Ulysses
you think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: _As in wild
earth a Grecian vase_. 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? That Moore is
Martyn’s wild oats? Awfully clever, isn’t it? They remind one of Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr
Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful
countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O’Neill Russell? O,
yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James
Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it
seems.
Cordelia. _Cordoglio._ Lir’s loneliest daughter.
Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.
—Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...
—O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.
—I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.
God ild you. The pigs’ paper. Bullockbefriending.
Synge has promised me an article for _Dana_ too. Are we going to be
read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league 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, 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?
—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.
—Yes.
Christfox in leather trews, 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,
bully 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.
—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.
Here he ponders things that were not: what Cæsar would have lived to do
had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of
the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore
when he lived among women.
Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice
of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with
tilebooks._
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
enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so
much. Others abide our question. 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. 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_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.
Quoth littlejohn 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.
Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under
wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l’uomo l’attosca_. Messer
Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.
—As we, or mother Dana, 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. And as the mole on my right breast
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 unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of
imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, 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 Hawthornden helped you at that stile.
—Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from
the son.
Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.
—That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.
John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.
—If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug
in the market. The plays of Shakespeare’s later years which Renan
admired so much breathe another spirit.
—The spirit of reconciliation, 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, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles,
prince of Tyre?
Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.
—A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.
—The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant
quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they
lead to the town.
Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon’s wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good
masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the
sun, west of the moon: _Tir na n-og_. Booted the twain and staved.
How many miles to Dublin?
Three score and ten, sir.
Will we be there by candlelight?
—Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
period.
—Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his
name is, say of it?
—Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter’s
child. _My dearest wife_, Pericles says, _was like this maid._ Will any
man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
—The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. _L’art d’être
grand_...
—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. _Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus
..._
—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. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles
on Shakespeare in the _Saturday Review_ 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. 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.
Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk’s egg,
prize of their fray.
He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? 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. Why does he send to one who is a
_buonaroba,_ a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a
scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord
of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had
written _Romeo and Juliet_. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely
killed. He was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say)
and he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play
victoriously the game of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will
not save him. No later undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of
the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew
is worsted yet there remains to her woman’s invisible weapon. 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. A like fate awaits him and the two rages
commingle in a whirlpool.
They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.
—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. That is why the
speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere,
backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with
him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare,
with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has
piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. 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. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind
by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, 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?
_Entr’acte_.
A ribald face, sullen as a dean’s, Buck Mulligan came forward, then
blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.
—You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he
asked of Stephen.
Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a
bauble.
They make him welcome. _Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen._
Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.
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 heaven
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.
He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.
—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.