Mulligan calls to Stephen from within the tower, pulling Stephen out of a series of flashback visions of his mother.

He tells Stephen to come on down like “a good Mosey.”  Gifford, in Ulysses Annotated, parses this as “one who moves slowly or shuffles.”  But I think there’s a strong overtone of “Moses” in it too.  Later in the day, Stephen will think of Moses and his view from Mt. Pisgah, as he writes a “parable of the plums” rooted in modern Dublin life.

The way Rob presents this moment, with an enormous, distant horizon, gives you a strong contrast to the claustrophobic visions of the past.   There’s a long view before Stephen, (a view towards Britain and beyond that, Europe), but he’s pulled away from it by his tie to Mulligan, as well as by the past that haunts him.

<< previous | next >>

Again here, an explanation of what’s going on in the comic beggars what the comic itself does on this page.  Stephen is caught up in his “brooding brain,” [another example of the Uncle Charles Principle, as the word "brooding," which ostensibly comes from some kind of narrator, has been very much part of Stephen's thoughts in this scene.]  Stephen does another deep dive into memories of his mother’s death, bringing up wonderfully precise images–the “shapely fingernails” (Q: what are shapely fingernails?) stained red with the blood of squashed lice, etc.

The question I’ve been asking myself about this moment is “If we look at Stephen as a writer struggling to come into his own, can we better understand his struggle with the memory of his mother?”  Certainly his command to her to leave him alone and let him live makes some sense.  I imagine Stephen here is struggling between  a writer’s impulse to record every detail of what he remembers of her (almost in the style of an epiphany), and his terror at bringing back the horror-movie-style guilt and terror of her death.

And about that Latin… Professor Gifford gives us a translation from the “Layman’s Missal”: May the glittering throng of confessors, bright as lilies, gather about you. May the glorious choir of virgins receive you.” It is a prayer for the dying, which can be said (according to the missal via Gifford) to commend the dying person to God if there is no priest present.  This is what Stephen should have prayed, if he had prayed.

<< previous | next >>

We’re following Stephen into a ‘flashback’ of a scene that took place just before his mother’s death.  I like how dramatically we go from the wide open brightness of the tower and the sea, which, as Mulligan tells us, forgives all offences, to the dark and claustrophobic space of Stephen’s family home.

This passage requires less explication in this format than it does in the book, as the comic form allows us to create the scene in Stephen’s head–just as before with the image of his mother’s ghost, or old Clive Kempthorpe.

My thoughts are never far from Hamlet or from the Odyssey here.  But what are the ghosts telling him to do?  Stephen doesn’t seem to feel terribly guilty about not praying at his mother’s bedside, he doesn’t seem to feel an urge to repent… his strongest urge is perhaps to remember most vividly and honestly the things that have happened to him.   If you’re willing to play along with my hypothesis that Stephen’s journey in this novel is to find the true path of his development as an artist, it will be interesting to see what he does with the ghosts that haunt him and hold him back.

<< previous | next >>
View this Page of the Comic
Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus
Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

A few pages ago, Stephen looked out at Dublin Bay and thought of the scene at his mother’s deathbed, associating the view with the bile his mother had coughed up into a white bowl.  That image is still with him here, “a bowl of bitter waters.”

The cloud covering the sun will appear again in a few chapters, when Leopold Bloom  sees the same cloud at the same time from a different part of the city.  The observation of the same phenomenon from two different places invokes parallax, an important concept for Ulysses.  Parallax is a technique for finding the distance of a remote object, like a planet or star.  The wikipedia article will tell you how it works, but the basic principle is that when you see something from two points of view, you can figure out where it really is.  Our two eyes automatically use parallax to determine depth in the world around us.

Bloom, who has an active, if uninformed interest in astronomy, thinks about Parallax several times during the day, but it also is a kind of metaphor for Joyce’s method.  We see the phenomena of one day in the life of a City from several different perspectives, and we need to take more than one perspective into account to find the real depth of the story.

Rob’s drawing reinforces this idea–we look from a POV that’s different from Stephen’s, and both of us can see the mail boat coming in to the harbor.

<< previous | next >>

Read the I: Telemachus Comic

Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus