Editing Ulysses (novel) (section)

===Joyce and Homer===
The 18 episodes of ''Ulysses'' "roughly correspond to the episodes in Homer's ''[[Odyssey]]''".<ref>"Ulysses", ''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'' (1995), edited Margaret Drabble. Oxford UP, 1996, p. 1023</ref> In Homer's epic, [[Odysseus]], "a Greek hero of the [[Trojan War]] ... took ten years to find his way from [[Troy]] to his home on the island of [[Ithaca (island)|Ithaca]]".<ref>Bernard Knox, "Introduction" to ''The Odyssey'', translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Books, 1995, p. 3.</ref> Homer's poem includes violent storms and a shipwreck, giants, monsters, gods, and goddesses, while Joyce's novel takes place during an ordinary day in early 20th-century Dublin. [[Leopold Bloom]], "a Jewish advertisement canvasser", corresponds to Odysseus in Homer's epic; [[Stephen Dedalus]], the protagonist of Joyce's earlier, largely autobiographical ''[[A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]'', corresponds to Odysseus's son [[Telemachus]]; and Bloom's wife [[Molly Bloom|Molly]] corresponds to [[Penelope]], Odysseus's wife, who waited 20 years for him to return.<ref>''The Oxford Companion to English Literature'' (1995), p. 1023.</ref>

''The Odyssey'' is divided into 24 books, which are divided into 3 parts of 4, 8, and 12 books. Although ''Ulysses'' has fewer episodes, their division into 3 parts of 3, 12, and 3 episodes is determined by the tripartite division of ''The Odyssey''.{{sfn|Ellmann|1972|pp=1–2}} Joyce referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in his letters. The novel's text does not include the episode titles used below, which originate from the [[Linati schema for Ulysses|Linati]] and [[Gilbert schema for Ulysses|Gilbert]] schemata. Joyce scholars have drawn upon both to identify and explain the parallels between ''Ulysses'' and ''The Odyssey''.{{sfn|Ellmann|1972}}<ref>{{cite book |last1=Tindall |first1=William York |title=A Reader's Guide to James Joyce |date=1959 |publisher=Thames and Hudson |location=London |pages=123–238 |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.124372/mode/2up |access-date=24 February 2024}}</ref>{{sfn|Kenner|1987|pp=19–30}}<ref>{{cite book |last1=Blamires |first1=Harry |title=The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through "Ulysses" |date=1996 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=0415138582 |pages=passim |edition=3rd |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=M6CVn25pid0C |access-date=24 February 2024}}</ref>

Scholars have argued that [[Victor Bérard]]'s {{lang|fr|Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée}}, which Joyce discovered in Zurich while writing ''Ulysses'', influenced his creation of the novel's Homeric parallels.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Gilbert |first1=Stuart |title=James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Study |date=1930 |publisher=Knopf |pages=passim }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last1=Seidel |first1=Michael |title=Epic Geography: James Joyce's "Ulysses" |date=2014 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=978-0691610665 |pages=passim |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Kt3_AwAAQBAJ |access-date=26 February 2024}}</ref> Bérard's theory that ''The Odyssey'' had Semitic roots accords with Joyce's reincarnation of Odysseus as the Jewish Leopold Bloom.{{sfn|Ellmann|1982|p=408}}

[[Ezra Pound]] regarded the Homeric correspondences as "a scaffold, a means of construction, justified by the result, and justifiable by it only. The result is a triumph in form, in balance, a main schema with continuous weaving and arabesque."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pound |first1=Ezra |title={{"'}}Ulysses' and Mr James Joyce": Literary Essays of Ezra Pound |date=1935 |publisher=Faber and Faber |location=London |page=406 |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.504260/page/n7/mode/2up |access-date=29 February 2024}}</ref> For [[T. S. Eliot]], the Homeric correspondences had "the importance of a scientific discovery". He wrote, "In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity&nbsp;... Mr. Joyce is pursing a method which others must pursue after him." This method "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Eliot |first1=T.S. |title="Ulysses, Order, and Myth": Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot |date=28 March 1975 |publisher=Harcourt Brace |location=London |page=177 |url=https://archive.org/details/selectedproseoft00elio/page/n9/mode/2up?view=theater |access-date=1 March 2024}}</ref>

[[Edmund Wilson]] wrote, "The adventures of Ulysses ... do represent the ordinary man in nearly every common relation. Yet I cannot but feel that Mr. Joyce made a mistake to have the whole plan of his story depend on the structure of the ''Odyssey'' rather than on the natural demands of the situation. ... His taste for symbolism is closely allied with his extraordinary poetic faculty for investing particular incidents with universal significance, nevertheless ... it sometimes overruns the bounds of art into an arid ingenuity which would make a mystic correspondence do duty for an artistic reason. The result is that one sometimes feels as if the brilliant succession of episodes were taking place on the periphery of a wheel which has no hub."<ref>{{cite magazine |last1=Wilson |first1=Edmund |title=A review of James Joyce's Ulysses |magazine=The New Republic |date=July 5, 1922}}</ref>

In the late 1930s, Joyce told [[Samuel Beckett]], "I may have over-systematized ''Ulysses''."{{sfn|Ellmann|1982|p=702}} Around 1937, in a conversation with [[Vladimir Nabokov]], Joyce disparaged the use of mythology in modern literature. Nabokov replied, "But you employed Homer!" "A whim", Joyce said. When Nabokov pointed to his collaboration with Stuart Gilbert, Joyce replied, "A terrible mistake ... an advertisement for the book. I regret it very much."{{sfn|Ellmann|1982|p=616}}

The American literary scholar [[William York Tindall]] has written, "Joyce considered Homer's myth the complete expression of man. ... Exile, home, humanity, and art, Joyce's concerns, found expression in Homer's ''Odyssey''. ... But the Homeric pattern is only one level of the narrative Joyce composed. Another level is the Christian pattern. ... Bloom is not only Odysseus but Jesus-God. These traditional beliefs, however, are less important that the main level of Joyce's myth: the story of Stephen Dedalus and Mr. Bloom in Dublin or the present, the particular, and the personal. ''Ulysses'' is a narrative composition of three levels, to which, by allusion, Joyce added others of less importance. His myth is not the ''Odyssey'' but ''Ulysses''."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Tindall |first1=William York |title=James Joyce, His Way of Interpreting the Modern World |date=1950 |publisher=Scribner |location=New York |pages=102–03 |url=https://archive.org/details/jamesjoycehisway0000tind/page/102/mode/2up}}</ref>