Ulysses is may be the best known myth of Ancient Greece.
His personality has fascinated all the great writers all over the times in the western culture from Dante to Joyce.
His original characters are depicted in the Homer's
epic poems Iliad and Odyssey.
In the first, though the central role is played by
monolithic epic warriors like Achilles, Agamemnon and Menelaus, emerges his
cunning and his courage, jointly with his prudence and wisdom.
In the second,
where he plays an absolutely main role, hits mostly his curiosity, his bravery
and craving of knowledge but also his misfortunes and disgraces (po’lymetis and po’lytlas
are the two Greek words that connote and
mark his character soon in the incipit of Homer's late masterpiece).
Ulysses, with his anxiety of knowledge, sometimes even
against the Greek’s gods will, reminds in someway to the biblical account of
Adam and Eve, who tasted against the God’s prohibition the fruit of the tree of
knowledge.
We cannot be sure that Homer (or better the more
ancient traditions that the classic fonts assign conventionally to his
collection) was influenced by the direct vision of the biblical reports; but we
can neither exclude it utterly, so mysterious and intricate are the
contaminations between different cultures, all over the human history.
But in the Ulysses of Dante we can notice that
jointing with the Greek-roman tradition, the new Jewish-Christian vision
prevails on the eldest basic characters:
in the XXVI Canto of Dante’s Comedy, the immortal Greek hero doesn’t follow the
knowledge at any rate, but his intentions are moved for thirst of “virtues and
knowledge”. That’s what we read in the Ulysses prolusion to his mates “You were
not born for living like brutes/ but for following virtues and knowledge”.
As matter of fact Dante puts his Ulysses with the cheating
advisers (jointly with Diomedes) and not with the Angels rebelled against God
(though we must observe that they are nevertheless very close each other, in
the bottom of the horrible hell).
In other words we can say that modern western culture
accepts the Dante’s vision of the Inferno’s Ulysses.
The rebellion against God is therefore reserved to
Adam and Eve and to the Angels who fought against God for supremacy; Ulysses is
the positive hero whose anxiety of knowledge is to be framed in the quest of
God; or at least that’s the positive idea that western culture accepts
unanimously now days.
This perspective of Ulysses‘ myth is also accepted by
the graduated poet, the English Alfred Tennyson.
Totally opposite is instead the vision given by Irish
writer James Joyce in his controversial novel Ulysses.
Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom
through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June 1904 (conventionally the day Joyce's
married his wife, Nora Barnacle).
The novel
establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those
of the poem (Leopold Bloom corresponds to Ulysses, Molly Bloom to Penelope, and
Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus).
Ulysses is
divided into eighteen episodes. Since publication, the book has been a highly
regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses first on
its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Joyce
fans worldwide now celebrate 16 June as Bloomsday.
It's useful to describe now the equivalence between
the epic's characters and the main
subjects in the modern Joyce's
Ulysses. As everyone knows the three main characters in the Irish novel are
Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus (a sort of autobiographic profile,
already featuring in a previous author's novel as The portrait of an artist as
a young man). The story establishes a series of parallels between its
characters and events and those of the Homeric's poem: Leopold Bloom corresponds to Odysseus, Molly
Bloom to Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus to Telemachus.
It could have
been very hard to find a real coincidence in the two stories (the Homeric and
the Joycean) if Joyce himself had not given a precise, peculiar imprint in that
direction. As matter of fact James Joyce divided his novel into 18 different episodes,
each one reminding the Homeric's Ulysses events. But while the Homeric hero
lives those events through a ten years journey all over the mediterranean
basin, Bloom, Molly and Stephen are shown to the reader featuring all over a
single day in Dublin.
We cannot correctly understand the Joyce's work, if we
don't sight it in the right frame of
the cultural background of the Joycean's
times.
The Irish writer lives and creates in the same period of
Picasso decomposing reality into the
cubism painting technique. In the same time that Dadaism cries out its anti-war
politics through a rejection against the war and the bourgeois way of thinking
and behaving both in its political and
colonialist approaches.
May be right title for the Joyce's opus could be "The hidden side
of the Homeric hero Ulysses" also
considering the probable freudian influence on the literature and arts in the
same Joyce's epoch.
In fact the Ulysses' stream-of-consciousness
technique, make me think that Freud’s concepts of the conscious, primary process and
dreams can help illuminate Joyce's characters.
As matter of fact, in the first two decades of the XX
century, ‘the stream of consciousness’ writing
technique finds several followers, such as Marcel Proust in France and
Italo Svevo in Italy (besides Joyce himself).
The great, innovative
discovery of these three
novelists, has been to turn fiction from
the external to internal reality.
Of course you might like or not Joyce’s novel (its
reading being so difficult and hard, though joyful and agreeable in certain
pages, where humor and nonsense prevail on the apparent leisure of the full
contest), and so, still prefer the myth as Homer has engraved it
in his unforgettable masterpiece, but Joyce’s Ulysses is already like a shadow
who will follow forever the Greek myth of Odysseus.
