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By Root 5683 0

war which coincided with the dawn of the age of Romanticism. And running through almost every kind of storytelling over the century which followed, as we have seen, was that endless succession of betrayed, imprisoned, violated, dead or dying heroines, summed up by Mario Praz as the image of `the persecuted maiden': Gretchen, seduced by the hero and brought to a miserable death in Goethe's Faust; Lucia di Lamermoor, hideously betrayed by her family, driven mad and eventually to her death; the innocent Gilda, unwittingly murdered and thrown into a sack by her father Rigoletto; Dickens's Nancy, battered to death by Bill Sykes; Tess, seduced and driven mad by her double-betrayal, ending up on the scaffold; Madame Butterfly, committing suicide in despair at her heartless abandonment. This constantly recurring image may have been the unconscious reflection of a newly industrialised civilisation losing touch with the anima and its roots in the Self. But at least in physical terms these depictions of the violated feminine were presented in an outwardly decorous fashion, designed to tug at the public's heartstrings on a sentimental level without showing anything too explicit. Through the long nineteenth-century heyday of respectable, bourgeois morality, the crude physical details of sex and violence were kept as firmly out of view as those apocryphal piano legs.

Then at the start of the twentieth century, coinciding with a further surge of technological innovation - wireless, motor cars, aeroplanes, skyscrapers - there were signs of a very different age beginning to dawn. It was the time when Freud, then Jung were beginning to reveal how much our conscious life is merely a fragile, superficial construct, at the mercy of immense mysterious forces hidden from view in the unconscious layers of the mind beneath. In all directions, artistically, socially, politically, established forms and structures were suddenly coming to be seen as a prison to the imagination, as constraints to be thrown off. In painting this showed in the tortured Cubist images of Picasso and Braque; in music in the electric energies of Stravinsky, the atonalism of Schoenberg, the syncopated beat of ragtime and jazz; in poetry in the free form of early Eliot. And nowhere did this new mood find more radical expression than in a long novel being written by an Irishman in Trieste, Zurich and Paris over the seven years between 1914 and 1921, just when Eliot was writing The Waste Land and Proust in Paris was completing A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

James Joyce intended his Ulysses to be read as a modern echo of Homer's Odyssey. In reality the contrast between the two stories could scarcely be more profound. As the Quest story beyond compare, the Odyssey is entirely shaped by the one overwhelming imperative: that its hero should finally come home, to dispel the terrible shadow which has fallen over his kingdom, to put the forces of darkness to rout and to liberate his faithful Penelope. All of which requires him to become a complete man, finally revealed in his full kingly state. Every detail of the story takes its place in working towards that conclusion, until we are presented with one of the finest pictures in storytelling of a hero developing and maturing to the point where he can achieve the state of Self-realisation.

It would have been hard for Joyce to conceive a story more opposed to this in every respect than his meandering 930-page account of how his little hero Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged, unhappily married, unsuccessful advertising salesman, spends a summer's day drifting aimlessly round the city of Dublin, attending a funeral, swapping trivialities with acquaintances, idly reading newspapers and advertising slogans, having lunch, going for an evening walk on the beach where he masturbates, visiting a brothel and finally returning home, to urinate in the garden with his friend Stephen Daedalus, before tucking up in a foetal position at the end of his wife Molly's bed where he had that afternoon been cuckolded.

Everything about Bloom's day spells defeat,