Fathers and Sons in Ulysses

Joyce’s Ulysses has a pendulum structure. JH Raleigh (in an essay in Joyce’s Ulysses, 102) points out the contrast of filius and mater as these are the poles around which the action is organized: “solitary and single vs conjoined, both licitly and illicitly; homeless rover vs statonary huswife (husey); at large vs at rest; drunk vs sober; abstract vs concrete; rationalistic vs intuitive; subjective vs objective; intellectualistic vs materialistic; solipsistic vs pantheistic; guilt-obsessed vs self-forgiven; skeptical vs credulous; idealistic vs naturalistic; infidel/heretic/agnostic/atheist (it is impossible to tell whether he disbelieves or disagrees or half-believes or totally rejects) vs believer; frustrated vs fulfilled (momentarily); sex-less vs sex-full.”

Stephen Dedalus dominates the front end as the son; Molly Bloom dominates the end as mother/wife. Leopold Bloom swings in the middle between them. He is the paternal between the mother and son. The structure of the book itself raises the question of paternity and maternity. Bloom comes to be in a father relationship with Stephen, Bloom is husband of Molly, but almost more like her child. She is an earth goddess, in her high place, sitting in her bed, Bloom her priest offering sacrificial meals morning and evening, doing her every whim, kissing her butt when he gets into bed at night.

Stephen is looking for a father, and Bloom has lost his son. That broken paternal-filial setting comes from the Homeric background, with Stephen playing the role of Telemachus mourning an absent father. Throughout this book, this is overlaid with constant references to Hamlet. Stephen is a brooding Hamlet at the beginning of the story. He has lost his mother rather than his father, and sees her ghost. Stephen’s family situation continues the story of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Stephen’s search for a father, the rupture and reconciliation with a father is a key to his artistic development.

Stephen thinks that paternity is a legal conviction, as opposed to maternity, which is biologically certifiable. Paternity is always contestable: Can anyone be sure but the mother, and can she even be sure? Maternity is natural; paternity is culture, art, law, religion. All human civilization is rooted in the fiction of paternity. Civilization as a whole is a construction, a fiction, but one that exercises dominating power in life and culture.

This contrast seems to be built into the structure of the novel as well. It is appropriate that Molly’s final soliloquy should take palce at night, under the governorment of the moon, the feminine body of heaven. She speak-thinks without having to observe the constraints of polite conversation or society, and so is able to be open and honest. Paternity is played out in the daytime, in public, in the world of society, the world of history that Stephen says is a nightmare from which he wants to awake. Public history is the history of fathers and, as Hamlet knew, of their deaths.

Joyce gives this a theological dimension with several passages about early Trinitarian controversies. While Stephen walks along the beach in chapter 3, he thinks about fathers and sons in terms of Arianism:

“Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler’s will. From before the ages He will me and now may not will me away or ever. A lex eterna stays about him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificantjewbangtantiality. Illstarred hereisarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophoroion, with clotten hinderparts.” (According to patristic legend, Arius died in an outhouse, suffering from disentery.)

In his later discussion about Shakespeare in the Library, Buck Mulligan talks about the modalist heresy, characterized as the theory that the Father is His own son. He offers a mock modalist creed: “He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends, stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on crosstree, Who let him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead when all the quick shall be dead already.”

Buck offers this creed to mock Stephen’s identification of Shakespeare with both Hamlet and Hamlet’s father. As Buck says, “he proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.” 

What Stephen is after is not an identity of Father and Son, but a reconciliation, though with the prior assumption that there is no reconciliation without prior rupture.

Paternity is also in the background of Stephen’s theory of art. He prefers the unmediated paternity of the artist, who fathers a whole world without mediation, without mother, without the instant of ejaculation. Shakespeare becomes father of his race; the son can rewrite his father, become his father’s father. An artist is like a paternal God, who creates ex nihilo.

At the same time, literary paternity, is inescapable, and limiting. N artist creates his language purely de novo – though Joyce gave it the old college try. Even Joyce used (mostly) English words, with more or less fixed public meanings, and he is constantly borrowing from his predecessors. Every paragraph of Ulysses is a densepack of literary allusion that takes hours for anyone to unravel. Even art is haunted by paternity. (Joyce anticipates Harold Bloom’s Freudian literary theory here.)

Yet: hough the son cannot escape the father and artistic paternity is inescapable, yet the son can re-read the father and re-write the father, and so surpass the father. In Joyce’s own work, we have this dynamic: He calls his book Ulysses, alluding to he parent text of the Odyssey; but the fact that he adopts the Roman name means that he is bringing Latin reinterpretatons of the Odyssey into play into his still-further reinterpretation of the work. Tennyson and Dante will be among the lenses through which he rewrites the Odyssey, as will, more indirectly, Christological heresy, Shakespeare, and much else. The son acknowledges the necessary evil of the fiction of fatherhood, but the son surpasses the father by incorporating the father.