Abstract
Stephen’s struggles in Ulysses are read as a failure of self-narration through betrayal specifically. The gruesome figure of the betrayed interferes fatally with the narratives of overcoming Stephen had relied on in Portrait. Where once he had used the structures of betrayal to enable a clear separation from the family and the national allegiances it represented, Stephen is unable to sustain his position as victim. Harangued by his mother’s accusing ghost, Stephen spends the day caught between the desire to sever finally and absolutely with his family, race, and nation, and the realization that even if this severance were possible, it would be too painful to achieve.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As he says to Stanislaus, “Absolute realism is impossible, of course. That we all know. But it’s quite enough that Ibsen has omitted all question of finance from his thirteen dramas.” 16 May 1907, qtd in JJ, 266–7.
- 3.
- 4.
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- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 36–7. This passage is in the “First Essay,” section 10.
- 9.
- 10.
Deleuze, Nietzschean Philosophy, 117, 118.
- 11.
Dettmar, The Illicit Joyce, 135.
- 12.
Enda Duffy, The Subaltern “Ulysses”, 26–7. (Duffy 1994)
- 13.
We should remember that Freud describes the child’s decision to go against the parent’s wishes (at least what they imagine to be the parent’s wishes) as a vital step in the family romance.
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Compare with “the mimic warfare was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage.” SH, 39.
- 15.
Breaking up Stephen’s short monologue as I have, I may have destroyed its strange and awkward cohesion. As is so often the case, the meaning is found as much in the gaps between the utterances as in the utterances themselves. Here it is together: “Very unpleasant. Noble art of selfpretense. Personally, I detest action.” Stephen’s speech here is more like internal monologue than external dialogue and, indeed, in his drunken state he appears to be using Carr primarily as a spur to his own thought.
- 16.
McCrea, Company of Strangers, 126.
- 17.
McCrea, Company of Strangers, 117.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
As I suggested above, Stephen is more than capable of feeling the anguish of his young brothers and sisters, even where they do not (consciously, at any rate).
- 21.
Bradley W. Buchanan, Oedipus against Freud, 106 (Buchanan 2010). Buchanan is thinking only of Duffy and doesn’t describe Stephen in this way.
- 22.
Deane, A Portrait of the Artist, xx. (Deane 1992)
- 23.
McCrea, Company of Strangers.
- 24.
SL, 48.
- 25.
Valente, James Joyce and the Problem of Justice, 54. (Valente 1995)
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———. 1992. Introduction to Finnegans Wake. Edited by James Joyce, v–lii. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Fraser, J.A. (2016). Betrayal, Stagnation, and the Family Romantic in Ulysses . In: Joyce & Betrayal. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59588-1_6
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