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. 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, Mitsunaga Whitten 8 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 9 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: Mitsunaga Whitten 10
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 11 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 12 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. Mitsunaga Whitten 13
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 14 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, Mitsunaga Whitten 15
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. Mitsunaga Whitten 16
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 17 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 18 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 19 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 20 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 21 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 22 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 23 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. Mitsunaga Whitten 24
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 25 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 26 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 27 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.
Mitsunaga Whitten 28
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 29 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 30
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 31 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 32 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 33 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 34 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 35
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 36 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 37
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- Mitsunaga Whitten 38 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 39
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 40 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 41
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 Mitsunaga Whitten 42 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 43 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 44 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 Mitsunaga Whitten 45 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. Mitsunaga Whitten 46
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