I plunge forward into Chapter Two, helpfully untitled – though I’ll get into all that later – in which we find Stephen apparently teaching Ancient History to a class of boys who seem to have uppermost in their minds a fast approaching game of hockey. At least the history gives me a chance to look up Pyrrhus, which I’ll admit I didn’t immediately recognise as the root of that familiar phrase “a Pyrrhic victory”, but which must have some relevance to Stephen’s state of mind. In this chapter we get to hear his thoughts as they tumble from one subject to the next, but all coloured by the same underlying theme.
Tag Archives: Stephen
Dressing the younger Dedalus…
Well, it seems my earlier questions about costuming have met some immediate twitter attention (man, I love me some twitter). Fantastic!
So here’s my first rough sketch of Stephen from my thumbnails of the comic. I don’t know of a way to add a colorforms-dress-up plug-in to the site (though that would be great fun…), so we’ll use this as fodder for discussion on “dressing the younger Dedalus”.
Plenty of things to ask here, hence the second post, from his boots (which are borrowed from Mulligan) to his Hamlet hat (which we’ve recently settled, thank you).
Here’s the quiz, folks; “what is this guy wearing and what should he look like?” Extra credit for the numerous things in his pocket (other than the handkerchief which I’ve already shown him losing).
I’m not much for contests, I think they’re silly crap in fact, but good answers here, at this particular juncture, could prove really helpful to me. Give me some insights on Stephen and win yourself a sketch. Hell, some of what you might say could easily put my earlier work out of context. That’s a collectors’ item of sorts, right?
Seriously. Help me out here and, remember, there’s like 200 more characters to go in the novel. Still, there’s something to be said for figuring out this guy…
-Rob
The mystery of the Hamlet Hat is solved!
As I mentioned, this thread is really intended as a kind of “help the artist do it right” part of our site. There’s many difficult riddles and historical content within the novel of course, and it would take a lifetime for me to research these things alone leaving very little time to draw. So, as web designers are fond of saying, this is the interactive part.
While the “Telemachus” chapter has been fully story-boarded, I’ve left details that need to be resolved soon if I’m going to continue, quite a lot of them having to do with costuming. Again, I’m a painter and cartoonist with no real background in something as specific as costume design, but a great deal of respect for historical accuracy.
One major stumbling block was the shape and cut of Stephen’s “Hamlet hat” which figures so prominently throughout the day. I knew it was a beret of some sort, but modern berets are smaller, less floppy, and don’t present the sometimes pointed mitre that Stephen’s hat needs to really work.
So, problem solved, thanks to Aida Yared over at Joyce Images. (this is, by the way, my favorite, most inspirational and most commonly used Joyce site. For a visual understanding of the world ULYSSES works in this is as seminal a text as Gifford’s)
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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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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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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: 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.
Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus
Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus
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