Stephen is, it seems, capable
of scientific thinking. In Circe he responds
directly and reasonably to Mulligan's cruel remark: “They say
I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer
did it, not I. Destiny.” But as a metaphysician he
cannot accept the shallow Christian view of God's unalloyed
goodness. In Scylla and Charybdis he refers to a
deity “whom the most Roman of catholics call dio
boia, hangman god,” which
Gifford notes is "a common Roman expression for the force that
frustrates human hopes and destinies." This god is quite
literally a "butcher."
Bloom too thinks, in Lestrygonians, that “God
wants blood victim.” That is, after all, the whole
logic of the Incarnation, the crucifixion, the Last Supper.
The YMCA throwaway that he is reading asks, "Are you saved?"
and it describes the immersion by which we can be saved: "All
are washed in the blood of the lamb."
In Oxen of the Sun a narrative voice modeled on the
scientific writing of Thomas Henry Huxley proclaims that
Stephen's view "that an omnivorous being
which can masticate, deglute, digest and apparently pass
through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect imperturbability
such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females emaciated by
parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak of
jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find
gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob,
reveals as nought else could and in a very unsavoury light the
tendency above alluded to." The tendency alluded to earlier in
the paragraph was Mr. Dedalus' "perverted
transcendentalism."
In other words God, in Stephen's highly "unsavoury" view, is
an omnivore who chews through every variety of human meat,
pausing occasionally to cleanse his palate with the delicate
juices of "staggering bob." The narrator pauses to gloss this
last dish: "For the enlightenment of those who are not so
intimately acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal
abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher
who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things scientific
can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides himself
on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in
the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers
signifies the cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly
dropped from its mother." YHWH here transcends his familiar
aspect of murderous senile delinquent and becomes a ravening,
gluttonous, red-toothed carnivore.
All of this can be dismissed as the ravings of a tortured
apostate, but Stephen's fanciful metaphysics complement the
scientific vision that pervades Ulysses: human life
is lived in bodies, bodies
are perishable meat, and no one knows what survives the grave.
Bloom thinks along these lines throughout Hades,
ignoring all the pious cant about the afterlife and focusing
on the facts of life (worth holding onto) and death (not worth
thinking about for very long).
Mulligan seconds his opinions in Telemachus: "You
saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the
Mater and Richmond and cut up
into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly
thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter."
[2014] A less materialist inspiration for Stephen's view of
the deity may perhaps be found in the works of William Blake.
Thornton cites a passage from A Vision of the Last
Judgment: "Thinking as I do that the Creator of this
World is a very Cruel Being, & being a Worshipper of
Christ, I cannot help saying: 'the Son O how unlike the
Father!' First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head.
Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it'" (28).
