| Time: 2:00 P.M., Thursday, June 16, 1904 Scene: the National Library. Organ: the brain Art: literature Colors: none Symbol: Stratford, London Technique: dialectic Correspondences: The Rock [on which Scylla dwells]--Aristotle, dogma, Stratford; The Whirlpool [Charybdis]--Plato, mysticism, London. Ulysses--Socrates, Jesus, Shakespeare. Background: In Book 12 of The Odyssey, Odysseus and his men re- turn from the Land of the Dead (see headnote to Hades, p. 104) to Circe's isle, where they fulfill Odysseus's pro- mise to bury Elpenor's body. Circe gives Odysseus "sail- ing directions". She tells him about the Sirens (Ulysses, Episode 11) and offers him a choice of routes: one by way of the Wandering Rocks (Ulysses, Episode 10) --"not even birds can pass them by"; and the other by way of the passage between Scylla and Charybdis. The latter route, which Odysseus chooses, offers a second choice: the ship that sails the side of the channel over- looked by the six-headed monster Scylla, that lives on "a sharp mountain peak", does so at the sacrifice of "one man for every gullet". But the ship that chooses the other side of the channel risks being totally engulfed by the "whirling / maelstrom" of Charybdis. Circe ad- vises Odysseus to "hug the cliff of Scylla", which he does. But she also urges him not to try to combat Scylla, a "nightmare [that] cannot die". When the time comes to face Scylla, Circe's bidding slips his mind, and try to combat Scylla he does--but in vain, because at the mo- ment of her strike Odysseus and his men are distracted by the terrifying vision of the "yawning mouth" of Charybdis |
* Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:1
--And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister.2 A
great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against
a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts,3 as one sees in real life.
He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking4 and a
step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.
A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
noiseless beck.
--Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts.5 One always
feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off.6 Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was
gone.
Two left.
--Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes before
his death.7
--Have you found those six brave medicals,8 John Eglinton9 asked with elder's
gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan10 he
calls it.
Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.
First he tickled her
Then he patted her
Then he passed the female catheter.
For he was a Medical
Jolly old Medi . . .11
--I feel you would need one more for Hamlet. Seven is dear to the mystic
mind.12 The shining seven W.B. calls them.13
Glittereyed his rufous skull14 close to his greencapped desklamp sought
the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed.15 He laughed
low: a sizar's laugh16 of Trinity: unanswered.
Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
Tears such as Angels weep.17
Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta.18
He holds my follies hostage.
Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen19 to free their sireland. Gaptoothed Kath-
leen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.20 And one
more to hail him: Ave, Rabbi:21 the Tinahely twelve.22 In the shadow of the glen
he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night by night. God speed.
Good hunting.23
Mulligan has my telegram.24
Folly. Persist.
--Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.25
--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.26 Cler-
gymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus.27 Art has to reveal to us
ideas, formless spiritual essences.28 The supreme question about a work of
art is out of how deep a life does it spring.29 The painting of Gustave Mor-
eau30 is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley,31 the words of
Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world
of ideas.32 All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer.33 Wall, tarnation strike me!
--The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely. Aristotle
was once Plato's schoolboy.34
--And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One can
see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.
Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath.35 Allfather, the heavenly
man.36 Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in
us at every moment.37 This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I
am the sacrificial butter.38
Dunlop,39 Judge,40 the noblest Roman of them all,41 A.E., Arval,42 the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H.,43 their master, whose identity is no secret to
adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge44 always watching to see if they can
help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light, born of an ensouled vir-
gin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of buddhi.45 The life esoteric46 is
not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off bad karma first.47 Mrs Cooper Oak-
ley48 once glimpsed our very illustrious sister H.P.B.‘s elemental.
O, fie! Out on't!49 Pfuiteufel! 50 You naughtn't to look, missus, so you naughtn't
when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.
Mr Best51 entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace a
notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about the
afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic
monologue, as shallow as Plato's.52
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:53
--Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with
Plato.
--Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his common-
wealth?54
Unsheathe your dagger definitions.55 Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.56
Streams of tendency and eons they worship.57 God: noise in the street:58 very
peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see.59 Through spaces smaller
than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks
into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.60 Hold to the
now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.61
Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
--Haines is gone, he said.
--Is he?
--I was showing him Jubainville's book.62 He's quite enthusiastic, don't you
know, about Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht.63 I couldn't bring him in to hear
the discussion. He's gone to Gill's64 to buy it.
Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
To greet the callous public.
Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish
In lean unlovely English.65
--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.
We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green twinkling
stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.66
--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg67 of Rus-
sell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are
born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.
For them
the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air
of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel,69 the musichall
song.68 France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarme70 but the
desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart,71 the life of Homer's
Phaeacians.72
From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
--Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems
Stephen MacKenna73 used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet.74 He
says: il se promene, lisant au livre de lui-meme,75 don't you know, reading the
book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don't you
know, a
provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
Hamlet
ou
Le distrait 76
Piece de shakespeare
He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:
--Piece de Shakespeare,77 don't you know. It's so French. The French point of
view. Hamlet ou . . .
--The absentminded beggar,78 Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
--Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but dis-
tressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.79
--A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him,80 Stephen said. Not for
nothing was he a butcher's son,81 wielding the sledded poleaxe82 and spitting
in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one.83 Our Father who
art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot.84 The bloodboltered
shambles in act five85 is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr
Swinburne.86
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.87
Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none
But we had spared . . .88
Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp.89 The devil and the deep
sea.90
--He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr
Best's behoof.91 Like the fat boy in Pickwick92 he wants to make our flesh
creep.
List! List! O list!
My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.
If thou didst ever . . .93
--What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of man-
ners.94 Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford95 as corrupt Paris lies
from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from limbo patrum,96 returning to the
world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.
Lifted.
--It is this hour of a day in mid June,97 Stephen said, begging with a swift
glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside.98 The
bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.99 Canvasclimbers100
who sailed with Drake101 chew their sausages among the groundlings.102
Local colour.103 Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
--Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank.104 But he does not stay to feed the
pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon105
has other thoughts.
Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola,106 make haste to help me!
--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow,107 made up in the cast-
off mail of a court buck,108 a wellset man with a bass voice.109 It is the ghost,
the king, a king and no king,110 and the player is Shakespeare111 who has studied
Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity112 in order to play the
part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,113 the young player who
stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,114 calling him by a name:
Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,115
bidding him list.116 To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young
Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare,117 who has died in Strat-
ford that his namesake may live for ever.
Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the
vesture of buried Denmark,118 a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his
own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince
Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did
not
draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dis-
possessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen,119
Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?120
--But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impa-
tiently.
Art thou there, truepenny?121
--Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean
when we read the poetry of King Lear what is it to us how the poet lived?
As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has said.122
Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip123 of the day, the poet's drinking,
the poet's debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal.
Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.
Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan,
Mananaan Maclir . . .124
How now, sirrah,125 that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
Marry, I wanted it.
Take thou this noble.126
Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's127 bed, clergyman's daughter.
Agenbite of inwit.
Do you intend to pay it back?
O, yes.
When? Now?
Well . . . No.
When, then?
I paid my way. I paid my way.128
Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner.129 You owe
it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.
Buzz. Buzz.130
But I, entelechy, form of forms,131 am I by memory because under everchanging
forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.132
A child Conmee saved from pandies.133
I, I and I. I.134
A.E.I.O.U.135
--Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries? John
Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for ever.
She died, for literature at least, before she was born.136
--She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw
him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his
children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he
lay on his deathbed.
Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror.137 Who brought me into this
world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. Liliata Rutilanti-
um.138
I wept alone.
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.139
--The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out
of it as quickly and as best he could.
--Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors
are volitional140 and are the portals of discovery.
Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian, softcreakfooted,
bald, eared and assiduous.
--A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of discovery,
one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates141 learn from Xanthip-
pe?142
--Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts
into the world.143 What he learnt from his other wife Myrto144 (absit nomen!),145
Socratididion's146 Epipsychidion,147 no man, not a woman, will ever know.148 But
neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures149 saved him from the
archons of Sinn Fein150 and their naggin of hemlock.
--But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.
His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to chide
them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless though
maligned.151
--He had a good groatsworth of wit,152 Stephen said, and no truant memory.
He carried a memory in his wallet153 as he trudged to Romeville154 whistling
The Girl I Left Behind Me.155 If the earthquake did not time156 it we should
know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds,157
the studded bridle158 and her blue windows.159 That memory, Venus and Adonis,
lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London.158 Is Katharine the
shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful.159 Do you think
the writer of Antony and Cleopatra, a passionate pilgrim,160 had his eyes in
the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire161 to
lie withal? Good: he left her and gained the world of men.162 But his boywo-
men163 are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent them by
males. He chose badly? He was chosen,164 it seems to me. If others have their
will Ann hath a way.165 By cock, she was to blame.166 She put the comether
on him, sweet and twentysix.167 The greyeyed goddess168 who bends over the
boy Adonis,169 stooping to conquer,170 as prologue to the swelling act,171 is a
boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than
herself.172
And my turn? When?
Come!
--Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
brightly.
He murmured then with blond delight for all:
Between the acres of the rye
These pretty countryfolk would lie.173
Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.174
A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its coop-
erative watch.175
--I am afraid I am due at the homestead.176
Whither away? Exploitable ground.
--Are you going? John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you
at Moore's tonight?177 Piper is coming.178
--Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?
Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.179
--I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting.180 If I can get away
in time.
Yogibogeybox181 in Dawson chambers. Isis Unveiled.182 Their Pali book183
we184 tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot185 he thrones
an Aztec logos,186 functioning on astral levels,187 their oversoul,188 maha-
mahatma.189 The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship,190
ringroundabout him.191 Louis H. Victory.192 T. Caulfield Irwin.193 Lotus ladies
tend them i'the eyes,194 their pineal glands195 aglow. Filled with his god, he
thrones, Buddh under plantain.196 Gulfer of souls, engulfer.197 Hesouls,
shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling,
they bewail.198
In quintessential triviality
For years in this fleshcase a Shesoul dwelt.199
--They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian said,
friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together a
sheaf of our younger poets' verses.200 We are all looking forward anxiously.
Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted,
shone.
See this. Remember.
Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen,201 hung on his ashplant-
handle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two index
fingers.
Aristotle's experiment.202 One or two? Necessity is that in virtue of which
it is impossible that one can be otherwise.203 Argal,204 one hat is one hat.
Listen.
Young Colum205 and Starkey.206 George Roberts207 is doing the commercial
part. Longworth will give it a good puff in the Express.208 O, will he? I liked
Colum's Drover.209 Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you think
he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian
vase.210 Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is
coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's
joke about Moore and Martyn?211 That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully
clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.212 Our
national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says.213 Moore is the man
for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron
kilt?214 O'Neill Russell?215 O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue.216
And his Dulcinea?217 James Stephens218 is doing some clever sketches. We
are becoming important, it seems.
Cordelia. Cordoglio.219 Lir's loneliest daughter.220
Nookshotten.221 Now your best French polish.222
--Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman . . .223
--O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.
--I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.
God ild you.224 The pigs' paper.225 Bullockbefriending.
Synge226 has promised me an article for Dana227 too. Are we going to be read?
I feel we are. The Gaelic league228 wants something in Irish. I hope you
will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.
Stephen sat down.
The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask
said:
--Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.
He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
chopine,229 and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:
--Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?230
--Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.
--Yes.
Christfox in leather trews,231 hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women
he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bul-
ly tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured
body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her
leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.232
--Yes. So you think . . .
The door closed behind the outgoer.
Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
brooding air.
A vestal's lamp.233
Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do
had he believed the soothsayer:234 what might have been: possibilities of
the possible as possible:235 things not known: what name Achilles bore when
he lived among women.236
Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned.237 And I heard the voice
of that Egyptian highpriest.238 In painted chambers loaded with tile-
books.239
They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of
death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
their will.
--Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most enig-
matic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so much.
Others abide our question.240 A shadow hangs over all the rest.
--But Hamlet is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind of
private paper, don't you know, of his private life.241 I mean, I don't care
a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty . . .
He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his defiance.
His private papers in the original. Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim in mo shagart.242
Put beurla243 on it, littlejohn.
Quoth littlejohn244 Eglinton:
--I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I
may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare
is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.
Bear with me.245
Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under wrinkl-
ed brows. A basilisk. E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca. Messer Brunetto,246 I
thank thee for the word.
--As we, or mother Dana,247 weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,
from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist
weave
and unweave his image.248 And as the mole on my right breast249 is where it
was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time
after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the
un-
living son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind,
Shelley says, is a fading coal,250 that which I was is that which I am and that
which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the
past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which
then I shall be.
Drummond of Hawthornden251 helped you at that stile.
--Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young.252 The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the
son.
Has the wrong sow by the lug.253 He is in my father. I am in his son.
--That mole is the last to go,254 Stephen said, laughing.
John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.255
--If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius256 would be a drug in
the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan257 admired so
much breathe another spirit.
--The spirit of reconciliation,258 the quaker librarian breathed.
--There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a
sundering.
Said that.
--If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over the
hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to
see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a man, shipw-
recked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles, prince of
Tyre?259
Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.260
--A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.261
--The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha262 is a constant
quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead to
the town.263
Good Bacon: gone musty.264 Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats.265 Cypherjugglers266
going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good masters?267
Mummed in names:268 A. E., eon:269 Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west
of the moon: Tir na n-og.270 Booted the twain and
staved.271
How many miles to Dublin?
Three score and ten, Sir.
Will we be there by candlelight?272
--Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
period.273
--Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his name
is, say of it?274
--Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita, that
which was lost.275 What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's child.276
My dearest wife, Pericles says, was like this maid. Will any man love the
daughter if he has not loved the mother?277
--The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L'art d'etre
grand . . .278
--Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
another image?
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all
men.279 Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupisci-
mus . . .280
--His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.
The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with
hope.
--I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of
the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George
Bernard Shaw.281 Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris.282 His articles on
Shakespeare in the Saturday Review283 were surely brilliant. Oddly enough
he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the sonnets.
The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke.284 I own that if the
poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more in harmony with
--what shall I say? --our notions of what ought not to have been.285
Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk's egg,286 prize
of their fray.
He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam?287 Dost
love thy man?
--That may be too, Stephen said. There's a saying of Goethe's which Mr
Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you
will get it in middle life.288 Why does he send to one who is a buonaroba,289
a bay where all men ride,290 a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood,291
a lordling292 to woo for him? He was himself a lord of language293 and had
made himself a coistrel294 gentleman and he had written Romeo and Juliet.295
Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed.296 He was overborne in a
cornfield first (a ryefield, I should say)297 and he will never be a victor in his
own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down.298 As-
sumed dongiovannism299 will not save him. No later undoing will undo the first
undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableed-
ing.300 If the shrew is worsted301 yet there remains to her woman's invisible
weapon.302 There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him
into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own
understanding of himself.303 A like fate awaits him and the two rages com-
mingle in a whirlpool.304
They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.305
--The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch
of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know
the
manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that
knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs
that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not endowed
with knowledge by his creator.306 That is why the speech (his lean unlovely
English)307 is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished,
what he would but would not,308 go with him from Lucrece's bluecircled ivory
globes309 to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted.310 He goes
back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an
old
dog licking an old sore.311 But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards
eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written
or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up.312 He is a ghost, a shadow
now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice,313 a voice
heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the
son
consubstantial with the father.
--Amen! was responded from the doorway.
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?314
Entr'acte.315
A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, then blithe
in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.316
--You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate,317 if I mistake not? he asked
of Stephen.
Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bau-
ble.
They make him welcome. Was du verlachst wirst du noch dienen.318
Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.319
He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself,
Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends,
stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on
crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into hea-
ven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand
of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick
and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.320
Glo --o --ri --a in ex --cel --sis De --o.321
He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.322
--Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion. Mr
Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of Shakespeare.
All sides of life should be represented.
He smiled on all sides equally.
Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:
--Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.
A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.
--To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.323
Mr Best turned to him.
--Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at the
D. B. C.324 He's gone to Gill's325 to buy Hyde's Lovesongs of Connacht.326
--I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
--The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played
Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin.327 Vining
held that the prince was a woman.328 Has no-one made him out to be an
Irishman? Judge Barton,329 I believe, is searching for some clues. He swears
(His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.330
--The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said, lifting
hisbrilliant notebook. That Portrait of Mr W. H. where he proves that the
sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.331
--For Willie Hughes,332 is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself.333 W. H.: who am I?
--I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the
colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very essence
of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.334 Tame
essence of Wilde.335
You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy's
ducats.
How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
For a plump of pressmen.336 Humour wet and dry.337
Wit. You would give your five wits338 for youth's proud livery he pranks in.339
Lineaments of gratified desire.340
There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime
send them.341 Yea, turtledove her.
Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.342
--Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking. The
mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.
Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His
mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.
--Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!
He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:
--The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense
debtorship for a thing done.343 Signed: Dedalus. Where did you launch it
from? The kips?344 No. College Green.345 Have you drunk the four quid? The
aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram! Malachi
Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer! O, you
priestified Kinchite!
Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue:
--It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did for
a gallus potion would rouse a friar,346 I'm thinking, and he limp with leching.
And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's347 sitting civil
waiting for pints apiece.
He wailed:
--And we to be there, mavrone,348 and you to be unbeknownst sending us
your conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like
the drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.349
Stephen laughed.
Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.
--The tramper350 Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard
you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule.351 He's out in pampooties352 to murder
you.
--Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.
--Murder you! he laughed.
Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of lights
in rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts.353 In words of words for words, palabras.354 Oisin
with Patrick.355 Faunman he met in Clamart woods,356 brandishing a winebottle.
C'est vendredi saint! 357 Murthering Irish. His image, wandering, he met. I
mine. I met a fool i'the forest.358
--Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
--. . . in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
Diary of Master William Silence has found the hunting terms . . .359 Yes? What
is it?
--There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the Freeman. He wants to see the files of the Kilkenny
People360 for last year.
--Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman? . . .
He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked, asked,
creaked, asked:
--Is he? . . . O, there!
Brisk in a galliard361 he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked with
voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most honest
broadbrim.362
--This gentleman? Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People? To be sure. Good day,
sir. Kilkenny . . . We have certainly . . .
A patient silhouette waited, listening.
--All the leading provincial . . . Northern Whig, Cork Examiner, Enniscor-
thy Guardian363. Last year, 1903 . . . Will you please? . . . Evans,364 conduct
this gentleman . . . If you just follow the atten . . . Or, please allow
me . . .
This way . . . Please, sir . . .
Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing dark
figure following his hasty heels.
The door closed.
--The sheeny!365 Buck Mulligan cried.
He jumped up and snatched the card.
--What's his name? Ikey Moses?366 Bloom.
He rattled on:
--Jehovah, collector of prepuces,367 is no more. I found him over in the museum
where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite.368 The Greek mouth that has never
been twisted in prayer.369 Every day we must do homage to her. Life of life, thy
lips enkindle.370
Suddenly he turned to Stephen:
--He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks.371 His pale Galilean372 eyes were upon her mesial groove.
Venus Kallipyge.373 O, the thunder of those loins! The god pursuing the
maiden hid.374
--We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval. We
begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at all,
as a patient Griselda,375 a Penelope stayathome.376
--Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty from
Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in whom
a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope.377 Twenty years he
lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary equal to
that of the lord chancellor of Ireland.378 His life was rich. His art, more
than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art of surfeit.379
Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of roses, marchpane,
gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies.380 Sir Walter Raleigh, when they arrested
him, had half a million francs on his back including a pair of fancy stays.381
The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough to vie with her
of Sheba.382 Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial love and its
chaste delights and scortatory love383 and its foul pleasures. You know
Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage to her
bed after she had seen him in Richard III and how Shakespeare, overhear-
ing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns384 and, when
Burbage came knocking at the gate,385 answered from the capon's blankets:
William the Conqueror came before Richard III.386 And the gay lakin, mistress
Fitton,387 mount and cry O,388 and his dainty birdsnies,389 lady Penelope
Rich,390 a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the punks of the
bankside, a penny a time.391
Cours la Reine. Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux? 392
--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of Oxford's mother393
with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:
--Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!394
--And Harry of six wives' daughter.395 And other lady friends from neigh-
bour seats as Lawn Tennyson,396 gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing
behind the diamond panes?
Do and do.397 Thing done.398 In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks,399 greyedauburn.400 An azured harebell like her veins.401 Lids of
Juno's eyes, violets.402 He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar,
in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
--Whom do you suspect?403 he challenged.
--Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord,404 his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.405
--As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.406
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton407 I watched them.
--It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all other
and singular uneared wombs,408 the holy office an ostler does for the stallion.409
Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a shrew to wife.410
But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow.411 Two deeds are rank in
that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour
has declined, deceased husband's brother.412 Sweet Ann, I take it, was hot in
the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
--The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet 413 he has branded her with infamy tell
me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the
day she married him and the day she buried him.414 All those women saw
their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John,415 Ann, her poor dear
Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first to go,
Joan, her four brothers,416 Judith, her husband and all her sons,417 Susan,
her husband too,418 while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use granddaddy's
words, wed her second, having killed her first.419 O, yes, mention there is. In
the years when he was living richly in royal London to pay a debt she had
to borrow forty shillings from her father's shepherd.420 Explain you then.
Explain the swansong421 too wherein he has commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton: You mean the will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law.422 His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.423
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London.424 And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
Punkt.425
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa!
--Pretty countryfolk426 had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays427 are true to type.
--He was a rich countrygentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms and
landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithe-farmer.428 Why did he not leave her his
best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in peace?
--It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr Secondbest
Best said finely.
--Separatio a mensa et a thalamo,429 bettered Buck Mulligan and was smiled
on.
--Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling. Let
me think.
--Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays
tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget
Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.430
--Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...
--He died dead drunk,431 Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for
a king.432 O, I must tell you what Dowden433 said!
--What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited.434 The people's William.435 For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...
--Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought
of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands
and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days.436 Lovely!
Catamite.
--The sense of beauty leads us astray,437 said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.
Steadfast John replied severe:
--The doctor can tell us what those words mean.438 You can not eat your
cake and have it.439
Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?440
--And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket.441 The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself
a cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine
riots.442 His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by
Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.443 He sued a
fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound
of flesh in interest for every money lent.444 How else could Aubrey's ostler
and callboy get rich quick?445 All events brought grist to his mill.446 Shylock
chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the
queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny
was yet alive:447 Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a
Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting.448 The lost armada is
his jeer in Love's Labour Lost.449 His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied
on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm.450 Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we
have a porter's theory of equivocation.451 The Sea Venture comes home from
Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our Ameri-
can cousin.452 The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's.453 As for fay Elizabeth,
otherwise carroty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Wind-
sor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid mean-
ings in the depth of the buckbasket.453
I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.454
--Prove that he was a jew,455 John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean of
studies holds he was a holy Roman.456
Sufflaminandus sum.457
--He was made in Germany,458 Stephen replied, as the champion French polish-
er459 of Italian scandals.460
--A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadmind-
ed.461
Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos.462
--Saint Thomas, Stephen began . . .
--Ora pro nobis,463 Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
--Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! 469 It's destroyed we are from this day! It's
destroyed we are surely!470
All smiled their smiles.
--Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading
in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of
the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious
way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one
near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hung-
ers for it.471 Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most
given to intermarriage.472 Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws
which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm
was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel.473 Whether these
be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy479 will tell us at doomsday leet.480 But a man
who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his
debts will
hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife.
No sir smile neighbour481 shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or
his maidservant or his jackass.482
--Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
--Gentle Will483 is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
--Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
--The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's widow,
is the will to die.484
--Requiescat! 485 Stephen prayed.
What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago . . .486
--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled
queen,487 even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a
motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes.488
In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place
and
drank a quart of sack the town council paid for489 but in which bed he slept it
skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his
chapbooks490 preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters
on the jordan,491 she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches and
The Most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze.492 Venus
has twisted her lips in prayer.493 Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is
an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.494
--History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos.495 The ages
succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's worst
enemies shall be those of his own house and family.496 I feel that Russell is
right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say that only family
poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man. I feel that the fat
knight497 is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred,498 the unco guid.499 Shy, supping with
the godless, he sneaks the cup.500 A sire in Ultonian Antrim501 bade it him. Vi-
sits him here on quarter days.502 Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman to see
you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth.503 Enter Magee
Mor Matthew,504 a rugged rough rugheaded kern,505 in strossers506 with a but-
toned codpiece,507 his nether stocks508 bemired with clauber of ten forests,509
a wand of wilding in his hand.510
Your own? He knows your old fellow.511 The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I touched
his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny512 is attending
her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil.
He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.513 If you
hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters,514 with thirtyfive
years of life, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,515 with fifty of experience,
is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg516 then you must hold that his
seventyyear old mother517 is the lustful queen. No. The corpse of John Shake-
speare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots.518 He rests,
disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate519 upon his son.
Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with
child.520 Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man.
It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession,521 from only begetter to
only begotten.522 On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning
Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe523 the church is founded and
founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm,
upon the void.524 Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subject-
ive and objective genitive,525 may be the only true thing in life.526 Paternity
may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should
love him or he any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea.527
Are you condemned to do this?
--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal annals
of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities, hardly record
its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves
that
dare not speak their name,528 nephews with grandmothers, jailbirds with key-
holes, queens with prize bulls.529 The son unborn mars beauty: born, he brings
pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a new male: his growth is his
father's decline, his youth his father's envy, his friend his father's ene-
my.
In rue Monsieur-le-Prince530 I thought it.
--What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
--Sabellius, the African,531 subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field,532 held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin,
with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him.533 Well: if the father who
has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son?
When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare534 or another poet of the same
name in the comedy of errors535 wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own
son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father
of all
his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grand-
son who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee under-
stands her, abhors perfection.536
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly glancing,
a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.537
Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.
--Himself his own father,538 Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena!539 A play! The
play's the thing!540 Let me parturiate!541
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
--As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest
of Arden.542 Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in Coriolanus.543
His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in King John.544 Hamlet,
the black prince,545 is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in The Tempest, in
Pericles, in Winter's Tale are we know.546 Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt,
and Cressid and Venus are we may guess.547 But there is another member of his
family who is recorded.
--The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste,
quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.548
STEPHEN
He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard.549 Gilbert in his old age
told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer one time
mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up in Lunnon
in a wrastling play wud a man on's back.550 The playhouse sausage551 filled
Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are recorded
in the works of sweet William.
MAGEEGLINJOHN:
Names! What's in a name?552
BEST
That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to say a
good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.
(laughter)
BUCKMULLIGAN:
(piano, diminuendo)
Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy . . .553
STEPHEN
In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago, Richard Crookback,
Edmund in King Lear,554 two bear the wicked uncles' names. Nay, that
last play was written or being written while his brother Edmund lay dying
in Southwark.555
BEST
I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name . . .
(laughter)
QUAKERLYSTER
(a tempo) But he that filches from me my good name . . .556
STEPHEN
(stringendo) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays,
a super here, a clown there,557 as a painter of old Italy set his face in a
dark corner of his canvas.558 He has revealed it in the sonnets where there is
Will in overplus.559 Like John o'Gaunt560 his name is dear to him, as dear as the
coat and crest he toadied for,561 on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent,562
honorificabilitudinitatibus,563 dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene
in the country.564 What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in child-
hood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a
firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter
than Venus in the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the
recumbent constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars.
His eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear,565 as he
walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery566
and from her arms.
Both satisfied. I too.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.567
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won.568 Ay, meacock.569 Who will woo you?
Read the skies. Autontimorumenos.570 Bous stephanoumenos.571 Where's your
configuration?572 Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even.573 S. D: sua donna. Gia:
di lui. Gelindo risolve di non amare S. D.574
--What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a celestial
phenomenon?
--A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.575
What more's to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
Stephanos,576 my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my feet.
Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
--You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is
strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer.577 The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe,578
steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.579 Pater, ait.580 Seabedabbled,
581 fallen, weltering.582 Lapwing you are. Lapwing be.
Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:
--That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know, we
find also in the old Irish myths.582 Just what you say. The three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third
brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.583
Best of Best brothers.584 Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
--I should like to know, he said, which brother you . . . I understand you to
suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers . . . But perhaps I am
anticipating?
He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called:
--Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants . . .585
--O, Father Dineen! Directly.
Swiftly rectly586 creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
--Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund. You kept
them for the last, didn't you?
--In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen587 nuncle588 Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother
is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall.589 My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan:590 now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.591
On.
--You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays.592 Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed
Ann (what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow.593
Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered.594
The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first.595 Of all his
kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,596 the
angel of the world.597 Why is the underplot of King Lear in which Edmund
figures lifted out of Sidney's Arcadia and spatchcocked on to a Celtic
legend older than history?598
--That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now
combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith.599
Que voulez-vous?600 Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast601
and makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.602
--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what
the poor are not, always with him.603 The note of banishment, banishment
from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two
Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it cer-
tain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book.604 It doubles itself in the
middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis,
epitasis,
catastasis, catastrophe.605 It repeats itself again when he is near the grave,
when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adul-
tery.606 But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weak-
ened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are
those of my lords bishops of Maynooth.607 An original sin and, like ori-
ginal sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned.608 It is
between the lines of his last written words,609 it is petrified on his tomb-
stone under which her four bones are not to be laid.610 Age has not withered
it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety611 ever-
ywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado About Nothing, twice in As
You Like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure612 --and in
all the other plays which I have not read.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.
Judge Eglinton summed up.
--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all
in all.613
--He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In Cymbeline, in Othello he is bawd and cuckold.614 He acts and
is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the
real
Carmen.615 His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago616 ceaselessly
willing that the moor in him617 shall suffer.
--Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!618
Dark dome received, reverbed.619
--And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When
all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas pere?) is right. After God Shake-
speare has created most.620
--Man delights him not nor woman neither,621 Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy,622 a silent witness and there, his journey of life
ended,623 he plants his mulberrytree in the earth.624 Then dies. The motion is
ended.625 Gravediggers bury Hamlet pere and Hamlet fils.626 A king and a
prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and
betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for,627 Dane or Dubliner, sorrow
for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced.
If
you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man
rewarded,628 Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie,629 the bad man
taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go.630 Strong
curtain.631 He found in the world without as actual what was in his world
within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today
he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it
is to Judas his steps will tend.632 Every life is many days, day after day.
We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young
men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The play-
wright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light
first and the sun two days later),633 the lord of things as they are whom the
most Roman of catholics call Dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in
all in all of us,634 ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too
but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more
marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.635
--Eureka! Buck Mulligan cried. Eureka! 636
Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's
desk.
--May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.637
He began to scribble on a slip of paper.
Take some slips from the counter going out.
--Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall
live. The rest shall keep as they are.638
He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his variorum
edition of The Taming of the Shrew.639
--You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought
us all this way to show us a French triangle.640 Do you believe your own theo-
ry?
--No, Stephen said promptly.641
--Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a dialogue,
don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.642
John Eclecticon643 doubly smiled.
--Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment for
it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some mystery
in Hamlet 644 but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met in Berlin,
who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret is hidden in
the Stratford monument.645 He is going to visit the present duke,646 Piper says,
and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise
to his grace. But he believes his theory.
I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief.647 That is, help me to believe or help
me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other
chap.
--You are the only contributor to Dana who648 asks for pieces of silver. Then
I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an article on
economics.
Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver649 he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.
--For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.
Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then
gravely said, honeying malice:
--I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper Mecklen-
burgh street650 and found him deep in the study of the Summa contra gentiles651
in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie, the
coalquay whore.652
He broke away.
--Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.653
Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts
and offals.
Stephen rose.
Life is many days. This will end.
--We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. Notre ami Moore654 says Malachi
Mulligan must be there.
Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.
--Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters655 to the youth of
Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?
Laughing, he . . .
Swill till eleven.656 Irish nights entertainment.657
Lubber . . .658
Stephen followed a lubber . . .
One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His
lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.659
Stephen, greeting, then all amort,660 followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt
head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight661 of
no thought.
What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
Walk like Haines now.
The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashel Boyle O'Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell662 parafes663 his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet
mad? The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen664 in booktalk.
--O please do, sir . . . I shall be most pleased . . .
Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself,
selfnodding:
--A pleased bottom.665
The turnstile.666
Is that? . . . Blueribboned hat667 . . . Idly writing . . . What? Looked? . . .
The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.668
Puck Mulligan,669 panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:
John Eglinton, my Jo, John,
Why won't you wed a wife? 670
He spluttered to the air:
--O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton.671 We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall.672 Our players are creating a new
art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck.673 Abbey Theatre! I smell
the pubic sweat of monks.674
He spat blank.
Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him.675 And left
the femme de trente ans.676 And why no other children born?677 And his first
child a girl?
Afterwit.678 Go back.
The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure,679 Phedo's toyable fair hair.680
Eh . . . I just eh . . . wanted . . . I forgot . . . he . . .
--Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson681 were there . . .
Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:682
I hardly hear the purlieu cry
Or a Tommy talk as I pass one by
Before my thoughts begin to run
On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
The same that had the wooden leg
And that filibustering filibeg
That never dared to slake his drouth,
Magee that had the chinless mouth.
Being afraid to marry on Earth
They masturbated for all they were worth.683
Jest on. Know thyself.684
Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
--Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing black
to be like nature.685 Only crows, priests and English coal are black.
A laugh tripped over his lips.
--Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old
hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you a job on
the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus.686 Couldn't you do
the Yeats touch?
He went on and down, mopping,687 chanting with waving graceful
arms:
--The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time. One
thinks of Homer.688
He stopped at the stairfoot.
--I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
The pillared Moorish hall,689 shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's morrice
with caps of indices.690
In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet:691
--Everyman his own wife
or
A Honeymoon in the hand
(A National immorality in three orgasms)
by
Ballocky mulligan
He turned a happy patch's692 smirk to Stephen, saying:
--The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
He read, marcato:693
--Characters:
TOBY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
CRAB (a bushranger)
MEDICAL DICK)
and (two birds with one stone)
MEDICAL DAVY )
MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
FRESH NELLY
and
ROSALIE (the coalquay whore).694
He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by
Stephen: and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:
--O, the night in the Camden hall695 when the daughters of Erin had to lift
their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured, multi-
coloured, multitudinous vomit!
--The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted
them.
About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
if Judas go forth tonight.696 Why? That lies in space which I in time must
come to, ineluctably.
My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.697
A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.
--Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.
The portico.
Here I watched the birds for augury. Aengus of the birds.698 They go, they
come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots
after. A creamfruit melon he held to me.699 In. You will see.
--The wandering jew,700 Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you
see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you.701 I fear thee, ancient
mariner.702 O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.
Manner of Oxenford.703
Day. Wheelbarrow sun704 over arch of bridge.
A dark back went before them, step of a pard,705 down, out by the gateway,
under portcullis barbs.706
They followed.
Offend me still. Speak on.
Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds.707 Frail
from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw
of softness softly were blown.
Cease to strive.708 Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline:709 hierophantic:
from wide earth an altar.
Laud we the Gods
And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
From our bless'd altars.710
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