Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  A detailed exegesis of all the allusions here can be found in the endlessly useful Notes for Joyce by Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman (1974), but I wish to emphasize only a few points. Joyce may have deliberately lost count or may have preferred the number nine. Hamlet is responsible for eight deaths, including his own: he stabs Polonius through a curtain; viciously rejects Ophelia, thus driving her to suicide; insouciantly sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to certain execution in England; and in the final poisoned sword and poisoned cup scene stabs Laertes, forces Claudius to drink of the cup that has just slain Gertrude, and with a flourish stabs Claudius also.

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  Everybody has his own Hamlet. Shakespeare created the only literary character who can compete with the J writer’s Yahweh, the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus, Dante’s Pilgrim, and Don Quixote. Stephen’s Hamlet, always affirmed by Joyce himself, is a study in the mystery of the fiction of fatherhood. Who is Hamlet’s father? Since we do not know when the sexual relationship between Gertrude and Claudius commenced, is it King Hamlet, now a Ghost, or is it the usurper and murderer Claudius? Hamlet does not know, and though he says nothing about this question, he rarely says exactly what he thinks, and he does not often speak without intentional irony. Why does he not slay Claudius deliberately, long before the end of this enormous play? Patricide might render anyone recalcitrant and inhibit action. And yet I scarcely believe that is the principal cause of Hamlet’s delay. He does not want to be the protagonist of one more revenger’s tragedy. Anyone can stab a usurper; the most capacious consciousness in all of Western literature is too large for the bloodiness that mars and trivializes the early Titus Andronicus, a drama that I can interpret only as a deliberate parody of Thomas Kyd, John Marston, and others.

  Stephen’s fiction that Shakespeare was cuckolded by all three of his brothers with Anne Hathaway is extravagant and rather silly. But the identification of Shakespeare with the Ghost, a part we know he played, and of Prince Hamlet with Hamnet Shakespeare, who died at the age of eleven, is more troublesome. Hamlet may have been composed as early as 1599, three years after the death of young Hamnet. There was an earlier Hamlet, staged in 1587, of which we have the text. I have always agreed with Peter Alexander that this first Hamlet was by William Shakespeare and not Thomas Kyd. It makes a difference, because the 1587 Hamlet failed and was mocked by its audience. In writing his second Hamlet, Shakespeare sought vindication and earned it by what in time became his longest and most famous drama.

  The uncut Hamlet, if you combine the Second Quarto (1604) with the First Folio (1623), runs to about four thousand lines. I have never seen it performed at that length, though such performances have taken place. Played without intermission, it might take up to five hours, depending upon the pacing of the director.

  One way of describing James Joyce’s audacity is to ask: who else has had the authority and ambition to subvert Hamlet and all, indeed, of William Shakespeare’s creation? The essayist and poet Robert Atwan, in a generous review of my sprawling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), gently chided me as forsaking my customary reliance on Milton’s Satan and Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “In Shakespeare has he found a master who finally makes subversion unthinkable?” I suppose my answer has to be “Yes.” But I am a teacher by profession and not a poet or a novelist. Of all post-Shakespearean writers, James Joyce alone was able to remake language as Homer, Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare had done before him. Proust, master of endless sentences, nevertheless does not attempt the impossible task of purifying the language of Flaubert.

  Joyce did not so much seek to subvert Shakespeare as totally to absorb him and transmute that process into something rich and strange, yet cognitively far simpler than Shakespeare. There is a Joycean ambivalence toward Shakespeare that sometimes risks absurdity. Joyce considered Ibsen a much better dramatist than Shakespeare and said this could be proved by comparing When We Dead Awaken to anything by the English Bard. There is also the question of creative envy. As he composed the Wake, Joyce brooded and compared that book’s lack of a ready audience to Shakespeare’s situation at the Globe Theatre.

  In 1912, Joyce gave a series of a dozen lectures on Hamlet to a paying audience in Trieste. As far as I know, we do not have the texts of what he said. But evidently his concern was almost entirely with language, a kind of word-by-word explication of etymologies, puns, and turns of phrase. By then Joyce described Shakespeare as an Italianate Englishman, taking his protagonists from continental sources. That is a partial truth only. Yet Stephen in the library scene of Ulysses gives us a series of fascinating speculations:

  —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. A like fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.

  They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.

  —The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. 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. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it King Hamlet’s ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece’s bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen’s breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.

  One could hardly have thought that even James Joyce might give us so persuasive a vision of the inward Shakespeare. Since the poet-dramatist composed the part of the Ghost of King Hamlet for himself to perform, Stephen’s scholasticism entertains and disarms. Shakespeare, man and playwright, though a mortal God, suffers the cost of his confirmation. Sexual fury drives the High Tragedies to one apotheosis in Othello and then transmutes into the total fury of the human in King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. After that, Shakespeare ebbs with an ebb of the ocean of life: Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and his share of The Two Noble Kinsmen show the same revulsions and ambivalences as do the troublesome Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida. Shadow and substance, father and son, Shakespeare alone carries in his heart the inland ocean of desolation, and since he is the son consubstantial with the father, he is both Jesus and Yahweh.

  Challenged by his skeptical auditors to prove that William Shakespeare was a Jew, Stephen anticipates Kenneth Gross’s Shylock Is Shakespeare (2006):

  And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love’s Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a po
rter’s theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sidney’s. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired the Merry Wives of Windsor, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

  This is too high-spirited to be refutable. Let it stand. Again Joyce dazzles, lord of wit and of language like his divine precursor.

  Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel.

  Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

  Anthony Burgess called this “keeping love in the family,” though he meant Earwicker’s lust for his daughter, Isobel. William Blake’s name for Yahweh, “old Nobodaddy,” delighted Joyce, who called the God of the Christians the “hangman god.” Sins and virtues meld.

  —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 greying man with two marriageable daughters, with thirtyfive years of life, nel mezzo del 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?

  If paternity is a legal fiction, then one can go further, as Hamlet does when the image of the ghostly father fades away in Act 5 and appears only in a reference to Claudius as he who killed my king and whored my mother, or in a single mention of my father’s signet ring. Confronting Laertes at the grave of Ophelia, Hamlet cries out, “It is I, Hamlet the Dane.” Here, then, I go with Stephen’s theory, which is a splendid artifact once you divest it of the supposed cuckolding of Shakespeare by Anne Hathaway with his brothers.

  James Joyce had a warm relationship with his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, and something of a guilty one with his mother, Mary Jane Murray, since he would not embrace Roman Catholicism again even to comfort her on her deathbed. Educated by the Jesuits, Joyce remained obdurate against priestcraft: “I will not serve.”

  A deep reader of Thomas Aquinas, Joyce found a precursor in the third-century theologian Sabellius, none of whose writings survived:

  Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

  Mr. Magee (John Eglinton in Ulysses) was William Kirkpatrick Magee, a contemporary Irish essayist. Sabellius becomes Stephen becomes Shakespeare, who becomes a pre-existent being, a perfection alien to nature. Shakespeare thus goes back before the Creation-Fall, like the Stranger God of the Gnostics. Since Joyce works toward a three-in-one of Shakespeare, Leopold Bloom, and James Joyce, he, too, would achieve aesthetic perfection on this account:

  Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils. A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it: prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa’s lump of love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

  Setting aside the splendor of this language (from Joyce we expect it), I am overwhelmed by what could be called the High Aesthetic Theosophy of the passage. Like the Hermetic divine man or Blake’s Albion or Kabbalah’s Adam Kadmon, Hamlet’s dream glorifies man. There are many accounts of androgynous angels, from John Milton to Ursula K. Le Guin, yet Joyce gives us a new Biblical cadence: “being a wife unto himself.”

  Prince Hamlet is a vortex that draws everything in. I tear myself away and finally move from Stephen and Shakespeare to Leopold Bloom and Shakespeare. It is much more Poldy’s book than it is Stephen’s. Mr. Bloom’s only rival is Dublin itself, alive with sound, a contentious citizenry, and ancient shadows. When I’ve been away from Ulysses for too long, I am liable to believe that Poldy is larger than his book, as Falstaff is not to be contained by the Henry IV plays. Immersing myself again in Ulysses dispels that illusion. Every page, every sentence, every phrase of Joyce’s epic overflows the measure.

  And yet Poldy (I have to keep to that name, since I am a lesser Bloom) is endlessly rammed with life. I return to my bafflement as to his Jewishness, upon which Joyce insists. You could argue that, according to Talmud, Molly Bloom is more Jewish than Poldy, because she had a Spanish Jewish mother. That will not work. There is nothing Jewish about her. She is universal. Poldy is the mystery. Since he identifies with his dead father, he thinks of himself as a Jew. All Dublin considers him such. Joyce is Poldy is Shakespeare: that is the argument of Ulysses, finally more central than Homer and Dante. Leopold Bloom is in search of a son, and this
quest is Messianic. He finds Stephen Dedalus, who is never quite there since he is both alcoholic and given to authentic visions.

  I am not writing a book about Ulysses; I cannot pretend to be a Joyce scholar. And I still intend to say something about the Wake before I am done. Therefore, I will leap ahead to Episode 12: the “Cyclops,” set at 5:00 p.m. in a Dublin pub where Poldy courageously confronts a gigantic, nasty Dublin citizen, who is unnamed, brutal, and abusive. Joyce uses a narrator of little personality, who tells the story of Poldy’s agon in the Dublin vernacular. The citizen drinks heavily and predicts a return to Ireland of its émigrés to join in rebellion against the English.

  “—Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was…”

  —Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.

  —But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

  —Yes, says Bloom.

  —What is it? says John Wyse.

  —A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

  —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.

  So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck out of it:

  —Or also living in different places.

  —That covers my case, says Joe.