Reading James Joyce and "Like A Rolling Stone"
On June 16, 1965 Bob Dylan entered Studio A at Columbia Records to record what would become one of the most pivotal songs in rock history, “ Like a Rolling Stone ”. That it was recorded on the same date (a date now celebrated as Bloomsday the world over) as the fictional odyssey of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses is more than a trivial coincidence. While none of us can claim that Dylan chose the date deliberately, the thematic and mythological parallels between the two works are too resonant to ignore. Both stand as artistic reckonings with displacement, identity, and the fall from cultural certainties. Joyce’s Ulysses , published in 1922, reimagines Homer’s Odyssey in the setting of turn-of-the-century Dublin. It takes place on a single day - June 16, 1904 - tracing the perambulations of Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising agent, across the city’s streets and shops, pubs and parlours. The structure of the novel loosely follows the episodes of Homer’s epi...