James Joyce's Ulysses, Episode 1, Telemachus
"It is a work perhaps of genius" - WB Yeats on Ulysses
The opening chapter of Ulysses dwells on the activities of the three residents of the Martello Tower at Sandycove on the south side of Dublin Bay (defensive fortifications of this kind were built around the coast of Ireland during the Napoleonic Wars a century before) as they rise to face the day on the 16th of June 1904. They are Malachi 'Buck' Mulligan, a carousing medical student, Haines, an English enthusiast for the Irish literary revival, and Stephen Dedalus, a young poet and one of the three main characters in Ulysses, the other two being Leopold and Molly Bloom.
The chapters of Ulysses are usually described as episodes; in all, the book consists of 18 episodes. Episode 1 is known as Telemachus, after a character from Homer's Odyssey. Although Ulysses can be enjoyed without any knowledge of its parallels with Homer, it is worth knowing that the book's main character, Leopold Bloom, a Dublin advertising salesman of Hungarian Jewish background is Ulysses, who in the Odyssey is on his way back from the Trojan War, and that Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus, the son of Ulysses.
One way of understanding Joyce's novel is to see it as symbolic of Bloom's journey home through the streets of Dublin and of Stephen's search for a father figure. Those familiar with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will recall that Stephen’s own father, Simon Dedalus (who is based on Joyce’s father, John Stanislaus Joyce), was an improvident character and a neglectful father. By the time Joyce entered university his father’s fortunes had declined to the point where Joyce listed his occupation as ‘entering competitions.'
Bloom and Stephen finally discover each other in the book's 16th and 17th episodes. There are references in the Telemachus episode to the father/son relationship as when Mulligan summarises Stephen's theory about Shakespeare's Hamlet, that he is the ghost of his own father. Haines recalls reading a theological interpretation of Hamlet, “The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.”
For a book of such linguistic and conceptual daring, James Joyce's Ulysses begins in a fairly conventional vein. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossed" could be the opening lines of any 19th century novel.
Telemachus contains little of the 'stream of consciousness' technique that runs through many of the 750 pages that follow. This particular literary device puzzled some of the novel's early readers and gave it a reputation for difficulty and obscurity. My advice to readers who encounter passages they struggle to understand is not to be deterred, and to move on. This is not a novel with a plot in which everything needs to be fully grasped. Most of its 'action' takes place within the minds of its three main characters.
In this first episode, the writing is mainly narrative and descriptive, and with quite a lot of dialogue. It has plenty of examples of Joyce's mastery of prose style.
They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale.
Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. ... Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.
As the critic, Edmund Wilson, puts it, the early chapters of Ulysses are "as sober and clear as the morning light of the Irish coast in which they take place." For WB Yeats, the Martello Tower pages were "full of beauty". He felt that Joyce had "certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
Readers familiar with Joyce's earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will recognise Stephen Dedalus, as the author's alter ego, a budding writer of lofty aesthetic ambition and with an aloof manner.
Buck Mulligan, who we know to be based on the writer, Oliver St. John Gogarty, will reappear a number of times in subsequent episodes of Ulysses. Joyce depicts Mulligan, who makes most of the running in Episode 1 as if he were the novel's main character, as a loquacious, cocksure medical student. Gogarty was furious about Joyce's unflattering portrayal of him. He described Ulysses in his typically feisty manner as “a book you can read on all the lavatory walls of Dublin.” Gogarty, whom Yeats once described as “one of the great lyric poets of the age”, went on to have a successful career as a medical doctor, an Irish Senator and a writer who spent the last two decades of his life in the United States until his death in New York in 1957.
The third character is Haines, an Englishman who is based on Richard Chenevix Trench. In the novel, Haines had alarmed Stephen by raving in his sleep about a black panther. In reality, Joyce ended his brief stay at the Martello Tower in understandable alarm after Trench discharged a gun during the night.
Although Ulysses concentrates on the private thoughts of its principal characters, it is interesting to see how much of the public life of early 20th century Ireland butts into its pages. Those familiar with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may recall the passage in which Stephen resolves to leave Ireland so as to escape the 'nets' of "nationality, language, religion" which he felt had been flung at his soul "to hold it back from flight." Those elements all make their way into the Telemachus episode.
The novel opens with Mulligan parodying the Latin mass and poking fun at Stephen on account of his absurd Greek name, his Jesuit manner and his stubborn unwillingness to pray at his dying mother's bedside. Later, Mulligan irreverently recites ‘The Ballad of Joking Jesus’.
For his part, Stephen is troubled by his mother's death and by her appearance in his dreams wearing her grave clothes. He describes himself as "a horrible example of free thought", and complains to Haines that he is "the servant of two masters", "the imperial British State" and "the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church".
Mulligan and Stephen are both dismissive of the Irish literary revival of the late-19th century. Here, Mulligan quotes some lines from Yeats:
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery
For Fergus rules the brazen cars.
For his part, Stephen conjures up an image of Irish art as "the cracked looking-glass of a servant". Joyce considered the revival backward-looking and, as a student, had published an intemperate essay deriding Yeats and others for pandering to popular taste. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce wrote that Yeats "remembers forgotten beauty" while Stephen (Joyce) desired "to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world."
Mulligan and Stephen are European modernists, scornful of Irish pieties. Mulligan thinks that he and Stephen can do something for Ireland, they can 'Hellenise it'. And in a way that is what Joyce does by calling his novel Ulysses, the Latin name of the Greek hero from Homer's Odyssey.
Ireland's two greatest 20th century writers, Yeats and Joyce, had a complicated relationship. Yeats was supportive of the younger writer and helped get Joyce an honorarium from Britain's Royal Literary Fund, which greatly helped his finances during World War 1. Joyce could be ungrateful to those who helped him and, for example, in Telemachus he refers to Lily and Lolly Yeats as the 'weird sisters'. When Yeats won the Nobel Prize in 1923, however, Joyce, who certainly deserved this honour but was never awarded it, sent a message of congratulations and later dispatched a wreath to Yeats's funeral in the south of France, although it did not arrive in time.
In 1904, the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 with the aim of reviving the Irish language, was attracting growing numbers of enthusiastic members, many of whom went on to play leading roles in the 1916 Rising and its aftermath, and the language issue duly surfaces at the Martello Tower. Haines, the hibernophile Englishman, believes people in Ireland should speak Irish but the old woman who delivers milk to the Tower has no knowledge of the language. She has been told, however, that it's "a grand language by them that knows." Joyce himself took a few Irish language lessons, with 1916 leader Patrick Pearse as his teacher, but quickly lost interest in the language. His priority was that Ireland should become more European.
In conversation with Stephen, Haines confesses that he regrets Britain's treatment of Ireland and concludes that "history is to blame." Stephen will return to the theme of history in the novel’s second episode, Nestor. But more of that in my next blog.
Although Leopold and Molly Bloom do not appear until the book's fourth episode, there is an indirect reference to them in Telemachus when Mulligan mentions that he has a brother living in Westmeath where he has developed an interest in a 'photo girl' there. We learn later in the novel that Bloom's daughter, Millie, is working in a photographic studio in Mullingar, County Westmeath. Such is the interconnected web that Joyce weaves!
Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador to the United States.