One of the many unconventional features of Joyce’s entirely unconventional Ulysses is the lack of chapter numbers or titles. Aside from three Book divisions clearly marked with I, II, and III, Joyce’s pages do not give the reader any way of naming a particular episode. A title schema drawn from Homer’s Odyssey has long stood in for this deficiency, at least for those who have studied Ulysses. But these names do not appear in the novel itself and are, therefore, useless Greek to the average reader encountering the novel for the first time.
Wouldn’t discussion of Ulysses between all manner of readers be enhanced if everyone used a simpler, more intuitive naming scheme for the episodes, rather than one that requires specialized knowledge and memorization? The book has 18 episodes that can be detected on the printed page by page breaks and capitalization. Why not just refer to the episodes by number?
Does “Lotus Eaters” come early in the novel? Is it before or after “Wandering Rocks”? As an untutored Joyce reader, I have no idea. But I am pretty sure that “Ulysses 5″ comes before “Ulysses 10″ and that neither opens or closes the book.
Here is a proposed new naming convention for the 18 episodes of Ulysses. The new episode name is followed by the Homeric title and the first few words of the episode.
[ Book I – The Telemachiad – episodes 1-3 ]
Ulysses 1 – Telemachus – “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan”
Ulysses 2 – Nestor – “You, Cochrane”
Ulysses 3 – Proteus – “Ineluctable modality of the visible”
[ Book II – The Odyssey – episodes 4-15 ]
Ulysses 4 – Calypso – “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate”
Ulysses 5 – Lotus Eaters – “By lorries along Sir John Rogerson’s”
Ulysses 6 – Hades – “Martin Cunningham, first”
Ulysses 7 – Aeolus – “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN”
Ulysses 8 – Lestrygonians – “Pineapple rock. Lemon platt, butter scotch”
Ulysses 9 – Scylla and Charybdis – “Urbane, to comfort them”
Ulysses 10 – Wandering Rocks – “The Superior, the Very Reverend”
Ulysses 11 – Sirens – “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons”
Ulysses 12 – Cyclops – “I was just passing the time of day”
Ulysses 13 – Nausicaa – “The summer evening had begun to fold”
Ulysses 14 – Oxen of the Sun – “Deshil Holles Eamus”
Ulysses 15 – Circe – “The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown”
[ Book III – The Nostos – episodes 16-18 ]
Ulysses 16 – Eumaeus – “Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed”
Ulysses 17 – Ithaca – “What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen”
Ulysses 18 – Penelope – “Yes because he never did a thing like that before”
