Abstract
To any reader of Ulysses or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is obvious that James Joyce makes extensive use of mythological patterns to organize his material and supply it with deeper levels of meaning. Why Joyce employs this method is explained by T. S. Eliot: | "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporarity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing ... a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is . . . a step toward making the modern world possible in art." | With the Daedalus and Ulysses parallels, Joyce certainly has made his modern world, Ireland, into art. But Joyce does not limit himself to antiquity, for Ireland at the turn of the nineteenth century has her own heroes, and Joyce becomes modern myth-maker to help shape the contemporary world. This modern myth in Ireland centers about the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell. That Joyce, himself living in voluntary exile from Ireland from 1904 until his death in 1941, should choose an Irish political leader for his myth seems a contradiction of the principle boldly announced by Stephen Dedalus in the Portrait: "You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets." But the posturings of young Stephen should not be confused with the actual opinions of a mature James Joyce.