http://bigthink.

com/strange-maps/518-mapping-bloomsday / Accessed 20th November 2014

518 - Mapping Bloomsday
by FRANK JACOBS
JUNE 13, 2011, 10:39 PM

With typically Hibernian hyperbole, James Joyce once claimed that if

[Dublin] suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed
from my book. That book would of course be Ulysses (1922), Joyces
masterpiece, seen by many as the most influential novel of the 20th
century.
Ulysses takes place on a single day - June 16th, 1904 [1] - and focuses on
the wanderings through Dublin of Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of Joyce's
earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and of Leopold Bloom,
this novels protagonist, an early 20th-century Everyman. In the latters
honour, June 16th is celebrated the world over as Bloomsday; in Dublin, fans
mark it by retracing the itineraries and visiting the places described in the
book.
Joyces book mirrors the structure of the Odyssey. Each of Ulysses 18
chapters corresponds with an episode of Homers classical epic, which
recounts the decade-long, danger-fraught journey home from Troy of
Odysseus [2]. The juxtaposition of that Greek heros mythical adventures
with the mundane events of Bloomsday infuses the work with a grand irony
- Ulysses has been summarised, not entirely unfairly, as: "Man goes for a
walk around Dublin. Nothing happens."
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http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/518-mapping-bloomsday / Accessed 20th November 2014

This map is not much help in reconstructing that walk, but it does capture
the elementary narrative structure of Ulysses. And it does so in that
perennial favourite of schematic itineraries, Harry Becks London
Underground map.

The map uses the convention of referring to the chapters, unnamed

inUlysses, by their episodic counterparts in the Odyssey. The colours used
for the itineraries of Dedalus (green) and Bloom (yellow) mimic those of the
District and Circle lines on the London Underground, which also substantially
overlap. On the Ulysses Underground map, green may also symbolise
Dedalus Irishness, while yellow might represent Blooms Jewishness [3].
The first three chapters (Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus), commonly referred to
as the Telemachiad, concentrate on Dedalus. The next two (Calypso, Lotus
Eaters) introduce Bloom. Blooms and Dedalus paths mirror each other for
the next four chapters (Hades, Aeolus, Laestrygonians, Scylla and
Charybdis), after which they separate - without actually having met. For the
next four chapters (Wandering Rocks, Sirens, Cyclops, Nausicaa), the
narrative focuses on Bloom, who finally meets up with Dedalus in the
fourteenth chapter (Oxen of the Sun). They run together for the next three
chapters (Circe, Eumaeus, Ithaca), until Dedalus declines Blooms offer of a
place to stay the night at Blooms home. The last, and probably most
famous chapter (Penelope) is the stream-of-consciousness soliloquy of Molly,
Blooms wife.

http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/518-mapping-bloomsday / Accessed 20th November 2014

So the underground map is a useful guide to the books internal structure.
But what about a map of the actual itineraries and locations in Ulysses?
Considering the cultural impact of the book, such a map is surprisingly
difficult to come by, at least online.

Barring offline sources (or actually reading the book, Dublin street map at
hand), one of the rare useful online sources to help prepare you for a
Bloomsday pilgrimage is this one, produced by Dublin Tourism. While neater
than Nabokov's scribbled map of Ulysses [4], its still rather low-res(See link
in end note for a slightly more legible version), and lacks a certain literary je
ne sais quoi. And while usefully listing a whole raft of locations and routes
from the book, it refers to a few outlying locations that are indicated on a
larger map of County Dublin, not findable online. Some of the places shown
here are: