In Telemachus Stephen says to Mulligan, "You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however." In Eumaeus Bloom thinks of Mulligan's "rescue of that man from certain drowning by artificial respiration and what they call first aid at Skerries, or Malahide was it?" These two passages acknowledge real-life exploits of Oliver Gogarty, and they contribute to a recurring theme of heroism in the novel: saving another person's life by diving into the aqueous, the filthy, the cold, the subterranean.

According to John Francis Byrne's Silent Years, Joyce was "a good swimmer," and in his late teens he would, like Mulligan at the Fortyfoot, swim naked in the ocean waters off the rocks of the Bull Wall (176). Gogarty, however, was a swimmer of real distinction. Byrne recalls seeing someone jump into the Liffey just west of the Butt Bridge to save "a sturdy man who was attempting suicide" in the river. After lugging his "reluctant and recalcitrant freight" to the foot of some steps, "The young rescuer, seeing that his charge was apparently in good hands, ran nimbly up the steps and came to retrieve his coat and bicycle; and then, having put his coat on over his dripping shirt, he immediately jumped on his bicycle, turned into Hawkins Street, and sped away without a word to anyone. This young man had done a deed which was triply courageous: first in jumping into the Liffey at a time and place where the current was swift and treacherous, second in tackling a would-be suicide, and third in plunging into a stretch of water which, at that time, was just a cesspool. Indeed, when he came up out of it with his face smeared with filth, and black muck dripping from his clothes, I was scarcely able to recognize him as the customarily spruce, well-groomed, and debonaire Oliver St. John Gogarty" (176-77).

Gogarty performed such rescues at least four times between 1898 and 1901, and much later he saved himself in the same way. In November 1922, an IRA faction that opposed the Treaty between Ireland and Great Britain authorized the killing of Irish Free State Senators, of whom Gogarty was one. Two months later, on 20 January 1923, six men kidnapped him at gunpoint from his home and took him to a house near Chapelizod where they intended to execute him. Ulick O'Connor's Oliver St John Gogarty recounts how he coolly made his escape: "'I tried a number of ruses to get outside, as close to the Liffey banks as possible, but none of them worked'. Then, suddenly, pleading that his bowels were loosening with fright, Gogarty doubled up and asked to be assisted out. On a second occasion, he repeated his request, but kept his arms inside his fur-collared overcoat, ready to slip out in a second. As he took the coat off, he threw it over the heads of his captors, flinging himself recklessly into the swirling Liffey almost in the same movement. The Liffey was in flood and it was a night of extreme cold. For a man of forty-five to have survived the initial shock was in itself remarkable. Swept onwards by the flood, he thought he had had a heart attack; he found himself unable to breathe" but managed to start swimming (211-12). After fifteen minutes in the water he staggered out, barely able to walk or speak, and found help.

Joyce has his persona Stephen call attention to Gogarty's aquatic heroism, and, altering the facts of his own biography, he makes Stephen as dissimilar as can be: "You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however." Stephen does not swim in Telemachus, and Mulligan tells Haines that he only bathes once a month. Ithaca defines him as "hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language." In Proteus he confronts his cowardice: "He saved men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping.... Would you do what he did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would you or would you not?" In Wandering Rocks he thinks guiltily of his sister Dilly, "She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death."

The thread of aquatic heroism associated with Mulligan finds at least two other expressions in the novel, both of them lightly tinged with irony. The closest analogue appears in Hades with the reporting of another real-life story—that of Reuben J. Dodd's son jumping into the Liffey, probably in an attempt at suicide. Dodd rewarded the rescuer “like a hero,” but with the un-princely sum of a florin (two shillings). Hearing the story, Simon Dedalus remarks “drily” that it was "One and eightpence too much.”

In Wandering Rocks Lenehan alludes to the story of Tom Rochford going down into a sewer to rescue a man overcome by gas. “— He’s a hero, he said simply.... — The act of a hero.” In this instance Joyce does not ironize the story in any way, but the real-life facts do. Robert Martin Adams describes how twelve men in succession went down the manhole, one after another becoming overcome by the methane and requiring a new rescuer to enter the fray (Surface and Symbol, 92-93). Tom Rochford was merely the third in this series of comically futile heroic actors, but Joyce liked Rochford and decided to elevate his importance. In Circe, however, Rochford's heroism is inflated to absurd proportions, when rather than attempting to save the dying he makes a Christ-like effort to save the dead. Paddy Dignam, who has become a dog, worms his way down through a hole in the ground, followed by “an obese grandfather rat” like the tomb-diving one that Bloom sees in Hades. His voice is then heard “baying under ground.” Rochford, following close behind, pauses to orate: “(A hand to his breastbone, bows.) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare.) My turn now on. Follow me up to Carlow. (He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole....)”

Read More

John Hunt 2025