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As a modern version of the Odyssey, the story form in Ulysses is a combination of myth, comedy, and drama. The overall arena is the city of Dublin, but the story primarily takes place not in a home but on the road. As in many myths, the main hero, Leopold Bloom, goes on a journey and returns home. But because this is a comic, or "mock heroic," myth, little or no learning is apparent upon the hero's return.
Like so many other advanced stories, Ulysses is set at the epoch-changing turn of the twentieth century, amid the shift between town and city. Dublin has many elements of the town but also many elements of the city—even the advanced, oppressive city. From the very beginning, we are deep inside the guilt that is so common in stories set in a town: Stephen has a housemate who makes him feel guilty for refusing to pray at his mother's deathbed.
The primary hero, Bloom, is both the everyman hero of the city and the bumbler of the advanced, oppressive city. Where Odysseus is a frustrated warrior, Bloom is a frustrated nobody. He is Charlie Chaplin's tramp, Charles Schulz's Charlie Brown, Seinfeld's George Costanza. He's also a timid cuckold who knows what his wife and her lover are doing but does nothing to stop it. In many ways, Joyce's story world doesn't come from the usual combination of elements. For example, Dublin is an oppressive city not because of increasing technology, the slavery of the future, but because of the stultifying power of the past, primarily English rule and the Catholic church.
Besides using the myth of the Odyssey and the shifting society, Joyce builds the story structure on the technique of the twenty-four-hour day. This circular time matches the circular space of the myth and comedy forms, further defining the everyday quality of its hero and highlighting and comparing the actions of a vast web of characters in the city.
Joyce also uses the twenty-four-hour day to set up the character opposition between his primary and secondary heroes. The opening three sections of the story, which track the journey of the secondary hero, Stephen, occur from 8 a.m. to about noon. Joyce then returns to the 8 a.m. start to track his primary hero, Bloom. This time comparison constantly triggers the reader to imagine what these two men are doing at approximately the same moment, and Joyce provides a number of parallels between them to help the reader compare and contrast them.
Joyce comes up with a number of unique techniques when depicting the minor characters of his story world. Because so much of his theme concerns the slavery of this world, he gives many of his minor characters a weakness and need of their own. Usually it is some variation of being tied too strongly to the Catholic church, going along with the dominance of England, or placing too much faith in the heroes of Ireland's past and its comfortable but ultimately debilitating stereotypes.
The character web of Ulysses is among the most detailed in story history. Along with the key fictional characters are a number of real people who lived in Dublin at the time the story is set, 1904. Intermingled with these real people are many fictional minor characters that Joyce has used in other stories (most notably in his short story collection, The Dubliners). All of this gives the story world a rich texture of reality that is at the same time deeply grounded, because each of these real or imagined people has a detailed character and history that have already been defined, whether the reader is familiar with them or not.
Joyce is a master at connecting key structure steps to the visual sub-worlds of the story. One of the benefits of founding a modern-day journey through the city on Odysseus's travels is that it lets Joyce create identifiable subworlds within an amorphous city. It also allows him, in this incredibly complex story, to imbue each subworld with one or two main structure steps. This technique anchors the reader in the storm and flow of a huge epic and highlights the two heroes' main lines of psychological and moral development no matter how complex things get.
Here is a thumbnail sketch of the major story structure steps, the section of the Odyssey on which they are based (in parentheses), and the sub-world of Dublin in which they take place (in italics).
■ Stephen's Weakness and Need, Problem, Opponent, Ghost
(Telemachus) Martello Tower. It is 8 a.m. in an apartment at Martello Tower, which overlooks the beach at Dublin Bay. Resident Stephen Dedalus is a troubled young man. He has returned from writing in Paris because of the death of his mother. He is aimless and doubts himself. He also feels tremendous guilt for refusing his mother's dying wish that he pray for her. Like Odysseus's son, Telemachus, he wonders who and where his true father is. His roommate, Buck Mulligan, apparently his friend but in reality his enemy, needles him for his failure to pray when his mother lay dying.
This tower home, which Joyce connects to Hamlet's castle, is a prison for the sensitive Stephen, who shares it with the tyrant Mulligan and the haughty Englishman Haines. Though Stephen pays the rent, he lets Mulligan borrow his key to the apartment. ■ Stephen's Weakness and Need, Problem, Ghost (Nestor) Deasy's School. Though he wants to be a writer, Stephen is forced to teach, for very little money, at a boys' school. The schoolroom, with its
noisy, cheating students, depresses him and reminds him of the ghosts of his youth. For a would-be artist like Stephen, this school is a trap.
■ Stephen's Weakness and Need, Problem, Ghost (Proteus)
Sandymount Strand. Stephen strolls along the beach, where he sees images of birth and death and a three-masted ship that reminds him of the crucifixion. He is confused about what is real and what is appearance, about who he must become versus what others want to make of him. Again, he wonders who his true father is.
■ Bloom's Weakness and Need, Problem (Calypso) Bloom's kitchen and his butcher shop. At 8 a.m., Leopold Bloom is making breakfast for his wife, Molly, who is still sleeping. Odysseus was enslaved by a woman, Calypso, for seven years. Bloom is enslaved by his wife. But his slavery is self-imposed. Quirky and isolated, Bloom is somewhat estranged from Molly, both sexually and emotionally. He needs deeply to be accepted and loved.
In the kitchen and at the butcher shop, Bloom shows his attraction to bodily pleasures, including food, women, and sex. Like Stephen, Bloom leaves the house without his key.
■ Bloom's Weakness and Need, Problem, Desire (Lotus Eaters) A street on the way to the postal annex and the chemist's. Bloom would prefer to avoid his troubles or, like the Lotus Eaters, forget about them entirely. Like Stephen, Bloom is reactive and aimless. Over the course of the story he comes up with a succession of petty desires that go nowhere. At the post office, he feels guilty about his correspondence with a woman named Martha, but he is also unwilling to go beyond words to consummation. At the drug-filled world of the chemist's shop, Bloom's desire is to escape and to overcome his loneliness.
■ Opponents, Ghost (Hades) Carriage trip through the streets to the graveyard. Bloom joins some men he thinks are his friends on a carriage ride to a man's funeral. But these men treat him as an outsider. They pass Blazes Boylan, a man Bloom knows will have sex with his wife later that day. Like Odysseus in the land of the dead, Bloom recalls his father's suicide and the death of his little boy, Rudy, some ten years before.
■ Desire, Opponents (Aeolus) Newspaper offices. In one of Odysseus's adventures, he is blown off course within sight of his home when his men open the bag of adverse winds that Aeolus, the wind god, had sealed tight.
The modern traveler, Bloom, sells newspaper ads. At the office, he tries very hard to make a sale but is unable to close it because of his boss. He also has to listen to a bunch of blowhards who slight him and make misguided comments about the false glories of Ireland's past.
■ Story World, Opponent, Ghost (Lestrygonians) Streets of Dublin, Burton Hotel restaurant, Davy Byrne's pub, National Museum. This miniature odyssey (and there are many miniatures in Ulysses) shows Bloom walking through the middle of Dublin, with many details of the people and quotidian events of that world.
At the Burton Hotel, Bloom is so disgusted by the way some piggish patrons eat that he is forced to leave. Because Bloom is on a journey and because he is a man who avoids confrontation
, his main opponent, Boylan, is not present to provide ongoing conflict, but he is constantly on Bloom's mind. At Davy Byrne's pub, Bloom checks the clock and realizes that Molly's rendezvous with his enemy is little more than two hours away.
At the end of this section, Bloom spots Boylan on the street. He slips into the museum to avoid talking to him but then must feign interest in the buttocks of statues of Greek goddesses to keep from being caught.
■ Stephen's Opponents, Revelation, Bloom's Opponent (Scylla and Charybdis) National Library. At the library, the place of the mind, the theoretical and artistic Stephen propounds his theories of Shakespeare to some of Dublin's literary elite. But like Bloom, Stephen is an outsider who has not been invited to their upcoming soiree. Buck Mulligan arrives and makes fun of him again. Stephen has an important revelation that the chasm between him and Mulligan is too great, and he will no longer treat Mulligan as a friend.
At the library, Bloom has his own run-in with Stephen's nemesis. Mulligan had seen Bloom slip into the museum and mocks his deep interest in the bottoms of goddesses.
■ Story World (Wandering Rocks) Streets of Dublin. The Wandering Rocks section is the entire story world of Ulysses in miniature, placed at the very center of the book. Joyce gives small defining moments to many of the minor characters of this city, both comical and sad, as they make their own odyssey through their day.
■ Bloom's Weakness and Need, Opponent, Apparent Defeat (Sirens) liar at the Ormond Hotel. Like the Sirens who lure sailors to their deaths with their song, two barmaids tease Bloom at the Ormond Hotel bar. The sentimental Irish songs he hears there are painful for him because they remind him of his lost son and his problems with Molly. And Bloom knows the very moment Blazes Boylan is entering his home. This is Bloom's lowest point, and it highlights his loneliness and deep sense of alienation.
■ Opponent (Cyclops) Barney Kiernan's pub. In Barney Kiernan's pub, Bloom stands up to the Irish nationalist "Citizen," who is the modern Cyclops. Ironically, Bloom also knows that at that very moment, his ongoing opponent, Boylan, is having sex with his wife. But even here, at his most heroic, Bloom cannot hide some of his own weaknesses. He comes across as "Mister Knowall," a tedious sermonizing blowhard.
The bar where Bloom confronts one of his biggest opponents, the "Citizen," is like a cave. And over the course of the section, this place gets darker, more violent, and more filled with hate.
■ Opponent, Drive (Nausicaa) Sandymount Strand. On the same strand that Stephen walked a few hours before, Bloom sees an attractive woman who so tempts him with her physical charms that he masturbates. But she is just another fake ally, and the moment is another false drive, a diversion keeping Bloom from reconnecting with his wife.
■ Bloom's Drive and Revelation, Stephen's Opponent (Oxen of the Sun) National Maternity Hospital, Burke's Pub, streets of Dublin. Bloom visits the hospital to check on Mrs. Purefoy, who has been trying for three days to deliver her baby.
Stephen has been drinking with some friends and at Burke's Pub further fritters away his money buying drinks he can't afford. He gets
into a fight with Mulligan, hurls his hand, and then proceeds to a brothel.
Bloom becomes concerned for Stephen and decides to stay with him to make sure he is all right. Until this point, Bloom, the reactive, aimless man, has had a number of little desires, most of them frustrated, that have taken him through his day. But now he has a serious drive that is focused on finding a son, and Stephen, his friend's son, will be that man.
■ Stephen's Opponent, Self-Revelation, and Moral Decision; Bloom's Drive and Moral Decision (Circe) Brothel. In the Circe section (where in the Odyssey men are turned into pigs), a drunken Stephen goes to a brothel. His dead mother, appearing in a hallucination, tries to increase his guilt so that he will return to the church. Stephen says no to that way of life and smashes the chandelier with his walking stick (his sword), finally ridding himself of the past that has trapped him for so long.
Bloom runs to the brothel and seeks out Stephen with intense determination. Bloom defends Stephen against the madam, Bella Cohen, who tries to take Stephen's money and demands far too much as payment for damage to the chandelier. Ironically, Bloom uses blackmail for his most moral act of the day: he threatens to reveal publicly that Bella has been using prostitution to send her son to Oxford.
■ Limited Self-Revelation and Moral Decision for Both Men (Eumaeus) Fitzharris coffeehouse. The two men head over to a little coffeehouse. After his self-revelation at the brothel, Stephen knows what he must do with his future. He lends a man some money and tells him his teaching job will soon be available at the school.
At the coffeehouse, Bloom and Stephen enjoy a long conversation on many topics. But though they experience a moment of communion, they are ultimately too different to sustain a friendship beyond this night. Bloom is too practical, too much a philistine, for the extremely theoretical and artistic Stephen.
Now Bloom's drive shifts again, this time to whether he will be able to return to Molly, in the sense of marriage and home. Though he is afraid of Molly's wrath, he decides to bring Stephen with him,
saying, "Lean on me." One sign that Ulysses is more complex psychologically and morally than most stories is that Bloom's moral decision is not strictly altruistic. He thinks Stephen could help him write an ad. He also believes the young man will provide him with material for a story he wants to write, and he can benefit from Stephen's higher sensibilities.
Thematic Revelation (Ithaca) Bloom's kitchen and bedroom. The new "father" and "son" share another communal moment, drinking cocoa in Bloom's kitchen, the same site where the "enslaved" Bloom fixed Molly's breakfast the previous morning. Stephen heads home, and Bloom goes to bed. Using a question-and-answer catechism technique to tell the story, Joyce begins the process of lifting Ulysses above these few characters to a cosmic perspective, a thematic revelation, just as he did at the end of his short story "The Dead." Though the two men have had a small but real communion, when Stephen leaves, Bloom feels the "cold of interstellar space." Molly's Weakness and Need, Problem, Partial Self-Revelation, Moral Decision (Penelope) Bloom and Molly's bed. In bed, Molly retells the story of Ulysses from her point of view, but her journey is completely in her mind. She expresses her deep loneliness and her feeling of being unloved by her husband. She is also well aware of her husband's many weaknesses and needs. In her marriage bed, with Bloom now sleeping beside her (though head to feet), she recalls her affair earlier that day with Blazes Boylan.
But finally Molly is the woman of "yes." The sense that Bloom and Molly's love may be reborn is found in her thought that this morning she will fix her husband breakfast and serve him eggs, and in her memory of Bloom when, deeply in love, she agreed to be his wife and fed him "seedcake." In this grand circular journey ending back home, there is the hint that a "remarriage" between Bloom and Molly might just occur.
Creating the Story World—Writing Exercise 5
■ Story World in One Line Use the designing principle of your story to come up with a one-line description of the story world.
■ Overall Arena Define the overall arena and how you will maintain a single arena throughout the story. Remember that there are four main ways to do this:
1. Create a large umbrella and then crosscut and condense.
2. Send the hero on a journey through generally the same area, but one that develops along a single line.
3. Send the hero on a circular journey through generally the same area.
4. Make the hero a fish out of water.
■ Value Oppositions and Visual Oppositions Return to the character web of your story, and identify the value oppositions between your characters. Assign visual oppositions that complement or express these value oppositions.
■ Land, People, and Technology Explain the unique combination of land, people, and technology that will make up the world of your story. For example, your story may take place in a lush wilderness inhabited only by small nomadic
groups using the simplest of tools. Or it may play out in a modern city where nature has virtually disappeared and technology is highly advanced.
■ System If your hero lives and works in a system (or systems), explain the rules and hierarchy of power, along with your hero's place in that hierarchy. If a larger system is enslaving your hero, explain why he is unable to see his own enslavement.
■ Natural Settings Consider if any of the major natural settings-ocean, outer space, forest, jungle, desert, ice, island, mountain, plain, or river—are useful to your story world as a whole. Make sure you don't use any of them in a predictable or implausible way.
■ Weather In what way might weather help you detail your story world? Focus on dramatic moments in the story—such as revelations and conflicts—when using special weather conditions. Again, avoid cliches.
■ Man-made Spaces How do the various man-made spaces in which your characters live and work help you express the story structure?
■ Miniatures Decide if you want to use a miniature. If you do, what is
it and what precisely does it represent? ■ Becoming Big or Small Is it appropriate for a character to become big or small over the course of the story? How does it reveal the character or theme of your story?
■ Passageways If a character moves from one subworld to a very different subworld, come up with a unique passageway.
■ Technology Describe the crucial technology in your story, even if it involves only the most mundane and everyday tools.
■ Hero's Change or World Change Look again at the overall change in your hero. Decide whether the world will change along with the hero or not and how.