Decoding Dedalus: Hamlet, ou le Absentminded Beggar

“The art of James Joyce, like that of Mallarmé, is art preoccupied with method, with how it’s made. Even the sensuality of Ulysses is a symptom of intermediation. It is an hallucinatory delirium – the kind treated by psychiatrists – presented as an end in itself.” – Fernando Pessoa

This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line.

The line below comes from “Scylla and Charybdis,” the ninth episode of Ulysses. It appears on page p. 186-187 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “—People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be” and ends “Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none/ But we had spared…”

“Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, is chock full of references to Shakespeare. However, someone as well-read as Stephen Dedalus is not content to leave it at that. Let’s take a look at a series of shorter allusions to the poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Rudyard Kipling and Algernon Swinburne.

“—People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on the hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phæacians.”

*A Spirit or Sidhe in a Landscape*, Æ Russell

Æ states the artistic ethos of the Celtic Revival, an artistic movement that put traditional Irish art front and center and focused on mythological and rural subjects over realistic and urban ones. His art and writing fell firmly into this aesthetic and politics, and he was a key figure of the movement. Stephen, hoping to make a name for himself as an artist, is once again caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. Publicly disagreeing with an influential man like Æ could derail his hopes and dreams. Æ was a tastemaker for the movement and could pick and choose who he published in his magazines. The Revivalist movement overlapped heavily with Nationalist politics, and literally being “politically correct” could make or break one's career. You can see the conundrum that Stephen finds himself in.

James Joyce found himself in a similar dilemma in his youth, as his approach to writing was in direct contravention to the Revivalist depictions of Irish virtue and the Platonic ideal of rural Ireland. In real life, Æ was quite supportive of Young Joyce and was the first to publish Joyce’s short stories in his magazine, The Irish Homestead. Ultimately, he had to stop publishing them because the magazine received so many complaints. Joyce had no desire to portray noble peasants worshiping the earth as their “living mother”, a totally idealized vision of rural life declaimed by a wealthy man who lived in Merrion Square in central Dublin.

*Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé,* 1876, Édouard Manet

It’s interesting here that the fictionalized Æ specifically takes aim at the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Symbolist poetry has its roots in Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 Les Fleurs du Mal, the source of Æ’s epithet “flowers of corruption.” Mallarmé produced poems in which multi-layered meanings arose from wordplay based on the precise proximity of words and sounds, an attention to process rivaled by Joyce himself in Finnegans Wake. In some cases, Mallarmé went even farther than Joyce. In the case of poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” even the exact position of words on the page and the size of their typeface in relation to one another was taken into consideration to craft meaning. Mallarmé famously held Tuesday night salons in his home in Paris that not only featured lively debates, but would generally end in Mallarmé presenting dances, plays or even magic tricks as he also loved performing arts. Writer Arthur Symons described Mallarmé as “one of the best talkers of his time” but noted that the poet was no monologist, allowing all his guests to have their say. Sadly, Mallarmé died a few years too soon for Joyce (or Stephen, I suppose) to have attended one of these salons.

Joyce greatly admired Mallarmé’s work, so it’s no surprise their sensibilities heavily overlapped. Scholar Dudley Marchi points out many such similarities, such as using the form of language to reveal layered meanings (as mentioned above). Marchi explains:

“Mallarmé, like Joyce, insists on the physicality of language, as well as on the instability of literary interpretation, and uses words to evoke diverse significations that continue nevertheless to belong to a central hermeneutic paradigm as inscribed by the text.”

Marchi also states that Mallarmé’s work is one of the most important precursors to modernism. While Æ is busy praising an idealized past, he is missing the new generation standing before his eyes, ready to radically transform art of all kinds. Ultimately, this temperament would be the undoing of the real-life Æ. His painting and poetry are largely forgotten while the work of Joyce is still widely read and studied. Politically, Æ was greatly opposed to the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising, and though he had been at the center of Nationalist politics for much of his adult life, his disconnect from this major revolutionary act meant that he rapidly fell from relevance in Irish politics post-1916. He comes across as very idealistic and totally, utterly wrong in this passage, though we readers are equipped with the gift of hindsight.

Back to Ulysses:

“From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
—Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet. He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don’t you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don’t you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
Hamlet
ou
Le Distrait
Pièce de Shakespeare”

Assistant Librarian Best chimes in with his own memory of having Mallarmé read to him in Paris, in this case a prose poem entitled “Hamlet et Fortinbras” about a production of Hamlet given in a small French town, as he says. Hamlet is re-titled “Le Distrait”, meaning “distracted” or “absentminded,” teeing up Stephen’s quip in the upcoming back-and-forth with Eg.

Scholar William Carpenter describes Best’s input bluntly: “From Stephen’s point of view, the man is making a fool of himself.” Best knows that the men are circling around the topic of Hamlet in the lead-up to Stephen explaining his Shakespeare theory, and now Mallarmé has been thrown into the mix. Best seemingly just wants to have a comment to toss in, but doesn’t have much to say about either topic. Stephen, however, not only knows the work of Mallarmé inside and out, as we’ll see, but he knows this specific prose poem by heart. Essentially, Best is mansplaining Mallarmé to Stephen, who by all rights should be the one explaining the finer points of the great Symbolist’s poetry to Best. Worse still, Best doesn’t know what he’s talking about whatsoever. He’s not saying anything of substance, and his final appraisal in the following section is simply that it’s “so French.”

To his credit, Best does recall one phenomenal line from “Hamlet et Fortinbras”: “il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même.” It means roughly, “he wanders, reading the book of himself,” Scholar Bartholomew Ryan says that this line is one of Joyce’s favorite lines in all literature, explaining that Joyce admired it for its concise, unitary style, its rhythm and sound, and its meaning. It’s also a great encapsulation of Ulysses as a novel. Ryan explains, “Dedalus views himself as the new Hamlet making his way through Dublin in Ireland’s greatest epic.”

The discussion in the library rolls on:

“He repeated to John Eglinton’s newgathered frown:
—Pièce de Shakespeare, don’t you know. It’s so French. The French point of view. Hamlet ou...
—The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
—Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.”

At least Stephen manages to extract a laugh from Eg.

Stephen might have garnered some hope from Eg’s “newgathered frown” in response to Best’s “analysis” of Mallarmé. Maybe he’ll have some witty riposte or support Stephen in some way, but alas, Eg has no interest in French avant garde poetry, witheringly dismissing the entirety of France as “excellent people” but “distressingly shortsighted.” Stephen thinks to himself, “Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder,” which is a translated line from “Hamlet et Fortinbras,” meant to show that Stephen, too, not only can quote from this prose poem, but also that he knows that Mallarmé did a rather good job of illustrating the finer points of Hamlet in a fairly brief poem. Carpenter interprets Mallarmé’s poem as having a message embedded for modern poets: “The vision is one of the destructive isolation of intellectual man.” This theme comes through much more strongly in Stephen’s quotation than Best’s.

Let’s consider Stephen’s joke about the absentminded beggar, a play on the French word “distrait.” “The Absentminded Beggar” is a poem written by Rudyard Kipling in 1899 as what he called a “catchpenny verse,” meaning it was meant to raise as much money as possible for soldiers fighting in the Boer War and their families. “The Absentminded Beggar” was a smash hit to say the least, particularly after it was set to music by Arthur Sullivan, one half of Gilbert and Sullivan. The tone of “The Absentminded Beggar” painted a sympathetic but jingoistic picture of the soldiers fighting South Africa, opening with the lines:

“When you've shouted "Rule Britannia,"
When you've sung "God save the Queen,"
When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth,
Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine
For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?”

The titular absentminded beggar is a young man who stepped up to serve without a second thought, putting the needs of his country before his own. He’s absentminded because he’s so focused on his patriotic duty that more mundane tasks (like work, family and finances) have fallen by the wayside. He’s given everything to defend the Empire, and now he needs help from YOU. Can’t you spare a few shillings? Overwhelmingly, people did open their pockets to various charitable funds due to the song, raising around £250,000 for the cause. In Ireland, the song was far less appealing to Irish Nationalists, who vehemently opposed Britain’s involvement against the Boers in South Africa. Apparently, Molly Bloom was blacklisted for a time in Dublin because she had performed “The Absentminded Beggar”:

“...they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her like on account of father being in the army and my singing the absentminded beggar …”

What does this all have to do with Hamlet? The works of Shakespeare were held up as pinnacles of civilized culture and used as propaganda by the British imperial government to justify conquering peoples deemed inferior to the British, whether they be Indian, African or Irish. Scholar M. Keith Booker calls Stephen’s sly remark “a subtle indication of the complicity of high culture in the expansion of British imperial power.” Æ, Best and Eg are all Irish Nationalists, upholding the peerless brilliance of Shakespeare and playing into imperial propaganda in the process. To Stephen, they are as absentminded as the lads in khaki.

“—A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot.”

The Robert Greene Stephen’s referencing here is not The 48 Laws of Power guy, but instead a popular Elizabethan author who published a pamphlet in 1592 by the title of Greene's Groats-worth of Witte Bought with a Million of Repentance. Greene does use the phrase “deathsman of the soul,” but in quite a different context than Stephen suggests:

“Despise drunkenness, which wasteth the wit and maketh men all equal unto beasts. Fly lust as the deathsman of the soul, and defile not the temple of the Holy Ghost.”

Shakespeare’s father also did not work as a butcher, and there are only eight deaths in Hamlet, including his own. Hans Walter Gabler interprets the ninth life as Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, who died at age 11, whose legacy Stephen believes is woven into the play.

Stephen doubles down on his conflation of Hamlet and a Boer War soldier in the final line of this passage, using the phrase “Khaki Hamlet” in reference to the color of British soldiers’ uniforms in that era. Hamlet was hesitant to kill anyone for much of the play, but a Khaki Hamlet has no such reserve. The phrase “don’t hesitate to shoot” is a reference to the Mitchelstown Massacre that took place in Cork in 1887. Locals organized a rent strike in the town. At a related protest, police fired on the crowd and in the ensuing scuffle, three men were killed by police. Speaking on the floor of Parliament, MP Thomas Sexton said of the incident:

“Captain Plunkett came fresh from an interview with the right hon. Gentleman the Chief Secretary for Ireland. They had spent an hour together in Dublin Castle, and Captain Plunkett went red hot to the telegraph office and he telegraphed to Youghal, Mallow—"Don't hesitate to shoot the people down." Well, the lesson has improved with time. The hesitation that may have been felt at that date at least appears to have been felt no longer. They did not hesitate to shoot down the people at Mitchelstown.”

The phrase “don’t hesitate to shoot” became a slogan for Irish rage against their colonial rulers in the 1880s. Stephen is reminding his comrades, who are all far more nationalistic than himself, that the violence done in South Africa has also be enacted on the Irish in the not-too-distant past (and will be again in the not-too-distant future, a fact that James Joyce would know all too well).

“The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none
But we had spared…”

Stephen likens the bloodbath of Hamlet’s fifth act as foreshadowing for the atrocities committed by the British in the Boer War, specifically the confinement of Boer civilians in concentration camps. “Mr Swinburne” is English poet Algernon Swinburne, maybe better known to us readers as Buck Mulligan’s “Algy” from back in “Telemachus”. Of course, Mulligan’s friend Haines’ family fortune likely comes from presumably pre-war plunder in colonial South Africa – “His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other.” Mulligan is indifferent to any suffering this colonial profiteering might have caused and is presumably indifferent to some of Algy’s terrible opinions, as we’ll see.

Stephen quotes from a 1901 sonnet of Algy’s by the title of “On the Death of Colonel Benson”, lamenting the death of the titular Benson in a Boer prison camp. Swinburne does this in part by defending the use of concentration camps by the British during the war:

“Nor heed we more than he what liars dare say
Of mercy's holiest duties left undone
Toward whelps and dams of murderous foes, whom none
Save we had spared or feared to starve and slay.”

In this passage, quoted by Stephen, Swinburne likens the children imprisoned in British concentration camps as “whelps and dams,” archaic words for the offspring of animals. In the fourth line quoted above, Swinburne defends the British use of concentration camps as far more humane than simply murdering the children of their enemies. In fairness, Swinburne’s poem was criticized as soon as it appeared in print as “unthinking” and “excessive.” However, it clearly acts as a glaring example of the dehumanization of non-British colonial residents in patriotic British art of the time. Though Swinburne was criticized retroactively, he had no trouble publishing his poem. Additionally, it was included in a collection of his poems that was published in 1904.

The next lines of Swinburne’s poem read:

“Alone as Milton and as Wordsworth found
And hailed their England, when from all around
Howled all the recreant hate of envious knaves,
Sublime she stands:...”

Swinburne invokes Milton and Wordsworth as proof of the superiority of British culture, and that their detractors are basically a bunch of haters who are just jealous of Britain. It certainly casts a darker shadow over the goofy, schmaltzy sentimentality of “The Absentminded Beggar.” Both poems support the same violent, colonial atrocities, but no one complained when it was laundered through Kipling and Sullivan’s crowd-pleasing verse and music. This is not to say that the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth as evil or bad, but we must as readers understand the context in which they existed in Ireland in 1904. None of these authors asked to have their work used as propaganda for colonial human rights abuse, but that fact is part of their legacy. I think Stephen finds hypocrisy in his Irish Nationalist friends’ adoration for these works above the work of Irish artists (like himself, *cough* *cough*).

Decoding Dedalus: Hamlet, ou le Absentminded Beggar

Further Reading:

A Shakespearean Ghoststory Part 1: Hamnet Shakespeare

Decoding Dedalus: Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.