Dundrum press

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Thornton notes that "five lines of text and ten pages of notes" seems to refer to "the work of the antiquarians who were editing, explaining, and annotating early Irish literature and folklore at this time." Gifford says of the project, “At times this interest ran to hairsplitting scholarship and at times to gross sentimentality.” For Haines's benefit, Mulligan adopts the persona of a hairsplitting pedant, and proceeds to demean the seriousness of the scholarly enterprise by citing all sorts of inauthentic arcane beliefs. A central figure in his mockery is Yeats, who joined the ranks of the scholars when he edited a collection titled Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888. Yeats' poems in the 1880s and 1890s show how extensively and beautifully these myths could shape a vision of Irish life, and at the same time how readily they could encourage escapism, freefloating sentiment, and vague substitutes for thought.

“The fishgods of Dundrum” ridicules Yeats' obsession. Gifford notes that fish gods “are associated with the Formorians, gloomy giants of the sea, one of the legendary peoples of prehistoric Ireland.” But Dundrum makes no sense in connection with the Fomorians. One Dundrum, north of Dublin, was the place “where ancient Irish tribes held a folk version of Olympic games.” Another, south of Dublin, was the site of an insane asylum and of a village where Yeats’ sister Elizabeth established the Dun Emer press in 1903 to publish his “new works and works by other living Irish authors in limited editions on handmade paper.” Her sister Lily became involved with the Dun Emer Guild, “which produced handwoven embroideries and tapestries.” Readers can now discern the context for Mulligan's earlier reference to "art colours" on the covers of books of poetry.

So a piece of authentic mythology (fishgods) is mixed up with some unrelated ancient customs, and both are attached to the Yeats family enterprise of reviving Irish art, with the implication that all these cultural enterprises, and all three Yeats siblings, belong in a lunatic asylum. At the end of Oxen of the Sun, Mulligan can be heard continuing to mock the Yeats sisters' publishing enterprise, now calling it the "Druiddrum press": "To be printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time." The last sentence repeats a different attack on Yeats that Mulligan has made in Scylla and Charybdis, mocking his praise of Lady Gregory, another prominent writer of the Literary Revival.

“Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind” establishes another chain of bizarre and wildly funny associations. The “weird sisters” have nothing to do with Irish mythology. They appear in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as Scottish witches whose name may owe something to the Old English concept of wyrd, fate. But after the glancing allusion to two sisters involved in the publishing business it seems that Yeats’s sisters are a bit weird. And indeed these sisters have used the phrase "the big wind." The Dun Emer edition of Yeats’s In the Seven Woods announces that the book was completed “the sixteenth day of July in the year of the big wind, 1903.” This phrase usually refers to 1839, which saw a terrible windstorm that destroyed hundreds of houses. There was another formidable tempest in 1903, but there is nothing ancient or mythological about it. In Aeolus it is referred to as "that cyclone of last year," and Oxen of the Sun mentions "the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the land so pitifully."

In his final sally, Mulligan turns from slandering the Yeats family and riffing on mythology to mocking scholarly pedantry. Addressing Stephen as if he were a professorial colleague, and imitating academic affectation “in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows,” he asks for assistance with a bibliographic citation: "is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?" The question is as absurd as Feste asking “For what says Quinapalus?” in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Mother Grogan is a character in a silly contemporary Irish song rather than a figure of ancient folklore. The medieval Mabinogion contains many ancient Celtic legends, but it is Welsh rather than Irish. And the Upanishads are ancient Vedic texts of Hindu spirituality and philosophy—of great interest to Theosophists, but otherwise completely unconnected to Ireland. Stephen, “gravely” participating in the scholarly charade, ends the mockery with his own very funny reply to Mulligan’s which-is-it question: "I doubt it."

Even here, though, there is a Yeats connection: in praising Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (1902) as the best to come out of Ireland in his time, Yeats compared the book to the epic tales in the Mabinogion. Some readers have also speculated about how the Anglo-Irish Haines may be implicated in Mulligan's mockery. On ulyssesseen.com, Andrew Levitas argues that in referring to the Mabinogion and the Upanishads Mulligan intends "to skewer Haines’ attitude toward Ireland and things Irish. Haines is collecting 'exotic' Irish sayings and other folk esoterica, in the same way Bartok, Dvorak and Smetana collected ethnic folk tunes from the backwaters of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as modernity began to overtake these regions." Since Wales is "another Celtic nation incorporated into Great Britain," and India is "Britain’s leading colony," Mulligan may be mocking the Englishman's project of cultural appropriation.