With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,
So here's to disciples and Calvary.
So here's to disciples and Calvary.
re-joyce-a-burgess
I have already said that the creation of a human community in fiction is the ?
closest the novelist can get to the creation of a cosmos, but Joyce is ambitious enough to want to create a human body (chapter by chapter, organ by organ) which is a sort of configuration (as in Blake or Sweden- borg) ofthe ultimate celestial order.
This is perhaps less blasphemous than it looks: it may even be taken as a gesture of piety.
It may cer- t.
linly be taken as Joyce's attempt to build for himself an order which is a substitute for the order he abandoned when he abandoned the Church.
But we must not forget that Joyce is, as well as a cosmic poet and apocalyptical epiphanist, a writer ofstorics. Ulysses is a story, and a simple story at that. It is a story about the need of people for each other, and Joyce regards this theme as so important that he has to borrow an epic form in which to tell it. The invocation of the Odyssey may reduce Ulysses to Bloom, but it also exalts Bloom to Ulysses. It is time to look at the nature of this invocation.
? ? 2: Taking over Homer
'ULYSSES' AND 'ULIXES' ARE, AS EVERY SCHOOLBOY USED TO KNOW, Latin forms of the Greek 'Odysseus', Odysseus was, even quite early in life, Joyce's favourite epic hero, and, knowing something of Joyce's temperament, one can see why. Most primitive poetry is about fighting, and the ancient epic naturally extols fighting quali- ties, making its heroes out of heavyweights gifted with blind courage, brute strength, and a garnishing of conventional virtue. Physical violence was repugnant to Joyce-there is very little of it in his books-but he responded readily enough to more intelligent ways of overcoming an enemy-organisation, coolness, tact, cunning. These qualities are all to be found in Odysseus, and to them we can add
various endearing imperfections of character. He longs to get home to his wife, but he is not averse to fornication with nymphs and god- desses. This wife is a second-best to Helen, whose hand he failed to win, and it is good loser's decency on his part to persuade all the suitors to join him in swearing an oath to'protect Helen from violence. Yet when Helen is carried off to Troy he tries to evade his obligations by pretending to be mad. Still, once launched on the expedition he proves wise and cunning in counsel and prudently brave in war. He is more likeable than Achilles and Ajax and JEneas; he is more human, more Bloom-like. The Iliad gives us a sharp picture of him.
Odysseus's qualities call for celebration in a separate epic poem,
and the Odyssey is devoted entirely to his adventures after the fall of Troy. It covers the ten years between his demobilisation and his arrival home in Ithaca to wrest the little island kingdom from the suitors of his presumed widow Penelope. Most of the' adventures which fin the ten years are related in retrospect, the actual events of the poem taking about six weeks. Before we meet Odysseus we meet his son Telemachus (this opening section of the poem is called the Telemachia). Telemachus, like Hamlet, is sick at heart. Various
88
island princes are seeking the hand of his mother, but she has-with a cunning perhaps learned from her husband-been putting them off by promising to come to a decision when she has finished weaving a winding-sheet for Laertes, Odysseus's father. What she weaves during the day she unravels at night, but, at the opening of the poem, this trick has been discovered: she must choose her husband now. It becomes urgent for Telemachus to get news of his father. He faces the prospect of having a stepfather whom he hates (he hates all the suitors, but Antinous, the candidate with the shortest odds, is the worst of them all); moreover, these insolent princelings are wasting the substance of the little kingdom of Ithaca very fast. Telemachus goes off to consult Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus and his wife Helen at Sparta: they may have news of his father. Meanwhile, the suitors prepare an ambush against his return.
We come now to the Odyssey proper. Odysseus has been living for seven years on the island of Ogygia, detained there by the goddess Calypso. He wants to go home, but she will not let him. But Zeus, father of the gods, steps in and orders his release, and Odys- seus builds himself a raft. He sails on it for seventeen days and comes within sight of Scheria, where the Phaeacians live, but then Poseidon, the sea-god, blows up a storm and destroys the raft. Odysseus, as we shall hear, put out the one eye of Poseidon's giant son Polyphemus, and he will not be allowed to forget it. Odysseus floats for two days on the sea, buoyed up by a scarf which Ino, sea- goddess, has given him, and at length he is cast ashore on the coast of Scheria. Nausicaa, daughter of the king Alcinous, finds him and looks after him. In the palace the bard Democodus sings to him about his own exploits-including that of the Trojan Horse-and Odysseus, who has up to that moment concealed his name, now tells the Phaeacians who he is and recounts his perilous story.
He tells of the raid on the Cicones at Ismarus, then of the land of the Lotus-Eaters, where so many of his men succumbed to the will- destroying, home-forgetting fruit. After that we hear about the one- eyed giant cannibals called Cyclopes and how Odysseus put out the eye of one of them - Polyphemus-with a red-hot stake. Then comes the account of his stay with the wind-god JEolus, who gave him the adverse winds tied up in a bag as a farewell present; his men, think- ing that the bag contained treasure, released the winds, doing them- selves and their leader little good. After that, the Laestrygones, another giant race of cannibals, destroyed eleven of his twelve ships and ate their crews. The forlorn remainder reached iEaea, where the
89
Taking over Homer
? ? The Labyrinth
Taking over Home1
witch-goddess Circe turned them all into swine-except, of course,
Odysseus, who was protected from enchantment by the herb moly, a gift from Hermes. After a year with Circe (during which he begot a son on her, Telegonus, who was eventually to destroy his father unwittingly) he left-his men having been restored to human shape- to consult the seer Tiresias in Hades about his prospects ofreturning to Ithaca. In Hades he saw the ghosts ofmany dead heroes and their womenfolk and talked with his own mother, Anticlea. Back on the sea again, he resisted the lethal song of the Sirens (himself tied to the mast, his men with wax in their ears) and steered between Scylla- a mariner-eating monster in a cave-and the whirlpool Charybdis. After so many lucky or cunning escapes, his men now did for them- selves by killing the cattle ofthe Sun-god Helios on Thrinacia: such
sacrilege earned them a thunderbolt, though Odysseus-who had
warned them against their crime-escaped on the wreckage of the
ship to Ogygia and the arms of Calypso.
Now comes the homecoming or Nostos. The Phaeacians take
Odysseus back to Ithaca (for their pains their ship is turned, by
Poseidon, into a rock on its return) and now the crafty Odysseus has
to encompass the destruction of the suitors. The goddess Athene disguises him as a beggar, and the faithful swineheard Eumaeus tells him of the behaviour of the suitors. He shows himself to Tele- machus (who escapes the suitors' ambush) and together they plan a massacre. Meanwhile, two others learn that this beggar is Odysseus- his nurse Eurycleia and his dog Argus. After insults from the suitors and a fight with the beggar lrus, our hero learns that Penelope is to marry the man who can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads. Needless to say, only Odysseus can bend the bow and shoot the arrow, and now he stands revealed in his glory and all the suitors quake-with justice, as it turns out, for Odysseus, Telemachus and Eumaeus kill them all, starting with Antinous, and even hang their women. Penelope knows that this must be her husband, since he can tell her what their bedstead looks like, and so all ends, though bloodily, happily. That is how Homer
tells the story.
Joyce tells it rather differently. He has eighteen chapters to
Homer's twenty-four books; he misses out some of Homer's material but inserts an adventure of the Argonauts-that of the Symplegades, or clashing rocks, expanding a reference to the Planktai, or wander- ing rocks, in the twelfth book (line 61) of the Odyssey. Also, he changes the order of Odysseus's exploits and presents them all in
dramatic immediacy, not in epic narration-within-a-narration. The
Joycean Odyssey runs as follows:
Telemachus, like Hamlet, is sick at heart. His mother is dead, and
he feels guilty about her; he has left his father's house to dwell with
two companions. One of these is a foreigner, member of a race that
has usurped the kingdom of his people; the other is a fellow-country- man who perpetually mocks him, demands money from him and even the key of the tower where they live together. He is dis- possessed, bitter at the presence of the usurper. From Nestor-a sage, garrulous and reminiscent prince-he can learn nothing that wi]] lead him back to lawful possession of his rights. He-not Mene- laus-consults the sea-god Proteus, but this god changes his form perpetually, slipping out of the grasp ofTelemachus. Oracular hints have been flashed at him about his need for a spiritual, as opposed to a biological, father, but he cannot formulate this need to himself. Now, after this Telemachia of three episodes, we are ready for Odysseus. Joyce's hero is both an exile and at home. He has his dwelling in the west, but his heart is tugged by ancestral memories of the east, wherefrom his people have wandered. Thus his wife Penelope can take on the properties of a goddess who has seduced him into staying in exile: this is her kingdom, and her name is Calypso. Odysseusgoes forth, having fed her with ambrosia and nectar, and at once finds himself among the Lotus-Eaters. He passes safely through their land and proceeds, with his companions, to
Hades, where he meets the ghosts of the fabled dead. Next he makes
windy contact with . lEolus and nearly meets Telemachus, in whom- his own son being dead - he sees the lineaments of another son. He wanders next among the Laestrygonians, filthy gorgers all, but is himself uneaten.
On the way to Scylla and Charybdis, a necessary passage of his
journey, he espies Antinous, whom he knows to be a suitor of his
wife Penelope. He does not offer fight: he is solitary; he has no son to help him. But now he sees Telemachus himself taking on with courage the perilous passage between the monster's cave and the whirlpool. Telemachus, steering through, sees this sonless father in his turn, and recalls a dream in which such a man seemed to visit him. And now both pseudo-father and pseudo-son have to face new perils: they become Argonauts and venture among the clashing rocks which hide one from the other. Then we are with Odysseus alone once more, and he is not lured by the Sirens' song away from his
purpose-to do the work the gods have set him to do and, at length, 90 91
? ? ? The Labyrinth
return safely to Ithaca. But he ventures into territory where the
Cyclops Polyphemus lurks, and Polyphemus attacks him. Odysseus
gets away, but the giant hurls a heavy missile after him. It is time to
seek brief shelter from the hostile world before continuing the journey. He rests in sight of the sea.
On the seashore the king's daughter Nausicaa is playing with her companions. She falls in love with the mature and weary stranger and, in a dream of abandon, gives herself to him. In a dream Odys- seus takes her, but, in the convalescence of after-love, he comes to
the realisation that, while he is thus dallying away from home, the suitor Antinous has prevailed in Ithaca. It is a bitter moment. Still, ever more mindful of others than himself, he sails to the island where the Oxen of the Sun-god bellow their song of fertility: the island is full of women in labour, and he knows that the wife of a companion is soon to give birth. He lands on the island, enquires about her, and is told that the hour is at hand. He sees that the young Telemachus is there, revelling with drunken companions, and Odysseus is shocked to hear blasphemy spoken against the divine gift of concep- tion: is not this a symbolic slaughtering of the holy oxen? But Zeus hears and, as a warning, launches terrifying thunder.
Odysseus sees that Telemachus has drunk too much wine; what dangers worse than blasphemy may not befall him? He appoints himself the young man's protector and follows him to the island of Circe, where men are turned by magic into swine. The prudent Odysseus is in no danger himself, for the god Hermes has given him the protective herb moly. He sails through terrifYing apparitions and phantasmagorias unscathed. As for the young hero towards whom his attitude grows ever more paternal, he too resists gross transfor- mation and is only in danger of attack from rough men whom lust and drunkenness have turned into beasts. He is struck in the face and falls. And now it is Odysseus's duty to take this new-found son back to Ithaca, to heal him, give him opportunity to recover, and offer him the freedom-as to a true son-of his palace.
But the return to the kingdom must be made with caution. They rest awhile, taking food and drink, in the rude shelter of Eumaeus. Then they take courage and walk to the Palace, imbibing there a sacramental cup of nectar, a pledge of paternality and filiality. The young man leaves, no stranger now. Odysseus seeks his couch-he is weary; he has travelled far-and his wife Penelope finds in him a masterfulness she has not known before. The suitors may have tasted of her body, but they have not prevailed as Odysseus has prevailed:
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they cannot draw his long bow of cunning and knowledge of the world and the deathless gods that govern the world. And Odysseus has brought her a son to replace the ttue son they lost long ago to the gods of the underworld. This son, not being of her body, stands in the potential relationship of messiah and lover. She sleeps, well content.
That, briefly, is Joyce's own version of the Odyssey. All we have
to do now is to dress these characters in modern clothes and make
them live through their adventures in a modern city, expanding these adventures to epic length but imposing on them the tight rules ofunity found in the classical drama. Let us go back to the beginning again but this time take it more slowly.
Taking over Homer
93
? ? 3: Telemachus
DAZZLED BY THE MOST GLITTERING ASPECT OF Ulysses - ITS display of literary techniques and its ingenuities of symbolism-we find it easy to regard each chapter as a separable item to be marvelled
at, the whole book as a loose collocation of tableaux like an exhibi- . '
tlon, and to forget that its fundamental concern is with the telling of a story. A plain summary of this story is not very enlightening, but the theme on which the story is based is potent, suggestive, and compelhng. It is the mystery of the relationship between non- begetting father and unbegotten son.
What sounds like nonsense or, at best, a paradox becomes clear
only in a context of theology. At the end of A Portrait we are puzzled by an identification which we did not expect. Stephen Dedalus has been seeing himself as the fabulous inventor of human flight and creator of the Labyrinth. But in his last diary entry he invokes Daedalus as a father. 'Brightness falls from the air' and 'Non serviam' are for Lucifer but also for Icarus, the son of Daedalus whose wings failed him. Stephen is both Daedalus and Icarus, both father and son. How can this mystery be resolved? Only in the
mystical terms of Christian theology, in which Father and Son are, though separate Persons, really aspects ofeach other.
And so the branch oflearning (art or science) which presides over the first chapter of Ulysses is theology. This justifies the liturgical opening, with Buck Mulligan intoning the beginning of the Mass- Introibo ad altare Dei-and carrying a lather-bowl on which a cross is made by a razor and mirror. The scene is that Martello Tower on the Dublin coast where Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty (the original of Buck Mulligan) lived for a short time (it is now a Joyce
museum), and the hour is eight o'clock on the morning ofJune 16th, 1904. We enter the story without difficulty. The technique is a straightforward narrative onc in which all the characters save one are young. Suddenly, though, the interior monologue of Stephen
94
Dedalus begins. Mulligan's teeth glisten with gold fillings and the detach~dword 'Chrysostomos' is thrown at us. It mean; 'golden ~? uth. and It refers us back to a Saint John so called. The reference IS lforucally apt when we remember that Mulligan is Oliver St John Go? arty. Here th~ worrie~ that accompany us when we read Joyce's major books begm-worne~ about real-life references which, pro- perly, should have no place m the readmg of a work of fiction. Time and time again obscurities only become clear when we consult the biographical background of Ulysses.
'Chrysostomos'-the word links the two worlds ofthe chapter and, for that matter, the bookItSelf. It suggests Christian hagiography a". d, bemg a Greek word, It suggests the Greek myth which, under- Iymg the whole work, must be established at once. Mulligan sees himself as a Greek. He Will teach Stephen the language. They will go to Athens together. They will try to 'Hellenise' the island. He r~cogmses that Stephen's surname is Greek, though this is absurd smce Stephen is a 'jejune jesuit'. Mulligan is a great mocker-of Stephen's 'poverty (he ~as given him some cast-off clothes), of the JesUIt stram m Stephen s make-up which cannot be eliminated. At once we start to see Mulligan as a kind of Antinous to Stephen's T~lemachus. Stephen IS patromsed and bullied. He has, we learn, paId the rent for thIS tower where they are living; soon Mulligan will demand the key as well as 'twopence for a pint'. To make matters worse, an English friend of Mulligan's-Haines-is staying with the~, and Haines serves to remind Stephen of his, and all Ireland's, servitude to the Bntlsh state. The key symbol to this episode is 'Helf', and Stephen feels himself to be disinherited: there is nothing he can call his own.
Mulligan addresses the sea in Greek-'Thalatta! Thalattal'-and says it is a 'great sweet mother'. This brings in a new and important theme-Stephen's guilt in relation to his own mother, recently dead. The eXile foreshadowed at the end of A Portrait was fulfilled: S:ephen went to Paris to study medicine. But a telegram stating that hiS ~other was dying summoned him home again. At his mother's bedSide he refused to kneel and pray for her-non serviatn. The sea a:dullgre. en mass ofliquid', now reminds him ofthe bowl of slug~ glsh bIle she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groamng vomiting'. Pity for her rests with him and he wears mourn- ing as its outwa:d sign, b? t he would not kneel and pray, nor does he regret that h~ did not. H,s mother remains as a symbol for a Church he both despises and fears, since it is the temporal voice of a hateful
95
Telemachus
? ? The Labyrinth
Telemachus
butcher God. And yet, in temperament, he is still what Mulligan
says he is-a 'jejune jesuit'.
If you reject family-which a mother holds together-as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you? There is art, but art has to be nourished, and Irish art is 'the cracked looking-glass of a servant'. Stephen, so totally disinherited, does not yet know where he will find security and material for the great literature he must create. He despises his father, though he does not fear him: it is his mother, not his father, who is to be associated with the bearded monster called God ('Nobodaddy' to William Blake). What he needs, though he has still to recognise this, is a spiritual or mystical father, a father who is not 'consubstantial'. This father will be a mother as well, and we are given a hint as to where he lies. Mulligan, a medical student, sees bodies cut up in the dis- secting-room of the Mater. The Mater is at the top of Eccles Street, where Leopold Bloom lives. 'Et unam sanetam cathaliearn et apostoli- cam ecclesiam' rings through Stephen's head. 'Eccles'l is there. Bloom will take on the function of both a mother and a church.
Once this opening chapter is under way the father-son theme is
presented obliquely but vigorously. Haines has heard of Stephen's theory of Hamlet and wants it expounded at once. Mulligan says: 'He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. ' Haines points to Stephen and says: 'What? He himself? ' And then Mulligan mocks Stephen with '0, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search o f a father l' Haines says: 'I read a theological intepretation of it somewhere. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father. ' And then Mulligan, blasphemous as well as mocking, recites some of his own (that is, Gogarty's) verses- 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'.
The mockery is apt:
- I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,
So here's to disciples and Calvary.
Stephen broods on heresies about the relationship between God the
Father and God the Son. In his own case, we realise, 'Photius and
the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one' speak a salutary warning. If we are to turn Stephen into a kind of Christ we have to
1 In Finnegans Wake, Ulysses is called 'The Blue Book of Eccles'. 96
.
remember that the word can only be made flesh through the mediacy of a mother. For Bloom to be father-mother is well enough in the world of the spirit, but the flesh remains: the physical mother is inescapable. Hence another symbol in this chapter-the omphalos. Stephen first speaks it to himself, in Matthew Arnold's words: 'To ourselves . . . new paganism . . . omphalos. ' Mulligan, talking o f the Martello Tower, says: 'Billy Pitt had them built when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos. ' We are linked to our . mothers by a navel-cord, and so back for ever and ever. And so the image of his mother must remain, a potent symbol, with Stephen all day. Also he is linked through her to two other mothers-Ireland and the Church. He cannot really escape to an empyrean where the son and heir knows only mystical family ties.
I have said that the opening chapter concentrates, with one excep-
tion, on young people, sons and heirs. The exception is the old woman who comes to deliver the milk. She is Ireland, poor and dis- possessed. Haines, her lord and master, speaks Irish; she does not; she has not even her own language. She goes off, uncomplaining, with her milk-bill not fully paid (the twopence that should go to her goes to Mulligan 'for a pint'). Though her Homeric analogue is Athene-who appears in the likeness of Mentor and tells Tele- machus to be wise and courageous like his father-she neither serves as a messenger nor upbraids like a goddess. And yet the sacramental potion of the day's beginning cannot be taken without her: Haines
and Mulligan want milkin their tea; Stephen, though, significantly, is willing to take it black.
The last word of this section is 'Usurper', and it applies equally to
Mulligan and Haines. Mulligan, as Antinous, is actively a usurper, here and now, mocking, patronising, taker of Stephen-Telemachus's goods as well as chider of his spirit and chiller of his courage. Haines's usurpation lies further back, the work of his ancestors, and Haines blames history for what he recognises as England's unfairness to Ireland. History is what Stephen is now to brood on in the fol- lowing chapter. The morning marine colours of white and gold are changed to brown. The technique is that of a catechism, perpetual question and answer, and this is fitting for a scene laid in a school.
The school belongs to Mr Deasy, and Stephen is employed as a teacher there. As the chapter opens he is asking his class questions about Pyrrhus (,Another victory like that and we are done for'), but his interior monologue is obsessed with the nightmare of history in general. History is so very much there, an incubus on living man, as
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Tekmachus
inescapable as the umbilical link with one's own mother. Was there ever any element of choice back there in history, anything which could have made events turn out differently?
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
His pupils too are oppressed by history. They ask their teacher for a
story, a ghost story, the release through the imagination from the
incubus of the past. Instead, Stephen hears their recitation from Milton's Lycidas, which they have been given to learn by heart. 'Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor': a 'drowned man' motif initiated in the preceding chapter (Mulligan saved a man from drowning) is continued here; it has its obvious Homeric parallel in the many drowned companions o f Odysseus, but it has another func- tion as well-it calls up an aspect of that world of the dead which, like history itself, oppresses the world of the living. The boy Talbot stumbles over the line 'Through the dear might of Him that walked the wave's', and Christ suddenly overshadows history. 'Here also
over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. ' But Stephen mocks the image away:
Riddle me, riddle me, randy roo My father gave me seeds to sow.
It is Thursday, a half-holiday (without that half-holiday the book would not have been possible), and the boys get ready to dismi" and then reassemble for hockey. First, though, Stephen gins them" riddle:
The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for this poor soul To go to heaven.
They cannot answer it, and Stephen's own answer disappoints them:
'The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush. ' But Stephen
means neither a fox nor a grandmother. The mother motif has re-
98
appeared and, when young Sargent comes to Stephen to be helped with his algebra ('He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather'), it is developed for the length of a whole paragraph. In Sargent Stephen sees the eternal son- 'ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed'-pro- tected from the world that would crush him by a mother's love. 'With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. ' In face of the dreadful nightmare of history is perhaps amor matris the only true thing in life? But, while he is asking this question, Stephen traces the sym- bols of an algebraic equation for Sargent, and Oriental images are suggested by these 'imps offancy ofthe Moors' - Averroes and Moses Maimonides, 'flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world'. Leopold Bloom, too, at this moment, is drawn towards an ancestral East, as we shall see when we come to the Joycean Odyssey proper. Stephen's mind and Bloom's mind are tuning up for the eventual meeting.
Stephen and Mr Deasy have a session together in the old school- master's study, full ofstale air, old coins and shells, pictures ofhorses on the walls. Mr Deasy is old, and his room stands for history. He himself stands for Nestor, the wise tamer of horses whom Tele- machus first consulted about the whereabouts of his father. He can tell Stephen nothing that will bring him closer to the repossession of his heritage. 'You think me an old fogey and old tory', he says, rightly. He knows of wrongs committed in the past-'a woman brought sin into the world': Helen, for whom the Greeks made a ten years' war on Troy, MacMurrough's wife who brought the strangers to Ireland, the woman who 'brought Parnell low' (here one Homeric parallel is set, like a clue, before us). But history still 'moves
towards one great goal, the manifestation of God'. To Stephen 'history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake' and God is 'a shout in the street'. The young dispossessed heir and the man of ancient wisdom can meet at few points, and Mr Deasy shrewdly guesses that Stephen will not stay long in his school.
But Mr Deasy gives Stephen money-his month's salary-and Stephen, through his journalistic contacts, can do Mr Deasy a good turn. Nestor's castle stood near the mouth of the river Alpheus, the river which Heracles deflected to clean out the Augean stables. Around this river cluster a whole host of bovine associations (the Semitic letters alif, lam, pa form a root meaning 'ox'; the letter alpha is derived from a simple representation of an ox's head). It is
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The Labyrinth
Telemachus
appropriate, then, that Mr Deasy should be much concerned about foot-and-mouth disease in Ireland and a threatened embargo on Irish cattle. He is writing a letter on the subject for newspaper publication, and he wants Stephen to place it with one of the editors he knows. This ox motif is important. Through its associations with the Oxen of the Sun, which stand for fertility, it suggests a way out of the treadmill of history-the perpetual renewal presented in Vico's theory of history (the basis of Finnegans Wake), already prefigured here in a reference to Vico Road, Dalkey. The young poet dubs himself 'bullockbefriending bard': the ancient knight has given him
a potent symbol.
Only here, though, do Nestor and Telemachus come together.
Mr Deasy thunders his false prophecies, particularly about the ruin that the Jews will bring upon England. Ireland is safe, however, both from Jewish conspiracy and guilt about Jewish persecution. His last words explain why: 'She never let them in. ' He apparently does not know of that man in Eccles Street. The fact is that Mr Deasy sees history as a march towards glory, the eventual vision of God, and blames the errors ofhistory on bad women and on Jews. To Stephen, as to Blake, history is barren, 'fabled by the daughters of memory'. The symbols of history which are contained in Mr Deasy's study, neatly arranged like facts in catechisms, are shells and coins. To Stephen coins are to spend, not hoard; shells are mere sounding hollows. Telemachus leaves Nestor unenlightened, except for the possession of that bull-image, symbol of a renewal of life not to be found in shelled, coined history.
The third section of this Telemachia is a lengthy monologue and our first encounter with the really 'difficult' Joyce. The scene is the seashore, the colour is green, the symbol the tide, the hour ap- proaches noon. The Homeric parallel is only indirectly concerned with Telemachus. Menelaus, whom Telemachus consults immedi- ately after his visit to Nestor, himself seeks to consult Proteus, the old sea-god who is unwilling to be consulted and will only prophesy if captured. But he is hard to catch, being adept at changing his form, and it is only with the aid of Eidothea, Proteus's daughter, that Menelaus is able to hold him down and question him. Evidently Proteus, in his very name, suggests some primal force, the very stuff o f life, capable o f expressing itself in many forms. Man's most
fundamental questions-about the nature of life, the heavens, the universe-are posed to a mess of shifting, elusive phenomena; he must learn the gift of reading the signs, of understanding the lan-
100
guage in which life expresses itself. It is philology, the science of language, that presides over this episode of Ulysses.
Stephen is his own Menelaus, walking along Sandycove shore, enquiring into the nature of reality, straining the resources of human language in the process. The signatures he must learn to read are all about-'seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen' (so Mulligan described the sea in the first chapter) 'blue- silver, rust: coloured signs'. Aristotle is invoked, 'maestro di color che sanno' (,master of them who know') according to Dante, to tame and classify the elusive world of matter. Stephen provides his own definitions of the elements in which this world lives and moves. Time is the Nacheinander-one thing coming after another; space is the Nebeneinander-one thing coming next to another. These subsist in the dark (Stephen shuts his eyes) when the world of visible matter has been shut out. Is the world of phenomenon dependent, as Bishop Berkeley thought it was, on the perceiver? Stephen opens his eyes and sees that everything is still there '. aU the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end'. But he had a moment, his eyes closed, of wondering whether evetything might vanish in that dark inter-
lude. One cannot really trust the world of matter.
A couple of Frauenzimmer (Joyce is entitled, in a chapter devoted
to philology, to draw on languages other than English) come down to the beach, one of them 'swinging lourdily her midwife's bag'. Stephen is at once back to the motif of the omphalos, a telephone which will bring one ultimately in touch with 'Edenville'- 'Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. ' Mr Deasy's bull has reappeared, next to a grosser symbol of fertility. At the end of the line is naked Eve, navelless, 'a belly without blemish'. If the metaphysical path leads Stephen to the 'ineluctable modality of the visible', the navel cord leads him back eventually to Eve's sin, original sin. Out of original sin came the generation of life not by miracle (Adam anaesthetised; the removal of a rib) but in pain. Stephen ponders his own making by two strangers-'the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghost- woman with ashes on her breath'-and is soon back on theology, the relationship between Father and Son, the lifelong war of the heresi- arch Arius on the 'contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality'-a mys- terious God-Christ identification which, in this grotesque term, anticipates the melting of Bloom into Stephen ('Stoom'; 'Blephen')
and Stephen into Bloom.
'Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. ' This chapter is
full ofHamlet references, looking forward to the scene in the National 101
? ? 'j !
The Labyrinth
Library where this whole father-son theme shall be hamm~red~ut; Stephen hears in imagination his 'consubstantial fat~er5 vOl~e mocking his in-laws, the Gouldings (this is John Joycehlmselfwlth his '0 weeping God, the things I mamed mto . . . HIghly respe~- table gondoliers . . . Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Chnst). Stephen cannot decide whether to VISIt Ius uncle R,ch,e Gouldmg or not but a fine comic picture of him prepares us for an eventual meeti~gwith him-though the meeting is Bloom's, not Stephen's. The Goulding house IS m decay, hke the Dedalus house. Man brings things to decay, and it was a great Dublm bram that went mad with viewing man's wretched folly. Stephen broods o~ SWIft; and the horse motif of the preceding chapter, as well as the equme length of Buck Mulligan's face (noted in the Martello Tm,;er),. re- emerges out of the image of the Houyhn,hnms. At once, the funous dean' and a memory of a priest whom, In A Portrazt, ,so~eof. the boys called Lantern Jaws and others Fox! Camrbell brmg m, a mocking reference to the Mass and, set In It, th~ Imp hypostasIS - hypostasis being the technical tefm for the doctrme of the common
substance of Father and Son. .
The speed with which Stephen's mind rushes from sub),:ct to
subject, the links of assocIation often bemg . wel~-submerl? ed, IS ap- propriate to a chapter celebrating the qUicksIlver elusIVeness of Proteus: Proteus is the mind, as! well as the pheno,! ,enal world which the mind seeks to comprehend. An obscure SWlftlan r~ference (Dryden's 'Cousin Swift, you wi~l~everbe a poet' becomes ~ou~m Stephen you will never be a samt ) leads on to a self-exammatlOn which c~tsthrough the usual self-delusions put out b~the Protean ego How stupid were his old ambitions-the eplphames left to all the'great libraries of the world, to be read 'after a few thousand
years, a mahamanvantara' (we have met that maham~nvantara-the Indian 'great year'-before: in The Holy Office. It IS one of the motifs that draw us to the East. In a chapter ruled by the sea-tide It is proper to be reminded of the manvantara and the pralaya-the human periods of waking and sleepmg whIch find analogues m the rhythms of the seasons and of the sea itself). .
Stephen walks on, past the Gouldings' decayed resldenc~, ~nd turns north-east towards the Pigeonhouse. ThiS makes hIm thmk of a lewd French joke about the Virgin Birth- 'c'est Ie pigeon, l~seph': we cannot be long away from the Divine Incarnation. But ~hlS. 1Sal~o a way into a lengthy and elliptical reminiscence a? out hIS time. m
Paris among the other Irish 'wild geese' (the eXIle theme whIch 102
Telemachus
matches Bloom's sense of estrangement). The literary technique is
brilliant here with its evocation of 'Paris rawly waking, crude sun-
light on her lemon streets'. We can, if we wish, fill out the ellipses with biographical references. As I have already indicated, so much of the remembered, as opposed to enacted, life of Ulysses touches the region of actuality. There is a penumbra surrounding the book, full of signs which lead us out to Joyce's own experience. Fiction itself is Protean, a disguise of real life. Often the interior monologoes of both Bloom and Stephen seem like the iceberg surface, with sub- merged mountains of references we can only reach by forgetting that Ulysses is a work of art and using it as an encyclopaedic guide to real history. Does this invalidate the novel as literature? I think not. True naturalism calls for shadows and mysteries and clues which may or may not be taken up, just as we please. If we cannot understand everything in Ulysses, nor can we understand everything in real life.
Stephen thinks of Kevin Egan, the revolutionary wild goose for- gotten. 'Remembering thee, 0 Sian. ' A faint image of Bloom, that other exile, beckons here. Looking south to the Martello Tower, Stephen reaffirms his loneliness. 'He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes . . . Take all. Keep all. ' The dispos- sessed heir is also the dispossessed father: he sees himself an instant as the ghost in Elsinore, King Hamlet as well as Prince Hamlet. But now the exterior world asserts itself again, though the language in which it is described is no diaphanous veil: 'He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ash- plant in a grike. ' The language draws attention to itself and, as we see at once, rightly. Stephen reminds us that philology is the science which presides here: 'These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted. ' The emphasis is back on reading the signs of nature, looking through nature's symbols, her disguise, for nature's own self. A dog runs across the sand, and Stephen-who, like his creator, fears dogs-comforts himself with 'I have my stick. Sit tight. ' The prose becomes highly contrapuntal, a vision of the Vikings landing (,bark/barque' is an inaudible enharmonic chord) leading Stephen to think of that Northern blood that flows hidden in him, the in- vaders of history, the pretenders of history (the Irish pretend to be 'all kings' sons'), the collapse of his own pretences when he finds himself shaking 'at a cur's yelping'. Behaviour, like history, isall disguises, gifts of Proteus. He tries to be honest with himself: could he, like Mulligan, have saved a man from drowning? No, nor could he save his mother: 'Waters: bitter death: lost. '
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Telemachus
burning scene' he notes a ship sailing into harbour-the returned
wanderer. An old sailor, emblem of completed exile, will preside over his meeting with Bloom at day! s end.
I say 'a sort of victory Over Proteus'. This is no mere fancy. The chaos of primal matter, of the 'phenomenal world, is figured in the chaos of language, ever-changing, hard to pin down. But language, despite the chaos, has, in a manner, pinned down the world outside. It remains for the poet to impose order on language and, by using the to-and-fro rhythms of the tide, to create an image of organic order, achieve the ultimate pinning-down. Already, at the end of the Telemachia, Stephen has come some way towards regaining his in-
heritance: he rules through words, and even Mulligan fears the lancet of his art, while the sea's ruler, Haines, has a mind to make a book of wisdom out of Stephen's sayings.
But we must not forget that Joyce is, as well as a cosmic poet and apocalyptical epiphanist, a writer ofstorics. Ulysses is a story, and a simple story at that. It is a story about the need of people for each other, and Joyce regards this theme as so important that he has to borrow an epic form in which to tell it. The invocation of the Odyssey may reduce Ulysses to Bloom, but it also exalts Bloom to Ulysses. It is time to look at the nature of this invocation.
? ? 2: Taking over Homer
'ULYSSES' AND 'ULIXES' ARE, AS EVERY SCHOOLBOY USED TO KNOW, Latin forms of the Greek 'Odysseus', Odysseus was, even quite early in life, Joyce's favourite epic hero, and, knowing something of Joyce's temperament, one can see why. Most primitive poetry is about fighting, and the ancient epic naturally extols fighting quali- ties, making its heroes out of heavyweights gifted with blind courage, brute strength, and a garnishing of conventional virtue. Physical violence was repugnant to Joyce-there is very little of it in his books-but he responded readily enough to more intelligent ways of overcoming an enemy-organisation, coolness, tact, cunning. These qualities are all to be found in Odysseus, and to them we can add
various endearing imperfections of character. He longs to get home to his wife, but he is not averse to fornication with nymphs and god- desses. This wife is a second-best to Helen, whose hand he failed to win, and it is good loser's decency on his part to persuade all the suitors to join him in swearing an oath to'protect Helen from violence. Yet when Helen is carried off to Troy he tries to evade his obligations by pretending to be mad. Still, once launched on the expedition he proves wise and cunning in counsel and prudently brave in war. He is more likeable than Achilles and Ajax and JEneas; he is more human, more Bloom-like. The Iliad gives us a sharp picture of him.
Odysseus's qualities call for celebration in a separate epic poem,
and the Odyssey is devoted entirely to his adventures after the fall of Troy. It covers the ten years between his demobilisation and his arrival home in Ithaca to wrest the little island kingdom from the suitors of his presumed widow Penelope. Most of the' adventures which fin the ten years are related in retrospect, the actual events of the poem taking about six weeks. Before we meet Odysseus we meet his son Telemachus (this opening section of the poem is called the Telemachia). Telemachus, like Hamlet, is sick at heart. Various
88
island princes are seeking the hand of his mother, but she has-with a cunning perhaps learned from her husband-been putting them off by promising to come to a decision when she has finished weaving a winding-sheet for Laertes, Odysseus's father. What she weaves during the day she unravels at night, but, at the opening of the poem, this trick has been discovered: she must choose her husband now. It becomes urgent for Telemachus to get news of his father. He faces the prospect of having a stepfather whom he hates (he hates all the suitors, but Antinous, the candidate with the shortest odds, is the worst of them all); moreover, these insolent princelings are wasting the substance of the little kingdom of Ithaca very fast. Telemachus goes off to consult Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus and his wife Helen at Sparta: they may have news of his father. Meanwhile, the suitors prepare an ambush against his return.
We come now to the Odyssey proper. Odysseus has been living for seven years on the island of Ogygia, detained there by the goddess Calypso. He wants to go home, but she will not let him. But Zeus, father of the gods, steps in and orders his release, and Odys- seus builds himself a raft. He sails on it for seventeen days and comes within sight of Scheria, where the Phaeacians live, but then Poseidon, the sea-god, blows up a storm and destroys the raft. Odysseus, as we shall hear, put out the one eye of Poseidon's giant son Polyphemus, and he will not be allowed to forget it. Odysseus floats for two days on the sea, buoyed up by a scarf which Ino, sea- goddess, has given him, and at length he is cast ashore on the coast of Scheria. Nausicaa, daughter of the king Alcinous, finds him and looks after him. In the palace the bard Democodus sings to him about his own exploits-including that of the Trojan Horse-and Odysseus, who has up to that moment concealed his name, now tells the Phaeacians who he is and recounts his perilous story.
He tells of the raid on the Cicones at Ismarus, then of the land of the Lotus-Eaters, where so many of his men succumbed to the will- destroying, home-forgetting fruit. After that we hear about the one- eyed giant cannibals called Cyclopes and how Odysseus put out the eye of one of them - Polyphemus-with a red-hot stake. Then comes the account of his stay with the wind-god JEolus, who gave him the adverse winds tied up in a bag as a farewell present; his men, think- ing that the bag contained treasure, released the winds, doing them- selves and their leader little good. After that, the Laestrygones, another giant race of cannibals, destroyed eleven of his twelve ships and ate their crews. The forlorn remainder reached iEaea, where the
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Taking over Homer
? ? The Labyrinth
Taking over Home1
witch-goddess Circe turned them all into swine-except, of course,
Odysseus, who was protected from enchantment by the herb moly, a gift from Hermes. After a year with Circe (during which he begot a son on her, Telegonus, who was eventually to destroy his father unwittingly) he left-his men having been restored to human shape- to consult the seer Tiresias in Hades about his prospects ofreturning to Ithaca. In Hades he saw the ghosts ofmany dead heroes and their womenfolk and talked with his own mother, Anticlea. Back on the sea again, he resisted the lethal song of the Sirens (himself tied to the mast, his men with wax in their ears) and steered between Scylla- a mariner-eating monster in a cave-and the whirlpool Charybdis. After so many lucky or cunning escapes, his men now did for them- selves by killing the cattle ofthe Sun-god Helios on Thrinacia: such
sacrilege earned them a thunderbolt, though Odysseus-who had
warned them against their crime-escaped on the wreckage of the
ship to Ogygia and the arms of Calypso.
Now comes the homecoming or Nostos. The Phaeacians take
Odysseus back to Ithaca (for their pains their ship is turned, by
Poseidon, into a rock on its return) and now the crafty Odysseus has
to encompass the destruction of the suitors. The goddess Athene disguises him as a beggar, and the faithful swineheard Eumaeus tells him of the behaviour of the suitors. He shows himself to Tele- machus (who escapes the suitors' ambush) and together they plan a massacre. Meanwhile, two others learn that this beggar is Odysseus- his nurse Eurycleia and his dog Argus. After insults from the suitors and a fight with the beggar lrus, our hero learns that Penelope is to marry the man who can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads. Needless to say, only Odysseus can bend the bow and shoot the arrow, and now he stands revealed in his glory and all the suitors quake-with justice, as it turns out, for Odysseus, Telemachus and Eumaeus kill them all, starting with Antinous, and even hang their women. Penelope knows that this must be her husband, since he can tell her what their bedstead looks like, and so all ends, though bloodily, happily. That is how Homer
tells the story.
Joyce tells it rather differently. He has eighteen chapters to
Homer's twenty-four books; he misses out some of Homer's material but inserts an adventure of the Argonauts-that of the Symplegades, or clashing rocks, expanding a reference to the Planktai, or wander- ing rocks, in the twelfth book (line 61) of the Odyssey. Also, he changes the order of Odysseus's exploits and presents them all in
dramatic immediacy, not in epic narration-within-a-narration. The
Joycean Odyssey runs as follows:
Telemachus, like Hamlet, is sick at heart. His mother is dead, and
he feels guilty about her; he has left his father's house to dwell with
two companions. One of these is a foreigner, member of a race that
has usurped the kingdom of his people; the other is a fellow-country- man who perpetually mocks him, demands money from him and even the key of the tower where they live together. He is dis- possessed, bitter at the presence of the usurper. From Nestor-a sage, garrulous and reminiscent prince-he can learn nothing that wi]] lead him back to lawful possession of his rights. He-not Mene- laus-consults the sea-god Proteus, but this god changes his form perpetually, slipping out of the grasp ofTelemachus. Oracular hints have been flashed at him about his need for a spiritual, as opposed to a biological, father, but he cannot formulate this need to himself. Now, after this Telemachia of three episodes, we are ready for Odysseus. Joyce's hero is both an exile and at home. He has his dwelling in the west, but his heart is tugged by ancestral memories of the east, wherefrom his people have wandered. Thus his wife Penelope can take on the properties of a goddess who has seduced him into staying in exile: this is her kingdom, and her name is Calypso. Odysseusgoes forth, having fed her with ambrosia and nectar, and at once finds himself among the Lotus-Eaters. He passes safely through their land and proceeds, with his companions, to
Hades, where he meets the ghosts of the fabled dead. Next he makes
windy contact with . lEolus and nearly meets Telemachus, in whom- his own son being dead - he sees the lineaments of another son. He wanders next among the Laestrygonians, filthy gorgers all, but is himself uneaten.
On the way to Scylla and Charybdis, a necessary passage of his
journey, he espies Antinous, whom he knows to be a suitor of his
wife Penelope. He does not offer fight: he is solitary; he has no son to help him. But now he sees Telemachus himself taking on with courage the perilous passage between the monster's cave and the whirlpool. Telemachus, steering through, sees this sonless father in his turn, and recalls a dream in which such a man seemed to visit him. And now both pseudo-father and pseudo-son have to face new perils: they become Argonauts and venture among the clashing rocks which hide one from the other. Then we are with Odysseus alone once more, and he is not lured by the Sirens' song away from his
purpose-to do the work the gods have set him to do and, at length, 90 91
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return safely to Ithaca. But he ventures into territory where the
Cyclops Polyphemus lurks, and Polyphemus attacks him. Odysseus
gets away, but the giant hurls a heavy missile after him. It is time to
seek brief shelter from the hostile world before continuing the journey. He rests in sight of the sea.
On the seashore the king's daughter Nausicaa is playing with her companions. She falls in love with the mature and weary stranger and, in a dream of abandon, gives herself to him. In a dream Odys- seus takes her, but, in the convalescence of after-love, he comes to
the realisation that, while he is thus dallying away from home, the suitor Antinous has prevailed in Ithaca. It is a bitter moment. Still, ever more mindful of others than himself, he sails to the island where the Oxen of the Sun-god bellow their song of fertility: the island is full of women in labour, and he knows that the wife of a companion is soon to give birth. He lands on the island, enquires about her, and is told that the hour is at hand. He sees that the young Telemachus is there, revelling with drunken companions, and Odysseus is shocked to hear blasphemy spoken against the divine gift of concep- tion: is not this a symbolic slaughtering of the holy oxen? But Zeus hears and, as a warning, launches terrifying thunder.
Odysseus sees that Telemachus has drunk too much wine; what dangers worse than blasphemy may not befall him? He appoints himself the young man's protector and follows him to the island of Circe, where men are turned by magic into swine. The prudent Odysseus is in no danger himself, for the god Hermes has given him the protective herb moly. He sails through terrifYing apparitions and phantasmagorias unscathed. As for the young hero towards whom his attitude grows ever more paternal, he too resists gross transfor- mation and is only in danger of attack from rough men whom lust and drunkenness have turned into beasts. He is struck in the face and falls. And now it is Odysseus's duty to take this new-found son back to Ithaca, to heal him, give him opportunity to recover, and offer him the freedom-as to a true son-of his palace.
But the return to the kingdom must be made with caution. They rest awhile, taking food and drink, in the rude shelter of Eumaeus. Then they take courage and walk to the Palace, imbibing there a sacramental cup of nectar, a pledge of paternality and filiality. The young man leaves, no stranger now. Odysseus seeks his couch-he is weary; he has travelled far-and his wife Penelope finds in him a masterfulness she has not known before. The suitors may have tasted of her body, but they have not prevailed as Odysseus has prevailed:
92
they cannot draw his long bow of cunning and knowledge of the world and the deathless gods that govern the world. And Odysseus has brought her a son to replace the ttue son they lost long ago to the gods of the underworld. This son, not being of her body, stands in the potential relationship of messiah and lover. She sleeps, well content.
That, briefly, is Joyce's own version of the Odyssey. All we have
to do now is to dress these characters in modern clothes and make
them live through their adventures in a modern city, expanding these adventures to epic length but imposing on them the tight rules ofunity found in the classical drama. Let us go back to the beginning again but this time take it more slowly.
Taking over Homer
93
? ? 3: Telemachus
DAZZLED BY THE MOST GLITTERING ASPECT OF Ulysses - ITS display of literary techniques and its ingenuities of symbolism-we find it easy to regard each chapter as a separable item to be marvelled
at, the whole book as a loose collocation of tableaux like an exhibi- . '
tlon, and to forget that its fundamental concern is with the telling of a story. A plain summary of this story is not very enlightening, but the theme on which the story is based is potent, suggestive, and compelhng. It is the mystery of the relationship between non- begetting father and unbegotten son.
What sounds like nonsense or, at best, a paradox becomes clear
only in a context of theology. At the end of A Portrait we are puzzled by an identification which we did not expect. Stephen Dedalus has been seeing himself as the fabulous inventor of human flight and creator of the Labyrinth. But in his last diary entry he invokes Daedalus as a father. 'Brightness falls from the air' and 'Non serviam' are for Lucifer but also for Icarus, the son of Daedalus whose wings failed him. Stephen is both Daedalus and Icarus, both father and son. How can this mystery be resolved? Only in the
mystical terms of Christian theology, in which Father and Son are, though separate Persons, really aspects ofeach other.
And so the branch oflearning (art or science) which presides over the first chapter of Ulysses is theology. This justifies the liturgical opening, with Buck Mulligan intoning the beginning of the Mass- Introibo ad altare Dei-and carrying a lather-bowl on which a cross is made by a razor and mirror. The scene is that Martello Tower on the Dublin coast where Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty (the original of Buck Mulligan) lived for a short time (it is now a Joyce
museum), and the hour is eight o'clock on the morning ofJune 16th, 1904. We enter the story without difficulty. The technique is a straightforward narrative onc in which all the characters save one are young. Suddenly, though, the interior monologue of Stephen
94
Dedalus begins. Mulligan's teeth glisten with gold fillings and the detach~dword 'Chrysostomos' is thrown at us. It mean; 'golden ~? uth. and It refers us back to a Saint John so called. The reference IS lforucally apt when we remember that Mulligan is Oliver St John Go? arty. Here th~ worrie~ that accompany us when we read Joyce's major books begm-worne~ about real-life references which, pro- perly, should have no place m the readmg of a work of fiction. Time and time again obscurities only become clear when we consult the biographical background of Ulysses.
'Chrysostomos'-the word links the two worlds ofthe chapter and, for that matter, the bookItSelf. It suggests Christian hagiography a". d, bemg a Greek word, It suggests the Greek myth which, under- Iymg the whole work, must be established at once. Mulligan sees himself as a Greek. He Will teach Stephen the language. They will go to Athens together. They will try to 'Hellenise' the island. He r~cogmses that Stephen's surname is Greek, though this is absurd smce Stephen is a 'jejune jesuit'. Mulligan is a great mocker-of Stephen's 'poverty (he ~as given him some cast-off clothes), of the JesUIt stram m Stephen s make-up which cannot be eliminated. At once we start to see Mulligan as a kind of Antinous to Stephen's T~lemachus. Stephen IS patromsed and bullied. He has, we learn, paId the rent for thIS tower where they are living; soon Mulligan will demand the key as well as 'twopence for a pint'. To make matters worse, an English friend of Mulligan's-Haines-is staying with the~, and Haines serves to remind Stephen of his, and all Ireland's, servitude to the Bntlsh state. The key symbol to this episode is 'Helf', and Stephen feels himself to be disinherited: there is nothing he can call his own.
Mulligan addresses the sea in Greek-'Thalatta! Thalattal'-and says it is a 'great sweet mother'. This brings in a new and important theme-Stephen's guilt in relation to his own mother, recently dead. The eXile foreshadowed at the end of A Portrait was fulfilled: S:ephen went to Paris to study medicine. But a telegram stating that hiS ~other was dying summoned him home again. At his mother's bedSide he refused to kneel and pray for her-non serviatn. The sea a:dullgre. en mass ofliquid', now reminds him ofthe bowl of slug~ glsh bIle she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groamng vomiting'. Pity for her rests with him and he wears mourn- ing as its outwa:d sign, b? t he would not kneel and pray, nor does he regret that h~ did not. H,s mother remains as a symbol for a Church he both despises and fears, since it is the temporal voice of a hateful
95
Telemachus
? ? The Labyrinth
Telemachus
butcher God. And yet, in temperament, he is still what Mulligan
says he is-a 'jejune jesuit'.
If you reject family-which a mother holds together-as well as the ties of Church and State, is there anything left for you? There is art, but art has to be nourished, and Irish art is 'the cracked looking-glass of a servant'. Stephen, so totally disinherited, does not yet know where he will find security and material for the great literature he must create. He despises his father, though he does not fear him: it is his mother, not his father, who is to be associated with the bearded monster called God ('Nobodaddy' to William Blake). What he needs, though he has still to recognise this, is a spiritual or mystical father, a father who is not 'consubstantial'. This father will be a mother as well, and we are given a hint as to where he lies. Mulligan, a medical student, sees bodies cut up in the dis- secting-room of the Mater. The Mater is at the top of Eccles Street, where Leopold Bloom lives. 'Et unam sanetam cathaliearn et apostoli- cam ecclesiam' rings through Stephen's head. 'Eccles'l is there. Bloom will take on the function of both a mother and a church.
Once this opening chapter is under way the father-son theme is
presented obliquely but vigorously. Haines has heard of Stephen's theory of Hamlet and wants it expounded at once. Mulligan says: 'He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. ' Haines points to Stephen and says: 'What? He himself? ' And then Mulligan mocks Stephen with '0, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search o f a father l' Haines says: 'I read a theological intepretation of it somewhere. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father. ' And then Mulligan, blasphemous as well as mocking, recites some of his own (that is, Gogarty's) verses- 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'.
The mockery is apt:
- I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree,
So here's to disciples and Calvary.
Stephen broods on heresies about the relationship between God the
Father and God the Son. In his own case, we realise, 'Photius and
the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one' speak a salutary warning. If we are to turn Stephen into a kind of Christ we have to
1 In Finnegans Wake, Ulysses is called 'The Blue Book of Eccles'. 96
.
remember that the word can only be made flesh through the mediacy of a mother. For Bloom to be father-mother is well enough in the world of the spirit, but the flesh remains: the physical mother is inescapable. Hence another symbol in this chapter-the omphalos. Stephen first speaks it to himself, in Matthew Arnold's words: 'To ourselves . . . new paganism . . . omphalos. ' Mulligan, talking o f the Martello Tower, says: 'Billy Pitt had them built when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos. ' We are linked to our . mothers by a navel-cord, and so back for ever and ever. And so the image of his mother must remain, a potent symbol, with Stephen all day. Also he is linked through her to two other mothers-Ireland and the Church. He cannot really escape to an empyrean where the son and heir knows only mystical family ties.
I have said that the opening chapter concentrates, with one excep-
tion, on young people, sons and heirs. The exception is the old woman who comes to deliver the milk. She is Ireland, poor and dis- possessed. Haines, her lord and master, speaks Irish; she does not; she has not even her own language. She goes off, uncomplaining, with her milk-bill not fully paid (the twopence that should go to her goes to Mulligan 'for a pint'). Though her Homeric analogue is Athene-who appears in the likeness of Mentor and tells Tele- machus to be wise and courageous like his father-she neither serves as a messenger nor upbraids like a goddess. And yet the sacramental potion of the day's beginning cannot be taken without her: Haines
and Mulligan want milkin their tea; Stephen, though, significantly, is willing to take it black.
The last word of this section is 'Usurper', and it applies equally to
Mulligan and Haines. Mulligan, as Antinous, is actively a usurper, here and now, mocking, patronising, taker of Stephen-Telemachus's goods as well as chider of his spirit and chiller of his courage. Haines's usurpation lies further back, the work of his ancestors, and Haines blames history for what he recognises as England's unfairness to Ireland. History is what Stephen is now to brood on in the fol- lowing chapter. The morning marine colours of white and gold are changed to brown. The technique is that of a catechism, perpetual question and answer, and this is fitting for a scene laid in a school.
The school belongs to Mr Deasy, and Stephen is employed as a teacher there. As the chapter opens he is asking his class questions about Pyrrhus (,Another victory like that and we are done for'), but his interior monologue is obsessed with the nightmare of history in general. History is so very much there, an incubus on living man, as
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inescapable as the umbilical link with one's own mother. Was there ever any element of choice back there in history, anything which could have made events turn out differently?
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death? They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? Weave, weaver of the wind.
His pupils too are oppressed by history. They ask their teacher for a
story, a ghost story, the release through the imagination from the
incubus of the past. Instead, Stephen hears their recitation from Milton's Lycidas, which they have been given to learn by heart. 'Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor': a 'drowned man' motif initiated in the preceding chapter (Mulligan saved a man from drowning) is continued here; it has its obvious Homeric parallel in the many drowned companions o f Odysseus, but it has another func- tion as well-it calls up an aspect of that world of the dead which, like history itself, oppresses the world of the living. The boy Talbot stumbles over the line 'Through the dear might of Him that walked the wave's', and Christ suddenly overshadows history. 'Here also
over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. ' But Stephen mocks the image away:
Riddle me, riddle me, randy roo My father gave me seeds to sow.
It is Thursday, a half-holiday (without that half-holiday the book would not have been possible), and the boys get ready to dismi" and then reassemble for hockey. First, though, Stephen gins them" riddle:
The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for this poor soul To go to heaven.
They cannot answer it, and Stephen's own answer disappoints them:
'The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush. ' But Stephen
means neither a fox nor a grandmother. The mother motif has re-
98
appeared and, when young Sargent comes to Stephen to be helped with his algebra ('He proves by algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather'), it is developed for the length of a whole paragraph. In Sargent Stephen sees the eternal son- 'ugly and futile: lean neck and tangled hair and a stain of ink, a snail's bed'-pro- tected from the world that would crush him by a mother's love. 'With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands. ' In face of the dreadful nightmare of history is perhaps amor matris the only true thing in life? But, while he is asking this question, Stephen traces the sym- bols of an algebraic equation for Sargent, and Oriental images are suggested by these 'imps offancy ofthe Moors' - Averroes and Moses Maimonides, 'flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world'. Leopold Bloom, too, at this moment, is drawn towards an ancestral East, as we shall see when we come to the Joycean Odyssey proper. Stephen's mind and Bloom's mind are tuning up for the eventual meeting.
Stephen and Mr Deasy have a session together in the old school- master's study, full ofstale air, old coins and shells, pictures ofhorses on the walls. Mr Deasy is old, and his room stands for history. He himself stands for Nestor, the wise tamer of horses whom Tele- machus first consulted about the whereabouts of his father. He can tell Stephen nothing that will bring him closer to the repossession of his heritage. 'You think me an old fogey and old tory', he says, rightly. He knows of wrongs committed in the past-'a woman brought sin into the world': Helen, for whom the Greeks made a ten years' war on Troy, MacMurrough's wife who brought the strangers to Ireland, the woman who 'brought Parnell low' (here one Homeric parallel is set, like a clue, before us). But history still 'moves
towards one great goal, the manifestation of God'. To Stephen 'history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake' and God is 'a shout in the street'. The young dispossessed heir and the man of ancient wisdom can meet at few points, and Mr Deasy shrewdly guesses that Stephen will not stay long in his school.
But Mr Deasy gives Stephen money-his month's salary-and Stephen, through his journalistic contacts, can do Mr Deasy a good turn. Nestor's castle stood near the mouth of the river Alpheus, the river which Heracles deflected to clean out the Augean stables. Around this river cluster a whole host of bovine associations (the Semitic letters alif, lam, pa form a root meaning 'ox'; the letter alpha is derived from a simple representation of an ox's head). It is
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appropriate, then, that Mr Deasy should be much concerned about foot-and-mouth disease in Ireland and a threatened embargo on Irish cattle. He is writing a letter on the subject for newspaper publication, and he wants Stephen to place it with one of the editors he knows. This ox motif is important. Through its associations with the Oxen of the Sun, which stand for fertility, it suggests a way out of the treadmill of history-the perpetual renewal presented in Vico's theory of history (the basis of Finnegans Wake), already prefigured here in a reference to Vico Road, Dalkey. The young poet dubs himself 'bullockbefriending bard': the ancient knight has given him
a potent symbol.
Only here, though, do Nestor and Telemachus come together.
Mr Deasy thunders his false prophecies, particularly about the ruin that the Jews will bring upon England. Ireland is safe, however, both from Jewish conspiracy and guilt about Jewish persecution. His last words explain why: 'She never let them in. ' He apparently does not know of that man in Eccles Street. The fact is that Mr Deasy sees history as a march towards glory, the eventual vision of God, and blames the errors ofhistory on bad women and on Jews. To Stephen, as to Blake, history is barren, 'fabled by the daughters of memory'. The symbols of history which are contained in Mr Deasy's study, neatly arranged like facts in catechisms, are shells and coins. To Stephen coins are to spend, not hoard; shells are mere sounding hollows. Telemachus leaves Nestor unenlightened, except for the possession of that bull-image, symbol of a renewal of life not to be found in shelled, coined history.
The third section of this Telemachia is a lengthy monologue and our first encounter with the really 'difficult' Joyce. The scene is the seashore, the colour is green, the symbol the tide, the hour ap- proaches noon. The Homeric parallel is only indirectly concerned with Telemachus. Menelaus, whom Telemachus consults immedi- ately after his visit to Nestor, himself seeks to consult Proteus, the old sea-god who is unwilling to be consulted and will only prophesy if captured. But he is hard to catch, being adept at changing his form, and it is only with the aid of Eidothea, Proteus's daughter, that Menelaus is able to hold him down and question him. Evidently Proteus, in his very name, suggests some primal force, the very stuff o f life, capable o f expressing itself in many forms. Man's most
fundamental questions-about the nature of life, the heavens, the universe-are posed to a mess of shifting, elusive phenomena; he must learn the gift of reading the signs, of understanding the lan-
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guage in which life expresses itself. It is philology, the science of language, that presides over this episode of Ulysses.
Stephen is his own Menelaus, walking along Sandycove shore, enquiring into the nature of reality, straining the resources of human language in the process. The signatures he must learn to read are all about-'seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen' (so Mulligan described the sea in the first chapter) 'blue- silver, rust: coloured signs'. Aristotle is invoked, 'maestro di color che sanno' (,master of them who know') according to Dante, to tame and classify the elusive world of matter. Stephen provides his own definitions of the elements in which this world lives and moves. Time is the Nacheinander-one thing coming after another; space is the Nebeneinander-one thing coming next to another. These subsist in the dark (Stephen shuts his eyes) when the world of visible matter has been shut out. Is the world of phenomenon dependent, as Bishop Berkeley thought it was, on the perceiver? Stephen opens his eyes and sees that everything is still there '. aU the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end'. But he had a moment, his eyes closed, of wondering whether evetything might vanish in that dark inter-
lude. One cannot really trust the world of matter.
A couple of Frauenzimmer (Joyce is entitled, in a chapter devoted
to philology, to draw on languages other than English) come down to the beach, one of them 'swinging lourdily her midwife's bag'. Stephen is at once back to the motif of the omphalos, a telephone which will bring one ultimately in touch with 'Edenville'- 'Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. ' Mr Deasy's bull has reappeared, next to a grosser symbol of fertility. At the end of the line is naked Eve, navelless, 'a belly without blemish'. If the metaphysical path leads Stephen to the 'ineluctable modality of the visible', the navel cord leads him back eventually to Eve's sin, original sin. Out of original sin came the generation of life not by miracle (Adam anaesthetised; the removal of a rib) but in pain. Stephen ponders his own making by two strangers-'the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghost- woman with ashes on her breath'-and is soon back on theology, the relationship between Father and Son, the lifelong war of the heresi- arch Arius on the 'contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality'-a mys- terious God-Christ identification which, in this grotesque term, anticipates the melting of Bloom into Stephen ('Stoom'; 'Blephen')
and Stephen into Bloom.
'Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs. ' This chapter is
full ofHamlet references, looking forward to the scene in the National 101
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The Labyrinth
Library where this whole father-son theme shall be hamm~red~ut; Stephen hears in imagination his 'consubstantial fat~er5 vOl~e mocking his in-laws, the Gouldings (this is John Joycehlmselfwlth his '0 weeping God, the things I mamed mto . . . HIghly respe~- table gondoliers . . . Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Chnst). Stephen cannot decide whether to VISIt Ius uncle R,ch,e Gouldmg or not but a fine comic picture of him prepares us for an eventual meeti~gwith him-though the meeting is Bloom's, not Stephen's. The Goulding house IS m decay, hke the Dedalus house. Man brings things to decay, and it was a great Dublm bram that went mad with viewing man's wretched folly. Stephen broods o~ SWIft; and the horse motif of the preceding chapter, as well as the equme length of Buck Mulligan's face (noted in the Martello Tm,;er),. re- emerges out of the image of the Houyhn,hnms. At once, the funous dean' and a memory of a priest whom, In A Portrazt, ,so~eof. the boys called Lantern Jaws and others Fox! Camrbell brmg m, a mocking reference to the Mass and, set In It, th~ Imp hypostasIS - hypostasis being the technical tefm for the doctrme of the common
substance of Father and Son. .
The speed with which Stephen's mind rushes from sub),:ct to
subject, the links of assocIation often bemg . wel~-submerl? ed, IS ap- propriate to a chapter celebrating the qUicksIlver elusIVeness of Proteus: Proteus is the mind, as! well as the pheno,! ,enal world which the mind seeks to comprehend. An obscure SWlftlan r~ference (Dryden's 'Cousin Swift, you wi~l~everbe a poet' becomes ~ou~m Stephen you will never be a samt ) leads on to a self-exammatlOn which c~tsthrough the usual self-delusions put out b~the Protean ego How stupid were his old ambitions-the eplphames left to all the'great libraries of the world, to be read 'after a few thousand
years, a mahamanvantara' (we have met that maham~nvantara-the Indian 'great year'-before: in The Holy Office. It IS one of the motifs that draw us to the East. In a chapter ruled by the sea-tide It is proper to be reminded of the manvantara and the pralaya-the human periods of waking and sleepmg whIch find analogues m the rhythms of the seasons and of the sea itself). .
Stephen walks on, past the Gouldings' decayed resldenc~, ~nd turns north-east towards the Pigeonhouse. ThiS makes hIm thmk of a lewd French joke about the Virgin Birth- 'c'est Ie pigeon, l~seph': we cannot be long away from the Divine Incarnation. But ~hlS. 1Sal~o a way into a lengthy and elliptical reminiscence a? out hIS time. m
Paris among the other Irish 'wild geese' (the eXIle theme whIch 102
Telemachus
matches Bloom's sense of estrangement). The literary technique is
brilliant here with its evocation of 'Paris rawly waking, crude sun-
light on her lemon streets'. We can, if we wish, fill out the ellipses with biographical references. As I have already indicated, so much of the remembered, as opposed to enacted, life of Ulysses touches the region of actuality. There is a penumbra surrounding the book, full of signs which lead us out to Joyce's own experience. Fiction itself is Protean, a disguise of real life. Often the interior monologoes of both Bloom and Stephen seem like the iceberg surface, with sub- merged mountains of references we can only reach by forgetting that Ulysses is a work of art and using it as an encyclopaedic guide to real history. Does this invalidate the novel as literature? I think not. True naturalism calls for shadows and mysteries and clues which may or may not be taken up, just as we please. If we cannot understand everything in Ulysses, nor can we understand everything in real life.
Stephen thinks of Kevin Egan, the revolutionary wild goose for- gotten. 'Remembering thee, 0 Sian. ' A faint image of Bloom, that other exile, beckons here. Looking south to the Martello Tower, Stephen reaffirms his loneliness. 'He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes . . . Take all. Keep all. ' The dispos- sessed heir is also the dispossessed father: he sees himself an instant as the ghost in Elsinore, King Hamlet as well as Prince Hamlet. But now the exterior world asserts itself again, though the language in which it is described is no diaphanous veil: 'He climbed over the sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ash- plant in a grike. ' The language draws attention to itself and, as we see at once, rightly. Stephen reminds us that philology is the science which presides here: 'These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted. ' The emphasis is back on reading the signs of nature, looking through nature's symbols, her disguise, for nature's own self. A dog runs across the sand, and Stephen-who, like his creator, fears dogs-comforts himself with 'I have my stick. Sit tight. ' The prose becomes highly contrapuntal, a vision of the Vikings landing (,bark/barque' is an inaudible enharmonic chord) leading Stephen to think of that Northern blood that flows hidden in him, the in- vaders of history, the pretenders of history (the Irish pretend to be 'all kings' sons'), the collapse of his own pretences when he finds himself shaking 'at a cur's yelping'. Behaviour, like history, isall disguises, gifts of Proteus. He tries to be honest with himself: could he, like Mulligan, have saved a man from drowning? No, nor could he save his mother: 'Waters: bitter death: lost. '
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Telemachus
burning scene' he notes a ship sailing into harbour-the returned
wanderer. An old sailor, emblem of completed exile, will preside over his meeting with Bloom at day! s end.
I say 'a sort of victory Over Proteus'. This is no mere fancy. The chaos of primal matter, of the 'phenomenal world, is figured in the chaos of language, ever-changing, hard to pin down. But language, despite the chaos, has, in a manner, pinned down the world outside. It remains for the poet to impose order on language and, by using the to-and-fro rhythms of the tide, to create an image of organic order, achieve the ultimate pinning-down. Already, at the end of the Telemachia, Stephen has come some way towards regaining his in-
heritance: he rules through words, and even Mulligan fears the lancet of his art, while the sea's ruler, Haines, has a mind to make a book of wisdom out of Stephen's sayings.
