Category Archives: 01 Telemachus

A guide to chapter one

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Mulligan calls to Stephen from within the tower, pulling Stephen out of a series of flashback visions of his mother.

He tells Stephen to come on down like “a good Mosey.”  Gifford, in Ulysses Annotated, parses this as “one who moves slowly or shuffles.”  But I think there’s a strong overtone of “Moses” in it too.  Later in the day, Stephen will think of Moses and his view from Mt. Pisgah, as he writes a “parable of the plums” rooted in modern Dublin life.

The way Rob presents this moment, with an enormous, distant horizon, gives you a strong contrast to the claustrophobic visions of the past.   There’s a long view before Stephen, (a view towards Britain and beyond that, Europe), but he’s pulled away from it by his tie to Mulligan, as well as by the past that haunts him.

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Again here, an explanation of what’s going on in the comic beggars what the comic itself does on this page.  Stephen is caught up in his “brooding brain,” [another example of the Uncle Charles Principle, as the word “brooding,” which ostensibly comes from some kind of narrator, has been very much part of Stephen’s thoughts in this scene.]  Stephen does another deep dive into memories of his mother’s death, bringing up wonderfully precise images–the “shapely fingernails” (Q: what are shapely fingernails?) stained red with the blood of squashed lice, etc.

The question I’ve been asking myself about this moment is “If we look at Stephen as a writer struggling to come into his own, can we better understand his struggle with the memory of his mother?”  Certainly his command to her to leave him alone and let him live makes some sense.  I imagine Stephen here is struggling between  a writer’s impulse to record every detail of what he remembers of her (almost in the style of an epiphany), and his terror at bringing back the horror-movie-style guilt and terror of her death.

And about that Latin… Professor Gifford gives us a translation from the “Layman’s Missal”: May the glittering throng of confessors, bright as lilies, gather about you. May the glorious choir of virgins receive you.” It is a prayer for the dying, which can be said (according to the missal via Gifford) to commend the dying person to God if there is no priest present.  This is what Stephen should have prayed, if he had prayed.

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The flashback continues. Stephen is thinking about his mother, thinking about her room and objects he identifies with her, thinking about her memories, things she told him about her childhood.

Remember the context–Mulligan wants to use Stephen’s money, his wit, his ideas for his own benefit.  This is mostly just selfishness, but also grandiosity, in that Mulligan wants to use Stephen for his project to “Hellenise” the island, to bring a new classical age to this struggling Ireland that’s at a critical point in its history.  Several times through the day Stephen will hear about a new plan for Ireland, people will turn to him to talk about the future, or it’s artistic future. Where does this lead him?

Backwards–to thoughts about his mother–to the creation of a scene.  In these powerful and vivid fragments, you’re seeing Stephen Dedalus begin to stretch his wings (so to speak) and show the promise of his creativity.

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We’re following Stephen into a ‘flashback’ of a scene that took place just before his mother’s death.  I like how dramatically we go from the wide open brightness of the tower and the sea, which, as Mulligan tells us, forgives all offences, to the dark and claustrophobic space of Stephen’s family home.

This passage requires less explication in this format than it does in the book, as the comic form allows us to create the scene in Stephen’s head–just as before with the image of his mother’s ghost, or old Clive Kempthorpe.

My thoughts are never far from Hamlet or from the Odyssey here.  But what are the ghosts telling him to do?  Stephen doesn’t seem to feel terribly guilty about not praying at his mother’s bedside, he doesn’t seem to feel an urge to repent… his strongest urge is perhaps to remember most vividly and honestly the things that have happened to him.   If you’re willing to play along with my hypothesis that Stephen’s journey in this novel is to find the true path of his development as an artist, it will be interesting to see what he does with the ghosts that haunt him and hold him back.

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A few pages ago, Stephen looked out at Dublin Bay and thought of the scene at his mother’s deathbed, associating the view with the bile his mother had coughed up into a white bowl.  That image is still with him here, “a bowl of bitter waters.”

The cloud covering the sun will appear again in a few chapters, when Leopold Bloom  sees the same cloud at the same time from a different part of the city.  The observation of the same phenomenon from two different places invokes parallax, an important concept for Ulysses.  Parallax is a technique for finding the distance of a remote object, like a planet or star.  The wikipedia article will tell you how it works, but the basic principle is that when you see something from two points of view, you can figure out where it really is.  Our two eyes automatically use parallax to determine depth in the world around us.

Bloom, who has an active, if uninformed interest in astronomy, thinks about Parallax several times during the day, but it also is a kind of metaphor for Joyce’s method.  We see the phenomena of one day in the life of a City from several different perspectives, and we need to take more than one perspective into account to find the real depth of the story.

Rob’s drawing reinforces this idea–we look from a POV that’s different from Stephen’s, and both of us can see the mail boat coming in to the harbor.

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In the top three pictures, Stephen looks out to sea while Mulligan goes down the stairs, reciting  a Yeats poem.  In the bottom two frames, a voice–presumably inside Stephen’s head, mashes together the poem and his perception of the sea.  It’s another example of the “Uncle Charles Principle,” where a voice that is ostensibly the narrator’s takes on the personality and knowledge of an individual character.

Also important to note that if we are inside Stephen’s head here, at least partly, that Stephen is beginning to work on a poem. His mind has left the conflict with Mulligan and has begun to shape, to try to capture in words, a visual impression.

The reference to “lightshod hurrying feet” sounds like a reference to the god Mercury, who, in the Odyssey, is described several times as running over the surface of the ocean with his winged sandals, on his way to deliver messages to mortals.

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Mulligan has finished shaving, and has lost the skirmish with Stephen, so he heads back downstairs.  In telling Stephen to quit his “moody brooding,” he triggers in Stephen’s mind a memory of the days at the end of his mother’s life.  Instead of praying with his mother at the time of her death, Stephen sings the W. B. Yeats poem “Who Goes with Fergus.”  The line from that poem “And no more turn aside and brood.” occurs to him all day.

“Chuck Loyola” is notthe name of another friend, but is rather Mulligan’s request to Stephen to leave behind his Jesuitical rigidity (the Jesuit order was founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola) and get over it.

“Sassenach” is a Scots word for Englishman–it’s derived from the word “saxon.”

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In a comment on the last drawing, Josh wrote:

I think one other way in which this [Stephen’s “offence to me” retort on the last page] is characteristically Stephen is that it is his way of showing Mulligan that he is unmoved by the verbal barrage he has just received; that he has no intent of dropping his grudge. As we see on the next page, it proves to be an effective parry. Stephen knows that behind Mulligan’s bluster is a strong desire to be adored and respected, and he knows that this is a pin in Mulligan’s balloon

Yes indeed.  Maybe this is a good moment to go back to the Odyssey, where Athena appears to young Telemachus to tell him that he must leave his house, which is filled with usurpers, and to go out into the world to find out what happened to his father.  Homer doesn’t really discuss it, but it seems Telemachus could have chosen to  attach himself to one or more of his mother’s suitors… he could have allowed himself to become coopted by them.  It would have been tempting to do so–it would be similarly tempting for Stephen to sign on with Mulligan’s vision of Ireland’s cultural future.  But he can’t, and in this reading, it seems clearer to me that what has happened overnight is that Stephen has realized that Mulligan really has no vision of his own, but has been preying on others the whole time.

Rob’s presentation of the scene requires no commentary–when I first saw it I thought again of the old Spy vs. Spy cartoons…

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If you didn’t already know that Mulligan was a medical student, here he proves it.  He doesn’t understand why Stephen is so offended by his “beastly dead” comment.  I suspect most readers are also a little confused by this–or at least about why Stephen has been holding on to it for so long.

You get (at the bottom of the page) a classic Stephenism–that he is not upset about the insult to his mother, but rather “of the offence to me.”

What does Stephen mean by this, and why is it coming out now?  On the simplest level, Stephen is perhaps as offended by Mulligan referring to him as “only Dedalus” as he is about his mother being “beastly dead.”  Further, if Mulligan respected Stephen, or saw him as a social equal, or saw him as the promising artist Stephen sees himself to be… he wouldn’t have said that.  It’s another small detail that shows you how Mulligan’s interest in Stephen is insincere.  The anecdote also serves to deflate, or put into context, Mulligan’s invitation to go to Greece.  I think Stephen also is offended because his mother’s death is such a huge presence in his present life–he might like to escape his fixation on it, but as we’ve already seen, the experience still haunts him.

So who was Sir Peter Teazle?  First,  a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal, a hugely popular play from the late 1700s.  Second,  a prize racehorse!  I had no idea about that second one, but it’s a nice Ulyssean fit.

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Stephen, disenchanted with the prospect of the new Hellenistic “omphalos” at the tower, airs a major grievance with Mulligan.  He seems unaware of or just uninterested in the ironic contrast between his highminded observation of mourning proprieties plus his sensitivity towards Mulligan’s crudeness, against his own refusal to follow her last wishes.  Of course, this isn’t lost on Mulligan.

I’m hoping for some commentary on Mulligan’s line about remembering “only ideas and sensations.”  The Gifford note on this doesn’t seem to be especially helpful–it talks about David Hartley & John Locke.  I associate the language with Walt Whitman, but for no good reason…

This scene sort of like Festivus–there’s a pole, there’s the airing of grievances… no feats of strength, but there will be swimming soon.

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