Is James Joyce'S Ulysses Based On Homer'S Odyssey?

I began Ulysses in college and, ever since, Joyce’s work has fascinated me in part because he took the greatest epic of the West and brought it to life on a rather ordinary day. He takes Homer’s very broad brushstrokes of a modern man, Bloom, and his wife, Penelope (Molly), and begins to fill in the strokes of their day in great detail. There are, of course, many resonant scenes where Joyce is drawing out a powerful parallel between his characters and those in the old myth. But there are also little moments – a lovely example of which is found in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter when the flirtation of Gerty MacDowell on a beach is revealed to be mirrored by that of young princesses in a shipwreck long ago left to the mercy of the gods. Powerful, often hilarious and sometimes heart-rending, as Joyce reduces myth to real life.

However, what’s even more clever is how Joyce inverses the major themes of the Odyssey in “Ulysses”. Instead of following the hero of action Odysseus through his year-long journey to reclaim his kingdom, Joyce maps out the inner thoughts and musings of another hero of thought, Bloom, over the course of one mundane day. In contrast to Homer’s world dictated by the gods above, the sheer, constant chaos and random nature of human psychology and chance seem to rule Joyce’s constructs, and thus stem from the essence of the modern novel to portray a world so vastly different from the older epic’s narrative shape and thus impart the notoriously arduous task of reading the novels in terms of mere stylistics to reflect the virtual lack of monumentalism of contemporary existence and all its attendant emotions and actions, yet somehow tie it up into a beautiful and unique package to render even the most banal events like buying soap or going to a funeral as being akin to the journey of an odyssey.

The secret code of ‘Ulysses’ after having read ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer is how Joyce has embedded the structure of Homer’s great work in every sentence of ‘Ulysses’. The Hades chapter of ‘Ulysses’, which is set in a cemetery, is the counterpart of the descent of Odysseus into the underworld. But whereas in the ‘Odyssey’ one meets ghosts from the past in the underworld, in ‘Ulysses’ it is the grief of loses of the past and the current political problems of Ireland which face Bloom in the Hades chapter. But even more, the style of the great poet is adopted in the different chapters of ‘Ulysses’. ‘Proteus’ is poetic, ‘Circe’ is chaotic, but Joyce finds poetry in the unheroic. The odyssey of Bloom is not a journey of a hero who is fighting against strange monsters, but a struggle to survive in a world where myths have vanished and only are left in the pubs, in the newspapers and on his way home.

Reading James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ alongside Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ is a literary journey down a never-ending rabbit hole of connection and correspondence. Firstly, ‘Ulysses’ appears to be a completely modern novel, following a single character on a single day in Dublin, but beneath the surface of apparently disconnected diaries and monologues, the ‘Odyssey’ is clearly there. Joyce’s modern hero is Leopold Bloom, an ‘everyman’ who roams the Same-Day could be experiencing through his wanderings around Dublin the same sort of epic journey that the Ancient Greek Odysseus had. Each of the novel’s chapters follows the same architectural structure to that of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as it moves from episode to episode. Whether Joyce is taking the ‘Cyclops’ episode and turning it into the vehicle of a particularly abusive and violent nationalist argument in a Dublin pub, or turning the ‘Sirens’ into an evening spent in bar Areas being constantly flirted with by young women, the connection to the ‘Odyssey’ is clear to see.

I could also explore how Joyce deals positively with the original in order to subvert it as well. For example, whereas the Odysseus of the Odyssey strives to complete his journey home and fight his various battles, Joyce has his modern hero journey to complete the minutest tasks of daily life in Dublin. Joyce highlights Bloom’s positive traits as they surface in moments of connection with others, i.e. his kind heart, or simple-minded’ capacity to survive against all odds, even as a (now) aging cuckold. It is therefore of interest to chart the development of my own thoughts regarding this ‘novel’ after a re-reading some years after my first. Ulysses can now be seen for what it is: an often-playful love letter to Homer’s monumental work, the Odyssey.