Ulysses

Ulysses is the creator-god in Joyce, a true demiurge who has freed himself from entanglement in the physical and mental world and contemplates them with detached consciousness. He is for Joyce what Faust was for Goethe, or Zarathustra for Nietzsche.

Jung identifies Joyce's Ulysses as a symbol of the higher self — a demiurgic figure representing individuation and liberation from samsara, analogous to Faust and Zarathustra in their respective authors' psychic economies.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966thesis

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Joyce's Ulysses, very much unlike his ancient namesake, is a passive, merely perceiving consciousness, a mere eye, ear, nose, and mouth, a sensory nerve exposed without choice or check to the roaring, chaotic, lunatic cataract of psychic and physical happenings.

Jung distinguishes Joyce's Ulysses from his Homeric counterpart, characterizing the modern figure as radically passive consciousness — a photographic receptor rather than a purposive agent — exposing the ego-dissolved condition of modernity.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966thesis

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Ulysses is not locked into opposites. He does not suffer from one-sidedness. In him there need be no conflict between senex and puer. His is an anima consciousness, which also helps account for his successful descent to the underworld.

Hillman reads the Homeric Ulysses as an archetypal figure of anima consciousness — his epithet polytropos signifying psychological multiplicity and differentiated relation with the feminine rather than heroic one-sidedness.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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Ulysses is a document humain of our time and, what is more, it harbours a secret. It can release the spiritually bound, and its coldness can freeze all sentimentality — and even normal feeling — to the marrow.

Jung argues that Joyce's Ulysses, despite its apparent nihilism, possesses a hidden therapeutic and symbolic potency that operates beyond its negative surface, functioning as a disruptive yet redemptive document of the age.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966thesis

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not one of them has an ego, there is no acutely conscious, human centre, an island surrounded by warm heart's blood, so small and yet so vitally important. All the Dedaluses, Blooms, Harrys, Lynches, Mulligans, and the rest of them talk and go about as in a collective dream that begins nowhere and ends

Jung identifies the complete absence of a stable, warm ego-centre in Joyce's characters as the novel's defining psychological feature — a collective dreamstate without individuated selfhood.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting

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It would never occur to me to class Ulysses as a product of schizophrenia... Ulysses is no more a pathological product than modern art as a whole. It is 'cubistic' in the deepest sense because it resolves the picture of reality into an immensely complex painting whose dominant note is the melancholy of abstract objectivity.

Jung refuses to pathologize the novel, instead aligning it with cubism as a formally radical mode of representing reality through dissolution of conventional perceptual unity.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting

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the ego of the creator of these figures is not to be found. It is as though it had dissolved into the countless figures of Ulysses.

Papadopoulos, summarizing Jung, highlights the dissolution of the authorial ego into the novel's figures as the ground for Jung's rejection of Freudian psychobiography as a method for interpreting the work.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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Ulysses shows how one should execute Nietzsche's 'sacrilegious backward grasp.' Joyce sets about it coldly and objectively, and shows himself more

Jung positions Joyce's method in Ulysses as a deliberate, cold execution of Nietzsche's iconoclastic reversal — a negation of inherited ideals pursued with detached psychological precision.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting

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the backdrop of Jung's debate with Joyce's Ulysses is composed of Freud's avowed admiration of Michelangelo's Moses... Jung's debate with Joyce is revealed to be also a debate with Freud, Freudian psychoanalysis and most notably with the Freudian psychoanalysis of art.

Papadopoulos argues that Jung's engagement with Ulysses is covertly structured as a polemic against Freudian aesthetics, with Moses and Ulysses serving as rival symbolic figures in the Jung–Freud confrontation.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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the symbolic references in James Joyce's Ulysses, in which the technique of a multiple reflection of consciousness and of multiple time strata would seem to be employed more radically than anywhere else. The book unmistakably aims at a symbolic synthesis of the theme 'Everyman.'

Auerbach identifies Joyce's Ulysses as the most radical deployment of multiple-consciousness technique, functioning as a symbolic synthesis of the universal human condition across all cultural strata.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

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The David of Guido Reni is presented as a cousin Ulysses, the clever and skilled hero, or anti-her

Papadopoulos maps Ulysses onto the figure of David as opposed to Moses, establishing a typological contrast between Jung's approach (cunning, adaptive, anti-heroic) and Freud's (monumental, law-giving).

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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Stephen Dedalus, the bird-headed sky-man, trying to escape from the all too gaseous regions of the air, falls into an earthly slough and in the very depths encounters again the heights from which he fled.

Jung interprets Stephen Dedalus's descent into squalor in Ulysses as an enactment of the Hermetic axiom 'as above, so below,' where the spirit recovers the sacred even in the depths of degradation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting

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The demiurge first created a world that in his vainglory seemed to him perfect; but looking upward he beheld a light which he had not created. Thereupon he turned back towards the place where was his home.

Jung concludes his reading of Ulysses with a Gnostic-mythological frame in which Joyce's demiurgic creator turns from his creation toward a transcendent light — mirroring the novel's ultimate arc toward the Eternal Feminine in Molly Bloom's monologue.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting

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I had already taken up Ulysses in 1922 but had laid it aside disappointed and vexed. Today it still bores me as it did then... The only thing beyond dispute is that Ulysses is a book that has gone through ten printings and that its author is glorified by some and damned by others.

Jung opens his essay with a frank admission of personal resistance to Ulysses, framing his analysis as a psychologist's professional obligation to engage with a culturally significant phenomenon despite subjective repulsion.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966supporting

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he sees himself more or less in the shadows, waiting for the sense such a text can bring to the reader, for whatever Ithaca he might find while following as best as he can this Ulysses.

Papadopoulos reads Jung's attitude toward the novel as one of intuitive accompaniment — the reader following Ulysses toward his own 'Ithaca' of self-discovery, structurally mirroring the individuation process.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006supporting

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'History,' states Stephen, in the course of his long helljourney of Ulysses in a world of living man, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'

Campbell situates Stephen Dedalus's famous declaration within a mythological framework of descent and awakening, reading it as the initiatory crisis that drives the novel's deeper spiritual movement.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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in both Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, at the end of the journey into night a change occurs: the dew of divine mercy falls, caritas, compassion, karuṇā, and the ever deepening descent turns into illumination from above.

Campbell aligns Joyce's Ulysses with Mann's The Magic Mountain as parallel myth-structures of nocturnal descent that culminate in transformative compassion — a movement from the law of death to redemptive grace.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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perhaps most famously by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), which uses the book structure of The Odyssey for a stylistically virtuosic narrative of one ordinary man's day wandering around Dublin before returning to his wife.

The Odyssey's editorial apparatus briefly notes Joyce's Ulysses as the pre-eminent modern adaptation of the Homeric structure, providing the intertextual context for depth-psychological readings of both works.

Homer, The Odyssey, 2017aside

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Everything abusive we can say about Ulysses bears witness to its peculiar quality, for our abuse springs from the resentment of the unmodern man who does not wish to see what the gods have graciously veiled from sight.

Jung argues that critical hostility toward Ulysses is itself diagnostic — a symptom of the reader's unconscious resistance to the shadow dimensions of modernity the novel forces into view.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 1966aside

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Jung himself experiences this jubilation that he qualifies as Dionysian in the last pages of his two texts, above all in the one that he devoted to Joyce.

Papadopoulos observes that Jung's essay on Joyce culminates in an unexpected Dionysian jubilation, suggesting that his engagement with Ulysses produces a genuine psychological transformation in the analyst himself.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006aside

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