Ulysses, allegorising myth to reality

Ulysses by James Joyce is a popular novel of the 20th century which is famous, among other things, for Joyce’s innovations in language and style. However, a salient characteristic of the novel is that it has extensively used myths to reflect upon reality.

Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of the novel, through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16 1904, the day of Joyce’s first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

Ulysses is the Latin name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s poem Odyssey, and the novel draws a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem.

Since its publication, Ulysses has been subject to literary scrutiny on its textual innovations and the use of literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, meticulously crafted structuring, and experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich characterisations and broad humour. It is considered as a popular English language novels of the 20th century and June 16 is celebrated worldwide by Joyce fans as Bloomsday.

Writing a lengthy and informative introduction to Ulysses, Declan Kiberd observes Joyce’s outrage at the evolving political scenario of the day, “In all likelihood, the stay-at-home English had cannily sensed that Joyce, despite his castigation of Irish nationalism, was even more scathing of the ‘brutish empire’ which emerges from the book as a compendium of ‘beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops’. It is even more probable that, in their zeal to defend great novelistic tradition of Austen, Dickens and Eliot, they were as baffled as many other readers by a ‘plotless’ book which had become synonymous with modern chaos and disorder.”

A seminal characteristic of the novel as observed by Kiberd is, though it does not seem to have a conventional style of ‘plot’ , it has , definitely, a single flow and at times, appeared to be ‘over-plotted’.

Kiberd examines, “In fact, Ulysses has a single flow, it may sometimes seem over-plotted and its ordering mechanisms can appear more real than the characters on whom they are imposed. Yet, such mechanisms have been found essential by writers, as a way of containing anarchic forces of modern life.

It will be seen that Joyce’s highly conscious recuperation of the story of Odysseus makes possible an auto-critical method, which itself is central to the book’s critique of authoritarian systems. But, to appreciate this more fully, it is worth considering Ulysses as the triumphant solution to a technical problem which, for over a century before its publication, has exercised the modern European writer. ”

Joyce allegorises the myth of Ulysses to cast his analytical eye on the unfolding immediate events of the day. Kiberd said; “If the irony of Ulysses cuts both ways, Joyce was probably more anxious to rebuke ancient heroism than to mock the concerns of a modern anti-hero. Odysseus may have been a reluctant warrior, but The Odyssey is nonetheless a celebration of militarism, which Joyce found suspect, whether encountered in ancient legend or in the exploits of the British army.

Bloom’s shaken cigar is finally more dignified than risible, a reproach to the forces which can cause a peace-loving man like Odysseus to inflict a wound. To Joyce, violence is just another form of odious pretentiousness, because nothing is really worth a bloody fight, neither land, sea nor woman. ”

Joyce underlines his conviction that ‘mythic archetypes are not exactly imposed by culture but generated within each person’. Kiberd said, “The universal wish to be original cannot conceal the reality that each is something of a copy, repeating previous lives in the inauthenticity of inverted commas (or as structuralists would say, prevented commas.).

Many early readers, including T.S Eliot, were depressed by Joyce’s implication that beneath superficialities of personality, most people were types rather than individuals. He, however, was merely repeating what Jung had already demonstrated, while adding the important rider that ‘same’ could somehow manage to become the ‘new’. ”

One of the profound ideas that Joyce reinforces in Ulysses is ‘History as a circular repetition’. Kiberd said, “To many modern minds, the notion of history as a circular repetition is a matter for despair. ‘ Eternal recurrence even for the smallest!’ exclaims Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘ that was my disgust at all existence!’. The aimless circles in which the citizens had walked through Dubliners were symbols of a paralysis which Joyce hoped he had himself escaped.

Those who believe in progress like to depict the world as moving in a straight line towards a definable goal. At the basis of the Marxist distrust of much modernist literature is the suspicion voiced by Hungarian critic Georg Lokacs, that ‘ it despairs human history, abandons the idea of a linear historical development, falls back upon notions of universal condition humane or rhythm of eternal recurrence, yet within its own realm is committed to ceaseless change, turmoil and recreation. ”

Myth and fiction

Kiberd argues that ‘autocritical structure ‘of the book is incongruent with the book’s ‘anti-authoritarian politics’. “The critic Frank Kermode has contended it is the self-criticism and self-deflation of modern art which saves much of it from the excesses of romanticism and fascism. In The sense of an Ending, he proposes a distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘fiction’, explaining that ‘fictions can degenerate into myths, whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.

In this sense, anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth, and King Lear is a fiction.’ By extension it could be said that Ulysses is a fiction built on the structure of a myth. Joyce’s attempt to submit that myth to the vicissitudes of everyday life results in a healthy comic deflation, of both book and myth.”