It is not difficult to track the journey that Homer's Odyssey had to take before first "setting foot" on British soil and it is even less difficult to assess the importance that this event had, not only for Britain, but also for Europe and the whole literary world. There are experts and historians, among them Andrei Brezianu, who think that if not for Britain, Homer's Odyssey would have been lost to us after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
We assume that Greek and Latin masterpieces reached Britain after 43 CE, the year when the Roman emperor Claudius conquered Britain. It is known that he imported and engrafted Roman culture, and presumably, this is how the British became acquainted with The Iliad and The Odyssey. Once the fall of the Roman Empire was set in motion after the Romans failed to defeat the Persians 361-363 CE and their military power diminished, the Romans were forced to abandon more and more territories and focus on protecting their capital city from the barbarian conquerors. In 407 CE, the Roman legions left Britain in order to defend Rome, which three years later was sacked by the Visigoths.
In his book, Odiseu in Atlantic, Andrei Brezianu considers that at the time when the Roman classicism was subdued:
. . . viaÈ›a intelectuală a continentului care născuse Iliada, Antigona, VieÈ™ile paralele, È™i ConsolaÈ›ia Filozofiei se înăbușă sub loviturile unei mutaÈ›ii colosale, activate de migraÈ›ii: un singur colÈ› de lume rămâne neatins - insulele verzi de dincolo de Strîmtoarea Mânecii, către care navighează acum întreaga moÈ™tenire a civilizÈ›iei Mediteranei de vest . . .
. . . the intellectual life of the continent that gave birth to the Iliad, Antigone, Parallel Lives, and the Consolation of Philosophy was stifled under the blows of a colossal shift, due to the migrations: a single corner of the world remains untouched - the green isles from beyond the English Channel, towards which the whole heritage of the Western Mediterranean civilization now sails to . . . (6)
It is understandable that without a refuge point, the Greek and Latin culture would have not survived, not because the hordes of Vikings and other barbarians sought to eradicate it, but because they simply did not find any interest in it and thus completely ignored it. According to Brezianu, the British king Alfred the Great, who translated Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae and ordered that numerous other works to be translated into English, among them some texts referring to the Homeric Ulysses, is the one we should thank for bringing The Odyssey in the foreground again, delivering it to the medieval culture(8).
Another writer, Dante, helps shape, define and root the figure of Ulysses in the European history timeline, aided by parts and adaptations of the Homeric story contained in classical and Medieval Latin and other vulgar works.
In British culture, Brezianu attributed the perspective shift of the Homeric story from obscurity into the foreground to Chaucer and Shakespeare, who often use a somewhat similar writing manner to that employed by Homer, borrow names of places and characters from The Iliad and The Odyssey and have works, which share the same theme, the journey. Romantics like Byron and Shelly also resort at some point or another to Mediterranean motifs, places and mythos, but it was Alfred Lord Tennyson who laid down the foundations for the modern Ulysses.
Tennyson, in his soliloquy entitled "Ulysses", presents Ulysses' life and thoughts after returning to Ithaca and growing old as an "idle king" and his resolution to set sail again, his longing for adventure and knowledge "'Tis not too late to seek a newer world". (needs q) He portrays in Ulysses as the human in which both the traits of the Classic and of the Modern converge. The symbol of classicism, men "Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will", face Stephen and Bloom who have as a second nature the 'need' "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".
In Eastern and Asian culture, an array of tales from the collection of stories known as One Thousand and One Nights, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, portray similar adventures to the ones Odysseus goes through. Joyce uses "Sinbad the Sailor" both as an alias for the character of W.B. Murphy, a sailor from Carrigaloe Station which, talking to Stephen, claims to know one Simon Dedalus, not Stephen's father, and tells many false tales of his travels around the globe, and as an alias to Odysseus. He also uses the name Sinbad in a wordplay on the name: Jinbad the Jailer, Tinbad the Tailor, Whinbad the Whaler, etc.
Of course, there have been other authors as well, not only British, who have tackled with the ever modern and contemporaneous Ulysses before Joyce did, Antonio Graf and Giovanni Pascoli are only a few of them, and there have been others, which came after Joyce and still felt that the Homeric story can be further re-written and re-interpreted, like for instance the Czech author Jiri Marek with My uncle Ulysses, and Clemence McLaren with his masterpiece Waiting for Ulysses.
Homer and James Joyce: A common Angle of Repose
Joyce constructed the framework of his novel on the structure and theme of one of the most influential works in world literature, Homer's Odyssey. Both in the case of Homer's Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, the plot's guidelines are rooted in the concept of life as a journey and the journey as a life as a heroic adventure. The protagonist of Homer's epic tale, Ulysses, encounters many dangers like angry, men-eating Cyclops, enraged gods, sea monsters and other such mythical creatures while on his voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War has ended. Joyce, in imitation of Homer, also depicts life, but as a mockery of a heroic journey: almost completely uneventful, without any real danger except for some flying bottles, some mind-numbing hallucinations and the sexual brutality of the brothel and soldiers. Joyce's Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, a Jew of Hungarian origin, who lives quite a normal, monotonous life in Dublin: no real hero with no real quest.
The 'greatness' of Bloom's 'epic adventure' is depicted using a lexicon of 30,030 words in a novel of approximately 265,000 words in length, which spans just one day of his life, but that particular day is representative for all the other moments of his life, past and future. His 'epic adventure' mainly consists of getting some breakfast, chatting with his wife, attending a funeral, doing some research for his job, defecating, masturbating, visiting pubs and thinking about his unfaithful wife. His doings parallel in a mocking way the adventures of Homer's heroic Ulysses, while the other main characters, Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, are themselves the opposites of Ulysses' son, Telemachus, and his faithful wife, Penelope. Although Stephen is not the son of Bloom and Molly, he is depicted as searching for a substitute father figure to replace his own besotted parent.
Structure - Setting - Sources
This is only a short introduction as to better understand why we are able to speak about the existence of a common angle of repose. A more detailed parallel view will be discusses in chapter 7. A Two Sided View of Literary Essence.
Structure
While commenting on the structure and style of the Odyssey, Professor Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, points out that the main narrative line of the Odyssey consists of two stories, which at some point intervene to give birth to the Homeric story as such. The first one focuses on Telemachus, Penelope, the misbehavior of the suitors and various events that take place in Ithaca, while the second, which does not begin until Book V, focuses on the eponym hero Odysseus. The two narrative lines merge when father and son are reunited in Book XVI.
While we follow the adventures of Odysseus's, we have to constantly monitor our surroundings, the author employing a number of flashbacks, interruptions, and time shifts which make it hard to keep in mind exactly as whom the hero is disguised, whom he pretends to be and moreover where he is located in the space-time continuum. Even after the two stories intervene, there are reoccurring back and forth shifts from one storyline to another, as well as simultaneous events. Such an example of back and forth shifts and simultaneity can be seen in Book XVI where the shift changes from Odysseus, who ,disguised by Athena, sets out to meet Eumaeus and test his loyalty, to the suitors feasting and wreaking havoc on the palace grounds, to Penelope, which waits in her quarters, and then back again out on the estates where Odysseus is waiting.
This kind of setting, is what professor Johnston calls:
. . . an almost spatial organization of incidents, as if at one moment we are seeing one corner of a grand picture, then shifting to another, and then moving to another, and then going back to the first, and so on-with everything, in a sense, simultaneously present (including events from the past).
A symbolical parallel links the structure of Joyce's Ulysses to the structure of The Odyssey. Both plots focus on a man which is on a journey, a man that is portrayed dealing with a variety of different people and situations encountered along the way. Nonetheless, the journey od Odysseus lasts ten years, whereas the journey of Ulysses - Bloom lasts a day. In Ulysses, like in The Odyssey, we also have simultaneity and back and forth shifts, but they are presented in a successive manner. We still have two main storylines, that of Stephen and that of Bloom, but they are not so strictly delimited, the two nearly meet a few times before their actual coming together. Of course, the focus is mostly at a given time just on one of them, but we often get impressions and thoughts related to a certain subject from both Bloom and Stephen. Such is the case in The Oxen of the Sun, when the two meet in the Holles Street maternity, where medical students blaspheme against the symbol of fertility, a woman which is about to give birth. The perspective from which is being narrated resembles a walk on the streets of any city, during which one is aware that there are simultaneous events happening all around him, but is unable to focus on all of them. This, in my opinion, is what, while reading Joyce's novel, gives you the feeling that all that is happening is real. Combine this with the stream-of-consciousness technique [1] and the reader will experience a three dimensional cinema-like view of all that what is happening with the protagonist, and even more, he gets an insight as how what the character sees is transmitted to the brain and analyzed, after which decisions are taken, words are uttered and actions are performed.
Setting and Sources
As opposed to The Odyssey, where the protagonist journeys, more or less of his own will, from Ithaca to Troy [2] , then, after sacking Troy, to the Island of the Cicones, from there to that of the Lotus Eaters, then to that of the Cyclops, Aeolus, Circe, the Underworld, to the isle of the sun god, Calypso, Phaecians and then, at last, home, Bloom, Joyce's Ulysses 'journeys' through Dublin and on the shore of the Irish Sea. While the entire story of Ulysses takes place on June 16, 1904, (aside for only a few hours on the morning of the next day) as a kind of forget-me-not of the day when Joyce met his companion, and eventual wife, Nora Barnacle, the plot of The Odyssey spans over a period of ten years.
Although we can't identify the exact sources Homer used for his inspiration while creating The Odyssey, it is clear that they range from stories told on the market place, by sailors or poets to myths, magic and other unexplainable events. This job of identifying the sources is less difficult when talking about Joyce, who, besides whole pages entirely of his own creation in which fiction and autobiographical notes intervene, based the content of his masterpiece mainly on episodes from Homer's Odyssey and on Shakespeare's work.
2.2 Assessment of the Novel
I have researched as thoroughly as possible to find some information about the assessment of Homer's epic, but where unable to find any material on it. Still, judging from the number of readers of Homer's work nowadays, I can only suppose that it was just as read, talked about and interpreted as it is at this moment, if not even more.
Assessment of Joyce's novel are quite impossible not to find. Opinions of the novel range across the spectrum. Some readers insist that Ulysses is a superior novel, a tour de force marking a turning point in modern literature. Others insist that it is an inferior novel, an extremely boring work featuring long passages with a chaos of strange words that are a penance to read and a hell to fathom. There can be no gainsaying, though, that Joyce has been highly influential. Through stream of consciousness-and through sometimes manipulation of language-he allows readers to view the complicated, perplexing, and sometimes irrational workings of the human mind. His display of this technique inspired later writers to use it in their own literary works. Unfortunately, because of its mission and its experimental nature, Ulysses tasks the reader like no other novel before it, making him plod through jungles of obscure symbols, perplexing allusions, and boring portraits of ordinary Dublin life. Admirers of Joyce acknowledge that the novel is difficult. Passages like the following (part of a chapter in which Joyce writes in various idioms that evolved during the development of the English language) make it so:
A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.
Since its publication, many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have exalted Ulysses as a work of enormous significance and brilliance. Probably just as many scholars, distinguished writers, and average readers have dismissed it as an unremittingly dull, tedious, and tiresome work-a waste of time. The verdict: The novel needs another century or two to ferment, marinate, or whatever literary works do when they go through the "test of time" (as literary tastes change and standards evolve) to reveal itself in all of its fullness to an unbiased judge. This much can be said for certain about the novel: Except in academia, not many people read Ulysses. Those who do decide to have a go at the thick, allusion-laden, language-bending tome frequently put it down after reading a few chapters, never again to pick it up.
One might say that Joyce lacks originality, his work not being, like Homer's, a mimesis of the mimesis, but a mimesis of a mimesis. To support this statement one might look upon the writing style: while the style in which the Odyssey was written doesn't resemble anything written before, not even the Iliad, in terms of style, Joyce imitated yet another writer, Édouard Dujardin (1861-1949) and his stream-of-consciousness technique. For me this statement is rude and clearly ill meant, especially if the existence of intertextuality is not taken into account.
