The authority of ‘old’ Homer: a new range of admiring responses

In the opening episode of Joyce’s Ulysses the memory of noisy horseplay between undergraduates disrupts a conversation between Stephen Dedalus and his co-tenant Buck Mulligan. The sound floats out of an open window and startles the tranquillity of an Oxford quadrangle, even as the moment of recall disrupts the narrative. Into the remembered scene a deaf gardener enters, aproned and 'masked with Matthew Arnold’s face'. Unable to hear the shouts of the students he pushes his mower over the 'sombre lawn' concentrating on his task intently. Before the students continue their conversation a single broken line intrudes consisting of the phrases 'To ourselves', 'new paganism' and 'omphalos'. This fragmented line, which might be said to express a parodic mantra of modernist concerns, serves to ensure that issues of identity, Hellenism and the return to the primitive remain firmly to the front of the reader’s mind even as Stephen’s attention is drawn back to the prosaic question of the behaviour of his lodger.

So what are we to make of Arnold’s cameo appearance at this early stage of the novel? It is interesting that the main commentators on Joyce have nothing to say about it. But for anyone reading the text with an eye to the relationship between Homer and modernity, the evocation of one of the nineteenth century’s most illustrious interpreters of Homer cannot fail to invite speculation about this particular figuration of the relationship between an ancient Greek literary text, one of the traditional landscapes of classical learning, and the cacophony of the modern.