Ulysses is a modernist novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. Partially serialized in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, the entire work was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday. It is considered one of the most important works of modernist literature and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”.

The novel chronicles the experiences of three Dubliners over the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, which fans of the novel now celebrate as Bloomsday.

Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus.

There are also correspondences with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and with other literary and mythological figures, including Jesus, Elijah, Moses, Dante, and Don Giovanni. Such themes as antisemitism, human sexuality, British rule in Ireland, Catholicism, and Irish nationalism are treated in the context of early 20th-century Dublin. The novel is highly allusive and written in a variety of styles.

Artist and writer Djuna Barnes quoted Joyce as saying, “The pity is … the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it. … In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious.”

According to the writer Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking”. The novel’s stream of consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose—replete with puns, parodies, epiphanies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterisation and broad humour have led it to be regarded as one of the greatest literary works.

Since its publication, the book has attracted controversy and scrutiny, ranging from a 1921 obscenity trial in the United States to protracted disputes about the authoritative version of the text.
Background

Joyce first encountered the figure of Odysseus/Ulysses in Charles Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses, an adaptation of The Odyssey for children, which seems to have established the Latin name in Joyce’s mind. At school he wrote an essay on the character, titled “My Favourite Hero”.

Joyce told Frank Budgen that he considered Ulysses the only all-round character in literature. He considered writing another short story for Dubliners, to be titled “Ulysses” and based on a Jewish Dubliner named Alfred H. Hunter, a putative cuckold. The idea grew from a story in 1906, to a “short book” in 1907, to the vast novel he began in 1914.

Locations

The action of the novel moves from one side of Dublin Bay to the other, opening in Sandycove to the south of the city and closing on Howth Head to the north. The plot of the first three chapters, along with chapter 12, “Nausicaa”, takes place on the shores of Dublin Bay, off the map.

Leopold Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street is the setting of episode 4 (“Calypso”), episode 17 (“Ithaca”), and episode 18 (“Penelope”).

The post office on Westland Row is the setting of episode 5 (“Lotus Eaters”).

Sweny’s Pharmacy on Lombard Street, where Bloom purchases soap, and Lincoln Place are also settings of episode 5 (“Lotus Eaters”).

The Freeman’s Journal on Prince’s Street, off of O’Connell Street, is the setting of episode 7 (“Aeolus”).

Davy Byrne’s pub serves as the setting of episode 8 (“Lestrygonians”).

The National Library of Ireland is the setting of episode 9 (“Scylla and Charybdis”).

Ormond Hotel on the banks of the Liffey is the setting of episode 11 (“Sirens”).

Barney Kiernan’s pub serves as the setting of episode 12 (“Cyclops”).

The Holles Street Maternity Hospital is the setting of episode 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”).

Bella Cohen’s brothel on 82 Tyrone Street Lower is the setting of episode 15 (“Circe”).

A cabman’s shelter at Butt Bridge is the setting of episode 16 (“Eumaeus”).

The orange line on the map shows the route of Paddy Dignam’s carriage ride from episode 6 (“Hades”). The Viceroy’s journey in episode 10 (“The Wandering Rocks”) appears in blue. Bloom and Steven’s route in episode 18 (“Penelope”) appears in red.

Structure

Ulysses is divided into the three books (marked I, II, and III) and 18 episodes. The episodes do not have chapter headings or titles, and are numbered only in Gabler’s edition. In the various editions, the breaks between episodes are indicated in different ways; in the Modern Library edition, for example, each episode begins at the top of a new page.

Joyce seems to have relished his book’s obscurity, saying he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring sic one’s immortality”. The judge who decided that Ulysses was not obscene admitted that it “is not an easy book to read or to understand”, and advised reading “a number of other books which have now become its satellites”.

One such book available at the time was Herbert Gorman’s first book on Joyce, which included his own brief list of correspondences between Ulysses and the Odyssey. Another was Stuart Gilbert’s study of Ulysses, which included a schema of the novel Joyce created. Gilbert was later quoted in the legal brief prepared for the obscenity trial. Joyce had already sent Carlo Linati a different schema. The Gilbert and Linati schemata made the links to the Odyssey clearer and also explained the work’s structure.

Joyce and Homer

The 18 episodes of Ulysses “roughly correspond to the episodes in Homer’s Odyssey”. In Homer’s epic, Odysseus, “a Greek hero of the Trojan War … took ten years to find his way from Troy to his home on the island of Ithaca”. Homer’s poem includes violent storms and a shipwreck, giants, monsters, gods, and goddesses, while Joyce’s novel takes place during an ordinary day in early 20th-century Dublin.

Leopold Bloom, “a Jewish advertisement canvasser”, corresponds to Odysseus in Homer’s epic; Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier, largely autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, corresponds to Odysseus’s son Telemachus; and Bloom’s wife Molly corresponds to Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, who waited 20 years for him to return.

The Odyssey is divided into 24 books, which are divided into 3 parts of 4, 8, and 12 books. Although Ulysses has fewer episodes, their division into 3 parts of 3, 12, and 3 episodes is determined by the tripartite division of The Odyssey.

Joyce referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in his letters. The novel’s text does not include the episode titles used below, which originate from the Linati and Gilbert schemata. Joyce scholars have drawn upon both to identify and explain the parallels between Ulysses and The Odyssey.

Scholars have argued that Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, which Joyce discovered in Zurich while writing Ulysses, influenced his creation of the novel’s Homeric parallels. Bérard’s theory that The Odyssey had Semitic roots accords with Joyce’s reincarnation of Odysseus as the Jewish Leopold Bloom.

Ezra Pound regarded the Homeric correspondences as “a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only. The result is a triumph in form, in balance, a main schema with continuous weaving and arabesque.” For T. S. Eliot, the Homeric correspondences had “the importance of a scientific discovery”.

He wrote, “In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity … Mr. Joyce is pursing a method which others must pursue after him.” This method “is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.

Edmund Wilson wrote, “The adventures of Ulysses … do represent the ordinary man in nearly every common relation. Yet I cannot but feel that Mr. Joyce made a mistake to have the whole plan of his story depend on the structure of the Odyssey rather than on the natural demands of the situation. …

His taste for symbolism is closely allied with his extraordinary poetic faculty for investing particular incidents with universal significance, nevertheless … it sometimes overruns the bounds of art into an arid ingenuity which would make a mystic correspondence do duty for an artistic reason. The result is that one sometimes feels as if the brilliant succession of episodes were taking place on the periphery of a wheel which has no hub.”

In the late 1930s, Joyce told Samuel Beckett, “I may have over systematized Ulysses.” Around 1937, in a conversation with Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce disparaged the use of mythology in modern literature. Nabokov replied, “But you employed Homer!” “A whim”, Joyce said. When Nabokov pointed to his collaboration with Stuart Gilbert, Joyce replied, “A terrible mistake … an advertisement for the book. I regret it very much.”

The American literary scholar William York Tindall has written, “Joyce considered Homer’s myth the complete expression of man. … Exile, home, humanity, and art, Joyce’s concerns, found expression in Homer’s Odyssey. … But the Homeric pattern is only one level of the narrative Joyce composed.

Another level is the Christian pattern. … Bloom is not only Odysseus but Jesus-God. These traditional beliefs, however, are less important that the main level of Joyce’s myth: the story of Stephen Dedalus and Mr. Bloom in Dublin or the present, the particular, and the personal.

Ulysses is a narrative composition of three levels, to which, by allusion, Joyce added others of less importance. His myth is not the Odyssey but Ulysses.”

Joyce and Shakespeare

After Homer’s Odyssey, the literary work Ulysses parallels most closely is Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play is mentioned in “Telemachus”. Hamlet is a symbol