Stephen and His Discontents

Philip Kitcher starts where the book does, with stately, plump Buck Mulligan on top of a Martello tower, where he lives with Stephen Dedalus and an English guest from Oxford who has nightmares and a gun. The opening reads like a continuation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, until halfway down the first page a one-word sentence appears: "Chrysostomos." Kitcher explains what the word means, whose vocabulary it belongs to, and why it matters: we have just been dropped inside Stephen's head, and Joyce will do this again and again for the rest of the book.

He talks you through the interior monologue, the technique Joyce developed and introduced on a huge scale, and why Joyce thought he understood the conscious mind better than Freud did. Then he walks through what actually happens: breakfast, the old milk woman, Haines and his panther, the trip down to the gentlemen's bathing place, where Stephen does not wash, and Stephen's decision that he will not come back to the tower. Kitcher doesn't think much of the Telemachus parallel. His own title for the episode would be "Stephen and His Discontents."

The film continues into the second episode, Nestor, where Stephen teaches history to bored boys at Mr. Deasy's school, is paid three pounds twelve, and decides he will not return there either. Two acts of going away, with no destination yet, from a young man the book will soon set aside for someone else.

Transcript

So, stately, plump Buck Mulligan. The first character we meet in Ulysses. He's on top of a Martello tower. Martello towers were put up in the Napoleonic era to defend the British Isles from a threatened Napoleonic invasion. And in one of these, Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan, his sort of friend, live together, and at the moment, they have there an English guest from Oxford, a man who frightens Stephen because he has a tendency to nightmares, and he also has a gun.

Joyce lets us into this very easily. The beginning of this chapter is relatively straightforward. It seems like a continuation of the style of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, if you've come to it from that. And you know about Stephen Dedalus. He's a character with whom you've become familiar over the five parts of that earlier novel, if you've read it before.

But halfway through the first page, after what seems like straightforward narration of a conversation between these two characters on the top of one of these towers, there's a sudden switch. We get a one-word sentence: "Chrysostomos." It means literally in Greek, golden-mouthed, and it was a name used in the ancient world, both for a saint and for an orator. What on earth is this word doing in the middle of an apparently straightforward bit of narration?

Well, those who come from Portrait to Ulysses know whose vocabulary this is. This is Stephen Dedalus, brilliantly educated in the humanities, who knows all sorts of esoteric and erudite stuff about literature, history, and the classics. Not that he knows much practically, but he has this phenomenal classical humanistic education. That's his word, and all of a sudden, we're inside his mind, and we're looking at the scene from his perspective. And Joyce will do that again and again and again through many of the episodes that follow.

He really developed (he didn't invent it; he claimed that he had predecessors, and I think that's probably right), but he introduced, on a huge scale, a new technique, the interior monologue, an attempt to replicate what goes on in our minds when we're thinking in ordinary ways at ordinary times. What Joyce recognized was that this kind of inner speech is quirky and sometimes jerky. It goes in fits and starts, and he portrays that extremely well. He was very proud. When asked about Freud, he said, "Well, the trouble with Freud on the unconscious is that he really doesn't understand the conscious at all." And Joyce thought that he had understood that, and he was able to get at the inner lives of his characters.

So he does that with Stephen throughout this episode. Interestingly, throughout the novel, he never does that with some characters. Buck Mulligan, for example, is always seen from the outside, but Stephen is often seen from the inside, and we see him from the inside throughout this episode.

The episode is relatively mundane. These two young men have just gotten up. They're going to have breakfast. An old woman will arrive and bring some milk. Stephen has been alarmed because during the course of the night, Haines has had a nightmare and wants to shoot a panther, and Stephen is worried that he's going to get his gun out and start firing away. And after the old woman has brought the milk and they've had breakfast, they go off and go down to the bathing place, a sort of inlet in the sea where men go and strip off and dive in. The gentlemen's bathing place, it's called. Stephen does not wash.

He decides that he's going to go away, and he leaves the scene saying, "I will not come here tonight. I will not come back tonight." He's going away, and that line is extremely important for understanding him and his mood. He has moved away from things. He's going away, but he doesn't yet figure out what his goal is. He doesn't have a place to which he is going.

Stephen is often thought of as the counterpart of Telemachus, Odysseus' son in The Odyssey. And in the early scenes of The Odyssey, Telemachus is searching for his father, who has not come home from Troy. I don't think of much of this as a parallel at all. It seems to me that a better title for this particular episode would simply be to call it "Stephen and His Discontents," because this is a young man who's discontented with his apparent friend Mulligan, with his situation in Ireland, haunted by the death of his mother, and he's discontented, above all, with himself.

So we follow him in the second episode to the work he does. He teaches in a school. The school is run by a rather conservative Irishman named Mr. Deasy. And Mr. Deasy has a school for boys. Stephen teaches there. When we come across him, he's teaching ancient history to these boys who are not much interested. Stephen is not a particularly talented teacher. And we get more and more and more of his inner thoughts in these interior monologues, and we come to see how deeply alienated he is from his environment.

Mr. Deasy pays him, and Stephen is, for the moment at least, relatively well off. He's given three pounds and twelve shillings. Not a vast amount in those days, but not a terribly small amount either. It's supposed to last him the next month. Anyway, at the end, he decides in his thought that he will not come back to the school either. He is not going to teach there anymore. So another act of going away.

So these first two episodes have introduced us to someone we might think is going to play a very, very large, in fact, the major role in the novel. That's not indeed going to be Stephen's role, but we get inside him in a way that is rare in any novel.