As Stephen looks over his shoulder and sees the disembodied threemaster
glide past him, he notices that her sails are "brailed up on
the crosstrees." He is hardly employing nautical terminology.
The conjunction of the words cross and tree, and the fact that
there are three of them, infers an allusion to the
Crucifixion. Jesus was crucified between two thieves, and
Christians have frequently referred to the cross on which he
hung as a "tree," opposing its salvific power to the tree in
Eden that brought death to mankind. The crucifixion symbolism
has significance for Stephen much as it did for Gabriel Conroy
at the end of The Dead.
Stephen has repeatedly pondered images of death in the third
episode: a dead fetus in a
bag, the "ghostwoman
with ashes on her breath," the remnants of the "lost Armada," "crucified
shirts" and "Human shells," a post office doorman blown to
bits by a shotgun, prison walls and tenements blown up by gunpowder, waves of
murderous Vikings, a shoal
of beached whales, the "Houses of
decay" evoked by Guido Cavalcanti, a drowning man, the
rotting body of a dog, a drowned man. But near the end of the
chapter he has been thinking intensively of the benign aspects
of death: resurrection as for
Milton's Lycidas, transfiguration
as in Ariel's song, reincarnation
in his cycle of life forms, welcome
release in the mildness of "Seadeath." The evocation of
Calvary in the final sentence joins these trains of thought in
balanced opposition. Crucifixion suggests both the cruel
certainty of extinction and hope for some kind of
resurrection.
Joyce had already played with such ambiguities at the end of
"The Dead," the concluding story of Dubliners. As
Gabriel Conroy swoons into fantasies of joining the dead, he
thinks of snow falling on "the lonely churchyard on the hill
where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the
crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on
the barren thorns." The details in these sentences
unmistakably evoke the hill of Calvary, the crosses on which
three men died, the spears of the Roman soldiers, and the
thorns of Christ's crown. But do Gabriel's thoughts represent
a capitulation to insignificance, or a revelation of the
possibility of redemption? Joyce leaves the fate of his
protagonist sublimely uncertain, while embuing it with mythic
potential. The story ends with snow falling "like the descent
of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Throughout Ulysses, Stephen is seen slipping into a
recapitulation of his father's dissolute existence, and
simultaneously positioning himself to be reborn. The narrative
does not indicate which trajectory may ultimately prevail.
Here at the end of the Telemachiad, the symbol attached to
Gabriel at the end of "The Dead" is repurposed, to express
both the despair and hope of Stephen's life.
