Chrysostomos

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Bernard Benstock says of this cryptic one-word sentence, "As a comment on Buck's dental work it is redundant; as a narrative comment it is out of place" (Critical Essays, 3). Who is thinking this odd thought? There is only one good possibility: the person standing next to Buck Mulligan, watching his moving mouth and listening to his verbal pyrotechnics. Stephen is the kind of person who can muse on church fathers before his first cup of tea, and also the kind of person who would notice that one of Mulligan's middle names is "St John," linking him with St. John Chrysostomos. And, as Benstock observes, Stephen repeatedly thinks of Mulligan in damning one-word judgments: "Usurper" at the end of Telemachus, "Catamite" in Scylla and Charybdis, "Chrysostomos" (i.e., glib speaker) here.

Joyce often said that the minor French novelist Édouard Dujardin inspired him to present the internal, unspoken thoughts of his characters in this way. Ellmann tells the story of how Joyce encountered Les lauriers sont coupés (1888) and was impressed by the technique of Dujardin’s experimental novel, an extended soliloquy that totally dispenses with third-person narration (126). He also quotes several sayings that evoke the book’s appeal to Joyce. One is a sentence of Fichte that inspired Dujardin: “The I poses itself and opposes itself to the not-I.” The other quotes are Dujardin’s: “the life of the mind is a continual mixing of lyricism and prose,” and the novel must therefore balance “poetic exaltation and the ordinariness of any old day.” 

“Chrysostomos” shows Joyce following in these Symbolist footsteps, opposing inward reality to the outward environment. The word takes readers for one moment into the fanciful realm of Stephen’s thoughts where ordinary images like gold and white teeth become imbued with intellectual significance. The word defines Mulligan––the "not-I"––as a glib coiner of elegant phrases who does not use language in the service of truth. It also affords a glimpse of the "I" that is Stephen, an ego desperately defining itself in opposition to other human beings. (People who have read Stephen Hero or especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are already familiar with this young man defining reality in his own way, rejecting all people and institutions who threaten to warp his understanding of himself.)

The term that Joyce used to describe Dujardin’s innovation, monologue intérieur, did not originate with either man. According to Ellmann, Valery Larbaud found the expression in Paul Bourget’s Cosmopolis (1893) and gave it to his friend Joyce as a tool for discussing the author’s big new book (519). Joyce soon felt that the phrase had outlived its usefulness and went searching for others that might point readers toward what he was trying to do in the novel. Nothing better caught on, but his endorsement of “interior monologue” should at least recommend it over the comparable phrase “stream of consciousness” that readers often apply to Ulysses. Only Molly Bloom’s interior thoughts can justly be called streaming.

[2014] Kevin Birmingham makes this point well in The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (2014). Of the novel's style he writes, “Thoughts don’t flow like the luxuriant sentences of Henry James. Consciousness is not a stream. It is a brief assembly of fragments on the margins of the deep, a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it.”