Category Archives: 01 Telemachus

A guide to chapter one

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I love how Rob has Mulligan sample the milk as if it were a bottle of wine at a fancy restaurant. Exactly Mulligan’s form of jackassery, even if it may be anachronistic.

I’ve never been sure what to make, exactly, of Mulligan’s speech on healthy food. It’s a class marker, to be sure, and perhaps we are to take it as more or less sincere, but misguided. People are starving in Dublin–there’s enormous poverty in the city at this time. The Great Famine is a living memory. More to the point, who is meant to benefit from this pontification? He’s showing off his knowledge and Doctor-power to the milkwoman… but what does this tell us about him?

Neither Joyce nor his alter-ego Stephen Dedalus had a Ph.D. in literature, but Stephen’s feelings here are very familiar to anyone who does. The real doctor gets all the attention. But they guy who’s going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of her race? He gets nothing.

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This is an especially marvelous page, and the less said about it the better. But something must be said.

So Stephen, Mulligan, and Haines are eating their breakfast. There being no refrigerator, milk is delivered every day by a milkwoman, who’s presumably just come from the cows. Stephen (or is it Stephen?) imagines her as a messenger in disguise, like Athena. If the milkwoman is Athena, and Stephen is Telemachus, then we can expect that in some way she’s going to send him on his way, wittingly or unwittingly.

Several old women represent Ireland symbolically: “Silk of the Kine and poor old woman,” are two, also the Shan van Vocht or Cathleen Ni Houlihan.  So you could say that Stephen and Mulligan’s profanation of Irish culture (and Irish women) has been punctured by the arrival of the symbol of Ireland herself.  We will soon find that she’s not a perfect symbol of all things Irish, but we’ll save that for a later panel.

So what’s with the naked lady?  It’s all part of Stephen’s notion of her as a goddess in disguise, also a figure of Ireland enslaved, serving her conqueror (Haines, the Englishman) and her gay betrayer (Mulligan).  If a messenger from the gods comes to visit your for breakfast, in the guise of a poor old woman, how might that change the way you face your day?

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The milkwoman finally arrives at the tower.  Mulligan makes another crack, as a kind of mock anthropologist speaking about the beliefs of “the islanders.”  God is the “collector of prepuces”–which is not to suggest that the Irish were much into circumcision [fascinating map of circumcision prevalence around the world here], but is more about circumcision being God’s will for his chosen people–a sign of his covenant.

As for the milkwoman — we’ll talk more about her in the coming panel. For now, two observations — first, who do you think is “saying” the “Rich, white milk” passage. Is it Stephen? Are you sure?  Second, the milkwoman is referred to as “maybe a messenger.”  Joyce seems to be tipping his hand here, basically announcing MILKWOMAN = ATHENA.  So if the first passage is in Stephen’s head, is this in Stephen’s head too?  Is Stephen projecting any of the Odyssey parallels onto the scene?

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Mulligan and Stephen are having some fun at Haines’ expense.  Haines has come to Ireland, (as we will shortly learn) on some sort of research trip having to do with Irish culture.  He’s the foreigner, the colonizer, who has come to make his name collecting and publishing the sayings of the natives.  We’ll also learn in a moment that he’s the only person in the tower who can speak Irish. But more on that later.

Mulligan’s and Stephen’s joke, such as it is, turns upon the idea that the Irish culture they know consists of dirty and profane songs, snippets, nothing worthy of the title of a national epic.  Just the “cracked lookingglass of a servant,” written in the master’s language.

Given Joyce’s disregard for the distinctions between high and low culture, and given his love of the real songs and phrases and practices of a city’s streets, it’s not hard to imagine that he would say a real collection of Irish culture would be the Mother Grogans and Mary Annes (and Molly Malones, while we’re at it).  And if you wanted to be extra cheeky about it, you could call that work Ulysses.

PS: according to Gifford, who cites Mabel Worthington, the last line of Mulligan’s verse should be “She pisses like a man.”  For a less interesting version of the song, click here…

[Photo by Informatique, courtesy of Flickr, by creative commons license]

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Back to the Odyssey for a second. Stephen is Telemachus, in a house of usurpers, a little too young and too weak to do anything about it but complain. Mulligan, as head usurper, here is still on his tear about selling fine original Irish witticisms to Haines. Stephen plays along half-heartedly, more enjoying the joke at Haines’ expense than whatever it is Mulligan is up to. Telemachus must have been tempted to just give in to the suitors–his situation is desperate, there’s no reason to think his father was going to return. Stephen is similarly lost.

Stephen is not, we will see, a big fan of the Irish nativist trend that was gaining in popularity at that time. There is so much scholarship on this moment, so much said about it, that I’m reluctant to even sketch it out.  Here’s some erudition on the Celtic Revival, as it’s sometimes called.  Haines is in Dublin to capitalize on then trend. If you’ve read Dubliners recently, you may remember the word “simony,” one of the three memorable words on the first page of the first story.  Simony is the sin of selling holy benefits, sacraments and otherwise, for money.  A big sin in the Joycean universe, and part of what we’re seeing here too.

The Mabinogion is a set of early Welsh stories, sometimes characterized as a Welsh national epic. The Upanishads are more of a Hindu religious text than a national myth, but still… you get the point.

So much of what’s going on in Mulligan’s palaver has to do with William Butler Yeats and the role he played in the Celtic Revival, aka Celtic Twilight (the title of a Yeats book),  aka, per Joyce “Cultic Twalette.” And yet this critique is put in Mulligan’s mouth–Mulligan wants to take his shots at the Irish revival and eat on it too, and it’s that inconsistency that Stephen can’t abide.

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We continue to get a picture of life inside the tower, with Mulligan as the obstreperous bully and Stephen as the passive brooder.  Mulligan’s penchant for satirizing the mass continues, as he doles out the eggs with the ol’ Signum Crucis.  But we can also map the father/son/holy ghost backwards-like onto the three men themselves, with Mulligan as the usurper who would be the father, Stephen as the son without a father, and Haines as the holy ghost who is neither.

Stephen’s suggestion of tea with lemon, as opposed to milk, is condemned by Mulligan as a “Paris fad.”  So we gather another fragment about Stephen, and will soon learn more about his time in Paris.  Stephen’s time abroad is a conneciton back to Joyce, who in real life went to Paris after graduating from college, only to return to be at his mother’s deathbed. It also recalls Hamlet, who is back in Denmark after happier times spent in Wittenberg.

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Although we will give Mulligan a few points for making breakfast, he is clearly not someone you want to be around when you have a hangover–the singing, the wiseassery, the smoke, the high energy, the bossing around (“Kinch, wake up”)… like an annoying frat brother.   I’m starting to see him as a slightly more sophisticated version of Will Ferrell’s “Frank the Tank” in Old School.

Gifford glosses the candle business as a joke about female masturbation, which is all well and good, but I’m not quite sure what it adds to our understanding of what’s going on.  It does recall the travesty of the mass we were talking about a few pages ago, and which will come back as he serves the eggs.

I love the detail of Stephen sitting on his upended valise–it’s in the text, but I never really noticed it before.  In Richard Ellmann’s famous biography of Joyce, he occasionally talks about Joyce’s habit of using suitcases as desks when he wrote at home–sitting in a chair with a suitcase in his lap.  Joyce’s family was always on the move when he was a boy–always on the move, avoiding landlords and other creditors.  That Stephen doesn’t have a chair says something about his status in the household, but it also tells you that he’s ready to go.

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This page made me smile when I first saw it–there’s not much happening, but it gives a  visual dimension to a moment in the novel that I had never really thought about visually, even after reading this chapter many, many  times. Rob’s drawing emphasizes how the scene moves from an a bright exterior to a very  dark and smoky interior, which isn’t as apparent from the text. Those who have visited the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove can attest to the close, dark quarters inside the tower, but Rob’s drawing saves you the flight.  As we move through this scene, you might keep an eye out for the differences in the dialog & the thoughts of the characters when inside the tower as opposed the outside.

The exchange about the key is also revealing–Mulligan tells Haines to open the door, says Stephen has the key, but the key is in the door the whole time.   Why is Haines the one to open the door?

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We’ve been getting a lot of context for Mulligan and Stephen’s relationship over the last few pages, a lot of backstory.  Here we get a clearer picture of what their relationship is like in the present. Stephen has a job, and he’s getting paid.  More to the point, Mulligan thinks he has figured out a way to pimp out Stephen’s epigrammatic talent. And Stephen thinks of himself as the “server of a servant.”

Stephen’s feelings are very familiar to anyone who’s had a careless roomate–do I clean up after this jerk? or leave the bowl where it is?–but Mulligan’s class card has already been played, and it means more to Stephen than just bad manners.  It’s also a compact way of bringing Stephen’s role as Telemachus back into view: the suitors are making a mess and taking his money, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

About the money–we’ll shortly learn that Stephen is paid a bit less than four pounds, or “quid” on this day.  While it doesn’t sound like much, it’s not a trivial amount of money.  Think about it this way–you could buy a pint of beer for 2 pennies, or pence,  in Dublin in 1904.  There are 240 pence in 1 old-style pound.  You could therefore buy 120 pints with a quid.  A pint of beer in our fair city of Philadelphia in 2008 will set you back anywhere from 2-6 bucks–let’s say $4.  So using beer as our point of reference, a 1904 pound in contemporary US dollars would be about $480.  Now, economists and other sticklers among you will remind me that the price of beer was kept artificially low in Dublin at this time, and that it’s a lousy basis for conversion… but if you take as a basic rule of thumb that 1p is very roughly equal to $1 in contemporary dollars, you’ll be close.  Mulligan is asking for a rather large amount of money.

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(image up top here is from the new chapter headers we’re developing)

-Rob; Some background on this lengthy project is probably needed here as we restart. The idea of adapting Joyce’s masterpiece into a web-based, educational comic was crazy. We all knew that. But four of us were willing to give a try from the start (way back in 2008).

Now the only professional Joycean and scholar among the group was Michael Barsanti, at that time Associate Director at the Rosenbach Museum and Library here in Philadelphia. Mike’s guidance to the project was invaluable from the start, and he really set the tone for developing the Readers’ Guide portion of this project into a friendly, comfortable environment for learning about Joyce. So here’s Mike… 

-Mike; If you know anything about Ulysses, you might know that it bears a strong family resemblance to Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce transposes elements of the ancient story to one day in the life of Dublin, a warm June day in 1904. Telemachus is the son of Odysseus (that’s Ulysses to you, if you’re Roman), and when you meet him, he is desperate to do something about the horde of suitors that is waiting to marry his mother and despoiling his home. He doesn’t remember his father, who’s been gone for a very long time.

But if you just pick up Joyce’s novel, you have no idea that the first episode is called “Telemachus.” [Nor, for that matter, do you know that it’s June 16, 1904, 8:00 a.m., or a Thursday. It takes hundreds of pages to figure this out. But we bring it to you on a platter!]

The word “Telemachus” appears nowhere in the book. Joyce had Homeric titles for all of the 18 episodes, however, and he used them regularly when talking about the book with his friends. In 1920, he created a “schema” for his friend (and writer and critic) Carlo Linati, which would quickly become the first of many tools for reading the book.

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View this Page of the Comic

Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

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