Abstract

James Joyce’s Ulysses rewrites the Homeric Odyssey in such a way that the ancient myth provides a structural pattern, which gives order and meaning to a seemingly chaotic and meaningless contemporary world – an aspect which T. S. Eliot called the “mythical method”. As the characters of Ulysses are ignorant of this ordering device, they function as Jungian archetypes rather than individuals: Their deeds correspond to a mythical framework which is not actively remembered but provides a collective unconsciousness that guides their lives as a principle of order and continuity. What they do is meaningful although they consider themselves as insignificant agents thrown into a seemingly chaotic world. Whereas scholars have focused on Homer’s Odyssey as an archetypal (i.e. collective unconscious) key to the cultural memory of the mythical roots of Western culture, they have turned a comparatively blind eye to the fact that Homer’s corresponding work of the Iliad has a similar function for the mythopoetic design of Ulysses. This paper is going to reconstruct Joyce’s neglected intertextual dialogue with the Iliad as an archetypal key to the cultural memory of the roots of Western civilisation.