James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus No. 20

Cf. 1922, 3:24-25; Gabler, 3:26-27

Finally, we get the point of Mulligan's joke.  He's using the echo of the surrounding mountains* to add to his travesty of the mass, as we've said several different ways and times already.

In responding to this picture, I started to think about ways in which Mulligan's performance is a mini-model of the book as a whole... but I don't really buy that.

We haven't talked much about textual issues yet, but it's interesting here that  the Rosenbach manuscript does not have the sentence on which this image is based: ["Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm."]  I have no intention of subjecting you to the full textual history--there's plenty of that on the web already.  Suffice it to say that the Rosenbach Manuscript, which is part of the collection of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, is an early handwritten draft of Ulysses.

Why add this sentence?  The skill of 'placing' the echo or the whistling mailboat says something about Mulligan's cleverness and awareness of his surroundings. It's likely also something that Joyce saw happen while he was writing, so he decided to stick it into the book--the man liked to add new material to the book whenever he got a chance.  This is a small, but useful example.

*Many readers believe the whistle is the call of a boat departing Kingstown harbor, perhaps the mailboat at 5:83 (Gabler).  This also seems logical to me, and probably would better explain why the returning whistles are "strong" and "shrill."  But if we go this way, we have to explain how Mulligan knows when the whistle will sound.  I note above that the "strong shrill whistles" are not in the Rosenbach Manuscript. Neither is the mailboat reference. So that makes it likely that the whistles are the boat... oops!

Ulysses "Seen" - Telemachus, Episode Two!

"He's the only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse." Like Bloom we're a bunch of bloody dark horses ourselves, and so it is that Ulysses Seen henceforward is a creation of Throwaway Horse LLC. Who are we? Rob Berry the artist of course, and Mike Barsanti, your faithful guide, and Josh Levitas, breathing life into these lumps of clay, and Chad Rutkowski, the lawyer lurking in the shadows. But why an LLC? Because we really like this format. We hope you will really like this format. And we hope that Ulysses, the first hyper-text novel, will prove a catalyst for presenting other magnificent works of intimidating literature in the same kind of explicatory, direct-to-your-mind style as what we are doing with Ulysses Seen.

Art by Gabe Ostley

Each of us loves this book, and it kills us that it has gotten the reputation for being inaccessible to everyone besides the English professors who make their careers teaching the book to future English professors who will make their careers doing the same. 'Tweren't supposed to be that way. It is a funny, sometimes obscene (but not in the legal sense), book about the triumphs and failures of hum drum, every day life. It makes heroes out of schlubs and cuts the epic down to size. And its elitist reputation has placed it well on its way to being as relevant to our cultural currency as conjugating Latin.

What these guys have done is remove the unnecessary obstacles. Rob eases us into turn of the (20th) century Ireland through the familiar language of comic books. And Mike uses the infinite resources of the web (not to mention his own estimable insight) to tame the million and one references and allusions in the book to the point where they'll fetch your slippers and the morning paper. You're going to see the increasing importance and the increasing integration (what's that?) of the blog posts with the text, you're going to see the format evolve into something interactive, and you're going to see the format leap from your desktop and onto your cell phone and beyond. So stick with us. Your patience will be rewarded.

But we can make more irrationally exuberant promises at a later time. Let's move on to why you came here in the first place.

And what a change in tempo this next installment offers, divorced from exuberance of any kind. We leave Mulligan and his clowning and get a taste for what makes the jejune jesuit so fearful. Stephen's overwrought musings about the past heartless bullying of a fellow student soon turn darker, and we find ourselves as trapped by the specter of the agonizing death of Stephen's mother as Stephen himself. And it is here that Rob's talent asserts itself, focusing the narrative punch for our movie-addled minds on the foreboding visions that plague Stephen, gripping us with the same images that are gripping Stephen.

Mike will take you more thoroughly through this segment, please make sure you've signed up for the blog posts.

And remember, should shimmering bowls of black bile be something you find happens to match your dining room drapes, original artwork is available here.

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 19

[Cf. 1922; 3:24, Gabler; 3:26]

So Mulligan is doing his staged transubstantiation joke, waiting for the sound of his whistling to bounce off the nearby Wicklow hills.  The word "chrysostomos" just sits in the middle of a small paragraph describing Mulligan's face and the scene.  Note how Rob has given it a different style to set it apart from the other dialogue, internal or external. We spent some time talking about this.

People reading Ulysses for the first time are so eager to get to the difficult stuff, the allusions, or just the smutty bits, that this odd and completely symptomatic moment on the first page gets passed over.  When I teach Ulysses, I like to dwell on this word for an uncomfortably long time, because the more you look at it, the weirder it gets.

Key question: who says it?  It's not dialogue, because it doesn't have one of the dashes that Joyce preferred to set off actual spoken words (as opposed to pedestrian quotation marks).  It seems to be the narrator, but it's pretty elliptical for a narrator--a normal narrator would say something like: "his teeth had gold caps, and they shone in the sun and made him golden-mouthed like St. John Chrysostomos."  So it's abrupt, and if you ask me, it's a chain of logic that sounds much more like Stephen than any impartial narrator.  This the next of many examples of the Uncle Charles Principle . 

But who is Chrysostomos anyway?  I've never found a really satisfactory connection to this allusion.  On some level, it's just that Mulligan as noticeable gold in his teeth. He's also a clever talker. So he's golden-mouthed.  Gifford is a good souce for going deeper into this kind of thing. He suggests a couple of possible suspects, one being the Greek rhetorician Dion Chrysostomos, another being the early church father St. John Chrysostomos .

These are perfectly legit and all, but I don't really feel they add much to what we know about Mulligan. If anything.  Gifford's third candidate, Pope Gregory I, is a more likely match. Called by the Irish "Gregory Goldenmouthed," he was a Roman pope who took on the project of converting the Britons to Roman Christianity ( as opposed to the strange Irish brand being practiced next door).  If you have better candiates, please let me know!

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 18

[Cf. 1922 3:22-23; Gabler3:25]

We're waiting for Mulligan to finish up with his whistling echo trick, a high point of the little parody of the mass that begins episode 1 of Ulysses.  Here he cocks his head to the left, waiting for the echo that's going to come in a minute.

We haven't talked about the Odyssey in a while, so let's revisit that frame of reference while the echo takes its time getting back to the tower.  Stephen is Telemachus.   A young man, Telemachus is just old enough to understand the insult that Antinoos and the rest of the suitors are visiting upon his house, and just young enough to not really be able to do anything about it.  The suitors live off the wealth Odysseus and his people have hoarded for years, and make a mockery out of the traditions and customs of the city.  Telemachus wants to rid his house of them, but he doesn't have the people or the will to do it.  So Athena comes to him and tells him to learn what he can about his father's fate, and possibly raise an army to take his home back.  So Buck would seem to be Antinoos, and he's certainly making fun of the traditions of Stephen's people... but Stephen doesn't have much faith in those traditions himself.  I suppose one could say that Telemachus needs to find out what happened to his father before he can really judge Antinoos--if Odysseus were dead, it might become his duty to follow Antinoos like a father, and then to look back on the desecrations of Penelope's courtship as a necessary cost of the "leadership transition."  And voila!  We arrived at Hamlet without even knowing we left the station. We're even conveniently situated at the top of a tower.  I bet we're going to see a ghost soon!

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus No. 17

Cf. 1922 3:22-23; Gabler3:25]

Mulligan has given his "long slow whistle of call" and now pauses "awhile in rapt attention," turning his head back and forth as he listens for the natural echo that's the punchline to his joke.

Though we've been moving through these opening lines at our own rather stately, plump pace, I think you can still notice that there's rather a lot of attention given to this scene by Joyce.  There aren't many such scenes in the novel, and Mulligan quickly becomes a peripheral figure.  It suggests to me that the scene retains a number of vestigial clues, styles, and storylines--perhaps when it was written in 1913 and 1914, Joyce had a very different idea of the struggle that Stephen was going to face during the day, and Mulligan was more involved. 

James Joyce's Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 16

[Cf. 1922; 3:22; Gabler; 3:24]

Mulligan is performing a little trick here at a critical moment in his parody of the mass. He knows that there's an echo from the top of the tower (never checked this out myself), so he's putting it to work at a moment that parallels the epiclesis, the moment when the presence of God is summoned into the communion wine and bread.

Joyce doesn't give a sound for Mulligan's whistle--only that it's a "long slow whistle of call," like the way you'd whistle to a dog, or the hot dog guy. There's something a little lascivious about the way Rob has drawn Mulligan's face and fingers here, which is all part of the picture too...

Ulysses, Telemachus, No. 15

[Cf. 1922, 3:19-21; Gabler 3:21-23]

Another thing I've 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.

Why all this talk of a black mass? Are we just trying to build readership? No, gentle reader... Mulligan's been parodying the mass for the last 20 lines or so. Gifford parses "Christine" as referring to the black mass "tradition" of having a naked woman serve as an altar.

If this all seems farfetched, there's an lascivious and fascinating (forgive the redundancy) 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 was two years after he wrote these lines. Interpret as you will...