ARCHDRUID BERKELEY AND ST. PATRICK : A TALE OF TWO VISIONS (FW611.4-613.

14) In a frequently quoted extract from a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce stated: "Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the arch druid and his pidgin speech, and Patrick the arch priest and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B's theory of colours, and Patrick's practical solution to the problem." Clearly, of all the four pieces ("vignettes") that Joyce drafted in the earliest stages of the compositional process, this one is of prime importance, but it is also one of the most difficult to interpret, not only by reason of the complex language and syntax, but also in terms of the ideas underpinning it. What follows is a suggested reading of the episode centred on two different modes of perception: Shemian "inward" or symbolic mental vision and Shaunian "outward" vision or surface perception, reliant on purely physical eyesight. Despite the similarity of the Shemian Archdruid's Berkeley's name and its variants, particularly in its distorted version of "Balkelly", to that of Buckley, I am not persuaded that the episode of Buckley shooting the Russian General is a true parallel. That episode is a sons versus father battle and has far more in common with, say, the Battle of Waterloo episode of Book I Chapter 1 or any of the other versions of the Primal Scene involving the three soldier sons and the two tempting girls.1. This episode is surely another version of the brother battles between Shem and Shaun with the Archdruid Luchru/ Bishop Berkeley/Shem/Joyce defending his theory of vision, which is a metaphor for Finnegans Wake, (hereinafter referred to as "the Wake"), as a whole and its approach to depicting what is (sur)real, against all the various figures of Philistinism that stack up against him: St. Patrick/Wyndham Lewis/Stanislaus Joyce/Ezra Pound and all the other majority of doubters who here, in this context, are conservative Shaun figures. The true parallel episode in the Wake is the Mime of Mick Nick and the Maggies of Book II Chapter 1 which is all about vision and the perception and non-perception of colours, and behind this episode again, the "Nausicaa" chapter of Ulysses which again is about true and false perceptions, "the projected mirage". My main argument is this: a principal cause of confusion is to take too literally what the Archdruid says in explanation of his superior "vision". Taken literally, what he claims to be able to see in every object are the six colours that the object is able to absorb, and which are hidden from normal physical vision, but, and here is the difficulty, these together would not make King Leary, (whom I take to be a form of HCE), all green. However the Archdruid's description of his vision is a metaphor, to be taken "literarily" not literally, to explain what Berkeley/Shem/Joyce is doing in writing the Wake. What is being described is a way of seeing the world through William Blake's inward eye of the imagination, the only sort of vision available to purblind Joyce for most of the time he was composing the Wake. Things appear as their true inward symbolical nature deems that they should appear.

This closely resembles Bishop George Berkeley's philosophical speculations upon the essential subjectivity of human experience; in his New Theory of Vision for instance, he sought to prove that what we see is entirely different from what we touch, and, among other examples, he explored the phenomenon of the moon appearing to the eye larger on the horizon than it did in the middle of the sky, although it remained the same size in actuality. Berkeley's mind could reason the moon to be the same size while his eye remained deceived. Berkeley's idealism at its extreme held that physical objects and their properties do not exist externally but only in the mind, and that the dependence of qualities such as heat and cold for their existence upon mental subjective experience of them "doth not so much prove that there is no extension or colour in an outward object, as that we do not know by sense which is the true extension or colour of the object". The Shemian Archdruid perceives objects in Berkeley's way through the subjectivity of the Wakean dream which paradoxically he argues is the truer perception than the "delusion" of the Shaunian Saint's physical vision - opposing his idealism to the Saint's practical realism. Why then should King Leary as the Archdruid's chosen example of his way of "seeing" the world appear all green ? Because the fundamental point about Leary is his Irishness, a true native Irish king, the embodiment of Ireland free and unoppressed, who must therefore be seen as green, Ireland's national colour, through and through to the Archdruid's "throughsighty" (FW611.32). Joyce is also saying that the Wake is a thoroughly Irish work. He puts at the start of the passage "Tunc" (FW611.4), a reference to The Book of Kells, a most thoroughly Irish work of art, and to that page of it which receives most attention in the Wake, the Tunc page, the The Book of Kells as a whole with its highly complex convoluted designs and visual symbolism, being closely identified with the Wake's method of composition and hidden content. The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript, rich in colour, and so is the Wake, though not literally, and the illumination it provides its readers has to be hard sought for, but it is there. It is an irony that it is St. Patrick's Christian monks who created The Book of Kells, one of many that subvert the apparent Shem/Shaun dichotomy in this episode and throughout the Wake.2. Also, to be "green" is to be nave, as in the Irish colloquialism "to have green in one's eye", and King Leary is in the position of the unsophisticated, trusting native, little realising (at least from Joyce's perspective) the misery and oppression that Patrick's Christianity will bring to Ireland. To quote from the "Cyclops" chapter of Ulysses: "Gob, he's not so green as he's cabbage looking. Arsing around from one pub to another." But green has another, darker, meaning for Joyce relating to his glaucoma (which in its early stages gives bright lights a rainbow halo, ("the several iridals gradationes of solar light" - FW611.17), how Joyce first became aware of his ailment). Joyce confided to Harriet Shaw Weaver that in order to ward off "the complete eclipse of my seeing faculties" he dressed himself superstitiously in green, grey and black, "the three colours of successive stages of cecity as the Germans divide them." Green tinged vision, then, was the first stage of Joyce's progressive blindness. Green, therefore, not only symbolises

the green green grass of the Irish homeland, but also a stage of blindness and by symbolical extension various types of psychological blindness, e.g. the blindness of Irish nationalist passion personified in the Citizen-Cyclops, or the I.R.A. (c.f. Joyce's Scribbledehobble notebook entry: "I.R.A. paint grass green"), or the general propensity of the Irish to be blinded by their passions. The irony is obvious that the colour the Archdruid chooses to display his "throughsighty" vision, seeing through the surface appearance of things, is one which demonstrates blindness, and not only in the physical sense. In Joyce's Scribbledehobble notebook entry: "Culter of the thing in itself see the grass (r + o + y + b + .i + v)" it is green, the very heart of the spectrum, that is noticeably absent. This may be an early demonstration of the Archdruid's theory of vision whereby grass which is "naturally" green to ordinary vision is visible to the seer in every other colour but that one. It is also perhaps an argument of Wakean logic that if one is to see things as a mixture of all colours, then rather than white light, why not see them as green, the central colour of the spectrum upon which all colours converge ? King Leary is described in terms of edible greens, I suggest, because he and the Ireland he represents are just waiting to be devoured by voracious invaders of which gluttonous Shaun as religious invader is but one representative type. Green, grey, black; Joyce's near blindness may be the central factor in understanding the metaphor by which a very generalised application of Bishop George Berkeley's theory of vision is used as a peg on which to hang the defence and indictment of the Wake as a whole. There are two modes of vision being contrasted. There is the "normal" daylight everyday vision of the physical world, the world of the practical pragmatic Shaun, the world of surfaces and surface appearances, of the realistic novel. Then there is the inner, subjective vision of the night time world of dreams concentrating on the subconscious drives and desires where things and particularly people are seen "in their true colours" for what, who, they really are (c.f. The entry in Joyce's Scribbledehobble notebook : "in his true colours"). "The Ding hvad in idself id est" (FW611.21) makes it clear by reference to the Id that this type of vision is psychological and subjective, not physical, seeing the real inner nature, the drives desires and personalities of people. For this type of seeing/ perception "with the mind's eye", Joyce/Shem comes into his own: the province of the night of the subconscious. In the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, amid the shallow materialism of the girls, it is Shaun who is in his element; he has no trouble with his good physical eyesight to "eyespy through them, to their selfcolours" (FW237.3-4), to discern with his sunray-like piercing sight through her diaphanous cloud veil clothing the correct colour of Isabel's drawers - heliotrope/purple. Shem/Joyce/Glugg with his poor physical eyesight is "apophotorejected" (FW251.7) away from the light and suffers, as Joyce himself suffered at the 1904 Feis Ceoil music competition, where he only won a bronze medal as opposed to John McCormack's gold medal of the previous year, due to his inability to sight read the music. The medals, bronze and gold, symbols of Joyce's keen sense of humiliating failure, become the two scornful barmaids in the "Sirens" episode of Ulysses, a chapter

that concerns a very personal low point of Bloom's self esteem. In the Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, Shaun/Chuff plays the same role as he does here as St. Patrick; both are associated with the Sun/Son (Christ) and both end up being adored heliotropically by those who "see the Light" in all its easy practical simplicity. From the Archdruid's point of view what Shaun/St. Patrick sees is only the surface of things, a mere one seventh of total reality, a mirage/trick of the light. In the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses Gerty MacDowell and Bloom each have a (mis)conception of the other based purely on optical contact. Each wilfully projects his/her erotic/romantic imaginings and needs on the other without any real insight into the other's true nature. Each is a mere object to the other and the transaction between them is essentially duplicitous - Bloom seems unaware of the erotic pleasure Gerty derives from watching him watching and masturbating over her and the deliberateness of her self exposure. This failure of surface vision is corrected later in the Circe episode where the Archdruid's type of inner vision prevails and Gerty confronts Bloom with his and her joint "guilt": "When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer. (She paws his sleeve, slobbering). Dirty married man ! I love you for doing that to me." The Archdruid's mantle is described as "roranyellgreenlindigan" (FW611.6) which noticeably omits violet. "-Greenlindigan" suggests "green, blue, indigo (that colour in the rainbow that most nearly approximates to grey) - blind again". Violet is not there firstly because after green and grey comes the blackness of blindness - violet is never reached and secondly because violet/purple is the colour of heliotrope, the colour Joyce/Shem as Glugg cannot see (although he may be able to write "purple prose"), the colour which by its very name association is one which rejects Joyce/Shem/Archdruid's night time world of Blakean inner imaginative vision in favour of Shaun's daylight world of sunlit waking reality. Conversely, the above colour progression associated with Joyce's blindness which precludes violet/heliotrope may be the reason for choosing it as the colour Shem/Glugg cannot see in the Mime chapter.3. "Roran-" suggests the Irish High King Roderick O'Connor ("poor old Roderick O'Connor Rex" - FW380.33). Roderick's rule was challenged by two of his sons. The first, Murchadh, he defeated, captured and put out his eyes. The second, Conchobar, defeated Roderick and ruled in his stead for a short time. "Roar and yell", also suggested, could refer to the intense pain that often attended Joyce's eye attacks. The episode describes the Archdruid Luchru (look, you)/Berkeley/Shem/Joyce's attempted conversion of St. Patrick to his way of seeing reality, paralleled by a description of Joyce's desperate attempts at the "conversion" of his friends and acquaintances the majority of whom, like Ezra Pound, felt that in writing the Wake Joyce was wasting his talent on a pointless exercise in obscurantism which nobody would be able to read. The Archdruid is clearly increasingly desperate and frustrated in his attempts to make himself understood which fall upon the literally and psychologically deaf ears of Shaun/St. Patrick. At first he speaks "murmurulentous" (FW611.29), i.e. quietly, but gradually "verbigratiagrading" (FW611.29) his tone upwards in the vocal scale he ends up "stridulocelerious" (FW611.29). He repeats what he has to say, saying everything twice over, in different ways"twotime hemhaltshealing with other words

verbigratiagrading" (FW611.28-29). But the more desperate, strident and haranguing he becomes, confronted by the silent, unresponding, unyielding, stone-like Shaun the less of an effect he has - St. Patrick/Shaun, the "comprehendurient" (FW611.30-31) hears him with "diminishing claractinism" (FW611.31) (clarity/charity) and positions himself for argumentation. (See also, for instance, the earlier confrontation of Mutt and Jute where Shaun/Jute cannot understand a word of what Shem/Mutt is trying to say to him: "I can beuraly forsstand a weird from sturk to finnic in such a patwhat as your rutterdamrotter. Onheard of and umscene ! See you doomed." (FW17.13-16) St. Patrick/Shaun is "stareotypopticus" (FW611.25) - all too mundane a stereotype to "catch" or understand the Archdruid's intellectual argument; he is an intellectual dinosaur ossified in his thinking (or lack of it - blind faith of religious zealotry admits no doubt, no argument, no seeing the other person's point of view, just silent certainty that one is right). Apart from the language difficulty between native and invader (equivalent to the language difficulty of the Wake, of which all readers are invaders), there is never the possibility here of a meeting of minds. As explained by J.Colm O'Sullivan in his Joyce's Use of Colours (U.M.I. Research Press, 1987, page 106): "Shaun cannot abide doubt or disunity but requires the certainty of things as they are supposed to be. The possibility of two acceptable but antagonistic points of view must be denied at any cost. What he wishes to impose on the rebellious parts of the psyche is conventional wisdom, outward respectability, "stupid realism".according to Shaun, the father is exactly what he seems and what Shaun will seem as his successor, a prosperous civic-minded burgher." Another, external, reason why the Archdruid is bound to fail is the fact that dawn is breaking, the long dark night of the Wake is coming to a close and has to give way to the daylight in the natural order of things: "Dies is Dorminus master" predicts Juva (FW609.28). Dawn, the borderline between the night time world of inner vision and dreams and the daytime world of waking reality is the most fitting place for the Archdruid and St. Patrick to confront each other at the end of the book. Why does the Archdruid speak Chinese pidgin and St. Patrick Japanese pidgin ? Perhaps because, according to Grace Eckley in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake, (edited by Michael H. Begnall and Fritz Senn, the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974), besides the obvious example of neighbouring countries at cultural and political war of England and Ireland, both representing one opposite (Western Culture), China and Japan offer another opposite (Eastern Culture). Within both pairings there is the certainty on each side that the other is barbarian, not quite human, "beyond the Pale", and the desire on the part of one to dominate and subdue the other. Cordell D. K. Yee in his The Word According to James Joyce (Bucknell University Press/Associated University Presses, 1997, pages 76-84) considers the confrontation of the Irish Archdruid and Christian Saint Patrick who "invaded" Ireland from the East, i.e. England, as comprehending both Ireland as conquered "slave" country to its English colonial master and the parallel situation, which unfolded during Joyce's own lifetime, of China as the Irish type underdog in a struggle against its ethnic cousin lying to its East, Japan, a type of England in its colonial expansionist ambitions. Joyce alluded to this

struggle in 1907: "A conqueror cannot be casual, and for so many centuries the Englishman has done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State, and what the Nipponese dwarf will do tomorrow in other lands" (Critical Writings, page 166). China lost Taiwan to Japan in 1895, was forced to grant economic concessions to Japan in 1915, had Manchuria seized from it by Japan in 1931 and was at war with Japan by 1937. As Yee explains: "The sketch depicts a meeting between two cultures, and the dawn can be conceived as a meeting of the day and night worlds, two worlds that correspond to the Orient and Ireland. Nighttime in Ireland is daytime in the Orient, and as one might expect in a dawn scene, Joyce blends the Eastern and Western Hemispheres .China's exploitation by the Japanese, as well as by European countries, helped stimulate a surge in Chinese nationalism, just as English subjugation had incited nationalistic movements in Ireland. What made the humiliation more painful to the Chinese was that, just as the Irish had contributed to English culture, they had helped stimulate the development of Japanese culture - something Joyce would have learned from his Japanese language lesson in mid-1926" (ibid. pages 78 and 80). Thus Joyce identifies Ireland with China as Shemian native underdog/downtrodden Chinese coolie and England and Japan as Shaunian invader/conqueror/exploiter, the ego suppressing the Id. Yee cites Jacques Mercanton who explained: "As we read, he [Joyce] showed me the constant factors which, according to him, were intended to guide the reader. Thus a Japanese word would always be followed by a Chinese word - an image for the antagonism that is the permanent background to the history of all men". Joyce in his critical writings stated his belief that the Irish language was "oriental in origin". Another offshoot from this Ireland/China parallel according to Yee, was the identification in the Wake of the Chinese philosopher Confucius with Joyce and his Wakean alter ego Shem. Points of affinity were Confucius' self exile from his native state which ignored his ideas and failed to recognise his merit, and the lack of recognition he suffered in his own lifetime. However there is a Brunonian undercutting of this primary identification by the use, according to Yee, of the Confucian "Doctrine of the Mean" or moderation, by the Japanese type Shaunian invader who dresses in a plain white robe, while the Archdruid wears an ostentatious multicoloured mantle and who takes practical action as advocated by Confucius, who was averse to abstract speculation, to defeat his opponent, who relies on long winded rhetoric. The Doctrine of the Mean uses this apposite example: "It is said in the Book of Poetry "Over her embroidered robe she puts a plain, single garment", intimating a dislike to the display of elegance of the former. Just so, it is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin." Thus Shaunian St. Patrick, like the Japanese, learns from his adversary and uses his own philosophy of action against him, like Alexander the Great impatiently cutting through the Gordian Knot of sophistry. In this weakness on the part of the Shemian Archdruid, Joyce may have intended to allude to the Irish weakness in general that he saw as being a main cause of Ireland's long continued enslavement to England: ""We Irishmen," said Oscar Wilde one day to a friend of mine, "have done nothing, but we are the greatest

talkers since the time of the Greeks." But though the Irish are eloquent, a revolution is not made of human breath and compromises. Ireland has already had enough equivocations and misunderstandings" (Critical Writings, page 174). Also, in Blakean terms, Japan stands for the East and Ireland the West and moving between them represents the dualism of contraries; the forces of error move from East to West and the regenerative forces of Los from West to East. Atherton in his The Books at the Wake notes that Joyce associates Bishop George Berkeley's philosophy with Eastern philosophy and Grace Eckley suggests a reason in A Conceptual Guide to Finnegans Wake (ibid. page 224) : "The Chinese philosophers of the Han dynasty (A.D.202-220) developed a system in which five colours corresponded to directions, seasons, virtues, gods and emperors and sound (the Pentatonic scale); and therefore Joyce could regard Berkeley's theories of light and colour as basically Oriental."4. Finally, does St. Patrick really triumph ? Joyce described the episode to Harriet Shaw Weaver as "the conversion of St. Patrick by Ireland" and not the other way around. This must be borne in mind when Patrick, Christianity's invader, appears to defeat the Archdruid, native Irish pagan, at the end of the episode. St. Patrick clearly "wins the day", but only the day, not the Shemian night, which will come around again in the cyclical scheme of things and of the Wake ("yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled. Fuitfiat !"- FW613.13-14). If St. Patrick converts the Irish they also convert/assimilate him to a national symbol of far greater potency than King Leary. St. Patrick's use of the shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity (apart from ironically commenting upon the false nature of St. Peter-the-Rock's Church) implicates him with another Irish national symbol and the legends of his doings will tie him into almost every geographical part of the island. St. Patrick wins by not being too difficult for the populace to understand; his "4-3-2" philosophy (suggesting a four leaf lucky clover, "the luck of the Irish", an example that would be appreciated by his Irish audience) is a simplifying, unifying one which ends up with the one common sense symbol of the divine - the fiery sun/Son, source of all light/the Light of the World, of the whole wide world ("the sound sense sympol in weedwayedwold of the firethere the sun in his halo cast !"- FW612.29-30).5. St. Patrick offers the simple white light unity of objective realism while Berkeley offers the complex rainbow diversity of subjective insight which the "common man" or the "common reader" finds too difficult to follow. However, the Archdruid Berkeley and St. Patrick can never decisively beat the other; the cathartic night world of released taboos (Joyce still performing his "Holy Office"), is "crosscomplimentary" (FW613.11) to Shaun/St. Patrick's waking world of practical concerns. Unity leads to diversity and back again, each of the identical opposite brothers are only half of the crown of King Leary/HCE (FW610.11-13). Without white light there is no rainbow and vice versa, no me without a defining you, each and all together forming a "farbiger pancosmos" (FW613.11-12). Peter D. Fitz-Hugh

1.

Juva's reference to the "burkeley buy" and the "Eurasian Generalissimo" (FW610.12-13) provides a further link between Shaun/St. Patrick and HCE/Russian General as does the Saint's ruddy, violent, "eruberuption" which is contrasted with the Archdruid's/sage's/scholar's "viriditude" or green truthfulness (FW612.23). Both HCE as Russian General and Shaun as St. Patrick are violent colonizers of Ireland consolidating their power bases in stone castles and churches, both are associated with British "redcoat" colonialism (St. Patrick was British by birth and HCE is often in the role of hated English invader/ oppressor) while pacifist Shem as the Archdruid represents the native invaded Irish. To quote J. Colm O'Sullivan from his Joyce's Use of Colours (ibid. pages 74 and 75): "Opposed to the arch druid's "viriditude" or Irish green is Patrick's "eruberuption" or violent British red. At the heart of his "Christianity" is power and its classic manifestation in British Christian imperialism ..The saint wears British imperial red, in his complexion if not in his clothes, and represents Christ and Caesar most happily hand in glove. The wise man, unwise in the ways of the world, champions the blind, superstitious, snot -green." Insofar as the Buckley versus the Russian General episode has a parallel with this episode, it is in Shaun/St. Patrick's close identification with father HCE/Russian General whose outward, conforming, commercially successful persona Shaun embodies.
2.

Another allusion that asserts the Irishness of the Wake apart from, but implicating The Book of Kells, is the general background presence of the slogan from the early Christian period which became Ireland's proudest self description : "Island of Saints and Scholars" a variation of which title became the title for a lecture Joyce gave in Trieste on April 27th 1907 : "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages". As J. Colm O'Sullivan in his Joyce's Use of Colours points out (ibid. page 75) the irony in this episode is that the saint and sage are "at each other's throats". Joyce's argument in this lecture, according to Ellman, is that while Ireland once upon a time deserved this title, it had deteriorated "monstrously" under British rule. The passage quoted by Ellman is of some interest to this episode: "The economic and intellectual conditions that prevaildo not permit the development of individuality. The soul of the country is weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties, and individual initiative is paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while its body is manacled by the police, the tax office, and the garrison. No one who has any self respect stays in Ireland, but flees afar as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove."
3.

Another reason why the Archdruid/Shem cannot see heliotrope/violet/purple may lie in his pacifism, in that the Wake frequently plays upon the puns violet/violent and ultra-violent/Ulster violence (FW316.2: "ulstravoliance") - the men of Ulster were long known for their violent nature. The presence of blue in "roranyellgreenlindigan" depends on the single letter "l" whereas if "b" had been included before the letter "l" the presence of blue in the colour sequence would be undeniable. The omission of "b", assuming it to be deliberate, may have at least two reasons. Firstly the flower, the Heliotrope, occurs in blue as well as light purple, although the most common colour of the flower is purple. Given the link between blue and the Shemian "blind spot" of heliotrope its partial appearance acknowledges that link. Secondly, to have included the "b" would have perhaps made the reading "blind again" too obvious for Joyce's purpose, while the reading itself restores the missing "b" for those who see it.
4.

According to Grace Eckley another figure making up the Archdruid is a Protestant archbishop named Bulkeley who destroyed the convent, school and chapel at Saint Francis' Church on St. Stephen's Day in 1629 in opposition to the Catholic Church. Bulkeley rather than Buckley, she suggests, contributes to the variations on Bishop Berkeley's name in the episode.
5.

St. Patrick's/Shaun's use of the Irish shamrock as a handkerchief seems an intentional echo of HCE's/ Russian General's use of Irish turf to wipe his arse, but while the latter act precipitates HCE's downfall as an insult to Ireland, the former seems to have the opposite effect for Shaun/St. Patrick. As yet, I am unable to draw any meaning from this, other than to note that opposite ends of the body are involved; perhaps the Shaunian Saint's action is seen as equivalent to a patriotic kissing of this national symbol. There may also be an echo of Shaunian Buck Mulligan's "snotgreen" as a new art colour for Irish poets, having borrowed Shemian Stephen Dedalus' soiled handkerchief with which to wipe his razor. This is perhaps another reason for the Shemian Archdruid seeing Irish King Leary in various shades of green. There seems to be a lot of unscrupulous Buck Mulligan in Shaun/St. Patrick and his Mercurial, thief-like purloining of the Archdruid's rainbow and grass green Irish symbols and his Confucian philosophy of plainness and action, converting the first two to his own use to demonstrate sham miracles. One interpretation of the Saint's reversal of the Archdruid Luchru's darkening of the sun during their legendary confrontation is that he made use of the natural phenomenon of a solar eclipse, an example of simony, equivalent to Buck Mulligan's use of the two whistles of the mailboat from Dublin to Holyhead as it cleared Dublin Harbour to obtain the two "other worldly" whistles in answer to his at the beginning of the first chapter of Ulysses as part of his mock Catholic Mass (see "The Three Whistles and the Aesthetic of Mediation: Modern Physics and Platonic Metaphysics in Joyce's Ulysses" by Stephen Whittaker and Francis X. Jordan, James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 33 Number 1, Fall 1996).

It is in fact tempting to see in the initial "confrontation" between Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses another parallel to that between the Archdruid and the Saint: Buck Mulligan is involved in a parody of the Catholic Mass, is dressed in a yellow dressing gown, a colour possibly symbolic of the sun and is of a "sunny" disposition, and Stephen Dedalus in black, the colour of night; Buck Mulligan "sees" things from a purely selfish, surface point of view (his reflecting shaving mirror) while Stephen has the inner vision of his mother's accusing ghost and sees in symbols - for Mulligan the sea is "scrotum tightening", a practical physical effect of its cold water while for Stephen Dublin Bay is the bowl of "bitter waters" beside his dying mother's bed; Stephen "sees" the insult in Mulligan's slighting reference to his dead mother and like the Saint's impatient dismissal of the Archdruid's "preachybook" (FW611.25) Mulligan similarly dismisses Stephen's complaint; at the end of each episode each Shem character is dispossessed by the Shaun: Stephen loses his key to the Martello Tower to Mulligan and St. Patrick dispossesses the Archdruid of his sway over the people.