Category Archives: 01 Telemachus

A guide to chapter one

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Haines’ interrogation of Stephen continues.  He’s confused by Stephen’s paradoxical attachment to the Catholic church despite not believing in God.  And he’s just told Stephen (in the last page) that he doesn’t see why Stephen can’t be free, be his own Master.  So here, Stephen explains why.

It is not surprising that an Irishman at the turn of the twentieth century would see himself as the servant of the British state and the Catholic church. But who is the third master Stephen mentions?

This is usually read as referring to Mulligan, as in Stephen’s thought that he is the “server of  a servant” when he carries Mulligan’s shaving bowl downstairs earlier in the episode.

So does Stephen seem interested in doing anything about his servitude? Does anything seem possible? What might it mean for Stephen to feel he is a servant to Britain and the church?

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Haines has been tentatively probing Stephen, trying to learn something about his religious beliefs, his thoughts about Shakespeare, his thoughts about Mulligan — anything that will help him understand the strange Irish intellectual and perhaps be able to use him in his work.  Stephen has no interest in this, however, and the questions just make him feel more and more isolated.

In these panels, Stephen concludes that he cannot stay any longer at the tower, that he cannot be a part of Mulligan’s bankrupt intellectual project, even though he paid the rent on the tower. [n.b. — in real life, Mulligan’s counterpart, Oliver St. John Gogarty, was the one who paid the rent.]  He accurately guesses that Mulligan will ask him for the key, and he will become displaced and homeless.

Stephen’s dragging his ashplant, or walking stick, behind him further accentuates his feelings of powerlessness and impotence.  He calls it his “familiar,” like a magician’s assistant, calling his name.  Everything around Stephen seems to be crying out for him to take action, like his Odyssean counterpart Telemachus.  Even Haines reminds Stephen that he has the power to be his own master, but Stephen doesn’t see it yet.

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Haines offers Stephen a cigarette, and asks directly about Stephen’s beliefs.

Haines has not spent much time around Stephen, but has heard enough and seen enough to assume that a person with such a strong bohemian affect can’t possibly believe in God, or at least not in the conventional God of the church.  After all, Haines knows that Stephen has refused to pray at his dying mother’s bedside–proof that Joyce’s attitude towards religion, and the Catholic church specifically, was complex.

On the one hand, he could not bring himself to believe. On the other, he had a profound respect for the culture and learning of the church; he knew more about it and its doctrines than most believers.  He took it very seriously, and he took his refusal to believe very seriously. His respect for the church amplified his defiance of it.  Stephen, who is to a large extent Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, clearly does not want to identify with Haines’ attitudes towards religion, but cannot pretend to really believe either.  We’ll watch Stephen continue to negotiate this paradox for… the rest of the book, really.

Rob has carefully drawn Haines’ cigarette case, which is described as a “smooth silver case in which twinkled a green  stone.”  It’s a deft symbol for the English Hibernophile… Ireland, of course, is often referred to as the “Emerald Isle,” as a beautiful green stone.  Its setting in a silver case also recalls a line from Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which England is referred to as a “precious stone set in a silver sea.”  Ireland has been substituted for England, but only as a kind of token.

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Having finished his song, Mulligan runs down to the sea, where he and Haines will bathe.

Haines lingers behind with Stephen, trying to figure out how to react to Mulligan’s funny, if blasphemous song.  By doing so, he is also probably trying to learn something about an Irish intellectual’s relationship to religion generally and the Catholic church specifically.  A Hibernophile Englishman, Haines plays the role of an amateur anthropologist, absorbing everything he can about the peculiar habits of the natives.  Mulligan both encourages him and mocks him for this — Stephen keeps it at a distance.

There’s a conspicuous classical reference here–Mulligan’s flapping hands are associated with “Mercury’s hat.”  Just a few moments ago, Mulligan referred to himself as “Mercurial Malachi.”  When I first noticed this, I thought it was a direct link back to the Odyssey, imagining that Mercury visited Telemachus in Ithaca… but it’s Athena who visits him.

Mercury is the god of travellers, businessmen, messengers and the like. He’s not a bad match for Mulligan, as he is also associated with trickery and deception, particularly around money. Joyce’s schema for the chapter doesn’t say anything about Mercury, but he seems to be here anyway. Joyce’s first readers didn’t really know how closely the parallel to the Odyssey was built, though the title gives a pretty big clue. References like this one would have provided other reminders to the reader to keep Homer in the back of your mind as you read.

So if Mulligan is being associated with Mercury… what of it?  What message is he bringing here?

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If you’ve waited until now to find out what this song is about, flip back the last two Reader’s Guide pages to get the longer explanation.

Basically, as the earlier verses have made fun of Jesus’ conception and miracle working, here they make fun of the creation of the gospels and the annunciation into heaven. “Olivet” is another way of referring to the Mount of Olives, where Jesus goes to pray shortly before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. Why wouldn’t Gogarty/Mulligan have used Golgotha, where he was crucified, instead?

And if you’re wondering about all the handflapping, that’s specifically described in the text: he “fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air.”

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If you look up “Joking Jesus” on YouTube today, this is what comes up first.

With all of the talk about Hamlet and Gogarty and Irish history and Dublin, etc. etc., it’s easy to lose track of the power that this blasphemous little verse can have.  As we were saying about Mulligan’s parody of the mass at the beginnng of this episode, the blasphemy here would have been fairly shocking to pious people.

Does the song make sense to you so far?  If you haven’t had a lot of churchin’, it might not.  On the last page, for instance, when Mulligan sings “My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird,” he’s referring to the story of the Annunciation

The Annunciation by Francesco Albani

The Annunciation by Francesco Albani, collection of The Hermitage

So Jesus’ mother Mary was a Jew. We can start with that. And Jesus’ father… well… our future friend Leopold Bloom will have some theories about that in episode 12 (“Cyclops”), but suffice it to say that Jesus came into human form through the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is often represented as a bird. A dove, I think.  Well, at the risk of killing all the jokes in such a clever way, you can just go here to learn more about the Annunciation.
In this panel — I’ll just assume that you know already that Jesus is described turning water into wine at a wedding in Cana.  “Plain” in this context means plain stout, as in a “pint of plain.” And yeah, it’s gross, but the joke here is that Jesus says “If you don’t think I’m the Messiah, you aren’t getting any of the wine I make–you’ll have to wait until I have to piss & hope it comes out beer.”  Which isn’t going to win you any points with the churchgoers. There’s more to come.

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Mulligan has been waiting for a chance to perform his masterpiece, the “Ballad of Joking Jesus.” More is coming in the next few pages.

The ballad is one of many things in Ulysses not written by James Joyce. It was written by the real-life inspiration for Buck Mulligan, Oliver St. John Gogarty. The ballad even has its own Wikipedia page. It’s brilliant. A friendly Welshman (Gareth, you out there?) once told me that the song was meant to be sung to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”

I’ve cherished this as a bit of inherited Joycean lore, but it does seem to have some basis in tradition. Note this retro website from John Patrick, a scholar of bawdy songs. Mr. Patrick (surely he is Dr. Patrick by now?) has an mp3 snippet of a 1962 recording of the song here. The snippet comes from the Library of Congress, and a recording in the Archive of Folk Culture of an interview with a man named Donald Laycock who was from New South Wales.

Would cherish further information, or even video of a boozy rendition of the song…

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Haines has been trying to get Stephen’s Hamlet theory out of him, but Stephen isn’t interested in telling it, and Mulligan is running interference, trying to get at least a pint out of the deal.

Haines’ wants to prove his intellectual mettle with Stephen. He’s eager to show that he knows something about Hamlet, that he can even quote a line or two. [Elsinore is the castle where the action happens in Shakespeare’s play].

Back in December, when these pages were first posted, we got an email from a reader reminding us that we had left out a line of internal dialog here at this point. Just after Haines says “that beetles o’er his base into the sea,” the next line is “Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak.”  We don’t really use this, but the reader felt it was a critical moment, because it showed (he felt) Mulligan having a flash of anxiety about Stephen killing himself.  I was skeptical — I thought it more likely that Mulligan was having a flash of anxiety about Stephen further ridiculing the meal ticket Haines. But upon looking at the context of the “beetles o’er his base” quotation, I can see the possibility of the reading.

See this Hamlet vid. [The relevant line comes up around 2:50]

In any event, when Stephen sees himself in “dusty mourning” next to their “gay attires,” he’s clearly thinking of himself as Hamlet. Whether his two companions are Horatio and Marcellus or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern… that’s another question.

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To anyone out there who’s reading this book for the first time, I’d suggest you not spend too much time trying to parse Mulligan’s summary of  Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare.  I will tell you, however, it is far more concise than Stephen’s own version, which you will read in Episode 9.

When Mulligan says to Stephen “O Shade of Kinch the Elder,” the reference ties back to him saying that Stephen is the ghost of his own father a moment before, but also ties to Hamlet, and the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father in the first act.

We don’t know anything yet about Stephen’s father, though we will be meeting him shortly.  We do know, however, that the title of this episode is “Telemachus,” and Stephen is Joyce’s Telemachus, another famous son of an absent father.  The Odyssey structure prompts us to ask in what way Stephen is looking for a father, and here the discussion comes straight to the point.

from Aida Yared's JoyceImages.com

The phrase “Japhet in Search of a Father” requires a little more excavation.  It’s the title of a novel from 1836 by the once-enormously-popular Capt. Frederick Marryat.  And if you’d like to take a few weeks out of your life to read it, thanks to Google Books, now you can.

And of course, there’s more.  Japhet is also Japheth, the third son of Noah (after Shem and Ham. Or possibly before. Unclear whether he was oldest or youngest.).  According to Biblical legend, Japheth is the ur-ancestor of Europeans.

On the most basic level, though, Mulligan is using Hamlet and the once-familiar title of a once-familiar book to give Stephen a little of the old “Who’s Your Daddy.”

This isn’t the easiest moment in the chapter for all of the references flying, but you can best get at what’ s happening here by just spending a minute thinking generally about what it means to be a father vs. a mother (obvious biology aside), and what it means to be a ghost. These are big questions in Ulysses, especially the uncertainty of paternity (in a pre-DNA age) vs. the certainty of maternity…

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The tryptich of the three men is quite wonderful here. Despite the clarity of the arrangement, however, the politics of this moment are quite complex.

Haines, the Englishman, asks about the tower, “Martello, you call it?,” apparently unaware of who built the towers or why, or how they represent a particularly painful moment in British/Irish relations.  Mulligan explains that the famous British Prime Minister William Pitt had them built “when the French were on the sea,” that is, at a moment when many Irish people hoped that Napoleon would invade Ireland and free them from British rule. So the towers were build not purely for the defense of Ireland, but rather to defend against an invasion that a significant number of natives would have welcomed.

Mulligan is quoting to an Irish song called the “Shan van Vocht,” a/k/a the Poor Old Woman, in which the nation of Ireland, in her frequent guise as an old woman, sings about how the French will soon come to save them from the devils who rule Great Britain, of the House of Orange (“and the Orange will decay,” etc.), and who, after the Battle of the Boyne, will rule Ireland without rival for a long time. Of course the old woman is wrong, and the French never came. But it’s an Irish song, so this all has a nostalgic glow to it anyway.

Here is a latter-day Mulligan, Haines, and Dedalus doing a bit of a dance that is reminiscent of Joyce’s famous “spider dance” to the same tune:

Mulligan quickly redirects Haines away from this line of thought by saying that the tower now serves as the “omphalos,” or center, of modern Irish thought.  In talking about the last page, we mentioned how Mulligan’s real-life counterpart Oliver Gogarty hoped that the tower would become a new capital of Irish bohemian intellectualism, and that Joyce would play a significant part in this.

Haines is quite interested in Irish culture, but not contemporary Irish intellectuals. As we will soon hear more about, when Haines looks at the tower he thinks, naturally, of the greatest English poet, Shakespeare.

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