REPORT ON JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

EPISODE 1--TELEMACHUS (2-23)

The novel begins at 8:00am on Thursday, June 16, 1904. It has been "two years, one month, and nineteen days" (Adams 124) since the last diary entry of Stephen Dedalus at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen has returned to Ireland from his self-imposed exile in Paris to be with his dying mother. He appears to have taken an Icarus-like fall from the grand picture he draws of himself at the end of Portrait as the potential poet/savior of Ireland. It is revealed, for example, in the Circe episode that Stephen broke his glasses the night before on June 15. He is currently living in a disused Martello tower (a circular masonry fort) on the outskirts of Dublin, with Buck Mulligan, a medical student, and Haines, an English scholar researching Irish culture.

As the novel opens, Mulligan performs "a mockery" (8) of the Mass while he shaves. When Stephen enters, Mulligan says "there is something sinister in [him]" (5) for refusing his mother's dying request that he knell and pray by her bedside, and he asks Stephen "what have you against me now?" (7). Stephen's refusal to serve or give in to the demands of the Catholic Church is clearly emphasized.

The Englishman Haines joins the two for breakfast, and Mulligan continues to chide Stephen for his offense to his mother. They are soon interrupted by an old milk woman who becomes for Stephen "a personification of Ireland" (Campbell 101). He sees her as "a wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror [Haines] and her gay betrayer [Mulligan]"(14). After breakfast the three men walk out to the seaside where Mulligan swims and Haines and Stephen share a smoke. Stephen explains to Haines that he is "the servant of two masters . . . an English ['the imperial British state'] and an Italian ['the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church']" (20). The "third . . . there is who wants [him] for odd jobs" (20) is, of course, Ireland. Stephen leaves Haines and walks on to his job at Mr. Deasy's school, a local private school for boys. As the episode ends, Mulligan asks Stephen for the key to the tower which he reluctantly gives up. As Bernard Benstock points out, "although Stephen has paid the rent for the tower, he surrenders the key to Buck, having already resigned himself to being dispossessed" (11). The final word of the episode--"Usurper"(23)--refers to Mulligan, whom Stephen comes to see as his betrayer.

The first four books of The Odyssey describe Odysseus's son Telemachus, specifically the helplessness he feels at the mercy of the suitors and his subsequent longing for his father's return. The goddess Athena in the guise of Mentor visits Telemachus as a messenger and tells him first to try once more to convince the suitors to leave and that if his efforts fail (which, of course, they do) to sail away from Ithaca in search of news of his father. Stephen assumes the role of Telemachus, and Mulligan fulfills "his Homeric role as Antinous, the chief suitor, usurping Telemachus's kingdom" (Benstock 12). Mulligan's insistence that Stephen "give up the moody-brooding" (9) echoes "Antinous's blustering speech to Telemachus after the suitors refuse [his] appeal . . . that they end the state of siege in Odysseus's house" (Gifford 18).

The old milk woman, described as "a messenger . . . to serve or to upbraid" (14), assumes the role of Athena who chides or upbraids Telemachus for his boyish refusal to confront the suitors and who serves him by sending him in search of news of his father (Gifford 21). This search for the father theme is prevalent throughout Ulysses, especially in Stephen's relationship with Leopold Bloom. Though Benstock argues that "there is little evidence" in the first episode of this search for the father quest (12), lines such as "the son striving to be atoned with the father" (18) clearly imply otherwise. Mulligan's assertion that Stephen is "Japhet in search of a father" (18) also recalls Telemachus's sailing for news of his own long-lost father (Gilbert 104) . Even the references to Stephen as a "boatman" (21) and the name of the pub he visited the night before ("The Ship" [23]) imply his role as Telemachus in search of a father.

Many of the themes prevalent in Dubliners and in Portrait are repeated in this episode. Joyce's quarrel with the Catholic Church appears in Mulligan's parody of the Mass and in Stephen's refusal to knell and pray by his dying mother's side. His sense of outrage over England's abuse of Ireland is reflected in the negative depiction of Haines as a "dreadful . . . ponderous Saxon" (4) who says to Stephen and Mulligan when the old milk woman presents a bill, "pay up and look pleasant" (15).

Joyce's attack on Ireland as its own betrayer is also emphasized. Not only is Mulligan described as a "usurper" (23), but because Stephen recognizes his subservient role to Mulligan, he sees himself as "a server of a servant" (11). As noted earlier, the old milk woman, as a symbol of Ireland, serves "her conqueror [Haines] and her gay betrayer [Mulligan]" (14). Even Stephen's vision of "his own image in cheap dusty mourning [clothes] between their gay attires" (18) suggests how the English and the Irish sympathizers have bettered themselves at the expense of the citizens of Ireland. Joyce's refusal to support Irish literary movements also shows up in his description of Irish art as "the cracked lookingglass of a servant"(6).

The feeling in Portrait that Stephen expresses about being trapped by his family is repeated here in a number of references to his mother. Her memory, for example, becomes "a cloud . . . shadowing" Dublin Bay and turning it into "a bowl of bitter waters" (9). His passionate plea--"no mother. Let me be and let me live" (l0)--clearly recalls his need to escape from family ties.

Adams, Robert M. James Joyce: Common Sense and Beyond. New York: Random House,

1968.

Benstock, Bernard. "Telemachus." James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays. Ed.

Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P. 1-16.

Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Gilbert, Stewart. James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1958.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage International, 1990.