Though not explicitly stated, the main character in Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog is named Moses E. Herzog and is likely a reference to this character. Thom’s does not mention a Moses Herzog as a merchant but does list a residence named Herzog and identifies him as a “an authentic one-eyed Dublin Jew.”

Stephen has been thinking of “my mind’s darkness” as something hidden, “reluctant, shy of brightness.” Now, inspired perhaps by the “glowlamps” within the cavernous gloom of the St. Geneviève reading room, he thinks of the mind or soul instead as calm, capacious irradiation: “Tranquil brightness … Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent.” The abstract phrases that are woven through these vivid images of light—"Thought is the thought of thought… . The soul is in a manner all that is: the soul is the form of forms"—indicate that he is still thinking of Aristotle, but now turning his attention to what the philosopher has to say about the mind. In one important passage, Aristotle uses light as a metaphor for an aspect of Mind that is eternally active and perfectly capacious. In human beings, this active mindfulness is one part of the complex process of intellection. In God, it is the entirety of being.

Joyce Project

Moving on from Blake, Stephen thinks of a different model for relating tyrannically stubborn facts to intellectually liberating insights. Aristotle’s Metaphysics describes coming-into-being as passage from a state of potentiality (dynamis) to a state of actuality (energeia). Stephen rather loosely reads this argument as implying that, in any moment, there are “infinite possibilities” that might become actual. Only one possibility does become actual, so the others are “ousted.”

In the following two sentences, he checks himself. Perhaps other possibilities are not infinite; perhaps, in fact, “only” that which becomes actual ever was possible. This line of thought seems closer to what Aristotle says in the Metaphysics, but it is even more discouraging than thinking of unpleasant actualities “ousting” better ones. It would make history one long deterministic process of unrolling a script that has already been (all but) written.

After an unfortunate interruption caused by the need to speak with his pupils (Stephen is not much of a teacher), he returns to his silent Aristotelian interrogation of history: “It must be a movement, then, an actuality of the possible as possible.” The allusion here, Gifford and Seidman observe, is to Aristotle’s Physics: “The fulfillment [completion or actuality, entelecheia, a near-synonym of energeia] of what exists potentially [dynamis], in so far as it exists potentially, is motion [kinesis].”

Joyce Project

Negligently “opening another book,” Stephen moves on to whatever lesson may be next. It is the pastoral elegy Lycidas (1638), in which John Milton urges his Cambridge peers not to bemoan the drowning of their classmate Edward King: “Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more / For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, / Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor.” King is not dead because he has been saved “Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves”: Jesus Christ, who walked on the waters in Matthew 14:29 to save his fisherman disciples.

As Talbot goes on reading Stephen veers into his own thoughts, just as he did while putting the boys through their Pyrrhus paces. The subject of his meditation now is Christ : “Here also over these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer’s heart and lips and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the tribute… . A long look from dark eyes.” Christ’s dark eyes return a bit later in the persons of two non-Christian philosophers: “Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.” The three wise men occupy a metaphysical darkness, invisible within the bustling world of craven hearts and eager faces. As with Pyrrhus, then, Stephen continues to look for the Spirit within the seemingly mindless futility of everyday reality.

The passage from Lycidas also offers another drowning victim to complement the two mentioned in Telemachus: one who was saved by Mulligan, and a second who has been dead for nine days and is expected to surface soon.

Joyce Project

When Mulligan says, “The aunt thinks you killed your mother,” and then charges, “You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you,” he resembles his model Oliver Gogarty, who casually declared to all his acquaintances “that Joyce was ‘mad,’ and ‘had killed his mother by telling her what he thought’” (Ellmann, 173). But Mulligan overstates the facts, assuming that they were similar to those surrounding Joyce’s mother’s death in August 1903,

Ellmann writes of Mary Joyce’s illness, “Her fear of death put her in mind of her son’s impiety, and on the days following Easter she tried to persuade him to make his confession and take communion. Joyce, however, was inflexible; he feared, as he had Stephen Dedalus say later, ‘the chemical action’ which would be set up in his soul ‘by a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of authority and veneration.’ His mother wept, and vomited green bile into a basin, but he did not yield. His aunt Josephine Murray argued with him” (129, emphasis added). Four months later, in Mrs. Joyce’s final hours, “she lay in a coma, and the family knelt about her bed, praying and lamenting. Her brother John Murray, observing that neither Stanislaus nor James was kneeling, peremptorily ordered them to do so. Neither obeyed” (136, emphasis added).

Joyce may have refused to compromise his spiritual integrity by making false declarations of faith, but he was not so priggishly self-righteous as to attempt to ruin other people’s spiritual consolations. After his mother’s death, he comforted his nine-year-old sister Mabel, sitting beside her on the stairs with “his arm around her, saying, ‘You must not cry like that because there is no reason to cry. Mother is in heaven. She is far happier now than she has ever been on earth, but if she sees you crying it will spoil her happiness. You must remember that when you feel like crying. You can pray for her if you wish, Mother would like that. But don’t cry any more’” (Ellmann, 136). The Stephen Dedalus of Telemachus was as sensitive to his mother’s suffering as Joyce was to Mabel’s: “Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed.”

Given such complex family dynamics, the accusation made by Gogarty and Mulligan seems callous and shallow. Joyce felt there was some, but only some, truth to the charge. At the end of August 1904 he wrote to his wife, Nora, “My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin—a face grey and wasted with cancer—I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim” (Ellmann, 169). But he did not back down from his principled stand about kneeling in prayer. In the following paragraph of the same letter he wrote, “Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently… . I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me… . Now I make open war upon it by what I write and say and do.”

Ulysses appears to heighten and focus the guilt Joyce felt, maximizing its narrative importance as much as the treatment of the black panther episode minimizes the narrative importance of those events. The dream which Stephen had of his mother after death seems to him a kind of malevolent ghostly visitation. His anguish at the ghost’s implicit demand that he kneel down in prayer attains a shattering climax in Circe.

Joyce Project

Stephen replies to the boys' clamoring for “a story, sir… . A ghoststory” by saying “After” (i.e., when the lesson is completed). He never gives them the story, but the riddle that he tells them instead does release a bit of the terrible emotional energy that he connects with ghosts.

In Telemachus Stephen recalls (twice) that he was visited “in a dream” by the ghost of his dead mother, and her specter will return to terrify him at a climactic moment in Circe. He gives the boys a miniscule window onto his terror by posing an unanswerable riddle and then, “his throat itching,” supplying the answer: “The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.” Gifford and Seidman note that the model for his riddle can be found in P. W. Joyce’s English as We Speak It in Ireland, where the answer to a very similar obscure riddle is “The fox burying his mother under a holly tree.” The riddle clearly functions as an expression of the guilt that Stephen feels about having “killed” his mother, though he masks it slightly by changing her into a grandmother. Later in Nestor he thinks guiltily of himself as a killer: “A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.”

Eventually, Stephen will tell “A ghoststory,” but not to the boys. In Scylla and Charybdis his talk on Shakespeare centers on the figure of Hamlet’s father’s ghost: “He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory … Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep.

Joyce Project

Discouraged by the story of Pyrrhus and by history in general, Stephen thinks of the apocalyptic alternatives to empirical knowledge proposed by the visionary English poet William Blake (1757-1827). The scholars Don Gifford and Robert Seidman trace “Fabled by the daughters of memory,” “Blake’s wings of excess,” and “the ruin of all space … and time one livid final flame” to particular passages in Blake’s writings.

The second plate of A Vision of the Last Judgment distinguishes “Fable or Allegory,” produced by the daughters of Memory (i.e. the nine Muses descended from Mnemosyne), from “Imagination,” produced by the daughters of Inspiration. Empirical understanding—knowledge based on memory—is a mere “Fable” in Blake’s estimation, while imagination yields what he calls “Vision.”

This anti-commonsense assertion appeals to Stephen because it would define all history as essentially false, but the Aristotelian empiricist in him quickly counters, “And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it.” The world is more than the mind’s conception of it; actual things happened to produce the reality that now enslaves us. As Stephen thinks a few paragraphs later, “They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.”

“A phrase, then, of impatience,” Stephen thinks. One of the devils' Proverbs in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell holds that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” and another one that “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.” Blake has characteristically overshot the mark, Stephen thinks, and his “wings of excess” strike the ear with (or fall to earth with?) a “Thud.”

But Stephen is enchanted by the language of apocalyptic transcendence, and will remain so throughout the novel. Blake also writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.” And when that fiery consummation occurs, “the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.” Stirred by this vision, Stephen thinks of “the ruin of all space” and the fiery annihilation of time.

Joyce Project

Telemachus ships out of Ithaca at the end of Book 2 of The Odyssey, to inquire about his father on the mainland. On his return at the end of Book 4, Antinous and nineteen other suitors lie in ambush for him behind an island that he must pass. Athena helps him to escape the deadly trap.

Similarly, Stephen will evade his antagonist. Instead of meeting Mulligan at “The Ship,” the downtown tavern that has figured in their conversation earlier in their chapter, at the appointed time of “Half twelve” (i.e., 12:30), he sends him a taunting telegram from only a short distance away. We learn of this development in Scylla and Charybdis, when Mulligan finds Stephen in the library (Stephen thinks, “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?”). Mulligan reads the telegram with delight, and asks, “Where did you launch it from?”

Joyce Project

Joyce inserted many parallels between Stephen’s first three chapters and Bloom’s first three. One of them is meteorological. The sunlight that greets Stephen on the first page of Telemachus greets Bloom when he leaves his home in pursuit of meat, and several pages later both men experience a cloud obscuring the sun—an adumbration of the dramatic thunderstorm that will visit Dublin later in the day. The eclipse is only brief, and with the return of the sun the mood of both men brightens.

Nearly seven pages into Telemachus, “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay behind him in deeper green.” A little more than six pages into Calypso, “A cloud began to cover the sun, slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.” Given the distance between the two men (between five and ten miles), they cannot be seeing the same eclipse at precisely the same instant. But given the close locations of these passages in each episode, it seems likely that they are seeing the same eclipse. The sense of simultaneity is reinforced by what happens next. Some forty lines after a cloud begins to obscure the sun in Telemachus, Stephen “heard warm running sunlight” on the morning air. Some twenty-five lines after the cloud begins to cover the sun in Calypso, “Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road, swiftly in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath” to greet Bloom. In both cases, the sun’s reappearance coincides with a move away from depressing thoughts.

Joyce Project

Mulligan is an Irishman, and in Stephen’s opinion a servant to the English and/or Catholic Ireland is England’s servant and Mulligan is ultimately the servant of Ireland and conventionality.

A reference to Genesis 9:20-27, specifically Gen 9:25 – And he (Noah) said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

James Joyce references this biblical episode in his 1926 letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver regarding Finnegans Wake.