Mulligan's scorn falls on all alike: on Shakespeare ("I seem to know the name"); on Synge, because of Yeats's elaborate comparison of him to Aeschylus; on Stephen, because of his mystio-biographical interpretation of all reality ("The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father," a parody of Stephen's musings about consubstantial fatherhood, which Mulligan overheard as he was entering the discussion room); and even on Bloom — especially on Bloom, who, Mulligan detects, is Jewish. Poor Bloom, the eternal loser, the Irish Charlie Chaplin, has failed once again. In spite of all his elaborate precautions, he has been observed, staring at the anus of a museum goddess! And of all the people in Dublin to discover him, it was Buck Mulligan. Looking at Bloom's name on the card that he fills out to examine the Kilkenny People file (for the Keyes ad), Mulligan ties together several strands in Ulysses as he turns suddenly to Stephen and says, "He knows you. He knows your old fellow [Simon, Stephen's father, a brief reference to the father-son theme]. O, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks [a pederast, but also a reference to the Greek Odysseus]. His pale Galilean eyes [Bloom paralleled with Christ] were upon her mesial groove."
Yet Mulligan, to give him his due, reveals his admirable buoyancy when he praises Stephen's wit in the telegram that informed Mulligan that Stephen would not meet him for lunch. Although Mulligan calls the telegram a "papal bull," emanating from the lapsed Jesuit Stephen, Mulligan thinks that sending it was "wonderful inspiration!" The telegram's quotation about the sentimentalist is a paraphrase of a passage from George Meredith's Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859); it probably refers both to Mulligan's blithe habit of literary borrowing and to his refusal to look seriously at traditions which he ridicules.
Just before the allusion to Meredith and the telegram, however, a much more important passage occurs, one in which Mulligan, significantly, does not take part. This concerns the discussion of Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W H. (1889), which argues that "Mr. W. H.," the person who Shakespeare said was the inspiration behind his sonnets, was really a boy actor named Willie Hughes. Of course, references to the mysteries behind the sonnets were not new to Joyce, and naturally the discussion does add to the mystifying "Charybdis" tone of the entire episode, but one wonders why Mulligan does not say anything when the theory of the homosexual Wilde is brought up. Mulligan, after all, is the one who humorously suggests that Stephen should be wary of Bloom's sexual preference; this possible homosexuality of Mulligan has tantalized many critics.
