"Japhet in search of a father" is the name of a novel
published in 1836 by Capt. Frederick Marryat, an English naval
officer. It represents the efforts of a "foundling" (a child
deserted by unknown parents) to find his father. By
identifying Stephen with Japhet, Mulligan mocks his
aspirations to spiritual
paternity.
Thornton quotes several sentences from Japhet, in Search
of a Father that typify Japhet's deep need for
paternity: "if I saw a nose upon any man's face, at all
resembling my own, I immediately would wonder and surmise
whether that person could be my father. This constant dwelling
upon the subject at last created a species of monomania, and a
hundred times a day I would mutter to myself, 'Who is my
father?'" After digesting Proteus and Scylla
and Charybdis, the reader of Ulysses will
realize that Stephen Dedalus has the same monomaniacal
need—not for biological paternity (Simon Dedalus, or "Kinch
the elder," is alive and well in Dublin), but for a
kind of spiritual paternity that will enable him to become an
artist.
Mulligan mocks this deep spiritual longing by comparing it to
Marryat's obsessive character, whose searches do not amount to
much; as Gifford observes, Japhet's father, "when finally
found, turns out to be a testy old East India officer.” But Ulysses
makes Stephen something more than just poor Japhet, by
analogizing him to more consequential sons: Telemachus and Hamlet.
Together with William Cardell in England and Herman Melville
in America, Marryat helped shape the genre of sea stories
later popularized by Joseph Conrad, C. S. Forester, Dudley
Pope, and Patrick O’Brian. In Ulysses (1987), Hugh
Kenner notes the popularity of his fictions: "Though the
allusion seems recondite now, we are to imagine that this was
a boy's book for Mulligan. Many Marryat titles abounded in
cheap reprint as late as the 1930s" (30).
