Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism by Cathy Gere

Author:Cathy Gere
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Mulligan is the true heir to Nietzsche, the dangerously charming medical student whose dissecting room experiences are all too compatible with moral nihilism. Poised to dive into the bay, he cries out “I am the Übermensch.”8 And like Nietzsche, he recognizes in the pagan polytheism of his beloved Greeks a religion compatible with his radical atheism: “God, Kinch, [Gogarty’s real nickname for Joyce, the sound of a knife­blade cutting] if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.”9

In counterpoint to Mulligan’s amoral cheerfulness, the whole opening scene is rendered through the veil of Dedalus’s obsessive relation­ship with his mother’s memory. Even the view of the bay from the tower—“a grey, sweet mother,” in Mulligan’s Swinburnian formulation—evokes the horror of her last days: “The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood be­side her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver.”10 Dedalus catalogs the objects that she left behind: “Her secrets: old feather fans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer.”11 She appears to him in a nightmare whose olfactory vividness continues to disturb his waking hours: “In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rose­wood, her breath bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.”12

An English anthropologist is staying with Mulligan and Dedalus in the Martello tower, and over breakfast the two men mock his earnest search for Gaelic authenticity, presenting the old woman who brings the milk as a figure from the annals of Irish mythology. But despite their banter, Stephen’s thoughts drift as he contemplates the old woman pouring the milk into their jug, fashioning her as an ancient archetype: “Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs.”13

Everywhere, the figure of the mother haunts Dedalus. The second chapter takes place in the school where he teaches classics to a class of inky schoolboys. One pupil approaches him afterwards for help with his mathematics homework, and Dedalus surveys him with a combination of disdain and reluctant kindness: “His tangled hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading.” After helping him with his sums he considers the boy again:

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