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

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.