Trapping the Fox You Are with a Riddle: The Autobiographical Crisis of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses - n't - Critical Essay

John King

Scholarship about Joyce has, from the start, envisioned autobiographical implications in Ulysses. In 1924, Herbert Gorman tells us that in the Stephen Dedalus of the first three episodes of the novel, "Joyce draws a portrait (obviously autobiographical) that is astonishing in its complexity and completeness" (124-25). In 1930, Stuart Gilbert, while also claiming that Stephen Dedalus is a self-portrait, adds that "Stephen Dedalus represents only one side of the author of Ulysses, "and that in the character of Leopold Bloom, "the balance is redressed" (102). In 1934, Frank Budgen likewise claims that Stephen is Joyce's self-portrait, and although he interprets Bloom differently, his interpretation still resembles Gilbert's biographic supposition:

There is a difference [between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom] of dimension and substance as well as character. Stephen is a self-portrait, and therefore one-sided. Bloom is seen from all angles, as no self-portrait can be seen. (James Joyce 59)

In 1955, Hugh Kenner discusses the issue of autobiography too, though he limits his remarks to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its even more autobiographical prototype, Stephen Hero, works that portray Stephen Dedalus but not Leopold Bloom (Dublin's Joyce; see especially 137). Yet the spirit that pervades even this shrewd book often betrays a willingness to go to the notebooks and conversations of Joyce, as if to find textual confirmation from the master himself.

In his exhaustive, authoritative biography of Joyce, first published in 1959, Richard Ellmann was a fastidiously close reader of the autobiographical content in Joyce's writings. He stresses the importance of Joyce's autobiographical material in the introduction:

The life of an artist, but particularly that of Joyce, differs from the lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command attention. Instead of allowing each day, pushed back by the next, to lapse into imprecise memory, he shapes again the experiences which shaped him. (James Joyce 3)

More than any other work of Joyce scholarship, this biography meticulously reckons instances in Joyce's life that got written into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Such autobiographical consideration of Ulysses elicits little surprise, since Joyce himself encouraged looking at his work autobiographically. While working on Stephen Hero, Joyce rather muddlesomely signed some of his correspondence as "Stephen Daedalus"; [1] and while working on Ulysses, he tried to change his life to resemble his fiction. Budgen shows, for example, how Joyce would try to make his relationship with Nora resemble that of Leopold with Molly Bloom: Nora

became tearful and through her tears she told me that Jim wanted her to "go with other men so that he would have something to write about." Joyce, pretending to be more drunk than he was, was shuffling up in the rear, hoping presumably, to catch some helpful words. (Myselves When Young 188)

Again, Joyce seems to encourage autobiographical inquiries by his confession to Budgen that Stephen Dedalus as he appears in A Portrait of the Artist (a significant the before artist) is a self-portrait (James Joyce 60). Little wonder, then, that Joyceologists set a high importance on convoking instances of life experiences that Joyce, in Ellmann's phrase, "shapes again" in Ulysses. Here are a few they have found: the humorous valentine poem sent to Joyce, a valentine that Joyce later uses in Ulysses as the one Bloom sends to his daughter Milly (Ellmann, James Joyce 31-32); George Russel's snubbing Joyce by not including him in an anthology of young Dublin poets that Russel was editing, a snub that Russel administers to Stephen Dedalus in the library scene (Ellmann, James Joyce 174n); and Joyce's rescue by a Mr. Hunter--Joyce's model for Leopold Bloom--which appears as Bloom's rescue of Stephen in "Circe" (Beja 68). A full list of such instances would be staggeringly long.

But if Ulysses and A Portrait are, in fact, autobiographical fictions, how can this biographic bearing be meaningful? How can we calculate in what ratio Bloom and Dedalus represent James Joyce? How can we extract any autobiographical significance beyond the mere recapitulation of Joyce's everyday life? S. L. Goldberg concludes:

All we can say in general terms is that in his own books [Joyce] reworked situations and themes he found in his own experience, either actually or potentially--which is so obvious a truism that it is hardly of much profit. (38)

Where these autobiographical issues whirl the most in the (vor) text of Ulysses is the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode when Stephen Dedalus, a character based on Joyce's previous self-portrait, and perhaps in some fashion still a self-portrait during the action of the novel, argues that Shakespeare's plays are distorted autobiographies, and that Shakespeare's characters are really people in Shakespeare's life. If we believe Stephen to be an autobiographical character, then what he argues regarding the biographic bearing in Shakespeare's plays should be crucial, for we can interpret the argument as a reflexive statement pertaining to James Joyce, the original model for the self-portrait. Surprisingly, however, scholarship has not offered a thorough exegesis of this reflexivity in Ulysses, though Lucien Dallenbach at least discerns it (191n15).

In a novel teeming with "autobiographical" content, including the biographic pretexts of Joyceologists as well as the autobiographical themes embedded in the text of the novel, a more vigorous textual exegesis of these issues is necessary to make the profit that has typically been lost in upholding the lame truism of the importance of autobiography in Ulysses. A first step in our new approach is to devalue the comparisons between the events of Joyce's everyday life and the events of the novel. Such a step simply renews Roland Barthes's stricture that "[t] he unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination" (148). Which is to say that the unity of a text is not in the author but in the reader, or more accurately in the act of reading. With a complementary criterion for examining texts, William Schutte notes that because Stuart Gilbert and Frank Budgen felt compelled to authenticate their texts with either the counsel or obiter dicta of Joyce, "criticism of Ulysses got off to an unusually bad start " (2). Nevertheless, the impulse to confirm readings of Ulysses with the life of James Joyce persists, as we can see in the recent criticism of Harold Bloom. [2]

Circumventing the recent autobiographical suppositions of Bloom and the previous suppositions of Ellmann, Gilbert, and Budgen, I will demonstrate how Ulysses presents readers with the perils of its autobiographical subtexts (rather than pretexts) in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode, and how in the "Circe" episode this metafictional treatment appropriately undergoes several metamorphoses that reveal in manifest images the latent relationship between Stephen Dedalus and the implied author of Ulysses, James Joyce. By "implied author," I mean what Wayne C. Booth defined in The Rhetoric of Fiction. [3] Booth describes the effect of storytelling in which a reader is impressed with the presence of the author in the work, as we certainly are in Ulysses. It is important to remember that this presence must be distinguished from the narrator, for there may be different degrees of distance between the persona narrating the story and the judgments of the implied author. It is equally important to remember that the impl ied author is constructed by the reader and has no direct relationship to the real author at all (in this, Booth is consonant with Barthes). These distinctions will prove crucial for Ulysses, for our implied Joyce will do his best to muddle us about the whole autobiography matter in the novel.

At the opening of the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode, in which Stephen will unfold his autobiographical Shakespeare theory, Mr. Lyster the librarian mentions Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, a novel whose central character translates and acts out his own version of Hamlet, a process that brings to the surface some deeply embedded psychological issues: "A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life" (182; emphasis mine). Whether Mr. Lyster knows about Stephen's own deeply buried issues or not (as Stephen himself will wonder later in the episode), Mr. Lyster's statement well describes Stephen Dedalus because, like Wilhelm, [4] Stephen has been posturing as Hamlet and Shakespeare in real life. Regarding this episode, Helene Cixous claims, "'Scylla and Charybdis' is... a chapter of life in search of its own meanings" (568), but it would be more lucid to say that the chapter is one of Stephen in search of his own meaning. To render Hamlet as Stephen Dedalus and Wilhelm Meister do, by rendering what one reads into experience in order to comprehend one's experience, is, from the character's perspective, a meaningful (although contrived) form of autobiography, just as Shakespeare, according to Stephen's theory, wrote Hamlet and performed the role of the ghost in it to better define his own experience. For Stephen Dedalus, whose mimicry is utterly byzantine compared to Wilhelm's (for characters and phrases from Hamlet represent items not only in Stephen's life but in Shakespeare's life as well), this posturing of Stephen's will signify a schizophrenic anxiety over his identity, as defined by the measure of his sovereignty over the text.

Before we examine the importance of Stephen's Shakespearean posturing and his autobiographical theory, however, let us first register something of the magnitude of Stephen's obsession, since, as Edmund Wilson has noted, "the lecture has little to do with Shakespeare, but a good deal to do with Stephen himself" (198):

* In the Proteus episode of Ulysses, Stephen refers to his "Hamlet hat" (48), a remark that becomes less oblique later when he refers to "my cockle hat and staff and his my sandals shoon" (51)--part of the ballad sung by Ophelia: "How should I your true love know / From another one? / By his cockle hat and staff / and his sandal shoon" (4.5.23--26). Don Gifford notes that "the cockle hat (with a scallop shell as a sign of pilgrimage) and the staff suggest the conventional metaphor of the lover as pilgrim" (65). In Hamlet, the song carries significance for Ophelia because her lover the prince has become, if not strictly a pilgrim, at least an exile: Claudius charges him to go to England after he has slain Polonius. Stephen has exiled himself too: "I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go" (24).

* Cogitating metaphysics with closed eyes, Stephen thinks about the literal prospect of falling down in Horatio's words that warn Hamlet of the danger of madness: "If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base" (38; 1.4.69--70).

* Contemplating paternity, one of the unlikely issues of his Shakespearean talk, Stephen, about the stifling conventionality of Ireland, thinks: "Where is dear Arius to try conclusions?" (39). This rhetorical question refers to Hamlet's speech to Gertrude in her bedchamber, when he anticipates her predisposition to betray him:

No, in despite of sense and secrecy,

Unpeg the basket of the house's top,

Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape,

To try conclusions, in the basket creep

And break your own neck down. (3.4.192--96; emphasis mine)

* The narrator in "Proteus," mired much in the thoughts of Stephen, calls the wind romping around Stephen, in a borrowing from Horatio, "nipping and eager airs" (39; 1.4.2).

* In his lecture, Stephen employs a pun to depict Shakespeare, who originally acted the part of the revenant of Hamlet's father, as--according to a situation like his own, in another sense of the words--"made up in the castoff mail of a court buck" (186).

Other examples could be proffered, but what perhaps reveals most about Stephen's obsession is when others take notice of his posturing. The Englishman Haines, for instance, indulgently calls Stephen's attention to the similarities of their setting by the Martello tower and the setting of Hamlet: "This tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o'er his base into the sea, isn't it" (20). Buck Mulligan, more directly, recognizes Stephen's identification with Shakespeare when he mocks Stephen's Shakespeare theory by replacing the name of Shakespeare with his nickname for Stephen (thus intimating the reflexivity of the theory) when he calls Stephen "0 Shade of Kinch the elder" (19).

Reckoning with all this Shakespeareana, we can see that his lecture on Shakespeare touches on Stephen's beliefs about his own identity in the novel; and indeed, his convictions (in more than one sense of the word) about Shakespeare's identity (which in turn he wants to inform his) will weaken his very thesis about Shakespeare. William Schutte has noted that although Stephen has worked rigorously to coordinate information from the Shakespearean studies of Frank Harris, Sidney Lee, and George Brandes, he nevertheless "is not interested in finding those facts which are historically accurate; he is interested in finding those facts which will bolster his preconceived notions about Shakespeare" (54). Indeed, Stephen often assumes an absolute reciprocity between scenarios in Shakespeare's plays and Shakespeare's life with no real argument, which leads Ellmann to observe that the "details of Stephen's theory are, as Stephen knows, barely plausible" (Ulysses on the Liffey 84). Even further, at one telling moment, St ephen avouches a specious fact quite on purpose ("Don't tell them he was nine years old when [the firedrake] was quenched" [207]). Stephen's duplicity with facts should disqualify his lecture as scholarship--at least to readers--and perhaps distinguish it as something else. John Paul Riquelme, for one, has concluded that because Stephen "fabricates his theory as a fiction that he finally disclaims, we can take his acting as theatrical" (204). Stuart Gilbert, for another, reasons that Stephen Dedalus thinks "it is the intellectual interest, the aesthetic value of the dialogue that counts rather than the conclusion" (217).

I would go further than Riquelme or Gilbert to argue that beyond acting and aesthetics, Stephen's Shakespearean lecture occurs because of two connected motivations. The first is the will to adjudge himself against classical standards, as Wilhelm and Rachel Vinrace did, and as Joshua Reynolds instructed the students of the Royal Academy to do:

What I would propose is, that you should enter into a kind of competition, by painting a similar subject, and making a companion to any picture that you consider as a model. After you finish your work, place it near the model, and compare them carefully together. You will then not only see, but feel your own deficiencies more sensibly than by precepts, or any other means of perception. (95)

In our case, Stephen has "entered into a competition" with Shakespeare by making himself a companion to the model of Shakespeare and placing himself, as much as he can by means of lecturing, next to the model of Shakespeare. The model of Shakespeare, especially the Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet, is chosen because Shakespeare, besides writing the play, originally portrayed the role of the ghost of Hamlet's father and thus, as Cixous writes, "put his soul on stage in an attempt to understand it" (567).

The second of Stephen's powerful motivations in Shakespeare-posturing seems to be the will to assert himself, by indirect means, as the novel's controlling consciousness, for latent in Stephen's posturing is a phenomenon beyond that of Wilhelm and Rachel Vinrace; Stephen is having a metafictional identity crisis. Consider that the Stephen of A Portrait is privileged autobiographically, for the title of A Portrait, indicating an identification of the main character as the author, and Joyce's signing his own letters as Stephen, both fulfill the autobiographic criteria set up by Philippe Lejeune in "The Autobiographical Pact" (15-18). In one other dimension, the earlier Stephen may also be privileged autobiographically, if we construe Stephen Dedalus as the narrator of A Portrait, as Riquelme astutely does (48-85). According to this view, the journal entries at the novel's end and the poems in the middle section are artifacts written earlier than the body of the book, which the matured Stephen composed at a lat er time. The Stephen of Ulysses, on the other hand, has forfeited any autobiographical privilege (to begin with, Joyce has stopped sharing his name, and Stephen must share his narrative space with other characters). Stephen is now a Stephen with a difference. [5] Edward Said characterizes the Stephen of Ulysses as an author whose work is "of a never-to-be-attained future," but whose work would resemble the text of Ulysses (244). In A Portrait, Stephen had the gratification of writing poems and a journal, and possibly the entirety of the text itself, yet in Ulysses he can feel no such gratification, and must content himself, which he does poorly, at posturing as Hamlet and Shakespeare and placing himself next to his models through his lecture. Little wonder he feels an identity crisis. The choice of model again informs us of Stephen's motivations: regarding Shakespeare's performance as the ghost, Cixous writes, "To write Hamlet, and in creating it to make oneself, is away of being one's own progenitor" (567). If the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses can no longer be reassured that he is autobiographical, then he would prefer to become Hamlet--the character who made Shakespeare his own progenitor--and in turn, make himself his own progenitor. [6]

Meanwhile, the narrator of Ulysses has undermined the sense of Stephen's identity in the novel by psychically fusing his consciousness and Leopold Bloom's. In a basic example, this fusion occurs in a thought of Stephen's--"A cloud began to cover the sun slowly wholly"--which recurs in a thought of Bloom's-"A cloud began to cover the sun wholly slowly wholly" (11,61). This fusion will lead to Bloom's tragicomic entanglement in the very threads of Stephen's obsession with Shakespeare, for right from the beginning, the narrator characterizes Bloom as having a life similar in detail to the life of Shakespeare as propounded by Stephen. Bloom, like Shakespeare, is a cuckold; Leopold has a daughter (Milly) as Shakespeare has a daughter (Marina); Bloom's son Rudy died at eleven days old as Shakespeare's son Hamnet died at eleven years old; the death of his father preoccupies Bloom as the death of Shakespeare's father (still according to Stephen) comes to consume Shakespeare. This similarity extends to the action of the novel, for one of Stephen's interlocutors asks him to prove that Shakespeare was a Jew, and Stephen obliges him. Ironically enough, Bloom seems to become the analogue of the revenant of Hamlet's father as Stephen becomes the analogue of the Danish prince, as Gilbert noticed (214)[7] Because of the analogues that Bloom suggests, Stephen cannot transform himself into a simulacrum of his own progenitor, even in his own self-dramatizations.

While Bloom provides an externally undermining influence on Stephen's attempt to fashion an autobiographical identity anew out of Shakespeare's life, discontinuities in Stephen's interior monologues worsen his identity crisis. Early in his lecture, Stephen's thoughts seem more and more schizophrenic as he seems to converse mentally with himself, whereas interior monologues in the novel have heretofore varied only between a flipflopping of perspectives between the indirect, third-person reporting of a character's thoughts and the direct, first-person presentation of them. Then an especially problematic discontinuity occurs when the voice of the interior monologue says "William Shakespeare and company, limited" (201), a phrase that ought to mean nothing to Stephen in a 1904 setting because it refers to the bookseller--established in 1919 by Sylvia Beach--that published Ulysses in 1922.[8] The effect is that of a narrator who is affecting the persona of "James Joyce" and who, in a lapse of concentration, dictat es by accident his own thoughts within the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus. (The reference to the novel's publisher, one should remember, was prominent to the readers of the original Paris editions, for the publisher's name was printed on the title page.) After this lapse of concentration, the two first-person voices present within Stephen's thoughts grow more argumentative, as if further separated in identity. The censorious first-person voice is possibly "Joyce" again when, as the lecture falters, he grouches, "What the hell are you driving at?" (205).

One of the most enigmatic passages in Ulysses involves exactly this problem of Stephen's schizophrenic interior mono(or, as we see, dia)logues in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode. Stephen tells his interlocutors that he does not believe his autobiographical theory of Shakespeare, but the voice of the interior monologue says,

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap. (211)

The first sentence, while indicating that Stephen's denial is a subterfuge to conceal the ambiguity he feels about his autobiographical subject, alludes oddly to Mark 9:17-27, a passage that depicts a father who beseeches Christ to heal his epileptic son of a "dumb spirit." Stephen needs curing of his own, metafictional, "dumb spirit," the implied presence of "Joyce," which was presumably once identical to Stephen's own consciousness in A Portrait. The subsequent sentences are likely a report of Stephen's two first-person voices again conversing with one another: the second sentence would be "Joyce," the third would be Stephen, the fourth "Joyce" again, and so on. If this approach be granted, then "Joyce" answers Stephen's questions with references to Joyce's other two publishers. Egomen refers to the Egoist, which published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in installments, and the "other chap" would be Joyce's headache of a publisher, George Roberts (Gifford, 251). Again, the presence of "Joyce" encro aches on the consciousness of the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses, a displacement that negates the possibility of Stephen's having an autonomous self, which by definition means that Ulysses is not, for Stephen, an autobiography, "the story of one's life written by himself' (OED).

Yet, in seeming contrast, one page of the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode is presented in dramatic format, without the interior observations or intrusions of the narrator apparent in earlier passages:

Stephen

(Stringendo.) He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. (207)

As Stephen hastens to his climax, he inadvertently informs us that he is scanning the metaphorical painting of Ulysses for the face in the corner of the canvas, hoping that the face will be his own (although he is as much in the dark corner of the canvasser Leopold Bloom). This instance of dramatic format links the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode to the "Circe" episode, wherein the implied author will maintain a semblance of a silence, while Stephen Dedalus will reach a climactic truth about his identity.

In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode, Stephen says, "I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink" (209). At the opening of the "Circe" chapter, Stephen has, like plenty of people who have sustained a psychic wound, satisfied the thirst it stimulated by getting himself drunk. At the same time, the narrator has resumed a dramatic format, which means that the narrator, throughout the episode, remains silent as regards the interior monologues of characters. The omission of interior monologues, however, merely seems displaced by the chapter's hallucinatory action, which often seems to project externally the psychological preoccupations of the characters themselves: thus Leopold Bloom will witness the tryst that he has vigorously avoided seeing all day long and, more importantly for us, Stephen will envisage the painful truth about his identity.

We see Stephen's autobiographical anxiety manifest itself in the chapter's action when Stephen and Bloom gaze into a distorting mirror indicated by means of stage direction: "The face of William Shakespeare, beardless appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall" (553). Stephen's face is transfigured into Shakespeare's--or is Shakespeare's face transfigured into Stephen's? Either version is a fulfillment of the prophecy of his lecture, but unfortunately for Stephen the mirror transfiguration also identifies a Shakespearean Leopold Bloom as well as himself: the reindeer antlers signify Bloom's (and Shakespeare's) cuckolding, whereas the antlers have no significance for Stephen. The Shakespeare in the looking glass, who I surmise is a contrived version of the historical personage since he lacks his beard, suffers most importantly from "facial paralysis," which indicates that he like Stephen suffers from the presence of a dumb spirit like the o ne Stephen alludes to in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode. Remember that Stephen looks into a cracked mirror in the opening "Telemachus" episode and responds bitterly to seeing himself divided in two ("Who chose this face for me?" [18]).

The dumb spirit will seem to have its indirect say in "Circe" despite the apparent silence of the narrator due to the lack of interior monologue, for the stage directions indicate that Shakespeare's speech occurs "in dignified ventriloquy" (553). The Circean Shakespeare must be no more autonomous than Stephen, who feels repressed by the division his identity has sustained (between himself and "Joyce") in crossing over from A Portrait to Ulysses; the presence of "Joyce" equally controls this Shakespeare. What is more, the next stage direction calls for this Shakespeare to crow "with a black capon's laugh" (553). Thus, Shakespeare here suffers his own autobiographical emasculation at the hands of the narrator, rendering him no longer analogous to Hamlet, for Hamlet himself would not suffer emasculation, according to his boast to Claudius: "I eat the air, promise-crammed: you cannot feed capons so" (3.2.94-95; emphasis mine). The passage that follows the caponical laughter corrupts the autobiographical theory o f Shakespeare and, in turn, corrupts the autobiographical Stephen: "Iagogo! How my Oldfellow chockit his Thursdaymomun. Iagogogo!" (553). We must unpack this passage:

* The personage addressed by Shakespeare in the mirror is presumably Iago from Othello, if the "facial paralysis" has caused Shakespeare to stammer. In this passage, the looking-glass Shakespeare addresses a character from one of his plays, a ploy that stresses that he cannot be the proper Shakespeare--reminds us, in fact, that he is a metafictional character.

* Gifford informs us that the term oldfellow means father (513). In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode, either Stephen or the narrator or the implied author in an interior monologue refers to Simon Dedalus as "old fellow" (204). Here the presence of "Joyce" might very well mean Simon Dedalus, as the father figure of his character Stephen, as "my Oldfellow." Later events in the chapter will corroborate this interpretation.

* Thursdaymomun cryptically signifies Stephen. We know from earlier in "Circe" that Stephen was born on a Thursday, and Zoe the whore consequently repeats part of a pertinent nursery rhyme: "Thursday's child has far to go" (548). At his age, Stephen represents Thursday's man instead, so in the mouth of a Shakespeare suffering facial paralysis, the phrase sounds stretched and stammery: "Thursdaymomun." Recall that in the "Hades" episode, Bloom thought: "Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it" (108). By fusing into Stephen's identity, Bloom becomes the Friday that buries the Thursday of Stephen, autobiographically speaking, just as Bloom can be construed as the Friday corresponding to Stephen as Robinson Crusoe.

The spectacle of Paddy Dignam's widow in the nighttown brothel, as again supplied by the narrator by means of stage direction, draws forth sputtering from a provoked Shakespeare in the mirror--"Weda seca whokilla farst" (554)--which amounts to a shortening of the lines spoken by Baptista, the Queen in "The Murder of Gonzago": "In second husband let me be accurst! / None wed the second but who kill'd the first" (3.2.189-90). If we look more closely at the procession of Mrs. Dignam to find what has caused this dire response, we discover that she and her brood parody many of the concerns of Hamlet:

* Offense to decorum. The stage direction indicates that the widow Dignam, shirking her mourning duties, "is rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips, and nose" (554). Gertrude too is a widow who, at least as Hamlet considers it, shirks her mourning duties. Of her, Hamlet complains that "[e]re yet the salt of most unrighteous tears / Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, / She married" (1.2.154-56). Moreover, Hamlet implies that Gertrude is willfully, or unnaturally, lascivious when he insists to Gertrude that "at your age / The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble, / And waits upon the judgement" (3.4.68-70).

* Profligacy. In the stage direction, Mrs. Dignam is flushed with "deathtalk, tears and Tunny's tawny sherry," her child Patsy has "a hank of porksteaks," and Mrs. Dignam is holding a large marquee umbrella and wearing "streamers flaunting aloft" (553, 554, 544). The revel of Claudius, occurring only two months after his brother's death, is described by Hamlet as profligate: "[A]s he drains his draughts of Rhenish down, / The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out / The triumph of his pledge" (1.4.10-12).

* Usurpation. The stage direction has Mrs. Dignam toting her husband's life insurance policy and wearing "her late husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots" (554). Hamlet, of course, regards Claudius as a usurper and "A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, / That from a shelf the precious diadem stole, / And put it in his pocket" (3.4.100-102).

* Neglect. The stage direction indicates that the widow Dignam's bonnet is crooked, her child Patsy wears a collar that is loose, her child Freddy is whimpering, her daughter Susy is "crying with a cod's mouth," and her daughter Alice is "struggling with the baby" (554). When the attentive King Hamlet, who "would not beteem the winds of heaven / Visit her [Gertrude's] face too roughly" (1.2.141-42) dies, Hamlet regards the world as "an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely" (1.2.135-37).

An image of the Elizabethan London in which Stephen situates Shakespeare is at one place superimposed on the farcical scene of Mrs. Dignam, "a pen chivvying her brood of cygnets" (554), for Stephen reports that Shakespeare, walking about London, "does not stay to feed the pen chivvying her game of cygnets" (186). This scene's connection to Shakespeare, then, made glaringly obvious, has spurred this made-up Shakespeare's anger. By having the widow Dignam chivvy (chase) her cygnets, the narrator, despite his relative silence within interior monologues, has distorted the emblem of an autobiographical Shakespeare into absurdity. This (mis)application of the Elizabethan London setting also emphasizes that Ulysses, for all of its "street furnishings," as Joyce's details of Dublin are known, is not necessarily more authentically autobiographical for having them.

But the undermining of the autobiographical Shakespeare is soon transferred directly to Stephen, as the narrator figures Stephen, by means of stage direction, as just another puppet: Stephen appears "with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile on his face," and when speaking, he "gabbles, with marionette jerks" (555). If Stephen were the puppet of himself, he could then be autobiographical, but the presence of "Joyce," who ventriloquized as Shakespeare's reflection, jerks the strings of Stephen's sovereignty playfully around.

To comprehend the crescendo of the autobiographical crisis of Stephen, we must first glance backward. In general, guessing how an author managed to write something is like answering the unfair riddle Stephen asks his pupils in the "Nestor" episode. The riddle--whose answer is "[t]he fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush" (28)--is (as Gifford tells us) "a joke at the expense of riddles, since it is unanswerable unless the answer is already known" (33). [9] The riddle lacks the clues needed for its answer; likewise, not enough Shakespearean evidence exists for Stephen to arrive at any authentic portrait: Stephen instead has given his own distorted answer to the question of who is Shakespeare by pretending to know the answer. But he could not contrive an answer for who is his autobiographical self, his dumb spirit, for in the "Circe" episode, the hallucination of a foxhunt commences in which a fox appears, according to the stage direction, in a manner that tellingly recalls Stephen's riddle: "A stout fox drawn from a covert, brush pointed, having buried his grandmother, runs swift for the open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth, under the leaves" (557).

The foxhunt represents the absolute disjoining of Stephen's two selves. (This passage, incidentally, is impossible to interpret chronologically, since Stephen responds to visual stimuli that can only be deduced belatedly; my explication of the passage will appear as appropriately roundabout.) Just before the hunt, his father [10] enters "on ponderous buzzard wings" (557), and Stephen notices that his own hands have changed into a vulture's talons (in a parody of the Dedalian symbolism of their family name). Before that occurs, Stephen cryptically complains, "Break my spirit, will he?" (557). The reader strives to determine whether the referent for he is Simon Dedalus, the narrator, or the implied author, but all equally corrupt the sovereignty Stephen has struggled for throughout the entirety of the novel.

The passage that follows Simon Dedalus's entrance stresses the issue (pardon the pun) of Stephen's origin: whether Stephen really has Simon Dedalus or "James Joyce" as his most proper "father." The foxhunt commences soon after Simon Dedalus sights "[a]n eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed" (557). These heraldic indicators, Gifford informs us, describe "the coat of arms of the Joyces of County Galway" (514), which the Book of Irish Names indicates is the family that Joyce is descended from (Coghlan 57). After Simon sights the Joyce escutcheon, he clamors for the Ulster King of Arms, the chief official of Irish heraldry at Herald's College in England, apparently to have that authority reconcile Stephen's identity to that of a simple character's, so that his boy will be strictly his. Only a moment before this clamor, Simon has criticized half-castes, [11] but in this context I think of the condition of two different progenitors, Joyce and himself: what is more, he charges Stephen: "Keep our flag flying!" (557). So when Simon makes the cry of the hound ("Burblblbrurbblbl!" [557]) after sighting the heraldic device of James Joyce, he is commencing the foxhunt in which the "quarry" can be semiotically equated with "Joyce" himself. [12]

We do not see what becomes of the stout fox seeking badger earth, for the horse race obscures the fox wholly from the text, and thus the presence of the author escapes after having made its incommoding appearance. He is hiding perhaps with Scylla in her cavern (if it were not that "Joyce" is a fox and Scylla is a mass of yelping hounds below her waist, but once "Joyce" leaves the page, what business is it of mine?). Stephen, after being implicated in the paralyzing of Shakespeare, after seizing the artist's prerogative only to become an ornament, ends overwhelmed, frustrated, and as doomed as autobiographical readings of the novel: he is "autobiographical" no more.

NOTES

(1.) See for example Joyce's 3 June 1904 letter to Oliver St. John Gogarty (Selected Letters 20-21), his 23 June 1904 letter to C. P. Curran (21-22), and his letter of early July to C. P. Curran (22). Joyce also ascribed the Irish Homestead's publication of "The Sisters" to Stephen Daedalus, as if using a nom de plume (24). (According to Ellmann, when George Russel requested Joyce to write a popular piece for the Irish Homestead, which would be "The Sisters," he said: "You can sign it any name you like as a pseudonym [James Joyce 163]).

(2.) In The Western Canon, Bloom is engaged in cultural criticism, not literary interpretation, but the compulsion for biographical authentification remains as insistent as in early Joyce scholarship. When Bloom brings texts to bear on his criticism, which is arguably more about authors than their texts, he seems to use them in a misleading, irrelevant, and untextual fashion. For instance, he writes: "While Stephen says that he does not believe his own theory about Shakespeare and Hamlet, Richard Ellmann tells us that, according to friends, Joyce took it very seriously and never recanted it" (414). Here Bloom's summation of Stephen's attitude suggests that Stephen does not believe his theory, even though the text indicates that Stephen feels ambivalent instead. This is made evident in an interior monologue: "I believe, 0 Lord, help my unbelief" (Ulysses 211). Also, in his paraphrasing of Ellmann, Bloom amplifies Joyce's attitude toward the theory: in the biography, Ellmann wrote that Joyce took the theory "m ore seriously than Stephen" (364), whereas Bloom indicates that "Joyce took it very seriously and never recanted it" (414). Bloom reveals his bias toward biographical verification most clearly when he writes that Budgen's James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses is "still the best guide to the book because it has so much of the personal Joyce in it" (415). Bloom seems so intent on unveiling the personal Joyce that, using the text of Ulysses, he even assumes an absolute reciprocity between Stephen and Joyce ("Joyce's theory of Hamlet is expounded by Stephen" [415]; "Stephen's emphasis, certainly as Joyce's mouthpiece here..." [421]), which makes the texts, rather like the canon according to Bloom's thesis (39), irrelevant except as a mnemonic principle for remembering the soap-operatic myths of constructing the canon.

(3.) See page 71. Later in The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth explores the difficulties of the implied author in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (323-36). At times he scans the commentary of Stephen Hero for what he calls "clarifications" as regards the judgments of the implied author (335). Nevertheless, his treatment of A Portrait is interesting in the way it shows how, by the ritual effacement of the implied author--who must have been off paring his fingernails, in Stephen's words--the novel does not really allow for the dynamic reading in which the narrator's and the implied author's judgments, as well as the judgments of the characters in the story, form a stratosphere of perspectives. In short, the presence of the implied author of A Portrait is dominated by the perspective of its central character, Stephen Dedalus. I will return to this crucial point later. For an interesting array of "authors" (that is, narrators who explicitly see themselves as the writers of their pieces and feel the perhaps in evitable discrepancy between the private identity they feel by writing and their implied, publicly constructed identity) addressing their "implied authors," see Halpern.

(4.) Besides Wilhelm, Stephen has a literary precedent for this behavior in Virginia Woolf's Rachel Vinrace, who in The Voyage Out obsessively acts out Ibsen and Meredith: "Helen [Rachel's guardian] was aware that it was not all acting, and that some sort of change was taking place in the human being" (137).

(5.) Stephen emphatically prefers to deny the discontinuity between his current identity and his identity in A Portrait. In an instance of pristine irony, Stephen, for his presentation, employs an anatomic item to argue his own continuity--an item that Hamlet uses as a metaphor for how some men will be inexorably corrupted by something in their nature (1.4.23-36)--the mole. Stephen argues, "And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving so comes forth" (192). The irony is that despite his mole of continuity, Stephen has nevertheless been corrupted. According to the OED, the adjective corrupt, when applied to a language or a text--an apt signification here--means "altered from the original or correct condition by ignorance, carelessness, additions." The narrator encourages Stephen's ignorance about his identity, carelessly encroaches upon Stephen's interior monologues, and adds Leopold Bloom to the portrait of Stephen that he composes in the novel. Stephen's identity, then, has, in Hamlet's words, "in the general censure taken corruption" (1.4.35).

(6.) The metafictional endeavors of characters making claims for their sovereignty of course recall Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). The theater manager of this play pedantically explains the significance of the action of another Pirandello play to one of his actors: "It's a mixing up of the parts, according to which you who act your own part become the puppet of yourself" (5). Like the six characters, Stephen tries to act his own part, to hoodwink the text into giving him his own sovereignty.

(7.) This Stephen/Bloom to Hamlet/ghost analogy becomes hysterically funny in the action of the novel. At the beginning of Stephen's lecture, when AE objects to the autobiographical argument, the narrator reports in Stephen's mind the phrase Hamlet makes to the phantasmic voice of the ghost who commands Horatio and the watch to swear to obey Hamlet's wishes: "Art thou there, truepenny?" (187). Stephen fantasizes about having a supernatural influence helping him persuade his audience. Much funnier than this, though, if we look back in time, is that Bloom becomes the much-displaced ghost corresponding to Stephen's iffy Hamlet. In the previous chapter, Bloom (a tad inaccurately) thinks over act 1, scene 5 of Hamlet, unlikely though that seems: "Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit / Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth" (150). Appropriately, Bloom speaks in his interior monologue as the ghost of the king. The narrator turns the metafictional screw on this portion of the action, for the applewoman in Bloom's vicinity almost responds as a Hamlet to the ghost's influence: "Two apples for a penny! Two for a penny!" (150).

(8.) For the delightful story of Sylvia Beach's endeavors in publishing Ulysses, see Fitch.

(9.) Stephen pursues such private, unsolvable riddles as a matter of habit, as we see in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode:

Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when he lived among women. (191)

Stephen's autobiographical theory about Shakespeare too considers things that were not (the firedrake) and unsoundly assumes as true the possibility of the possible as possible (the adultery of Anne with Shakespeare's brothers). The basis of these riddles is the very privacy of their nature. If Stephen could successfully answer riddles like the one he constructed for his pupils, then he would know what Shakespeare knew, know what Homer knew, and by answering the cryptographic riddle he poses in "Scylla and Charybdis," know what Joyce knew. In Ulysses, Stephen seems to be in the predicament the readers of A Portrait were in according to Booth: "Whatever intelligence Joyce postulates in his reader--let us assume the unlikely case of its being comparable to his own--will not be sufficient for precise inference of a pattern ofjudgments which is, after all, private to Joyce" (335). In Ulysses, Stephen tries to crack the code of Joyce's privacy, for in the cracking of that code lies his sovereignty as an autobiogra phical personage.

(10.) For reasons made clear throughout my argument, I have avoided commenting on the issue of paternity in Ulysses, a perennial Joyceologist's theme and one which, in only a small but important way, seems relevant at this late point to Stephen's metafictional identity crisis. Gilbert devoted a subchapter of his study (57-64) to the issue of paternity, and Edward Duncan, responding in part to Gilbert, offers first an incompletely Freudian, then an ultimately theological response to answer the question he initially asks of the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter: "Why was Stephen Dedalus not satisfied with ordinary fatherhood, the relationship with Simon, his consubstantial father; and what was the particular relation for which he quested?" (126). Regarding the paternity motif a red herring, I tend to value Duncan's question more than his answer, for the relation that Stephen quests for seems the simply contiguous relation with the author who is writing him. If he once was the author of himself, then to suffer a f ictional father in the text becomes a psychological pain to him. Much more interesting to me are Sheldon Brivic's psychoanalytical observations regarding the paternity issue, especially when he points out that "[w]henever Stephen establishes himself in a comfortable matrix in pursuit of some goal, . . . . a paternal threat will arise that will make this mode of life intolerable" (77). Exactly this scenario, according to my view, unfolds in the "Circe" chapter, as Simon Dedalus, the most paternal of paternal threats, thwarts Stephen's pursuit of James Joyce, who is symbolically equated with the fox chased by hounds. For a useful study of how Ulysses employs paternal parallels with The Divine Comedy, see Mary Reynolds 33-78. For a Lacanian reading of paternal motifs, which does not impinge on my study here, see Rabate.

(11.) Of course, caste is related to race, which becomes a pun when the foxhunt becomes a horse race. The cinematically minded might be amused by the recasting, accidentally perhaps, of this scene in Mary Poppins, in which the merry-go-round horses first join a foxhunt and then stumble into a horse race. As Mary Poppins, Bert, and the children go from the foxhunt to the horse race, Bert rescues the fox, who just happens to speak with a definite brogue.

(12.) In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann records a conversation in Joyce's life in which Joyce identifies himself as similar to a hunted deer (438). Ellmann argues that this notion of Joyce's gets translated as Bloom's being chased by the citizen's dog at the end of the "Cyclops" chapter, whereas I would argue that it gets more clearly translated as Joyce's being identified as the fox/quarry in the hunt of the "Circe" chapter.

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