Tag Archives: Mulligan

Telemachus 0041

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Haines has basically ordered Mulligan and Stephen to pay their milk tab, which otherwise they would probably have been happy to delay for several months. Mulligan reluctantly scrounges up money to pay her, and recites some Swinburne to make it classy.

Rob has taken pains to show us a detail from the narration of this moment–Mulligan comes up with the coin from his trousers, but it’s Stephen who actually hands the coin to the milkwoman.  It’s a concrete illustration of the difference in caste between Stephen and Mulligan, but also Stephen’s role as the “server of  a servant.”

Looking back over the last few pages, what does the milkwoman get from each of the men in the tower, and what might each of those gifts say about them?  From Haines the Englishman?  A speech in Irish that she can’t understand.   From Mulligan the aristocrat with family money?  A poem about how poor he is. From Stephen? A coin that isn’t really his.  Is this any way to treat Athena in disguise?

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Telemachus 0040

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We’ve talked some over the last few pages about why Joyce’s milkwoman doesn’t speak Irish–click back to see (and maybe even to participate in!) this discussion.

In reading this page, I was struck by the oddness of Haines telling Mulligan to pay the milkwoman.  If we read between the lines, we might infer that Haines has been there for three days, because they’ve had more milk for the last three days. Perhaps Haines is scandalized that they keep getting this milk and not paying for it.  It’s been a while since she’s last been paid.

We’ve made up a quiz about money that we’ll post in the next day or so.  Ulysses has a lot of money in it, as it should, given that it’s a record of a day in the life in the twentieth century.  Joyce tells us how much meals and tram fares are, not to mention daily milk delivery.  The milkwoman’s tally of what the men owe is conspicuously long and complicated.  I’ve made a bookmark for my copy of Ulysses that has the old British money system on it: 12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound, etc.  It gives you a very important dimension to the book.  Here’s an important benchmark (and an answer on the quiz)–a pint of beer costs 2 pence. This is the same amount the milkwoman was charging for a pint of milk. The accumulated cost of cost of the milk is 2 shillings, 2 pence, or enough money for a good drunk for two.  Mulligan is clearly not happy about having to pay up.

But what difference does it make to Haines?  In the next chapter we’ll hear that an Englishman’s proudest boast is “I paid my way,” a completely alien thought to Stephen and Mulligan.  Keep an eye on debts and payments in Ulysses, financial and otherwise, and you’ll learn a great deal.

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Telemachus 0039

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Haines tries out his Irish on the old milkwoman, but she has no idea what he’s saying.  She asks if he’s from the west of Ireland (where Irish is more commonly spoken), but as we know, he’s English.  Stephen thinks about how impressed the woman is with the Englishman and the Doctor, while he goes unnoticed.

The irony of the  Englishman being the only one who knows Irish is pretty straightforward.  Historically, there’s a basis for it–the use of Irish dropped during the 19th century thanks to the Great Famine and the ban on teaching Irish in the National Schools.  It survived in the West and in more remote parts of the island, but in “The Pale,” the area around Dublin that had the strongest British influence, Irish was largely unknown at this time.  It was revived by the writers and scholars of the Celtic Revival, which was just gaining momentum in 1904.  Because language nearly became extinct, the new Irish republic made it a required subject in schools–for a while it was a requirement to pass an Irish exam in order to get a government job.  Every Irish student now learns it, but they don’t tend to use it, and the language is again gravely threatened.  Joyce famously tried to learn Irish, but gave up after a few lessons.

Perhaps for this reason, whatever it is that Haines says in Irish is not in the text of Ulysses.  Rob has come up with a clever solution–if you roll over the Irish text, you’ll get a translation.  (This is true wherever you see foreign words in Ulysses Seen.)

You might be confused by the milkwoman’s question to Haines, “Are you from West, sir?”  This is how the question appears in the first edition, the 1922 edition, of Ulysses, so that’s what we’re using.  In later editions it would be corrected to “Are you from *the* West, Sir?,” but you get the idea either way.

Extra Credit: Whom do you think Rob has Haines is modeled after? Who does he look like?

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Telemachus 0038

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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.

Telemachus 0035

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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]

Old Mother Grogan

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Ulysses-Grogan-1Mother Grogan is a mildly rude joke, characteristically brought up by Mulligan and quickly used to skewer Haines’ attitude toward Ireland and things Irish. Haines is collecting “exotic” Irish sayings and other folk esoterica, in the same way Bartok, Dvorak and Smetana collected ethnic folk tunes from the backwaters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as modernity began to overtake these regions. The implied condescension is obvious, especially to Stephen. It is alright for he and Mulligan to run down Irish culture; it is quite another thing for an Englishman, citizen of the reigning colonial power, to do so, and Mulligan quickly satirizes Haines’ study, asking Stephen if he thinks Mother Grogan is mentioned in the Mabinogion or the Upanishads. Since these are, respectively, the national epics of Wales, another Celtic nation incorporated into Great Britain, and India, Britain’s leading colony, Haines is being ragged quite pointedly.

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Telemachus 0034

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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.

Telemachus 0033

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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.

Telemachus 0032

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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.

Oliver St John Gogarty (1878-1957)

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gogarty1 The unfortunate but now-consequently-famous friend of James Joyce who stood as the model for Buck Mulligan is Irish physician and bawdry-poet Oliver St John Gogarty.

Gogarty was much respected by Dublin literary society in later years and the rift between him and Joyce is a fairly unsolvable knot of which man might, in the final analysis, prove to be the greater ego. Particularly interesting in this judgement is Joyce biographer Richard Ellman’s assertion that Gogarty was the man who got Joyce drinking and, as Simon Dedalus might say, “tickled his catastrophe.”