Joyce and Homer

In the National Library, Stephen Dedalus overhears the Irish poet, artist and editor George Russell (known as A.E.) say that ‘Our national epic has yet to be written’.

He says this in a novel which we may now think of as Ireland’s national epic, self-consciously modelled on Homer. Like another story which is mentioned in the same breath by Russell, Don Quixote, it is a novel which is as likely to be comic as heroic. There are many ways in which novels are not epics, and Ulysses, like Don Quixote, contains much material which is mock-epic, everyday as opposed to heroic, fascinated with low as much as high style.

The Homeric parallels, though, provide structure and correspondence. The many correspondences in Ulysses, like its multiple allusions and sometimes fantastical and obscure learning, can be infuriating to first-time reader and scholar alike. As a novel about a day in the life of a small number of characters in one provincial city the correspondences with mythological heroes who were first imagined over two thousand years before can seem preposterous. But the one-eyed monster of race hatred, the sirens tempting the wanderer in an Irish bar where there is much singing, the seemingly innocent seductress over whom the hero fantasises, the whip-cracking madam of a brothel, all these ordinary – and maybe now and again not-so-ordinary – things gain meaning by their associations with Homer. Similarly, the Homeric epithet, the recurrent phrases attached to the things, places and characters in a long poem designed to be memorised and recited – ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, ‘wine-coloured sea’ – are refigured, indeed re-embodied, in Joyce: ‘the snot-green sea, the scrotum-tightening sea’.

Ulyssean allusions are not just with Homer. Joyce shared schemes for the novel with friends, charting other correspondences. Every episode has a dominant colour, is associated with an organ of the body, an art or science, and explores a different style or technique. Some of these correspondences are simple and obvious: kidneys for breakfast; green for Irish nationalism, literature in the library. Some do symbolic duty: lungs for a newspaper, magic in the brothel. And some are opportunities for virtuoso experiment: in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode, Bloom goes to the city maternity hospital to find out about Mina Purefoy, who is giving birth. Stephen and Buck Mulligan and some medical student friends are getting drunk downstairs. The organ of the body in the episode is womb, and the style is ‘embryonic development’. Sensible enough – until we see that the episode is written in forty paragraphs which follow the human gestation period, and the style is an endlessly metamorphosing history of the English language which starts with the medieval and ends up in drunken gibberish.

If Ulysses is the national epic, and if epics have given way to novels – with their everyday settings, characters with motives, blind-spots, desires and failings; and if those novels work best in modern cities where many figures can rub up against each other in a believable and ever-changing environment – then is Ulysses the national novel? When it follows a character into the toilet, or he lets off wind or masturbates, or when he is transformed in a sado-masochistic sexual fantasy, then it looks like the epic and its heroic tales have been exchanged for what Virgina Woolf called a ‘cloacal obsession’ (that is, an obsession with the sewer). Many courts across the world agreed and the book was initially banned across the world.

Ulysses is in many ways the novel which has laid down a challenge to all novels which followed: a liberation in one way, but in another a great encyclopaedic sorting through of ways to tell a story based on a very old story, if not quite the oldest story, a story about going home. And if Ulysses is above all things the novel which purports to bring us inside the minds and bodies of its characters, as if their stories are not being merely ‘told’, as if their lives are being lived on the page before us, then Joyce’s fantastical structures show us just how those lives are coded and foretold, of how small people can circle round their small cities with inevitable heroic resonance.

Ulysses like The Odyssey returns home after its hero’s wanderings. But just when it seems that the novel has gone to sleep as Leopold Bloom’s long Thursday has passed into the early hours of Friday morning, the reader discovers a further chapter. It is about 24,000 words long, unpunctuated except for eight paragraph breaks which may mark eight sentences. The novel ends at a single full stop. This is ‘Penelope’, an episode which has no narrator as such – that is, it seems to be a person thinking on the page. Of course, we have seen that before in Ulysses, from Stephen’s first fragmented interior monologues through the long inner thoughts of Bloom on all sorts of topics as presented to him during the day.

What we encounter most radically in this last episode of Ulysses is often called stream of consciousness. This is not quite what the right term, because here, thoughts happen in space and time, and their movements are pictured by Joyce going back and forwards across time and space in memory (the past) or in desire (the future). The person thinking tells us about the day gone by – that is what they were doing while we followed Bloom and Stephen. That day was very much full of concrete experience, not the least of which is the sex they experienced in the afternoon. If the consciousness seems unmediated in front of us, that consciousness still needs experience, it must recall events, in times and place: the external world presents itself to us in memory – and in language. And one more thing – that experience and world is all imagined, it has formed the plot of a novel modelled on a much-older epic structure.

Above all, what this final episode gives us is a woman – Molly Bloom – thinking in language, after a long day spent with the thoughts of various men. Her consciousness happens in time – albeit in the middle of an insomniac night. It is marked by various patterns and rhythms which are timed on these final pages – from the passing trains which she hears out the window to the rhythms of her own body, as when she begins to menstruate. There may have been a woman thinking in an earlier episode, ‘Nausicaa’, Gerty McDowell the girl sitting on a beach who Bloom is shown ogling earlier in the day. But the experiment in that episode was how to show men watching rather more than women being watched. What Joyce gives us in ‘Penelope’ is a woman as watcher and experiencer, the receiver of experience as much as the object of it, in Joyce’s epic attempt at presenting a woman’s subjectivity to go with the multiple versions of subjectivity shown throughout the novel.