Joyce had always planned for Ulysses to echo events
in Homer's poem, and as he wrote early chapters he described
them to friends using names drawn from characters and places
in the epic. When he began receiving galley proofs from
Maurice Darantière in June 1921, and filling the unfortunate
printer's margins with elaborate additions to the set text, he
revised and extended the Homeric correspondences of earlier
chapters to make them consistent with what was evidently
becoming a more serious engagement with Homer in later
chapters. This compositional process, detailed in Michael
Groden's textual study Ulysses in Progress (Princeton
UP, 1977), suggests that a reader may be well advised to look
for precise narrative correspondences between the novel's 18
chapters and certain parts of Homer's epic tale.
Nine months earlier, on 21 September 1920, Joyce had sent to
his Italian translator Carlo Linati a
"summary-key-skeleton-schema (for home use only)" that
indicated the importance of certain Homeric correspondences,
as well as numerous other compositional principles. He listed
in hand-written Italian the Title of each chapter (drawn from
an episode in the
narrative of the Odyssey), the Hour at which its
action takes place on June 16, a representative Color (or, in
a couple of instances, two colors), some Persons from the Odyssey
(presumably meant to correspond to people in the chapter, but
not so identified), a narrative Technique (or, often, more
than one), a corresponding Science or Art in other fields of
intellectual endeavor, a general Significance, a bodily Organ,
and a Symbol (several for each chapter).
Some of the entries on the Linati chart suggest interesting
lines of reading, while others, including many of the Homeric
persons, seem gratuitous, impenetrably obscure, even bizarre.
The schema is long and sprawling, and it multiplies orders of
categorization to the point of becoming disorderly. Chapters
are numbered in two ways, with a straightforward 1-18 and a
confusing 1-3, 1-12, 1-3 emphasizing the novel's division into three parts.
Time superscriptures ("Dawn," "Morning," "Mid-Day," "Day,"
"Midnight") detract from the elegant, though oversimplified,
assignment of each chapter to a numerical "hour."
The sprawling and cryptic document does, however, twinkle
with glimpses of Joyce's thought processes. One notable
example: to explain the absence of "organs" for the book's
first three chapters, Joyce wrote vertically across those
three lines, "Telemaco non soffre ancora il corpo," Telemachus
does not yet suffer (endure, bear) a body.
In November 1921 Joyce produced a revised schema for the
writer Valery Larbaud, who was preparing to deliver a lecture
on the forthcoming novel in Paris. He also sent a copy to his
biographer Herbert Gorman, and it seems that several other
people saw versions of this chart during the 1920s, always
with the caveat that it was for private use and not to be
published, until Joyce finally authorized Stuart Gilbert to
publish a copy in his critical study James Joyce's
Ulysses (1930).
The new schema had a slightly varied line of headings:
Title, Scene, Hour, Organ, Art, Colour, Symbol, Technic, and
Correspondences. Scene was a new category. Significance was
omitted. The Correspondences went beyond lists of Persons,
noting precise parallels between characters in Ulysses
and the Odyssey. The Hour entries do not always
agree with those in the Linati schema. Both documents show the
day starting at 8:00 (the Linati shows Telemachus
and Calypso occurring at "8-9," while the Gilbert
assigns both to "8 AM"), but they differ on Nestor
and Lotus Eaters (Linati says "9-10" while Gilbert
says "10"[-11]), and on Proteus and Hades
(Linati 10-11 and Gilbert 11[-12]). The two documents agree on
the six chapters from Aeolus to Cyclops,
assigning each to a successive hour (12-1, 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5,
5-6), and on Nausicaa (8-9) and Oxen of the Sun
(10-11). Disagreements enter again, however, with the final
four chapters: the first schema has Circe, Eumaeus,
and Ithaca occupying the hours immediately after Oxen
(11-12, 12-1, 1-2), while the revised one postpones each by an
hour (12 AM, 1 AM, 2 AM). The Linati schema lists an infinity
symbol for Penelope, while the Gilbert simply
records a dash.
The new schema was somewhat tidier, and since Joyce composed
it after finishing all eighteen chapters and making revisions
to earlier chapters, it may better reflect his knowledge of
his own book, at least in some instances. But the tidiness
comes at the expense of capaciousness. To take one of many
examples, the Linati schema identifies the Significance of Aeolus
as "The Mockery of Victory," and the Symbols as
"Machines: Wind: Fame: Kite: Failed Destinies: Press:
mutability." The Larbaud schema simply identifies a single,
not very evocative Symbol: "Editor."
Joyce came to regret his decision to go public, and quite
possibly rued having composed the schemas in the first place.
Based on a conversation in 1937, in which Joyce told him that
the collaboration with Gilbert was "A terrible mistake, an
advertisement for the book. I regret it very much," the
novelist Vladimir Nabokov decided that the whole symbolic
superstructure was a kind of perverse game, not to be taken
seriously. In his Lectures on Literature (delivered
over the course of two decades at Wellesley and Cornell),
Nabokov acknowledges "That there is a very vague and very
general Homeric echo of the theme of wanderings in Bloom’s
case," but he argues that searching for detailed
correspondences would reduce the novel to "a pedant’s stale
allegory." Similarly, Ezra Pound reckoned that Joyce's rickety
structures were a kind of scaffolding that had helped him to
conceptualize his project as he worked but could be discarded
upon completion. He called the schemas an affaire de
cuisine, more interesting to the chef in the kitchen
than to the diner consuming the meal.
Although skepticism is well warranted, this website mentions
the schemas in the headnotes to each chapter, and occasionally
in other notes when they promise to enrich the reading of a
passage.
