When Stephen thinks of "The oval equine faces, Temple, Buck
Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws," the references to
people are clear enough but his purposes in mentioning them
are obscure. Temple was one of
the students at Dublin's University College who companioned
Stephen in part 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man. Buck Mulligan
is his present companion. And Father Richard Campbell was one
of his teachers at Belvedere College, whom he thinks of in
Part IV of A Portrait as a jesuit "whom some of the boys
called Lantern Jaws and others Foxy Campbell."
Mulligan's face was described in Telemachus as "equine
in its length." In A Portrait Temple has
"dark oval eyes" and a face "equine in
expression," so these two characters are responsible for
Stephen's thought of "oval equine faces."
Campbell is mentioned only briefly in A Portrait, as
Stephen imagines becoming a jesuit priest himself and
experiences the "mental sensation of an undefined face or
colour of a face. The colour faded and became strong like a
changing glow of pallid brick red. Was it the raw reddish glow
he had so often seen on wintry mornings on the shaven gills of
the priests? The face was eyeless and sour-favoured and
devout, shot with pink tinges of suffocated anger." He thinks
that he may have derived this apparition from the face of
Father Campbell.
The amalgamation of these three faces into one raises more
questions than can be easily answered. Is Stephen thinking of
his near escape from the clutches of the priesthood? His
reflection that Beauty does not reside in the theological
tomes of Marsh's library, within "the cathedral close," is
followed by nearly three paragraphs of thoughts about priests
and his own "awfully holy" phase. And Mulligan was imitating a
priest in Telemachus when Stephen thought of his
face as "equine." But nothing beyond Temple's name connects
him to the clergy. This "gipsy-like student" who hangs on
Stephen's every utterance is a socialist and a Republican, and
strongly anti-clerical.
Temple was modeled on a Dublin medical student named John
Elwood who kept company with Joyce and Gogarty. So the
conjunction "Temple, Buck Mulligan" makes
sense. But a generalizing inference that the "oval equine
faces" belong to young men who have briefly attached
themselves to the artist's genius is negated by the presence
of Father Campbell, and makes little sense in the context of
Stephen's thoughts in this section of Proteus.
Still more questions attach to the equine imagery. Stephen
imagines Jonathan Swift not merely as a Gulliverian
horse-lover but as himself a horse, running from the
irrational mob to "the wood of madness, his mane foaming in
the moon." He associates the brilliant Swift with the
brilliant Joachim, another
member of the clergy: "Abbas father, furious dean, what
offence laid fire to their brains?" It is not entirely
clear what kind of balance Stephen is striking between
admiration for the genius of these two writers and dismay at
their (essentially religious?) flight from the all-too-human.
Things become murkier still when he associates Swift, and by
extension Joachim, with the "equine" Mulligan, Temple, and
Campbell. Did any offense lay fire to the brains of these
three?
