A “server” is an altar boy (or a seminarian, or, sometimes, a
member of a minor clerical order like a subdeacon) who assists
the priest celebrating the Catholic Mass. In Hades,
Bloom watches as "A server bearing a brass bucket" precedes
the priest into the mortuary chapel, and then listens as the
boy sings the Latin lines that the liturgy prescribes as
responses to the priest's: "The server piped the answers in
the treble." Stephen has performed this role in his youth, and
in Telemachus, taunted by Mulligan's adoption of
the role of a
priestly celebrant, he feels that he is back in that
subordinate position.
When Mulligan leaves his shaving bowl (which has served as a
ciborium) behind on the top of the tower, Stephen decides to
bring it back down and return it to him: "He went over to it,
held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling
the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was
stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at
Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same. A servant too.
A server of a servant." Since even the celebrant
performs his actions in the service of God, servers may be
conceived as doubly indentured, servers of a servant. Thornton
observes that a kind of biblical curse may be involved. Ham
saw his father Noah's nakedness and all his descendants were
cast out: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants
shall he be unto his brethren" (Genesis 9:25).
At the conclusion of his pious phase in A Portrait,
when the director of Belvedere
College asks him whether he feels he has a vocation for
the priesthood, Stephen recalls his many fantasies of
performing priestly rituals, but "above all it had pleased him
to fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining.
He shrank from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased
him to imagine that all the vague pomp should end in his own
person or that ritual should assign to him so clear and final
an office. He longed for the minor sacred offices, to be
vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at high mass, to stand
aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people..."
Now, holding the shaving bowl that Mulligan made a chalice,
and remembering being an altar boy at Clongowes Wood College,
he reflects that his desire for self-effacement seems to have
implicated him in another variety of servitude. Just as he
once served priests who served God, now he serves Mulligan who
serves the British overlord Haines. Though unshackled from the
Catholic Church, he is still unfree. In Ithaca,
however, Stephen inhabits the role more joyfully, playing a deacon to Bloom's
priest as the two men exit the Eccles Street house.
