Just a note on Ulysses

I tire of hearing the line that Joyce shows how modern life reveals deep mythic structures, how the Homeric narrative silently supports the 'surface story' behind the backs of the characters themselves. But there are few one to one and systematic Homeric parallels in Ulysses. It is not as if incidents in the immediate story are systemically translatable back into their Homeric ‘equivalents’, their hidden reality. Take for example the ‘no man’ of the Cyclops episode – this epithet could refer to the narrator but also to Bloom, whose polyoptical view of things (he can always 'see the othe fellow's point of view'), various names (Bloom/ Flower/ Virag) and fleeting connection with Everyman make him well fitted to this. Odysseus’ 20 year exile is glimpsed, arguably, in the 20-1 odds on Throwaway, like a tiny ironic splinter of the original story. The story before us does not peel away to reveal its Homeric contours. The blinding of Polyphemus, for instance, is not simply translated into Bloom’s metaphorical blinding of the monofocal Citizen, but is glimpsed in the sweep’s brush that nearly has the anonymous narrator’s eye out. In such trivial incidents are glimpsed the refracted light of the dead mythic star. The Homeric content is shattered, re-distributed, a single element appearing in Joyce’s Dublin as several splinters. What these shards (or sometimes brief jokes) do is not bridge the seeming gap between present and mythic past but to measure it.

I explain all this to Gutner in the pub. 'in literary terms, Ulysses is postmodernism's transitional object' he states boldly before ordering a plate of fried kidneys from a singing barmaid and dashing off to the bog.