EPISODE 1, âTELEMACHUSâ:
A Stately, Plump Martello Tower
Here we are. On the opening page of the first of the novelâs eighteen episodes, we get a reminder from a jaunty Buck Mulligan that there is more to Ulysses than the comings and goings of an ordinary Dublin day. Whoâs the âancient Greekâ? I will come back to this classical dimension, but first to the assessment of someone who is mentioned here and there in the pages of Joyceâs novel, Irelandâs national bard, W. B. Yeats. I have had a lifelong enthusiasm for the poetâs work, and as I am currently Honorary President of the Yeats Society, I am happy to begin this journey by quoting his opinion of Ulysses: âIt is a work perhaps of geniusâ.11 âPerhapsâ is an interesting word. I would say that it is essentially a work of genius, with an accent on the word âessentiallyâ, but I will get back to that later. Let the show begin.
Wake up! Itâs eight oâclock on 16 June 1904 and we have a long day ahead of us, roaming through âthe heart of the Hibernian metropolisâ with James Augustine Joyce as our guide. As we explore the first page of Ulysses, weâre in Sandycove on the south side of Dublin Bay, looking out over the âscrotumtightening seaâ. To our left as we gaze across the bay, we can see âthe mailboat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstownâ (whose name was changed to DĂșn Laoghaire two years before Ireland became independent in 1922, the year in which Joyceâs magnum opus was published).
The opening chapter of Ulysses dwells on the acti- vities of the three residents of the Martello tower at Sandycove as they rise to face the day. Martello towers were defensive fortifications built across the British Empire throughout the nineteenth century. Around 50 towers were erected in Ireland, mainly during the Napoleonic Wars, with 29 of these located around Dublin.
Stephen Dedalus, a young poet, will be one of the three main characters in Ulysses, the other two being Leopold and Molly Bloom. Readers familiar with Joyceâs earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, will recognise Dedalus, that novelâs principal character. He is clearly Joyceâs alter ego, a budding writer of lofty aesthetic ambition and with an aloof manner.
Malachi âBuckâ Mulligan, one of âthe brood of mockersâ, is a carousing medical student who, by his own account, is âtripping and sunnyâ. An ebullient character (âI remember only ideas and sensationsâ), Buck Mulligan is based on the writer Oliver St John Gogarty. Mulligan will reappear a number of times in subsequent episodes of Ulysses. Joyce depicts Mulligan as a loquacious, cocksure personality. Mulligan makes most of the running in this opening episode, as if he were the novelâs main character. Gogarty was furious about what he saw as Joyceâs unflattering portrayal of him. He described Joyce as âDublinâs Danteâ who had âto find a way out of his own Infernoâ,12 and dismissed Ulysses, in his typically feisty manner, as âa book you can read on all the lavatory walls of Dublinâ.13 Gogarty, whom Yeats once described as a writer of âheroic songâ and âone of the great lyric poets of the ageâ,14 went on to have a successful career as a medical doctor, an Irish senator and a successful writer who spent the last two decades of his life in the United States, dying in New York in 1957.
The third character is Haines, an Englishman, who is an enthusiast for the Irish literary revival and âa ponderous Saxonâ. According to Mulligan, Haines thinks that Stephen is not a gentleman. For his part, Stephen is resentful of Haines, with his âsmile of a Saxonâ. Haines is based on Richard Samuel Chenevix Trench (1881â1909), a graduate of Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, who had taught himself to speak Irish. 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. Trench ended up committing suicide, shooting himself in the head while described as temporarily insane.15
The novel opens with Buck Mulligan strutting around the roof of the tower in a yellow dressing-gown breezily jousting with Stephen who is âdispleased and sleepyâ because his nightâs rest has been disrupted by Hainesâs nocturnal antics.
We are in early twentieth-century Dublin, but there is a sense in which we are also brushing up against classical Greece. Although Ulysses can be enjoyed without any knowledge of its parallels with Homer, an awareness of a few key points can enhance a readerâs enjoyment of the novel. It is worth noting that the bookâs main character, Leopold Bloom, a Dublin advertising salesman of Hungarian-Jewish background, is Joyceâs equivalent of Homerâs protagonist Odysseus from the Odyssey (âthe man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troyâs sacred citadelâ16). Here, I have used Richmond Lattimoreâs translation of the Odyssey which I bought during my most recent visit to Greece. The best-known translation is by Robert Fagles (the Odyssey, Penguin Classics, 1999), in which this passage is rendered more poetically: âSing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troyâ. Both translations â âthe man of many waysâ and âthe man of twists and turnsâ â seem to me to capture the intricate character that is Leopold Bloom. Odysseus â or Ulysses, as he is known in the Latin version of that mythic tale â is the main character in Homerâs epic, which recounts its heroâs lengthy journey home from the Trojan War.
This first episode of Joyceâs novel is known as âTelemachusâ, named after Odysseusâs son in the Odyssey. He awaits his fatherâs return home to the island of Ithaca after the Trojan war. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is presented by Joyce as akin to Telemachus, while Molly Bloom is our Penelope, wife of the Homeric hero. In this opening salvo of the novel, we are introduced to Stephen, who is the central character in the novelâs first three episodes. After that we come into contact with Leopold Bloom, who dominates most of the rest of its pages.
One way of understanding Joyceâs novel is to see Bloomâs journey home through the streets of Dublin, and his urge to find a substitute for his deceased son, as symbolic of Odysseusâs journey home to Ithaca in the Odyssey. This is coupled with Stephen Dedalusâs more or less unwitting search for a father figure â much like Telemachusâs quest to find the absent Odysseus. Those familiar with Joyceâs first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen is the budding artist at its heart, will recall that Stephenâs own father, Simon Dedalus (based on Joyceâs father, John Stanislaus Joyce), was an improvident character and a neglectful father. By the time James Joyce entered university, the familyâs fortunes had declined to the point where he listed his fatherâs occupation as âentering competitionsâ. In A Portrait, his father is described by Stephen as âa praiser of his own pastâ.
Bloom and Stephen finally discover each other in the bookâs sixteenth and seventeenth episodes, but there are references in these opening pages to the father-son theme. Mulligan refers to Stephen as Japhet (Noahâs son) âin search of a fatherâ. Referring to Stephenâs theories about Shakespeareâs Hamlet, Mulligan jests that âhe proves by algebra that Hamletâs grandson is Shakespeareâs grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own fatherâ. Haines recalls reading a theological interpretation of Hamlet, âThe Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.â In âTelemachusâ, however, it is Stephenâs recently deceased mother who hauntingly occupies his thoughts.
For a book of such linguistic and conceptual daring, Ulysses begins in a fairly conventional vein. Its opening lines â âStately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossedâ â could be drawn from any nineteenth-century novel; its opening pages are a lively, enjoyable read. In all of the Bloomsday readings I have organised over the years across three continents, these pages of the novel have always featured. Together with its closing passage, this must be the best-known part of Ulysses.
âTelemachusâ contains little enough of the âstream of consciousnessâ technique (also known as an âinterior monologueâ) through which Joyce gives us direct access to the charactersâ thoughts and impressions of the world around them. This is something the reader needs to get used to as they progress through many of the 750-or-so pages that follow. Here is an example of a sudden shift within a single paragraph from the third person âheâ of the narratorâs vantage point to the first person âIâ of Stephenâs inner world: âIt lay behind him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergusâs song: I sang it alone in the house, holding down the dark chords.â Warning: it gets more difficult to spot these transitions later on in the book. By the time we get to the closing episode, âPenelopeâ, the narrative has shifted entirely to âinterior monologueâ.
This particular literary device puzzled some of the novelâs early readers and gave Ulysses a reputation for difficulty and obscurity that it has never managed to shed. My advice to readers who encounter passages they struggle to understand is not to be deterred, but to move on. This is not a novel with a plot in which everything needs to be fully grasped. Most of its âactionâ takes place within the minds of its three main characters.
If youâre a reader who wants to become acquainted with Ulysses but do not feel you have the stamina to read the entire book, you could do worse than to read this episode, together with Episodes 2 (âNestorâ), 4 (âCalypsoâ), 6 (âHadesâ), 8 (âLestrygoniansâ), 12 (âCyclopsâ) and 18 (âPenelopeâ). Taken together, they will give the reader a flavour of what it has to offer and of the feat of writing it represents. After being exposed to the more accessible and immediately compelling parts of Ulysses, readers may be encouraged to tackle its more taxing portions. One of my aims throughout this book is to allow my readers to do some tasty sampling of Joyceâs work. The eighteen episodes of Ulysses can be read as more or less self-contained short stories or, in the case of the longer episodes, novellas, and in one case a full-length play!
In this opening episode, the writing is descriptive and contains quite a lot of dialogue. There are plenty of examples of Joyceâs mastery of prose style. Take for example, âThey halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whaleâ, âWarm sunshine merrying over the seaâ or âInshore 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.â
As the critic Edmund Wilson puts it, the early chapters of Ulysses are âas sober and clear as the morning light of the Irish coast in which they take placeâ.17 For W. B. Yeats, the pages set in the Martello tower were âfull of beautyâ.18 He thought that those early episodes he had read in The Little Review in 1918 were âan entirely new thing â neither what the eye sees or the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.â19 Even before Ulysses was fully published, Yeats was spot on in his understanding of what Joyce was attempting.
Although Ulysses concentrates on the private thoughts of its principal characters, it is interesting to see how much of the public life of early-twentieth-century Ireland butts int...