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 epic: Bloom is Odysseus, wandering the mundane sea of Dublin; Stephen Dedalus (a character very much based on the young Joyce from the writer’s earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) serves as Telemachus, the searching son; and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s unfaithful wife, becomes a radically reinterpreted Penelope.

Likewise, “Like a Rolling Stone”, at over six minutes one of the longest songs ever recorded for release as a single, is a miniature odyssey of its own. It tells of a once proud woman cast from grace into anonymity. “You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat,” Dylan sings, mocking the pomp that has now dissolved into isolation. The Homeric echoes are subtle but palpable. The fall from status mirrors Odysseus’s shipwrecks and humiliations. The “chrome horse” evokes not only modern vanity but perhaps a mechanical version of the Trojan Horse - ornate, deceptive, a vehicle of downfall. The woman’s banishment from comfort to the “mystery tramp”’s world reflects Odysseus’s own wanderings through foreign lands, relying on wit and resilience to endure estrangement. The song’s insistent refrain, “how does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home / like a complete unknown” feels like a secular distillation of Homer’s epic question: what becomes of the hero once he is stripped of name, land, and legacy?

Joyce’s Dublin and Dylan’s 1960s America share historical weight. Dublin in 1904 was, as Declan Kiberd has noted in his warm study of the novel, Ulysses and Us, “the second city of the British Empire”; provincial in status, but rich in culture and politics. It was also, however, a city paralyzed by colonialism and clericalism, which Joyce sought to liberate through his radical play with form. In Ulysses, Homer’s epic is not rewritten to glorify Ireland but to reframe heroism itself: as endurance, as empathy, as the sacred within the ordinary.

New York in the 1960s, the young Dylan’s adopted city, was the cultural capital of a newly confident empire. America’s post-war dominance fostered innovation, upheaval, and rebellion. Dylan, like Joyce, stood at a threshold. Just as Joyce rejected Ireland’s nationalistic romanticism in favour of exile and aesthetic freedom, Dylan rejected the protest song tradition he had come to symbolize. “Don’t follow leaders,” he sang just a few months before in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. His new electrified sound, that he pushed over the edge with “Like a Rolling Stone”, was a departure from the pastoral certainty of the folk revivalism he had come into a few years earlier upon his arrival in the city. This new sound he was building was something more fragmented, ambiguous, and yes, modernist in tone.

Stephen Dedalus, as Joyce’s artist-hero, exemplifies this kind of break with older things. He tells a friend in Ulysses, that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Haunted by dead generations, he rejects all master narratives - religion, nation, family - in favour of artistic autonomy. Dylan’s narrator in “Like a Rolling Stone” may also be read as a kind of Stephen: lashing out at a woman who once rejected him, articulating his wounded genius through lyricism and disdain.

But it is Bloom who most resembles the song’s protagonist. He is presented as a figure in transition, navigating a hostile social world with compassion and irony. Bloom, mocked for his Jewishness, for his gentleness, for his sexuality, responds with quiet dignity. Dylan’s fallen socialite must now do the same: “you said you’d never compromise / with the mystery tramp, but now you realise / he’s not selling any alibis.” She too must walk through the marketplace in disguise, stripped of illusions.

The Homeric undertow is unmistakable. Ulysses dramatizes Odyssean episodes in the key of banality: the Cyclops becomes a pub nationalist; the Sirens, barmaids in the Ormond Hotel; the Underworld, a funeral in Glasnevin Cemetery. Dylan’s rogues gallery - “the jugglers and the clowns,” “Napoleon in rags,” and the thief who “reaches into your cup” - mirror Homeric antagonists in disguise. The suitors devouring Odysseus’s household have been transformed into a world of absurd posturing and deceit, where everyone is hustling, and nothing is sacred.

In both cases, the heroic is internalized. Joyce’s true odyssey is empathy: Bloom’s ability to forgive transgressions, to imagine the thoughts of those around him, and to accept disturbances. Dylan’s song, too, though bitter in tone, ends without triumph. There is no conquest, only exposure. The loss of identity is not redeemed; it is the cost of living in a world where myth has collapsed.

Molly Bloom, often overlooked in discussions of Ulysses, provides one of literature’s most remarkable Homeric transformations. She is Joyce’s Penelope, but one whose fidelity is not physical but imaginative. Her famous soliloquy - “yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” - is not a celebration of monogamy, but of embodied affirmation. She ends the novel not as a dutiful wife but as a sovereign voice, closing the circle of the day. In Dylan’s universe, women are often treated more critically, but the figure in “Like a Rolling Stone” is also given a kind of agency. She has fallen, yes, but she survives. She must now live as “a complete unknown,” making her own way in her own city.

Both of our artists reimagine the Homeric journey not as a physical voyage but as a confrontation with selfhood, time, and social expectation. Both strip their protagonists of the armour of culture - religion, class, myth - and observe what remains.

Joyce made the ordinary epic; Dylan made the epic ordinary. In “Like a Rolling Stone”, the fall from grace is no less monumental than Odysseus’s shipwreck, or Bloom’s return home to a wife who has betrayed him. Both works take place within constrained timeframes - one momentous day, a six-minute song - but contain multitudes. They ask what it means to be unmoored, to be “on your own,” as Dylan puts it, “with no direction home”.

These questions resonate as deeply now as they did in 1904 or 1965. The Homeric impulse remains: not just to tell a story of return, but to redefine what “home” even means in the modern world.

16 June, 2025