Having lobbed out one highly suggestive image in "crosstrees," the final
sentence of the Telemachiad concludes with another: "homing,
upstream, silently moving, a silent ship." If Stephen's protean wrestlings in the third
chapter somehow reenact the efforts of Homer's Telemachus to
learn about his father's whereabouts (by questioning Menelaus,
who questioned Proteus), then this silent ship may somehow
reenact Odysseus' stealthy return to his home in Ithaca.
Other details conspire with the words "silent" and "homing"
to create this impression. Just before turning to see the
ship, Stephen has thought, "Behind. Perhaps there is
someone." He may only be worrying that someone has
seen him picking his nose (he has reached for his
handkerchief, only to realize that he never picked it up when
Mulligan threw it to him in Telemachus), but the
thought that "someone" is coming to town on that ship is
effectively insinuated into the reader's mind.
A reader of Joyce's fictions, in particular, may think of
Odysseus. In "An Encounter," the second story of Dubliners,
the two boys who are "miching" from school walk along the
quays on the north side of the Liffey and see a "graceful
threemaster" being unloaded on the opposite side of the river.
They take a ferry across to watch, and the protagonist looks
at "the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes for
I had some confused notion....." The boy's unexplained
"notion" is probably the medieval one that Odysseus had green
eyes. (This tradition has been perpetuated in modern culture.
Glyn Iliffe's recent popular novel The Voyage of Odysseus,
for instance, gives the hero "green eyes.")
Joyce's Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, will appear on the very next
page of the novel, so the final words of the Telemachiad read
like a prophetic transition, a linking of expectant son to
triumphantly returning father. But symbolic connections tend
not to cohere quite so neatly in Joyce's fictions. Bloom is
not arriving on a schooner on June 16; he is conducting
everyday business as a citizen of Dublin. And symbolically, he
has only started on his journey from Calypso's island to an
Ithacan homecoming.
Even in "An Encounter," the boy's search for an adventure is
not fulfilled in quite the way he has hoped for. The man he
eventually encounters, with "a pair of bottle-green eyes
peering at me from under a twitching forehead," is no Ulysses.
And this "queer old josser," a leering and demented substitute
for the expected hero, will have his counterpart in Ulysses.
In Eumaeus Stephen will find that there indeed
was "someone" on the ship, name of W. B. Murphy. He too is a
very disappointing Odysseus.
