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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
This paper is in the nature of a caveat entered against one mode of interpretation to which Joyce's work has been subjected. Many literary works in our time have been hitched onto mythopoeic horses, but Ulysses has been rather worse handled than most, in this regard. My comments are directed against the uses to which have been put, by certain critics, mythopoeic references and allusions in Joyce's novel. The problem has not to do with whether Ulysses employs symbols, for it obviously does, but rather with the character of their employment.
1 In Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), passim.
2 James Joyce's “Ulysses” (London, 1930), p. 59.
3 “Unsubstantial Father: A Study of Hamlet Symbolism in Ulysses,” UTQ, xviii (Jan. 1950), 136.
4 “The Odyssey in Dublin” (1929), rptd. in Seon Givens, ed. James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (New York, 1948); these claims are made on pp. 231-232 and 239.
5 James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York, 1950), pp. 28, 35.
6 One has been made by W. S. Gleim, called The Meaning of “Moby-Dick” (New York, 1938).
7 I follow the practice of Levin and Kain in citing Ulysses from the 1934 Random House edition, directly after the citation. 8 Tindall, Joyce, pp. 26, 30.
9 Above Delta in Cassiopeia (685, 712). On 49 Stephen sees “worlds” (artistic?) in that region, and on 207 he mentions the star that rose there at Shakespeare's birth, calling it his “star by night,” an echo of his Moses parable at lunchtime.
10 See, for the local-joke approach, the symposium in Envoy (Dublin), v (May 1951), 1, which combines scorn for the gullible “foreigner” with some uneasiness.
11 “The day,” says Daiches, in The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago, 1939), p. 145, “is hardly even a normal day; it tends to be weighted on the side of the trivial.”