Stephen’s Hamlet Theory and Literary Fatherhood

If children cannot survive without their mothers and motherhood may be the only true thing in life, as Stephen asserts in an early episode of Ulysses, then a theory of literary creation based solely on fatherhood is inherently destabilized. This further elucidates Stephen’s troubles with his own theory. Moments of self-doubt creep in between his long speeches. At one point he stops talking out loud to inwardly interrogate himself: “What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you! I have reasons. Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea Are you condemned to do this?” (266). Stephen doesn’t answer but we can posit that his desperation for a literary father has condemned him to loosely interpreting Shakespeare in an effort to create a purely imagined literary father. The result is hollow, lacking in the materiality to do justice by the birthing process. Indeed, Mulligan mocks Stephen’s statement that Shakespeare fathered “all his race” by concluding that Shakespeare must have fathered himself: “Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The play's the thing! Let me parturiate!” (267). Here Mulligan pretends to be pregnant in the unique fashion of Zeus, who birthed Athena out of his head. Mulligan listens while Stephen talks about a heaven without marriages: “heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself” but he is not sucked into the romance of it (274). Instead he cuts down Stephen’s sentimentality using humor, crying “Eureka” and beginning to write a play about masturbation titled “Everyman His own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in...

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...te and then set out to find her, Bloom is an answer to Stephen’s quest for a literary father. Bloom cannot replace Shakespeare or Stephen’s mother. Shakespeare represents the ideal literary father, to which Bloom will be measured. Stephen’s mother physically birthed him and provided him with the love he needed as a child. However, the role of Stephen’s father is physically vacant. Here, Bloom fits into Stephen’s life. Upon cursory overview, this can seem unspectacular, yet it is through this physical realm that people agree, disagree, and shape a conception of reality. This ability to see through other peoples’ eyes and vigilantly note the confluence and schisms between their outlooks, as well as ones’ own, may be an essential part of what it means to be a writer.

Works Cited

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Declan Kiberd. London, England: Penguin, 2000. Print.