27 March 1993Eliots Objective Correlative in TelemachiaA good writer, T S Eliot m ight argue, does not write, There was

a guilt-ridden young man standing near the water; instead he writes, He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a [seasi de] ledge of rock, carefully (Joyce, 3.42.500). Eliot would further argue that be hind that nose-scratch, beneath that sea, there exist a set of objects, a situati on, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; suc h that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are g iven, the emotion is immediately evoked. Eliot names that set of objects, etc., t he objective correlative and asserts that the use of this device is the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art (Eliot, 124). He introduces the term in a 1919 essay on Hamlet, and attributes that plays artistic failure to Gertrudes in sufficient ability to embody her sons guilt (Eliot, 125). Eliot is apparently ove rjoyed# three years later when Joyce manipulates this device to correlate Stephe n Dedalus emotions with the surrounding Dublin bay. The snotgreen sea[, t]he scrot umtightening sea (J, 1.4.78) is for Stephen the inescapable symbol of his many fa iled or strained relationships; it is literally and metaphorically capable of ab sorbing him and his expansive emotions. Most importantly, the sea calls to his m ind his mother and her bilious vomit, and Buck Mulligans powerplays at Martello T ower. The former relationship is over and irreconcilable, but still the primary source of Stephens self-pity, ill-will, and insecurity. These factors deeply affe ct his involvement with Mulligan, an individual who seems more than willing to e xploit Stephens weaknesses to ask for it...all (J, 1.17.632). These two relationshi ps, probably the two most significant in his life, so complicate his psychologic al schema that Jung likens Ulysses to the rambling monologue of a schizophrenic (Eco, 34). Eliots coining of the objective correlative and Joyces subsequent use of it offer further commentary not just on the pathological content of Stephens char acter, but also on the Telemachia relative to the backdrop of Hamlet . By the sect ions end, Joyce establishes nearly all the components of Eliots correlative formul a, but he leaves somewhat open the question of exactly what expressible emotion St ephen feels. Joyces handling of Stephen at first glance seems to fit Eliots recomm endations perfectly, but occasionally Joyce departs from Eliot, almost refutes h im, and relates Stephens feelings through Stephens own thoughts and actions.Ulysse s begins with the introduction of a set of objects important, although not essen tial, to the understanding of the Telemachia as a objective correlative formula. No less important is the character Joyce chooses to carry those objects: Stately , plump Buck Mulligan...bear[s] a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor l ay crossed (J, 1.3.1-2). With the first sentence, Joyce inaugurates at least six themes of his novel, four of which relate to Stephens correlative. The three obje cts i.e., the bowl, the razor, and the mirror maintain prominent but separate po sitions in Stephens life and mind, and their bearer, Buck, is Stephens incorrigibl e foil even when absent, a capacity that serves in itself as a situation with whic h Stephen eventually must cope.Joyces thematic use of mirrors is at times more ob viously symbolic than at others. On one basic level, he uses a mirror to convey Bucks vanity and Stephens insecurity. A laughing and stately Mulligan handles it a s an extension of his body and his persona, gracefully sweeping the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad....His curling shaven lips laughe d and the edges of his white glittering teeth and then condescends to Stephen, Loo k at yourself, you dreadful bard. Obeying Bucks request, Stephen peers at himself and observes only a pitiful dogsbody to rid of vermin (J, 1.6.130-37). But on a mo re developed level, and a more decidedly Eliotic one, Joyce uses the mirror to a bsorb, not merely reflect, at least one of Stephens emotions: his self-pity. Unli ke Hamlets mother, the mirror is a vessel with an infinite capacity. Whatever Ste phen places before it, it holds for as long as he looks at the mirror. Stephens b elief that the mirror reveals him as [Buck] and others see [him] and Bucks subseque nt pejorative remarks, point to a knowledge of Stephens problem with self-esteem. Stephen might

feel, then, that however much he dislikes it, the mirror captures and displays h is internal weakness. In other words, a concrete and specific physical trait as shown in the mirror represents certain intangible aspects of Stephens character. The looking-glass is a small-scale objective correlative of Stephens severe lack of confidence, and, because he is helpless to prevent that circumstance#, Stephe n may further understand the correlative as an element of the ineluctable modalit y of the visible (J, 3.31.1). Bucks razor appears in many different forms througho ut the Telemachia, but most often it represents some means by which Buck subjuga tes or mocks Stephen, much the same way he uses the mirror. Buck begins with the mirror and the razor crossed, and utters his first words in mockery of Stephens religion: In troibo ad altare Dei (1.3.5) he intones, and walks to the parapet, hi s altar, where he sets his mirror. The act of shaving separates Buck from Stephe n further. The dogsbody of Stephen implies a hairy beastliness that Buck hopes to remove from himself. Neither Buck nor Stephen seems able to escape the image of Stephen as animal. Dogsbody is his own word, and he recalls her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from his childhood shirts (J, 2.9.268). B uck, for his own part, makes the insensitive and unforgettable comment to his ow n mother that, Its only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead (1.7.198). When the bl ade is in hand, however, he tempers his wit to stay in control of himself. This conscious move to control establishes some connection in Bucks mind between his r azor and Stephen. As he prepares his face for the razors glide, Buck takes gentle verbal jabs at Stephen but ceasing, he beg[ins] to shave with care, and shave[s] w arily over his chin when reminiscing on having dubbed Stephen Kinch. A moment later , when Stephen declares he will leave if Haines stays, Buck frowns at the lather on his razorblade, not at Stephen (J, 1.4.37-65). In a series of worsening denigr ations, he commandeers Stephens handkerchief, wipes his razor on it (as Stephen w ould wipe his own nose), and announces a new art colour for our Irish poets [such as Stephen]: snotgreen (1.4.78) As a result of these continual insults and vario us other affronts, it is understandable that Stephen feels betrayed, and it is u nderstandable when later he recollects the image of Caesars stabbing (2.21.49). B ucks introduction of the adjective snotgreen is crucial to connect the series of ob jects that form the objective correlative. Mulligans first connects the tincture of Stephens mucus to the sea around them and all of Ireland, the ring of bay and s kyline [that] held a dull green mass of liquid. The language is evocative first o f Bucks shaving bowl, and secondly, but more significantly, of Stephens mothers bed pan, a bowl of white china...holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn u p from her rotting liver (1.5.106-8). The welldeveloped thought association at op erating here presents much more than an example of Joyces stream-of-consciousness facility; it describes Stephens view of himself, thought through [his] eyes {3.31. 1) and thought of thought (2.24.74), and it reveals how subsumed in his relationsh ip with his mother. Bucks offhand comment that, You can almost taste [the snot-gre en] is less than appealing when he refers to Swinburnes great sweet mother, but it i s entirely distasteful when that sweet mother becomes Stephens own, and the taste is that of her vomit. What makes the connection so powerful and disturbing, how ever, is that it comes directly from Stephens thoughts. It is as though the sea a round Stephen is composed of all his failures and fears. His bitterness regardin g his dead mother, his envy and fear of Buck Mulligan, his disagreements with Ir eland and its church, are joined merely by their common color, but other problem s are associated with the sea as well. The scrotumtightening sea threatens Stephens questionable sexuality just as the tailors shears (associated with Bucks razor) t hreaten to debag young Clive Kempthorpe (1.7.170). Because Stephen cannot flee his land or fly over the sea, he might be tempted to swim in it, but doing so would be to immerse himself in his weaknesses, not to cleanse himself of them. The cl assic symbol of cleansing water becomes a vomit of sins. Stephen is, with good r eason, reluctant to bathe in these waters. The unclean bard makes a point of wash ing once a month (1.13.475) notes Buck. Within the text, the sea is so vast and s o

vile, perhaps infinitely so, Stephen would need an almost eternally inexpressibl e emotion for it to fail as his objective correlative. In identifying the sea as the objective correlative, the situation, [and] chain of events which shall be t he formula of that particular emotion also became evident. Through Bucks manipulat ion of the objects and of Stephen it becomes clear in Telemachia that there is a deep moral and perhaps sexual tension between the two, and it is a tension that exaggerates Stephens problems with his late mother. The simplified chain of even ts in approximate chronological order begins with the death of Stephens mother, c ontinues with Stephens leaving home to seek misfortune (16.506.252), Bucks beastly de ad remark, Stephen staying with Buck, Haines visit, and the skirmish regarding the keys to the tower. Joyce explores most of these events in great detail, and lik e the sea, Stephens life is an organism made up of events which may be taken as infi nitely inclusive or infinitely small and each of which involves all the others; and each of these events is unique (Wilson, 177). And because these events form t he correlative sea, it is necessary to determine exactly what emotion the sea re presents.Read against Hamlet, Telemachia could reveal a form of guilt as Stephens dominant emotion. Eliot writes that, The essential emotion of the play is the fe eling of a son towards a guilty mother (Eliot, 124). The problem with Hamlet is t hat the emotion, which neither Shakespeare nor Eliot could name in a word, canno t find an adequate equivalent in Gertrude. So, Eliot concludes, Hamlet stumbles ar ound looking for an appropriate representation of his emotion, as does Shakespea re. Finding none, Shakespeare ends his drama without concluding it. It is of not e that Ellman describes Ulysses as one of the most concluded books ever written (J , xiv).The dominant emotion of Telemachia may be said to be that of a guilty son toward his mother, but Stephens situation is more complicated than that and Haml ets. Stephens mother was (presumably) no adulteress or murderess. She was a hard-w orking, God-fearing, son-loving Irish Catholic woman, and, from this at least, S tephen has and had no legitimate reason not to like her, except for his being th e near-polar opposite of her. So far, his animosity toward her is inexplicable. Neither did he stab her, poison her, or otherwise physically contribute to her d eath. Yet Buck insists that Stephen crossed her last wish in death (1.7.213) and ki ll[ed] his mother (1.5.122). Stephens dream vision of his mother reflects both his guilt and his animosity toward his mother. No, mother! he cries. Let me be and let me live (1.9.279). It is rare that Stephen thinks in particular terms about how he feels. When remembering his mother and his dream, he describes pain, that was not yet a pain of love (1.5.100) and considerably later, when alone, he adds, Sad, too (J, 3.41.436). A sad pain is similar to guilt, but guilt implies a culpabili ty that Stephen doesnt seem (consciously, at least) to believe he has. It appears instead that his mother assigns him culpability, but can do so only in the unco nscious realm of Stephens dreams. For this reason, whatever guilt, or emotion aki n to guilt, Stephen might feel does not reveal itself explicitly in the text, be cause it could be contained only in a stream-of-subconsciousness, a narrative st yle beyond even Joyce. That emotion, like Hamlets, whatever it is, is hidden bene ath Stephens consciousness and, by extension of Eliots objective correlative theor y, beneath the surface of the waters surrounding Ireland. Joyce manipulates Elio ts theory once more in his creation of the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience. Just as his consciousness does not constrain Stephens emotion s, neither does surface reality exclusively define his external facts. Walking o n the strand, Stephen waxes solipsistic. Thought through [his] eyes (J, 3.31.1) fo r Stephen soon becomes eyes through his thought, the process by which Stephen obse rves an object and almost immediately transmutes it into something from his memo ry; it is the process by which he escapes the too-true mirror, the ineluctable m odality of the visible. He thus makes his world and each of its components, as W ilson says, unique. From that point, J Mitchell Morse glosses the passage, In th e next few lines, Stephens walking stick is changed into a sword, his legs into B uck Mulligans legs, the

word nebeneinander into solid ground under his feet, Blakes Los into Platos demiur ge, and Sandymount Strand into Blakes way out of time into eternity, where the ne beneinander and the nacheinander are one....Thus, in less than a page, Stephen, not knowing who he is or where he is going, has identified himself with Aristotl e, Boehme, Hamlet, Blake, perhaps Lessing, perhaps Gutzkow, and an upsidedown Be rkeley...The whole chapter is a chapter of such changes (Hart, 36). Joyce has cr eated an upside-down (or an inside-out) Eliot as much as Stephen developed an up side-down Berkeley. Stephens internal facts are substituted for what once was ext ernal reality. All that is left to complete the Eliots formula for Stephen is to t erminate [the external facts] in sensory experience, [after which] the emotion i s immediately invoked. The passage in which Stephen undergoes his sensory experi ence is the subject of much debate regarding the specific experience undertaken, but either of the possibilities serves essentially the same purpose. First, it is possible that Stephen urinates on the beach as people pass by. Simply stated, this is a beautifully written parallel between Stephens literal and metaphorical catharsis as he expels whatever that snotgreen fluid, whatever that deep subcon scious emotion, is into the upswelling tide of his correlative sea. Or, second, it is conceivable that Stephen masturbates on the beach as people pass by. Still r ecovering from his Touch me...soft soft soft hand...O, touch me soon, now thoughtflow (3.41.436), Stephen may have decided to use his own soft hand to achieve a simulacra of a sensory experience equivalent in nature to the solipsistic mutati ons earlier in the episode. If Stephen is masturbating, and he does ejaculate, i t seems fitting that his sperm can find no mother womb and must fall into the se a, spent. Flop, slop, slap...its speech ceases is onomatopoeia worthy of micturati on and masturbation, and perhaps it is best to let the individual choose his cat hartic preference (U, 3.41.455-60).According to Eliot, immediately after the sen sory experience in this case the purging the emotion must be evoked. Accordingly , Stephen summarizes his earlier solipsism with the observation that God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain and then touc hes on the source of all his emotion, conscious and subconscious, correlated and not correlated. Hinting at his mothers waxen, ashen odor, Stephen realizes his d ead mothers influence on him: Dead breaths I living breathe (U, 3.42.479). His moth er is around Stephen and within him, green and bilious. 2659 words

BIBLIOGRAPHYEliot, T S. Selected Essays. (New York: HBJ, 1934)Joyce, James. Ulys ses. (New York: Random House, June 1986)Hart, Clive and Hayman, David. James Joy ces Ulysses. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977)Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard , 1989)Wilson, Edmund. Axels Castle. (New York: Scribners, 1969)# I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found....I will le ave it at that. Eliot, Ulysses Order, and Myth. Selected Prose (New York: HBJ, 1975 ), 175.# Except when there is no light, in which case Stephen can get on nicely i n the dark (J, 3.31.15). But this is Joyce first manipulating Eliots concrete, sta tic notion of objective correlative through the use of a concrete, yet dynamic a nd infinitely absorbent, device such as a mirror, and secondly continuing his th eme of Bucks gold-mouthed brightness and Stephens (like mythic Dedalus) fear of sun /light. Also, darkness would create the ineluctable modality of the invisible and neither Joyce nor Dedalus mentions any such thing.-#-