Telemachus: Who's Your Daddy?

"O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead."

RECAP: Stephan Dedalus is still in mourning from his mother's death. He hangs out with his friend Buck Mulligan, a medical student, and Haines, an English academic. They have breakfast, order some milk from an old Irish milkmaid, and swim in the sea.

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I know Stephen Dedalus from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a book I mostly remember being read aloud by a professor while I was experiencing a mid-grade fever in a stuffy room with sunlight filtering through the window to warm my back. It was the fall semester, around the time the trees are all barren and the days can't decide between summer temperatures or freezing rain. I was somewhere between delirium and sleep, which is how I imagine gurus meditate, and also how I feel Joyce is meant to be read. The language rolled over me, the tide crashing just when it was lulling me to close my eyes, like the Irish sea Joyce wrote so much about. I loved Portrait, but I've always been wary of Ulysses -- as I've continually heard it's the greatest novel in the history of the English language and Joycean scholars will eviscerate you for any misinterpretations. So Stephen was a welcome familiarity and I'm glad to see his daddy issues are still brimming at the surface.

But it's Stephen's mother we're mostly concerned with right now. If you've never read Portrait, you should know that it's a bildungsroman, with Stephen spending most of his time searching for identity while struggling with his absent father, class inequality and religion (as well as Irish politics in general), and his art. In the end, he decides to leave his beloved, religious mother for his art. In Ulysses, we have the consequences of this search of self: Stephen is haunted with guilt and traumatized by his mother's death because he refused to pray with her on her deathbed.

I've always found it interesting that scholars seem to focus more on the absent fathers and son motifs in Joyce's fiction rather than the women-as-mother trope. When studying Portrait in class, I was, of course, drilled and then quizzed on how the Icarus-Daedalus myth and the Irish struggle against the British both echo and inform Stephen's search for his father and his own identity. And the daddy issues are A-PLENTY. But Stephen's always had mommy issues, struggling to fit every woman in his life in Portrait in either the Virgin or Whore archetype, whether sexually, religiously, or artistically. In this first episode of Ulysses, we have two women so far: Stephen's "beastly dead" mother and the old milkmaid.

"A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favor" (Joyce I.1.15)

The milkmaid is widely interpreted as Ireland herself, but she also acts as another mother presence (don't @ me with your mother's milk jokes). Stephen is awed at the sight of her, imagining her practical role in milking cows as both "a witch on her toadstool" and "a poor old woman," kindly taking care of the cows and milk-drinkers of her land (Joyce I.1.14). He's also jealous and scornful of her, feeling rejected when she seems to favor Buck because he's a medical student: "She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman; me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in God's likeness, the serpent's prey" (Joyce I.1.15).

Like I said, dude's got some issues with women.

Joyce is also throwing some shade here, critical of Irish citizens who are complicit in their own subjugation by the British (which, like, victim blaming, but okay, I can pick up what you're putting down, révolution!, sure). This shade is emphasized throughout the chapter with Haines, the Englishman scholar who speaks Gaelic and is #woke for Ireland and says things like "It seems history is to blame," all wistful and entirely oblivious to the real reason behind Irish suffering (Joyce I.1.21). He's also Antisemitic, which...oh, boy do we get into some Antisemitism in episode 2. There's class struggle and inequality in the milkmaid image as well, since Stephen is always insecure about being poorer than his friends (same) and emphasizes the servant/master imagery of the milkmaid when he tells Haines he is the unwilling "servant of two masters," the Church and Britain (Joyce I.1.21).

The sea section of the episode is by far my favorite. Stephen watches Buck wade into the sea while remembering a man who drowned recently and his own dying mother. Absolutely beautiful language and imagery.

Other notes:

• Buck Mulligan's actions are all a long parody of religious rituals - i.e. the famous bowl of lather that acts as his altar, which Stephen also carries around as he follows him downstairs.

• Buck's a total dick about Stephen's mom. When Stephen calls him out on it, Buck laughs it off and Stephen drops the subject.

• There are a lot of Irish folksongs and lullabies sung by Buck or the milkmaid, most of which remind Stephen of his mom and also reference Irish suffering or Irish revolt under British rule.

• The dad stuff is still here, too. Stephen is the episode's namesake, Telemachus, who mourns his absent father, Odysseus, and is abused by his mother's suitors. There's a lot of references to Shakespeare's Hamlet and pretty much every nickname Buck calls Stephen translates to "Who's your daddy?"

• Buck references the Greeks a lot, comparing the Irish sea to the Mediterranean and invoking the Odyssey in Latin: "Epi oinopa ponton" translating to upon the wine dark sea (Joyce I.1.6). Pretty much any time Joyce mentions the sea, it's well worth reading and paying attention.

#Ulysses

#amreading

#proustandprejudice

#TBR2019