Michael Waller

24 March 2017

Joyce, Shakespeare, and Benjamin: A Portrait of the Artist as a Flaneur

Abstract

As its title implies, James Joyce’s Ulysses abounds with literary allusions. This thesis examines the young protagonist Stephen Dedalus’s struggle to determine his own literary identity in light of his Shakespeare theory and its “proof by algebra” in the National Library scene of “Scylla and Charybdis,” utilizing specifically the concept of the flâneur from Walter

Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” as a means to analyze the centrality of the shock experience to the production of art. I will contend that the development of Stephen’s theory points to authorship as a means of crafting one’s identity, while also serving a second purpose in its critique of Shakespeare’s example by exemplifying the Bard’s lack of control over the interpretation of his life’s work, and consequently his life. For this reason a focus on

Stephen’s shifting identity throughout the first three chapters of the book and in particular his meditations on Hamlet and vision in “Proteus” must be applied in order to trace the formation of his theory throughout the day.

In depicting the physical Shakespeare hustling to perform Hamlet at the Globe, the exposition of Stephen’s theory in “Scylla and Charybdis” serves a purpose similar to The Murder of Gonzago as a play-within-a-play by staging the Bard within his historical setting of

Elizabethan London. This moment presents the further maturation of Stephen’s theory of artistic creation by his emphasis on the author’s grounding in material circumstance, which relates back to Stephen’s meditations on the dead dog he encounters along Sandymount Strand. The corpse of dogsbody figures significantly in the formulation of Stephen’s identity and his Hamlet theory, as this scene itself parallels the gravediggers in act 5, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play. Furthermore, this epiphany motivates Stephen in the formation of both his identity and the Shakespeare theory, as he resolves to counteract history through the power of artistic creation, figuring himself as the new Irish national poet. In this way, Stephen attempts to redefine authorship and determine its value according to his own perspective by investigating the mechanism of Shakespeare’s transfiguration from cuckold, as he contends, into the formless father of English literature which status he retains today. The individuality which Stephen so craves proves to be his downfall, however, as no others confirm his greatness for him. Instead, by the time of Leopold Bloom’s own walk on the beach in “Nausicaa,” Stephen no longer presents an image of the artist, the claim to his previous identity lost to the sands of Sandymount Strand and the nightmare of history.