Telemachus

Reading the first section of Joyce's Ulysses required having dictionary.com and babelfish open for most of it. Despite this, I am still uncertain what "ouns" are. Regardless, the over all tone has been set for a novel where class and race divides are a strong undercurrent within Stephen Dedalus' life. By the second page, or page four in the Vintage edition, Buck Mulligan establishes this dynamic by discussing Haines with Dedalus, saying; "A ponderous Saxon, He thinks you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English. Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus; you have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade."

This allows us to see much about Buck Mulligan as well as reigning issues between the English and the Irish within the novel. Buck Mulligan's name for Dedalus asserts his own work as a medical student and it also gives the reader insight into a character, the main character, that we don't hear very much from till pages into the first section. This nick-name makes Dedalus into a person who dissects things and is exacting, perhaps cruel, perhaps sterile and honest. We have yet to learn. And the way a reader does learn about Stephen is in the narrative shifts. The novel begins with a narrator that is not a character but an observer. It is difficult to tell at first if the narrator is ommnipotent and as one reads on by page six it is tempting to see the narration as first person unreliable when there suddenly appears the words "me" and the reader is thrust into an internal monologue. By page ten however it becomes clear that this "me" or "i" voice is the internal dialogue of Stephen Dedalus and the narration is close third person narration. This confusion manages to allow Joyce liberties with aspects of his descriptions which bring us close to the characters whose heads he does not enter, but he maintains his tie to Dedalus as the character whose thoughts he shares.

By page fourteen an interesting focus on language is given attention and we see an Irish peasant, romanticized in Dedalus' head into some ideal pastoral scene, bring the milk to breakfast. The focus on language arises when Haines, an English man begins to speak Gaelic to her and she mistakes it for French, not recognizing the original language of her own people. This allows the discussion on class to deepen and it shows social power structures at work, the same way that the key to the tower shows the power dynamic between Stephen and Mulligan. The power structure being connected to language is something entirely intentional on Yeats' part and shows not only his focus on history and nationality, but on the uses and weight of language. That an English man would speak to an Irish woman in Gaelic and then preach to her that "we ought to speak Irish in Ireland" is adding insult to injury, since the primary reason English became the dominant language in Ireland was because of the British occupation of the lands and their demand of obedience to the English king. Language is a tolken of culture and by taking away their language the English were breaking apart Irish culture to make them a part of their own. Joyce makes a commentary here on this porcess and an attempt at perhaps asserting his on view that Ireland should reclaim their language. This idea of misplacement within their own lands continues with Dedalus' statement that he is the "servant of two masters... the imperial British state... and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church." (20)

It seems that these focuses, so strongly asserted in the beginning of the novel will become dominant themes within the book, much as they are within Irish history.