A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man culminates in Stephen Dedalus’ ardent rejection of both his fatherland and his church (his history) in favor of a new vision of artistic creation that is unburdened by either of those influences. Throughout Ulysses, we see a different image of the aspiring artist: he hasn’t been successful in fulfilling his vision of art. On the contrary, he finds himself a servant to the ideas that he rejected in A Portrait. Over the course of the novel, Stephen asks a related question: does art serve history, or does history serve art? I.e, does historical actuality inform artistic possibility, as one might intuitively think, or does artistic possibility inform historical actuality? The latter seems like a paradox, but the former leads us to an apparent contradiction with Stephen’s former vision of art: how can art be unburdened by history if it is informed by history? Stephen struggles to navigate these aesthetic tensions, pondering them in the context of both his personal life and his prospective art, and finding in them, I argue, a synthesis of what artistic creation constitutes.
“Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.”1
Stephen reads into this mundane encounter a clash of opposing symbolic structures: the milkwoman as a symbol of Ireland, betrayed by those who should be loyal to her, and the same milkwoman as a symbol of Mentor, the wise Athena disguised in order to spur Telemachus (Stephen) on his journey to maturation, or in Stephen’s case, artistic self-realization. Thus, Stephen finds himself at a dialectical impasse. By virtue of the symbols he has read into this encounter, he has condemned his self-realization to being reliant on Ireland, the nation he has chosen to reject. We see here the oscillation between the artist’s subservience to history (to serve) and his simultaneous rebellion (to upbraid) against it. This is Stephen in microcosm: brought up mired in the Irish nationalism of his father and the devout Catholicism of his mother, he is trained to interpret his life through the very same structures he wants to escape, and so every attempt to escape only leads him further into them.
“–History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”2
In order to wake up, he turns to an artist who he believes achieved the freedom he aspires to: Shakespeare. Through analyzing Shakespeare’s art, and more specifically Hamlet, Stephen believes he can retrace the steps that Shakespeare took in order to synthesize this opposition between historical actuality and artistic possibility, between the artist’s reliance on his history and his aspiration for freedom from its shackles. As Stephen begins to build his theory of Hamlet, he proposes the aforementioned, seemingly paradoxical idea that artistic possibility informs historical actuality, drawing on the fact that Shakespeare played King Hamlet: “is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?”3 The basis on which his theory rests is the assumption that the art that an artist creates is of the same essence as, if not an exact reflection of, the artist. Otherwise, there would be no logical reason to believe that merely because Shakespeare decided to play King Hamlet that he was himself a reflection of King Hamlet. Throughout the book, Stephen is both identified with and personally identifies with Prince Hamlet repeatedly, and here it is no different, as the “dispossessed son” is the exact phrase used in the schema to describe the meaning of “Telemachus,” referring to Stephen. This is noteworthy because Stephen also identifies himself with Shakespeare a few lines earlier. “Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin.”4 In the same way that Shakespeare left his home in Stratford for London, so too did Stephen leave Dublin for Paris. This double-identification might seem contradictory, especially as we might be drawn to think that Shakespeare should be identified with Leopold Bloom, the father who lost his son and was made a cuckold, but I attempt to offer a resolution that synthesizes both sides of the argument.
“As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth.”5
Stephen claims that just as the form of the mole remains constant although the matter it is made out of has changed, so too does the form of the artist remain constant although his matter, in this case his image, has changed. In this way, he identifies the artist as a point-source from which different, infinitely many images of the artist, the characters he creates, radiate. We can see how this applies to Joyce himself in creating both Bloom and Stephen, as it emphasizes the aforementioned point that art is a reflection of some spiritual essence or form of the artist6, but Stephen’s point is also much more than that. The ghost of the unquiet father is that of the purely fictional King Hamlet, whereas the image of the unliving son is that of the historical Hamnet Shakespeare. This is not a contradiction as it may seem at first; in fact, Stephen here has almost finished answering the question we raised at the start of this paper. In the case of his vision of artistic creation, it is artistic possibility that serves historical actuality, and not the other way around. It is not only that Shakespeare is King Hamlet, but Hamnet Shakespeare is himself William Shakespeare. To clarify, we must delve into the methodology of how Hamlet was written: “There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself…But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come.”7 Stephen’s reasoning here is profoundly dogmatic. Instead of attributing the fact that King Hamlet knows he was poisoned to an error on Shakespeare’s part, he reasons that it must be Shakespeare himself endowing him with omniscient knowledge available only to the creator of the world of Hamlet, adding a new layer to Stephen’s theory of art. It is not only that the artist reflects his form, he does so insofar as he filters his past self through his present understanding of who he is and who he may come to be.
“In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.”8
Gifford notes that Shelley is referring to the process of creation here.9 Thus, Shakespeare in the process of the creation of Hamlet is not only able to do so in reflection of who he was in the past, but also who he is now, and who he may come to be. But from this same soul, the everchanging form of forms, springs also the image of the unliving son, the image of the son who died before Hamlet was written and thus was itself created by the artist before King Hamlet was. In other words, the artist, William Shakespeare, the Father, King Hamlet, must be consubstantial with the art, Hamnet Shakespeare, the Son, Hamlet. “He is a ghost… a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.”10
Stephen’s reading of Shakespeare is characteristically and admittedly dogmatic.11 He maps the same Catholic structures he uses to interpret his own life onto Shakespeare’s life, in much the same way that Aquinas synthesizes catholicism and Aristotelianism. In doing so, he finds a formula for secular salvation, for passing “on towards eternity in undiminished personality”12 even without God; instead, he relies on artistic discovery and the infinitude of the artist’s soul. With this theory of Shakespeare in hand, how do we reconcile the tension that Stephen feels between his subservience to history and his condemnation to his heritage with his aspirations to free himself from it? The answer, I believe, lies in Joyce. In the same way that Shakespeare “[went] back, weary of the creation he [had] piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore,”13 so too did Joyce need to go back to his past and history in Dublin and Catholicism. For Stephen and Joyce, artistic creation is much less a process of actual creation and much more a process of finding something in the past that had always been there and revealing it through a new perspective based on the present and what may come to be in the future, in the same way that Shakespeare “found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible.”14.
The events of June 16, 1904 did not transpire in the exact way that Ulysses portrayed them; regardless, they represent a universal truth found in a particular day, the universal truth of who James Joyce, and by extension Stephen Dedalus & Leopold Bloom, were, are, and may come to be. The culmination of Stephen’s theory first expounded in Portrait and later refined in Ulysses is that the artist must go back and find within himself, and that includes within his history, the artistic possibility that informs who he is.