Telemachus

This is about the third time I've read this chapter and it is the reading I've gotten the most pleasure out of so far. Yeats and Elliot were good preludes to this book because they sharpened my sensitivity to excellent wordplay. Ulysses, of course, is a masterpiece on phonetic merits alone. You can't get through more than a few sentences before hitting brilliant strings of syllables like "sullen oval jowl", "smokeblue mobile eyes", and "bowl of bitter waters". Joyce was a prose-poet in the highest sense of the word and much of this chapter benefits from being read out-loud.

It's surprising how much of Joyce's humor still retains its force today. Though much of the puns are rooted in elitist intellectual archetypes, many of them are still appreciable. The annotations point to the mockery of the Catholic mass a number of notes, but this time I saw the parody in fluidity for the first time. It reminded me that the first time I read this chapter I actually believed that Buck Mulligan was a monk and that Daedalus was somehow back in training for priesthood. I saw the parody for what it was immediately during this reading. The razor lays "crossed" on the bowl, signaling Christian symbolism. As Mulligan stands with his dressing gown open and floating in the breeze he carries out a blasphemous rendition of the mass. And it's pretty funny. When I read the sensual description of the milk lady pouring the milk ("not hers"), I laughed out loud and read it to my roommate who laughed as well. Another classic is Buck's announcement at the table after taking off his clothes: "Mulligan has been stripped of his garments."

In this chapter, Joyce's style is familiar and reminiscent to Portrait of the Artist. He toils obsessively over the mundane. The forgotten shaving bowl, the ballad of "Joking Jesus",
the Latin quarter hat. These details don't just make the narrative remarkably lucid and real. They also provide a startling contrast against Joyce's bursts of ecstatic writing. They're toned down here. Mulligan and Daedalus suddenly look at each other in a solemn silence. A seal pokes his head out of the bay. Nightmare images of Daedalus' undead motherblow through his mind. If these passages were more prominently featured in Joyce's writing they would seem self-important and lofty. They would lose their firm connection to the real and perceivable. This technique allows Joyce to both startle his reader with jolts of profundity and secure those jolts compellingly to everyday life.