telemachus

What I found striking about the first book in Ulysses is that it begins with Buck Mulligan. Joyce opens with a figure that is hulking and of heroic stature, and yet he is not our hero – he is the foil for Stephen Daedalus the meek and insecure anti-hero. This false start is clearly modern in what it achieves. On one hand it harkens back to the classic, to the Odyssey, because it begins in the middle of things. However, when we realize that this is not the intended protagonist within the story the rug gets pulled out from underneath us. By structuring the beginning of his epic in this way Joyce further underscores Stephen’s apparent ineptness as a hero.

As to why this section is given the title of Telemachus may also be modernist in its intent. In the Odyssey Telemachus is Odysseus’s son who is born just before Odysseus is called to war. This idea of father and son and of lineage arises in Ulysses when Buck Mulligan jokes by saying “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” Later on in the conversation Haines goes on to say, “The Father and the Son idea. The son striving to be atoned with the father.” That is to say that perhaps Stephen is a “descendant” of the ultimate hero and therefore diluted and removed from greatness. Or maybe it is even Joyce commenting on his attempt to modernize the classic epic and atone, somehow, with Homer,

QUESTIONS:

-Money permeates the first book – what role does it play in defining the relationships between characters? And will it continue to be a prevalent image throughout the rest of the books?
- Is Joyce attempting to create a new form of poetics or is he pursuing a modernist narrative?