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 totally lost Stephen, as the Englishman goes into his conspiracy theory about the German Jews taking over Britain.

Stephen, meanwhile, is having that moment familiar to all precocious young artists wherein he realizes he is wasting his gifts among idiots. After his vision of the purge of the heretics, background music by Palestrina, he gives himself a little sarcastic applause. He’s so smart! But surrounded by racists and spongers.

So when he hears about a man who has drowned in the harbor, he easily finds sympathy.

The reference to the drowned man also links back to the Odyssey, and to Odysseus’ supposed fate, lost with the rest of his crew for 10 years since the end of the Trojan war.  And given that our modern Odysseus is a Jew, Haines’ comments further paint him as an impatient suitor.

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

Haines’ interrogation of Stephen continues.  He’s confused by Stephen’s paradoxical attachment to the Catholic church despite not believing in God.  And he’s just told Stephen (in the last page) that he doesn’t see why Stephen can’t be free, be his own Master.  So here, Stephen explains why.

It is not surprising that an Irishman at the turn of the twentieth century would see himself as the servant of the British state and the Catholic church. But who is the third master Stephen mentions?

This is usually read as referring to Mulligan, as in Stephen’s thought that he is the “server of  a servant” when he carries Mulligan’s shaving bowl downstairs earlier in the episode.

So does Stephen seem interested in doing anything about his servitude? Does anything seem possible? What might it mean for Stephen to feel he is a servant to Britain and the church?

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus

Haines offers Stephen a cigarette, and asks directly about Stephen’s beliefs.

Haines has not spent much time around Stephen, but has heard enough and seen enough to assume that a person with such a strong bohemian affect can’t possibly believe in God, or at least not in the conventional God of the church.  After all, Haines knows that Stephen has refused to pray at his dying mother’s bedside–proof that Joyce’s attitude towards religion, and the Catholic church specifically, was complex.

On the one hand, he could not bring himself to believe. On the other, he had a profound respect for the culture and learning of the church; he knew more about it and its doctrines than most believers.  He took it very seriously, and he took his refusal to believe very seriously. His respect for the church amplified his defiance of it.  Stephen, who is to a large extent Joyce’s alter ego in Ulysses, clearly does not want to identify with Haines’ attitudes towards religion, but cannot pretend to really believe either.  We’ll watch Stephen continue to negotiate this paradox for… the rest of the book, really.

Rob has carefully drawn Haines’ cigarette case, which is described as a “smooth silver case in which twinkled a green  stone.”  It’s a deft symbol for the English Hibernophile… Ireland, of course, is often referred to as the “Emerald Isle,” as a beautiful green stone.  Its setting in a silver case also recalls a line from Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which England is referred to as a “precious stone set in a silver sea.”  Ireland has been substituted for England, but only as a kind of token.

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Reader’s Guide for I: Telemachus

Dramatis Personae for I: Telemachus