Religious allusions are used, as well, to express the false father theme of Ulysses. Haines has nightmares about being attacked by a black panther, and one apocryphal tradition holds that Christ’s father was a Roman centurion named Panther or Pantherus (Joyce uses this legend in Finnegans Wake). Mulligan recites his irreverent “Ballad of Joking Jesus,” with its parody of the Virgin birth (“My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird”), after he has flung his towel around his neck as if it were a priest’s stole (“stolewise”). In a similar vein, the heretics Arius and Sabellius long ago debated the procession, or order, of the members of the Trinity.
Stephen is clearly alienated from Mulligan; he is also condemned to remain apart from Haines, whom he dislikes. Haines has been to a good school, Oxford; Joyce (if we read Ulysses autobiographically) resented the fact that he was forced to attend University College, Dublin, which he considered inferior to Trinity College (Dublin), which has reciprocity with Oxford and Cambridge. Haines has money; the Dedalus family lives in dire poverty. Haines is part of the British tennis set. He is also a bit of a fascist—an anti-Semite who, in addition, excuses England’s barbarous treatment of the Irish throughout history. Added to these problems for Stephen is the irony that he is being virtually forced out of a place for which he—not Mulligan—pays the rent, and, in addition, he is still brooding over his part in his mother’s unhappiness on her deathbed. What nightly surcease from his difficulties which Stephen might find is hampered by Haines’s noisy nightmares, a situation which occasions Stephen’s ultimatum to Mulligan about Haines’s having to leave.
The false father theme is reinforced in this chapter by the many references to Shakespeare, especially to Hamlet, and these are developed at length in “Scylla and Charybdis.” Already in “Telemachus,” Stephen emerges as a Hamlet figure, and Mulligan as a false Horatio. Symbolically, the top of the Martello Tower becomes the heights of Elsinor, and both overlook abysses of figurative madness that both Hamlet and Stephen are facing.
After Mulligan’s shave (Stephen himself detests washing and water generally), after breakfast, and after the visit of the old milk woman, the three young men go outside of the Martello Tower: Mulligan takes his plunge into the water, Haines sits on a rock watching him, and Stephen (taking up his “prophetic” ashplant) begins to walk along a path. Stephen, half in pique and half in despair, has surrendered the key to the Tower to the usurper Mulligan, and Stephen is now both symbolically and literally homeless. He has been victimized by the tyrant Mulligan, just as his country has been spiritually “usurped” and plundered by England (Haines).
Clearly, the emptiness of Irish Catholicism and the desperate lack of clear ideals and leaders are joined with Joyce’s depiction of the futility of the Irish Renaissance, a literary movement which turned for inspiration and subject matter to the country’s roots, here personified in the arid old milkwoman. The old lady is a parody of the Shan van Vocht, the Poor Old Lady of Irish lore, who will turn into a beautiful young queen when Ireland begins to take her place among the nations of the world. Her most prominent appearance in Irish Renaissance literature is in Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which she arrives to inspire a young man to take up arms against the British during the Rebellion of 1798.
Joyce’s symbolic Shan van Vocht, however, has little ability to inspire anyone. She delivers milk but, in her, the milk of life has dried up; she arrives late; she prefers the loud, posturing medicine man, Mulligan, to the withdrawn intellectual, Stephen. She is not bothered very much by the fact that an Englishman, Haines, can speak Gaelic while she cannot, and although she admits that she is ashamed of her deficiency, she accepts the judgment of those who can speak the tongue that Irish is a “grand language.” By picturing the old milkwoman as a “witch on her toadstool,” Joyce is excoriating the folklore excavations of such writers as Yeats and Lady Gregory, who went from cottage to cottage recording the tales of western Irelanders. Joyce, who looked to Europe for artistic inspiration, thought such renderings to be empty exercises, products of senile minds, inventing a false past to evade present responsibilities. This escapism is seen in the wretched life of Mary Dedalus, another victim of rote acceptance of the status quo, and Stephen cannot help but see the similarities between the old crone and his own mother.
In one sense, then, “Telemachus” asks the question: “Who will hold the key to Ireland’s future?” Will it be Mulligan, who at the end of the chapter has the large key to the Martello Tower, using it to press down his clothing? Or will it be Bloom, who spends the entirety of the novel trying to negotiate an advertisement with the House of Keyes and who neglects, on the morning of June 16, to bring with him his own key to his house at 7 Eccles Street and must, in “Ithaca,” find another way to get into his own home (like Homer’s Odysseus)? Is the key to Ulysses to be found in the brash physicality of Mulligan, the solipsistic intellectuality of Stephen, or the passivity and humanitarianism of Bloom? Although Joyce never does answer these questions, the novel depicts and suggests many possibilities.
