Time and Identity in "Ulysses" and the "Odyssey," by Stephanie Nelson (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Time and Identity in "Ulysses" and the "Odyssey," by Stephanie Nelson
• Stephen Sicari (bio)

TIME AND IDENTITY IN "ULYSSES" AND THE "ODYSSEY," by Stephanie Nelson. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2022. xii + 282 pp. $85.00 cloth.

When I read in the introduction to Stephanie Nelson's Time and Identity in "Ulysses" and the "Odyssey" that "there has been no full-length study of the two together" (2), I admit I was surprised. Surely Joyce scholars have been pursuing the relation of the two works even before a copy of Ulysses was printed for Joyce's fortieth birthday. Upon reflection, I realized that Nelson's assertion may in fact be true, especially when she explains that she does not seek anything new to say about the Homeric correspondences (in fact, she rightly calls them "Joyce's superficial play with Homer"—2), but pursues different ends: "This book, then, compares two works concerned with similar themes" (3). Putting the two together in a "full-length study" is, for Nelson, not the usual one-way street of using Homer to explain Joyce; rather, they illuminate one another: "Just as the Odyssey helps us think through Ulysses, so Ulysses brings out aspects of the Odyssey that many layers of interpretive varnish have obscured" (3). She wants to bring to light what she calls "the complex of associations that the Odyssey and Ulysses share" (106). It takes until page 151 for her to say this clearly: "[T]he Odyssey does not provide a key that unlocks Ulysses. Rather, it points us to where the issues lie, as does Ulysses for the Odyssey."

Nelson indeed identifies many such issues and associations in her study. While her title states that "Time and Identity" are her main emphases, within any one chapter (which she more or less organizes according to correspondences between characters in the two texts), one will find many sub-themes. For instance, in chapter 1, one finds: "Homer's Kinds of Time: Mythic and Ordinary," "Joyce's Kinds of Time: Internal and External," "Fluid and Fixed Identities," and "The Epic Tradition and the Use of Time." Within these sections are subsections, and at times the sheer array of such associations and issues can feel overwhelming. This is a list of some of the other themes: from chapter 2, "Problems with Property," "Problems with Family," and "The Displaced Son"; from chapter 3, "Names and Identities" and "The Role of Storytelling"; and from chapter 4, "The Passive Hero," [End Page 174] "Deeds and Imposing Identity," and "The Place of War and the Open-ended." The remaining two chapters also have several such headings with sub-sections. This list is intended to provide a sense of the array of associations and issues to be encountered.

My overall impression is that the author is more successful in using Ulysses to think about the Odyssey than the other way around. Nelson is a Classics scholar (her previous scholarship includes a book on Hesiod and Vergil and another on Aristophanes¹) who brings that formidable body of knowledge to this study. Not being a Classics scholar myself, I found what she has to say about the Odyssey provocative and new (new to me, at least). And if this is how she came to her insights about the various themes she discusses, then her placing them next to one another is at least a partial success. My own sense of the Odyssey has certainly been enlarged and enhanced.

Dedicated readers of Ulysses might find her persistent emphasis on the family dynamics in the Odyssey illuminating in themselves and provocative in thinking about the family situations of both Bloom and Stephen. Perhaps it was her reading of Joyce that led her to describe the Odyssey as quite modern, if not modernist. Nelson presents the relationship between Penelope and Telemachus as more tense and complicated than I had assumed. In her handling, Penelope has to keep Telemachus a dependent child if she is to be able to avoid ceding him the authority to oversee the household, which would free her to marry, which she may or may not actually desire. When Nelson says, "For Telemachus [waiting for Odysseus's return] means...