Ulysses — themes & analysis

Homer's Odysseus is a king, a warrior, a survivor of the Trojan War who washes up naked on Phaeacian shores and is recognized for who he is. Joyce's Odysseus is Leopold Bloom, a thirty-eight-year-old Dublin advertising canvasser of Hungarian-Jewish descent, whose wife is sleeping with another man, who buys a bar of lemon soap at Sweny's the chemist and forgets to pay for it, who eats a Gorgonzola sandwich alone at Davy Byrne's pub, who masturbates on Sandymount Strand watching a stranger during a fireworks display, who walks home in the small hours and lets a young drunk poet he has just met sleep in his kitchen.

Joyce mapped the novel onto the Odyssey episode by episode — eighteen episodes, eighteen Homeric names, in a schema he sent privately to friends but kept out of the published book. Bloom is Odysseus. Stephen Dedalus, the twenty-two-year-old former seminarian still in mourning for his mother, is Telemachus, a son looking for a father he cannot quite name. Molly Bloom, the wife who has spent the afternoon in bed with her concert promoter, is Penelope. The Citizen in Barney Kiernan's pub is the Cyclops Polyphemus. Bella Cohen, the brothel madam who dominates Bloom in his nighttown hallucinations, is Circe.

The argument is not that Bloom is heroic in spite of being ordinary. The argument is that the patterns Homer found in heroic life — wandering, return, recognition, the offer of food to a stranger, the long delay before a husband and wife actually see each other again — are present in any sufficiently attentive Thursday in any sufficiently attended-to city. The book's correspondences are sometimes tight (Bloom outwits the Citizen the way Odysseus outwits the Cyclops; both throw something on the way out) and sometimes ironic (Bloom's "wandering" is a four-mile loop through central Dublin). Either way, the form is the argument.

Most modern fiction has worked from this premise since. Bloom's decency — he buys a stamp for a blind man, he stands up to the Citizen's antisemitism, he takes Stephen home and feeds him cocoa — is a form of heroism the ancient world could not quite name, because the ancient world was looking for kings. Joyce is suggesting that the kingdom moved.

Where to follow it: Episode 4 (Bloom's breakfast — the morning of an Odysseus), Episode 12 (the Citizen — the Cyclops scene), Episode 17 (Bloom and Stephen in the kitchen).

Joyce divided Ulysses into eighteen episodes and wrote each in a different prose register. The first three are relatively conventional interior monologue — the reader is eased in by following Stephen's mind on the tower roof, in his classroom, walking the strand. After that, the techniques start coming apart on purpose. Episode 7 (Aeolus) is broken up by newspaper headlines. Episode 11 (Sirens) is structured like a fugue. Episode 13 (Nausicaa) is written in the prose style of late-Victorian women's magazines. Episode 14 (Oxen of the Sun) runs the entire history of English prose styles in chronological pastiche, from Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse through Bunyan and Sterne and Dickens to a contemporary American religious tract. Episode 15 (Circe) is staged as a hallucinatory play. Episode 17 (Ithaca) is written entirely in catechism — describing Bloom's kitchen down to the volume of water in his teakettle.

The form is the argument. A single ordinary day in a single city contains every register a writer could use, and no single register is enough. The reader who finishes Ulysses has read, in effect, eighteen short novels stitched together by the body of one man walking through Dublin. Every later novel that mixes techniques across its chapters is in this novel's debt — Faulkner, Woolf, Pynchon, Bolaño, every ambitious novel since.

The most influential technique is the one most associated with Joyce's name: stream of consciousness. We are not told what Bloom is thinking; we hear it as he thinks it, fragmented, associative, sliding between the kidney on the pan and the cat at his feet and the funeral he has to attend and the daughter who has sent him a letter from Mullingar. Sentences break off. Connectives drop. The mind, Joyce shows, does not speak in paragraphs.

The technique reaches its purest version in Molly's closing monologue — episode eighteen, Penelope — forty-five pages in eight long sentences with almost no punctuation, almost no paragraph breaks, almost no concession to the conventional reader. Reading it is encountering the book's argument that consciousness is not what novels had assumed: not orderly, not single-tracked, not in sentences, not divisible into thought and sensation, but a continuous drift the prose has to invent a new technique to follow.

Where to follow it: Episode 4 (Bloom's interior monologue established), Episode 11 (Sirens — the fugue), Episode 14 (Oxen of the Sun — pastiche), Episode 18 (Penelope — the unbroken stream).

Joyce left Dublin in 1904 — the same year the novel is set — and never lived there again. He wrote Ulysses in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris over seven years, with the help of a Dublin street directory, letters from his aunt, and a memory so exact it appears photographic. The technical detail is the point. The trams run on real schedules. The shops sell real goods at real addresses. Bloom's walking routes can be retraced street by street; readers do, every June 16, on Bloomsday. Joyce told a friend that if Dublin were destroyed, the city could be reconstructed from his book.

The exactness is not nostalgia. Joyce was scathing about Dublin — "the centre of paralysis," he called it in a famous letter — and the city in Ulysses is provincial, gossipy, drunk, prejudiced, broke. Stephen's father Simon is a charming wastrel slowly destroying his family. Bloom is mocked for being a Jew everywhere he goes. The Citizen in Barney Kiernan's pub is the worst of Irish nationalism distilled. The medical students at the maternity hospital are revoltingly loud. The Catholic Church is everywhere and trusted by almost no one in the book.

And yet the city is the novel's true protagonist. Episode 10 (Wandering Rocks) is structured as nineteen short vignettes tracing nineteen different Dubliners through the same hour across the same streets, with the city itself as the only continuity between them. The viceregal cavalcade passes through nine of the vignettes; we see it from nine different vantages. The argument is structural. No single consciousness, not even Bloom's, contains the city. The city contains them.

Joyce is doing two things at once. He is writing the most exact urban novel in English. And he is claiming, by the very exactness, that one provincial city on the western edge of Europe contains the whole of human life — the same patterns Homer found, the same conflicts, the same recognitions and refusals. Dublin in 1904 is the world. Any city closely enough attended to is.

Where to follow it: Episode 6 (the funeral — the city in motion), Episode 10 (Wandering Rocks — nineteen vantages), Episode 12 (Barney Kiernan's — the city at its worst).

Stephen Dedalus opens the novel watching Buck Mulligan parody the Catholic Mass on the Martello tower roof — "Introibo ad altare Dei." Stephen has just refused to pray at his dying mother's bedside, and the refusal will not leave him. His mother's ghost rises in the Circe hallucinations of episode 15 and asks him, again, to repent. He smashes a chandelier with his ashplant and runs. The novel's clearest portrait of an Irish Catholic apostasy is in him. He has not become anything else; he has only refused to remain. He is, throughout the day, what the church calls a fallen-away — homeless in spirit, sharp-tongued about doctrine, incapable of forgetting it.

Bloom is the other side of the same problem. He is the son of a Hungarian Jewish father who converted to Protestantism and then killed himself, and a Catholic Irish mother. Bloom himself was baptised three times in his life and circumcised once. He does not practise. He eats pork. He has married a Catholic. He is, by the strict standards of either tradition, nothing. By the standards of Dublin in 1904 he is unmistakably a Jew, and the city tells him so all day — at the newspaper office, at Davy Byrne's pub, in the funeral carriage, and most savagely at Barney Kiernan's, where the Citizen calls him names and throws a biscuit tin at his retreating cab.

Joyce's portrait is unsparing about both communities. Catholic Dublin is suffocating; the church is everywhere; the priests in the novel are mostly comic figures or mild bigots. Father Conmee, the Jesuit who opens episode 10, walks through the city in a state of self-satisfied serenity that Joyce dismantles sentence by sentence. The Citizen's antisemitism is open and casual and shared, in milder forms, by men in the funeral carriage and the newspaper office. Bloom faces it with patience.

What the novel offers in place of either tradition is harder to name. Bloom's practical kindness — buying a stamp for a blind man, taking Stephen home, making cocoa — is closer to what the gospels actually ask than what most of the Catholics in the book do. Stephen's refusal to kneel at his mother's deathbed is closer to what the Jewish prophets demanded than what most of the Jews would have approved. The novel does not say so. It lets the men act and the reader notice.

Where to follow it: Episode 1 (Mulligan's mock Mass; the mother's ghost), Episode 12 (the Citizen's antisemitism), Episode 15 (the mother's ghost returns).

The marriage at the centre of Ulysses is a wounded one. Eleven years before the novel opens, Leopold and Molly Bloom's infant son Rudy died at eleven days old. They have not slept together fully since — the book is delicate about this and the inference is unmistakable. Molly, a thirty-three-year-old professional singer, has spent the afternoon of June 16 in bed with her concert promoter Blazes Boylan. Bloom knows the affair is happening. He knows Boylan has an appointment at the house at four o'clock. He watches a clock cross four and keeps walking. The most painful thing in the novel is the thing Bloom decides not to do.

What he does instead is wander the city, attend a funeral, watch a young woman on a beach, drink in a maternity hospital, follow a young drunk poet into a brothel to keep him safe, bring him home, make him cocoa, and finally climb into bed beside Molly at two in the morning. He does not interrupt the affair. He does not confront her. He kisses her bottom, asks her to bring him breakfast in bed — the small reversal of the book's opening — and falls asleep. The novel's argument is that this marriage, with its old grief and its current betrayal and its surviving tenderness, is the marriage. It is not failed. It is not idealised. It is what most marriages look like at thirty-eight with one child dead.

The book closes with Molly. Episode 18 — Penelope — is forty-five pages of her interior monologue, alone in bed in the small hours, drifting between the afternoon with Boylan, her childhood in Gibraltar, her father, her dead son, her marriage, her sense of her own body, her tenderness for Bloom that she rarely shows him. Almost no punctuation. Eight long sentences. The mind not pretending to be an essay.

She ends remembering the day on Howth Head, years before, when Bloom proposed. She remembers the rhododendrons and the seedcake passed mouth to mouth. The book's last words — "yes I said yes I will Yes" — are the most-quoted affirmation in modern literature. They do not say the marriage is fine. They say that on this Thursday, in spite of everything, Molly is still capable of remembering the moment she said yes, and the saying still works on her. That is what Joyce thinks a marriage is.

Where to follow it: Episode 4 (the morning — Boylan's letter arrives), Episode 11 (Boylan goes to the house; Bloom watches him leave), Episode 17 (Bloom climbs into bed beside Molly), Episode 18 (Molly's monologue; the final yes).