Puck Mulligan: A Joycean-Shakespearean Fool

“—We oughtn’t to laugh, I suppose. He’s rather blasphemous. I’m not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn’t it?” - Haines

In “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, just as Stephen Dedelaus’ exegesis on Hamlet in “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, reaches a crescendo, he is suddenly and violently interrupted by a cry from the doorway, “Amen!” Could this be the proverbial shout in the street? Stephen despairs, thinking, “Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?” The word “Entr’acte” appears on the page, signaling an interval between the first and second “acts” of the episode. This subtle rupture in the reality of the novel heralds the arrival of one Malachi “Buck” Mulligan, destroyer of worlds and mocker of Kinch. This sequence is probably my favorite character entrance in the entirety of Ulysses, in large part because it feels positively theatrical, cinematic even, as Mulligan emerges from the shadows to rain on Stephen’s parade:

“A ribald face, sullen as a dean’s, Buck Mulligan came forward, then blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles.”

Stephen thought he had cleverly dodged his forced socialization with Mulligan and Haines at The Ship back in “Aeolus,” but Mulligan has hunted him down and will now exact his vengeance. We can see Stephen’s psyche instantaneously unravel as Mulligan is warmly embraced by the other men. Confronted with this eldritch horror, Dedalus speaks in tongues, declaring in German, “Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen.” He eventually steadies himself with thoughts of the heresiarchs he invoked way, way back in “Telemachus,” first Photius, and then a full paragraph of a corrupted version The Apostle’s Creed in the style of the Sabellian heresy:

“He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.”

Further proving that reality has shifted, this ironic prayer is punctuated by a bar of musical notation declaring “Gloria in Excelsis Deo.”

The structure of the rest of “Scylla and Charybdis” comes unglued from this point forward, including an interlude written as dialogue, as the novel as whole begins its tilt towards the surreal, horrific and absurd, peaking in the “Circe” episode. Scholar Robert Bell, in his book Jocoserious Joyce : The Fate of Folly in Ulysses, describes this transformation as “the kind of wordplay that amuses Joyceans and annoys sensible people.”

Here be monsters. You have been warned.

Mulligan’s dramatic entrance wrests the attention of Stephen’s audience of literary elites and shatters any hope our young Artist had of winning them over with his elaborate theory on Hamlet. Stephen knows his goose is cooked. The other men, however, seem to relax, as they’ve been delivered from Stephen’s pedantry. Mulligan’s entrance dispels the tension in the room and means that they are about to be entertained by a comic sideshow rather than preached at. Lyster the Librarian, bless his heart, welcomes Mulligan to join their discussion with open arms, stating:

“A most instructive discussion. Mr Mulligan, I’ll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.”

Poor Stephen. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

James Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that as Ulysses progresses, Mulligan should “begin to pall on the reader,” to which Budgen countered that he found Mulligan as “witty and entertaining as ever in Scylla and Charybdis.” Personally, I have to agree with Budgen. Though well-intentioned and earnest, Stephen’s Shakespeare discourse is beginning to become ponderous and long-winded by this stage in the episode. Æ has already fled for the hills, and the other men are all arguing less vigorously than they did at the outset of the episode. Mulligan’s entrance is terrible for Stephen but a relief to basically everyone else. Scholars John Noel Turner and Marc A. Mamigonian explain:

“Joyce’s claim that Buck Mulligan’s wit wears threadbare is untrue in terms of the experience readers have had with it. It seems clear enough that it is defensiveness, rather than insight, being revealed here.”

Mulligan’s role in this scene, though farcical, is part of a long literary and theatrical tradition of clowns and fools, a staple of Shakespeare’s plays. Mulligan snugly inhabits the role and, like many Shakespearean fools, is able to take the protagonist down a peg. Of course, Stephen stood up Mulligan and Haines for lunch, which Mulligan had expected Stephen to bankroll. For this transgression, Stephen needs to be put in his place. Mulligan is explicitly described as a fool or jester multiple times over the course of the novel. He makes his debut in “Scylla and Charybdis” “blithe in motley,” and near the end of the episode, he is described as “a lubber jester, a wellkempt head,” an allusion to Will Kempe, the actor who frequently portrayed clowns and fools in Shakespeare’s acting company. In “Circe”, Mulligan manifests “in particoloured jester’s dress of puce and yellow and clown’s cap with curling bell.” Like Shakespeare’s fools, Mulligan is full of nonsense that, upon closer inspection, sometimes turns out to be quite insightful or even prophetic. Mainly, Mulligan functions to keep our Irish Hamlet, Stephen, from getting too big for his breeches. Stephen is deeply serious to a fault, and Mulligan is happy to mine those faults for comedy.

In Jocoserious Joyce, Bell is quite insistent on the lofty status Mulligan is afforded by his clowning, explaining, “Like Shakespearean fools, then, Buck is more important than his hour upon the stage suggests.” Bell compares Mulligan heavily to Lear’s fool, a darkly comic figure who stands apart from the actions of the play, but is afforded a privileged vantage point to comment on the comings and goings of the powerful. Mulligan takes aim at powerful targets, such as blaspheming against the Church, but mainly he focuses his clowning on poor Stephen, who lacks the power and authority of, say, King Lear, but Stephen is our protagonist nonetheless.

No one knows Stephen better than this loudmouthed mocker it seems, and Stephen is far too serious to laugh at his own expense, so there is an unavoidable volatility to their interactions. If we rewind to “Telemachus,” we see Mulligan loudly calling out Stephen’s insistence on wearing only black as a show of mourning, Stephen’s lack of hygiene, his lack of Greek, and most harshly, Stephen’s mother as “beastly dead.” Mulligan strikes at Stephen’s inner turmoil; to Mulligan, “Agenbite of Inwit” is merely a silly hang-up to be purged rather than a deep, existential horror. He mocks Stephen’s intellectual pursuits as well, reducing Stephen’s dialectic showpiece on Shakespeare to mere algebra. Mulligan leaves no stone unturned in Stephen’s psyche or soul. He doesn’t even refer to Stephen by his name - it’s always Kinch this, Kinch that, Kinch the fearful Jesuit, Kinch the unclean bard, Kinch the loveliest mummer of them all!

When Mulligan bursts onto the scene in “Scylla and Charybdis,” he interrupts Stephen ruminating on paternity and consubstantiality. Scholar Robert Kellogg points out that Stephen had mocked Æ’s mysticism earlier in the episode, and now he is being clowned on by Mulligan at his own spiritual apex. Stephen is getting a dose of his own bitter medicine. The shock of this exposure pushes Stephen into a defensive posture from which he won’t recover for the rest of the episode. Not only will Stephen not recover before the end of “Scylla and Charybdis,” but this will be his last intellectual foray for the day. When Mulligan and Stephen re-enter the story in “Oxen of the Sun,” Stephen is deliriously drunk and will remain so until Bloom sobers him up in the cabmen’s shelter in “Eumaeus.”

The worst part of all of this for poor Stephen is that Mulligan, like his Shakespearean counterparts, does have some prophetic messages to deliver. For all his obnoxiousness, he can’t be immediately dismissed out of hand. Bell points to Mulligan’s comments about Bloom in “Scylla and Charybdis” as evidence of this gift of prophecy:

“—He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker than the Greeks.”

In Bell’s interpretation, the fact that Mulligan knows that Bloom is connected with Stephen’s natural father points to Bloom as a surrogate father figure. Additionally, his proclamation that Bloom is “Greeker than the Greeks” reveals that Mulligan is somehow aware of Bloom’s metempsychotic role as the exalted reincarnation of Odysseus, and that Mulligan is somehow even aware of the schema that rules his life on the page. Later in the episode Mulligan declares, “The Lord has spoke to Malachi,” which for Bell confirms that the Lord of Ulysses, James Joyce, is speaking through his mouthpiece Buck Mulligan to deliver these cryptic prophecies. Of course, Malachi in Hebrew means “messenger of God,” though as soon as Mulligan appears in the doorway, Stephen calls him “pseudomalachi,” a reminder to exercise caution, as Mulligan makes a terrible guru.

From Stephen’s point of view, Mulligan is not a clever, cogent revealer of deep truths, just an asshole here to ruin his day. Stephen is actively trying to escape Mulligan’s egregore and not really succeeding, not on Bloomsday anyway. Stephen certainly doesn’t see himself as a powerful monarch needing to be undercut. Stephen is trying to carve out a place among Dublin’s literary movers and shakers, who have just discussed the great party they’re all headed to later sans Stephen (though Mulligan and Haines are invited). Early on in “Scylla and Charybdis” Stephen already highlighted how these Nationalists dedicated to reviving and elevating Irish art are in fact devoted to English art over Irish. Stephen sees Mulligan in a similar vein, not so much tritely speaking truth to power, but just a clown to entertain the English, exemplified by his friendship with Haines. Joyce at one time described Oscar Wilde as “a court jester to the English,” and Mulligan occupies a similar role in Ulysses, “a jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a clement master’s praise.”

Like Lear’s fool, Mulligan’s rambling commentary verges into hostility, making him all the more disorienting for Stephen. You never know which version of Mulligan you’ll get - the one where he’s snarking on your shoes or the one where he’s accusing you of killing your mother. Bell says:

“Split between innocence and malice, [Mulligan] alternates cold blasts of irony with warm gushes of sentiment.”

As a result, Stephen is immediately on the backfoot after Mulligan’s intrusion in “Scylla and Charybdis.” In the Scylla and Charybdis dichotomy established by the schema for this episode, Mulligan is on the Charybdian side of things. Maelstrom Mulligan whirls around our young Artist, boisterous and unpredictable, and Scylla Stephen, steadfast in his own convictions, fails to parry. Bell argues that this is because Mulligan has no fixed identity; he can take on any form that suits the moment, donning a series of masks. He can shapeshift so easily because he ultimately believes nothing. Mulligan can discard any identity and quickly take up another, embodying the archetype of trickster. Even his name shifts throughout “Scylla and Charybdis,” as he is alternately called Monk Mulligan, Cuck Mulligan, and Puck Mulligan. Because Mulligan’s inner world is protean, he ultimately wriggles free of any scrutiny or mockery aimed at him. Turner and Mamigonian contend that:

“[Mulligan] is an uncanny character, unique among the minor characters in that Joyce cannot control him.”

They note how Joyce portrays his callousness while at the same time also delighting in his wit. No matter what he told Budgen, it’s hard to believe that Joyce didn’t enjoy writing Mulligan to some degree.

In the end, I think Stephen is right about Buck Mulligan. Despite everything, Mulligan’s clowning is ultimately hollow. Mulligan is like the broken clock in the old saying, right twice a day. Yes, we can glean some insight from his tomfoolery, but really his joking is entirely for joking’s sake, as Mulligan doesn’t espouse any coherent ideology or worldview. He views life as one big absurdity, but this is not a liberatory ideology for someone like Stephen who hopes to fly by the nets of his society and actualize himself as an artist. Of course, this is why it’s so confounding to Stephen that his own, original ideas are drowned out by Mulligan’s pointless cacophony. Stephen, a learner rather than a teacher as he declares in “Nestor,” hopes to learn something from debating a theory that he doesn’t fully believe himself. He can learn nothing from Mulligan’s folly. Yes, Mulligan has the jester’s privilege to mock the powerful in a way no one else can, but he doesn’t do anything meaningful with it. He can mock the English or the Church, but he’s happy to kiss the ring if it means personal gain. He has the ability to say whatever he pleases because he isn’t meaningfully challenging the powerful of society. This reveals a weakness of satire as an artform. As Stephen puts it, “Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen.” - “You will serve that which you laugh at.”

Puck Mulligan: A Joycean-Shakespearean Fool

Further Reading:

Decoding Dedalus: Christfox in Leather Trews