Ulysses - A Jewish Stream of Consciousness

Ulysses Essay 1 (3:5) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 1   “ Introibo ad altare Dei”   It is 8 am on Thursday morning, 16 June 1904 (3 Tammuz 5664 by the Hebrew calendar), and in a disused Martello military tower overlooking Dublin’s Kingstown Harbor, medical student Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan is performing a mock Catholic mass with his shaving bowl, using the then ubiquitous Latin rite. Mulligan parodies the celebrant of the mass as he begins the rite by declaring “ Introibo ad altare Dei ” - the introductory part of a biblical verse (Psalms 43:4 [Vulgate 42:4]) and constituting the Latin translation of the original Hebrew text: “ Ve’avo’ah el mizbach * Elohim ” -   “I will go to God’s altar”. Taking it a bit further, one cannot but note that Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, who is witnessing Mulligan’s antics with less than approbation, does not join in the fun. Discontented with the presence of Haines, (an obnoxious Englishman that Mulligan has slyly sequestered into th

Ulysses Essay 2 (4:11) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 2 “Malachi” Stephen’s flat-mate is Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan, a character who is supposedly based on Joyce’s companion (and later rival) Oliver St. John Gogarty. But why “Malachi”? Malachi, the last of the prophets, was active in the land of Israel (around 420 B.C.E.) after the return of the Jews from the seventy year Babylonian exile and the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. His name means “my messenger” (also “my angel” – angels and messengers seem to be the same thing in Jewish thought). It is not a common given name in Israel, but there were two important Malachy’s (note the “y” spelling) in Irish history: the tenth century King Malachy the Great and the twelfth century reformer prelate, St, Malachy, who, so the tradition runs, had a gift for prophecy (see Gifford & Seidman, “Ulysses Annotated” – hereinafter “Gifford”). I first ran into Irish Malachy’s in 1996 when reading “Angela’s Ashes”, Frank McCour

Ulysses Essay 3 (7:12) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 3   “Hellenize it” For a moment, Malachi Mulligan joins forces with Stephen Dedalus against the rich Englishman Haines and proposes that Stephen try to wheedle some money out of Haines (“a guinea” is his suggestion, the equivalent of one pound and one shilling; I still recall physicians’ and lawyers’ bills in mid-twentieth century Cape Town being priced in snobbish “guineas”). Mulligan goes on to assert that they (Mulligan and Stephen) are so much Haines’s’ intellectual superiors that if they put their minds to it they could even “Hellenize the island” (i.e., bring backward Catholic Ireland into the modern world of esthetism and humanism). Gifford points out that the verb “to Hellenize” was coined in the mid-nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold, in contradistinction to the verb “to Hebraise”. Whereas “Hebraism” represented the practice of habits, dogma and discipline, Hellenism was founded on knowledge, thought and flexi

Ulysses Essay 4 (9:25) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 4 “A bowl of bitter waters” Looking down from the tower at Dublin Bay, the scene of a recent drowning, and described by the egregiously crude Malachi Mulligan only a moment ago as “the snotgreen sea”, Stephen is reminded of the bowl of green bilious vomit at his dying mother’s bedside. Immediately, the “bitter water” of the Book of Numbers (5:17-21) seeps into his consciousness. Mosaic Law dictates here that if a jealous husband suspects that his wife has had a sexual relationship with another man, although definite proof of the affair is lacking, he is at liberty to subject her to a trial by ordeal conducted by a priest who has been engaged for this purpose in return for a “jealousy offering” of barley meal. The priest fills an “earthen vessel” with “holy water” and the wife, having denied the charge of adultery, is instructed to drink the “bitter water” after being told that if she is indeed innocent of the charge, all w

Ulysses Essay 5 (11:12) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 5 “The boat of incense” Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan calls Stephen to come downstairs to the lower level of the tower where they are about to have breakfast with Haines, their English guest. Stephen notices that Mulligan has forgotten his nickel shaving bowl (the parodied “communion bowl”) on the parapet but, still at odds with Mulligan, he equivocates within himself as whether to bring it down or whether “ to leave it there all day, forgotten friendship. ” Eventually (and typically) he does take the bowl: right away its smell of “clammy lather” arouses in him memories of his Jesuit schooldays at Clonglowes Wood College, where he would act as the priest’s server (the part that Mulligan had wanted him to imitate while playing out the parody on the Mass). The bowl is now transmuted in his mind to the “boat of incense” which the server would carry to enable the priest to spoon off grains of incense onto the red-hot charcoal

Ulysses Essay 6 (13:16):   Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 6   “The collector of prepuces” Stephen, Mulligan and Haines, are about to sit down to a breakfast of fried eggs made by Mulligan who is bemoaning the fact that there is no milk for their tea. Stephen, the eternal compromiser, says that they can “ drink it black ” as “ there’s a lemon in the locker ”. At this very moment Haines, at the doorway, tells them that he has seen “ that woman coming up with milk .” , In one of his most endearing character studies, Joyce draws the rural milk-woman in Stephen’s thoughts as sincerely religious and patriotic. Joyce also describes her as practical, generous and decent: she adds a “tilly” – a little extra – to the quart of the milk on order, and allows them twopence credit when Mulligan unwillingly manages to haul out a florin in part payment. Her actions and words are in sharp juxtaposition to the elitist and condescending pseudo-academism (and miserliness) of the three men,

Ulysses Essay 7 (14:4-6):   Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 7   “Her woman’s unclean loins, of man’s flesh made not in God’s likeness, the serpent’s prey.” Stephen bitterly resents the fact that the milk-woman, on learning that Mulligan is a medical student, treats the latter with great respect. Stephen inwardly mocks Mulligan that although he is nothing more than “ her bonesetter, her medicineman ” it is in Mulligan that the simple milk-woman places her trust, in contrast to Stephen’s awareness that – as he puts it to himself – “ me she slights .” Dwelling on Mulligan’s parody of the Mass, Stephen transforms him in his mind from a physician of the body into a Catholic priest administering the sacrament of extreme unction to a critically ill parishioner. He deplores the milk-woman’s deference “ to the voice that will shrive and oil all there is of her but her woman’s unclean loins, ” referring to the fact that the extreme unction incorporates a ritual in which the priest dabs oi

Ulysses Essay 8 (19:15) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 8 “Free thought” Haines, trying to draw out Stephen’s views on God and religion, challenges him:   “ Either you believe or you don’t, isn’t it? Personally I couldn’t stomach that idea of a personal God. You don’t stand for that, I suppose? “You behold in me,” Stephen said with great displeasure, “A horrible example of free thought.” The concept of holding ideas which are “free” of the constraints of religion was first propounded in 1713 by the theologian philosopher Anthony Collins in his Discourse of Freethinking . It is interesting that the early twentieth century socialistic Zionist immigrants from Russia who established the first kibbutzim in Palestine, and who were fiercely anti-religious, were termed disparagingly “ ha’chofshi’im ” (“the free”) by the small but vociferous and long-established ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Palestine (who for sure had never heard of Anthony Collins). This appellation, int

Ulysses Essay 9 (19:20) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 9   “Salt bread” While talking to Haines, Stephen is still occupied with Mulligan’s supercilious mien, and with obvious irritation he contemplates the probability that soon Mulligan will request the key to the Martello tower which they have been co-renting, and that he will have to find other lodgings: “ He wants the key. It is mine, I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes. ” By “salt bread” Stephen is alluding Dante’s Paradiso in which his dead great-great-grandfather predicts a life of exile for Dante which will entail eating the lower class salty bread of others, as compared to the fine non-salted bread he was used to in Florence. But conversely “bread and salt” has for me a positive connotation. I recall my father, after making the blessing on the two challah breads on Friday night (the double portion recalling God’s instruction to the I

Ulysses Essay 10 (20:14) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 10   “Michael’s host” Having admitted to Haines his ill-tolerated subservience to the Catholic Church, Stephen contemplates the theological challenges that Catholic dogma confronted and overcame through the centuries: he recalls how the church mercilessly excommunicated the “heresiarchs” within the church for their heretical opinions (which mainly consisted of variant conceptions of the ”consubstantiality” of the Holy Trinity). Finally Stephen considers the earth shattering Protestant Reformation against which Catholicism – shaken to its core by this unprecedented revolt   – found it necessary to enlist the militant sword-wielding archangel Michael as its “defender” in order to disabuse Luther’s adherents of their traitorous heresies (unsuccessfully, as it turned out). But the archangel Michael that jumps into my mind is a much more amiable being and relates to the Yom Kippur synagogue service. Jewish liturgy has

Ulysses Essay 11 (20:18) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 11 “Into the hands of German Jews” Haines replies to Stephen’s musings about English domination of Ireland with a non sequitur: “Of course I’m a Britisher,” Haines’s voice said, “And I don’t want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That’s our national problem, I’m afraid, just now.” Stephen had made no reference to the Jews, and neither does he attempt to reply to Haines’s blatantly anti-Semitic remark, to be echoed time and time again by many of the characters in Ulysses . (And in passing, the fact that Joyce does not capitalize “jews” throughout Ulysses speaks for his conceptualization of the exiled and persecuted Jewish people as a special case among the nations, in many ways analogous in his mind to the Irish, dominated and deculturalized for nearly a millennium by their English colonizers). But why does Haines refer specifically to German Jews? The simplest answer might relate t