6 - Stephen in Ulysses: the loveliest mummer

Summary

In Ireland in June 1904 the Abbey players are in rehearsal. Buck Mulligan and Haines, with whom Stephen is sharing the Martello Tower, have been along to see them:

We went over to their playbox Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey theatre! I smell the public sweat of monks.

(U 215)

Theatricality is in the air and Mulligan provides an egregious example of it. His first act, and the book's opening gesture, is to impersonate a priest celebrating Holy Communion. Mulligan likes to organize his friends and his preferred role is that of impresario or master of ceremonies rather than simple mummer. From a generation that has ‘grown out of Wilde and paradoxes’ (U 24) he craves recognition as the latest and most outrageous of the Irish wits. In mockery of the new national theatre (and especially, one suspects, of J. M. Synge) he has ‘conceived a play for the mummers’, a ‘national immorality in three orgasms’ (U 216). He is provocative and patronizing towards Stephen, whom he addresses as ‘Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all’ (U 11).

Stephen is like someone who has agreed to take part in a serious play and is disgusted to see it turn into farce. A year after being summoned back from Paris to his mother's deathbed, he has fallen in with Mulligan's proposal to set up house in the tower.