Ulysses: Annotated

Ulysses, a Modernist reconstruction of Homer's epic The Odyssey, was James Joyce's first epic-length novel. The Irish writer had already published a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the semi-autobiographical novella, whose protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, reappears in Ulysses. Immediately hailed as a work of genius, Ulysses is still considered to be the greatest of Joyce's literary accomplishments and his first two works anticipated what was to come in Ulysses. The novel was written over the span of several years, during which Joyce continued to live in self-imposed exile from his native Ireland. Ulysses was published in Paris in the year of 1922--the same year in which T. S. Eliot published his widely regarded poem, "The Waste Land."

Within English literature, the "Modernist" tradition includes most of the British and American literary figures writing between the two world wars, and James Joyce is considered among the likes of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf: standard-bearers who initiated the Modernist "revolution" against the Victorian "excesses of civilization." Even today, Ulysses is widely regarded as the most "revolutionary" literary efforts of the twentieth century if only for Joyce's "stream of consciousness" technique. In his efforts to create a modern hero, Joyce returned to classical myth only to deconstruct a Greek warrior into a parody of the "Wandering Jew." Joyce's hero, Leopold Bloom, must suffer the emotional traumas of betrayal and loss, while combating the anti-Semitism of 1904 Dublin. In place of Greek stoicism and power, Joyce set a flawed and endearing human being. And while Homer's The Odyssey only touched upon "epic," dignified themes, Joyce devoted considerably detailed passages to the most banal and taboo human activities: gluttony, defecation, urination, dementia, masturbation, voyeurism, alcoholism, sado-masochism and coprophilia-and most of these depictions included the hero, Bloom.