In Telemachus Stephen says to Mulligan, "You saved
men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however." In Eumaeus
Bloom thinks of Mulligan's "rescue of that man from certain
drowning by artificial respiration and what they call first
aid at
Skerries, or Malahide was it?" Drawing on a real-life
difference between Joyce and Oliver
Gogarty, the novel returns repeatedly to the theme of
saving another life, beginning with Stephen's meditations in Proteus
on whether he could ever be capable of such a thing: "He saved
men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping.... Would
you do what he did? A boat would be near, a
lifebuoy. Natürlich, put there for you. Would you or
would you not?"
Gogarty did in fact save men from drowning, snatching people
from the Liffey at least four times between 1898 and 1901, and
his aquatic heroism outlived his twenties. In November 1922,
the commander of an IRA faction that opposed the Treaty
between Ireland and Great Britain authorized the killing of
Irish Free State Senators, of whom Gogarty was one. Two months
later he was kidnapped by IRA soldiers and held in a house
near Chapelizod. Aware that he might soon be executed, he
feigned diarrhea, was led out into the garden, broke free,
jumped into the Liffey, and swam to freedom in Phoenix Park.
Ulick O’Connor's authorized, and valuable, biography of
Gogarty details these events beginning on p. 194.
Ulysses continues to follow the thread of aquatic
heroism, but subsequent instances are tinged with sardonic
irony. In Hades we learn that the son of Reuben J.
Dodd jumped into the Liffey, probably in an attempt at
suicide, and was hooked out by a boatman. Dodd rewarded the
rescuer “like a hero,” with the
un-princely sum of a florin
(two shillings). Hearing the story, Simon Dedalus remarks
“drily” that it was “One and
eightpence too much.”
In Wandering Rocks Lenehan alludes to the story of
Tom Rochford going down into a sewer to rescue a man overcome
by gas. “’He’s a hero,’ he said simply. . . . ‘The act of a
hero.’” In this instance, however, life complicates the
simplicity of art. Robert Martin Adams describes how twelve
men in succession went down the manhole, one after another
becoming overcome by the methane and requiring a new rescuer
to enter the fray (Surface and Symbol, 92-93). Tom
Rochford was merely the third in this series of comically
futile heroic actors, but Joyce knew and liked Rochford and
decided to elevate his importance.
In Circe, the importance is inflated to absurd
proportions, as Rochford, Christ-like, jumps in to save the
dead (Paddy Dignam) rather than the dying. Paddy Dignam, who
has become a dog, worms his
way down through a hole in the ground, followed by “an obese
grandfather rat” like the tomb-diving one that Bloom sees in Hades.
Dignam’s voice is heard “baying under ground.” Tom Rochford,
following close behind, pauses to orate: “(A hand to his
breastbone, bows) Reuben J. A florin I find him. (He
fixes the manhole with a resolute stare) My turn now
on. Follow me up to Carlow. (He executes a daredevil
salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the coalhole. . .
.)”
