In Telemachus Mulligan tells Stephen, "You put your hoof in it now," and as he sets off carrying Deasy's FMD letter at the end of Nestor Stephen thinks that "Mulligan will dub me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard." From these details it would seem that, in addition to nicknaming Stephen "Kinch" and caustically calling him a "jesuit," Mulligan has for some reason decided to think of his friend as bovine. But the mythology originated with Joyce, and he did not merely peg it to his persona as an external symbolic accoutrement. Stephen has learned to think of himself in relation to cattle in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and those habits persist in Ulysses.

Gifted by his creator with a strange surname, Stephen thinks of himself in Portrait as a Daedalus-to-be: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." Before Daedalus made wings to fly away from Crete, he crafted an artificial cow inside which Pasiphae could satisfy her lustful desire for a prize bull. Stephen recalls this unsavory past in Circe: "Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox." The name Stephen, which means "wreath," also evokes the garlands which prepared bulls for sacrificial slaughter in ancient Greece. The passive verb stephanomai carried the meaning “to be prepared for sacrifice.”

From its first sentence Joyce's Portrait associates Stephen with cattle: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...." As a boy of six years, he is drawn to the beauty of cows in a pasture but revolted by their winter quarters: "the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs, sickened Stephen’s heart." But when he rides on the milk car "these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat." Later, at Belvedere, some fellow students call him by the Greek name for oxen: "—Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!… —Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!" Stephen recalls this nickname in Oxen of the Sun: "I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard."

"Bullockbefriending" adds a puzzling detail to Stephen's association with cattle. In a personal communication David Heinimann reminds me that a bullock is a steer––i.e., castrated. Stephen would surely be aware of this distinction implicit in his choice of words. In Telemachus he has reacted to Mulligan's promise to give Haines a "ragging"––a schoolboy hazing—by imagining the victim's terror: "With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" Debagging refers simply to pulling down a boy's trousers, but the tailor's "shears," the "slit" shirt, and the "bag" between the boy's legs evoke castration, and putting a "calf's face" on him (amplified by the mention of an "ox") links this cutting with cattle. The thought prompts kindness toward Haines: "— Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at night."

It may be that the thought of bulls' throats being slit, obscurely lodged in Stephen's Christian name, lies behind his fantasy of bovine castration, and that this fantasy which makes him unexpectedly befriend Haines in Telemachus suggests "bullockbefriending" in Nestor. If Stephen is indeed thinking along these lines, then his feeling of solidarity with cattle coheres with his self-identification as a stag "bayed about" by hounds in Proteus. Joyce, a pacifist who thought of himself as a solitary striver menaced by the rabble, had tried out the deer image in two works in 1904: the poem The Holy Office and the essay A Portrait of the Artist. It suited his conception of himself as a sacrificial victim comparable to Charles Stewart Parnell and Jesus Christ. In Ulysses he apparently added bulls to the mix.

As far as I know Joyce did not think of himself as an ox, but there is good reason to suppose that he harbored creaturely sympathies with cattle. Like Stephen, he responded to an acquaintance's concern about foot and mouth disease by helping to place a letter on the subject in an Irish newspaper, so one may imagine that he took some jocoserious interest in the fool's errand on which Mr. Deasy sends Stephen.

Stephen's fancy of a "bullockbefriending bard" may also sound intertextual notes. Gifford observes that Homer "befriended" the cattle of the god Helios by condemning the Greeks who slaughtered them—and Homer was certainly the "bard" most important to Joyce's project of writing an epic in modern times. Aquinas, another writer who was supremely important to Joyce (and Stephen), was called "the dumb ox" by his fellow students at the university in Cologne. Gifford quotes a remark attributed to his teacher, Albertus Magnus: "We call him the dumb ox, but he will one day give such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other."

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John Hunt 2024