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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1999 by John King

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]