Latin quarter hat

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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!"