[cf. Gabler 3:1]
What if Joyce started off with "Buck Mulligan was stately and plump. He came from the stairhead, bearing..."? It sounds a little simpler that way, more American, a little more Dashiell Hammett or Hemingway. But he didn't.
We'll see that Joyce almost always values sound and associative nuance over simplicity. [And by "associative nuance" I mean that jamming the adjectives "stately" & "plump" directly up against their referent, Buck, he's invoking the old Homeric epithet style, like "gray-eyed Athena" or "resourceful Odysseus."]
Another effect of this not-so-strange-but-still-distinctive beginning is that, compared to the Americanish alternative, the narrator is in a less visible position. To say "Buck Mulligan was..." is to put a narrating storyteller clearly on the stage; it draws a frame around the events. Putting "stately" first puts us more inside the frame.
And about "stately." It's not a strange word, not an unapproachable word, not an unfamiliar word... but it calls just enough attention to itself to stand off the page a little bit. Joyce's narration always seems normal at first glance in these early chapters, but the more weight you put on it, the more you see how it presages the big weirdness that comes later. The question of "who's talking" is never as cut & dry as it seems.
So Mulligan is stately and plump. We'll meet Stephen in a minute, who is skinny and nervous. 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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3 comments:
I like the Malkovitch casting, though I'm glad you didn't mention it earlier. Good casting picks have a way of cluttering up an artist's (or a reader's) imagination and Buck is such a fun character throughout that i wanted to get a look for him that was totally my own.
I'm pretty surprised you didn't mention anything here about that enormous letter "S" on the page and it's origin.
-Rob
Yes, the S! I see the S as a shout-out to the designers of the 1934 Random House edition of Ulysses--the standard edition for American readers until Mr. Gabler's work came along. The first page of the Random House *Ulysses* (and now the Modern Library edition) gives "Stately" a ginormous S--it takes up the whole page. And the beginning of episode 4 (which is also Book II) has an enormous M. And the beginning of episode 16 (also Book III) has an enormous P.
As far as we know, Joyce had nothing to do with this design choice, but it's led thousands of readers to write hundreds of papers about the signifcance of S,M,and P. ...not entirely without cause, as Joyce was superstitous about letters, and you can't put it past him that these chapters begin with very specific ones...
As fond as I am of casting imaginary plays, the young Malkovich I recall was as wiry and highstrung as a whippet, therefore not the type you're looking for at all. He was on Broadway with Joan Allen in a Lanford Wilson play called "Burn This" circa 1986 and managed to make even Miss Allen look a bit lethargic. But play on, I like this game!
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