ULYSSES

p.38
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You
were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., Commented [GR1]: Hamlet
you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en
civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural
tone: when I was in Paris; boul’ Mich’, I used to. Yes, used to carry punched tickets to
prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere. Justice. On the night of the
seventeenth of February 1904 the prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did
it: other me. Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. Lui, c’est moi. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.

NOTES

 Mulligan tosses Stephen his "Latin quarter hat" as the young men prepare to begin their day outside the
tower, and in Proteus Stephen, reminiscing about his time in Paris, thinks of the counter-cultural poses that
both he and Mulligan are striking in the world: "My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the
character." (Haines too dresses informally in a "soft grey hat.")
Gifford describes Stephen's hat as “A soft or slouch hat associated with the art and student worlds of the
Latin Quarter in Paris, as against the 'hard' hats (bowlers or derbies) then fashionable in Dublin.” In
December 1902 Joyce mailed a Parisian photo-postcard of himself posing in such a hat to his friend J. F.
Byrne. The look contrasts sharply with most of the headgear that one would have seen on Dublin streets.
In Proteus Stephen thinks of this bohemian topper as "my Hamlet hat." But its resemblance to certain
clerical chapeaux causes some people to refer to Stephen as a clergyman. Early in Oxen of the Sun he is
described as having the "mien of a frere," and near the end of the chapter someone says or thinks, “Jay,
look at the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal! Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus,
Pater et Filius.” Shortly later, he is called "Parson Steve." At the beginning of the next chapter, Circe, two
British soldiers call out derisively to him as "parson."
JH 2011

 "God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots. Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself." Mulligan's perpetual spray of quotations from his favorite writers
(Swinburne, Russell, Homer, Xenophon, Nietzsche, Yeats, Wilde) continues as he rummages through his
clothing trunk. Apparently, he is applying Walt Whitman's famous saying to the fact that he chooses to
accessorize his yellow waistcoat with green boots and dark red gloves.

In Song of Myself, Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Gifford notes the relevant fact that Whitman’s reputation was high in England at the end of the nineteenth
century, citing “Swinburne’s praise of him as the poet of the ‘earth-god freedom’ in To Walt Whitman in
America (1871).”

Mulligan's determination to dress in the outrageous fashion of the fin de siècle avant-garde ("we'll simply
have to dress the character") coheres, then, with the quotation that accessorizes the accessories.

Stephen thinks of these lines in Proteus, and in Scylla and Charybdis he too mentions Whitman in the
course of his Shakespeare talk.

JH 2011
 Richard Ellmann detects a reference to nationalism in the colors: “Mulligan, on the other hand,
butters up Haines and bullies the milkwoman. He offers to wear puce gloves and green boots,
that is, to play both the British game and the Irish one. (To corroborate fiction, Gogarty became,
among other things, a jester at English country houses in the late 1920s)”
 Gifford describes Stephen’s "Latin quarter hat" as “A soft or slouch hat associated with the art and
student worlds of the Latin Quarter in Paris, as against the 'hard' hats (bowlers or derbies) then fashionable
in Dublin.” Joyce wore such a hat in 1902, and mailed a photograph showing it to a friend.
Gifford, Don and Seidman, Robert J. Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008. Print.

 supermen." Stephen too will think of his decaying teeth, at
Vocabulary:
Puce: purple
Puce gloves
____________________________________________________________________
p.38
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like?
Forget: a dispossessed. With mother’s money order, eight
shillings, the banging door of the post office slammed in
your face by the usher. Hunger toothache. Encore deux
minutes. Look clock. Must get. Ferme. Hired dog! Shoot
him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered
walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack
back. Not hurt? O, that’s all right. Shake hands. See what
I meant, see? O, that’s all right. Shake a shake. O, that’s all
only all right.
Commented [GR2]: At the beginning
of Telemachus, Stephen has pondered "Mulligan's even
white teeth, glistening here and there with gold points." At
the end of the chapter, Mulligan turns his "hyperborean"
flattery of Stephen to mockery: "Toothless Kinch and I, the
the end of Proteus: “My teeth are very bad. Why, I
wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to
a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This.
Toothless Kinch, the superman.” In these details Joyce was
faithfully representing his own condition at the time.
Ellmann observes in a footnote that, after leaving for the
continent with Nora in the autumn of 1904, “In Paris his
teeth had been so bad that, when he occasionally yielded to
his fondness for onion soup, the hot soup striking his teeth
made him writhe in pain” (194). In Pola in early 1905, under
Nora’s loving influence, he began to take more care of his
physical being: “He put on weight, grew a moustache, and
with Nora’s help in curling began to wear his hair en brosse.
He felt the first stirrings of dandyism. He went to the dentist
as planned, and had some teeth fixed; then he bought a new
suit. He rented a piano and sang his songs” (194).
By having Stephen wonder, on Sandymount Strand where
Joyce first walked out with Nora, whether he should go to a
dentist and get some teeth fixed, the novel may be obliquely
alluding to the beneficent influence of a lover.
JH 2011
Commented [GR3]: Turning from Patrice Egan to himself,
Stephen lapses into more French as he thinks of what a sorry
figure he cut in his Paris days. This note translates the
French phrases from the three paragraphs of text that
culminate in his return to Dublin via Newhaven, England.
"You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other
devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: physiques,
chimiques et naturelles." (Physics, chemistry, and biology.)
Stephen pronounces the initials as the French do, thinking
wryly of his pretense of being a premedical student. Like
Stephen, Joyce dabbled halfheartedly in these studies for a
time. Ellmann comments, "Paris was Dublin's antithesis. The
daydream of himself as Dr. Joyce, poet, epiphanist, and
physician, surrounded by fair women, was not at all
dampened by the small amount of money beyond his fare
that his father could give him . . ." (111). In December 1902
"he prevailed upon Dr. Paul Brouardel, dean of the faculty at
the École de Médecine, to grant him a provisional card of
admission to the course for the certificate in physics,
chemistry, and biology" (113). In actuality Stephen led a
most unglamorous life in those days, "Eating your
groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed
by belching cabmen." Gifford identifies mou en civet as "a
stew made of lungs, the cheapest of restaurant dishes." The
"belching cabmen" jammed in beside Stephen on a cheap
bench complete the picture.
Despite the dismal circumstances and the silly pretentions,
Stephen has supposed that the glamor of the great city will
rub off on him. He imagines alluding to it after he leaves, to
impress people: "Just say in the most natural tone: when I
was in Paris, boul' Mich', I used to." The Boulevard Saint-
Michel, Gifford notes, is "a street on the left bank of the
Seine in Paris and the café center of student and bohemian
life at the turn of the century." He quotes Arthur
Symons' The Decadent Movement in Literature (1893) on
the "noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries
of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and exhaust their ingenuities
in theorizing over the works they cannot write." Stephen is ...