[cf. 1922; 4: 23-35; Gabler 1:50-66]Stephen and Mulligan are discussing their visitor, Haines, who woke in the middle of the night, apparently screaming about a black panther. Presumably not this kind of black panther.
Many years ago at a Joyce conference in Rome I heard a scholar give a paper that argued that Haines is, at least in part, based upon William Bulfin, an Englishman who wrote a book about his bicycle tours in Ireland at the turn of the century. The book, Rambles in Eirinn, was very popular & reprinted many times. In a passage about Dalkey & Sandycove, Bulfin describes a visit to an old military tower where some young men were staying. I'll steal the excerpted passage from a great RTE website about Ulysses:
On a lovely Sunday morning in the early autumn two of us pulled out along the road to Bray for a day's cycling in Dublin and Wicklow. We intended riding to Glendalough and back, but we were obliged to modify this programme before we reached Dalkey, owing to a certain pleasant circumstance which may be termed a morning call. As we were leaving the suburbs behind us my comrade, who knows many different types of Irish people, said casually that there were two men living in a tower down somewhere to the left who were creating a sensation in the neighbourhood. They had, he said, assumed a hostile attitude towards the conventions of denationalisation, and were, thereby, outraging the feeling of the seoinini.One of them had lately returned from a canoeing tour of hundreds of miles through the lakes, rivers, and canals of Ireland, another was reading for a Trinity degree, and assiduously wooing the muses, and another was a singer of songs which spring from the deepest currents of life. The returned marine of the canoe was an Oxford student, whose button-hole was adorned with the badge of the Gaelic League-a most strenuous Nationalist he was, with a patriotism, stronger than circumstances, which moved him to pour forth fluent Irish upon every Gael he encountered, in accents blent from the characteristic speech of his alma mater and the rolling blas of Connacht. The poet was a wayward kind of genius, who talked with a captivating manner, with a keen, grim humour, which cut and pierced through a topic in bright, strong flashes worthy of the rapier of Swift. The other poet listened in silence, and when we went on the roof he disposed himself restlessly to drink in the glory of the morning. It was very pleasant up there in the glad sunshine and the sweet breath of the sea. We looked out across to Ben Edair of the heroic legends, now called Howth, and wondered how many of the dwellers in the "Sunnyville Lodges" and "Elmgrove Villas" and other respectable homes along the hillside knew aught of Finn and Oisín and Oscar. We looked northwards to where the lazy smoke lay on the Liffey's bank, and southwards, over the roofs and gardens and parks to the grey peak of Killiney, and then westwards and inland to the blue mountains
That was longer than it needed to be, but you get the point. Throughout the book, Bulfin approaches Irish people with the same mystification about how he knows more about the history and the language than they, the natives, do. Ironically, back at the Rome Joyce conference, the scholar who was giving the paper was not aware (nor was I) that Bulfin's book, and the coincidence of his visiting during Joyce's very brief stay at the tower in September of 1904, was well known among the senior Joyceans. I didn't know about it and was glad to learn, but the moral was to be careful you're not teaching your audience something they already know.
The black panther is still a mystery to me. I don't know if there is a particular symbolic referent here, or if it's one of the red herrings Joyce throws into this book. It's certainly odd that Stephen says "black panther" two times in close proximity. Even without a clear allusion, (and I'm looking to you all, helpful readers, to tell me what you know about black panthers), the panther dream suggests that there is something a little unhinged about Haines. Maybe he, with Bulfin as his prototype, is to be seen as approaching his travels in Ireland as a kind of exotic safari (I picture him with his guncase and a pith helmet), and the black panther is the symbol of the exotic otherness of the Irish. You tell me.
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4 comments:
The mystery of the Black Panther, eh?
Yeah, its a bit puzzling why this image from Haines' dream should seem to have so much weight in the chapter. Haines is not the kind of character whom readers would see as an oracle of any kind, certainly not in the same way we're to look at the milkwoman who visits the tower a few pages later.
But there does seem to be a significance to the panther imagery of Haines' dream in the way Joyce delivers it.
I think that this sort of jibes with a notion I mentioned earlier about the significance of "noises off" in the novel; the idea that important messages are trying to intrude into the life or story of any individual and we seldom listen to them.
Thomas Hardy published his poem "Panthera" in 1909, about the time Joyce was writing this, and while it's largely overlooked now, the poem made quite a sensation in its time. It deals with a gnostic accusation that Mary had conceived Jesus not of the Holy Ghost, but by a traveling Roman officer named Panthera. The poem can be found here;
http://www.jesusdynasty.com/blog/2007/01/15/thomas-hardy-on-panthera/
Joseph Campbell makes something of this in his work on ULYSSES, claiming that it causes us to see Haines as a kind of false Holy Ghost in the same way we are to see Mulligan as a false Father. I think that's a bit much given how little use Joyce makes of Haines later in the chapter, but it does seem that the panther imagery is to be seen in terms of the black mass and the ill-suited home Stephen has with these two in the tower.
-Rob
One of my favorite scenes is in Calypso (I think. Mike-- a little help here if I'm off) when Joyce describes a Bloom reverie in which Bloom imagines being in a middle eastern bazaar and a vendor rubs a melon on his face during which he delights in the coolness and fragrance of it. It's a description of the joys of experiencing the exotic, before high-minded literary theory deemed the mere notion of the exotic a demeaning tool of colonial despots. What is nice about Joyce is that he just misses the deconstruction fad, so he's free to explore a bit two kinds of exoticism without being freighted down with its post colonial implications. Bloom's experience of the exotic is very innocent-- he's focused on the tactile, sensual nature of the experience itself, and not what that experience means in the larger picture. I can't help but think Joyce is using Haines' black panther as a juxtaposition to Bloom's embrace of the exotic. Haines the Oxford Englishman away from home and sleeping with the wild Irish sees in exoticism and implicit threat, and that threat terrorizes him in his dreams in the form of an exotic beast. What the hell is he doing with a gun case in the first place? Was 1904 Ireland the wild west? He's clearly shown up with preconceived notions of what those beyond the bounds of the civilized world are capable of, and, unlike Bloom, he cannot leave the experience for the experience itself. Perhaps I'm straying into anti-colonial claptrap now, but isn't it just like the English to see a threat in the wild, in the exotic, and thus need to bring it to heel? Ironically all three, Mulligan, Haines, and Stephen, have notions of civilizing Ireland, but I think we are being shown three very different ideas about how that should be done.
I'm inclined to go with the "red herring" assessment, but I think it's possible that it's as much a red herring to Stephen as it is to the reader. This may be off base, but I think it could be good fuel for discussion.
Stephen lives almost entirely inside his own head for most of the novel, and I think this may be the first of a number of examples of Stephen incorrectly assuming that all attention in the Universe is focused on him. Given his black mourning dress and generally black mood, it's not a tremendous stretch to consider it a possibility that Haines is referring to him, but I don't think Stephen can just jump to that conclusion. His readiness to make that jump may come from a feeling that Haines is aligned with Buck, the usurper, and that he, Stephen, is odd man out. I've had that experience with roommates, so I can understand that.
The second mention of the black panther comes in "Oxen of the Sun", in Mulligan's frightening tale, just as the Haines character in his story is drinking poison. This is shortly after Buck has seen Stephen recoil in fear at a thunderclap that he believes to be directed at him by God, himself. It's possible that Mulligan sees Stephen's self-centered fear as his most glaring weakness, and preys upon it by bringing up the black panther again. Following that line of thinking, it's also possible that Buck may have put Haines up to deliberately trying to scare Stephen by pretending to talk in his sleep.
As for why specifically a black panther, I've seen it written that Stephen feels that he has killed his mother in his refusal to pray at her bedside, and I've seen it written that he perhaps feels that he has, on some level, a predatory nature. So a black, predatory animal would be a good choice for anyone trying to play upon his fears - or for any writer creating a metaphor for those fears and the way that they prey upon Stephen.
In “The Bloomsday Book, A Guide Through Joyce’s Ulysses, Harry Blamires asserts pretty definitively that Bloom is the black panther. The following are quotes of the relevant passages, first from Telemachus:
“Stephen provides a watchful but weary for Mulligan’s performance. He complains of the behavior of their English guest, Haines, who is subject to hysterical nightmares. Last night Haines raved terrifyingly after dreaming of a black panther. (Later passages establish the black panther is a symbol of Bloom, whose Christian name is Leopold. It is symbol, too, which carries overtones of divinity. Bloom becomes the lost ‘father’ whom Stephen discovers.)”
From Proteus:
“He [Stephen] is distracted by two cockle-pickers with their dog, and when their dog begins to scrape up the sand, thought of the fox burying his grandmother recurs. Then the dog, panther-like, reminds him of Haines’s dream, and hence of his own dream last night from which Haines’s cries awoke him. The images of this dream are a forecast of Stephen’s crucial meeting with Bloom today and of Bloom’s hospitable reception of him at Eccles Street. In the street of harlots an oriental figure receives him smilingly, offers him melon-fruit, and leads him home over a red carpet to ‘You will see who’. Page 16-17”
From Lestrygonians, Blamires chronicles Bloom’s meeting with Mrs. Breen:
“His [Bloom’s] recollections are interrupted. He meets an old flame, Mrs. Breen, the wife of Denis Breen who has become feeble-minded. Bloom and Mrs. Breen exchange greetings and formal inquiries. When Bloom, approaching the subject tactfully, asks after her husband, Mrs. Breen declares him a ‘caution to rattlesnakes’. Even now he is looking into the law of libel; and Mrs. Breen dives into her handbag to show Bloom the latest. Inhaling the smells and vapors of Harrison’s café, Bloom watches her rummaging among the contents of her bag – hatpin, money, medicine bottle, pastilles. The new moon last night must have made Denis especially bad, Mrs. Breen says, for he woke her up complaining of a nightmare in which he saw the Ace of Space walking up the stairs. (Like the black panther of Haines nightmare, p. 3, 4 and the oriental stranger of Stephen’s dream, p. 58-9, 47, the Ace of Spades, walking up the stairs foreshadows the wandering, intruding, dark-suited Bloom.)”
From Cyclops, Blamires writes:
“There are more drinks. And there is more violence in the air as Alf Bergan looks at a picture in the paper of a butting match and another of a negro lynching. There is a headline ‘Black Beast Burned in Omaha, Ga.’ reminds us that Bloom is a ‘dark horse’; he is in mourning; he is the ‘black panther’ of Haines’ nightmare (p. 3, 4) and of Stephen’s delirium (p. 701, 608).”
Blamires does not tie Haines’ vision of the black panther in the Oxen of the Sun section directly to Bloom.
Blamires final reference to the black panther is in Circe:
“Bloom returns to Stephen and tries to awake him, calling his name. In response, Stephen groans and mutters incoherently. In his words the ‘Black Panther’ of Haines’s nightmare, already associated with the saving and intruding ‘divine’ Bloom (see pp 3, 539, 637, 4, 412, 521) merges with the ‘vampire’ of his poem composed on the beach this morning (see pp. 60 and 168, 48 and 132). The succeeding broken phrases of verse come from Yeats’s ‘Who goes with Fergus?’ Mulligan quoted this poem in song this morning and it stirred Stephen because it was the song he sang to his mother, at her request, when she lay on her deathbed (see pp. 10, and 681, 9 and 581. Bloom’s paternal solicitude is stirred by what he sees and hears. He bends down and unbuttons Stephen’s waistcoat to help him to breathe. Stephen stretches, sighs, and curls up.”
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