N.B. I’d planned to post this as a comment on a friend’s site, but apparently my comment is too long. So I’ll just blog it here, and post a link to this blog posting on his site. Check him out here. A most insightful new Joycean.
When Stephen Dedalus is thinking about Shakespeare, never forget that Stephen regards himself already as one literary genius regarding another literary genius. It’s easy to overlook that.
Don’t.
In the case of Scylla and Charybdis there’s another level of irony you didn’t mention, and in part this is probably because you’re still new to Ulysses and Joyce, but all of Joyce’s writing is supersaturated with events from his own life. That doesn’t mean exactly, or necessarily, that Joyce wrote autobiographical fiction, but it does blur the denotations and connotations most of us bear in mind when we use the word fiction. For Joyce the separation between his real life and his writing was not even paper-thin.
In Ulysses we have Stephen Dedalus, a surrogate genius-writer and stand-in for James Joyce. Who would argue with the equation that James Joyce ≈ Stephen Dedalus? Within the text of Joyce’s novel Ulysses, the frustrated writer Stephen, who can’t quite get it together literary-wise, it may be, on 16 June 1904, encounters the characters and events who will inspire his own magnum opus that he will soon write: a variant of the novel known as Ulysses.
That being the case, the question of the degree to which we must consider the autobiography of the author with respect to his work takes on a deeper meaning, since in the literary object called Ulysses (and Portrait before it), we are examining (among other things) the fictitious autobiography of this fictitious genius-writer Stephen Dedalus, and considering the effect it will have on the fictitious work he will produce. Can fictitious Stephen be separated from his fictitious fiction?
I doubt it.
I myself have tried to hold Joyce’s works at arm’s length from Joyce the man, but increasingly I find that difficult, and probably quite impossible, to do: understanding of Joyce’s text commonly requires understanding of triggering events from Joyce’s life. Joyce obviously knew this as he was writing: he knew we could not understand what we were reading without knowing his personal story, and he shared much of his personal story with certain biographers, formal and informal, in order to leave us the necessary signposts. Joyce deliberately made his personal life a central part of his fictional life, and vice versa. I’ve never heard of any other author doing the same. Hollyweird actors, perhaps.
I don’t think there is “a theory” of Shakespeare in Scylla and Charybdis, and so one who racks his brain trying to find one must finally be frustrated. The closest to something approximating a “theory” I’ve come is unrelated to Shakespeare: it’s Stephen struggling to work out psychological issues in his own autobiography, caught up so potently as he is in the recent death of his mother, and thereby closely linked to his relationship to his father, his Freudian hero-enemy. John Stanislaus Joyce, the model for Simon Dedalus, provided from his own life a vast wealth of story material for his illustrious son: they two were and remain inseparably linked. Joyce is interested in Shakespeare because Shakespeare is Joyce’s greatest literary rival: he wants to know Shakespeare so he can best him at his game. Stephen sees in Shakespeare ― or is it in Shakespeare’s works? or both? ― distorted manifestations of the same deep psychological concerns which beset his own family and his own life. And although in your reading, David, you’re still far from it, probably the second greatest theme of Ulysses is the question of paternity, of the relationship between father and offspring. These interior psychological matters are of far greater, immediate concern to Stephen than are their reflections he finds in Shakespeare’s life. Does Stephen believe his own theory? He denies that he does. Because the internal questions are far more important than his external projection of them.
I once wrote a book about science fiction novelist Frank Herbert in which I sought to place all his writings within the context of the times and places in which they were written, and what was going on in Frank Herbert’s own life during those times. Is it fair or appropriate to do that, delving into the personal experiences of someone who just happened to write a given book? As a writer myself, I know that all of my own experiences affect the fiction I write, directly or no. It is inescapable. What captures us as readers? If we like one novel, don’t we seek out other works by the same author? Then it’s not just the product itself; it can’t be. The question lingers: is it the writer or his works? Or as Mick Jagger would have it, is it the singer or the song?
Tagged: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Frank Herbert, Frank Herbert: The Works, James Joyce, John Stanislaus Joyce, Mick Jagger, Scylla and Charybdis, Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus, Ulysses, William Shakespeare
