8
Loving the Alien
Egoism, Empathy, Alterity, and Shakespeare Bloom in Stephen’s Aesthetics
SAM SLOTE
Frank Budgen recounts that shortly after “Lestrygonians” had been published in The Little Review, Joyce received a letter from a reader who was tiring of Bloom. “The writer of [the letter] wants more Stephen. But Stephen no longer interests me to the same extent” (Budgen 1972, 105). Budgen uses this exchange as a pretext to elaborate the salient features of Bloom and, coming after an account of five Bloom-centric episodes, his encomium is certainly not surprising.11 However, it also directly precedes Budgen’s summary of “Scylla and Charybdis,” the last Stephen-centric episode and an episode in which Bloom barely appears, and only at the very end.22 I, for my part, find this placement of Joyce’s curt dismissal of Stephen in favor of Bloom in Budgen’s book to be telling, since I would argue that Bloom is indeed a central character in “Scylla,” and that this episode offers, at least in part, a theory of Bloom couched within Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare.
Stephen begins his theory with the assertion that Shakespeare, whose son Hamnet died in childhood, was cuckolded by his wife. So, right off there is a correlation between Stephen’s Shakespeare and Bloom. This particular conjunction intersects with a variety of correspondences throughout the book in a complex fashion as I have argued elsewhere.33 Now, according to Stephen, Shakespeare modelled the character of King Hamlet after himself so that he might play that rôle on stage in order to enact a symbolic revenge against his unfaithful wife. By addressing Hamlet through the proxy of the dead king’s ghost, Shakespeare addresses his dead son Hamnet: “you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway” (U 181).
There are several dissents to Stephen’s theory. Initially, Eglinton protests at the biographical reading Stephen proposes: “She died, for literature at least, before she was born” (U 182). Eglinton thus subscribes to an aesthetic idealism where art is divorced from the material circumstances of its creation. Stephen retorts that “She died . . . sixtyseven years after she was born. She saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed when he lay on his deathbed” (U 182). Stephen thus counters Eglinton by apparently reinserting Hathaway back into the dialogue. For Stephen, art is not an abstracted idealism, but rather is inseparable from its material circumstances. Indeed, his refutation is not merely a simple, thetic counterstatement, but rather proceeds through concrete and specific details, such as the pennies placed on Shakespeare’s eyelids on his deathbed. Stephen’s retort is thus conveyed through the style of his formulation as much as through its substance. As with the elaboration of his Shakespeare theory, where he depicts the specific scene of Shakespeare onstage playing King Hamlet opposite Burbage’s prince, the accumulation of “Local colour” (U 180) is fundamental to Stephen’s (and Joyce’s) style.
Furthermore, by invoking the material circumstances of Anne Hathaway’s life and death, Stephen reminds himself of the scene of his own “Mother’s deathbed” (U 182). Indeed, the image of Anne Hathaway placing pennies on her husband’s corpse derives from Stephen’s mother’s funeral, as he recalls that her corpse was “bronzelidded” (U 182). The specific material circumstances of Stephen’s life, his agenbite of inwit, thus inform his theory of Shakespeare as is presented in the library.
Eglinton, in any case, tries to refute the import of Anne Hathaway by claiming that Shakespeare’s marriage was a mistake (U 182), an accident of life that has no bearing on art. This leads Stephen to make his famous claim that for a man of genius “errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery” (U 182). There are a number of resonances of this line, but for the moment suffice it to say that Anne Hathaway is important to Stephen’s theory primarily insofar as he can claim her as an adulteress. In effect, she is little more than the punchline to Stephen’s unoriginal joke “If others have their will Ann hath a way” (U 183).44 As Mr Best says of this exchange between Stephen and Eglinton, “Yes, we seem to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her” (U 183). Anne Hathaway seems to betoken a bit of a blind spot in Stephen’s theory; something I’ll get back to later.
The next dissent that Stephen faces in articulating his theory is the widely held view that Shakespeare modelled Prince Hamlet after himself and thus the king would be a figuration of his own father, John Shakespeare.55 So, in identifying the ghost as Shakespeare, Stephen is blithely flying past the net of most Shakespearean scholarship:
The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that mystical estate upon his son. . . . Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son? (U 198–99)
Stephen has veered away quite a bit from Shakespeare in this privileging of paternity over maternity. While motherhood may be certain, just as motherly love is, as Cranly had told Stephen in A Portrait (P 241–42), the provenance of fatherhood is uncertain. However, it is precisely because of this uncertainty that fatherhood is important for Stephen. The paternal bond is metaphysical, not physical or biological. Stephen clarifies what he means by this mystical estate: “When Rutland bacons out Hampton shakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection” (U 199).
Stephen defines patrimony as the essential condition for the artist and in so doing has introduced a significant modification to his biographical reading of Hamlet: Shakespeare is not just Hamlet’s father, he is the father of all; he is even more pan-paternal than Theodore Purefoy, that most “remarkablest progenitor” (U 402). In a sense, it doesn’t matter who exactly wrote Shakespeare’s plays, merely that they were written by some prolific individual. Indeed, on the one hand Eglinton remarks that “of all great men, [Shakespeare] is the most engigmatic” (U 186), while, on the other, Best replies that “Hamlet is so personal” (U 186). As William Schutte points out, both comments are valid: the plays are personal without divulging the character of their creator (Schutte 1957, 88).
This patrilineal mode of artistic creation follows from Stephen’s aesthetic theory in A Portrait, where he defined the artist as being independently self-creating. Of course, in A Portrait Stephen chose his namesake Daedalus, the “Old father, old artificer” (P 253), as his artistic exemplar. In chapter 5, he explicitly defines a work of art as one that is mystically infused with the personality of is creator:
The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. . . . The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of the aesthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (P 215)
As with the enigmatic Shakespeare, the artwork is intimately personal even as the artist remains mysterious. The other key component to Stephen’s aesthetic is the realization of claritas in the artist’s work. Stephen describes this as the “whatness,” or quidditas, of the thing being represented in the only possible synthesis occasioned by the realization of its integritas and consonantia: “This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal” (P 213).66 According to Stephen’s theory, the moment of aesthesis, claritas, is accomplished only through the initiative of the artist’s personality, which withdraws from the artwork and, in so doing, permeates it entirely. The artist’s imagination is thus fulfilled in the act of representing the world in full phenomenological precision. Mimetic fidelity is artistic fulfilment both in the sense of the fulfilment of the artwork and the fulfilment of the artist.
This theory is perfectly commensurable with Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in A Portrait, which is not to say that Stephen could necessarily write that novel; he is, after all, still a young man and not yet the artist. But his aesthetic theory anticipates the style of the narrative in which he is presented as a character, a style inflected by his character. So, in a sense, Stephen’s aesthetic theory in A Portrait is a theory of the style of that novel. And, this theory is highly egocentric: the artist is the essential and focal prism between life and art. And, in being as such, he creates not just the work of art but also creates himself as an independent, self-standing, self-sufficient artist. The consequence for this is that all art is necessarily autobiographical in a rather tautological manner: the artist creates the artwork that is infused with him, and this in turn is what creates the artist as artist. The artist is father to both the work of art and to himself, or, as Mulligan mockingly puts it in “Scylla”: “Himself his own father” (U 200).
This theory clearly follows from Joyce’s 1904 essay “A Portrait of the Artist”: “Our world, again, recognizes its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalized lumps of matter that which is the individuating rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion” (P 258). And, in Finnegans Wake, Joyce satirizes this notion of the self-involved and self-creating artist with the image of Shem writing about himself on his body with an ink made from his excrement (FW 185.14–26).
In his important essay “Against Ulysses,” Leo Bersani precisely identifies this comportment of the Joycean aesthetic: “Joyce miraculously reconciles uncompromising mimesis with a solipsistic structure” (Bersani 2004, 219). This perhaps aptly describes what we find in A Portrait, but while it may well be apposite to Ulysses, it misses some nuance, as I will argue shortly. And while Bersani’s critique of Ulysses is quite negative, it is actually quite consonant with Hélène Cixous’s more positive reading in The Exile of James Joyce, where she posits Joyce as a self-creating artist who substitutes himself for God, the ultimate father, as the creative agency.77 The artist is thus an artist by being an egoist. Jean-Michel Rabaté expands upon this point in his book James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, where he argues that Joycean egoism does not retreat into solipsism because it blends with language, in such a way as to make Joyce “the Lacanian symptom of literature” (Rabaté 2001, 23; cf. 67–69).
Returning to “Scylla,” Stephen’s argument, which started by positing Shakespeare as playing the rôle of King Hamlet, has now morphed into a theory of Shakespeare as the preeminent figure of a godlike artist, Coleridge’s polytropic “myriadminded man” (U 197)88 who encompasses all creation and, in so doing, creates himself. This would mean that Stephen’s initial premise is faulty since Shakespeare, in his divine plenitude, could not be reduced to any one of his characters. As Eglinton observes: “The truth is midway. . . . He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all” (U 204). Stephen relents at this and agrees: “He is. . . . The boy of act one is the mature man of act five” (U 204).
Shakespeare reflects and is inflected by everybody, everybody seeing their reflection in Shakespeare.99 This pan-dimensionality of Shakespeare is hardly a point original to Joyce. As Borges has it in a footnote in his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “All men who speak a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare” (Borges 1998, 76n4). Coleridge’s myriadminded man infects the minds of myriad men.1010 Shakespeare is analogous to (the Christian) God not simply because of the sheer range of his creative output, but rather because he infuses himself throughout his creations. Shakespeare, like God, in-gathers and subsumes multiplicities, his multiplicities. As Eglinton observes, “When all is said Dumas fils (or is it Dumas père) is right. After God Shakespeare has created most” (U 204). The comment was properly made by Dumas père, Alexandre (Schutte 1957, 150n9). And the irony of Eglinton’s confusion is that, in a sense, it confirms Stephen’s construction of artistic patrimony in that father and son become indistinct (or, at the very least, their witty aperçus become indistinct and unattributable) in the “apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten” (U 199).1111
After Eglinton’s comment that Shakespeare is “all in all,” Stephen proposes a new scene for Hamlet in which Shakespeare again plays, but unlike the earlier scene where Stephen cast Shakespeare as King Hamlet, here Shakespeare plays all characters. This new scene works as the revision to Stephen’s Shakespeare theory as well as to his aesthetic theory from A Portrait. Furthermore, the scene is painted through a variety of lines and images concatenated from Shakespeare’s works and days:
Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas goes forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics calls dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself. (U 204–5)
The paraphrase from Maurice Maeterlinck’s La Sagesse et la destinée1212 is apt because, in a review of his first play, Octave Mirabeau called him, “le Shakespeare belge,” a line that Joyce alluded to in a 1907 letter to Stanislaus (LII, 212). Shakespeare’s progeny are legion. Indeed, this passage concerns the multiplicities engendered in and by Shakespeare. If Shakespeare is all his characters, “all in all” as Eglinton said, then this omnipresence is itself present in everyone, “all in all in all of us,” as Stephen says. This marks the important modification Stephen makes to his aesthetics of egoism. The artist, whether Shakespeare or Maeterlinck or Stephen or Joyce or God, is not the only focal point; egoism is multipolar. Any man can be an everyman, just as any day can be a Bloomsday, or as Stephen puts it, “Every life is many days, day after day” (U 204). And, as Molly explains why she chose Bloom, “as well him as another” (U 732). The artist is important precisely in that he is multiple, and this multiplicity is reciprocal and communal: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” (U 204). In effect, Stephen here proposes an egotistical empathy, the artist-as-everyman, and, conversely, everyman-an-artist, or, at least, a potential artist.
Indeed, this sense of possibility actualized is what makes the artist an artist: “He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible” (U 204). The artist sees his imagination (his world within) confirmed in the world outside. Stephen’s formulation here is, in effect, an Aristotelian rendition of Mallarmé’s line about Hamlet: “il se promène . . ., lisant au livre de lui-même” (Mallarmé 2003, 275).1313 The artist sees himself confirmed by seeing the world, but conversely, this confirmation can only occur by the artist’s ability to be receptive to that world. In other words, the artist who is confirmed as an artist is an artist with an ability to empathize with that world. The artist that Stephen proposes here is the egoist open to alterity, which is thus unlike the more closed-off and withdrawn artist proposed in A Portrait.1414 In this way, Stephen’s Shakespeare theory represents a further step in his maturation as an artist.
In this way, Stephen here proposes a theory of Bloom as well as a theory of Shakespeare. After all, as we learn in “Ithaca,” one of Bloom’s many possible careers is an “exponent of Shakespeare” (U 642). While Bloom may not have actualized this particular Shakespearean possibility, it is actualized in the text. As Stephen says in “Circe”: “What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self” (U 475). Just as Joyce and Budgen had extolled Bloom’s Bloomish virtues, so too does Stephen in “Scylla,” even though he barely knows Bloom at this point.
The possibility of empathy as indicated in Stephen’s comment also impacts how Joyce reworks free indirect discourse in Ulysses. If in A Portrait Stephen’s theory of aesthetics reflects Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in that novel, then an analogous thing happens in “Scylla.” Simply put, Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in Ulysses is multipolar, which is to say that it is not strictly delimited by the consciousness of any one individual. To take “Scylla” as an example, both Stephen’s various discourses as well as the narrative style of the episode-as-a-whole take on a Shakespearean cant and hue (just as the style of “Lestrygonians” is literally peppered with culinary and gastronomic terms and allusions). In A Portrait the narrative style betrayed a tendency to the centripetal, whereas in Ulysses the style is both centripetal and centrifugal.
After Stephen has finished his peroration, he admits that he does not believe in his own theory (U 205). At this, Eglinton cannot resist interjecting a variety of other au currant theories about Shakespeare and Hamlet and sarcastically notes that, at the very least, the proponents of these theories did believe in them (U 205). Stephen then thinks: “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” (U 205).
Stephen does not necessarily not believe in his proposed theory, and there’s the rub. On the side of belief lie the egomen, or rather, the Greek word “egomen,” “I, for my part” or “I myself” (which is roughly equivalent to mé fhéin, the singular of Sinn Féin). And, on the side of unbelief there’s everybody else, the “other chap” of alterity. Not believing thus marks the retreat of the ego and the approach of alterity, and Stephen does not know yet where to go.
This shows the flaw in Stephen’s theory, which is why it would be more of a prolegomenon to Bloom than a theory of Bloom as such. Stephen concludes the proposition that the artist is “all in all in all of us” with the postulation that he would be “an androgynous alien, being a wife unto himself” (U 205). To this, Mulligan sarcastically cries “Eureka!” (U 205). This then leads him to his crude satire of Stephen’s proposition “Everyman His Own Wife / or / A Honeymoon in the Hand” (U 208). The crass, masturbatory joke is actually quite apposite to Stephen’s logic. Since his formulation of egotistical empathy is still somewhat solipsistic in that it omits the care, that is to say, the love of alterity. Stephen’s theory of egotistical empathy omits love. Concomitant with the omission of love is the omission of the maternal from this theory of artistic patrimony.
As with the earlier discussion of Anne Hathaway, the omission of the maternal is a blind spot or error, which is to say that it might also be some kind of potential portal of discovery. Obviously, Stephen’s omission of maternity from his theory would be informed by his agenbite of inwit over not having prayed at his mother’s deathbed. Now, his agenbite of inwit can be characterized as a result of the conflict between aesthetic self-determination and independence on the one hand and filial duty to the surety of maternal love on the other.1515 In this way, Stephen’s agenbite could be characterized as a symptom of the impossibility of absolute self-determination, which is to say a symptom of the impossibility of a pure, self-sufficient egoism. Stephen thus has one more net to fly by, the net of his own egoistic artistic self-determination.
Even if Stephen has not yet escaped this net, by admitting empathy into the artist’s egoism, with the “all in all in all of us,” he does point toward a way out. By omitting love as the condition of empathy, he does not get there yet, and this inability highlights the centrality of Bloom, the “Everyman or Noman” (U 679) in all of us.
1. “Bloom should grow upon the reader throughout the day. His reactions to things displayed in his unspoken thoughts should not be brilliant, but singular, organic, Bloomesque” (Budgen 1972, 105).
2. Budgen notes that he asked Joyce about Bloom’s virtual absence in this episode; Joyce replied: “Bloom is like a battery that is being recharged. . . . He will act with all the more vigor when he does reappear” (Budgen 1972, 118).
3. See Slote 2008.
4. Shakespeare puns on the varying resonances to his name “Will” in Sonnets 135 and 143. The pun on the name Anne Hathaway goes back at least to 1792 and Charles Dibdin’s “A Love Dittie” in his novel Hannah Hewit; or, the Female Crusoe: “Angels must love Ann Hathaway; / She hath a way so to control, / To rapture the unprisoned soul, / And sweetest heaven on earth display, / That to be heaven Ann hath a way; / She hath a way, / Ann Hathaway—To be heaven’s self Ann hath a way” (quoted in Schutte 1957, 62n5).
5. Hamlet was officially registered on July 26, 1602, one year after Shakespeare’s father’s death (Brandes 1911, 341; cf. Schutte 1957, 161–62).
6. Stephen echoes Shelley’s line again in “Scylla” as the “intense instant of imagination” (U 186). In “A Defence of Poetry” Shelley writes: “[T]he mind in creation is a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure” (Shelley 1977, 503–4). Joyce also cited this image in his essay on Mangan (Joyce 2000, 133).
7. “Joyce is attempting to set up a vision of his own, ex-centric as far as the Creation is concerned, a world which can escape from the Absolute which rules the world God has created. Everything which usually constitutes or contributes to the traps and net in which God holds the world and the mind captive, subjected to his Presence and Omnipotence, is endangered by Joyce’s art” (Cixous 1972, 701).
8. In the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes that his own work could not surpass “the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare” (Coleridge 1985, 320).
9. This happens to both Stephen and Bloom in “Circe,” when they each see themselves in the face of a “beardless” Shakespeare in the mirror (U 528), the image of the face crowned by the antlers of a cuckold.
10. Nietzsche suggests this paradox in The Will to Power: “The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘man’ shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled” (Nietzsche 1968, §966).
11. Stuart Gilbert takes a different route in explicating Eglinton’s confusion by saying it “is a recall of Stephen and Sabellius’ hypothesis” (Gilbert 1955, 220n). In “Telemachus,” Stephen had thought about, among other heresiarchs of divine patrimony, “Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son” (U 21).
12. “If Judas go forth to-night, it is towards Judas his steps will tend, nor will chance for betrayal be lacking; but let Socrates open his door, he shall find Socrates asleep on the threshold before him, and there will be occasion for wisdom” (Maeterlinck 1912, 31).
13. Best cites this at U 9. The citation is from Mallarmé’s letter-essay “Hamlet et Fortinbras,” which is not, as Best characterizes it, a prose poem (U 179).
14. The crossover that Stephen posits between the actual and the possible derives from Aristotle’s Poetics, where that “Bald . . . millionaire” (U 37) writes: “the historian narrates events that have actually happened whereas the poet writes about things that might possibly occur. Poetry, therefore, is more philosophical and more significant than history, for poetry is more concerned with the universal, and history more with the individual” (Aristotle 1981, 1451b1 9–14). Stephen, on the other hand, posits an equivalence between the actual and the possible through the medium of the artist reading the book of himself in his environs. An implication of this formulation, which would be a hallmark of Joycean aesthetics, is that a precisely defined individual becomes universal. Bloom is an everyman not because he is perfectly, or even adequately, representative of all mankind, but because his specific quirks are precisely enumerated.
15. See P 241–42 and U 28.