Unkind as it may seem for Mulligan to say that “The unclean
bard makes a point of washing once a month,” he is actually
being generous to Stephen, or ignorant of the true magnitude
of his problem. Because of a morbid fear of water, Stephen has
not had a bath for eight months.
Ithaca explains "That he was 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."
The last proclivity may be assigned to Stephen’s Jesuitical love
of intellectual clarity, but the phobia dates to a single
event narrated in A Portrait. As a very young boy
(probably age 6), and new to Clongowes Wood College, he was
pushed by an older boy into “the square ditch,” a cesspool for
a privy used by the boys in the dormitory. The water was “cold
and slimy,” another boy “had once seen a big rat jump into the
scum,” and Stephen is soon sent to the infirmary with a severe
infection that makes him wonder whether he will die. Now, at
age 22, he still dreads the water, as he acknowledges in Proteus
when he thinks of "my fear" in contrast
to Mulligan's aquatic heroism.
Mulligan continues to niggle at Stephen's unwashed state in Oxen
of the Sun, calling him "polycimical." Combining
the Greek prefix poly- (many) with the Latin noun cimex
(bug, plural cimices), the word implies that he is
infested with bugs.
Penelope contains the novel's funniest reference to
Stephen's hygiene. Conflating him with a small statue of a
Greek god that her husband once bought, Molly imagines
performing fellatio on one or both of them: "besides hes young
those fine young men I could see down in Margate strand
bathing place from the side of the rock standing up in the sun
naked like a God or something and then plunging into the sea
with them why arent all men like that thered be some
consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he
bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his
shoulders his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty
and poetry for you I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over
also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind
taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was
asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his
boyish face I would too in ½ a minute even if some of it went
down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides
hed be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose
never dream of washing it from 1 years end to the other the
most of them." Stephen is quite unlike those youths who
regularly plunge naked into the sea, and quite like those pigs
of men who never dream of washing it.
