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

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.