Ulysse

The action of Ulysse takes place in one day, in Dublin, in 1904. Ulysse's character is a young Jewish employee, Leopold Bloom; Stephen Dedalus, a young Irish poet, is Télémaque; Marion, Bloom's wife and the one who plays the trumpet, is Pénélope. Nothing extraordinary happens in the course of this day. Bloom and Dedalus leave the city, going about their business, and find themselves in a bordel in the evening. Each episode corresponds to an episode of L'Odyssée. But the parody leads to a critique of the modern world in an era of vulgarity. Joyce expresses the universal through the particular. Bloom, Dedalus, and Marion are archetypes. All of life, birth and death, the search for the father (Dedalus is also Hamlet), and the search for the son (Bloom lost a young son), all of history is contained in a single day. It is to Rabelais and Swift that one can compare the art of Joyce, who wrote, in Ulysse, the greatest epic and satirical work of our time.