Telemachus
This is the first episode of Ulysses as well as the ini- tial chapter in the Telemachia section. A version of this chapter first appeared in print when it was seri- alized in the March 1918 issue of the LITTLE
REVIEW. According to the SCHEMA (see Ulysses schema, Appendix on page 392) that Joyce loaned to Valéry LARBAUD, the scene of the episode is the MARTELLO TOWER. The time at which the action begins is 8 A.M. The art of the chapter is theology. The episode’s symbol is the heir. And its technique is narrative (young).
The Telemachus episode derives its name from the son of ODYSSEUSwho, after 20 years of awaiting his father’s return to Ithaca, restlessly initiates the action of THEODYSSEYby defying the suitors of his
mother, Penelope, and setting off in search of his father. In a similar fashion, Stephen Dedalus (see Characters, below), who has already left his father’s house “to seek misfortune” (U 16.253), as he later tells Leopold Bloom in the cabman’s shelter during the Eumaeus episode (chapter 16), begins the day unconsciously searching for a spiritual father and still in mourning for his mother, who died nearly a year earlier.
In keeping with Stephen’s aloof and sometimes indolent nature, it is Buck Mulligan who initiates
the action of the novel by cajoling Stephen to adopt a more pragmatic, less overt program of intellectual rebellion than the stringent and seri- ous-minded one that he is pursuing. Stephen’s carefully constructed reply, which hints at a rivalry between the two and skirts engagement with the issue of his public persona, instead introduces one of the novel’s major themes, an inquiry into the nature of paternity and of creativity. After acquaint- ing readers with the unacknowledged competition between Stephen and Mulligan, the Telemachus episode lays out a number of other important themes associated with Stephen throughout the novel: his sense of loss and his feelings of guilt related to the death a year earlier of his mother, his dissatisfaction with his present life without a clear sense of alternatives, his nagging desire for recogni- tion by his fellow Dubliners, and his frustration over his apparent inability to fulfill his artistic ambitions. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead . . .” (U 1.1). With these words the day of June 16, 1904, opens for the reader. There, on the roof of the Martello Tower in SANDYCOVE, pausing while shaving to give his blessing to all that he sur- veys, Mulligan presents a portentous beginning that signals a tone of self-mockery and of self- awareness that will run throughout the narrative discourse. By opening the chapter and the book with a parody of a Catholic priest reciting the open- ing prayer of the Latin mass: “Introibo ad altare Dei” (I will go unto the altar of God; U 1.5), he plays upon a ritual familiar to most Irish of the day with a flippant tone that both acknowledges and dismisses a central feature of Irish culture, its Catholic her- itage. Mulligan continues his mummery by mimick- ing the act of consecration of the Eucharist and pretending to effect his own form of TRANSUBSTAN- TIATION. It is a typical gesture for him. Mulligan is outrageous and irreverent among those who will take no offense, but, unlike Stephen, he remains careful not to display his impudent wit before those who might not be amused.
Stephen Dedalus appears on the scene immedi- ately thereafter, and, for readers of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, intimations of a sequel to
that work seem at this point quite strong. Stephen, who at the close of Joyce’s last novel stood
metaphorically poised, like ICARUS, to take flight from Ireland, is now, like Hamlet, back in his native country, sitting glumly on the gun rest at the top of the tower. He has in the interval been to Paris, but has returned to his native city, recalled a year ear- lier by an unintentionally comical telegram that announced with the initial word mistyped the sad news of the impending death of his mother: “Nother dying come home father” (U 3.199). Now, dressed in black as a sign of his continuing mourn- ing (and of his morbid Hamlet fixation), Stephen watches Mulligan shave and listens to him pontifi- cate about plans to Hellenize Ireland through an infusion of Classical culture: “Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you” (U 1.79).
As this discourse continues, Mulligan patronizes Stephen about his clothes, his demeanor, his poverty, his art, and his general reputation around DUBLIN. To all this, Stephen replies with a laconic wit, noticeably absent in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man, that shows an awareness of Mulligan’s
competitiveness and an assurance of being more than capable of holding his own against Mulligan (a medical student): “He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his” (U 1.152).
Beneath this seemingly lighthearted early- morning banter, evidence of a rivalry between the two young men gradually emerges for readers. At first it is manifested subtly, by Stephen’s coolness when he reminds Mulligan of an offhand and thoughtless remark made nearly a year before, shortly after the death of Stephen’s mother, which Stephen still recalls with umbrage. As the narrative devel- ops, however, it becomes obvious that larger and longer-lasting concerns are the source of a continu- ing sense of friction in the relations between the two young men.
While it is never clearly or fully delineated, the antagonism that hovers at the margins of their con- versation seems to arise from a competitiveness based upon artistic ambition and dedication. Even the relatively brief opening chapter has already shown that both Stephen and Buck are clever and entertaining, and both have ambitions beyond sim- ply being barroom wits. Markedly different attitudes, however, condition their approaches to manifesting creative abilities and to gaining public recognition.
Stephen has given himself over completely to art and shows no regard for public sentiment or expectations. Mulligan, on the other hand, frankly and unashamedly seeks the renown afforded by art that is popular and easily accessible, and he is unwilling to sacrifice material comfort and social approval for artistic principle. Thus, although he is bawdy in certain circumstances—the “Ballad of Joking Jesus” (U 1.584–587, 589–592, 596–599), which he recites near the end of the chapter, attests to this—he is always careful to gauge his audience and to adjust his performance to suit its tastes. (As for the ballad itself, Joyce received a version of this poem in 1905 from his friend Vincent COSGRAVE, who claimed that he had gotten it from Oliver St. John GOGARTY, the model for Buck Mulligan.)
As the episode unfolds, it quickly becomes apparent that this rivalry between Stephen and Mulligan has been exacerbated considerably by the intrusive presence in the Martello Tower of the Englishman Haines, Mulligan’s Oxford classmate. Haines, a modern version of the archetypal English invader of Ireland, has come in the role of an intel- lectual colonist; he wishes to study the effects of the IRISH LITERARY REVIVAL. His enthusiasm for Irish folk tradition ironically counterpoints Stephen’s dis- enchantment with Irish culture and politics. Stephen is schooling himself in Continental intel- lectual currents.
On his trip across the Irish Sea, however, Haines has lost none of the imperial insensitivity that had for generations fostered among the Irish an intense animus toward the British. Haines’s attitude toward Stephen is even more patronizing than Mulligan’s, and he views most other Irish whom he encounters with a mixture of amusement, conde- scension, and suspicion. Haines’s unself-conscious ANTI-SEMITISM only underscores the fundamental chauvinism and cultural intolerance that underlie his nature. On a more mundane level, Stephen’s personal distaste for Haines and his Anglo-Saxon attitudes has been considerably aggravated this morning by lack of sleep, caused by Haines’s “rav- ing and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther” (U 1.61–62) as he slept.
Haines, in fact, becomes the embodiment of many of the conditions that trouble Stephen
throughout the Telemachus chapter. His self-con- gratulatory, condescending view of the Irish becomes most apparent in the interchange among himself, Mulligan, Stephen, and the old woman who delivers milk during their breakfast in the tower. It serves as a bitter reminder to Stephen of both Ire- land’s second-class status within the British Empire and the maddening subservience evident among so many of his countrymen toward the very people who oppress them. In this interchange, Stephen’s natural reticence causes him to be overlooked as the old woman is shamelessly obsequious toward Haines, who speaks to her in Irish, and self-consciously polite toward Mulligan, who only grudgingly pays for the milk she has delivered: “a voice that speaks to her loudly . . . me she slights” (U 1.418–419). While Stephen normally would care little about such a per- son’s opinion, this one stings him, for both metaphorically and literally she represents Ireland and its potential response to him and his art.
After breakfast, despite the superior tone that he has unconsciously adopted toward Stephen, Haines still seeks to explore, with unfeigned curios- ity, the paradoxical makeup of the Irish intellectual. As the three men walk toward the 40-foot hole for Mulligan’s swim, the obtuse and humorless Haines and the mordant Stephen engage in an animated discussion revolving around the English treatment of the Irish. Stephen is in a ticklish position, for, as he made clear in his exchanges with Davin in chap- ter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he certainly does not wish to embrace conventional nationalist sentiments. At the same time, he can hardly abide Haines’s willful suppression of the English role in creating the political troubles that have circumscribed Irish life for centuries.
Stephen wittily resolves this dilemma by a deft metaphorical evocation of the problem confronting him. He speaks of his sense of isolation and oppres- sion in a clever epigram that sums up his problem without entrapping him in clichéd political rheto- ric: “I am a servant of two masters . . . an English and an Italian. . . . And a third . . . there is who wants me for odd jobs” (U 1.638, 642). Although Stephen here refers to the obedience demanded by the English colonial authorities and by the Roman Catholic Church, and somewhat obliquely to the
pull of Irish nationalism, Haines, the devotee of Irish culture, is frankly baffled by the allusions and can acknowledge them only by offering the tepid, self-deluding observation that “[i]t seems history is to blame” (U 1.649).
Arriving at the 40-foot hole, Stephen’s sense of displacement grows. Feeling alienated both from Mulligan and from the prospect of their continuing to share accommodations, Stephen sees his options being foreclosed even as the day itself is only begin- ning. The episode ends with Stephen relinquishing his key to the Martello Tower; and as he leaves Mulligan and Haines, he has a heightened sense of his own alienation.
For additional details concerning the Telemachus episode, see Letters, II.126–127, 187n.1, 206n.1, 218n.3, 414, and III.240 and 284.
Nestor
This is the second episode of Ulysses and the sec- ond chapter in the Telemachia section of the novel. A version of the episode first appeared in serialized form in the April 1918 issue of The LITTLEREVIEW,
and it was also published in the January–February 1919 issue of the EGOIST. According to the SCHEMA (see Ulysses schema in the appendix on page 392) that Joyce loaned to Valéry LARBAUD, the scene of the episode is the school in Dalkey, about 15 min- utes southeast of the MARTELLO TOWER, run by Garrett Deasy (see Characters, below). The time at which the action begins is 10 A.M. The art of the chapter is history. The episode’s symbol is the horse. And its technic is catechism (personal).
The informal title of the chapter refers to Odysseus’s old comrade Nestor, the master chario- teer who fought by his side during the siege of Troy. After leaving the family home in Ithaca to search for news of his father, Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, in book III of The Odyssey, first seeks out Nestor in the hope of learning his father’s fate. Although Nestor can give the young man little information relating specifically to the return of Odysseus, he treats his old friend’s son with honor, and tells Telemachus what he has learned of the homecom- ings of other Greek heroes who had fought at Troy. The stark contrast between this archetypal wise man and the fatuous Garrett Deasy reminds readers
of the mock-heroic undertone of the narrative and underscores how alone Stephen is in a world in which crass materialism and smug self-satisfaction now masquerade as attributes of wisdom.
Like Telemachus in Ithaca, Stephen Dedalus finds himself surrounded by hostile males—the sar- donic Buck Mulligan and the obtuse Englishman, Haines—in his fortress home, the MARTELLO TOWER. In leaving, however, Stephen does not come across support elsewhere. Instead he encoun- ters the recalcitrant, naive anti-intellectualism of the upper-middle-class students at Garrett Deasy’s private school in Dalkey. Like the surly young men whom Stephen teaches, Deasy, too, seems to har- bor a measure of animosity toward Stephen, but his more obvious role is to provide an ironic analogue to Homer’s Nestor by offering Stephen Dedalus inappropriate advice on the practical management of his affairs, financial and otherwise. With such contrasts, the chapter presents an impressionistic view of Stephen’s public self, or at least his profes- sional self, and it demonstrates that this facet of his life is no more satisfactory than the private one outlined in the previous chapter.
In its opening pages, the Nestor episode under- scores Stephen’s ineffectuality in the classroom as he struggles to maintain a modicum of order among a group of boys who have no interest in the rote drill by which he attempts to lead them through the day’s lessons. Their lack of attention mirrors Stephen’s own boredom. As the INTERIOR MONO- LOGUE of the opening scene makes evident, his mind seems as detached from the curriculum as those of his students. While the grinding routine of recitation moves forward, he distracts himself by evoking first the elaborate panorama of the victory of Pyrrhus at Asculum won at a great cost and then by imagining, with an interest bordering on voyeurism, the details of the social lives that await the boys he is now teaching.
As the class progresses, however, it becomes apparent that a good portion of the problems that Stephen faces in the classroom relates quite simply to his own social awkwardness. Although he tries to win over the boys through his wit, they are at a loss as to how to respond to the allusion that Stephen makes to the Kingstown pier as a disap-
pointed bridge or to his riddle with the enigmatic answer, “The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush” (U 2.115). In the end his behavior sim- ply puzzles and embarrasses them. He cannot quite succeed as either a teacher or an entertainer, and his students are all too happy to run off to the play- ing field at the end of the period.
After the class has left to play field hockey, Stephen remains in the room for a few moments to tutor one of his students, Cyril Sargent, who has fallen behind in his math studies. In his helpless- ness and his isolation Sargent may evoke for some readers images of the young Stephen as a student at CLONGOWESWOODCOLLEGEin the first chapter of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen
himself makes this connection and briefly calls to mind incidents from his own school days. In conse- quence, he responds to Sargent’s helplessness with perhaps greater patience and sympathy than he might otherwise have shown.
The differences between student and teacher, however, are much greater than any similarity. While both the young Stephen and Cyril Sargent must endure the indignities of their physical weak- ness, Stephen as a boy had the advantage of a quick wit, an active intelligence, and the courage of his convictions. The last of these qualities eventually earned for him the respect of his classmates when he went to complain to Father John Conmee, the rector of Clongowes Wood College, about the unfair punishment that he had received from Father Dolan. Sargent, in contrast, stands out as dull, stupid, and perpetually fearful, as helpless and timid intellectually as he is physically.
Nonetheless, Stephen sustains the parallels between them that he sees by calling up an image of Sargent’s mother as a woman fearlessly protecting her feeble boy from the threats of the world. The picture is entirely Stephen’s invention, but it under- scores for readers at least the reverence that he still has for motherhood and by extension his veneration for the memory of his own mother. Indeed, in the Circe episode (chapter 15), Stephen’s hallucination, in which his mother appears to remind him of the care that she gave him when he was a child, reveals not her feelings but the guilty remorse that Stephen himself experiences.
After sending a still-baffled Sargent off to partici- pate reluctantly in field hockey with the rest of his class (again evoking images from chapter 1 of A Por-
trait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen too
was unenthusiastic about playing sports), Stephen goes to Deasy’s office to collect his salary. As Deasy pays Stephen, he cannot resist incorporating an abbreviated lecture on economics into the proceed- ings; but his evocation of “the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman’s mouth . . . I paid
my way” (U 2.244–245, 251) shows not only
Deasy’s inability to count (four words, not one) but also his severe misunderstanding of Stephen’s tem- perament and national loyalties.
Deasy, in fact, is himself far more disposed to the English than to the Irish in his sentiments, although he tries to link his Unionist views with a broad commitment to Irish heritage and culture. In the abstract, such an argument might have merit, but inaccuracies in Deasy’s recapitulation of Irish history undermine much of the force of his senti- ments. Most notably, Deasy mistakenly thinks that his ancestor Sir John Blackwood supported union with the United Kingdom when in fact he opposed it, and the pedantic and misogynistic schoolmaster confuses the roles played by both MacMurrough and O’Rourke in bringing about the English inva- sion of Ireland by the forces of Henry II.
The chapter concludes with a final idiosyn- cratic gesture on Deasy’s part. He gives Stephen a letter that he has written warning the public at large of the dangers to Irish cattle posed by a potential epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease. Although skeptical about such an effort, Stephen agrees to approach some editors whom he knows about publishing the letter in various newspapers and journals. (In the Aeolus episode [chapter 7] he is successful in getting Myles Crawford to