his growing up, using the language and range of sensations suited to each stage of
infancy, boyhood, adolescence and student life. He is sensitive and short-sighted,
and his experiences are negative: family politics, nationalist and clerical; school
tyrannies; sexual experience and ascetic reaction; an invitation to the priesthood;
fruitless romantic love; family impoverishment. His wit and learning earn respect
from fellow students. He has an exalted vision of a girl wading offshore, whom he
sees in the likeness of a sea-bird: ‘A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of
mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before
him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.’ This is an
‘epiphany’, a revelation. After it, Stephen
climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of
the young moon cleft the pale waste of sky like the rim of a silver hoop embedded in
gray sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves,
islanding a few last figures in distant ponds.The next section begins:
He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing the crusts of fried
bread that were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar. The yellow
dripping had been scooped out like a boghole ....Transposition of these watery images from a high into a low register undercuts
Stephen, who is less heroic than in Stephen Hero; the artist revised his self-portrait.
The private Stephen is less assured than in the epigrams he fires at his fellows. The
book ends in diary form, concluding:
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to
forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.Stephen is about to fly Dublin; his ‘old father’ is Dedalus, the smith who with his son
Icarus flew away from the island of Crete on wings he had made. But Icarus fell, and
although Stephen hopes to forge a conscience for his race, he wears ‘new secondhand
clothes’ packed for him by his mother. The aspiring artist is unaware of this, and of
the ambiguity in ‘forge’. It is a portrait of a self-absorbed young man.
Ulysses
The case is changed in Ulysses, in which Stephen Dedalus plays second fiddle to
Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising agent, a father figure to him. Much of the book
co nsists of Bloom’s mingled impressions and reflections as he wanders round
Dublin, going to a funeral, a pub, a newspaper office and other locations. He meets
Stephen, whose stream of consciousness is more elevated.
Unity of place and time is observed in this unclassical book, all of which takes
place in Dublin on 16 June 1904.Ulysses ends with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in bed
saying, ‘Yes’, and opens in the Martello Tower, south of Dublin, where Stephen is
staying.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on
which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was
sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and
intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 347