And A Very Good Time It Was: A Short Life of ... - The Modern Word

With the help of the deadlines for The Egoist, Joyce made quick work on finishing and
polishing Portrait. He also began work on his only play, Exiles, which would be published but
performed only sporadically in his lifetime, and given a lowly status in his canon.
Now beginning to gain the recognition he knew he deserved, he began seriously writing
Ulysses. He had spent the previous seven years thinking about it, and would spend the next seven
writing it. Taking place on June 16, 1904, it is separated into three parts, the first with three
episodes, the second twelve, and the third three, with all but one of the eighteen (The Wandering
Rocks, from the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts) having a parallel in the Odyssey.
Part one has Stephen Dedalus at the Martello Tower with Buck Mulligan (Telemechus),
teaching school and meeting with his boss (Nestor), and afterwards contemplating the universe on
Sandymount Strand (Proteus).
Part two introduces Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly (Calypso). Afterwards, Bloom takes a
walk about Dublin and relaxaes in a public bath (Lotus-Eaters), attends his friend Paddy
Dignam’s funeral (Hades), visits the offices of the Freeman’s Journal as part of his job as an ad
canvasser—where he just misses meeting Stephen (Aeolus), and wanders ravenously for some
lunch (The Lestrygonians). We return to Stephen and Mulligan again who, with others, discuss
Shakespeare at the National Library, where Bloom briefly appears towards the end (Scylla and
Charybdis), and then enter the only non-Homeric episode, itself a set of eighteen vignettes from
around Dublin that serve as a microcosm of the entire book (The Wandering Rocks). (Peter
Costello makes the good point that Stephen disappears from the book now, just around the time
Joyce and Nora would have been out walking that evening. 119 ) Bloom stops at a bar and musicroom
(Sirens), has an unfortunate encounter with a violent nationalist and anti-Semite at a
different restaurant (Cyclops), and has a nearly opposite and erotic encounter when he sees Gerty
MacDowell (Nausicaa). We return to Stephen and his medical student friends at a hospital where
a child is born (The Oxen of the Sun), and part two concludes in the long hallucinogenic
adventure (it takes up nearly a quarter of the book) in Nighttown among the prostitutes where
Bloom and Stephen finally meet, the latter rescuing Stephen from his equally inebriated friends
(Circe).
The third part consists of Stephen and Bloom’s exhausted visit to a cab-men’s shelter where
the style (wordy and sloppy) matches their frame of mind (Eumeaus), followed by their walk to
Bloom’s house on 7 Eccles Street, where Stephen continues on and Bloom goes to bed (Ithaca).
The book finishes with Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy with her husband beside her (Penelope).
“A perfectly ordinary day,” 120 Stuart Gilbert says.
Many of the more anecdotal Homeric parallels have been pointed out only to deride the
technique; one that comes to mind is “the cigar Bloom keeps brandishing in front of the citizen is
like the spear Ulysses uses to blind the Cyclops.” 121 While these are bits of Joyce’s humor, and
jokes on Homer, they are also, for a man who wanted to solemnize the everyday, “the
ennoblement of the mock-heroic.” 122 In fact Joyce favored a mistaken etymology for the Greek of
Ulysses’ name: a combination of Outis (nobody) and Zeus (God). 123 The etymology may be
wrong, the but the point has been made. Ellmann elaborates:
For Bloom is a nobody—an advertisement canvasser who, apart from his family,
has virtually no effect upon the life around him—yet there is god in him. By god
Joyce does not intend Christianity; although Bloom has been generously baptized
in both the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church, he is obviously not a
Christian. Nor is he concerned with the conception of a personal god. The divine
part of Bloom is simply his humanity—his assumption of a bond between
himself and other created beings. 124