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Mitsunaga Whitten 1 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 2 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 3 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 4 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 5 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, Mitsunaga Whitten 6 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 7 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.

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