Recursive and Allusive Fathers and Sons

I finally started re-reading Hamlet this week.  I've been meaning to get to it for a couple of months since Hamlet plays a big rôle in a chapter of Ulysses, which I just had a class on.  I had a notion of reading both The Odyssey and Hamlet so that it would be easier to understand what was going on in Ulysses (allusion-wise), but I made it through only The Odyssey.  So now since school's over, I decided to re-read Hamlet.  The last time I read the whole thing (which was also the first time I read the whole thing) was the summer in between my sophomore and junior years of high school, which was about five years ago.  (I was supposed to have read the whole thing in my introductory English class during my freshman year of university, but I got the act and scene numbers mixed up and didn't read as much as I should have, and I never felt bad enough to go back and finish it.)

Before I actually got to start the play, I read all of the introductory material in the front of the book.  That's where I learned that Hamnet Shakespeare - Shakespeare's son whose death in some way inspired Hamlet - was born on 2 February.  Things clicked to-gether in my brain, and I actually had to stop reading because I got so excited about this.

James Joyce's birthday is 2 February.  Supposedly, so is Stephen Dedalus' - one of the main characters in Ulysses.  But what was really interesting about learning this was the whole author/book and father/son relationship combining.

In the Hamlet-centric chapter of Ulysses, Mr Best makes a pun about Hamlet and Shakespeare in French.  Hamlet is "un pièce du Shakespeare."  The play is a piece of Shakespeare in the same way that Hamnet is a piece of Shakespeare.  This involves the ideas of consubstantiality between father and son and metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls) that are central to Ulysses.  (And which I wrote my final paper about.)  Different father/son relationships are constituted by a variety of means:

• Leopold Bloom and Rudy (actual father and son) - like Hamnet, Rudy died
• Simon Dedalus and Stephen (actual father and son) - a big deal is made of their eyes' being the same, which is one of the main examples of father/son consubstantiality
• Bloom and Stephen - Bloom sort of adopts Stephen as a replacement son for Rudy; they are also described in the same way by a cabman; and Ulysses incorporates their rôles as Odysseus (Bloom) and Telemachus (Stephen) - a relationship which also resembles King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet in terms of heredity and royalty
• Paddy Dignam and Paddy Dignam (actual father and son) - this also plays with the Hamlet paradigm as both father and son have the same name and the elder of the pair dies shortly before the main action

In the paper I wrote for my class, I had intended to tie all of this father/son, consubstantiality, and metempsychosis stuff back to literature itself, but it got confusing and I never attempted it.  But from the relationship among Shakespeare, Hamnet, and Hamlet, one can see that literature acts as either a substitute or a continuation of father/son relationships.  This same type of idea is presented in The Divine Comedy, which Ulysses has many allusions to.  Virgil the poet acts as a guide to Dante.  Depending on how one looks at it, Dante could be guided by an actual person - a mentor - or he could be guided by literature itself.  Ulysses has that same idea:  people and literature can play similar rôles.

But learning that Joyce's birthday was the same as Hamnet's takes this all a step further.  Shakespeare's creation of Hamlet to - in a way - replace Hamnet is mirrored by Joyce's creation of Ulysses.  Shakespeare creates his progeny in literature because his real son has died, and then Joyce - who shares Hamnet's birthday - writes about father/son relationships and their replacement in literature.

This is the type of recursive and allusive paradigm that makes Ulysses both great fun to read and really frustrating.