How Does Ulysses By James Joyce Compare To Homer'S Odyssey?

Reading ‘Ulysses’ after ‘The Odyssey’ is like moving from the oral storytelling of campfires and caves to the jazz improvisation of a late night club. Both works are based on the same journey but whereas Homer created a Mediterranean odyssey and journey home of Odysseus, the modernist author created a Dublin pub crawl of Leopold Bloom. Where Homer provided his readers with the external events of the Sirens and the one-eyed giant Cyclops, Joyce brings all these events to life within the internal world of a single man. Reading about Odysseus’ escape from Polyphemus the one-eyed giant is as eventful as reading about Leopold Bloom’s purchase of soap in the soap shop.

It’s remarkable how Joyce can retain the essence of a myth while grafting on modern flesh. Penelope’s weaving becomes Molly’s extended monologue, Circe’s magic the various forms of sex available in Nighttown’s brothels. Instead of Homer’s direct intervention of the gods, their presence is suggested by coincidence or reported in the newspapers. Despite the weight of the myth being transferred to the page, it is masked by a plethora of tram tickets and internal monologues about the best kidney breakfasts. Reading ‘The Odyssey’ and then ‘Ulysses’ is like never knowing quite where you are. Odysseus must battle literal monsters, but at the same time, he is somewhere near Bloom, lost in the various labyrinths of modern social life, and passing ships in some literary limbo.

Homer’s epic motion is that of oarlocks. So much in his work is predictable and therefore hypnotic and easily segued from one self-contained “episode” to another like a series of islands. But then there is the Washing Machine of Wonders that is Joyce. A cacophony of all sorts of things, most of them puns, often delivered via newspaper clipping, but all thrown at you in such a way that you require constant orientation as to who is speaking.

Both works are drawn from the same source material and thus, resemble each other in many ways, though, much like two pieces of DNA that have been rearranged, they differ in important ways. Thus, the lotus-eaters of Homer’s epic travel to strange, alien lands while Joyce’s versions of them are stuck in time, mired in the mundane drudgery of daily life in Dublin. Likewise, Nestor’s words of wisdom in the ancient work are echoed by the bigoted but clueless schoolmaster Deasy in Joyce’s novel, while the adventurer Odysseus so long ago evaded the one-eyed giant Cyclops by stuffing a stake up his single eye in Joyce’s counterpart, Bloom, avoids confrontation in a similar fashion but is given only brief glimpses of insight into what has just occurred. Many of the crucial allusions to the ancient work required annotations to have recognized them at all, and it leaves this reader to wonder whether Joyce was having fun with his predecessor or if he was something more by constructing the literary equivalent of a treasure hunt.

The two works under consideration here are like a cathedral and its reflection in a puddle — grand and magnificent in one case, warped and wobbly in the other but true to the first’s form in its own uneven way. Homer created the archetypes of the hero, the faithful wife, and the vengeful gods. Joyce destroyed these to create thousands of psychological fragmented images of human nature. Thus, instead of the adventures of Odysseus the man, we have the spiritual adventures of the everyman Odysseus in search of himself — in ‘Hades’ we see the existential spiral of Bloom.

Your reviewer was awed by Joyce’s audacity in creating a series of novellas that mirror the Odyssey in terms of structure while simultaneously plunging them into the chaos of the modern world. While each chapter roughly mirrors an episode from the Odyssey (e.g. “The wyrd bondage of Ithamy” is “Odyssey Book 5,” while “Hades” is “Odyssey Book 11” and “The Dead” is “Odyssey Book 24”), actually spotting parallels between say a jazzed up bar scene and “The Odium of Odysseus” or the mad-painting “Circe”- nightmare of typographic chaos while the characters grow drunker and drunker (e.g. while in “Oxen of the Sun” a rowdy pub full of Dubliners break into a rousing chorus of “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” featuring Plumtree’s Potted Meat) was left to the reader, usually exhausted, but exhilarated by the encounter with both books—exhausted by Homer in terms of scope (the brutality of battle in the Homeric age), exhausted by Joyce in terms of pertinence—is the reviewer’s impression of both novels—The Odyssey as a fully realized journey; Ulysses as a place which one has barely begun to unpack.