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

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: