"–– He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen
said. Where is his guncase?...Out here in the dark with a man
I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
black panther." Something very similar happened to Joyce in
the tower, but the terror was even greater: shots were fired
in the small stone room, and bullets flew around his bed.
Richard Ellmann narrates the actual events. Joyce was living
at the tower, largely at Gogarty’s expense and "sufferance"
(the word used by Stanislaus Joyce in his diary). Relations
were strained, but Gogarty did not want to endanger his
bohemian reputation, and his chance of appearing in a good
light in Joyce's fiction, by putting Joyce out. Trench, whom
Gogarty knew from Oxford and who had become a fervent follower
of the Irish Revival, was
living with them in the tower.
On the night of September 14, 1904 Trench woke up screaming
about a black panther that was about to spring on him, fired
his revolver at the fireplace beside which Joyce was sleeping,
and then went back to sleep. His nightmare returned and he
screamed once more and reached for his revolver, but Gogarty
had taken it. Gogarty said, “Leave him to me,” and shot some
pots and pans over Joyce’s bed, which crashed down on him.
"The terrified Joyce considered this fusillade his dismissal"
(175). He got up, dressed, left the tower, and walked all the
way to Dublin. The next day, he wrote a note to a friend
asking him to go to the tower and pack up his trunk. Ellmann
comments: “Perhaps all grand gestures end with someone else
packing the trunk.” This event prompted Joyce to decide
finally to leave Ireland, for
the second time and for good. He did so with Nora
Barnacle, whom he had met in June of the same year. They
boarded a ship for France in October.
Trench committed suicide on 1 June 1909 by blowing out his
brains. Ellmann speculates that it was "perhaps with the very
weapon with which he and Gogarty had so nearly blown out
Joyce's," and it seems by no means too ingenious to suppose
that the black panther of his dream may have been a projection
of whatever it was that he so violently feared or hated in
himself. In Proteus Stephen thinks of the gun-toting
Englishman as an adventurer on safari and simultaneously as
the fearsome quarry he stalks: he and Mulligan are "the
panthersahib and his pointer." In Oxen of the
Sun Haines briefly enters as a dark gothic apparition
and drinks some laudanum to
quell the demon within: "In vain! His spectre stalks me.
Dope is my only hope... Ah! (The black panther!...)"
In fictionally presenting these decisive events, Joyce made
many changes. He eliminated the terror of having a firearm
discharged in his direction in the confines of a small dark
room. Haines does not fire his gun, and Stephen merely asks
nervously the next morning, "Where is his guncase?" Gogarty’s
role in the terrorizing disappears as well. Stephen’s response
thus becomes softer than Joyce’s was. Sympathizing with Haines
when Mulligan promises to "give
him a ragging," he decides that he can remain in the
tower. And instead of a dramatic break with Mulligan, he
merely deepens his feeling that a break is imminent, thinking
that he cannot come back to the tower on the next
night. In Proteus he thinks, "I will not sleep there
when this night comes." (His next thought is, "Call: no
answer." Probably he is imagining showing up at the tower,
yelling up at the stone slits to announce his arrival, and
being rebuffed.)
Although Stephen does take his leave of Bloom much as Joyce
took his leave of Gogarty—by walking off into the darkness at
the end of Ithaca—the novel does not encourage
readers to think that his split from Mulligan will exercise
any decisive significance in his life. Instead, by setting the
events in the tower on 16 June 1904, the date of his first
outing with Nora Barnacle, Joyce manages to make the story
more about love than
alienation.
