The evolution of the epic and moving beyond a dream

Charles A. Watson
EDUC327
Journal 6
April 9, 2014

JOURNAL 6: on JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

I’m moving slightly away from focusing my thesis on religious symbolisms of James Joyce Ulysses, instead seeking to prove that the longest and most symbolically informative chapter within this tale, a grand parody of Homer’s Odyssey, was a construct of the subconscious dream world of Stephen Dedalus. Recall that in chapter 14, the character had been indulging in absinthe with some of his intellectual friends. In Chapter 15, Circe, Stephen is knocked unconscious by a couple of British thugs. We don’t find out until the end of this bizarre chapter of hallucinations and fantasies of guilt, sexuality, politico, genderbending, and religious-based weirdness. Psychological, symbolic, informal and surreal, this nightmarish play within a novel takes place in Night Town, the brothel district of old Dublin. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe was a sorceress who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs. This transformation extends through the symbolic imaginings of the dreamscape of Ulysses’ Chapter 15 (Circe) when events describe more than they seem, just like analyzing any deep dream. And it is clear and even enlightening to my professor that I would declare that this whole entire figurative chapter was from the mind of one character in particular.

Because of the detailed character development from the previous chapters, the reader is engrossed in the personalities as they come to life with stage direction instead of philosophical meandering of the character Stephen Dedalus’ thoughts or Joyce’s inflections through other characters. Most all of the personalities from this novel surface in this nightmare from hell, or heaven (or purgatory if you will) and, through stage direction, provide symbolism for this closet drama in the middle—a play without any sense of performance.

The redirection of this thesis requires an open mind to my argument. I have confidence to proceed for I have found the proof, all the way to the biscuits in Stephen’s pocket from chapter 16, further proof that the events of the dream in Circe were from his cognitive circuitry.

The metaphor of a potato exchanged in a foggy dream in Dublin’s brothel district (Circe) equals the biscuits that were once in Stephen’s pocket: “He put his hand in a pocket anyhow not with the idea of finding any food there but thinking he might lend him anything up to a bob or so in lieu so that might endeavor at al events and get sufficient to eat but the result was in the negative for, to his chagrin, he found his cash missing. A few broken biscuits were all the result of his investigation. He tried his hardest to recollect for the moment whether he had lost as well he might have or left because in that contingency it was not a pleasant lookout, very much the reverse in fact. He was altogether too fagged out to institute a thorough search though he tried to recollect. About biscuits he dimly remembered. Who now exactly gave them he wondered or where was or did he buy. However in another pocket he came across what he surmised in the dark were pennies, erroneously however, as it turned out. (16:180–188)

Of the half dozen or so references of the potato and its metaphor for bread as staple of life, in one exchange from Zoe, who had been concealing a potato in her stocking in the surreal drama of Circe, to Stephen marks the significance of this empty pocket of crumbs. The spud also represents the potato famine that had plagued Ireland in the late 19^th Century and all of the politics surrounding it.

The value of studying this novel at this point in my academic career is cast through studying the language of the epic novel. The author Joyce presents a challenge for the serious reader of literature to yearn to uncover the truths and parallels of the original Homer Odyssey. Why do we study the same themes? What is their value to young minds? Why would I want to explore this for the rest of my literate years, to share the value of enjoying literature for its themes with boys, girls, men, and women—because time never ends, as long as we are alive. Every living creature has a story to tell, to share, based on a unique experience and voyage from points A to B, and the myriad that makes us who we are. Literature helps the mature mind work through these scapes that come from our dreams, built upon yesterday but beckoning tomorrow. Whereas modern electronic media will influence the subconscious, pure pulp of poetry and prose will realign the brain’s cognitive circuitry in ways that motion and repetition of electronic pixels and impulses hinder it. The mind will always dream in its unconscious or subconscious state, but dreams are most productive when the imagination is active and creative, when a person’s mind must create imagery from a literary construct instead of being fed through media. Fact—electronic media lead more to nightmares or even insomnia than pure and simple literature.

Joyce’s language and writing style throughout Ulysses changes with every chapter to indicate a connection to the original epic. Even at 100 years old, the classic Ulysses is modern: Dublin, on its emerald isle. Shakespeare and Company of Paris first published this novel in 1924, ten years after Joyce began writing it and 20 years after the novel’s setting. Interestingly, Ulysses was banned from distribution in the United States until 1936. It’s still timeless.

These are eloquent parodies of thought and communication, and also street slang and local vernacular, even bad writing or ad copy—poetry from its author’s shapeshifting characters. Like an actor in the greatest movie of all time, an epic with hundreds of angles and individual stories, this is truly great, inspiring writing. In Chapter 16 (Eumaeus), with its timely mockery of the mariner and conversational English, reading at times like the dialogue of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh series.

God-fearing, suspicious, and scrupulous, Eumaeus delivers probably the oldest extant example of literary sarcasm. In Joyce’s Ulysses, the sailor shares a twisted tale of his travels.  In Greek mythology, Eumaeus was Odysseus’s swineherd and friend. His father, Ktesios son of Ormenos, was king of an island called Syria. In Homer‘s Odyssey, Eumaeus is the first mortal that Odysseus meets after his trip to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War. He has four dogs, ‘savage as wild beasts,’ who protect his pigs. Although he does not recognise his old master — Odysseus is in disguise — and has his misgivings, Eumaeus treats Odysseus well, offering food and shelter to one whom he thinks is a mere indigent. On being pushed to explain himself, Odysseus spins a distorted tale, misleading Eumaeus into believing that he is the son not of Laertes but of Castor. (Wikipedia)

The Sailor, D.B. Murphy of Carrigaloe at Queenstown Harbour, is like Bloom with “his little woman waiting for him back home” (Fort Camden, Fort Carlisle). But is she really? Like Odysseus, Murphy is a sailor telling his tales: “Klaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.” The sailor tells of what he saw… giant plants, cannibals, and hallucinatory little pills in the water, Chinese men cooking rats for soup. (410–471)

The parallel lives of the central characters and Odysseus as we remember him begin to emerge in Eumaeus. Stephen is equivalent to Odysseus’ son Telemachus, Eumaeus must now equal Leopold Bloom, and the British sailor is Odysseus. Stephen has met his estranged father in a symbolic sense. After finishing this chapter, the takeaway is finding the meaning—the connection—as previously in the story’s narrative Stephen’s father Simon had been mentioned, even that he was a pallbearer perhaps for the Patty Dignam’s funeral, and that Simon knew Bloom, but maybe only peripherally. That’s the beauty of Joyce’s craft—the ability to create a village of folks whose lives intertwine as part of the surreal dream and create the patchwork of a magnificent epic.