Individuation and Collective Merging in Homer's Odyssey and ...

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A Narratological Insight on the Journey to an Integrated Self; Individuation and Collective Merging in Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses

Introduction

A sun rises and falls on a beautiful summer day in Dublin. It is June

sixteenth and two men find their way through another circadian round as

routine and ordinary as the next. But this is not how James Joyce proceeds to tell

their story. Although Joyce’s Ulysses is explicitly written and arranged to parallel

books from Homer’s Odyssey, of course with liberties, it manages to become

wholly new. Joyce’s shift from Homer’s omniscient narrator to an inconsistent

“arranger,” with multiple voices, as Hugh Kenner calls it, supports a

significantly larger meaning for the text (Kenner, 61). As theorists and critics

have discussed in the last hundred years, both narratives are deeply entangled

with intrinsic implications for the human psyche. The narrative styles of both The

Odyssey and Ulysses provide stories of self-becoming, but by vastly different

means. Of course, both plots revolve around homecomings, however the

narration of each text opens another way to understand the Odysseus’ and

Bloom’s journeys. That is to say, by analyzing the narration with the theory of

Carl Gustav Jung in mind, the narration itself changes and evolves along with

the development of our heroes. My argument aligns with that of Professor Jean

Kimball, who writes, "the psychic transformations realized in the stages of

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Joyce’s fictional portrait exhibit patterns that are congruent with Jung’s

theoretical descriptions of stages in the psychic transformation process he called

individuation, the aim of which is the integration of the personality” (Kimball,

42). This integration of the personality that Kimball refers to is analogous to the

concept of a self as I refer to it. In their journey to integrate their personalities, or

wholly develop their selves, Odysseus individuates, while adversely Leopold

Bloom merges with the collective. The self, according to the original self

psychologist Heinz Kohut, is “a structure within the mind, similar to an object

representation, containing differing and even contradictory qualities” (Siegel,

65). Disruptions in the development of the self can lead to narcissistic disorders

and central pathologies. For Jung, these disruptions stem from failure to

integrate both contradictory qualities of our essential being, the collective aspects

of ourselves and the individualistic aspects of ourselves. Although I agree with

Kimball that Ulysses as a whole aligns with the self development that Jung puts

forth, I more specifically submit that the narratological patterns mirror the

psychic forces that are involved in the process of individuation in The Odyssey

and the process of identifying with the collective unconscious in Ulysses. The

way in which these two stories are narrated show that Odysseus, by trying to get

home, is on a psychological path towards individuation and Bloom, oppositely,

by setting out on June sixteenth manages to merge with the collective

unconscious. The Odyssey achieves its meaning through an elevated, mythic

stance of the heroic journey in which Odysseus partly narrates his own story and

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Ulysses through a bodily, antiheroic human experience in which a collection of

voices communicates Leopold Bloom’s archetypal ontology. The convergence

between Homer and Joyce lies in the tales’ modes of multiplicity and in their

narratological implications. What is shown about each hero’s journey by the way

in which his story is told? As several other authors before have concluded, Carl

Jung is profoundly present in both The Odyssey and Ulysses. In my effort to trace

the nature and development of these two contrasting narrative styles, Jung’s

theory will play a valuable role in showing the relationship between text and life,

narrative and the psyche.

This project will address the differences between the narrative styles of the

Odyssey and Ulysses, exploring the psychological implications of self-becoming in

order to open up the Greek poem and Irish novel to expose an applicable

understanding of the human condition. We humans are obsessed with finding

ways to understand who we are, why we are, and how we got to be the way we

are. I aim to reveal one possible way for considering answers to these questions.

For Jung, both the collective and the personal unconscious are necessary to

accept, confront, and incorporate into one’s self. He writes, “the Self appears as a

play of light and shadow, although conceived as a totality and unity in which the

opposites are united” to make clear that both the collective unconscious and

personal unconscious, individuality, although in opposition, should be

integrated in the healthy and complete self (Collected Works, par. 789). Closely

comparing The Odyssey and Ulysses with a narratological lens reveals two

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spectacularly similar views of the ways in which the human psyche can move

from existence in the collective unconscious to individuation and alternatively,

move out of an individualistic modern society to recognize intrinsic existence in

the collective. Going home for Odysseus and Bloom means that they have

recognized and accepted both the individual and collective aspects of their

psyches in order to constitute a healthfully developing self.

Jung explains, “The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is

self-realization or individuation. … And because individuation is a heroic and

often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the

ego: the ordinary person we once were is burdened with the fate of losing one's

self in a greater dimension and being robbed of fancied freedom of will. We

suffer, so to speak, by the violence done to us by the self” (Collected Works, par.

233). Ulysses and the Odyssey are books that allow its readers to bear witness to

the suffering that accompanies self development. Odysseus and Bloom both find

their way home, but they also find their “return to light and life,” as Douglas

Frame would say, through semiotic duplicities of narration that lead us straight

into these characters’ unconscious (Frame, 28).

The Psychological Implications of Narrative Style; The Fiction Inside Us

Nearly 3,000 years after the composition of The Odyssey, we are still

enthralled with the journey Odysseus embarks upon and with Homer’s

storytelling itself. Almost one hundred years ago James Joyce created his

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astonishing epic based on The Odyssey, Ulysses, and it continues to confound the

literary world as an expressively meaningful text. But why have these two

specific works withstood criticism and held popularity for so much time? Why,

when searching a library catalogue for either one of these authors, do hundreds

of critical books pop up that attempt to explain them? Questions of how we can

live most healthfully, both mentally and physically, always stand at the crux

religion, science, myth, literature, and art. Joyce knew that Homer asked and

answered these questions in The Odyssey and wrote something possibly more

cryptic, but also just as poignant on the subject of being for a modern audience.

Homer’s The Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses help reveal the necessity of

understanding how literature and life converge. Through examining these

heroes’ journeys and the way in which they are told, we are presented with

insight on how to achieve healthy selfhood within ourselves. Charles Martindale

and Richard F. Thomas posit that narrative “brings new contexts and analogies

that are understood by virtue of old contexts and figures. It may uncover ideas

that were already ours but of which we were ignorant; it may bring the familiar

into unforeseen combinations. It may require the invention of new metaphors or

new blindnesses just as it can stir old passions and refigure forgotten stories”

(Martindale and Thomas, 17). The notion that there are ideas that are already

ours, but are unconscious, is the essence of Jungian theory. Through a

narratological lens, The Odyssey and Ulysses help to uncover these old passions,

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forgotten stories, or as Jung calls them, archetypes. 1 The most remarkable part

about Homer and Joyce’s success and relationship as storytellers is that they

achieve the representation of an essential, archetypal truth through a tremendous

difference of narrative styles. We care so much about the clever war hero and the

Jewish advertising agent because these fictional characters can be found as an

archetypal being in each and every one of us. We inherently and empathetically

share in their experiences. As readers, we do not necessarily find the exact

journey to selfhood that we will experience in reality, we read to enlarge our own

journeys and ourselves.

The Psychoanalytic Priority of The Odyssey & Ulysses; The Emblematic Stories of

Jungian Theory

The Odyssey and Ulysses are both books in which the hero must find their way

home. Arriving at home, as I have discussed, metaphorically stands for the

development of a healthy self. The narrative style of The Odyssey allows

Odysseus to stand out from the very collective tradition he was written in. The

narration of Ulysses, on the other hand, presents a character who is embedded in

the collective, moving away from the relentless nationalism and unhealthy

selfishness that modern society reinforces. What is more, there are moments of

multiplicity in both narrations that present a human fragmentation, the duplicity

1 Carl Jung coined the term archetype; Images and definite forms that are inherited and

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and multiplicity of the psyche that each hero must essentially work through in

order to arrive at home.

Although Joyce clearly wrote Ulysses as a gesture towards Ireland and its

people, immortalizing as well as parodying specific Irish ways of living, it

became something much more nonexclusive. Ulysses is a book with profound

depth to be learned from by whoever was able to read it. In “Scylla and

Charybdis,” Stephen elegantly philosophizes, “Every life is many days, day after

day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men,

young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” (U

9.1044-1047). The flood of varying narrative styles and voices authenticates

Bloom, our accepting and Christ-like figure, as an archetypal figure available for

all people to talk about and incorporate into their being. As many people should

do today and always, Bloom taps into his collective ontology through the

multiplicity of voices that tell his story. Mark Shechner, a pioneer of Joycean

psychoanalytic criticism, posits, “life as a dramatic series of solipsistic self-

encounters is a definition too of the life we discover in Ulysses” (Shechner, 11).

It seems that to explain and justify psychoanalytic interpretations of

literature here would be superfluous as its refinement as a literary criticism

throughout the years has been, for the most part, accepted and achieved.

However, simply to stand on the shoulders of giants, I will again quote Shechner

who says, “if literary study is a subcategory of anthropology, as I believe it is,

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and if our proper study is man, then we need a criticism that can locate art,

creativity, plot, style, character, and reader response inside the continuum of

normal human behavior without prearranged, defensive fictions about what is to

be discovered” (Shechner, 3). To look unto works of Homer and Joyce through

this metacritical lens is to open up a floodgate of understanding the human

condition. Psychoanalytic interpretation draws out manifest substances of

dreams, fantasy, or literature in order to align them with a latent content, to use

Freudian terms, which hails the protean archetypes, Odysseus and Leopold

Bloom. Certainly, if one is familiar with Jungian theory, his archetypes and

ideologies appear to be littered consistently throughout both texts. However, to

reiterate, I will focus on the narrative of each epic and how that specifically

interacts psychoanalytically with the characters’ journey towards home and self-

realization.

To follow the pattern of genuine chronology, I will begin with The Odyssey.

What exactly does it mean to find Jungian design in the narration itself? First and

foremost, however, a brief overview of Jungian theory may be necessary in fully

understanding this central exposition. His concept of the collective unconscious

is undoubtedly the most obvious place to start. In “The Structure of the Psyche,”

Jung postulates, “The existence of an individual consciousness makes man aware

of the difficulties of his inner as well as his outer life. Just as the world about him

takes on a friendly or a hostile aspect to the eyes of primitive man, so the

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influences of his unconscious seem to him like an opposing power, with which

he has to come to terms just as with the visible world,” describing the

fundamental condition of the basic psychic conflict of humans (The Portable Jung,

45). The Odyssey blatantly pictures a hero’s journey of working through a hostile

external world complete with monsters to conquer, beautiful goddesses to resist,

and gods to overcome. Nevertheless, on the narratological front, we are able to

see Odysseus come to terms with the conflict of his internal and psychic world.

The very first instance the narrative style gives us a clue as to his fragmented

story, or intrinsic contention, is on the first page when the narrator asks the Muse

to “Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,/ start from where you will-

sing for our time too” (O 1.10). Successfully invoking the Muse for inspiration in

telling Odysseus’ tale, the narrator begins the epic with, “By now, all the

survivors,/ all who avoided headlong death/ were safe at home, escaped the

wars and waves./ But one man alone…” The narrator begins in medias res where

Odysseus is held back on Calypso’s island, ten years after the end of the Trojan

War. Why not begin the story directly after the end of the war, at the triumph of

our war hero’s victory? Jumping ahead ten years into peacetime displays the

narrative fragmentation, the semiotic multiplicity that makes reception of this

story so instinctively captivating. This moment of narration draws our attention

towards Jung’s beliefs, as described in the Portable Jung, about the collective and

personal unconscious:

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For the primitive, whose personal differentiation is, as we know, only just beginning, both judgments are true, because his psyche is essentially collective and therefore for the most part unconscious. He is still more or less identical with the collective psyche, and for that reason shares equally in the collective virtues and vices, without any personal attribution and without inner contradiction. The contradiction arises only when the personal development of the psyche begins, and when reason discovers the irreconcilable nature of the opposites. The consequence of this discovery is the conflict of repression. We want to be good, and therefore must repress evil; and with that the paradise of the collective psyche comes to an end (97).

Although Odysseus himself recounts his story to the Phaeacians

beginning with his departure from Troy, the start of the poem must highlight

this pivotal and medial point of Odysseus’ journey towards home. The narration

starts ten years after the fact because this particular moment in time marks the

instance when Odysseus embarks on his journey of integrating his personal

unconscious with his primitive, or collective, unconscious. Jung’s collective

unconscious, to be more precise, is “a part of the psyche which can be negatively

distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the

latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal

acquisition” (The Portable Jung, 60). He continues, “the contents of the collective

unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been

individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity,” showing

that there is an entity in every individual that is inherited, generic, and made up

of what he calls, “archetypes” (60). Similar to Freud’s term, “archaic remnants”

or the mythological term, ‘motif,’ archetypes are primordial, symbolic images

found in the collective unconscious. Moreover, Jung attributes the motivation of

instincts to these preexisting forms, explaining, “Instincts are not vague and


indefinite by nature, but are specifically formed motive forces which, long before

there is any consciousness, and in spite of any degree of consciousness later on,

pursue their inherent goals. Consequently they form very close analogies to the

archetypes, so close in fact that there is good reason for supposing that

archetypes are in the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other

words, that they are patterns of instinctual behavior” (61). So, in the case of

Odysseus, the ever wandering one, the irreconcilable nature of opposites

becomes apparent in him when he feels the internal tension between his yearning

to go home and the pleasurable contentment he feels on Calypso’s island. Jung

even calls the collective psyche, “paradise,” which is precisely where Odysseus

had been residing during the interim of the war and the start of the narrator’s

report. This is not to say that Odysseus, the hero, is a primitive being. On the

contrary, Odysseus is a dynamic, multi-faceted character whose self is simply not

fully developed at the beginning of the Odyssey when assessed through Jungian

theory. The self is an ever-changeable entity that can always continue to grow.

Jung continues, “Our imagination, perception, and thinking are likewise

influenced by inborn and universally present formal elements,” which informs

an incredible amount about Odysseus’ unique, nomadic nature and most

definitely sheds light on the perplexing end in which he must leave home again

to begin another adventure (62).

Yet before investing more time on the narratological study of these two

men, it is necessary in understanding why Odysseus and Bloom are specifically


worthy of this attention. Why not invest our time in caring about the people of

reality who might really need or deserve our rapt attention in their real life

suffering or adventures? As Blakely Vermeule wonders, “What does it mean to

be more interested in a representation of something than in the thing itself?”

(Vermeule, 247) Narration is a complex art of telling that uncovers new contexts,

analogies, metaphors, and perceptions that might not have been consciously

available before the hearing or reading the story. Odysseus and Bloom both

represent vital stages of self-becoming in Jungian theory. Homer’s allowing

Odysseus to narrate his own story shows Odysseus individuating and standing

out. Contrarily, the story of Bloomsday is told by an accumulation of a

community of voices. Classics theorists Charles Martindale and Richard Thomas

posit that “the point of reception is the ephemeral interface of the text; it occurs

where the text and the reader meet and is simultaneously constitutive of both”

(Martindale & Richard, 17). This is precisely why reading narrative voice

through a psychoanalytic lens can revitalize an individual’s own psychic

encounters and transform a character’s story into something immensely

meaningful in real life. Without doubt, Homer has been read with a

psychoanalytical lens by an enormous number of theorists and scholars before

me. I intend to add to the collective discussion regarding this topic and,

ultimately, argue that the manner in which both Homer and Joyce narrate their

story is profoundly influential in cultivating an intersubjective grasp of the texts.


To be sure, referring to the narrative voice in Ulysses and The Odyssey is

not the same as referring to the authorial voice or even the voice of the implied

author. The narrator itself is a type of character in the same way that Bloom and

Odysseus are. However, as Kenner explains, “Characters must have voices,

spoken and unspoken, but the office of distancing and differentiating had to be

entrusted to an auxiliary narrative voice which could not be the voice of any

character since no character beholds the book’s entire action” (Kenner, 84).

Accordingly, the office of distancing and differentiating that Kenner refers to is

precisely where the heart of the psychological implications lies.

Omphalos: The Narrator’s Separation as a Point of Contact with the Unknown

Although the narrator can be considered a persona Homer and Joyce create

to tell the story they have imagined, the narrator’s distance and separation

simultaneously connects and severs the relationship between the characters and

the narrator, the narrator and the reader, and especially reality and fiction, just

like Stephen’s omphalos. Omphalos, in the Greek, means navel, and although it is

an imprecise word for the navelcord, it is the apparatus that connects two

people. Ruminating on some passing midwives in Joyce’s third episode,

“Proteus,” Stephen thinks, “A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in

ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandent wining cable of all flesh” (U,

1.38). This navelcord, is a repeated symbol throughout Ulysses, emblematizing


the source of connective nourishment from mother to child as well as something

that is cut, a “primal sundering,” as Maud Ellmann affirms in her book, The Nets

of Modernism (Ellmann, 7). In a footnote in “The Interpretation of Dreams,”

Sigmund Freud also recognizes the navel as a valuable symbol writing, “there is

at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable- a navel, as it were,

that is its point of contact with the unknown,” which, as apparent in the title of

this section, is precisely how the image of the navel functions in terms of

narratology (Freud, 4:111n). It was appropriately Carl Jung who coined the term

“psychic parallelism,” meaning that some things cannot be related to each other

causally, but must be connected by another kind of principle altogether (The

Portable Jung, 24). In the case of The Odyssey and Ulysses, the narrative styles are

connected by psychic parallelism, revealing how Odysseus and Bloom are

aligned, mirroring each other’s psychic journeys through their homecomings.

Avrom Fleishman attests, “Joyce still stands as the artist of the factual, making

fictional world out of the real and the imaginary” (Fleishman, 5). In the same way

that an umbilical cord both connects and detaches a mother from her child,

narration in The Odyssey and Ulysses synchronously and psychically links reality

and fiction.

The first connective and separating narrative quality is the gap between the

characters and the narrator in both Ulysses and The Odyssey. Homer uses an

omniscient narrator that tells Odysseus’ story in a chronological and sensical

fashion. Homer begins the poem with the famous words, “ἄνδρα µοι ἔννεπε,


µοῦσα, πολύτροπον,” or “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and

turns” (O 1.1). From the first sentence, even within the first three words, the

audience is told that the narrator is an entity itself, a “me” to be sung to and a

“me” that is not itself part of Odysseus’ story. Brian Boyd, a Professor of English

at the University of Auckland, explains, “We are not taught narrative. Rather,

narrative reflects our mode of understanding events” (Boyd, 131). So, when

Homer’s narrator beholds the power to see and retell events that occur with

Penelope and Telemachus back in Ithaca and then jumps miles away to

Calypso’s island report on the goddess’ custody of Odysseus between Book Four

and Book Five, the implied audience is able to witness the complete story

through a bird’s eye view simply as a reflex. Our mode of understanding The

Odyssey is to be separate from it and from the characters because our narrator is

as well. We are given a type of special insight that the characters are not allotted.

On the other hand, Odysseus also is allowed the ability to tell his own story in

the epic, weaving his own wool, so to speak, on Phaeacia. Book Twelve begins,

“Now when our ship had left the Ocean River rolling in her wake and launched

out into open sea with its long swells to reach the island of Aeaea-“ with

Odysseus narrating his story to the Phaeacians (O 12.1). What does this say about

the interrelation between the poet narrator and Odysseus himself? Character and

narrator are both separated and connected with their narratological navelcord.


To further this image, one could understand the narrator as the mother

archetype and Odysseus as the child. In his article, “Psychological Aspects of The

Mother Archetype,” Jung delineates the importance of this archetype in

particular and how integrating this aspect of one’s unconscious is necessary in

developing a healthy self. He writes, “This figure of the personal mother looms

so large in all personalistic psychologies that, as we know, they never got beyond

it, even in theory, to other important aetiological factors” (Collected Works, 81-84).

Odysseus meets the ghost of his mother in Hades as well and to put it in Jungian

terms, he is able to confront both his personal mother here and his collective

mother, the narrator in this metaphor, thus dissolving his projections and being

free to tell his own story in the following chapter. This is the narratological

περιπετεία, or the turning point, for Odysseus, who now has the ability to tell his

own story. It is in Book Nine when Odysseus, “the great teller of tales,” as the

poet narrator deems him, begins to recount his personal adventure (O 9.1).

Helping us to understand the significance of being able to tell one’s own story,

Jung writes, “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-

personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without

considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the

dark aspects of the personality as present and real” (The Portable Jung, 145).

Odysseus recognizes and accepts his shadow by telling his own story, the people

he had tricked and killed, going to hell and back, and all the other horrors of his

journey. By Book Nine, Odysseus has gathered enough psychic strength to


acknowledge and vocalize his journey, recognizing his personal shadow as a part

of who he is. Jung continues, “This act is the essential condition for any kind of

self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.

Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires

much painstaking work extending over a long period” (145). It takes Odysseus

twenty years to begin his journey home, or in Jungian terms, to begin his journey

to a healthier ego state that does not suppress or project his dark characteristics.

The narratological status of moving from a distinguished poet narrator, separate

from the characters, to Odysseus himself recounting his story, mirrors a

psychological advancement that helps our hero progress on his journey home.

We are also given this special type of narratological insight in Ulysses,

however in a fiercely divergent manner. Obviously Joyce is famous for his stream

of consciousness writing, a term coined by psychologist William James, otherwise

known as free indirect discourse (Herman, 95). Vermeule posits that free indirect

discourse “allows a writer to express sympathy and distance from her character

at the same time. It demands of the reader a signal critical attention,” and this is

exactly what Joyce’s puzzling narrative does (Vermeule, 76). The free indirect

discourse is especially stimulating in the book’s fifteenth chapter, “Circe,” a

chapter in which the arranger knowingly taps directly into Bloom’s unconscious.

The narration of “Circe,” could be considered as more of a stream of

unconsciousness writing rather than stream of consciousness writing. Not even a

fraction of the bizarre and grotesque scene in the Red Light District of Dublin is


remembered by Bloom, as apparent in the following chapter, “Eumaeus.” From

personified synecdoche to sado-masochistic gender transformation to ghosts,

nymphs, and prostitutes, this wild performance is an utterly unconscious drama.

The implied reader is granted a strange and wonderful inner-vantage of

unconscious phenomena. Sheldon Brivic argues, “Every author must provide

depth for his figures from a source beyond consciousness if they are to resemble

people, for people constantly receive and send impressions and images that they

can neither understand nor predict,” to show that Joyce, with his plethora of

authorial agencies, orchestrates actual life within his characters (Veil of Signs,

61). That is to say, Joyce’s creative power manifests Bloom, Stephen, and even

Molly, as multi-faceted human beings complete with a dynamic unconscious. By

severing a direct bond between the characters and the narrator and allowing the

narrator to understand and interact with aspects of the characters that the

characters themselves cannot perceive, we become infinitely more aware of

Bloom and Stephen as constructs, but also as real.

While there is this disconnect, Joyce’s lack of quotation marks and “he said,”

or “she thought,” means that the boundary between characters and narrator

becomes less determined and severe. So do Joyce’s characters necessarily

represent real people? Or, as I will argue, do they move past that realm into

something more archetypal, more universal, and more collectively profound? In

Jungian theory, all people have a collective unconscious filled with limitless


archetypal images, like the mother archetype or father archetype. Joyce’s

protagonist accesses so many of these archetypes in Ulysses, by means of the

multiplicity of his narration, that he himself becomes an archetypal symbol for

the everyman. Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom are perfectly

imperfect, so real that they transcend normalcy into the realm of archetypal

beings. Joyce’s abundance of different narrative styles simultaneously allows the

narrator to become one of the characters while being inevitably distinguished

from them.

For example, in Chapter Twelve, corresponding with Homer’s episode

describing Odysseus’ battle of wits with the Cyclops, Polyphemus, Joyce flexes

his protean ability to write through of any sort of narration. An unnamed debt

collector, a one-eyed Irish dun, follows the Citizen, our parallel for the Cyclops,

into Barney Kiernan’s pub and is the first narrator of the chapter. James

Hefferman, a Joycean lecturer, quotes Karen Lawrence and calls a second

narrator, who listens to their conversation and silently interjects throughout the

chapter, the rival narrator or the parodist. On the first page, the parodist wedges

in an eloquent and rigid passage regarding financial business in Dublin amongst

the crude and witless words of the original narrator, who is undoubtedly as

bigoted as the citizen himself. This shift in perspective exemplifies Joyce’s

determination to represent Bloom from all sides as we have largely seen him so


far through only his own eyes. Stephen Sicari explains the purpose of moving

past the viewpoint of our hero, Bloom:

As long as the reader is confined to a view of things dominated by Bloom’s consciousness, we will not rise above the limits of naturalism. It has become a cliché in Joyce criticism to gush about how ‘human’ Bloom is, and the early episodes do indeed establish his ‘humanity’ in perhaps the most fully realized depiction of a character in all literature. Yet that is the problem: Joyce wants to move beyond the human (49).

And he does so by parodying the history of the novel and allowing us to go

one step deeper in the perception of this bar scene with yet another narrator who

comments on the first and vice versa. This narrative situation in which there are

multiple narrators telling the same story but in hilariously differing manners,

moves Bloom beyond the human because to the implied reader, he becomes

thoroughly realized from multiple perspectives. It shows Bloom to be

multiplistic himself.

Why does Joyce jolt us back and forth from the parodist’s exaggerated

formality of what Heffernan explains to be the pretentiousness of old Irish

revivalist translation to the common and even obtuse language of the debt

collector? Joyce seems to compare the artificial language of Irish literary

revivalism to the living language of his characters showing that complicated

intellectualism has no relevance to actual being in the world. The parodist

converts simple actions around the bar to grand and elevated adventures. For

example, the parodist rephrases the debt collector’s, “he took the bloody old

towser by the scruff of the neck and, by Jesus, near throttled him,” as “A couched

spear of acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage


animal of the canine tribe who stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in

uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic

movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquilising blows

of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone” (U 12. 149, 200). By

linking the loudmouthed, belligerent citizen and debt collector with the

revivalist’s tendency to inflate old Irish heroes with stiffly composed, unrealistic

language, the parody also links highfalutin revivalism with the unarguable

stupidity of Homer’s Polyphemus who is easily fooled by Odysseus and his men.

Joyce’s free-associative double narration detracts and separates both narrators

from the characters while simultaneously blurring the boundary between them.

The narrator here is a character, yet unlike the others in the scene.

What does this narrative trick imply about Jung’s concept of the self and its

multiplicity? By having a narrator comment on another narrator sporadically

throughout a chapter, an authoritative, coherent narrative voice diffuses into a

collection of voices. Moreover, the debt collector fascinatingly narrates in past

tense, affixing Bloom in another way into the Jungian concept of the collective.

Jung believes that to deny that the primordial collective unconscious is to “deny

the existence of a priori instincts common to man and animals alike” (The Portable

Jung, 61). Where and when are the narrators narrating from? Because the

implied reader cannot tell, the arranger once again emits that tone of already-

ness of manifest destiny and timelessness, a characteristic of the collective

unconscious that is inescapable throughout the novel. This is not to say that this


is not still a journey for both Bloom. As Bloom’s day progresses from eight

o’clock in the morning to sometime after four o’clock the next morning, he has

transcended into the realm of the archetypal through a polyphony of voices.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious itself was, is, and will always be, so

Bloomsday fits right in to the melting pot of archetypal journeys with its sense of

timelessness.

Sicari suggests this already-ness as the reason Joyce decided to use the Latin

name “Ulysses” as the title of his book instead of “Odysseus.” He writes,

“Ulysses and useless are almost anagrams, a Joycean way of suggesting that this

hero’s greatness will be in accepting the utility of action, in resigning himself to

the uselessness of most of our efforts to avoid destiny,” showing that the crux of

Bloom’s being lies in the already-ness of his day (Sicari, 80). Interestingly

enough, around the time when he was writing Ulysses, Joyce had been studying

Nietzsche who wrote, “It follows therefore that the universe must go through a

calculable number of combinations in the great game of chance which constitutes

its existence…. And since every one of these combinations would determine the

whole series in the same order… the universe is thus shown to be a circular

movement which has already repeated itself an infinite number of times, and

which plays its game for all eternity,” in The Will To Power (Kenner, 150). Bloom,

in this sense, is therefore not weakly afraid to intervene on Molly’s conspicuous

affair at four o’clock, he is accepting of something that is inevitable and has even

already occurred. If The Odyssey is about a man standing out of a crowd or


individuation, then Ulysses is about blending into the collective. The

narratological frameworks analogously work to show that Odysseus has to

individuate from a collective ontology. On the other hand, Joyce’s narrative

cornucopia reflects that Bloom, so often described as the invisible man, has to

gain access to the collective unconscious in order to arrive home.

The paralleled chapters, “Cyclops” in Ulysses and Book Nine in The Odyssey,

which Robert Fagles names, “In The One-Eyed Giant’s Cave,” hold another

substantial meaning for both texts. In The Odyssey, Odysseus declares himself to

the asinine Cyclops as “outis,” or “Nobody,” in order to escape from

Polyphemus on the underbelly of his sheep without alerting the other Cyclopes

of his presence literally erasing his identity and individuality (O 9. 413). In his

final moment of escape he yells back to the confounded and blinded

Polyphemus, “Cyclops-/ if any man on the face of the earth should ask you/

who blinded you, shamed you so- say Odysseus,/ raider of cities, he gouged out

your eye,/ Laertes’ son who makes his home in Ithaca” (O 9.558-62). Odysseus

literally goes from being “nobody,” to Odysseus, the hero and man of Ithaca, a

specific, unique individual. He emerges out of the collective with this audible fit

of self-identification to distinguish who he is as a personalized human.

Joyce of course, diverges from this plot device and omits Bloom yelling his

own name to the brutish citizen. Committing an act similar to Odysseus’

individuating triumph during the height of his argument with the citizen Bloom

yells, “Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercandante and Spinoza.


And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God” and continues,

“Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me” before fleeing the scene while

being assaulted by a biscuit tin (U 12.1804-09). Instead, however, Bloom boldly

lists famous Jewish men, arriving at the most prominent name, Jesus Christ, and

adds, “like me.” Bloom does not emerge from the collective with this

announcement like Odysseus, but instead sinks into it, marking his identity as

someone who is the same as others, in tune with something larger than himself,

the collective.

Moreover, there is duplicity in the junction between the narrator and the

implied reader, by which I mean the reader that is supposed by Joyce to be

reading the text. According to Wolfgang Iser, “the text only takes on life when it

is realized and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the

individual disposition of the reader- though this in turn is acted upon by the

different patterns of the text” (Iser, 275). The implied reader has his or her own

subjective disposition when arriving at a text, but also lives up to expectations of

understanding, anticipating, or experiencing the text as the reality that the

author intended to express. So where is the gap, this navelcord, between the

narrator and this implied reader and what is its effect in The Odyssey and Ulysses?

Oral Composition and its Role in the Narratology of The Odyssey

Of course, it is hugely important to remember the possibility that Homer’s

Odyssey was not read, but in fact heard and repeated by a community. There is


controversy around whether or not Homer was an individual author, as the

answer would deeply impact our understanding of The Odyssey as a text. In

agreement with Robert Fagles, I will argue that The Odyssey is an amalgam of

orations solidified by a company of oral poets. Fagles, in his introduction to his

translation of The Odyssey, agrees that the formula and metrical pattern show

much evidence for multiple authorship, saying, “the poems are the creation of a

people, of a tradition, of generations of nameless bards” (Fagles, 17). Although

this section is extremely speculative, the manner in which the story was

manifested is incredibly relevant to a Jungian psychoanalytical interpretation. In

arguing that Odysseus emerges out the system that he was written in, I mean to

say that he individuates despite having been created by many separate entities.

Bloom develops his self in an opposite fashion of course, that is, merges with a

symphony of voices while having been written by one man.

As Rosalind Thomas says, “We need a more basic understanding of Greek

oral tradition before going on to ‘age-old’ legends widely known, accepted and

enshrined in poetry” (Thomas, 8). There is an essential difference in narrative

theory and analysis that we must address between the orated poem of Odysseus

and the physical text we can buy at the bookstore. The collective oral tradition in

ancient Greece made The Odyssey, as we know it literarily today, an action as

opposed to an artifact because we are no longer evolving it. In his book, The

Language of Heroes, Richard Martin argues that this difference “does not excuse us

from making the effort of imaginative reconstruction to interpret the poem as


closely as possible in its own context,” but what it does allow us to do is cut

ourselves from the bonds of what it means to have a single reader and to

interpret in a way accessible to a collection of archaic people (Martin, 1).

Although our mode of understanding The Odyssey as a text is inherently

altered from hearing it as a poem, we have to attempt to understand its narration

in the way that it was initially created. This is a complicated and assuming task,

however, for the sake of my argument, Ernest Renan eloquently states that

“unless we enter into the personal and moral life of the people who made it;

unless we place ourselves at the point of humanity which was theirs, so that we

see and feel as they saw and felt; unless we watch them live, or better, unless for

a moment we live with them,” we will struggle to understand the collective

atmosphere that the ancient Greeks lived (Parry, 1). Although we will never be

able to fully “live with them,” we can attempt to study the reception of epic oral

verse and how it interacts with the poem we now have cemented on pages.

Albert Lord continued the foundational work of Milman Parry on oral

tradition after his death in 1935 with his book The Singer’s Tale. Although Lord

philosophizes about the point of examining poetry in the context of oral

composition, he also recognizes the importance of New Criticism, examining

only the text. Both the text and the context of Homeric poetry, in the case of

narratology, are necessary to consider in order to acquire a full sense of the

meaning behind the narrative style. Lord explains, “Oral tradition is not merely


entertainment, but has a serious function in its society. It contains the ideals and

values of the society, as well as a concern for the basic problems of both the

community and the individual, and how to solve them or to become reconciled

to those that are insoluble. These are embodied in the myths with which, in my

opinion, epics, including, Homer’s and others in Ancient Greece, originated”

(Lord, 12). Through Homer’s epics, the values of his society, even in just single

poem, however long, are now contained. In this context, the Odyssey is a story

about Odysseus individuating out of the collective society he was created in.

During the age of the oral transmission of The Odyssey, those values were ever

shifting and reforming, just as values do in real-time of all societies. Lord

continues:

To return to the subject of poetic language, Homer’s had been forged by generations of singers before him, just as the average speaker of any language has inherited his nonpoetic language, which has been forged by generations of speakers before him and indeed by the same process of assimilation. In both cases not only are words inherited but also clusters of words in a variety of combinations, together with the flexibility to create new combinations (73).

Although singers of Homer’s time were unfathomably adept at memorizing,

there is always potential for a poem to evolve from singer to singer, just as in

tradition of folk music. The Odyssey as we know it today is an amalgam of a

community, arguably not just of a single man writing a story alone at a desk. I

will even go as far as classifying it as an embodiment of the Jungian concept of

the collective unconscious.


The Equal and Opposite Implied Reader and Narrator

To return to the implied reader’s interplay and correspondence with

narrative voice, it is necessary to address the heavily investigated reader

response theory. Iser says, “The manner in which the reader experiences the text

will reflect his own disposition, and in this respect the literary text acts as a kind

of mirror; but at the same time, the reality which this process helps to create is

one that will be different from his own,” discussing the reading process as a

dynamic realization of reality (Iser, 281). This is essential to recognize in the

context of The Odyssey and Ulysses because the narrator recounts Bloom’s and

Odysseus’ stories in a way that no actual human could accomplish believably. As

Erich Auerbach said, “the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a

uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present… despite much going back

and forth, it yet causes what is momentarily being narrated to give the

impression that it is the only present, pure and without perspective” (Auerbach,

9). If a person were a witness to Odysseus’ journey, he or she would not at all

have perceived it in the way the poet narrator tells, that is, without any

subjectivity. People live subject experiences, they see something from where they

are standing, hear with their own ears, and perceive things with unconscious and

automatic interpretation. The poet narrator manages to be a voice without

subjectivity because it can follow the story of Telemachus, Odysseus, and

Penelope while they are miles apart, experiencing completely different


situations. The gaping dissimilarity between this present-tensed Homeric

narrator and the implied reader’s experience of life results in a gateway to

something other than a conscious retelling. Part of the reason humans have held

onto this story for centuries is that, despite the fantastical and unbelievable

elements, there is an element in it that is inherent in all of us. Homer does not

recount a story we are supposed to believe; he tells a story we are supposed to

recognize. The implied reader is related by nature to the narrator because

Odysseus’ story is, has been, or will be present in all of our unconscious strivings

to become ourselves. A story told and heard by a collective people is pregnant

with meaning in a way that a story written by a single author has never been,

perhaps up until Ulysses.

The profusion of different voices Joyce uses to narrate Bloom’s story both

distance and link the narrative style with the implied reader. Joyce’s narrator, the

fluid performer who transforms from a preposterous explicator to an enigmatic

inner monologist to a man eavesdropping from the bar is not similar to the

implied reader in how they consciously arrange their experiences. While this

divergence of perception still remains, the manner in which Joyce jumps from

voice to voice, narrated to unnarrated, is, at the same time, exactly how we

perceive the world. The third and densest chapter, “Proteus,” is all about a

constant flux of life, the infinite turn of the tides. Amidst the very first paragraph

of this modulating chapter, Stephen thinks to himself while strolling on


Sandymount Strand, “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more,

thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn

and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot,” in Joyce’s signature stream of

consciousness, first person narration (U 3.1). However, the protean introduction

continues:

But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che saanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! (U 3.4-14)

Joyce exemplifies here this modality of the audible, that is, the ability to will

closing one’s eyes, but the inescapable consequence of thinking a thought when

inspired by the senses one cannot turn off. Stephen experiences the world not

only nacheinander, or one thing after another, but also nebeneinander, things

side by side or all at once. Proteus is a chapter in which Stephen grapples with

ideas and fears about sex, water, and all that is the resonant changing of life.

Switching from third person narration to second person narration to first person

internal monologue to second person and back to first person mirrors the

ineluctable modality of our psyches. Ulysses is a book of life because all the

different narrative forms it takes are difficult, baffling, and full of metamorphic

possibilities just like real life. In Book Two, Stephen has his students read Lycidas,

a pastoral elegy by John Milton, which is about a man who drowns and is


resurrected by the water. Stephen is undoubtedly terrified of water, and water all

throughout Ulysses, is literally, life. Stephen tries to amend his disconnect from

life, from the body, from water in “Proteus,” through attempting to replace his

intrinsic subjectivity, the ineluctable modality of the visible, for objectivity.

Vincent Pecora writes, “the threatened integrity and identity of particular voices

in the text- the voice of the narrator as well as that of any character- meant a

more ‘objective’ and egalitarian approach to reality, with power and authority

dispersed throughout the text and the tyranny of ‘unusual voices overcome”

showing that not only does Stephen strive for a new kind of objectivity, but Joyce

does as well through this fluctuating narrative style (Pecora, 236).

There is something destructive in Stephen’s intellectuality, as parodied with

the density of this chapter, which cuts him off from the immediacy of life. In the

passage above, not only does the narrative voice merges with Stephen’s, but

Stephen seems to have more than one voice himself. “You are walking through it

howsomever. I am, A stride at a time,” he thinks as if having a conversation with

a separated aspect of his conscious (U 3.11). The narration here exemplifies the

multiplicity of the self, the Cartesian dualism involving the radical split between

body and mind. Uri Margolin in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative states,

“The narrating voice indicates a judgment of sameness in the midst of change by

maintaining the same proper name or referring expression for a given

individual,” but it is clear that Joyce’s narrator denotes the complete opposite of

maintaining sameness (Herman, 75). It is with this divergence from the usual


consistent narration that Margolin talks about that Joyce fits Bloom into the

Jungian concept of archetypes that reside in the collective unconscious. Bloom,

having been thought up by a single man, moves from being individually created

to being universally narrated through a profusion of voices. In order to achieve a

full and healthy self, to refer once again to self psychology, is to fuse both the

personal unconscious with the collective unconscious, to recognize one’s

individuality while also interacting and accepting the innate collectivity within

all of us.

Embedded in the passage from “Proteus,” the name itself coming from a

minor sea god with the power to metamorphose, is a narrator that emits a sense

of change amongst a world of constant instability and flux. In The Odyssey,

Menelaus recounts for Telemachus the tale of capturing Proteus, the Old Man of

the Sea and a shape-shifting god, in order to find his way back to Sparta. Proteus’

daughter, Eidothea instructs Menelaus on his trap, saying, “He’ll try all kinds of

escape- twist and turn/ into every beast that moves across the earth,/

transforming himself into water, superhuman fire,/ but you hold on for dear life,

hug him all the harder!/ And when, at last, he begins to ask you questions-/

back in the shape you saw him sleep at first-/ relax your grip and set the old god

free” (O 4. 465). Menelaus must keep a grip on Proteus while he cycles through

all possible physical forms until he returns to whom he authentically is.

Metaphorically, Menelaus’ recollection of holding onto life through all its

different shapes and forms is what Odysseus must do on his journey home. In


the same way that Menelaus holds on in order to find out what Proteus’ true

form is, Odysseus has to face the mutability and multiplicity of life in order to

arrive home. Of course, Odysseus is a man who knows who he is. This is not his

problem. His journey in the Odyssey is not to ‘find himself,’ but to develop it, of

integrating both his collective unconscious with his individuality. Both Joyce and

Homer compose with a humanistic multiplicity that translates to the stories

themselves as well as to the narrative voices that tell them. Stephen even thinks,

“Molecules all change. I am other I now” playing with temporality and

awareness in life (U 9.205). What we find in this gap between the narrator and

the implied reader is a pulsatingly vibrant representation of the intricate

complexity of human experience, a protean existence. In the same way that The

Odyssey is possibly told by a community of Homeric poets, Ulysses is told from

multiple perspectives of the psyche. Joyce purposefully disconnects the implied

reader from the narrative style in the same way we are distanced from our own

unconsciousness and from that same token, we are presented with an infinitely

more intimate correspondence with Stephen and Bloom.

Polytropos; The Books of Many Turns

Finally, the most significant narrative navelcord is between Homer and Joyce

themselves. The narrative implications connect The Odyssey and Ulysses in a

meta-textual way. Joyce, although not at all trained in ancient Greek, attempted


the seemingly impossible. That is, he aimed to bridge the gap between ancient

and contemporary life. Why does Joyce use the Greek that he does in Ulysses,

when his educational roots in Latin were no secret? More important, why does

he diverge from the generally omniscient narrator that Homer employs? Do they

produce a similar end and how when they went about it in such contrasting

narrative fashions?

The title of this particular section is a spin off from the title of Fritz Senn’s

Book of Many Turns, which argues that Ulysses shares The Odyssey’s ability to find

new ways to be read and always avoid repetition (Schork, 125). Senn discusses a

foray of philological connections between the two books, one of which seems to

be especially aligned with Philip Herring’s Uncertainty Principle. Explaining this

principle, Sicari says, “Joyce carefully leaves out essential evidence in order for

unsolvable problems to remain in his texts. Herring boldly claims that the

information we need for full identity and closure to exist in Ulysses simply does

not exist and that every effort to find such closure is doomed to failure” (Sicari,

28). Of course, it is undeniable that there are unanswerable perplexities in both

texts, like Joyce’s man in the mackintosh, Stephen’s fox riddle, or the ball that is

missed by Nausicaa and her handmaidens on the beach. These “mistakes” have

sustained these books through time by mirroring human shortcoming, the

universe’s randomness, and the anthropological state of hamartia, or missing the

mark. Whether it is Odysseus needlessly yelling out his true name to


Polyphemus, the citizen’s failed catapulting of the biscuit tin towards Bloom, or

Bloom’s tolerance of Molly’s affair, deficiencies here will not show victimhood or

weakness, they present us with a heroic acceptance which both authors

champion. Senn concludes in his book, “Missing one’s aim is part of the human

condition, one recognized by Homer and profusely modulated by Joyce, who

may differ from most of his predecessors by not concentrating on reports of

success, without, however, making failure necessarily tragic,” (Senn, 105). These

two narratives are far from perfectly understandable, but that is what makes

them permanent and allegorically meaningful. Sicari explains, “The fundamental

irony of Joyce’s Ulysses is that it will be teaching us that language, especially

poetic language, is inherently fraudulent,” to divulge that in order to tell the

truth of life, Joyce must do so in a form that reaches beyond any form of

relativity (Sicari, xiii).

On this note, Ulysses and The Odyssey are asymptotic. An asymptote is a

curve that always moves towards a fixed point, but never quite arrives at it. In

the same way that we, as critics, will never finish discussing, arguing, and

changing the meanings of these texts, Odysseus and Bloom may never fully

arrive at home, in the sense that home is a metaphor for the self. The

development of the self is an ever-budding and wavering process that requires

endless reflection. Although Odysseus manages to return to his marriage bed

carved from a living tree growing through his house, an undeniable symbol for


his private home, he follows the prophet Tiresius’ forewarning that he will travel

inland to find the people who will not recognize the oar in his hand. Odysseus

connects for a brief time in his life with this symbolic home and must depart

from it again because the journey to selfhood is never ending. The final scene in

Ulysses is also enigmatic. We can speculate as to whether or not Bloom’s

relationship with Molly will improve, whether he will stop her affair, or move on

from the death of Rudy, but it is completely open ended, just as developing one’s

self is. According once again to the Heffernan lectures, Joyce said himself that the

effort to say even the most simple things does indeed require the most complex

means.

On the subject of nomadism and return, I turn again to some work of

Douglas Frame. In Book Nine of The Odyssey, Odysseus meets the Lotus-eaters,

whose food stunts the desire to return home. Frame explains, “This loss of desire

is a kind of ‘forgetfulness,’ as is revealed by two closely related collocations, both

in verse-final position: nostou te lathesthai2, ‘to forget their homecoming,’ in line

97 and nosoio lathetai3 that he might forget his homecoming,’ in line 102”

(Frame, 35). Having these two words paralleled so closely is to suggest that to

loose one’s want to return is the same as loosing one’s mind, or forgetting. In the

context of narratology, this maneuver indicates that the Homeric poets composed

with the complexity of the psyche in mind. It even seems like Homer tapped into

an understanding of what would become Jungian theory thousands of years ago.

2 Transliterated from the Original Greek that Frame employs; νόστου τε λαθέσθαι 3 Transliterated from the Original Greek that Frame employs; νόσοιο λάθηται


H. Porter Abbot confers, “All of these usages of plot feature the term as a skeletal

story, either universal or culturally fabricated, which performs its psycho-social

work while cloaked in a diversity of narrative dress” (Herman, 43). For

Odysseus, losing the will to go home is like losing the will to distinguish himself

as an individual. To connect this idea to Jungian psychology again, if Odysseus

did not motivate himself initially to leave the comfort and pleasure he found on

Calypso’s island, then he would not have embarked on this hero’s journey to

individuate. On individuation, Jung writes, “In general, it is the process by

which individual beings are formed and differentiated from other human beings;

in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being

distinct from the general, collective psychology” (Collected Works, par. 757). As

we know, the collective psychology that Jung refers to here can by symbolized in

myths, dreams, and fantasy as paradisal.

Neomai; Narratological Implications of the Return

To further Douglas Frame’s argument which states, “The origin of this

tradition has to do with the etymology of the Greek word noos, ‘mind,’ which I

propose to connect with the Greek verb neomai, ‘return home,’” I submit that the

journey home is inextricably intertwined with, not only the mind, but also, and

perhaps more essentially, the development of the psyche in both The Odyssey and

Ulysses. In fact, Odysseus’ most rivaled suitor is named Antinous, meaning anti-


mind. What does going home and arriving at home mean for Leopold and

Odysseus? Odysseus, upon his arrival, is patient, clever, and filled with rage

towards the maids and the greedy, unworthy suitors, especially Antinous. These

crafty and bloody scenes that occur in the final eight books when Odysseus is

finally present in Ithaca, from a Jungian standpoint, are bursting with

archetypes.

The first apparent archetype that manifests upon Odysseus’ return is in

Book Sixteen, which involves Odysseus confronting his son for the first time

since Telemachus was an infant. This long awaited meeting allows Odysseus to

indulge in his fatherly instincts, to access the father archetype that is inherently a

part of who he is. Irene de Jong writes, “the subject of reunion of father and son

is underscored by the narrator through his use of periphrastic denomination:

more than in any other book, Odysseus is referred to as father, (42, 192,214, 221),

Telemachus as son (11, 178, 190, 308, 229, 452)” recognizing the prevalence of his

newly discovered archetypal characteristic in Book Sixteen (Jong, 385). Jung

explains, “it is always the father-figure from whom the decisive convictions,

prohibitions, and wise counsels emanate…an authoritative voice which passes

final judgments,” and Odysseus absolutely passes final judgments on the

wrongdoings of the suitors (Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 214-15).

Odysseus is also presented with the opportunity to make a grand entrance

through disguise and trickery. The psychological aspects of the father archetype

are to be stern, authoritative, reasonable, and lawful, while the aspects of what


Jung calls the “the trickster-figure,” are mischievous, witty, and paralleled to the

individual shadow (Four Archetypes, 177). Going home for Odysseus is a chance

to face his shadows, suppressed and sometimes projected dark aspects that are

present in everyone. Jung describes the trickster figure archetype writing, “Even

his sex is optional despite his phallic qualities. He can turn himself into a woman

and bear children,” distinctly reminding us of Blooms fantastical, yet Dionysian

ability in “Circe,” to become a female complete with birthing capacities (476).

Jung continues, “From this point of view we can see why the myth of the

trickster was preserved and developed. Like many other myths it was supposed

to have a therapeutic effect. It holds the earlier low intellectual moral level before

the eyes of the more highly developed individual, so that he may not forget how

things looked yesterday” (480). Odysseus returns to his personal ‘yesterday,’

Ithaca, to reconcile with different aspects of his shadow.

More urgently, when Odysseus gets home he is also forced to reconcile

with the monstrosities of multiplicity that have accumulated in his psyche, the

suitors. Because home is a metaphor for the self, the suitors represent the final

obstacle towards individuation. The narration of his final advance in “Ithaca” is

drastically different than in previous books of The Odyssey. The narratological

timeframe is slowed way down, contrasting Book Five in which Homer describes

years of Odysseus’ stay with Calypso in a few pages. Norman Austin points out,

“Homer’s temporal notions carry a wealth of associations related to communal

life, to daily human activity, and to the changing aspects of nature,” illustrating


how time in reality can mirror Homer’s narrative choice when dealing with self-

discovery, which can be a painstakingly lasting experience (Austin, 85). To

explain the strange arrangement of time in these final chapters, Jong continues,

“The ‘continuity of time,’ principle is therefore not observed, since the same

amount of time should have elapsed for them as for Telemachus, who since

sunrise has disembarked, seen an omen, and walked to Eumaeus’ hut. The

reason for this breach of narrative convention could be that the narrator wants to

include the crucial detail of Odysseus and Eumaeus sending away the other

herdsmen, which means that the stage is now empty except for the protagonists”

(Jong, 386). As soon as the scenes begin to take place in Ithaca, the narrator

explains with tremendous detail, particularly in Book Twenty-Two, “Slaughter in

the Hall.” Of course, the narrator is in a bit of a predicament in these concluding

books because it is difficult to emit a sense of suspense when Odysseus’ victory

and revenge on the suitors is preordained. However, the narrator obviously

prevails by means of what Jong calls, “suspense through retardations” (Jong,

525). She explains, “Athena does not help Odysseus immediately, Odysseus

failed to leave behind arms for Telemachus and himself, and Telemachus

inadvertently leaves open the door to the armoury, thus allowing the Suitors to

arm themselves,” which displays the dramatic effect of embedded focalization

(525). Thus, the suitor’s ignorance and slow recognition that Odysseus has truly

returned allows for a new kind of narratorial intervention, one that makes


Odysseus stand out amongst a crowd. Jong pulls attention towards a specific

moment of narration:

Suitors ‘Now your steep death is secure, because you killed the best of the Ithacan youths (26-31a).’

narrator Thus they spoke, thinking that he had killed Antinous inadvertently. But the fools did not know that the ropes of death were fastened on them all (31b-33).

Odysseus ‘You thought I would never come back, but now the ropes of death are fastened on you all (34-41).’

narrator They became pale with fear and looked around for a way to escape steep death (42-3). 528

The suitors are narrated as a collective entity during this instance. This

narration draws out Odysseus’ uniqueness and prominence as an individual. As

one standing out of the collective, responding to the collective speech of the

suitors, Odysseus has the power to enact his revenge and reunite with his home,

family, and self. Jong makes one more poignant diagnosis of the narrative style

of the final slaughter scenes explaining, “to evoke the feverish atmosphere, the

narrator turns to a jerky kind of narration, which is also found in 16.328-412:

Odysseus’ instructions to Eumaeus are merely summarized (129); the arming of

the Suitors is not first described by the narrator, but immediately focalized by

Odysseus (148); and the fact that Telemachus left the door open (154-6) is not first

mentioned by the narrator, and therefore comes just as unexpectedly for the

narrates as for Odysseus” (530). Through a Jungian perspective, this chaotic

narrative moment means that Odysseus is working through the most fragmented

and projected aspects of his shadow archetypes that are also the most difficult to

conquer. He cannot simply walk into his own house and kill all the suitors, or as


they represent, his psychic multiplicity. Odysseus must put on a disguise. He

cannot reveal himself when first confronting these horrific invaders and can only

actually begin the annihilation after taking off his mask and thus, individuating.

Sporadic, unexpected narration and narrative omissions make not only the

implied reader, but also Odysseus, who is excluded from some insight that the

narrator holds, feel as if they are groping around in the darkness, a feeling that

Jungian psychology would posit is a symptom of the trepidation of confronting

one’s shadow. Facing one’s deepest innate intricacies will be the most

courageous challenge of one’s life and although the Ithacan King is successful,

the narration plays with the feeling of uncertainty, chaos, multiplicity, and

horror with this gruesome spectacle.

The Jungian psychological implication of the narration of Bloom’s

reappearance to 7 Eccles Street at the end of the novel is, of course, equally

noteworthy. To begin, Bloom makes the final trek home accompanied by Stephen

in Book Seventeen, “Ithaca.” The narrative style in this particular book is

startling following Book Sixteen, “Eumaeus,” which exemplifies a more logical

and familiar manner of narration. The “arranger,” to use Kenner’s term again,

organizes this chapter in a question-answer method. For example, one narrator

asks, “What comforted his misapprehension?” To which another answers, “That

as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown

to the known through the incertitude of the void” (U 17. 1018-20). These

narrators not only discuss the conversation Bloom and Stephen have in the


kitchen, but also their inner thoughts, their differing views, their wants,

reflections, and memories. The implied reader does not know whether this is the

conscious internal thought of the two men as they converse or if it is the

narrator’s opinion. Is Bloom aware that he had proceeded through the unknown

to the known through the incertitude of the void? Bloom may or may not be, but

the narrative evolution from the start of the novel to the end reveals a

narratological consciousness that undoubtedly is. Sicari writes, “The ‘Lotus

Eaters’ narrator cannot lift the veil from Bloom’s face and so cannot see the ‘light

of inspiration shining in his countenance’ that the ‘Ithaca’ narrator sees so

clearly, after the fact and so upon retrospection” (Sicari, 19). Bloom is not

narrating this scene himself, but whether or not the thoughts or descriptions

come from his mind or the narrator’s mind is ambiguous. So, the narration in this

chapter adduces Bloom’s ineluctable involvement with the collective, fusing

arranger and character. The line between the narrator and the arranger makes

clear that it is not only Bloom who is telling his story, but a collection of voices. A

story that is this in tune with the collective unconscious cannot be told, because

no one person can tell it. Although James Joyce is one man, there are multiple

narrators in Ulysses. Making clearer the connection between the multiplicity of

the narrator and self-development, Jung resolves, “The collective unconscious,

however, as the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not

individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals, and is the

true basis of the individual psyche” (The Portable Jung, 38). Odysseus


communicates his own adventure; Bloom’s is being communicated by a

symphony of voices. In order to have a healthy, integrated self, a person must

amalgamate the collective unconscious with their individuality. In Ulysses,

Bloom enters the collective, while preserving his individuality. In the Odyssey,

Odysseus emerges from the collective to individuate, while preserving the ability

to confront the collective unconscious as he departs once again.

Conclusion

The Odyssey and Ulysses are not confined civic commentaries and are far

from being solely relevant to the time and place they were created from.

Although they are each situated in the locality of Greece and Dublin, the

implications of their narrative patterns are universal. The narratology of each

story helps affix Odysseus and Bloom into Carl Jung’s theory of the human

experience. That is to say, the process of individuating and confronting the

collective unconscious is involved in every person’s existence, whether it is

repressed or healthfully achieved. Jung writes that the development of

consciousness “gradually brings liberation from imprisonment in agnoia,

‘unconsciousness,’ and is therefore a bringer of light as well as of healing” (Four

Archetypes, 488). The development of consciousness, ego, and ultimately, the self

is the result of going through journeys like Odysseus and Bloom. The Odyssey,

having been created by means of oral transmission from poet to poet

narratologically manages to extract Odysseus from the collective tradition it was


composed in. Alternatively, as seen through Joyce’s multiplicity of narrative

voice, Bloom succeeds in escaping the individualistic ethics of modern society.

What was unconscious to Odysseus was his individuality and for Bloom, his

collectivity.

The relationship between narration and selfhood is made clear by these

two texts. Narrating one’s own story is analogous to Jungian individuation while

being narrated by an excess of voices is to be admitted into the collective.

Odysseus, through Homer’s concrete and detailed exterior narration, emerges

out of the paradisal collective as an individual with a developed self, having

reached home. Leopold Bloom is a ghost, Jew, Christ, husband, father, nobody,

everybody, citizen, man, woman, lover, animal, artist, and wanderer. He is our

floating, metamorphic, and archetypal god of Ulysses as told by so many

distinctive deliverers. Both Odysseus and Bloom are characters sustained

through the power of narrative style. In this narratological context, Jungian

theory allows The Odyssey and Ulysses to become paradigms of the archetypal

experience of individuation and identification with the collective.


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