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A guide to chapter one

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Stephen has complained to Mulligan about their visitor, Haines, and Mulligan has threatened some violence against him if he acts up again.  This has led Stephen to a sequence of thoughts about Mulligan’s real or imagined hazing of one Clive Kempthorpe, involving at least the threat of castration.

From here, Stephen’s mind has skipped to Mulligan’s cultural pretensions, of establishing a “new paganism” in the tower, setting a new cultural moment, with the tower as its “omphalos.”  Poised on the knife-edge of Stephen’s analysis, Mulligan is revealed as a superficial intellectual with a violent bully not far beneath the surface. Stephen decides he can’t continue the ruse of being Mulligan’s friend.

Omphalos is a Greek word meaning navel or center, and it was used to refer to places like Delphi that were at the center of the world and a point at which the gods communicated with men.  More particularly, it was a stone sculpture like this.

Which, of course, bears more than a passing resemblance to our Martello tower.

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Mulligan sees he has gone too far with his teasing and condescension–more to the point, he is aware that dissheveled and depressed as Stephen may seem now, he has enormous potential as a writer, at least as a crafter of epigrams, and he wants to be on the right side of that power. He suggests that Stephen could probably get some money out of Haines for the ‘cracked lookingglass of a servant” idea, and he tries to enlist Stephen in his program to “Hellenise” Ireland.  [Rob’s transformation of Mulligan into a Greek Apollo is just a taste of what the comics format can do for this book.]

What would it mean to “Hellenise” Ireland?  A few pages ago I brought up the identity crisis of Ireland at the turn of the century–should it turn backwards to Irish history for its culture?  Should it accept its place as a British capital?  Mulligan’s interest in the Greeks (mumble your innuendo here) suggests a nominal interest in democracy, but a democracy of aristocrats, with a vibrant and metropolitan culture rooted in the ancient world. Doesn’t sound so bad. The Modernists were fascinated with the classical world–we are, after all, reading a book that is a descendant of the central story of ancient Greece.  One of the significant intellectual forces propelling Modernism in the arts was the discovery of the original site of Troy in 1870 (so the Iliad is based on a real place and a real war! wild!).

So why isn’t Stephen interested?   Because it is still looking backwards? Because there’s too much of a state power in it?  Because it’s based on aristocratic and class-driven institutions?  Joyce famously thought that the best kind of government to live under was a decaying and ineffectual empire–because it stayed out of his life and his work.  His character Robert Hand, in the 1918 play Exiles, says ““If Ireland is to become a new Ireland, she must first become European.”  Robert Hand is based, in part, on Gogarty and should not necessarily be taken to speak for Joyce or Stephen Dedalus, but the line shows the pattern of thought at work here.  Who does Ireland become in order to become something new and independent?

You see in the last panel of this page a moment of Stephen’s inner thought, just as you did a few pages ago when he was thinking about his mother.  Mulligan’s reference to the “ragging” he gave Clive Kempthorpe  is obscure, but Rob’s interpretation gives you the sense of what it’s about. So what’s with all the sexual threat here?

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Cf. 1922; 3:17, Gabler 3:19]

Mulligan’s travesty of the Catholic mass continues with a joke about transubstantiation–he pretends to be changing his shaving lather into the body and blood of Christ.

Rob and I had a long conversation about this passage and what Buck means when he says “back to barracks.” I see it as a garden-variety transubstantiation joke–wherein Mulligan is trying to keep the genie in the bottle, the spirit of Christ (or “christine,” as Mulligan will say in a moment) from escaping the shaving bowl before it can be transmuted into the shaving lather.

About the barracks. It’s important to know that in Joyce’s Dublin, a “barracks” was an all-to-familiar part of the neighborhood. In 1904, as at many times in Irish history, British troops were garrisonned in barracks that were cheek and jowl with densely populated urban areas, because their function was to control the people living in those neighborhoods. The presence of British troops on the street, their movements, their leisure entertainments, their interactions with the “natives,” are all an important part of the atmosphere of Dublin in June of 1904.

These days, the old barracks have been appropriated for various purposes… the now-called “Collins Barracks” is a stunning museum, part of the National Museum of Ireland, with exhibitions relating to decorative arts and Irish history. The barracks at “Beggars Bush” has a national printing museum.

So what’s the “genuine Christine”?  Gifford parses “Christine” as referring to the black mass “tradition” of having a naked woman serve as an altar.  Interesting thing I just learned from Wikipedia: The black mass is not a Satanic ritual per se, but rather just kind of a fun “extra,” a parody of the regular mass that’s a morale-builder for the troops.

If this all seems farfetched, there’s an lascivious and fascinating story in Ellmann’s biography (and elsewhere) about Joyce’s encounters with a young woman in Zurich named Marthe Fleischmann. In 1919, on his 37th birthday, Joyce made arrangements with his friend Frank Budgen to entertain Ms. Fleischmann in Budgen’s studio. [ Fleischmann also may have served as the model for Bloom’s correspondend Martha Clifford, and Gerty Macdowell…] We don’t know much about what happened… Joyce later claimed to have explored the “hottest and coldest” parts of a woman’s body. Very unsexy. Apparently he also brought a menorah (!) to the occasion, telling the man he bought it from that it was intended for a “black mass.” this would have happened at least two years after he wrote these lines.

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Everything you need to know about Mulligan is in this brief exchange.  He’s the kind of guy who steals a broken mirror from one of his aunt’s servants, and then makes fun of her for being ugly.  Joyce has shown us this type before in his short story “Two Gallants,” starring Lenehan and Corley, who also appear in Ulysses.

Mulligan’s line about the “rage of Caliban” is lifted from Oscar Wilde, who in the preface to the Portrait of Dorian Gray says “The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”  It’s interesting that this follows Stephen’s interior moment (on the last page) where he doesn’t recognize his face, or rather, wonders who “chose this face for me.”

And as for Ursula…  a virgin of note, a leader of virgins, probably apocryphal.  Her name means  a little (female) bear.

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“Who chose this face for me?”

Quite a question–we flash back to Stephen’s memories of his mother, the image of the bay, the razor.  Stephen’s engaging with a metaphysical question about where he comes from, but he’s also thinking about his identity–is it his mother’s face, his father’s face, an irish face, a catholic face, a poet’s face?

One of the interpretive paths you can take through Ulysses is to look at identity, how people define themselves.  Some of the worst people in this book have the simplest sense of their identities, and some of the best can’t even pin themselves down, like Stephen here.

And a random link–this passage always makes me think of the Talking Heads song “Seen and Not Seen.”  [“He would see faces in movies, in tv, in magazines, and in books…”]

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[Cf. 1922: 5:2-15; Gabler 1:67-80]Stephen has just been complaining about Haines and his nightmare. Mulligan is changing the topic, staying on his tear about “Hellenization.”

Mulligan jokingly suggests that the new art color for Irish poets is “snotgreen.”  The color green is not a trivial thing to the Irish, especially not in 1904, when the memory of the Penal Laws (which repressed Catholicism and symbols of Irish identity) would still have been present.  At this moment in history, Irish identity, and the future of Irish identity, is up for grabs.  There is a newly emerging school of scholars and artists who are turning back to the native culture of Ireland as the source of its future–people are just starting to learn the Irish language again and read ancient Irish poetry.   Mulligan is basically making fun of this.  Instead, he’s looking to ancient Greece, perhaps thinking about a new Irish classical age.  But Stephen isn’t much interested in this either.  I’ll suggest that instead of looking backward into history, Stephen is looking towards the new artistic capital of Paris.

In the second panel, Rob has drawn Mulligan and Stephen in an odd pose. Stephen seems to be surprised in mid-phrase, and Mulligan is reaching into his pocket. Specifically he “thrust his hand into Stephen’s upper pocket.” It’s an interesting moment, one that the comic allows us to show the body language for. Mulligan is intruding, being forward, in Stephen’s space. “Thalatta thalatta” means, unsurprisingly, “The sea, the sea!” It’s from Xenophon. You can look it up…

A small textual point–there’s an omission in this early draft–Mulligan says “Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor” –we left out the “your.” Also, in the Rosenbach manuscript, Mulligan’s first mention of the sea in this moment is “she is our “great” sweet mother.” That’s in Joyce’s handwriting, and it’s quite clear. It’s repeated a few lines later. But in his errata for the first edition, Joyce specified that he wanted this to be “grey” sweet mother. A nice allusion to grey-eyed Athena, Odysseus’ protector, but otherwise obscure.

And as for the Greek– “Epi Oinopa Ponton” means (according to Gifford) “upon the winedark sea,” a common epithet in Homer’s Odyssey. This is another moment when I wonder if Joyce was raising another flag to his readers… “Hey! The Odyssey! It’s important!” We know the Odyssey is important now, eighty years after it was published… but this might have been a more useful to early readers.

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[cf. 1922; 4: 23-35; Gabler 1:50-66]

Stephen and Mulligan are discussing their English visitor, Haines, who woke in the middle of the night, apparently screaming about a black panther. Presumably not this kind of black panther.

Why does Mulligan think that kinch, “the knife blade,” is such a good nickname for Stephen?  Perhaps because Stephen is prone to cutting people down?  Or that he’s sharp-witted?  I think it’s also because he’s unstoppably analytical.  The word “analysis” means to break (or cut) apart, and Stephen is an admirer of Aristotle, the grandaddy of analysis, the breaking into parts.  To be a knife-edge means  that you would rather make distinctions than take sides.  Mulligan is also saying that Stephen is hard to read, it’s hard for Haines to “make him out.”  Haines says he’s not a gentleman, but Mulligan says he has the “real” Oxford manner.

Stephen is clearly not happy with the living arrangements, and feels unsafe.   He’s ready to quit.  In real life, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the prototype of Mulligan, thought that the Martello Tower could become a kind of bohemian hangout or colony,  but Joyce didn’t last a week there.

Haines is generally believed (following Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce) , to be modeled after Samuel Chenevix Trench, an Anglo-Irish friend of Gogarty’s who was fascinated with Celtic culture.  He also had bad dreams, and in September of 1904, Trench had a nightmare about a black panther while staying in the tower with Joyce and Gogarty.  He shot a revolver at the wall (no minor thing, given that this is a small,  round, stone room we’re talking about). Gogarty confiscated the gun, but not before shooting off a few rounds himself. Joyce left the tower immediately. Smart move.

Many years ago at a Joyce conference in Rome I heard a scholar give a paper that argued that Haines is also, at least in part, based upon William Bulfin, an Englishman who wrote a book about his bicycle tours in Ireland at the turn of the century. The book, Rambles in Eirinn, was very popular & reprinted many times. In a passage about Dalkey & Sandycove, Bulfin describes a visit to an old military tower where some young men were staying. I’ll steal the excerpted passage from a great RTE website about Ulysses:

On a lovely Sunday morning in the early autumn two of us pulled out along the road to Bray for a day’s cycling in Dublin and Wicklow. We intended riding to Glendalough and back, but we were obliged to modify this programme before we reached Dalkey, owing to a certain pleasant circumstance which may be termed a morning call. As we were leaving the suburbs behind us my comrade, who knows many different types of Irish people, said casually that there were two men living in a tower down somewhere to the left who were creating a sensation in the neighbourhood. They had, he said, assumed a hostile attitude towards the conventions of denationalisation, and were, thereby, outraging the feeling of the seoinini.One of them had lately returned from a canoeing tour of hundreds of miles through the lakes, rivers, and canals of Ireland, another was reading for a Trinity degree, and assiduously wooing the muses, and another was a singer of songs which spring from the deepest currents of life. The returned marine of the canoe was an Oxford student, whose button-hole was adorned with the badge of the Gaelic League-a most strenuous Nationalist he was, with a patriotism, stronger than circumstances, which moved him to pour forth fluent Irish upon every Gael he encountered, in accents blent from the characteristic speech of his alma mater and the rolling blas of Connacht. The poet was a wayward kind of genius, who talked with a captivating manner, with a keen, grim humour, which cut and pierced through a topic in bright, strong flashes worthy of the rapier of Swift. The other poet listened in silence, and when we went on the roof he disposed himself restlessly to drink in the glory of the morning. It was very pleasant up there in the glad sunshine and the sweet breath of the sea. We looked out across to Ben Edair of the heroic legends, now called Howth, and wondered how many of the dwellers in the “Sunnyville Lodges” and “Elmgrove Villas” and other respectable homes along the hillside knew aught of Finn and Oisín and Oscar. We looked northwards to where the lazy smoke lay on the Liffey’s bank, and southwards, over the roofs and gardens and parks to the grey peak of Killiney, and then westwards and inland to the blue mountains.

That was longer than it needed to be, but you get the point. Throughout the book, Bulfin approaches Irish people with the same mystification about how he knows more about the history and the language than they, the natives, do.

The black panther is still a mystery to me. I don’t know if there is a particular symbolic referent here, or if it’s one of the red herrings Joyce throws into this book. It’s certainly odd that Stephen says “black panther” two times in close proximity. Even without a clear allusion, (and I’m looking to you all, helpful readers, to tell me what you know about black panthers), the panther dream suggests that there is something a little unhinged about Haines. Maybe he, with Bulfin as his prototype, is to be seen as approaching his travels in Ireland as a kind of exotic safari (I picture him with his guncase and a pith helmet), and the black panther is the symbol of the exotic otherness of the Irish. You tell me.

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We’ve talked already about Stephen as “Daedalus”, master builder and whatnot, but Rob’s drawing  brings home that Stephen is in a labyrinth.
Despite Stephen’s Greek name, however, here Mulligan is thinking of a trip to Greece and Stephen is focused on the present moment and an unwelcome guest.
Would Stephen go to Athens if Mulligan’s aunt were to pay?  No.  That’s why Mulligan calls him “jejune” or immature.  He wouldn’t take advantage of misplaced generosity in the name of a good trip.

Mulligan points the way to the association with his riffing on Stephen’s “absurd” Greek name. Why is Mulligan talking about the Greeks, anyway? I’m sure part of what’s going on is Joyce signalling to the reader that we are both in Homer’s Greece and and in Joyce’s Ireland at the same time. Mulligan’s interest in Greek also marks his superior education, and for a few brave interpreters, suggests that he may be gay.

Stephen is an artist, and he’s looking for direction. For many Dublin artists, the logical place to go was London–that’s where the publishers and readers were, that was where the roots of English literature were planted, that was where the money was. In 1904, with a great Celtic awakening in full swing in Ireland, many artists were looking instead to the island’s native culture–think of John Millington Synge, or of Miss Ivors’ cutting remarks to Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead.” Mulligan proposes a third way–looking to the traditions of the ancient world, and past the less-culturally-stimulating history of the Roman empire to the world of the Greeks.

Many articles have and will continue to be written on this subject, but for now, let me put in a small placeholder to indicate that that the concept of the classical world was very important for all kinds of “modern” artists–advances in archaeology in the late nineteenth century made that world suddenly far more real, and many artists of the period looked to the classical world for a purity and humanism in art that would get them past what was seen as the decadence and chauvinism of the late Victorian period. This trend is the very place Ulysses comes from, after all. [Tho’ on this, another brief note–Joyce himself did not know much ancient or modern Greek. He sure knew his Latin, though!]

One would expect that Stephen would be more sympathetic to Mulligan’s invitation, then. But Mulligan’s invitation, we will see, is utterly insincere. And also, Telemachus doesn’t go back to Troy to find his father…

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[Cf. 1922; 3:24, Gabler; 3:26]

So Mulligan is doing his staged transubstantiation joke, waiting for the toot of the approaching mailboat to echo his whistle .

In the book, the word “chrysostomos” just sits in the middle of a small paragraph describing Mulligan’s face and the scene.  Note how Rob has given it a different style to set it apart from the other dialogue, internal or external. We spent some time talking about this.

People reading Ulysses for the first time are so eager to get to the difficult stuff, the allusions, or just the smutty bits, that this odd and completely symptomatic moment on the first page gets passed over.  When I teach Ulysses, I like to dwell on this word for an uncomfortably long time, because the more you look at it, the weirder it gets.

Key question: who says it?  It’s not dialogue, because it doesn’t have one of the dashes that Joyce preferred to set off actual spoken words (as opposed to pedestrian quotation marks).  It seems to be the narrator, but it’s pretty elliptical for a narrator–a normal narrator would say something like: “his teeth had gold caps, and they shone in the sun and made him golden-mouthed like St. John Chrysostomos.”  So it’s abrupt, and if you ask me, it’s a chain of logic that sounds much more like Stephen than any impartial narrator.  This the next of many examples of the Uncle Charles Principle .

But who is Chrysostomos anyway?  I’ve never found a really satisfactory connection to this allusion.  On some level, it’s just that Mulligan as noticeable gold in his teeth. He’s also a clever talker. So he’s golden-mouthed.  Gifford is a good souce for going deeper into this kind of thing. He suggests a couple of possible suspects, one being the Greek rhetorician Dion Chrysostomos, another being the early church father St. John Chrysostomos . Of course, Mulligan’s real-life model was Oliver St. John Gogarty, and Joyce may be connecting the “St. John” in both of their names.

These are perfectly legit and all, but I don’t really feel they add much to what we know about Mulligan. If anything.  Gifford’s third candidate, Pope Gregory I, is a more likely match. Called by the Irish “Gregory Goldenmouthed,” he was a Roman pope who took on the project of converting the Britons to Roman Christianity ( as opposed to the strange Irish brand being practiced next door).  If you have better candiates, please let me know!

One more thing –the electricity reference has always  struck me…  I’ve  read this as Mulligan making a reference to some kind of medical experiment he would have seen as a student, a la Frankenstein

Looking around the web, I found a nice piece of trivia–the Pigeon House, the famous unreached destination of Joyce’s short story “An Encounter,” began it’s long life as an electricity power station in 1903, only a year before the events in the tower are supposed to happen.  The Poolbeg Station now surrounds the original Pigeon House, and is easily visible from the top of the Joyce tower [It also plays a starring role in U2’s “Pride (in the name of love)” video.]

The first power station in Dublin was opened in 1892.  Clearly the tower doesn’t have electricity.  A gas lamp gets a speaking part later on in the book, and Stephen and Bloom eventually have a conversation about electric vs. gas streetlams–I’ll look forward to tracking electricity references from here…

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Enter Stephen Dedalus, the brooding poet.  I love how Rob’s illustration brings out the way in which the top of the tower is like an arena–there’s a gladatorial dimension to what’s happening here that this format really brings to life.

— In case you were wondering, Portrait fans, this is the same Stephen Dedalus we last saw vowing to “forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race.” Joyce used the name as a nom de plume early in his career, in addition to giving it to his fictional alter ego. But you’ll see that Stephen is a little older, a little more jaded, and more than a little depressed.

— I know it’s basic, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little refresher on Daedalus. A master builder and creater of labyrinths.

— Interesting that as Rob has drawn it, we’re getting Stephen’s POV here. One of Joyce’s signature moves is to give his narrating voice elements of the vocabulary or stylistic tics or perceptions of a character in the scene. Where it might first seem that the narrator is your usual omniscient, once you really start to parse who’s doing the talking, it can sound like the narrator’s voice and style are flavored by a particular character (often described as the character “infecting” the narrator’s voice). I have a perverse theory that the narrator of Portrait is actually Stephen himself, talking about himself in the third person. [Hugh Kenner called this style the “Uncle Charles Principle.” in his classic Joyce’s Voices]. The text here doesn’t show UCP (as the Joyceans call it) so much, but this medium requires choices of perspective that can help illustrate the phenomenon.

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