1 [For the genesis of this essay, see appendix, infra, p. 132. It was first published in the Europäische Revue (Berlin), VIII:2/9 (Sept., 1932); reprinted in Wirklichkeit der Seele (Zurich, 1934). Translated by W. Stanley Dell in Spring (New York), 1949, and in Nimbus (London), II: 1 (June–Aug., 1952), which translation forms the basis of the present version.

[The quotations from Ulysses are in accordance with the 10th printing (Paris, 1928), a copy of which Jung owned and cited, though he evidently (infra, par. 171) had seen Ulysses upon its first publication, 1922.—EDITORS.]

[Author’s headnote added to version in Wirklichkeit der Seele:] This literary essay first appeared in the Europäische Revue. It is not a scientific treatise, any more than is my aperçu on Picasso. I have included it in the present volume because Ulysses is an important “document humain” very characteristic of our time, and because my opinions may show how ideas that play a considerable role in my work can be applied to literary material. My essay lacks not only any scientific but also any didactic intention, and is of interest to the reader only as a subjective confession.

2 As Joyce himself says (Work in Progress, in transition): “We may come, touch and go, from atoms and ifs but we are presurely destined to be odd’s without ends.” [As in Finnegans Wake (1939), p. 455. Fragments were published 1924-38, under the title Work in Progress, in the monthly magazine transition and elsewhere.—EDITORS]

3 Curtius (James Joyce und sein Ulysses) calls Ulysses a “Luciferian book, a work of Antichrist.”

4 Curtius (ibid., p. 60): “A metaphysical nihilism is the substance of Joyce’s work.”

5 The magic words that sent me to sleep occur at the bottom of p. 134 and top of p. 135: “that stone effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and prophecy which, if aught that the imagination or the hand of sculptor has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live, deserves to live.” At this point, dizzy with sleep, I turned the page and my eye fell on the following passage: “a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.” This refers to Moses, who refused to be cowed by the might of Egypt. The two passages contained the narcotic that switched off my consciousness, activating a still unconscious train of thought which consciousness would only have disturbed. As I later discovered, it dawned on me here for the first time what the author was doing and what was the idea behind his work.

6 This is greatly intensified in Work in Progress. Carola Giedion-Welcker aptly remarks on the “ever-recurring ideas in ever-changing forms, projected into a sphere of absolute irreality. Absolute time, absolute space” (Neue Schweizer Rundschau, Sept. 1929, p. 666).

7 In Janet’s psychology this phenomenon is known as abaissement du niveau mental. Among the insane it happens involuntarily, but with Joyce it is the result of deliberate training. All the richness and grotesque profundity of dream-thinking come to the surface when the “fonction du réel,” that is, adapted consciousness, is switched off. Hence the predominance of psychic and verbal automatisms and the total neglect of any communicable meaning.

8 I think Stuart Gilbert (James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” 1930, p. 40) is right in supposing that each chapter is presided over, among other things, by one of the visceral or sensory dominants. Those he cites are the kidneys, genitals, heart, lungs, oesophagus, brain, blood, ear, musculature, eye, nose, uterus, nerves, skeleton, skin. These dominants each function as a leitmotif. My remark about visceral thinking was written in 1930. For me Gilbert’s proof offers valuable confirmation of the psychological fact that an abaissement du niveau mental constellates what Wernicke calls the “organ-representatives,” i.e., symbols representing the organs.

9 Curtius, p. 30: “He reproduces the stream of consciousness without filtering it either logically or ethically.”

10 Curtius, p. 8: “The author has done everything to avoid making it easier for the reader to understand.”

11 Curtius, Stuart Gilbert, and others.

12 [See the appendix, infra.]

13 Gilbert, p. 2, speaks of a “deliberate deflation of sentiment.”

14 Gilbert, p. 355 n.: “… to take, so to speak, a God’s-eye view of the cosmos.”

15 Gilbert likewise stresses this detachment. He says on p. 21: “The attitude of the author of Ulysses towards his personages is one of serene detachment.” (I would put a question-mark after “serene.”) P. 22: “All facts of any kind, mental or material, sublime or ridiculous, have an equivalence of meaning for the artist.” P. 23: “In this detachment, as absolute as the indifference of Nature herself towards her children, we may see one of the causes of the apparent ‘realism’ of Ulysses.”

16 As Joyce himself says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1930 edn., p. 245): “The artist, like the God of Creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

17 Wilhelm and Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower (1962 edn.), p. 57. [The picture is reproduced in Alchemical Studies, p. 33.—EDITORS,]

18 My italics.

19 [This passage has been difficult to interpret, for the quotation could not be located in Ulysses. Jung quoted the novel usually in English but here he uses German: “‘Und flöh’ ich ans äusserste Ende der Welt, so …’ der Nachsatz ist des Ulysses beweiskräftige Blasphemie.” This may be a reference to the beginning of a speech of Stephen Dedalus in the Circe episode (p. 476): “What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self…. Wait a second. Damn that fellow’s noise in the street….” The “noise in the street” is a gramophone playing a sacred cantata, The Holy City. Professor Ellmann has suggested a back-reference here to Stephen’s remark to Deasy in the Nestor episode (ch. 2): “That is God.… A shout in the street.” Jung could also have intended a Biblical allusion; cf. Psalm 139: 7–9 (AV): “… whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea …”—EDITORS.]

20 [Horace, Epistles, 1.2.33 (trans. Fairclough: “yet on [the river] glides, and on it will glide, rolling its flood forever”).—EDITORS.]