Wanted to return to the comments Ulysses and just expand a little. Georg Lakoff talks about metaphor as ‘cross-domain’ mapping. For example, when you say ‘she was really cold to me’, emotion is understood – or ‘mapped’ – in terms of temperature; when we say ‘the past is behind me’, time is mapped in terms of space. One ‘domain’ (the target domain) is understood in terms of the other (the source domain).
So it is that Ulysses is understood as a kind of cross-domain mapping with 1904 Dublin as the target domain and Homeric myth as source domain. It's this which seems to me only half-true. What happens rather is that the ‘source domain’ (the Homeric) is broken up and disseminated through the target domain; and instead of being a domain of stable meaning which spontaneously 'reads' early 20th C Dublin, it is used, almost as the unconscious would use it, for jokes, puns, semantic hyperlinks and so on. As with the unconscious too, there is ‘overdetermination’ – Molly is not only Penelope but at one point Circe too, so that ‘penelope’ and ‘circe’ slide and reattach. New resemblances and significances are produced from the ruins of a distant mythic substrate.
If we see this from the point of view of novelistic construction, it is clear that a mythic element, such as the ‘no man’ of the Cyclops episode, is not approached in terms of ‘what is the contemporary equivalent of this? (ie who is the modern signifier of this signified)’ but ‘what different meanings can this signifier generate?’ You then put the signifier to work in the text, like a little programme, throwing up various puns, correspondences etc
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