"God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I
want puce gloves and green boots. Do I
contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."
Mulligan's perpetual spray of quotations from his favorite
writers (Swinburne, Russell, Homer, Xenophon, Nietzsche,
Yeats, Wilde) continues as he rummages through his clothing
trunk, applying Walt Whitman's famous declaration of personal
immensity to the superficial business of accessorizing a
yellow waistcoat with green boots and dark red gloves.
In Song of Myself, Whitman wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Gifford notes the relevant fact that Whitman’s reputation was
high in England at the end of the nineteenth century, citing “Swinburne’s praise of him
as the poet of the ‘earth-god freedom’ in To Walt Whitman
in America (1871).” Mulligan's determination to dress
in the outrageous fashion of the fin de siècle
avant-garde ("we'll simply have to dress the character")
coheres, then, with the quotation that accessorizes the
accessories.
Stephen thinks of these lines in Proteus, and in Scylla
and Charybdis he too mentions Whitman in the course of
his Shakespeare talk.