Episode 1: Telemachus

Ulysses opens on the rooftop of the Martello Tower at 8:00 am on the morning of June 16th, 1904.  Buck Mulligan, a medical student in his 20s, looks out over Sandycove, a bayside suburb just south of Dublin, and begins to parody the Catholic mass as he prepares to shave his face.  He calls back down “the dark winding stairs” (1.6) for Stephen Dedalus to join him in the mild morning air.

Anyone unfamiliar with Joyce’s first novel might mistake Buck for the protagonist of Ulysses; his wit and charisma dominate the book’s first few pages.  Those who have read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, however, have followed Stephen from infancy through school to his young adulthood’s grand aspiration to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (P 235).  Called to a life of creative freedom beyond the encumbering “nets” of his family, his religion, and his nation, Stephen left Dublin in April 1902 and moved to Paris.  His self-imposed exile was cut short about a year later when he was called home to say goodbye to his dying mother before her passing on June 26th, 1903.  Nearly a year after her death, Stephen remains in Dublin, paralyzed by guilt, poverty, and frustration over his failure to realize his lofty ambitions.  At this point, Stephen is more Icarus than Daedalus.  Plus, he’s living with Buck, a frenemy who mercilessly needles him, as well as Haines, a well-meaning but naïve Oxford-educated Englishman who treats him as a curiosity.

Before we get into the events of the episode, let’s situate “Telemachus” in the context of its two principle correspondences: Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  The Odyssey begins with Telemachus, Odysseus’s adolescent son, depressed and surrounded by suitors vying to marry his mother and aiming to usurp his rightful kingdom on the Greek island of Ithaca.  Telemachus has grown up without a father’s guidance because Odysseus/Ulysses has been away for roughly 17 years fighting the Trojan War (as depicted in The Iliad) and then wandering around the Mediterranean on a troubled journey home (as depicted in The Odyssey).  Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with Prince Hamlet mourning the death of his father and seething over his mother’s hasty remarriage to his uncle Claudius, who has usurped the Prince’s rightful throne.  Both Hamlet and Telemachus begin their respective stories in a state of angst and dispossession, and both are sons without fathers. In these and other ways, Stephen Dedalus fits into their lineage.  They are his literary ancestors.

However, it is Buck Mulligan, whose character corresponds to the usurpers Claudius in Hamlet and Antinous in The Odyssey, who occupies the spotlight at the outset of Ulysses.  As he blasphemously mocks the liturgy, Stephen emerges onto the rooftop; Buck “ben[ds] toward him and ma[kes] rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head” (1.12-13), acting as if Stephen is possessed by a demon.  At this gesture specifically and at his situation generally, Stephen is “displeased and sleepy” (1.13).  Buck’s continued parody uses scientific terminology to describe the miracle of transubstantiation; he is a blasphemous atheist, a strict materialist.  You may notice that the novel’s opening scene depicts a fairly unremarkable event (an obnoxious young man shaves his face while antagonizing his dour roommate), but the epic setting of the tower and Joyce’s careful prose instill a sense that each detail is laden with meaning and significance.  Perhaps Buck’s “equine” face and “oak” hued hair signal that he is a Trojan horse (1.15-16), but those details also simply describe the guy’s head.  Joyce relied on this tension between realism and metaphor as a driving force in his writing from his earliest surviving works (the “Epiphanies”).  Joyce intended to “convert the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own” (S. Joyce 103-04).  Through Ulysses’s layered correspondences, Joyce elevates ordinary people and situations into the realm of myth, and the genius of the text allows for multiple levels of interrogation.  Rest assured, though, that you don’t have to consider the figurative significance of each and every detail in order to understand or even enjoy this novel – certainly not on a first reading. 

That said, we should pause a moment to consider the word “Chrysostomos” (1.26).  This one word sentence, an interruption in the narration, provides our first access to Stephen’s inner monologue. He notices Buck’s “white teeth glistening here and there with gold points” (1.25-26) and thinks of St. John Chrysostomos, “the Church father famed for his rhetorical skill” (Benstock 3).  Also, Chrysostomos is Greek for “golden mouthed” (Gifford 14), which refers directly to the gold fillings in Buck’s mouth.  This label, the first of two Stephen will mentally apply to Buck in “Telemachus,” reveals Stephen’s incisive intelligence and erudition.  His inner monologue constantly makes references that will require most readers to open the Gifford book of annotations for explanation. My general advice: seek explanations for the allusions that genuinely pique your curiosity, but please don’t feel compelled to look up everything that you don’t know.  Lots of stuff is going to fly over your head.  Let it.

“In friendly jest” (1.35), Buck starts teasing Stephen over his name: Stephen (a martyr) Dedalus (a cunning inventor).  Note Buck’s repeated attempts to apply names and labels to Stephen in these opening pages: “Kinch,” “fearful jesuit,” “absurd,” “jejune jesuit,” “the bard,” “poor dogsbody,” “sinister,” “hyperborean,” “lovely mummer,” “impossible person,” and “insane.”  Most of these labels are insults, and their quantity demonstrates the challenge of pinning down Stephen’s Protean character.  The man is too complex for easy definition.  Plus, these repeated efforts to name Stephen contrast with Stephen’s precision in labeling Buck.  Mulligan draws attention to his own “absurd” dactylic name, Malachi Mulligan, described as “tripping and sunny” with a “Hellenic ring” (1.41-42).  Stanley Sultan glosses the name Malachi to reference three individuals: a Hebrew prophet, an Irish king, and an Irish archbishop (Sultan 40); therefore, Buck’s given name primes him to lead a new spiritual movement.

Finally breaking his silence, Stephen asks, “How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?” (1.49).  Haines, a visiting Oxford student interested in Irish culture, woke Stephen up in the night, yelling through a nightmare about shooting a black panther.  Concerned that another nightmare might prompt Haines to fire a shot, Stephen asks where Haines keeps his gun case. In fact, James Joyce (the source for Stephen) lived in the Sandycove Martello Tower for part of 1904 with two other young men, Oliver St. John Gogarty (the source for Buck Mulligan) and Samuel Trench (the source for Haines).  One night, Trench had a nightmare and actually shot his revolver at the fireplace beside Joyce’s bed. Later that night, when Trench woke up a second time yelling about a panther, Oliver St. John Gogarty grabbed the gun from Trench, saying “Leave him to me!” and fired at the pans hanging on the wall above Joyce’s head.  The pans came clattering down on top of Joyce, who got up and left the Tower in the middle of the night, never to return (JJ 175).  In Ulysses, Stephen threatens to leave the Tower if Haines stays. In this way, Stephen brandishes “exile,” one of the three weapons with which he armed himself back in Portrait (along with “silence” and “cunning” (P 229)).

Buck agrees that Haines is “dreadful” (1.51), but his antagonism remains trained on Stephen.  He intrusively “thrust[s] a hand into Stephen’s upper pocket” (1.67-68) to borrow a “dirty crumpled handkerchief” (1.71) which he derides as “the bard’s noserag! A new colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen” (1.73).  Stephen remains silent, presumably unamused, as Buck elaborates on “the snotgreen sea” as “our great sweet mother” (1.78, 80).  The notion of the sea-mother shifts Buck’s attention to Stephen’s late mother and the events surrounding her death.  Buck says, “the aunt thinks you killed your mother” (1.88), referring to Stephen’s unwillingness to kneel down and pray for his mother on her deathbed, refusing her dying wish.  Buck finds “something sinister” (1.94) in Stephen and considers him overly hyperborean, a term Nietzsche uses to describe an elite intellectual class aloof from the common masses and independent of Christian morality and (Slote).  While we may be inclined to agree with Buck’s condemnation of Stephen’s cruel denial of his mother’s final request, we might also find reasons to respect Stephen’s integrity.  In A Portrait, Stephen assumes a Luciferian posture in stating that he “will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church” (P 229); because Stephen no longer believes, praying at his mother’s bedside would have been blasphemously insincere.  Paradoxically, his refusal to pray is respectful of God.  For this decision, he feels immense guilt, but not regret.

The paragraph beginning at line 100 conveys this guilt while initiating the reader into the novel’s revolutionary technique of shifting quickly between narrative modes.  This paragraph begins with highly detailed realism (“the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve”) to lyricism (“pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart”) to the narration of Stephen’s nightmare of his mother (“silently, in a dream, she had come to him after her death”) back to description and imagery (“across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea [...] a dull green mass of liquid”) which Stephen then associates with the memory of his mother’s deathbed (“the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting”).  Joyce doesn’t provide much if any guidance through these shifts, but he is subtly training us in how to read this novel.

Buck asks about the pants he handed down to Stephen, drawing attention to Stephen’s embarrassing poverty and significant indebtedness (we learn in the next episode that he owes Buck £9, roughly equivalent to $2,700 in 2020’s money).  Masking his antagonism as generosity, Buck offers to give him another pair of pants, but Stephen “can’t wear them if they are grey” (1.120) because he is still wearing black in bereavement.  Again, you might be tempted to agree with Buck’s over Stephen’s absurd contradictions: “He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers” (1.122).  But that’s an oversimplification of the nuances of Stephen’s situation: his sincere grief is made all the more painful by his guilt.[1]

Buck continues to alternate between aggressive thrusts and testing embraces.  He casually tells Stephen that there’s gossip around town that Stephen has “g. p. i.” (1.128), a euphemism for syphilis.[2]  Not a rumor you want out there.  Buck then shoves a mirror in Stephen’s face and demands he look at himself. We get our first sustained access to Stephen’s inner monologue: “Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too” (1.136-37). Stephen eventually offers a witticism, identifying the broken mirror as “a symbol for Irish art.  The cracked lookingglass of a servant” (1.146). This symbolism reflects Joyce’s own rejection of the early 20th century Irish literary movement as introspective, warped, self-pitying, and submissive.  Stephen’s pithy expression reminds Buck of his cleverness, and he seeks to ingratiate himself out of fear that he might end up disparaged by Stephen’s depiction of him in a future work of literature.  Sorry, Mulligan/Gogarty.  Too little, too late. 

Hoping to ease the tension of their intellectual dueling and mutual distrust, Buck entices Stephen to join the literary movement and Hellenize Ireland.  He links his arm with Stephen’s (as Cranly did toward the end of A Portrait) and attempts to shift Stephen’s attention towards a common enemy, the Englishman Haines, suggesting they “give [Haines] a ragging” (1.163), launching Stephen’s mind to imagine the scene of Clive Kempthorpe’s hazing at Oxford.  Stephen, who detests violence, would prefer to “let [Haines] stay” (1.177) than to instigate this sort of cruelty.  He also seems to associate this sort of chauvinism with the phrases “to ourselves” (the Sinn Fein Irish independence movement), “new paganism” (an avant-garde movement) and “omphalos” (an esoteric Greek word explained by Stuart Gilbert to mean the Delphic navel of the earth, the “seat of prophetic power […] linking up the generations of mankind” (Gilbert 53).  In this context, Buck seems to have conceived of the Martello Tower – a protuberance which resembles a belly button – as a new Delphi.  Stephen “free[s] his arm quietly” (1.182) from Buck’s embrace in silent rejection of these appeals.  When forced to choose between union and independence, Stephen will almost always choose the artistic freedom afforded by independence.

Faced with this rejection, Buck asks, “What have you against me now?” (1.180). Stephen explains that he was offended when Buck once referred to him as “only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead” (1.198-99).  Buck explains that he “didn’t mean to offend the memory of [Stephen’s] mother” (1.214-15) – as a medical professional, he is desensitized to death. But Buck has misunderstood Stephen, who is “not thinking of the offence to [his] mother” but rather “of the offence to [himself]” (1.218, 220).  Here, Stephen might mean that he was offended by Buck’s callous and harsh language, but we might also take him to mean he was offended by Buck saying, “it’s only Dedalus” (emphasis mine), thus minimizing Stephen’s importance.  “Impossible person” (1.222) indeed.  As Sam Slote puts it, Stephen “has one more net to fly by, the net of his own pretentious egoistic self-determination” (Slote 40).

Haines calls to Mulligan from within the tower, and Buck heads down to make breakfast.  As he descends the stairs, he pauses to implore Stephen to “give up the moody brooding” (1.235-36), echoing Claudius in Hamlet and Antinous in The Odyssey.  Stephen hears him singing Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus?” in the stairwell.  Coincidentally, Stephen sang exactly this song at the request of his crying mother on her deathbed, so Buck’s unfortunate song choice prompts Stephen to remember his mother’s life and death even more poignantly. Take note here that “a cloud began to cover the sun” (1.248) at around 8:15 am; we will see this same cloud in the “Calypso” episode, which also begins at 8:00 am but across town in the home of Mr. Leopold Bloom.  We will use the term “parallax” to describe moments when the novel shows us the same object, person, or idea from different perspectives (more on that idea to come).   After thinking of Turko the Terrible, a popular pantomime about a magical kingdom, Stephen broods on memories of his mother and recalls again her reproachful appearance to him in a dream.  He mentally recites a Latin prayer for the dying.  Horrified by these haunting images, his inner monologue exclaims, “No, mother! Let me be and let me live” (1.279).  This assertive statement echoes Telemachus standing up to his mother, Penelope, in the first book of The Odyssey.

From within the tower, Buck calls up to Stephen that “breakfast is ready” (1.284).  He is so traumatized by his thoughts regarding his mother that he hears even Buck’s voice as “friendly” (1.283).  He will gladly go into the tower to escape these dark thoughts.  Buck’s head pops out of the staircase to tell Stephen that Haines is charmed by his witticism about the cracked mirror and encourages Stephen to get money from the Englishman.  Stephen announces that he will receive his monthly salary from his job as a schoolteacher this morning, and Buck’s spirits lift as he foresees getting “glorious drunk” (1.297) on Stephen’s tab later today.  Mulligan descends the stairs again, and Stephen notices that Buck left his shavingbowl on the parapet.  He contemplates whether to “bring it down? Or leave it there all day” as an emblem of their “forgotten friendship” (1.307-08).  He decides to do Buck this favor, and carrying the bowl reminds him that he also “carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes” (1.311) as a schoolboy. He contemplates his physical and spiritual development since those days, thinking “I am another now and yet the same” (1.311-12).  Questions of the continuity of our character and discontinuity of our persons will arise in characters’ minds repeatedly over the course of the novel.  Regardless of whether Stephen is the same as he was as a child, he remains “a server of a servant” (1.312); he serves Buck, a servant of Ireland, in turn a servant of England, just as he served the Clongowes priests, servants to Rome.  Presented with these heavy, systemic layers of subservience, perhaps we now begin to appreciate the strength of spirit and unwavering commitment required of Stephen to free himself.         

The setting shifts to “the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower” (1.313) where Buck prepares a full pan-fried breakfast for the three young men.  Smoke from the stove begins to fill the room, and Buck asks Haines, the shadowy “tall figure” (1.319) sitting on the hammock, to open the door.  Haines asks the whereabouts of the key to the tower, and Buck responds that “Dedalus has it” (1.323) because he pays the rent.  In fact, the key is already in the lock, and Haines turns it to open the door to the morning’s “light and bright air” (1.328).  Buck finishes cooking, again parodies religious language in his mock blessing, and then curses when he realizes that “there’s no milk” (1.336) for his tea because the milkwoman is late in her delivery to the tower.  Buck demands that he “wants Sandycove milk” (1.342-43), contrasting with Stephen’s more cosmopolitan suggestion that they use lemon to flavor their tea. 

English Haines announces the milkwoman’s approach and comments on the strength of Buck’s tea, prompting Mulligan to quote from a crude Irish folk song: “when I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said.  And when I makes water I makes water” (1.357-58).  Making water = urinating, so “don’t make them in the one pot” (1.362).  Tongue-in-cheek, Buck then presents this lyric as an item for inclusion in the book Haines plans to write about Irish culture.  Haines’s interest in the Irish is essentially condescending, but it lacks malice.  Buck tries to involve Stephen in the joke of elevating Mother Grogan’s scatological humor to the lofty heights of the Hindu sacred text of the Upanishads or the Welsh Mabinogion’s tales; Stephen “gravely” (1.372) declines to play along.  Rather, he suggests that Mother Grogan more likely shares kinship with Mary Ann, a bawdy character from Irish folk songs.  Buck slices bread and sings a song featuring Mary Ann.

With imagery that alludes to Athena’s entrance in Book 1 of The Odyssey, the milkwoman enters the tower.  Stephen’s inner monologue vividly imagines this old woman milking the cows this morning and identifies her as the archetypal Old Mother Ireland, worn haggard from centuries of oppression.  In “scornful silence” (1.418), Stephen’s thoughts reveal his resentment toward the Irish Mother’s preference of Dr. Buck over him.  Haines speaks Irish to her, which she mistakes as French, evidencing the shortcomings of an Irish Mother who does not recognize her own language.  Certainly, there’s a touch of irony in Haines speaking Irish, and the Englishman holds the opinion that they “ought to speak Irish in Ireland” (1.431-32) … rather patronizing, especially given that the English outlawed the language.  Buck pays most of the bill, and the milkwoman leaves.

The men then review the day’s agenda: Stephen will go teach (and receive his monthly salary) this morning, Buck is eager to drink on Stephen’s dime, Haines needs to visit the National Library, but first they must wash themselves with a swim in the bay.  Stephen is teased for rarely bathing.  His hydrophobia may be rooted in a rejection of his baptism or PTSD from being shouldered into pondscum as a kid back at Clongowes, but we learn in the “Ithaca” episode that his last bath occurred eight months ago.  Stephen suggests that “all Ireland is washed by the gulfstream” (1.476), but I’m not buying it.  Pretty gross.  As they prepare to leave the tower, Haines says to Stephen, “I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me” (1.480).  Stephen attributes Haines’s interest in his mind and the Irish culture as an effort to “wash and tub and scrub” (1.481) away his English guilt, noted as “Agenbite of inwit” (1.481) (Middle English for “remorse of conscience” (Gifford 22)) and Lady Macbeth’s sleep-washing of her bloody hands (“yet here’s a spot” (1.482)).  So, Stephen recalls centuries-old expressions of guilt in his oppressor’s language to imply the longevity of English subjugation of the Irish.  Dude’s wicked smart.

With a covert kick under the table, Buck begins to hype Stephen’s theory about Hamlet, hoping that Stephen will play along.  Rather rudely, Stephen asks if he would profit financially from contributing his witticisms to Haines’s project.  Haines ducks the awkwardness of Stephen’s blunt solicitation and walks away, and Buck then rebukes Stephen’s tactlessness.  Remember, though, that Stephen is poor.  His family is destitute.  At the forefront of his mind, “the problem is to get money.  From whom? From the milkwoman or from him. It’s a toss up, I think” (1.497-98).  Regardless of whether he seeks income from poor Old Ireland or wealthy England, he “see[s] little hope” (1.501) from either. Buck offers himself as a source of support…I wouldn’t count on it.

In anticipation of his swim in Forty Foot bathing area, “Mulligan is stripped of his garments” (1.510) (an allusion to the Stations of the Cross), and Stephen prepares to walk to his teaching job in Dalkey by putting on his wide brimmed “Latin quarter hat,” “taking his ashplant” walking cane, and dropping “the huge key in his inner pocket” (1.530).  They descend the ladder to the ground and, walking to the water, Haines inquires about the tower. Buck explains that they were built by the English to defend the coast against an anticipated Napoleonic invasion; he also claims that that their tower is “the omphalos,” meaning both the architectural source for the other towers as well as the center of his secular Irish literary movement.

Haines comments that the tower and the rocky coast of Sandycove remind him of Elsinore (the setting for much of Shakespeare’s Hamlet) and presses Stephen on his Hamlet theory, but Buck claims to need “a few pints” (1.548) before he can listen to the absurd complexity of Stephen’s argument: “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father” (1.555-56).  Baffled, Haines offers halting comments on Hamlet, receiving no reply from Stephen.  Haines tosses out “a theological interpretation” of the play, “the Father and Son idea.  The Son striving to be atoned with the Father” (1.577-78), thus adding the flavor of divinity to the theme of father-son consubstantiality.  These ideas seem inadequately developed here, but they will be expounded upon in the “Scylla & Charybdis” episode when Stephen finally delivers his much anticipated Hamlet lecture in the National Library.

Buck recites his “Ballad of Joking Jesus” as he “caper[s]” (1.600) down to the water.  More blasphemy.  More pee jokes.  Buck may be revealing himself to be something of a one-trick pony.  But he is funny enough, as Haines laughs at Buck’s clowning before checking himself now that he’s walking alone with Stephen.  He attempts to engage Stephen on questions of religious faith and a “personal God” (1.613), but Stephen treats Haines similarly to Hamlet’s toying with Polonius.  Haines removes from his pocket “a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone” (1.615-16), which may symbolize emerald Ireland as a charming trinket in England’s possession.  Still, he accepts the cigarette Haines has offered.  Stephen’s silent monologue imagines Buck and Haines returning to the tower in the dark tonight and presciently foresees Buck asking for the key.  Stephen claims legitimate possession because he paid the rent.  In the Linati schema, Joyce listed “the dispossessed son in struggle” as the “meaning” for the “Telemachus” episode.  Stanley Sultan explains: “the struggle is for rule of the Martello tower, the common home of the poet and the scientist, [and] the symbol of control is, quite properly, the key. Ancient tradition held that the poet rules Ireland, that he sits on the right hand of the king in council, and that his wisdom prevails.  Correspondingly, Stephen possesses the key.  But today it changes hands” (Sultan 38).  As we shall soon see.

You have to admire Haines’s persistence in trying to engage Stephen, who is more-or-less ignoring the Englishman.  However, Stephen realizes that his antipathy toward Haines might be unfair; the Englishman may be a dolt, but he is “not all unkind” (1.635).  As a result, Stephen relaxes his posture and explains that he serves “two masters, … an English and an Italian” – the British Empire and the Roman Catholic Church – “and a third [Ireland]… who wants [him] for odd jobs” (1.638, 641).  Haines, expressing his English guilt while avoiding personal responsibility, says that “we feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame” (1.648-49).  In today’s parlance, Haines is struggling to unpack his privilege.

The reference to “history” sends Stephen’s mind, which was already spinning with Christian theology, into thoughts of Church history, particularly its engagement of the controversy and various heresies surrounding the Trinity and consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  Stephen notes the connection between these tidbits of Church history and the “words Mulligan had spoken a moment since” (1.660-61) when he mocked Stephen’s Hamlet theory regarding father-son consubstantiality.  The heavy father-son motif here at the outset of the novel points to Stephen’s own father, Simon Dedalus, a man woefully inadequate to meeting his son’s needs.  We’ll spend time with Simon in the episodes ahead.

Haines’s anti-Semitism brings Stephen crashing back to earth from his inner monologue’s elevated plane.  Fear of the influence of “German jews” (1.667) hints at the hostile environment endured by the novel’s second protagonist, Mr. Leopold Bloom, a Jewish man.  Stephen passes by a businessman and a boatman, overhearing their discussion of the drowned corpse expected to be swept in with the afternoon tide, and he imagines the “swollen bundle” (1.676) appearing on shore.  They make it to the bathing area, where a young man carefully navigates the rocks “frogwise” (1.680) and an old priest pops out of the water. Mulligan mockingly crosses himself as the priest scuttles past.  Mulligan knows the unnamed young man, and they share the latest news from Bannon, a mutual friend, who has a new romantic interest, a “sweet young thing … photo girl” (1.685) – through the novel’s parallax technique, we will soon learn the identity of this young woman.  They also discuss Seymour, another friend, who has changed his career from medicine to the military and is apparently involved with a rich red-headed girl. The stereotype that “redheaded women buck like goats” (1.706) establishes the ugly attitudes toward women present in this society.

Buck again references Nietzsche and strips down.  The young man in the water does the backstroke.  Haines smokes. Stephen begins to leave, but Buck calls him back, issuing a command: “Give us that key, Kinch.”  He veils his aggression by supplying a practical purpose for this demand: “to keep my chemise flat” (1.721).  Stephen, despite his earlier assertion that “it is mine, I paid the rent,” relinquishes his ownership of the tower by laying the key across Buck’s shirt.  Perhaps emboldened, Buck also demands money “for a pint,” and Stephen again obliges.  Haines bids Stephen farewell, and Buck and Stephen agree to meet at The Ship, a pub in town, at 12:30 pm.    

As Stephen begins his walk to work, he hears a nearby belltower chime three times, signifying that the time is now 8:45 am (three chimes for each quarter past the hour).  Stephen hears these chimes as three lines of Latin from the Catholic deathbed prayer recalled earlier in the episode; the Latin translates to “May the glittering throng of confessors, bright as lilies, gather about you. May the glorious choir of virgins receive you” (Gifford 19).  Stephen remains utterly haunted by the memory of his mother’s death. 

Downcast and dispossessed, Stephen inclines himself to self-imposed exile, realizing that he “will not sleep here tonight.  Home also [he] cannot go” (1.740). Buck calls to him from the water, and Stephen waves in reply before silently sniping Buck with a final label: “Usurper” (1.743).

Works Cited

Birmingham, Kevin. “On Joyce and Syphilis.” Harper’s Magazine. 31 July, 2014.

Benstock, Bernard. “Telemachus.” James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays. Edited by Clive Hart and

David Hayman. University of California Press, 2002.

Hayman, David. Ulysses, the Mechanics of Meaning. University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother's Keeper: a Memoir of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Da Capo Press,

2003.

Slote, Sam. Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Sultan, Stanley. The Argument of Ulysses. Wesleyan University Press, 1987.

Ellmann, Richard.  James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.