Rereading 'Ulysses': "Ithaca" and modernist allegory - book by author James Joyce

Buck persistently burlesques everything abstract, ethereal, or idealistic. Nothing is left unchallenged; everything is open to travesty, parody, mockery The tug downward is insistent in Ulysses, and Buck Mulligan is the apostle of gravity. (14)

Joyce opens the novel with the voice and sensibility of a glib and witty mocker who is ready to deny and reject the kind of elevation to heroic or ideal height that Joyce intends to perform with Bloom. But Bell is wrong to say that "the text eventually approaches Buck's view" (21). Buck Mulligan dominates the opening of Ulysses and represents challenge set for this novel, to overcome the ironic reduction of the cynical mocker whose sophistication and wit are turned against ideals.

It is appropriate that the model for Buck Mulligan just happened to be in 1904 a medical student, for the perspective on life of a physician could tend to reduce most considerations to a material, physical level:

- And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter.

(1: 204-07)

Such a view is earned by hard experience and is valid, as far as it goes. "It's a beastly thing" is a fine and sincere assessment of death from a physician's educated view, but we may (and I think ought) to balk at "and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter." Buck's "naturalistic" view is valid but partial, severely limited to and by the material world and its concerns. It is Buck's tendency to reduce most concerns to such a "low" level by his banter and mockery. Opposed to the reductive mockery of science is Stephen's poetic sensibility. When the old woman delivers the milk, Mulligan treats her with contempt (mocking her religiosity, his favorite target), while Stephen attempts to elevate her significance through his imaginative powers:

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. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky, cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. (1:399-406)

While Hayman calls her "an allegory of Ireland" (36), I want to call this a failed allegory, a sign of Stephen's desire to see higher significance and his inability (thus far, at any rate) to do so in a way that satisfies the strenuous demands of naturalism. For in Stephen's musings, the old woman is only a figure in the "allegory of poets"; her actuality is effaced as Stephen tries to make her something more than what she is. We have with Mulligan and Stephen the two poles that the "allegory of theologians" attempts to bridge, the reductive irony of naturalism and the elevated significance of "symbolisme."