In Telemachus 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." In Oxen of the
Sun Stephen's unconventional headgear and black suit
cause him to be mistaken for a Protestant minister.
The Latin Quarter is the bohemian area around the Sorbonne in
the center of Paris. Gifford describes Stephen's hat as “A
soft or slouch hat associated with the art and student
worlds," a sharp contrast to "the 'hard' hats (bowlers or
derbies) then fashionable in Dublin.” Slote, Mamigonian,
and Turner cite Robert Forrest Wilson's observation in Paris
on Parade (1926) that such hats were "broad-brimmed and
made of black felt" (195). 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's streets.
In Proteus Stephen thinks of this bohemian topper
as "my Hamlet hat." But its resemblance to
certain chapeaux worn by Protestant ministers 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 a boy
in a gang of street urchins shouts out, “Jay, look at
the drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal!"
Mulligan responds in character with a priestly blessing:
Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius”
("May Almighty God bless you, Father and Son [and Holy
Spirit]." Slote and his collaborators note that Joyce wrote on
one of the notesheets for his novel, "SD drunk black greeted
by arabs O.G. imparts the papal benediction. SD salutes the
urchins, himself in them." This note helpfully identifies
Mulligan as the performer of the clerical blessing.
Another useful comment on the incident cited in the Slote
annotations (albeit with the wrong page number) can be found
in Stanislaus Joyce's My Brother's Keeper:
My brother, who never did things by halves, was soon
careering along the road of excess at full gallop. He became
the hero of a rowdy group of students, chiefly medical, whose
own excesses, however, were still tempered by some invisible
control. They recounted his wild exploits and mishaps amid
abundant laughter. His odd manner of dressing suited the part
he was now to play. In a conventional city such as Dublin was,
even slight deviations from the normal are noticed at once. My
brother's tall, slender figure and bohemian garb were bound to
catch the eye: the flowing butterfly bow, the inevitable
ashplant, and the round wide-brimmed soft felt hat, which in
that Dublin of the past was much in favour with Protestant
ministers.... [Stanislaus goes on to describe an occasion on
which the friends carried his "insensible" brother on their
shoulders to a park to sleep it off.] Some little ragamuffins
who were still in the street at that late hour began to run
and cut capers around the mock funeral, and seeing the hat,
shouted to one another:
––Yurah, come and look at the drunken
Protestan' minister. Did ye ever see the like? He's blind to
Jaysus. (248-49)
This recollection accords with the language in Oxen
("Jay, look at the drunken minister"), and it supplies
some context for the centrality of Stephen, who appears more
drunk than the others and who appears to be a focus of their
merriment. Several sentences later someone hollers, "Where's
that bleeding awfur? Parson Steve, apostates' creed!"
"Awfur" sounds like a distorted version of "author" and it
must be so, because the person hailing "Parson Steve" either
praises him for one of his blasphemous parodies or invites him
to recite it. The Apostles' Creed, which Stephen
thinks about in Telemachus, was an early formulation
of Christian faith. Stephen, who is an apostate rather than an
apostle, mocks Christian teachings throughout Oxen,
and in Scylla and Charybdis he has performed a mocking
version of this particular creed. He does not do so here, but,
if the British
Beatitudes heard shortly afterward are his, then he
seems to answer the request with another number from his
repertoire: a parody of the Sermon on the Mount.
At the beginning of Circe, the medical students'
celebration of their drunken blaspheming comparion gives way
to derision as Stephen and Lynch pass by two British soldiers
on their way to the brothel. Jerking a finger in Stephen's
direction, Private Compton says, "Way for the parson."
Private Carr calls out sneeringly, "What ho, parson!"
