This conversation with the unnamed man serves a few purposes — one is to set up a surprise about the “photo girl” you won’t really get until Episode 4– but it also showcases Mulligan’s alpha personality, and  the eagerness with which others approach him with the latest news.

Mulligan’s miming the sign of the cross might seem a little unclear. One reason is that there is a swimmer we’ve left out of the comic — an old man who climbs up a rock next to Mulligan and who is likely a priest, so Mulligan may be signalling that to the swimming man. He may also be making a joke (as several people do during the day) about Stephen’s mourning dress and hat making him look like  a priest.

Textual trivia. In the Rosenbach Manuscript of Ulysses, the line “red-headed women buck like goats” is followed with “and all creation simply gloats.” Now you know.

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

Stephen identifies with the drowned man.  In contrast, Mulligan is irrepressibly vital.  Joyce puts Mulligan’s disrobing and his getting ready to swim at the center of the narrative frame — which Rob picks up here.  As the chapter winds into its close, we see Mulligan asserting his dominance and power over Stephen, sealing Stephen’s determination to escape him and thereby sending Stephen on his journey.

Mulligan’s physical energy connects him with Antinoos, the chief of the suitors pursuing Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey.  The unnamed man in the water seems like a supplicant to Mulligan–which seems even clearer from Rob’s representation.  Their world, with its gossip and hierarchy, is a trap for Stephen–one of the masters he serves.

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

Haines has been tentatively probing Stephen, trying to learn something about his religious beliefs, his thoughts about Shakespeare, his thoughts about Mulligan — anything that will help him understand the strange Irish intellectual and perhaps be able to use him in his work.  Stephen has no interest in this, however, and the questions just make him feel more and more isolated.

In these panels, Stephen concludes that he cannot stay any longer at the tower, that he cannot be a part of Mulligan’s bankrupt intellectual project, even though he paid the rent on the tower. [n.b. -- in real life, Mulligan's counterpart, Oliver St. John Gogarty, was the one who paid the rent.]  He accurately guesses that Mulligan will ask him for the key, and he will become displaced and homeless.

Stephen’s dragging his ashplant, or walking stick, behind him further accentuates his feelings of powerlessness and impotence.  He calls it his “familiar,” like a magician’s assistant, calling his name.  Everything around Stephen seems to be crying out for him to take action, like his Odyssean counterpart Telemachus.  Even Haines reminds Stephen that he has the power to be his own master, but Stephen doesn’t see it yet.

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

Having finished his song, Mulligan runs down to the sea, where he and Haines will bathe.

Haines lingers behind with Stephen, trying to figure out how to react to Mulligan’s funny, if blasphemous song.  By doing so, he is also probably trying to learn something about an Irish intellectual’s relationship to religion generally and the Catholic church specifically.  A Hibernophile Englishman, Haines plays the role of an amateur anthropologist, absorbing everything he can about the peculiar habits of the natives.  Mulligan both encourages him and mocks him for this — Stephen keeps it at a distance.

There’s a conspicuous classical reference here–Mulligan’s flapping hands are associated with “Mercury’s hat.”  Just a few moments ago, Mulligan referred to himself as “Mercurial Malachi.”  When I first noticed this, I thought it was a direct link back to the Odyssey, imagining that Mercury visited Telemachus in Ithaca… but it’s Athena who visits him.

Mercury is the god of travellers, businessmen, messengers and the like. He’s not a bad match for Mulligan, as he is also associated with trickery and deception, particularly around money. Joyce’s schema for the chapter doesn’t say anything about Mercury, but he seems to be here anyway. Joyce’s first readers didn’t really know how closely the parallel to the Odyssey was built, though the title gives a pretty big clue. References like this one would have provided other reminders to the reader to keep Homer in the back of your mind as you read.

So if Mulligan is being associated with Mercury… what of it?  What message is he bringing here?

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

If you look up “Joking Jesus” on YouTube today, this is what comes up first.

With all of the talk about Hamlet and Gogarty and Irish history and Dublin, etc. etc., it’s easy to lose track of the power that this blasphemous little verse can have.  As we were saying about Mulligan’s parody of the mass at the beginnng of this episode, the blasphemy here would have been fairly shocking to pious people.

Does the song make sense to you so far?  If you haven’t had a lot of churchin’, it might not.  On the last page, for instance, when Mulligan sings “My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird,” he’s referring to the story of the Annunciation

The Annunciation by Francesco Albani, collection of The Hermitage

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus