Passage: chapter 9, lines 828-845

-A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death. If you hold that he, a graying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel messo de cammin di nostra vita, with fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. 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. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and last man who felt himself with child. 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?

This half page is from chapter 9. The setting is the library, and the speaker, Stephen, is in the middle of an argument about Shakespeare's relationship to his creations, Hamlet and the ghost of Hamlet's father. In other words, he is asking if Shakespeare identifies more with the prince or the ghost. His ultimate argument will be that Shakespeare becomes both father and son, ghost and prince, and all instances of similar relationships simultaneously. At this point in his argument, Stephen compares implicitly the relationship between author and character and that between father and son. He even expands this relationship to claim that the "fiction" of this relationship is the foundation of Western Christian thought. At the same time, he maps his alienation from his own father on to his argument. He also highlights his position as a character in a novel by discussing authorship as if he were an author, identifying himself with Shakespeare while actually being Hamlet. Thus, Stephen is speaking on both the grandest and the most personal levels of discourse simultaneously, and in the impossible position of both creator and created, only begetter and only begotten. Arguably this is how his argument parallels that of Odysseus traveling between the mountain of Scylla and the whirlpool of Charybdis. This is suggested in this passage at the very beginning, when the narrator characterizes Stephen as "battling against hopelessness" as he speaks. He is in a hopeless situation much like Odysseus, and yet he must continue through the end because there is no other alternative.

His first statement in the passage is that "a father is a necessary evil." Here he is speaking in a kind of legal-ese, bringing his very real sense of distance from his father to an abstract level, posing it as a thesis statement. The idea of the necessary evil arises from theological arguments, in which Stephen the Jesuit is well versed. The theological frame of reference will become important later in the passage. For now, Stephen shifts entirely to a discussion of biographical facts about William Shakespeare, which will serve as evidence for this statement. "He" is, obviously, Shakespeare, "the play" is Hamlet, and Stephen is alluding to the biographical evidence that the playwright's father died shortly before Hamlet was written. This fact was often cited by critics eager to prove that Shakespeare mapped himself on to Hamlet. Stephen uses other biographical data to refute this, pointing out that at this time Shakespeare was thirty five with two teenaged daughters, living in much different circumstances than Hamlet. This is an interesting argument for him to make considering that Hamlet is thirty years old in the play, only five years younger, and makes sense only in the context of the late nineteenth-century interpretation of Hamlet as a kind of pasty-faced adolescent, or "the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg." That Stephen mentions the prince of Denmark's status as a student emphasizes a connection between them suggested already in the first chapter, in which Stephen's tower is compared to Elsinore and his "inky cloak" is commented upon. Thus his argument alienating Shakespeare from Hamlet also alienates Shakespeare from himself, interestingly, even though he identifies elsewhere with the poet or artist who is the creator or ghostly father of himself.

Another crucial line in this portion of the text is the line in Italian, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, the first line of Dante's Divine Comedy. With this line the Italian poet situates himself in the middle of his life, in an allegorical forest of life's troubles, where he will meet Virgil, a poet who had a canonical position relative to Dante similar to that of Shakespeare to Joyce or Stephen, and then take a tour of the afterlife. Dante is similarly confronted by two beasts and unable to pass between them, much like Odysseus and therefore Stephen. Thus, Shakespeare is like Dante who is like Odysseus who is like Stephen. As Stephen is like Hamlet, it seems strange that this quote, alluding as it does to a troubled individual who meets a ghost that attempts to give them direction, is intended to suggest that Shakespeare is unlike Hamlet. Here Stephen's tapestry of allusion threatens to come apart. He is saved by the fact of composition. While Dante the character is in some sense the spiritual son of Virgil, Dante the poet is "father" to them both, just as Joyce is the "father" of both his fictional self-caricature Stephen and in Stephen's "father" Bloom. The "like" relationship is one between both fathers and fathers and between fathers and sons. In fact, the difference between fathers and sons is entirely relative, as any son can be a father. This allusion therefore ties Shakespeare's poetic project to Dante's, a useful connection for Stephen's later argument that Hamlet and its father-son dilemma exhibits a set of concerns that are originally Italian and Catholic.

The crucial part of Stephen's reductio ad absurdum is the idea that Shakespeare's seventy year old mother would be the "lustful" Queen Gertrude. Earlier he suggests that the model for this might actually be Anne Hathaway, herself an older widow at the time of her marriage to Shakespeare. Following this train of allusion leads one to at least the idea, if not the conclusion, that Shakespeare must therefore be Claudius the usurper, were it not for the fact that Anne was the seducer; after a fashion, she is both Claudius and Gertrude. In terms of Ulysses, if the project of the novel is in fact the creation of a father-son relationship between Bloom and Stephen, then the lustful queen is none other than Molly. Hamlet's intense relationship with his mother might be at the root of the strange Oedipal suggestion in Eumaeus, when Bloom shows Stephen a picture of his wife. Thus, in addition to being the faithful wife, Molly is also the weak-willed wife, the wife of the poet, and the mother as wife. If the Dante allusion is traced further, she could also be seen as Beatrice, Dante's idealized love, who guides him through heaven and the last third of the Divine Comedy. By comparing Molly implicitly to both Beatrice and Gertrude, Joyce characterizes her as not only a paradox of madonna and whore, but also as an subject of art, both perplexing and interesting to the artist.

In the sentence "the corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night," Stephen alludes to the most famous line of the father's ghost, that he is doomed to "walk the night." Interestingly, he says the "corpse" of Shakespeare's father, while in the play it is only his "spirit." Stephen's next sentence continues this imagery of corporeality; it "rots and rots," emphasizing decomposition and disgust. This refers to or at least parallels Stephen's visions of his mother's rotting body, both earlier in the day and in her actual physical appearance in Circe. In its physical existence, the image divorces the man who was a father from the idea that is fatherhood, and suggests that the cause of that divorce is death. Shakespeare, Stephen and Joyce are not concerned with things that have become dead; is the "mystical estate" of fatherhood that is the playwright's burden and problem, the "spirit" not of his own father but of fathers in general.

The next allusion, to the Decameron, is interesting on two levels. Firstly, it is another reference to the Italian language and poetic tradition that ties it in with the English, and not only in terms of the larger discussion of Shakespeare. The Decameron was the poem that inspired the structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, another poem that is about as canonical as English literature can get. Placing the structure of an older poem in a new context suggests not only Dante's use of Virgil as a poetic guide and Shakespeare's adaptation of an earlier play in Hamlet, but also the basic concept of Ulysses itself. Elliptically, this reference to English appropriation of Italian themes, the second in this passage, could be said to refer to the relationship between Anglicanism and Catholicism, an appropriation and adaptation. Although, given that Joyce said he preferred Catholicism to Protestantism because its logical absurdity was at least internally consistent, it is doubtful that he would be comfortable comparing his novel to the theology of Henry VIII. Still, the theme of English taking from the Italian, or one of Stephen's masters borrowing from another, even being the father of another, is exemplified in this very passage and its allusions, and is an important one for him in establishing the importance of the father-son myth in both Hamlet and in his own life.

The second important point about the Decameron allusion is its content, the man who felt himself with child. Of course, in Circe, Bloom will become the second and last man to experience this sensation. This statement brings in the problems of androgyny that riddle the text. It makes a reader at least ask whether or not Stephen's argumentation is too straightforward here, if he might not be perhaps leaving something out in his discussion of fatherhood. Doubtless this is the case; as Stephen said earlier in talking about Shakespeare's relationship to Hamlet, particularly the passage about art holding the mirror up to nature, the character's ideas of art are not necessarily those of the artist. It is interesting that Stephen should say this, as his comments on aesthetics in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are often attributed to Joyce. The implication is that Joyce's relationship to Stephen is the same as Shakespeare's relationship to Hamlet. When Stephen talks about the father and artist, he would like to be talking about himself, but actually he is talking about Joyce, from the perspective of one of his creations.

In the next passage, Stephen finally moves from the specific into the argument he began several sentences ago, that a father is a necessary evil. He calls it an apostolic succession, referring to the doctrine that priesthood was begun by Christ when he conferred on his apostles the ability to perform the sacraments, an ability that they pass on in turn through the sacrament of holy orders. Theoretically, any priest can trace the history of their ordination back through the ages to one of the apostles and to Jesus himself. Thus, to believe in a relationship between fathers and sons is only an article of faith, not something rooted in physical reality. The phrase "only begetter to only begotten" is a combination of Shakespeare's dedication of his sonnets to their "only begetter," and the Nicene creed, which refers to Jesus as God's "only begotten" son. Thus to the father Shakespeare/Joyce/Bloom/Dante-the-poet/Boccaccio/Virgil is added God the father, and to the son Hamlet/Stephen/Dante-the-character/Chaucer is added Jesus, and both roles can be applied to the same individual. This relationship, God to Jesus, is the one on which Stephen bases his idea of the other relationships. God the Father created the character Jesus to be his voice in his narrative artwork the world. Jesus the character was God the father completely, but he was also completely a character in his own right who could have his own "sons," begin his own "apostolic succession."

Stephen rejects this narrative of narrative as somehow untrue, and attributes it to the "cunning Italian intellect," again recalling the quotes from Dante and Boccaccio already mentioned. Recognizing its artificiality, however, does not free him from it. It is "founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void." Here he alludes both to contemporary physics with its discovery of the space between particles and classical Genesis theology, in which God creates the world out of the void. The lack of anything underneath to explain it gives the narrative and the universe a kind of stability, in that it precludes the possibility of denial or affirmation. That he then turns to the love of mothers and women once again recalls the strange position of Molly as Beatrice or Anne Hathaway, the raw material for artistic creation, "subjective and objective genitive." Women, it seems, are that void upon which the myth of paternity is founded. They are the stuff that the dream of the structured universe is made of, the "only true thing in life."

Thus the passage creates a portrait of Stephen, "battling against hopelessness," with a mother who is a generative void and a father who is a fiction imposed on that void. Of course, behind all of this theorizing we have the fact that his father does not know him, nor he his father; the question "who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son" is actually a question about a specific father, his, and a specific son, himself. That Stephen is a fictional character who himself points out that fictional characters do not speak for their authors, and who later confesses that he himself does not believe in the argument he has set forth, makes this argument problematic as an explanation of the text. It fails to take into account Bloom, a man who feels himself with child, and Molly, who, while generative, is far from being anything as passive as a void. Rather, this argument is a kind of half-truth generated out of Stephen's life, as fictive as anything devised by Italian intellects, and exists more to be disproved by the novel than upheld.