Ruefully setting off at the end of Nestor with Deasy's letter warning about cattle disease, Stephen thinks that Mulligan will now have yet another mocking nickname for him: "the bullockbefriending bard." But it is Stephen who is coining the phrase, and the mission is one that James Joyce himself briefly embraced. The name evokes several distinctive threads in Joyce's art and Stephen's character.

Joyce sufficiently sympathized with an acquaintance's concern about foot and mouth disease to write a letter on the subject to the editor of an Irish newspaper, so one may suppose that the fool's errand on which he sends Stephen is a matter of some jocoserious interest. This inference finds support in the mythological significance that he embedded in Stephen's surname, presenting him in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a Daedalus-to-be: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." Before Daedalus made wings to fly away from Crete, he crafted an artificial cow inside which Pasiphae could satisfy her lustful desire for a prize bull, as Stephen recalls in Circe: "Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first confessionbox." His first name, which means "wreath," also evokes the garlands which prepared bulls for sacrificial slaughter in ancient Greece. The passive verb stephanomai carried the meaning “to be prepared for sacrifice.”

From its first sentence the Portrait associates Stephen with cattle: "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...." As a boy of six years, he is drawn to the beauty of cows in a pasture but revolted by their winter quarters: "the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbrook with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming bran troughs, sickened Stephen’s heart." But when he rides on the milk car "these chilly drives blew away his memory of the filth of the cowyard and he felt no repugnance at seeing the cow hairs and hayseeds on the milkman’s coat." Later, at Belvedere, some fellow students call him by the Greek name for oxen: "—Come along, Dedalus! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!… —Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforos!"

The phrase "bullockbefriending bard" in Ulysses adds a puzzling detail to Stephen's association with cattle. In a personal communication David Heinimann reminds me that a bullock is a steer––i.e., castrated. Stephen would surely be aware of this distinction implicit in his choice of words. What may he be thinking? One answer is suggested by his reaction in Telemachus to Mulligan's promise to give Haines a "ragging"––a schoolboy hazing. Stephen imagines the victim's terror: "With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" Debagging refers simply to pulling down a boy's trousers, but the tailor's "shears," the "slit" shirt, and the "bag" between the boy's legs evoke castration, and putting a "calf's face" on him (amplified by the mention of an "ox") links this cutting with cattle. The thought prompts kindness toward Haines: "— Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at night."

It seems possible that the thought of bulls' throats being slit, obscurely lodged in Stephen's Christian name, lies behind his fantasy of bovine castration, and that the castration fantasy which makes him unexpectedly befriend Haines in Telemachus suggests "bullockbefriending" in Nestor. If Stephen is indeed thinking along these lines, then his feeling of solidarity with cattle coheres with his self-identification as a stag "bayed about" by hounds in Proteus. Joyce, a pacifist who thought of himself as a solitary striver menaced by the rabble, had tried out the deer image in two works in 1904: the poem "The Holy Office" and the essay "A Portrait of the Artist." It suited his conception of himself as a sacrificial victim comparable to Charles Stewart Parnell and Jesus Christ. In Ulysses he apparently added bulls to the mix.

In addition to all these precedents in Joyce's life and writing and Stephen's history as a character, there may be intertextual echoes to explore. Gifford observes that Homer "befriended" the cattle of the god Helios by condemning the Greeks who slaughtered them—and Homer was certainly the "bard" most important to Joyce's project of writing an epic in modern times. Aquinas, another writer who was supremely important to Joyce (and Stephen), was called "the dumb ox" by his fellow students at the university in Cologne. Gifford quotes a remark attributed to his teacher, Albertus Magnus: "We call him the dumb ox, but he will one day give such a bellow as shall be heard from one end of the world to the other."

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John Hunt 2024