The Greek word "Chrysostomos" in the tenth
paragraph of Telemachus compounds Chrysos
(gold) and stoma (mouth). Several orators of
antiquity acquired this epithet "golden-mouthed," notably St.
John Chrysostomos (ca. 349-407), a renowned speaker and one of
the Three Holy Hierarchs of the Greek Orthodox faith. The odd
one-word sentence appears to comment on Mulligan's "even white
teeth glistening here and there with gold points," in the
previous sentence. It is the first appearance in Ulysses
of the book's revolutionary stylistic device of interior
monologue, often mislabeled stream of consciousness.
Bernard Benstock says of this cryptic one-word sentence, "As
a comment on Buck's dental work it is redundant; as a
narrative comment it is out of place" (Critical Essays,
3). Who is thinking this odd thought? There is only one good
possibility: the person standing next to Buck Mulligan,
watching his moving mouth, listening to his verbal
pyrotechnics. Stephen is the kind of person who can muse on
church fathers before his first cup of tea, and also the kind
of person who would notice that one of Mulligan's middle names
is "St John," linking him with St. John Chrysostomos. And, as
Benstock also observes, Stephen repeatedly thinks of Mulligan
in damning one-word judgments: "Usurper"
at the end of Telemachus, "Catamite" in Scylla and
Charybdis, "Chrysostomos" (i.e., glib speaker) here.
Joyce said often that the minor French novelist Édouard
Dujardin inspired him to create the internal, unspoken
thoughts of his characters in this way. Ellmann tells the
story of how Joyce came upon the novel Les lauriers sont
coupés (1888), and he describes the
technique of Dujardin’s experimental novel, an extended
soliloquy that does without any third-person narration (126).
He also quotes several sayings that evoke the book’s appeal to
Joyce. One is a sentence of Fichte that inspired Dujardin:
“The I poses itself and opposes itself to the not-I.”
The others are Dujardin’s: “the life of the mind is a
continual mixing of lyricism and prose,” and the novel must
therefore balance “poetic exaltation and the ordinariness of
any old day.”
In “Chrysostomos,” one can hear Joyce's deployment of these
Symbolist oppositions of a poetic inward reality and a mundane
outward environment. The word takes us for one moment into the
fanciful realm of Stephen’s thoughts, where ordinary images
like gold and white teeth become imbued with psychological,
moral, and spiritual signifiance. Stephen's single word
defines the "not-I," Mulligan, as a glib coiner of elegant
phrases who does not use language in the service of truth.
This is our first real glimpse of the "I" that is Stephen, an
ego desperately defining itself in opposition to other human
beings.
The term that Joyce used to describe Dujardin’s
innovation, monologue intérieur, did not originate
with either man. According to Ellmann, Valery Larbaud found
the expression in Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis (1893)
and gave it to his friend Joyce as a tool for discussing the
author’s big new book (519). Joyce soon felt that the phrase
had outlived its usefulness and went searching for others that
might point readers toward what he was trying to do in the
novel. But his endorsement of “interior monologue”
should recommend it over the similar phrase, “stream of
consciousness,” that readers often apply to Ulysses.
Only Molly Bloom’s interior thoughts can justly be called
streaming.
[2014] Kevin Birmingham makes this point well in The
Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses
(2014). He says of the novel's style, “Thoughts don’t flow
like the luxuriant sentences of Henry James. Consciousness is
not a stream. It is a brief assembly of fragments on the
margins of the deep, a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before
the tide reclaims it.”
JH 2011