#20: Ulysses and the Challenge of Literary Innovation
On June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom leaves his Dublin home, attends a funeral, visits a newspaper office, eats lunch, walks along the shore, enters a maternity hospital, and eventually returns to bed. Nothing in that outline sounds capable of filling one of the most discussed novels ever written. James Joyce found an epic inside the ordinary day. Ulysses loosely parallels Homer’s Odyssey, with Bloom as a modern wandering hero, Stephen Dedalus as a searching young intellectual, and Molly Bloom waiting at home with a life and mind entirely her own. Each episode experiments with language and form. One resembles a play, another traces the development of English prose, while the final chapter enters Molly’s flowing thoughts with very little conventional punctuation.
