< — Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army. — Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said. — Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily? — Yes. — Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with money. — Is she up the pole? — Better ask Seymour that.
Seymour = BM's friend from p7: "I'll bring down Seymour" (from where?) 'going over' where? Lily Carlisle, redhead Carlisle girls 'stew' = study for army??? "up the pole" maybe 'pregnant', explaining Seymour's career-change?
— Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said. He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely: — Redheaded women buck like goats.
the manuscript continued "...And all creation simply gloats." (Buck says 'buck') 'bleeding' (BM chooses a British obscenity here?) 'officer' (it's taken for granted he won't just be an enlisted man) no one seems bothered that it's the British army he's joining
He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt. — My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Übermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen. He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay. — Are you going in here, Malachi? — Yes. Make room in the bed.
rib = Eve? BM's boast pointedly includes SD and omits Haines both dressing and almost immediately undressing cause BM difficulties
The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a stone, smoking. — Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked. — Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.
'creek'?? sitting-on-stone is an FW motif for Shaun
Stephen turned away. — I'm going, Mulligan, he said. — Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat. Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes. — And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there. Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly: — He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.
why 'chemise'? (BM must remove: shoes, socks, pants, underpants, jacket?, vest, shirt) Delaney says 'tuppence', Donnelly 'two pence' does "Dressing" refer to BM a few minutes earlier? SD sees BM treating him like an inferior each time "He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord" Proverbs 19:17
< of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery.
isn't SD honoring BM's mockery by classing it with these historic heresies?
The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields. Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu!
is SD imagining himself giving this eloquent speech in public?
— Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.
more than 100,000 German Jews had immigrated to Britain in recent decades [wiki] only 75 were in Ireland in 1901, then down to 66 in 1911
Harold Bloom notes the evolving antisemitism in Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather [nytbr]
Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman. — She's making for Bullock harbour. The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain. — There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today. The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am.
5 fathoms = 30ft (less than 40 feet, but the depth of the Forty Foot is less anyway) 9 days: the drowning happened the day the milkwoman started delivering (or was last paid up) pic: 1920s
They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water. — Is the brother with you, Malachi? — Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons. — Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her. — Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.
"green... jelly" (frogspawn?)
'the brother' is BM's brother (OG had two younger brothers: Henry) ((does BM's reappear?))
Bannon's photo girl is 15yo Milly Bloom, daughter of our Ulysses
"Brief exposure" suggests she might pose for naughty pictures
Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth. Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips and breastbone.
"young man... elderly man" "shot up.. a... face" ('face' seems to be the object of the verb, rather than the reworded subject) garland = tonsured loincloth = what priests would have worn there (now that it's wet he'll have to change it)
Delaney thinks BM's gesture is mocking (cf disingenuflect)
< open with his thumb and offered it. — Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette. Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.
— Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose? — You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.
He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.
"ferule" = tip, probably metal "path" = packed soil, or gravel? familiars are magicians' guardian spirits [eb11]
"They will walk on it tonight" = they won't come from the south?
Someday we'll have sorted out who paid what when and who requested the milk deliveries. For now we know Gogarty paid and moved in first with Trench. But since SD has a paying fictional job, he might have paid and moved in with BM (without Haines). JAJ might have tweaked the facts so SD can feel usurped by BM, like Telemachus with the suitors. "It is mine. I paid the rent." sounds less like SD rehearsing than SD imagining BM's attitude
— After all, Haines began... Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind. — After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me. — I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian. — Italian? Haines said. A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me. — And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs. — Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean? — The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.
Haines repeats "After all" because SD's look has unsettled him momentarily
Haines willfully overlooks the Church
(aPOStolic or apoSTOLic?)
Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke. — I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation:
and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs.
Joyce loved Palestrina-- so is he reluctantly acknowledging that the Church sometimes made room for such artists?
< He held up a forefinger of warning. — If anyone thinks that I amn't divine He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine But have to drink water and wish it were plain That I make when the wine becomes water again.
BM/OG neatly demonstrates the shallowness of Catholicism's requiring belief in Jesus's divinity
yet another 'make water' pun
He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted: — Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead. What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly And Olivet's breezy — Goodbye, now, goodbye!
(why not 'all that I said'?) "bred in the bone" = father's a bird
OG's actual last verse: Goodbye, now, goodbye, you are sure to be fed You will come on My Grave when I rise from the Dead What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly And Olivet's breezy-- Goodbye now Goodbye.
He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdlike cries.
Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said: — We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He is rather blasphemous. I'm not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner? — The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered. — O, Haines said, you have heard it before? — Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.
actually "The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly sarcastic) Jesus"
— You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. — There is only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said. Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it
"one sense" = Jesuit/Aquinas all-or-nothing, dismissing all watered-down Protestant compromises
(Surely there's a simpler name for this rhetorical device?!)
(In later episodes too) I'm noticing descriptions that attribute actions to bodyparts-- faces, voices, lips, heads, forms, figures, hands:
the shaking gurgling face that blessed him the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk. A voice within the tower called loudly: His head halted again His head vanished Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly about the hearth A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors. -- Have you the key? a voice asked. Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands.
It gives a sort of disembodied clinical objectivity...? While also animating nature...
Nestor The boy's blank face asked the blank window The words troubled their gaze Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife his old man's voice cried sternly Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed round him Stephen's embarrassed hand moved over the shells Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.
— You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox? — Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. — What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself? Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear: — O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father! — We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is rather long to tell.
SD gets to expound his theory, stone sober, in episode 9. Briefly, his veryclosereading of all Shakespeare's works leads him to see WS's relation to his wife as central, with Gertrude in Hamlet playing her role.
'stolewise' like leaningplace is a real word, neat but rarely used.
why "shade" not 'shades'?
"Kinch the elder" is Simon Dedalus (John Joyce) who'll appear presently in the fictional flesh. Japhet was one of three sons of Noah (the infamous biblical drunk) who turn up often in FW. "Japhet in Search of a Father" was the title of an 1836 bestseller never mentioned in FW (so the novel itself is probably irrelevant).
Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands. — The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said. — I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o'er his base into the sea, isn't it? Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires. — It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.
"We"? "as they followed" meticulously choreographed to show character and relationship (SD and H follow BM)
Hamlet I.iv (Haines gets the quote exactly right) 'beetles' comes from beetle-browed or scowling; it's not Elsinore itself but a cliff that juts dangerously, and the danger is that the malevolent Ghost will cause Hamlet to fall to his death.
BM may be self-censoring the quote's continuation, because it's too close to SD's issues? "...And there assume some other horrible form, Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason And draw you into madness?"
SD momentarily sees himself as they see him, dirty and poor and sad
"wonderful tale" diminishes WS 'bring to halt' is much less common than '...to a halt'
Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat, vague on the bright skyline, and a sail tacking by the Muglins. — I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.
this is the first we've heard of Haines' eyes. "firm and prudent" is generous. (1920 notesheet: "Haines I was polite.")
Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:
— I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. My mother's a jew, my father's a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. So here's to disciples and Calvary.
OG, later that year: I'm the queerest young fellow that ever was heard. My mother's a Jew; my father's a Bird With Joseph the Joiner I cannot agree So 'Here's to Disciples and Calvary.' [more]
jew (for Catholics, an awkward fact); bird (Holy Ghost); joiner (carpenter)
And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief.
Haines' collar was 'loose' and his scarf wellbehaved. (p16 above). BM's stiff collar sounds like he's dressing to impress someone (or everyone) rather than for comfort.
1908 notebook: "Gogarty: He addresses lifeless objects and hits them smartly with his cane: the naturalism of the Celtic mind." (as atypical as OG must have been, JAJ sees him here as typically Celtic) We don't hear what he says to these lifeless objects (yet), surprisingly.
The watchchain would have been attached to the watch in his yellow vest's watchpocket (aka "primrose waistcoat" below), to be buttoned to the vest (suggesting he's assembling his public persona (disguise?) here).
Joyce used the word 'trunk' for BM on page 6, above: "Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk." He'll re-use 'plunged' below, again of BM: "His plump body plunged."
"called for" = talking to himself, pretending to have a servant (neither Haines nor SD would have responded)
God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi.
Joyce omits both paragraph break and leading dash for once, BM speaking aloud, to no one, as if it's a running interior monolog. (Haines is out of hearing, at the door.)
'Dressing the character' implies BM is still pondering his spat with SD, imagining 'playing them' via ostentatious dandyism.
"puce" echoes 'prepuces' above (p13). The color notoriously derives from squashed fleas (cf squashed lice above). (Reds paired with greens are a recurring motif in PoA.)
BM is quoting Walt Whitman here (continues "...I am large, I contain multitudes")
A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands. — And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.
cf Portrait "the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light"
The latin quarter of Paris was the student/bohemian ghetto at the time [wiki] Joyce could in fact speak Latin as a lingua franca there.
rather than play the dandy, SD's rebellion-of-dress is limited perhaps to romantic bohemian poverty.
Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway: — Are you coming, you fellows? — I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door.
Throwing the hat so SD has to pick it up off the floor (and saying "There's" rather than 'Here's') shows some lingering contempt, which BM never risks with Haines even though he insults him behind his back.
Come out, Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow: — And going forth he met Butterly.
BM is wellfed, SD is always hungry. "You have eaten all we left" anticipates the first vignette of FW, Roderick O'Connor drinking everyone's dregs
longshot: Maurice Butterly, 69yo magistrate in 1901
'butter' is a leitmotif associated with JAJ's enemies
'wept bitterly' Matthew 26:75 in the Douay-Rheims, not KJV
Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket. At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked: — Did you bring the key? — I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.
Gogarty says the ashplant had a right-angled handle:
'leaning-place' is a real word, rarely needed.
"inner pocket" (of his (black) jacket)
The towers were designed with one ladder each that could be pulled up to discourage attackers. I think these were bolted on in peacetime, or replaced with stairs. If this ladder truly hadn't been replaced yet, the milkwoman's ascent while carrying a full milkjug would have been remarkable!
Haines asked: — Do you pay rent for this tower? — Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said. — To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.
either Mulligan or Joyce is exaggerating: it was even cheaper, at eight pounds a year ($90/month now) paid quarterly
SD seems to lighten up a bit here, unless it's a subtle jesuit jibe about contributing to the enemy (the detail about the shoulder seems to make this less likely, somehow. Cf above? "Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.")
They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last: — Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it? — Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos.
(how bleaker than other places? why winter especially, given that snow is rare?)
JAJ and OG did describe the Tower as 'the Omphalos'
— What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen. — No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first. He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat:
Aquinas was a Jesuit favorite Joyce never rejected
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