously hybrid and innovative in their sense of cultural identity.)
Joyce sensed that the surviving elements of premodern thought in his world might yet become the basis for a common culture in the future and that they need not signal repression or denial. That, after all, was the understanding upon which Yeats and his collaborators were basing the Irish literary revival, and there is good reason to see Joyce as someone who felt himself a part (however angular a part) of that movement. If the story of Odysseus anticipates many features of the lives of the civic bourgeoisie, that may say more about the vulnerability of that modern class than it does about the permanence of the ancient world, for Ulysses is, among other things, an elegy for the public-spirited bourgeois world that was fast disappearing as Joyce wrote his book. A central theme right through the Odyssey is its insistence that the solitary traveler really is alone, isolated by his own sophistication from the superstitious activities among primitive peoples, whose codes he views with the incredulity of a scandalized anthropologist. The song of the Sirens is, by definition, based on the pull of the past, and the worship of that past, though seductive, can only strike the busy Odysseus as an attempt to wish away the challenges of the present. Bloom voices a similar reservation when he rephrases the old patriotic song “Who Fears to Speak of Ninety-Eight?” as “Who fears to speak of nineteen-four?” (U 11 1072–3). Calypso, Circe, the Sirens themselves are all nothing but “a stylisation of what can no longer be celebrated” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 43). Small wonder, then, that Joyce would key his own lament for a dying civic bourgeois culture to such a story of lost worlds. Ithaca began to generate elegies to lost cultures at just that moment when it began to appropriate and abolish them, much as the modern discipline of sociology began to emerge only when society was no longer felt to fit like a glove. The logic of the Odyssey is the same as that in so many tales which involve a shipwreck – that “the solution to Old World problems would be found only in the ideal, Golden Age setting of the New World across the seas” (Dougherty 2001: 85), on the other side of a shipwreck. The catastrophe must precede the clarification, to paraphrase a character in Ulysses, before the tables of the law can be set down in the language of the outlaw.
That new land may in fact simply be one’s old land returned to and seen now in a fresh light. It is dangerous to leave one’s country, as Joyce showed in his play Exiles, but more dangerous still to go back to it. Odysseus returns to Ithaca a chastened man, but with a sense that he may now know enough to see his place as if for the first time. The Exodus narrative of the Old Testament was different, since it told the story of a type of return, long delayed, to a land which the people of Israel had never possessed (Hartog 2001: 20) and in which a messiah would appear. The Greeks were different, not feeling the need for a messiah and sensing that all their gods were near at hand.
The gods of the Greeks were social beings, possessed of a past and a present reality. They were made in man’s image, not pictured as mythical monsters or fabulous birds, but as people with human organs. This humanization was itself a bold and modernizing act. It suggested that if man could create gods in his image, then he might himself be godly (Finley 2002: 139). The returned Odysseus at the close has the knowledge, even omniscience, of a god, although in his disguise he looks like a traveling beggar. By a similar logic, both Jesus and Bloom never seem more godlike than when they appear most bereft. To become a nomad is to have no place in which to lay your head – it is to give up all identity. Odysseus’ great fear of dying at sea and drowning in the water, without clean burial, is of being a “nameless one.” The equivalent modern fear might be of massification, of being lost in the crowd, or even at a more personal level of drowning in one’s own unconscious zones (since the sea is often a dream image of the unconscious). All through Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom seem to fear that they are drowning in the spray of phenomena, and the body washed up out of the sea in the opening episodes might well be read as Joyce’s satiric dismissal of Homer and the uses to which he will put the dead sailor in the rest of the narrative.
One of the reasons why Telemachus sets out in pursuit of his father is to establish a viable identity for himself. Years without a father have left a vacuum and so his journey is a search for authority rather than a revolt against it, a search for a meaning (even more than an answer) to his question. Like father, like son. Telemachus never quite catches up with his target, finding in pursuit a kind of happiness. His trajectory parallels his father’s rather than intersecting with it, much as Stephen will trace parallel lines through most of Ulysses with Leopold Bloom. In the event, he learns little about his father, but he does discover how to share in his journey – his own journey to a self-formed identity, his father’s to an exemplary role (Brann 2002: 149).
Telemachus sets out to discover what men are saying about his father and, if necessary, to build an appropriate tomb. On his travels he enters that condition of nonidentity, already well known by his father, for a nomad by definition can never be anybody in particular. “My mother says I am Odysseus’s son, but I myself cannot tell, for no one really knows his father himself” (Brann 2002: 148). The very separation of both protagonists epitomizes the psychic problem. For Joyce, this was the fear of many men – that they were not the true biological fathers of their designated children, but for Homer (as for Shakespeare) that became also a pressing problem for sons, no longer sure of their own fathers. (Such a doubt may, in part, account for Hamlet’s hesitation about enacting the revenge called for by his dead “father.”) Telemachus bravely and wisely concludes that he must take his given father on trust. All of these uncertainties help to explain the lure of Calypso or of the Sirens with their promise of immortality: but they are false muses, whose poetry of the past would only empty men like Odysseus or Telemachus of their selfhood.
The true muses are the gods, who guide the traveler often to faraway places (as if the Odyssey also functions as a sort of prospectus for settlers and tourists), often under cover of the darkness of the night. This gives Homer’s story its astonishingly cinematic quality, for it is a narrative filled with “jump cuts.” There is no gradual transition from one scene to the next. Every setting is arbitrarily just there as a “given” at the start of each episode, in a book whose tales have the weird but lucid discontinuity of a dream. Ulysses proceeds in similar fashion: there is no explanation, for example, as to how Leopold Bloom ends up on Sandymount Strand at 8 p.m. And neither Odysseus nor Bloom appears at the outset of either tale. Odysseus only comes into his story in Book Five, by which time he has evoked a crescendo of expectation, since in all the earlier scenes a huge point is made of the disastrous effect of his absence on family, friends, and the body politic. Bloom, for his part, appears only in the fourth episode of Ulysses, and his emergence is quite sudden, arbitrary, unannounced, and unexpected.
Ulysses may have been the first artistic work to centralize the very process of thinking, but in doing as much it was simply taking to a logical conclusion a discovery of Homer: that thought itself is godly. For him it was not just a god but the god, not something to be bounded by human form. Athene is at once an external god and a projection of human thought processes – which is to say, interior monologue. In the primitive world, people did not recognize thought as coming from their own minds and so emotions such as anger, nervousness, and desire were identified with organs of the body like the lungs, stomach, or heart. (One way of reading the organ-for-everyepisode scheme in Ulysses would be to interpret the book as putting that world back together again, but in the form of a completed human body.)
Like all storytellers and human psychologists, Homer was intrigued by those vital moments in life when characters act impulsively, as if under the sway of forces greater than themselves. E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational called these moments “monitions” which “allow us to ascribe all sorts of mental events to the intervention of some god” (Dodds 1951: 11). Literature is filled with instances of people who act with decisive or tragic effect, as if their will were not their own:
Whenever someone has a particularly brilliant or a particularly foolish idea; when he suddenly recognises another person’s identity or sees in a flash the meaning of an omen; when he remembers what he might well have forgotten or forgets what he should have remembered, he or someone else will see in it, if we are to take the words literally, a psychic intervention by one of these anonymous supernatural beings (Dodds 1951: 11).
This sounds remarkably like some of the interior monologues of Joyce’s masterpiece: “Often he is conscious of no observation or reasoning which has led up to them. But in that case, how can he call them ‘his’?” (Dodds 1951: 11). All of which is to suggest that there are severe limits to what modern people call “individuality.” Some force has inserted such thoughts, outside the thinker’s formal control, much as a clap of thunder seems to arise from a source outside the usual pattern of the weather. (Joyce was terrified of thunderclaps, perhaps because he thought of them as monitions from angry gods. When someone pointed out to a quaking Joyce that his children were not at all frightened, he replied that that was because they had no religion.)
What makes Homer so subtle and, in a sense, so modern is his recognition in the Odyssey that often the thinker alone can visualize the prompting god, who remains invisible to everyone else. The clear implication of this is that some sort of projection of people’s inner states has led humans to create gods, by whom the creators then feel themselves possessed. This would explain some of the obsessive-compulsive behaviour of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the “Circle” sequence of Ulysses, as it also accounts for the ways in which a proud person can offload responsibility for some types of behaviour:
When he acts in a manner contrary to the system of dispositions which he is said to “know”, his action is not properly his own, but has been dictated to him […] Acts resulting from these impulses tend to be excluded from the self and ascribed to an alien origin […] especially acts such as to cause acute shame to their author (Dodds 1951: 17).
No deed done by persons is ever fully their own, for men and women never quite find the conditions in which they must act to be those which they would ideally have chosen. As the Player King warns in Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 2): “Our thoughts are ours / Their ends none of our own.” Joyce, by a weird kind of analogy with the monitions, may have installed Homer as one of his gods, only to feel possessed by him, so that Ulysses is not just Joyce’s own work but also that of the spirit which guided his hand as he wrote. The attempt to seize a life as peculiar to the self is the wisdom sought by Homer, by the authors of the New Testament Gospels, and by Shakespeare, as well as being the basis of the story in the Odyssey, the life of Jesus, and Hamlet, but that attempt can never be wholly successful, being conditioned by many forces from the past which suggest that experience is always somehow more real than the rather frail, tenuous selves on which it is imposed. Just when he or she is about to innovate and do something radically new and unprecedented, a ghost from the past appears and seeks to return the script to somewhat more familiar lines.
For the epic poet (unless he is Walt Whitman) does not speak of himself; rather the Muse, goddess of inspiration, speaks through him, being invoked at the outset, whether by Homer, Virgil, or Milton. Homer used his own invocation in order to protest against rival versions of his stories, much as Joyce himself would prove jealously dismissive of the claims of other modern masters. In Ulysses the inspiratrice speaks only at the end, but the entire book is a telling example of how the hidden gods intervene, by analogy with the Muse, through monitions and forces which are latent in the everyday self. And, at the close, the book seems to have developed a separate, independent consciousness, which still sings through Joyce, but has moved well beyond him. That consciousness was, perhaps, born in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode and is summed up by the soliloquy of Molly Bloom in such a style as to make it seem to float free of the intentions of its creator.
The wisdom to be gleaned from the Odyssey is clear enough: that there is nothing better in life than when a man and woman live in harmony and that such happiness, though felt intensely as a truth by the couple themselves, can never be fully described. It can merely be evoked, either by comparison or by contrast. Homer set out to heroicize the domestic, even as Joyce wished to domesticate the heroic. Although these are not exactly identical processes, the results have much in common. The major, characteristic device of Homer is the “normalization” technique of recalling a touching, homely image in the midst of a terrifying battle: “as when the farmer ploughs his field” (Brann 2002: 138–9). The whole of Ulysses might be taken as just such an extended hymn to the dignity of everyday living, when cast against the backdrop of the First World War, in which young men went naively to battle seeking extreme sensations of exaltation or debasement after the long peace.
It is as if Joyce has turned Homer inside out and made the “as if” similes the key to the entire narrative, rather than having them function just as passing moments of beautiful relaxation within it. In a more localized and concrete sense, the “as if” similes of Homer might be taken to lie behind not only the interior monologues but also the daydreams and reveries of Bloom throughout the book. It has been said that the epic similes of Homer are designed not simply to escape battle, but “to project the excruciating enormities of battle onto an integral world of peaceful and homely work” (Brann 2002: 139). This is also very like the effect which Joyce achieves, when scenes from or responses to the First World War break in upon (however anachronistically) the meditations of his characters: “I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?” (U 2 9–10). The war features repeatedly in the text (“killing any finelooking young men,” as Molly laments; U 18 396), but as something ancillary rather than primary – as a final measure of the unsurpassable sweetness of the middle range of human experience. It is as if Joyce had all the time anticipated Tom Stoppard’s little joke: “What did you do in the Great War, Mr. Joyce? I wrote Ulysses – what did you do?”
All that might seem like a charter for a complacent banality, but at the time it was very much a minority viewpoint among intellectuals. Even the liberal humanist Freud was convinced that decades of peace had left the youth of Europe supine and spineless. And so he welcomed the era of the mass-grave and the testing of the moral fibre of nations. “Life has become interesting again – it has recovered its full content,” he opined, bemoaning the fact that during the prolonged peace it had seemed to become “as shallow as an American flirtation” (Kiberd 1992: 16). In those prewar years, cults had grown up around boy-scouting, mountain-climbing, Arctic expeditions – anything that allowed men to assert a jeopardized virility and to escape from taunts of emptiness and effeminacy at home. The link between all this and empire-building was obvious enough, and Joyce was keenly aware of the use to which the classical texts of Greece and Rome were put in the classrooms of Britain and Ireland. A cult of manly strength, cut loose from clear ethical moorings, had led to the jingoism finally unleashed in the First World War. As early as 1905, Joyce had written to his brother Stanislaus,
Do you not think the search for heroics damn vulgar — [?…]
I am sure, however, that the whole structure of heroism is, and always was, a damned lie and that there cannot be any substitute for individual passion as the motive power of everything — (LII 81).
That attack on heroics is really a critique of the idea of imperial mastery over subject peoples; yet Joyce’s own project, while employing the Nestor episode to deride the false use of the classroom classics in 1904, offers a renewed version of the older educational project.
Ulysses is brave enough to celebrate the feminine while attacking the merely genteel, and its writer would probably have agreed with Henry Stanley that “England is becoming effeminate and soft from long inactivity, long enfeeblement of purpose, brought about by indolence and ease, distrust of her own powers and shaken nerves” (cited in Lasch 1991: 299). Joyce, after all, was the man who boasted that he could find nobody in Ireland with a faith to match his own (LI 63), and this at a time when Sorel was contending that epic still had a future, being “an anticipation of the kind of work that ought to be carried on in a highly productive state of society” (Lasch 1991: 314). Such a society would make for strong, self-reliant individuals, such as the republican John Wyse Nolan in Ulysses, who, because he knows how to stand up to the British, will never fall into the error of hating them, and who in his own relaxed self-acceptance is easily open to the Jewishness of Bloom.
Bloom’ charm, like his heroism, is inadvertent and never conscious of itself as such. He no more knows his own effect on others than he realizes that in his wanderings through Dublin he might be re-enacting the voyage of Odysseus. “The healthy know not of their own health,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, “but only the sick” (Lasch 1991: 236). The real problem posed for Freud and Stanley by the long peace was not the absence of a fibre-testing war but rather the fact that virtue, if it grows overly aware of itself, becomes sickly. It was in that precise context that William James could contrast “the health, brightness and freshness” of “the bloody old heathens of The Odyssey” and “the essentially definite character of all their joys,” with “the overcultivated and vaguely sick complainers of today” (Lasch 1991: 287). Odysseus, like Mr. Bloom, accepted the universe and held to the here-and-now. Hamlet, like Stephen Dedalus, wished that it might all dissolve.
The quotidian world of work, to which people rise each morning, is affirmed in the Odyssey: Penelope at her weaving, the farmer at his ploughing, these are among its defining images. Hamlet has no distraction from his worries but the assumption (real or imagined) of madness, but for Odysseus this is a mere trick done to outwit the press gang. An epic character like Odysseus is no more subject to change than a Leopold Bloom: theirs is not the world of the bildungsroman, for at the end “their experiences leave them more like themselves than ever” (Moretti 2000: 114). Ulysses teases the reader by opening as might the conventional novel of growth, but from the fourth episode it turns its focus onto Mr. Bloom, already 38 years old and too mature to develop as might the youthful hero of a nineteenth-century novel. Joyce, in fact, may not know how to produce a bildungsroman except in this aborted form. He can set up a meeting between his Telemachus and Odysseus near the end, but he cannot tell how the younger man will turn into a convincing version of the senior one.
Shakespeare had something of the same problem in showing how exactly the naive Hamlet of Act 1 becomes the mature sage of Act 5; and so he removed Hamlet, as Telemachus is removed by Homer, from some of the central episodes of his narrative. Both men had hoped (like Stephen at the close of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) to excite the sympathies of the demos with their program – only to fail utterly. The problem of writing such a bildungsroman has been well captured by Eva Brann: “we need an identity in order to learn but learning is supposed to confer an identity” (Brann 2002: 51). Growing into an adult state allows a person to absorb energies which, once selfhood is found, can be applied to an interpretation of the world, but if, lacking identity, Stephen in Ulysses is not fully free at all times to learn, he may at least hope to study at close range just how an older man, possessed of selfhood, can take on the world. Bloom can no more narrate this wisdom in words than Odysseus can for Telemachus; it is merely a case of both men in each story “arriving” at the same moment at a place that could be called home.
Odysseus fears that Penelope will have aged; Bloom worries that his wife is not faithful. The Greek wanderer speaks to his wife as if she is still young, to be courted over again, but in Joyce’s version it is Molly who sets herself the task of a renewed wooing.
The famous interpolated story of Eurycleia discovering the identity of Odysseus by seeing his old scar and recalling how he got that wound offers a long retrospective reverie in mid-action. Told on the verge of the long-postponed finale, this is Homer’s technical trick, by which he can deliver delayed gratification in yet another form, and it is offered as a momentary pause in mid-narrative, a memory which consumes but a moment of consciousness-time even though it takes far longer to hear or read it through. Joyce in Ulysses opened many similar portals into the remembered past at various points in his unfolding of the action on June 16, 1904. In somewhat similar mode, just as Homer’s characters break in upon one story in order to tell another, so also do Joyce’s males, competing for narrative time in funeral carriage or in pub. Both the Odyssey and Ulysses repeatedly cannibalize earlier sections of their own tale, and each is written in a way which shows itself deeply alert to its own reception as a literary performance. Some of the internal audiences for tales within the works suggest parallels with the external audience (just as the listeners to Stephen in the National Library episode may be that part of Joyce’s readership on which he hopes to wreak a merry revenge).
Interpreters of the Odyssey often try to recover its immediate effect on its first audience, and so also readers of Ulysses hope for the sort of “innocent” analysis possible only to its initial audience in 1922. The problems posed for both sets of interpreters are, in fact, identical: each work is now over-familiar to scholarly commentators, who fail to open themselves at a given moment to the exfoliations which might (but did not) ensue. Congealed readings need to be challenged in order to allow to each moment in the unfolding text the openness which it once had. There are missed meetings, or missed accounts of vital meetings, all through both stories, and each one has plenty of time for the sort of nondescript individual who might well have been passed over in a more conventionally heroic tale. The drunken Elpenor was no great fighter, nor were his wits of the foremost, but in his death by falling from a roof he becomes the prototype for Paddy Dignam, a decent man whom Dubliners have taken the liberty of burying.
Many other ordinary people are given their moment of prominence by the aristocratic Homer: a nurse, a swineherd, a bard. When Odysseus returns to Ithaca at the end, he moves among his servants like a god in disguise, testing their fidelity, much as Jesus rejoins his disciples after the crucifixion or as Bloom returns to his familiar possessions at Eccles Street. Eumaeus grieves for the missing master who is in fact already present and cries out for that which is lost, even as it has already been found. Ulysses, in its lament for a lost world, may find even in the energy expended on elegy a basis for the recovery of its inner codes, because a tradition will always live on, even in the lament for its passing. Stephen says, with some self-disgust, “dead breaths I living breathe” (U 3 479), but that breathing is done over a “green grave,” as the very dead Homer helps to reactivate a culture.
Like Homer, Joyce belongs to everyone and to no one – but to the lover of literature most of all, who might turn to his text, as the Greeks turned to the Odyssey, for their ideas of virtue and decency. The epics of other nations (and even those of the Greeks and of the children of Israel) fed that mood of manic nationalism that drove Europeans over the edge of madness in 1914 – but these past epics were subverted and reconfigured by Joyce. Nor was the surgery required of him all that radical. For both the Odyssey and the New Testament stood out from other epics in their willingness to treat ordinary life and ordinary people as subjects of innate dignity. In a sense, both of these prior works had already questioned ancient epic notions of aristocratic militarism, long before Joyce mocked those notions even more fully.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary reading
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (1979) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Gumming. London: Verso.
Ahl, Frederick and Hanna M. Roisman (1996) The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Brann, Eva (2002) Homeric Moments: Aids to Delight in Reading The Odyssey and The Iliad. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books.
Dodds, E. R. (1951) The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dougherty, Carol (2001) The Raft of Odyseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey. London: Oxford University Press.
Finley, M. I. (2002) The World of Odysseus. New York: New York Review Books.
Griffin, Jasper (1980) Homer. London: Oxford University Press.
Hartog, François (2001) Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Homer (1993) The Odyssey, trans. and ed. Albert Cook. New York: Norton Critical Edition.
Jenkyns, Richard (1992) Classic Epic: Homer and Virgil. London: Bristol Press.
Kiberd, Declan (1992) “Introduction” to James Joyce, Ulysses: The Student’s Annotated Edition. London: Penguin Classics.
Louden, Bruce (1999) The Odyssey; Structure, Narration and Meaning. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Secondary reading
Aragon, Louis (1994) Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston, MA: Exact Change.
Eliot, T. S. (1923) “Ulysses, order and myth,” Dial 75: 480–3; reproduced in Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (eds.) (1965) The Modern Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gilbert, Stuart (1968 [1930]) James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” London: Peregrine Books.
Grana, Cesar (1964) Bohemian versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Basic Books.
Kavanagh, Patrick (1972) Collected Poems. London: Martin, Brian, and O’Keefe.
Lasch, Christopher (1991) The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: Basic Books.
Moretti, Franco (2000) The Way ofthe World; The Bildungsroman in European Culture, trans. Albert Sbragia. London: Verso.
O’Brien, Darcy (1974) Patrick Kavanagh. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
O’Connor, Ulick (ed.) (1967) The Joyce We Knew. Cork: Mercier Press.
Potts, Willard (ed.) (1979) James Joyce: Portraits of an Artist in Exile. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.
Stoppard, Tom (1975) Travesties. London: Faber and Faber.