In the opening verses of chapter 2 of John's gospel, Jesus
turns water into wine for a wedding feast in Cana––the first
of his many miracles, and the most Irish of the lot.
Mulligan's Joking Jesus unhospitably demands faith as the
price of admission to such alcoholic miracles: those who think
"that I amn't divine" will "get no free drinks."
He goes on to indulge some seemingly gratuitous, but actually
quite involved, thoughts about urination.
In addition to threatening nonbelievers with the pains of
sobriety, Joking Jesus
rather fantastically condemns them to drink urine. Earlier in
Telemachus he has made a joke out of Mother Grogan's strong
tea: "When I makes tea I makes tea.... And when I makes water
I makes water." Her companion Mrs. Cahill picks up on the pun
(to "make water" is to urinate) and turns the teakettle into a
chamberpot: "God send you don't make them in the one pot."
Joking Jesus imagines the water that will come out of his body
after he drinks his wine:
If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again.
Jesus is making all the drinks in
this place, converting water into wine and wine into water.
People cheeky enough to deny his divinity will wish, after
tasting the yellow water in their glasses, that it was Guinness
stout, commonly referred to in Ireland as "
a pint of plain"
(plain porter, that is). Mulligan thus manages to add to his
blasphemous mockery of the Savior a second crude joke about
drinking piss.
Somewhere in the author's teeming mind still another
association is at work. The collection of poetry titled Chamber
Music (1907) implicitly associates the delicate musical
art of its lyrics with the tinkling sounds of urine falling
into a chamberpot, and in Finnegans Wake urination and
creation are strongly linked in the writing of Shem the
Penman. In Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake
(1962), Clive Hart observes that this linkage can also be
found in Mulligan's joking lyric, because at Cana Jesus is
engaging in acts of Transubstantiation (206-7). In the first
paragraphs of Telemachus Mulligan is seen mocking the
Christian liturgical mystery, and now instead of soap
suds he plays with wine, water, and urine. For Joyce,
the mystery of changing one substance into another became a
metaphor for his transformation of the common materials of
human experience into the radiant beauty of art.
