Ulysses is a joke that keeps its promise. Take the Odyssey, remove the gods, set it in Dublin on 16 June 1904, and see whether a canvasser, a young prig, and a woman in bed can hold the epic. They can. The miracle is not the schema. The miracle is that a fried kidney, a funeral, a list of names, and a yes can do the work that used to require a cyclops.
Leopold Bloom is not Odysseus by parody only. He is Odysseus by ethic: cunning turned into kindness, wandering turned into a day’s work, homecoming turned into the decision not to make a scene. Stephen is Telemachus with a theory and a dead mother. Molly is Penelope who does not have to delay. Her last word is not a test. It is an assent that includes infidelity, memory, Gibraltar, and flowers. That is a different fidelity from the loom, and Joyce knows it.
Woolf, across the water, is doing a cousin’s experiment. A London day, a party, a war still in the body of a man who will not survive the afternoon. Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses share a wager: that consciousness, given enough sentences, can replace the catalogue of ships. They do not share a temperament. Woolf’s clock is Big Ben; Joyce’s is the body. Both make the ordinary bear the epic without asking the ordinary to become picturesque.
Harold Bloom liked to say that Joyce defeated the anxiety of Homer by swallowing him. Fine. What matters for a reader is more practical. After Ulysses, a walk to the shops can be a katabasis. After Dalloway, a florist can be a liturgy. The Folio keeps these books not as monuments to difficulty but as proofs that the epic did not die. It moved into the hours.