Abstract

The broad outlines of Joyce's narrative are of course strongly Homeric: the three parts, with Telemachus' adventures at first separate from those of Ulysses, their eventual meeting, their homeward journey and return. Equally Homeric is the account of a heroic traveler picking his way among archetypal perils. That the Odyssey was an allegory of the wanderings of the soul had occurred to Joyce as to many before him, and he had long since designated the second part of a book of his poems as "the journey of the soul" . He had also construed Stephen's progress in A Portrait as a voyage from Scyllan promiscuity in chapter 4. Although in Ulysses he diverged sharply from Homer in the order of events, Joyce clearly adapted the Homeric settings and what he chose to consider the prevailing themes. He found the Odyssey beautifully all-embracing in its vision of human concerns. His own task must be to work out the implications of each incident like a Homer who had long ago outlived his time and had learned from all subsequent ages. Joyce once asked his friend Jacques Mercanton if God had not created the world in much the same ways as writers compose their works; but he then bethought himself and murmured, "Perhaps, in fact, he does give less thought to it than we do." Neither God nor Homer could compete with Joyce in self-consciousness. Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, received the 1960 National Book Award for his definitive James Joyce: A Biography. He has written extensively on Joyce and other modern writers, edited work by and about them, and examined the theoretical implications of biography in Golden Codgers. "Joyce and Homer" is a selection from his book, The Consciousness of Joyce, published by the Oxford University Press