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James Joyce once wrote a “tactically masochistic” letter to his Nora in which the image of an abused mongrel figures predominately: “… I have wandered like a mongrel dog that has received a lash across the eyes … wandered about the streets like some filthy cur whose mistress had cut him with her whip and hunted him from her door.”1
Joyce's novelistic art reflects much of the same masochistic propensity. It is evident in the mongrel imagery and its concomitant symbolism in Ulysses, particularly with reference to Leopold Bloom.
The psychic significance of the mongrel image to Joyce's Ulysses is manifested early in the novel as Stephen Dedalus, in the “Proteus” episode, watches the dog Tatters loping along Sandymount strand as his owner calls to him: “Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel. The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve” (U 46-47).2
The kick is brutal; the dog's cowardice is reflected in the intransitives “sulk” and “slink.” “Flight” instead of “fright” is also appropriate in this context. Although the dog is not physically harmed, the animal fears potential harm from his master.
Physical brutality is connected with the masochistically tinged image of the mongrel Garryowen in U 295: The anonymous narrator of the “Cyclops” episode recalls complaints about “that… mangy mongrel” Garryowen: “… bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him that would