Tag Archives: Stephen

Telemachus 0043

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Haines suggests that he might publish a collection of Stephen’s sayings, but Stephen impertinently suggests he’ll participate if he stands to make any money by it.  He thinks to himself how Mulligan’s and Haines’ habit of bathing is an attempt to cleanse themselves of more than just dirt.

In the first panel of this page, there’s a kind of exchange between Haines’ dialogue and Stephen’s internal monologue.  Of course, what Stephen is thinking to himself (in the dark boxes) is harder to understand than what Haines is saying out loud.  “They wash and tub and scrub” refers back to Mulligan’s teasing about Stephen’s infrequent bathing (check the last page), which Stephen also associates with Lady Macbeth’s scrubbing.

“Agenbite of Inwit” is a little more obscure.  It’s a Middle English phrase that means (again according to Professor Gifford) “remorse of conscience.”    When you think about it, it makes wonderful sense.  Your inner wits bite  you.  again.

The kick under the table is Mulligan kicking Stephen, so as to get him to perform his Shakespeare theory and close the deal on Haines’ support. Or at least to get Haines to buy a few round of drinks.  But Stephen does not want to play–apparently he’s in no mood, and since he’s getting paid today he doesn’t need Haines’ help. So he does a decidedly un-English thing and puts his desire to be paid for his work out in plain view.

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Telemachus 0042

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Mulligan boldly tells Stephen to go to his job and earn money so they can all go out drinking later.  Haines shares his plan for the day — a trip to the National Library — and Stephen shares his unusual approach to personal hygiene.

Thanks to Professor Gifford, I’m reminded that Mulligan’s line “Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty” is lifted from Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Specifically, it is one of the final communications he made to the English fleet before the Battle of Trafalgar, where he was killed.  And yes, he said “England” instead of Ireland on that occasion.  We’ll be hearing  more about “Nelson’s Pillar,” a monument erected to him  in the middle of Dublin, but for now it’s interesting to note that the tower the gentlemen are living in is a souvenir of the Napoleonic wars in which Nelson was so instrumental.  The design is copied from one that his navy found in the Mediterranean. And Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar is what made the tower largely superfluous.

So what are we to make of Stephen’s dislike of bathing?  In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen experiments with mortification, and this could be seen as a revisiting of that experience.  It also goes along with his mourning, and with what certainly looks like a diagnosable depression.  It will also set a sharper contrast with Leopold Bloom, who we will see bathing later in the day.

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The Hypertext Chapbook (vi)

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Ulysses_UmbertoEcoBack once one more dear readers to give you a little look-see around the interwebs regarding what the talk is on our favourite subject.

Blogger Laura Valerie mentions in her ‘to read’ list my current and my last ‘most difficult book to read’ right above one another. I’ll just say that Focault’s Pendulum though weighty in its own right is a cinch next to this beast! And speaking of Umberto Eco he manages to give Joyce more than a name check in this Spiegel interview that has been publicised all over this month. November has been quite a month of Joyce for blogger Veronica Frydel too. She tackles the novel and posts once, twice and thrice on her blog. Good luck with the journalism Veronica. Continue reading →

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 0037

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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?

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]

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.

Oh, I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside

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ulysses_gunkI forge ahead, but shortly after entering the forbidding jungle of meaning that is Chapter III, or part the third, or as I am reluctant to call it Proteus (I say reluctant as it seems the unnecessary addition of just one more word that escapes my understanding), I at last feel some sympathy for those who have indeed given up, lain down and expired on this Joycean journey.

Green Hell. I think it may be safe to say that everyone has a threshold for ‘this kind of thing’ and I can’t help feeling the desire for a sort of game-show type scenario (as at right) whereby readers are eliminated one by one. I myself have the uncomfortable feeling I’m about to take a short fall into the tank of gunge at any moment.

However, sheer meanness at the thought of wasting money prevents me from hurling the 1922 out of the nearest window. I am not a man to be defeated so easily. Well, not today anyway.

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