Faubourg Saint Patrice - ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University

shackles still bind him. In their place Stephen witnesses "two plumes of smoke"
ascending, foreshadowing his pending union with Bloom, his "symbolic" father.
Later, in "Oxen of the Sun," Stephen comically reveals his rejection of his earlier
calling when asked by Dixon why he had not "cided to take friar's vows." Stephen
responds with his usual sarcasm: ". . . obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but
involuntary poverty all his days"--a mockery of the clerical vows (14.336-7). Stephen's
humorous reflection on his rejection of the priesthood is soon clarified by the narrator:
. . .he had in his bosom a spike named bitterness which could not by
words be done away. . . But could he not have endeavored to have found
again as in his youth the bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed
no for Grace was not there to find that bottle. (14.430,432-5)
Just as Stephen had feared the loss of grace as a youth at Belvedere, the narrator reveals
to the reader, in Joyce's mockery of John Bunyan's pulpit rhetoric, that Stephen, the
spiritual deviant, has alienated himself from the Church's, and thus God's grace (Gifford
421). Ironically enough, throughout the day Stephen--with his black mourning clothes,
his cleric's hat, and his sober demeanor--is mistaken for a parson (14.1445; 15.64, 2532,
2649).
The guilt, the stubbornness, and the despair reach a nadir in "Circe," as Stephen,
along with Bloom, confronts the deep emotional turmoils which have plagued his
conscience. Beginning with his characteristic ridicule of Catholic ritual, Stephen, with
"considerable profundity," mockingly recites the antiphon used during the asperges, the
blessing of the altar prior to a High Mass: "Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere
dextro. Allelulia. . . .Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista. .Salvi facti sunt"
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