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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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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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[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. Gabler 3:5, 1922 3:5]

Mulligan has come to the top of the tower to shave.  There’s light there, and a beautiful view.  He associates his morning ritual with a Catholic mass, and summons Stephen Dedalus upstairs to join him.

What he’s saying translates as: “I will go up to God’s altar.” More pertinently, it was one of the first things the priest said at the beginning of the Catholic mass, back when the Catholic mass was said in Latin.  Here‘s a rather lovely version.

So yes, Mulligan’s giving a little parody of the mass, and yes, this is a wicked and kinda funny thing to do.

I think it’s worth noting a few points of cultural context. 1) the “introibo” would not have been an obscure phrase to any Catholic reader of Ulysses in 1922, or up to the end of the Latin mass in the 1960’s. This would have been as familiar as “play ball!” to a baseball fan. 2) to a Catholic audience, in 1904 or 1922, this is sacrilege. And what follows is much worse.

What we’re supposed to think of this is a little hard to say. What Joyce thinks of it we don’t know, but (within the fourth wall) what Stephen thinks of it, we’ll see later. Joyce was an unbeliever, but the Catholicism was so deeply dyed into him, that he was really more Catholic than the Catholics. The groundwork is all so elaborately laid out in *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* that it seems superfluous to talk any more about it, but I’ll say for the first time of many times, that Joyce was not Stephen. it can be useful to forget that Joyce was not Stephen, but still and forever, they are not the same.

And what is Mulligan carrying: “a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” On one level, a man is simply about to shave. But Joyce’s careful syntax invites a deeper dive. Mulligan is about to begin chanting the opening prayer of the Catholic mass, and the visual cues Robert’s been giving us have primed us to see him as a kind of priest. But here, for the moment, we get to look at Mulligan’s tools: a mirror, and a razor. The razor cuts and makes distinctions–hair from skin, mostly (analysis?). The mirror reflects an image, sends back to its viewer the appearance of a person where before there had only been a disembodied experience of impressions and thoughts (synthesis?). [And yes, I’m thinking about Jacques Lacan and his “mirror stage” here.] Neither the mirror nor the razor creates anything really new. This is the opposite of what is supposed to happen during a real mass, when the priest uses his tools and the magic of transubstantiation to bring the body and blood of Christ to the table.

Yeah, I’m pushing it a little hard here, but I do think we’re meant to see Mulligan as energetic and vital, but also as bankrupt, as barren, as a parasite. Dedalus is weak and ineffectual, but he has the creative vitality and inner strength that Mulligan lacks.

So why does Joyce have Mulligan wear a yellow robe?  Don Gifford & Bob Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated might be useful here.  Gifford cites a volume on Christian symbolism: “Yellow is sometimes used to suggest infernal light, degradation, jealousy, treason, and deceit. Thus, the traitor Judas is frequently painted in a garment of dingy yellow (I’ve been trying to get that picture–which is an image of “The Kiss of Judas” by Giotto– see below. You can click to enlarge the image.

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Why does Mulligan call call Stephen “fearful”? Probably because of an incident that happened during the night with a house visitor–we’ll be hearing about that soon. But also because of Mulligan’s blasphemy, which we’ve been chatting about over the last few frames. Stephen isn’t a believer, but he’s not above hedging his bets.

Oliver St. John Gogarty, the person on whom the character of Mulligan is based, once referred to Joyce as an “inverted Jesuit.” Joyce identified closely with the Jesuit order–he was educated in Jesuit schools as a boy, and in one famous anecdote, said “you allude to me as a Catholic; you ought to allude to me as a Jesuit” (see Kevin Sullivan’s Joyce among the Jesuits for an exhaustive discussion). The Society of Jesus, then and now, has been closely associated with education based on rigorous and independent scholarship. Mulligan’s ‘fearful Jesuit’ may also pick up on the dreaded reputation of Jesuits as interlocutors.

Finally, remember Mulligan is the usurper. How does this bit of mockery add to that reputation?

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-Rob; Here we begin with the big “S” (yes, we’ll get to that). I’ve made the file a little bigger here so that you can see some quick margin notes there on the bottom left and that page number on the right. At this time we hadn’t really decided on the chapter header as part of the page count, so numbering the original storyboards is off from what you’ll see online. But we eventually figured things out.

On the subject of pagination you will also find that from here on in there are citations from both the Gabler Revised text that is commonly used and the original 1922 edition. All the work you’ll see done here is from the ’22 (for various reasons).  There are many edition that you might be following along and it makes it hard to find the right passage at times. A new online resource comes to us now (2018) with John Hunt’s excellent Joyce Project. It is an informative guide for new and experienced readers alike, but it also has a wonderful feature six different editions to the pagination!

[cf. Gabler 3:1, 1922 p. 3]

-Mike; Some pudgy guy is carrying a bowl to the top of a tower.  So begins the most important novel of the twentieth century. A ceremony of sorts is about to happen.

This is not our first main character, but is instead a secondary one–this is his biggest scene. He’s based on a real acquaintance of Joyce’s Oliver St. John Gogarty, a physician and writer who would go on to be a Senator in the Irish Free State.  In 1904, he rented an abandoned military fortification outside the city, which he lived in and would use as a kind of salon for over twenty years.  Joyce lived there, but only for a week in September 1904.

Let us say something obvious. Living in an unheated Napoleonic fortification, 7 1/2 miles from the center of town as the crow flies, is not a practical decision.

And one more obvious thing–there’s a practical reason Mulligan comes to the top of the tower to shave. It’s very dark and smoky in the living quarters below, not to mention the heady aroma of one rather unclean Dedalus (more on that later) and a sleeping Englishman.

Rob’s drawing gives us an intriguing birds-eye view that conveys at least two important pieces of information: a) we’re out in the middle of nowhere, and b) Mulligan is putting on a show without an audience. Not having an audience is intolerable for Mulligan, so he will shortly summon Stephen Dedalus to serve as an altar boy to his perverse shaving mass. Making the “S” extra big, like Random House did when they designed the first American edition of Ulysses, Rob really makes it stand off the page.  Some scholars have taken the fact that the book begins with an S to suggest that Stephen is the focus of the early chapters… we just like the way it looks and how it lends an epic feel.

I’ve always thought Mulligan gets a bad rap… and I identify with him in a way.  Here, at the beginning of the day, he seems a little glib,  a little snobby, but he’s more sensible than Stephen. And he’s funny and stately and plump.
We’ll meet Stephen in a minute, who is skinny and anxious. If we were casting Mulligan, we’d need someone a little officious, with a touch of wickedness and a sharp wit, a little aristocratic, a little paunchy, someone not entirely in control of their appetites but who’s comfortable with that…. a young John Malkovitch, perhaps?

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[singlepic id=37 w=320 h=240 float=right]Buck Mulligan is the antagonist of the Telemachus episode. He attempts to maintain superiority over Stephen Dedalus through mockery and other subtle bullying tactics.

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[cf. 1922 5.18, Gabler 1.85]

A moment ago, Mulligan was quoting Swinburne when he referred to the sea as our “great sweet mother.”  He’s modulated into George William Russell a/k/a AE, who often referred to nature as the Mighty Mother. Russell was a preeminent literary figure in turn of the century Dublin, and in 1904 he became the first person to publish a short story by Joyce–in a newspaper he edited called The Irish Homestead.  Russell has a prominent part in Episode 9–“Scylla and Charybdis”–and we’ll certainly talk more about him then.

Back here in “Telemachus”, Mulligan’s comment will lead, a moment from now, into a discussion of Stephen’s mother’s death.  There’s a lot to be said about the different roles of mothers and fathers in Joyce’s world–especially in Episode 9.  Very briefly–mothers are associated with ultimate, undeniable truth–truth beyond language.  They may be the one true thing in life (a paraphrase). Paternity, however–especially in the days before genetic testing–was uncertain.  This uncertainty creates an intolerable vacuum, that has to be cemented over with legal, verbal certainties. In “Scylla,” Stephen talks about paternity as a “legal fiction,” (and you should put as much emphasis on the fiction as on the legal here).  You should also be thinking about Hamlet again, and always!

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[Cf. 1922 5:20-27, Gabler 1:86-94]

We get an important glimpse of Stephen here, as we learn that he refused to pray for his mother at her deathbed. What kind of a**hole doesn’t obey his dying mother’s wish to pray with her? Discuss.

I mean, yes, Stephen is an Artist of Profound Integrity, who cannot compromise his belief in his unbelief. And yes, we are meant to think of him as kin with Hamlet, with Telemachus, with those who fight to leave behind their lives as boys to become men. And I even think that we are meant to pity Stephen more than a little, who has become so alienated through his extremism.

Mulligan refers to himself and Stephen as “hyperborean.” What does this mean? Gifford gives us the basics–it’s a classical allusion, to a kind of perfectly youthful master race who lived at the far ends of the earth. More specifically, Gifford pegs the reference to Nietzsche & a passage in The Will to Power, wherein the Ubermensch were described as hyperborean, as beyond the constraints of conventional morality, especially Christian morality.

Anyone out there have more to say about hyperborean? About Stephen’s refusal to submit and what we’re supposed to think about it?

I love the bottom panel here… Mulligan looking stately and plump indeed, beautifully framed and posed like he’s about to start shooting lasers out of his hands. Which would make things interesting. His pose, his position, his framing, all speak together with the authority of Mulligan’s perfectly reasonable criticism of Stephen. And Stephen knows it, but he doesn’t care.

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