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Ulysses

Ulysses (1922), a novel by James Joyce, dealing with the events of one day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, and modelled on episodes in Homer's Odyssey. The central characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and his wife Marion (‘Molly’), correspond to Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope, while several others also have Homeric counterparts. The chapters are known by the titles Joyce used during composition, though these do not appear in the published text: ‘Telemachus’, ‘Nestor’, ‘Proteus’, jointly called the Telemachiad; ‘Calypso’, ‘Lotuseaters’, ‘Hades’, ‘Aeolus’, ‘Lestrygonians’, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, ‘Sirens’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Nausicaa’, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, ‘Circe’, jointly called the Odyssey; and ‘Eumaeus’, ‘Ithaca’, and ‘Penelope’, jointly called the Nostos. Highly experimental in form from the outset, and increasingly so in successive chapters, it makes extensive use of the techniques of stream of consciousness (or ‘interior monologue’) and stylistic parody. The separate itineraries of Stephen and Bloom are treated in alternate sections before they meet in the Holles St. National Maternity Hospital (‘Oxen of the Sun’), after which Bloom follows Stephen to the brothel quarter (‘Circe’) and takes him home via the cabman's shelter to 7 Eccles St. (‘Eumaeus’). Stephen accepts refreshment but refuses an offering of lodgings and departs alone (‘Ithaca’). Later Molly, in bed upstairs, mulls over her life as girl and woman in a soliloquy composed of four long, unpunctuated sentences, ending with a sexually compliant and life-affirming ‘Yes’ (‘Penelope’). Stephen Dedalus's day begins at the Martello Tower which he shares with Malachi (‘Buck’) Mulligan (‘Telemachus’). Stephen departs to teach for the last time at Mr Deasy's preparatory school (‘Nestor’). Reviewing his position as he walks on Sandymount Strand, he reflects on problems of perception, identity, and their relationship with nascent art (‘Proteus’). Drawing on the life and works of Shakespeare, he argues that art is a sublimation of personal experience in the National Library (‘Scylla and Charybdis’). In the offices of The Freeman's Journal he rejects the rhetoric of nationalist Irish culture (‘Aeolus’). When Bloom arrives at the Holles St. Hospital to pay his respects to a woman in labour, Stephen is drinking with medical students (‘Oxen of the Sun’). In Bella Cohen's brothel Stephen is visited by a ghoulish hallucination of his mother (‘Circe’). He smashes the lamp in the brothel and is knocked down by a soldier. Bloom, who has already taken charge of his money, effects a rescue. Leopold Bloom is an advertising canvasser married to an amateur singer. Sexual relations have ceased after the death in infancy of their son Rudolph some years before. Their one living child, Milly, is working as a photographer's assistant in Mullingar. Molly is having an affair with ‘Blazes’ Boylan, the manager of her musical tour. Bloom begins the day by making breakfast for Molly (‘Calypso’). Later, he collects a letter from a female correspondent, enters a Catholic church, and visits the Turkish baths (‘Lotuseaters’). At Paddy Dignam's funeral he extends his reflections on religion and its influence on Irish conduct, travelling to the Glasnevin cemetery with Stephen's father, Simon Dedalus, and several other Dubliners (‘Hades’). He visits the Freeman's Journal offices to place an advertisement and crosses paths with Stephen, whom he has already spotted on the journey to Glasnevin (‘Aeolus’). He takes a sandwich and a glass of wine in Davy Byrne's pub, reflecting on food and sensual appetite (‘Lestrygonians’). He goes to the Ormond Bar to answer his letter of the morning, hears Simon Dedalus and Ben Dollard singing, and glimpses Boylan setting out on a jaunting-car for his assignation with Molly (‘Sirens’). In Barney Kiernan's pub he is attacked by an intransigent nationalist, asserts his Irish nationality, defends the Jews, and declares against violence in politics (‘Cyclops’). Sexually aroused by Gerty MacDowell's display of underwear on Sandymount Strand near the Dignam household where he has gone to make insurance arrangements, he masturbates (‘Nausicaa’). In ‘Circe’ his anxiety spills into masochistic fantasy. In the penultimate chapter, we learn that Bloom's temperate reaction to his wife's infidelity includes the ‘antagonistic sentiments’ of ‘envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity’ (‘Ithaca’). Ulysses was first conceived as an additional story for Dubliners, to be based on the occasion when a Dublin Jew called Alfred Hunter rescued Joyce after he had been knocked down in the street by the escort of a young woman in January 1904. The streets and houses of contemporary Dublin are portrayed with an exhaustive precision which owes its thoroughness to Joyce's use of Thom's Dublin Directory (1904), which enabled him to claim that the city could be rebuilt from the information in his novel.

Bibliography

Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (1930); and Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated (1989).