The convergence of Homer's 'Odyssey' and Joyce's 'Ulysses' (Greece, James Joyce, Ireland)

The intertextuality that Joyce cultivates in Ulysses with Homer's Odyssey incites numerous apparent contradictions, such as the disparity between faithful Penelope and adulterous Molly Bloom. For this reason, Joyce's congruence with Homer has traditionally been dismissed as simply ironic, as a parody, or as a crude structural device without profound meaning. But Joyce justifies his construction of such intertextual oxymorons as emulations of tensions which Homer fostered within his own poem. My close textual analysis, supported by pertinent critical scholarship, proves that an inherently multivalent depiction of heroism and fidelity pervades each text. For Homer and Joyce use similar narrative strategies to portray a kind of heroism which is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, and a kind of marital fidelity which is so often subverted by ambivalence and extramarital desire that it constantly borders on infidelity. Joyce's echoes with Homer illustrate how the meaning of heroism and fidelity endures from antiquity to modernity and demonstrate the persistence of a cross-cultural concept of human heroism and fidelity with a common ethical basis. Nonetheless, Joyce's eradication of gender roles and rules exposes certain irreconcilable differences between the two texts. Hence in Ulysses, Joyce simultaneously reinforces and revolutionizes the meaning of Homer's Odyssey.