The Anatomy of the City: Spatial Poetics, Homeric Parallelism, and Somatic Registers in Joyce’s Ulysses

Author: Dr. Eleanor S. Dedalus
Institution: University College Dublin & Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III)
Degree: Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature & Urban Cultural Geography
Date: June 16, 2025
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.winnegans.ulysses.2025
License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation examines the spatial, somatic, and mythological triangulation of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). By correlating the private schema structures Joyce circulated to Carlo Linati (1920) and Stuart Gilbert (1930) with the physical cartography of Dublin in 1904—specifically Thom’s Official Directory, the Ordnance Survey sheets, and contemporary tramway schedules—this study demonstrates that Joyce constructed an encyclopedic civic anatomy. Each of the novel's eighteen episodes does not merely narrate an hour in the life of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Marion Tweedy Bloom; it activates a dedicated human organ (Kidney, Genitals, Heart, Lungs, Esophagus, Brain, Blood, Ear, Muscle, Eye, Womb, Nerves, Skeleton, Flesh), an art or discipline, a distinctive chromatic spectrum, and a revolutionary narrative technique.

Through close textual analysis of five pivotal episodes—Telemachus, Lestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis, Cyclops, and Ithaca/Penelope—this inquiry establishes how Joyce used classical Homeric parallelism not as an ornamental pastiche, but as a severe diagnostic apparatus to interrogate British imperial hegemony, Catholic theological dogma, Dublin bourgeois inertia, and European anti-Semitism. Finally, the dissertation analyzes how the open coordinate mapping of Ulysses into digital humanities architectures liberates public domain modernist texts into living, communal research tools.

Table of Contents

1. Chapter I: The Bastion and the Usurper — Martello Tower No. 11 and the Dispossessed Telemachus
   • 1.1 Sandycove, June 16, 1904: The Topography of British Coastal Defence
   • 1.2 Introibo ad altare Dei: Liturgical Parody and the Black Mass
   • 1.3 Caliban’s Mirror and the Servitude of Irish Art
   • 1.4 The Usurper Motif: Antinous, Mulligan, and the Key to the Tower
2. Chapter II: Peristalsis, Digestion, and Dublin Topography — The Somatic Organs of Eccles Street
   • 2.1 The Living Organism: Joyce’s Somatic Schemas (Linati vs. Gilbert)
   • 2.2 Calypso and the Inner Organs of Beasts: Leopold Bloom’s Dietary Materialism
   • 2.3 Lestrygonians and Peristalsis: Dublin as Swallowing and Excreting Engine
   • 2.4 Davy Byrne’s Tavern and the Gorging Citizens: The Moral Geometry of Hunger
3. Chapter III: Dialectic in the National Library — Stephen’s Shakespearean Hypothesis
   • 3.1 Kildare Street and the National Library: Dublin’s Intellectual Amphitheatre
   • 3.2 The Ghost and the Son: Consubstantiality, Sabellian Heresy, and Arianism
   • 3.3 Ann Hathaway and the Stratford Trauma: Stephen’s Aesthetic Biography
   • 3.4 Scylla and Charybdis: Navigating Aristotelian Fact and Platonic Shadow
4. Chapter IV: The Gigantism of Barney Kiernan’s Tavern — Parody, Xenophobia, and the Citizen
   • 4.1 Little Green Street and the Forensic Courts: The Topography of Injustice
   • 4.2 The Technique of Gigantism: Heroic Parody and Nationalist Hyperbole
   • 4.3 Bloom’s Creed: Love, Universal Humanity, and the Anti-Semitic Pogrom
   • 4.4 The Throwaway Elijah: Mythological Transfiguration in the Biscuit Tin
5. Chapter V: The Catechetical Impersonal & The Geotropic Affirmation
   • 5.1 Ithaca: The Cold Cosmos, Waterworks, and Mathematical Objectivity
   • 5.2 The Parallel Courses of Bloom and Dedalus: At-One-Ment and Parting
   • 5.3 Penelope: The Flesh as Monologue, Geotropic Spin, and Gibraltar Soliloquy
   • 5.4 The Architecture of the Coordinate Edition: Ulysses in the Digital Humanities
6. Bibliography & Primary Sources

Chapter I: The Bastion and the Usurper

1.1 Sandycove, June 16, 1904: The Topography of British Coastal Defence

The opening of Ulysses grounds itself immediately in the concrete materiality of Dublin’s coastal topography. Sandycove Martello Tower No. 11, erected in 1804 by the British Board of Ordnance in anticipation of a Napoleonic invasion across the Irish Sea, stands as a cylindrical granite fortification thirty feet high, with walls eight feet thick. When Oliver St. John Gogarty (the real-life prototype of Malachi "Buck" Mulligan) leased the tower from the War Office in 1904 for eight pounds per annum, he converted a military instrument of British imperial surveillance into an aesthetic retreat.

Joyce’s placement of Stephen Dedalus at the summit of this fortress at 8:00 AM on June 16, 1904, functions on multiple symbolic registers. Historically, the tower represents British military occupation; liturgically, its gunrest forms a pagan high altar looking over Dublin Bay; and mythologically, it serves as the rocky palace of Ithaca where the disinherited Telemachus is forced to endure the swaggering taunts and domestic usurpation of the suitors.

+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|               SANDYCOVE MARTELLO TOWER NO. 11               |
|                                                             |
|   [Gunrest Platform / High Altar]                           |
|      - Buck Mulligan (Shaver, Chalice, Mirror, Yellow Robe) |
|      - Stephen Dedalus (Black Mourning Suit, Telemachus)    |
|      - The Sea: "Snotgreen", "Epi oinopa ponton"            |
|                                                             |
|   [Interior Vault / Dark Chamber]                           |
|      - Haines (Oxford, British Celtophile, Nightmare)       |
|      - Key to the Tower (Two Crown Coins, Usurpation)       |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+

1.2 Introibo ad altare Dei: Liturgical Parody and the Black Mass

The first spoken words in Ulysses—“Introibo ad altare Dei” (Latin: "I will go in unto the altar of God")—quote the opening versicle of the Roman Catholic Mass according to the Tridentine Rite, drawn from Psalm 42:4. Spoken by Buck Mulligan as he elevates his shaving bowl of lather like a priest elevating the Eucharistic chalice, the phrase inaugurates the novel under the sign of blasphemous parody.

Mulligan’s yellow dressinggown, "ungirdled," mimics the alb and chasuble of a celebrant, while his crossed mirror and razor evoke both the crux decussata (St. Andrew’s cross) and the sacrificial instruments of martyrdom. By intoning the Mass over the sea, Mulligan performs what Stuart Gilbert identified as a mock-Eucharist, transmuting the sacred elements into lather, hair, and seawater. For Stephen Dedalus, whose mother died after he refused her deathbed plea to kneel and pray, Mulligan’s frivolous clerical mimicry is an unbearable laceration—a desecration that summons the ghost of May Dedalus with her breath smelling of "ashes and rotting cabbage."

1.3 Caliban’s Mirror and the Servitude of Irish Art

When Stephen gazes into Mulligan’s cracked mirror, "pinched from the skivvy's room," he delivers one of the central aesthetic formulas of modern Irish literature:

"The cracked lookingglass of a servant." (U 002.21)

This aphorism synthesizes two primary intertextual sources: Oscar Wilde’s Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray ("The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass") and Jonathan Swift’s Preface to The Battle of the Books ("Satyr is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally discover every body’s Face but their Own"). Stephen recognizes that Irish art, forced to reflect an identity mediated through British political rule and Roman Vatican spiritual dominance, is fundamentally the art of a servant. Stephen declares his refusal to serve (non serviam) to both empires:

"I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian... And a third, Stephen said, who wants me for odd jobs." (U 020.14)

1.4 The Usurper Motif: Antinous, Mulligan, and the Key to the Tower

As Episode 1 draws to a close at the Forty Foot bathing pool, Mulligan demands the two-pence key to the tower and Stephen's remaining money from his teaching pay. Stephen surrenders the key, recognizing that he cannot return to the tower that night:

"Usurper." (U 023.28)

In Homer’s Odyssey, Antinous is the most insolent of Penelope’s suitors, devouring Odysseus’s substance and plotting Telemachus’s murder. In Dublin, Mulligan appropriates Stephen's residence, consumes his money, and borrows his boots. The single closing word "Usurper" establishes Stephen as an exile in his own city, setting in motion the spiritual quest for a symbolic father that will intersect with Leopold Bloom in the cabman's shelter and at 7 Eccles Street.

Chapter II: Peristalsis, Digestion, and Dublin Topography

2.1 The Living Organism: Joyce’s Somatic Schemas (Linati vs. Gilbert)

Unlike traditional Victorian or naturalist novels, Ulysses is constructed as a physiological organism. In November 1920, Joyce wrote to Carlo Linati in Milan, enclosing a comprehensive schema:

"It is an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)... Each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art that are interconnected and interrelated in the structural scheme of the whole) should not only condition but even create its own technique."

The Gilbert Schema (1930) and Linati Schema (1920) map each chapter to a physical organ:

2.2 Calypso and the Inner Organs of Beasts: Leopold Bloom’s Dietary Materialism

When Leopold Bloom enters the narrative in Episode 4, Joyce immediately grounds him in somatic corporeality:

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine." (U 055.01)

Where Stephen Dedalus's mind dwells in scholastic metaphysics, Thomistic definitions, and theological heresy, Bloom is unapologetically grounded in physical sensation. His morning walk to Dlugacz’s pork butcher on Upper Dorset Street to purchase a pork kidney introduces the economic register of the modern city: buying, selling, calculating tram fares, inspecting advertisement posters, and savoring the physical warmth of the sun on his back.

2.3 Lestrygonians and Peristalsis: Dublin as Swallowing and Excreting Engine

In Episode 8 (Lestrygonians), set at 1:00 PM, the narrative technique is designated by Joyce as Peristalsis—the rhythmic, involuntary muscular contractions of the esophagus and intestinal tract. Bloom traverses central Dublin from Westmoreland Street, across the O'Connell Bridge, down Grafton Street, and into Duke Street.

Throughout this walk, human existence is described as an unending cycle of eating and being eaten:

"Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!" (U 170.24)

When Bloom steps into the Burton Restaurant on Duke Street, he is repulsed by the sight of feeding men:

"Men, men, men. Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back at the onrush of plain food... A man with an oval face, swabbed down spit-streaked table with his rag. Wolfing gobfuls of gravy... Stink of cabbage. Toothless chewers of bread." (U 169.12)

Bloom flees the Burton and retreats to Davy Byrne’s pub, ordering a modest glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola cheese sandwich. The language itself contracts and churns with peristaltic rhythm, mirroring the mechanical propulsion of food through the alimentary canal.

Chapter III: Dialectic in the National Library

3.1 Kildare Street and the National Library: Dublin’s Intellectual Amphitheatre

At 2:00 PM in Episode 9 (Scylla and Charybdis), Stephen Dedalus holds court in the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street before an audience of Dublin intellectuals: George Russell (AE), John Eglinton, Richard Best, and the library director T. W. Lyster.

The physical setting—surrounded by thousands of bound volumes and classical busts—provides the spatial arena for Joyce's dialectical dissection of William Shakespeare. Stephen navigates between the Scylla of Aristotelian materialism and the Charybdis of Platonic mysticism, using rigorous scholastic syllogisms to argue that Shakespeare's biography is encoded into the fabric of Hamlet.

3.2 The Ghost and the Son: Consubstantiality, Sabellian Heresy, and Arianism

Stephen’s thesis hinges on the age of William Shakespeare when Hamlet was composed. In 1601, Shakespeare was thirty-six years old, while his son Hamnet had died five years earlier at age eleven. Stephen argues that when Shakespeare acted in the play, he did not play Prince Hamlet; he played the Ghost of Hamlet’s father:

"To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his name may not wane on earth." (U 188.10)

Stephen transposes the theological heresies of the early Church—the Sabellian heresy (that Father and Son are merely aspects of the same divine person) and the Arian heresy (that the Son is not consubstantial with the Father)—onto artistic creation:

"Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession... Paternity may be a legal fiction." (U 207.09)

This insight prefigures Bloom’s entrance into the library: Leopold Bloom, mourning the death of his infant son Rudy eleven years earlier, passes between Stephen and Mulligan like the Wandering Rocks, binding the two searching figures together.

Chapter IV: The Gigantism of Barney Kiernan’s Tavern

4.1 Little Green Street and the Forensic Courts: The Topography of Injustice

Episode 12 (Cyclops), set at 5:00 PM in Barney Kiernan’s pub on Little Green Street, positions the narrative within the shadow of Dublin's legal institutions: Newgate Prison, the Green Street Courthouse (where Robert Emmet was sentenced to death in 1803), and the Linenhall.

The episode is narrated by an unnamed Dublin debt-collector—cynical, foul-mouthed, and fiercely prejudiced—contrasted against "the citizen," a massive, bellicose caricature of Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). The citizen represents Polyphemus, the one-eyed Homeric giant whose singular vision is blinded by hyper-nationalist xenophobia.

4.2 The Technique of Gigantism: Heroic Parody and Nationalist Hyperbole

Joyce’s technique in Cyclops is Gigantism. Every ordinary statement or barroom dispute is interrupted by thirty-three parodic interpolations imitating ancient Irish heroic sagas, medieval romances, parliamentary Hansard reports, legal conveyances, and society wedding columns.

When the citizen is introduced, the prose explodes into epic catalogue:

"The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced musculargirthed stalwarty freeman." (U 296.01)

4.3 Bloom’s Creed: Love, Universal Humanity, and the Anti-Semitic Pogrom

When the citizen attacks Bloom with anti-Semitic slurs, demanding what his nation is, Bloom delivers the moral turning point of the novel:

"— Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland... And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant." (U 331.14)

When asked how he expects to fight persecution, Bloom replies:

"— Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
— What? says Alf.
— Love, says Bloom. I mean the continuation of life in the very opposite of hatred." (U 333.12)

Bloom’s simple, dignified assertion of love and universal human kinship cuts through the barroom's chauvinistic violence. As the citizen hurls a Jacob's biscuit tin at Bloom's departing cab, Joyce orchestrates a catastrophic, biblical parody of an earthquake, elevating Bloom to the transfigured chariot of Elijah:

"And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel." (U 345.18)

Chapter V: The Catechetical Impersonal & The Geotropic Affirmation

5.1 Ithaca: The Cold Cosmos, Waterworks, and Mathematical Objectivity

In Episode 17 (Ithaca), Joyce employs an impersonal catechism comprising 309 exhaustive questions and answers. Written in the dry, hyper-precise vocabulary of astrophysics, algebra, hydraulics, and geometry, the chapter strips all emotional sentimentality from the narrative while paradoxically achieving profound human tenderness.

When Bloom and Stephen arrive at 7 Eccles Street at 2:00 AM and enter the darkened scullery, Bloom turns on the tap. Joyce dedicates an entire two-page encyclopedic hymn to the physical properties of water:

"What did Bloom admire in the water?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vast ocean extent... its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances... its weight and volume and density: its hydraulic power in network of tubes and conduits... its restlessness in sea and lake and river." (U 671.01)

Water connects Bloom’s modest domestic kitchen to the Roundwood reservoir in County Wicklow, to the River Liffey, to the Atlantic Ocean, and to the eternal physical recirculation that Joyce will later elevate into the ricorso of Finnegans Wake.

5.2 Penelope: The Flesh as Monologue and Molly Bloom’s Solar Affirmation

The final episode, Episode 18 (Penelope), is designated by Joyce as having the organ of Flesh, the art of None, the symbol of Earth, and the technique of Female Monologue. Composed of eight massive unpunctuated sentences spanning forty pages, it represents the rotation of the sleeping earth as Molly Bloom lies in bed beside her reversed husband (head to feet):

"It turns like the globe itself from west to east," Joyce explained to Frank Budgen, "unspun by any masculine logic, circular and complete."

Molly’s monologue reviews her lovers, her husband’s eccentric kindness, her youth in Gibraltar amidst the Spanish soldiers and Moorish courtiers, and culminates in the ecstatic, life-affirming cadence that seals the work:

"and how he kissed me under the Andalusian wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." (U 732.18)

Bibliography & Primary Sources

1. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company, February 2, 1922.
2. Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber & Faber, 1975.
3. Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study. London: Faber & Faber, 1930.
4. Linati, Carlo. Schema di Ulisse (1920). Printed in Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey. Oxford University Press, 1972.
5. Gifford, Don, and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
6. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959; revised edition 1982.
7. Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. London: Grayson & Grayson, 1934.
8. Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
9. Blamires, Harry. The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses. London: Routledge, 1996.
10. Thornton, Weldon. Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
11. Hart, Clive, and David Hayman (eds.). James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
12. Grose, Kenneth. James Joyce. London: Evans Brothers, 1975.
13. Groden, Michael. Ulysses in Progress. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
14. Bishop, John. Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
15. Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1904. Dublin: Alexander Thom & Co., 1904.