Burns ADMIntroibo: 27 March 1993Eliot’s Objective Correlative in Telemachia

A good writer, T S Eliot might 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 [seaside] ledge of rock, carefully” (Joyce, 3.42.500). Eliot would further argue that

behind that nose-scratch, beneath that sea, there exist “a set of objects, a situation, a

chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the

external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience are given, the emotion is

immediately evoked.” Eliot names that set of objects, etc., the 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

play’s artistic failure to Gertrude’s insufficient ability to embody her son’s guilt (Eliot,

125). Eliot is apparently overjoyed1 three years later when Joyce manipulates this device to

correlate Stephen Dedalus’ emotions with the surrounding Dublin bay.

“The snotgreen sea[, t]he scrotumtightening sea” (J, 1.4.78) is for Stephen the

inescapable symbol of his many failed or strained relationships; it is literally and

metaphorically capable of absorbing him and his expansive emotions. Most importantly,

the sea calls to his mind his mother and her bilious vomit, and Buck Mulligan’s power-plays

at Martello Tower. The former relationship is over and irreconcilable, but still the primary

source of Stephen’s self-pity, ill-will, and insecurity. These factors deeply affect his

involvement with Mulligan, an individual who seems more than willing to exploit Stephen’s

weaknesses to “ask for it...all” (J, 1.17.632). These two relationships, probably the two

most significant in his life, so complicate his psychological schema that Jung likens Ulysses

to the rambling monologue of a schizophrenic (Eco, 34). Eliot’s coining of the “objective

correlative” and Joyce’s subsequent use of it offer further commentary not just on the

1 “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found....I will leave it at that.” Eliot, “Ulysses Order, and Myth.” Selected Prose (New York: HBJ, 1975), 175.

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pathological content of Stephen’s character, but also on the “Telemachia” relative to the

backdrop of Hamlet . By the section’s end, Joyce establishes nearly all the components of

Eliot’s correlative formula, but he leaves somewhat open the question of exactly what

“expressible” emotion Stephen feels. Joyce’s handling of Stephen at first glance seems to

fit Eliot’s recommendations perfectly, but occasionally Joyce departs from Eliot, almost

refutes him, and relates Stephen’s feelings through Stephen’s own thoughts and actions.

Ulysses begins with the introduction of a set of objects important, although not

essential, 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 lay crossed” (J, 1.3.1-2).

With the first sentence, Joyce inaugurates at least six themes of his novel, four of which

relate to Stephen’s correlative. The three objects — i.e., the bowl, the razor, and the

mirror — maintain prominent but separate positions in Stephen’s life and mind, and their

bearer, Buck, is Stephen’s incorrigible foil even when absent, a capacity that serves in

itself as “a situation” with which Stephen eventually must cope.

Joyce’s thematic use of mirrors is at times more obviously symbolic than at others.

On one basic level, he uses a mirror to convey Buck’s vanity and Stephen’s insecurity. A

laughing and stately Mulligan handles it as 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 laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth” and then

condescends to Stephen, “Look at yourself, you dreadful bard.” Obeying Buck’s request,

Stephen peers at himself and observes only a pitiful “dogsbody to rid of vermin” (J,

1.6.130-37).

But on a more developed level, and a more decidedly Eliotic one, Joyce uses the

mirror to absorb, not merely reflect, at least one of Stephen’s emotions: his self-pity.

Unlike Hamlet’s mother, the mirror is a vessel with an infinite capacity. Whatever Stephen

places before it, it holds for as long as he looks at the mirror. Stephen’s belief that the

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mirror reveals him “as [Buck] and others see [him]” and Buck’s subsequent pejorative

remarks, point to a knowledge of Stephen’s problem with self-esteem. Stephen might feel,

then, that however much he dislikes it, the mirror captures and displays his internal

weakness. In other words, a concrete and specific physical trait as shown in the mirror

represents certain intangible aspects of Stephen’s character. The looking-glass is a small-

scale objective correlative of Stephen’s severe lack of confidence, and, because he is

helpless to prevent that circumstance2, Stephen may further understand the correlative as

an element of “the ineluctable modality of the visible” (J, 3.31.1).

Buck’s razor appears in many different forms throughout the Telemachia, but most

often it represents some means by which Buck subjugates 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 Stephen’s religion: “In troibo ad altare Dei” (1.3.5) he

intones, and walks to the parapet, his altar, where he sets his mirror. The act of shaving

separates Buck from Stephen 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). Buck, for his own part, makes the insensitive and unforgettable

comment to his own mother that, “It’s only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead”

(1.7.198).

When the blade is in hand, however, he tempers his wit to stay in control of himself.

This conscious move to control establishes some connection in Buck’s mind between his

razor and Stephen. As he prepares his face for the razor’s glide, Buck takes gentle verbal

jabs at Stephen but “ceasing, he beg[ins] to shave with care,” and “shave[s] warily over his

2 Except when there is no light, in which case Stephen can “get on nicely in the dark” (J, 3.31.15). But this is Joyce first manipulating Eliot’s concrete, static notion of objective correlative through the use of a concrete, yet dynamic and infinitely absorbent, device such as a mirror, and secondly continuing his theme of Buck’s gold-mouthed brightness and Stephen’s (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.

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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 denigrations, he

commandeers Stephen’s handkerchief, wipes his razor on it (as Stephen would 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 various other affronts, it is

understandable that Stephen feels betrayed, and it is understandable when later he

recollects the image of Caesar’s stabbing (2.21.49).

Buck’s introduction of the adjective “snotgreen” is crucial to connect the series of

objects that form the objective correlative. Mulligan’s first connects the tincture of

Stephen’s mucus to the sea around them and all of Ireland, “the ring of bay and skyline

[that] held a dull green mass of liquid.” The language is evocative first of Buck’s shaving

bowl, and secondly, but more significantly, of Stephen’s mother’s bedpan, “a bowl of white

china...holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver”

(1.5.106-8). The well-developed thought association at operating here presents much

more than an example of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness facility; it describes Stephen’s

view of himself, “thought through [his] eyes” {3.31.1) and “thought of thought” (2.24.74),

and it reveals how subsumed in his relationship with his mother. Buck’s offhand comment

that, “You can almost taste [the snot-green]” is less than appealing when he refers to

Swinburne’s “great sweet mother,” but it is entirely distasteful when that sweet mother

becomes Stephen’s own, and the taste is that of her vomit. What makes the connection so

powerful and disturbing, however, is that it comes directly from Stephen’s thoughts.

It is as though the sea around Stephen is composed of all his failures and fears. His

bitterness regarding his dead mother, his envy and fear of Buck Mulligan, his

disagreements with Ireland and its church, are joined merely by their common color, but

other problems are associated with the sea as well. The “scrotumtightening sea”

threatens Stephen’s questionable sexuality just as the tailor’s shears (associated with

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Buck’s razor) threaten 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

classic symbol of cleansing water becomes a vomit of sins. Stephen is, with good reason,

reluctant to bathe in these waters. “The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a

month” (1.13.475) notes Buck. Within the text, the sea is so vast and so vile, perhaps

infinitely so, Stephen would need an almost eternally inexpressible 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 the formula of that particular emotion” also became evident.

Through Buck’s manipulation 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 Stephen’s problems with his late mother. The simplified chain of events

in approximate chronological order begins with the death of Stephen’s mother, continues

with Stephen’s leaving home “to seek misfortune” (16.506.252), Buck’s “beastly dead”

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 like the sea, Stephen’s

life “is an organism made up of ‘events’ which may be taken as infinitely 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 the correlative sea, it is necessary

to determine exactly what emotion the sea represents.

Read against Hamlet, Telemachia could reveal a form of guilt as Stephen’s

dominant emotion. Eliot writes that, “The essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a

son towards a guilty mother” (Eliot, 124). The problem with Hamlet is that the emotion,

which neither Shakespeare nor Eliot could name in a word, cannot find “an adequate

equivalent” in Gertrude. So, Eliot concludes, Hamlet stumbles around looking for an

appropriate representation of his emotion, as does Shakespeare. Finding none,

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Shakespeare ends his drama without concluding it. It is of note 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 Stephen’s situation is more complicated than that and Hamlet’s. Stephen’s

mother was (presumably) no adulteress or murderess. She was a hard-working, God-

fearing, son-loving Irish Catholic woman, and, from this at least, Stephen has and had no

legitimate reason not to like her, except for his being the 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 death. Yet Buck insists that Stephen “crossed her

last wish in death” (1.7.213) and “kill[ed] his mother” (1.5.122). Stephen’s 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 culpability

that Stephen doesn’t seem (consciously, at least) to believe he has. It appears instead that

his mother assigns him culpability, but can do so only in the unconscious realm of

Stephen’s dreams. For this reason, whatever guilt, or emotion akin to guilt, Stephen might

feel does not reveal itself explicitly in the text, because it could be contained only in a

stream-of-subconsciousness, a narrative style beyond even Joyce. That emotion, like

Hamlet’s, whatever it is, is hidden beneath Stephen’s consciousness and, by extension of

Eliot’s objective correlative theory, beneath the surface of the waters surrounding Ireland.

Joyce manipulates Eliot’s theory once more in his creation of “the external facts,

which must terminate in sensory experience.” Just as his consciousness does not constrain

Stephen’s emotions, neither does surface reality exclusively define his external facts.

Walking on the strand, Stephen waxes solipsistic. “Thought through [his] eyes” (J, 3.31.1)

for Stephen soon becomes “eyes through his thought,” the process by which Stephen

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observes an object and almost immediately transmutes it into something from his memory;

it is the process by which he escapes the too-true mirror, the ineluctable modality of the

visible. He thus makes his world and each of its components, as Wilson says, unique.

From that point, J Mitchell Morse glosses the passage,

In the next few lines, Stephen’s walking stick is changed into a sword, his legs into Buck Mulligan’s legs, the word nebeneinander into solid ground under his feet, Blake’s Los into Plato’s demiurge, and Sandymount Strand into Blake’s way out of time into eternity, where the nebeneinander 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 Aristotle, Boehme, Hamlet, Blake, perhaps Lessing, perhaps Gutzkow, and an upside-down Berkeley...The whole chapter is a chapter of such changes (Hart, 36).

Joyce has created an upside-down (or an inside-out) Eliot as much as Stephen

developed an upside-down Berkeley. Stephen’s internal facts are substituted for what

once was external reality. All that is left to complete the Eliot’s formula for Stephen is to

“terminate [the external facts] in sensory experience, [after which] the emotion is

immediately invoked. The passage in which Stephen undergoes his sensory experience 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 Stephen’s literal and metaphorical catharsis as he expels whatever that

snotgreen fluid, whatever that deep subconscious 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 recovering from his “Touch me...soft soft soft hand...O, touch me

soon, now” thought-flow (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

mutations earlier in the episode. If Stephen is masturbating, and he does ejaculate, it

seems fitting that his sperm can find no mother womb and must fall into the sea, spent.

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“Flop, slop, slap...its speech ceases” is onomatopoeia worthy of micturation and

masturbation, and perhaps it is best to let the individual choose his cathartic preference

(U, 3.41.455-60).

According to Eliot, immediately after the sensory 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 touches on the source of all his emotion,

conscious and subconscious, correlated and not correlated. Hinting at his mother’s waxen,

ashen odor, Stephen realizes his dead mother’s influence on him: “Dead breaths I living

breathe” (U, 3.42.479). His mother is around Stephen and within him, green and bilious.

2659 words

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eliot, T S. Selected Essays. (New York: HBJ, 1934)

Joyce, James. Ulysses. (New York: Random House, June 1986)

Hart, Clive and Hayman, David. James Joyce’s 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. Axel’s Castle. (New York: Scribner’s, 1969)

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