Joyce lived with Gogarty in "the tower" at
Sandycove Point, southeast of Dublin, for a few days in
September 1904. Telemachus realistically depicts the
top of the
tower and the living space one floor below.
It also mentions the military history that produced these
defensive fortifications. But Joyce chose this dramatic
setting as much for its symbolic resonances as for its basis
in lived experience: it gave him a way to begin his novel with
parallels to Homer's Odyssey and to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Both of these works tell stories of usurpation and revenge,
and both center on the powerful visual image of a royal
palace.
Hamlet begins with sentinels meeting on the
battlements of Elsinore castle just before daybreak, as
Denmark prepares for war with Norway. A ghost appears, to
inform Hamlet that there is an internal as well as an external
enemy: his uncle Claudius has seized the Danish throne by
murdering Hamlet's father. Like Shakespeare’s play, Ulysses
begins at daybreak with Stephen and Mulligan meeting on the
battlements of a military tower. Stephen is described at one
point standing "at his post" there. There is
no war, but in 1904 Ireland was still very much under British
occupation, after the Home Rule
movement of the 1880s died with the disgrace and death
of the parliamentary leader Charles Stuart Parnell.
The so-called Martello tower
in which the men are living embodies British occupation by
virtue of its history and by virtue of the fact that an
Englishman is currently living in it with Mulligan and
Stephen. Haines later says to Stephen, “I mean to say,
. . . this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of
Elsinore. That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
isn’t it?” (Stephen will think of this phrase from Hamlet
again in Proteus.) This first episode of Ulysses
will also introduce a ghost,
in the form of a nightmare
that Stephen has had about his mother. And it will liken Mulligan to Claudius
in subtle ways, making him the usurper on the inside of the kingdom.
At the beginning of the Odyssey the palace on Ithaca
has been overrun by insolent, armed young men, who have been
eating and drinking Telemachus out of his patrimony, and who
promise to continue doing so until his mother Penelope agrees
to marry one of them. Mulligan is likened to the chief of
these suitors, Antinous, at several points in the narrative,
and his mixture of gaiety and malice recapitulates the spirit
found in the feasting hall of Odysseus' palace. At the
breakfast which he cooks for his two companions, "He
lunged toward his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread,
impaled on his knife"; later he mildly rebukes
Stephen for eating
too much of the food. At the end of the Odyssey,
the feasting hall becomes an abattoir, as Odysseus and
Telemachus separate the suitors from their weapons and
slaughter them to the last man.