Buck Mulligan
The medical student who shares a seaside tower with Stephen Dedalus and speaks the first words of the novel. He is generous, extremely funny, and not a friend.
Stephen Dedalus's company, and an audience for it. "God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it." Kinch is his nickname for Stephen; to Hellenise Ireland means to remake it on ancient Greek lines, a plan he raises more than once and never entirely as a joke.
The book
At a glance
- Medical student; shares the Martello tower at Sandycove with Stephen Dedalus
- Malachi Mulligan — "two dactyls," as he points out on the first page
- Rented for twelve pounds a year from the secretary of state for war; Stephen says he paid it
- Kinch, the knife-blade
- Haines, an Englishman collecting Irish sayings, who keeps a gun and has bad nights
- The first chapter, the National Library, a tearoom with Haines, and a maternity hospital
- Oliver St John Gogarty · 1878–1957 · Dublin
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMalachi Mulligan, known as Buck, opens Ulysses. He comes up the stairs onto the roof of a stone tower at Sandycove, south of Dublin, carrying a bowl of shaving lather with a mirror and razor laid across it, and intones the opening words of the Latin Mass over it. He is a medical student, he is the best company in the book, and within ten pages he has borrowed a handkerchief, insulted a dead woman, and taken the front-door key.
He and Stephen Dedalus share the tower, which is rented for twelve pounds a year from the War Office. Stephen says he paid the rent. Mulligan holds the key by the end of the morning, and the third occupant is an Englishman named Haines who has come to collect Irish folklore and spent the previous night shouting in his sleep about shooting a black panther.
The two men are close and the friendship is not equal. Mulligan is the one who mocks, nicknames and pays for drinks; Stephen is the one who is mocked and does not forget. The specific injury is a sentence Mulligan said to a visitor the day after Stephen's mother died and cannot now remember saying. Mulligan reappears through the day — at the National Library, at a maternity hospital, over coffee with Haines — and each appearance costs Stephen something.
How the book draws them
- The opening line of the novel"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." He then holds the bowl up like a chalice, says the priest's line at the start of Mass, and calls down the stairs: "—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!"
- The names he hands outStephen is Kinch, the knife-blade; also dogsbody, the loveliest mummer of them all, and the unclean bard who washes once a month. He is pleased with his own name too: "—My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls."
- The remark he cannot remember makingThe day after Stephen's mother died, Mulligan's own mother asked who was in his room, and he answered, in Stephen's hearing: "O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead." Reminded of it on the tower roof he goes red, says he remembers only ideas and sensations, and then argues that death is beastly and nothing else and it simply doesn't matter.
- Other people's moneyHe pulls Stephen's dirty handkerchief out of Stephen's own pocket to wipe his razor. He tells Stephen to touch the Englishman for a guinea. He borrows a pound of Stephen's four pounds of wages before Stephen has been paid them. On the beach he takes the tower key and twopence for a pint.
- The blasphemyHe sings a piece of doggerel he calls the ballad of joking Jesus, capering along the cliff path with his hands flapping like wings, and the Englishman decides his gaiety takes the harm out of it. Stephen, who has stopped believing and has not stopped being Catholic, says he has heard it three times a day, after meals.
- The calling cardsIn the evening he arrives at a maternity hospital and hands round pasteboard cards printed that day: "Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator. Lambay Island." He then explains, at length and with figures, his plan to buy the island and set up a national fertilising farm at which he would personally serve any woman who applied. The medical students think it is excellent.
- What he says when Stephen is not thereOver coffee and scones with Haines he explains that Stephen was driven mad by visions of hell, that he will never manage the right note, and that "He can never be a poet." Asked whether Stephen writes anything, he answers: "—Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something in ten years."
- The last word of the first chapterStephen hands over the key, walks up the path away from the swimmers, and hears Mulligan's voice call to him from the water. The chapter ends on the single word Stephen thinks in reply: "Usurper."
The original was Oliver St John Gogarty, a Dublin poet and medical student who rented the Sandycove tower in 1904 and put James Joyce up in it for about a week that September. It ended in the small hours when the third man in the tower, an Englishman called Samuel Chenevix Trench, woke shouting about a black panther and fired a revolver; Gogarty took the gun and fired it again, at a shelf of pans over Joyce's bed. Joyce dressed and walked out before dawn. Gogarty went on to be an ear, nose and throat surgeon and a senator of the Irish Free State, was abducted by anti-Treaty gunmen in January 1923 and escaped by swimming the Liffey, and wrote a much-liked memoir, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (1937). He disliked the portrait for the rest of his life. The tower is now a museum devoted to Joyce.