Decoding Dedalus: Saint Thomas' New Viennese School

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. 205-206 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the passage that begins “—Saint Thomas…” and ends “... his maidservant or his jackass”

As the argument about Hamlet rambles on in “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, things are heating up in the librarians’ office between Stephen Dedalus and his rival, John Eglinton. Ol’ Stiff Breeches thinks he has Stephen backed into a corner, as he assumes that Stephen’s comparison to Shakespeare and Shylock means that Stephen literally believes that Shakespeare was Jewish. Luckily, Stephen has one more weapon in his arsenal: Thomas Aquinas.

The advent of Aquinas in Stephen’s Shakespeare theory shouldn’t come as a huge surprise given his Jesuit education. It was already prophesied by a woe-struck Buck Mulligan back in “Telemachus”, when Haines inquired about the substance of Stephen’s theory:

“—No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I’m not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.”

If, like Mulligan, you are crying out for mercy (Ora pro nobis!), you’ll be happy to know that the short, unassuming paragraph discussed in this blog posts contains very little Thomist philosophy at all. It does, however, include an odd, little mystery that has stumped the scholars for decades. There’s no need to despair, though. Let’s see if we can solve the puzzle together. First, the paragraph in question:

“—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.”

There’s a lot going on here, maybe even enough to give you whiplash. The first sentence is the one that gets the most scrutiny, so we’ll start there:

“—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.”

Stephen has moved from comparing Shakespeare to Shylock to Thomas Aquinas’ views on incest. Stephen boasts that he’s read Aquinas’ “gorbellied” works “in the original,” meaning he read them in Latin. “Gorbellied” is a stealth Shakespearean allusion. It means fat or potbellied and could be applied to reputedly corpulent “Aquinas tunbelly.” In Shakespearean terms, it comes from the mouth of Falstaff, the “fat knight” himself, who proclaims in Henry IV, Part I:

“Hang ye, gorbellied knaves, are ye undone? No, ye fat chuffs, I would your store were here! On, bacons, on! What, ye knaves! young men must live. You are grandjurors, are ye? We’ll jure ye, faith.”

The fat knight is fat-shaming. You get the idea.

Stephen references Aquinas’ view of incest as an “avarice of the emotions,” a concept found in the Summa Theologica, which you can read in translation in a much less gorbellied PDF here. Aquinas makes several arguments against incest, and what Stephen says here is essentially true. An incestuous relationship, in Aquinas’ view, keeps bonds within a family that could otherwise be extended to a larger social community.

That’s not the bit that has scholars tying themselves in knots, though. It’s Stephen’s reference to “the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of.” Part of the confusion is that it’s not clear that Mr Magee (John Eglinton) ever spoke of any Viennese school. It’s also unclear what Joyce meant by “the new Viennese School” in the first place. The most common interpretation is that he’s referring to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, but the ambiguity leaves enough wiggle room for discussion.

The way one might interpret this passage comes down to how influential they believe Freud was to Joyce, a point of controversy since the 1920’s. Prominent writers like Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Eliot were sure that Joyce was heavily influenced by Freud’s ideas, whereas close friends of Joyce, including Italo Svevo and Maria Jolas, insisted that he wasn’t. Some have guessed that Joyce may have encountered Freud’s work on his brief sojourn in Paris in 1902, but Freud wasn’t known widely outside Vienna that early. According to his brother Stanislaus, Joyce had developed an interest in the unconscious prior to exposure to Freud’s work, so the influence is perceived rather than actual.

Of course, it’s completely unnecessary for Joyce to have read Freud by 1904 for Stephen Dedalus to reference his work in fictional 1904. Joyce wrote “Scylla and Charybdis” between 1918 and 1919 in Zurich, by which time he had read about psychoanalysis. There are plenty of instances of anachronisms in Ulysses when it suited Joyce; the novel is autobiographical but not an autobiography. He also incorporated ideas that he didn’t necessarily believe where necessary, so whether or not Joyce was all-in on Freud, he would be willing to incorporate Freud’s ideas into Stephen’s Shakespeare theory if it made thematic sense to do so.

This passage is particularly confounding because it’s not that Stephen just drops an off-hand reference to the “new Viennese school”, but that he pins it on Mr Magee, who made no such mention. Some commentators believe the link is this remark from Eglinton/Magee that immediately precedes the passage in which Stephen discusses the Shylock-Shakespeare connection:

“Steadfast John replied severe:
—The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake and have it.”

Is the doctor Freud? There’s simply not much to go on beyond this remark’s relative proximity to the phrase “new Viennese school.” Even that proximity is somewhat tenuous. Could the doctor be Thomas Aquinas, who was a Doctor of the Church? I don’t know if lapsed Presbyterian Eglinton would be as quick to reach for Aquinas as the jejune Jesuit, Stephen. I think it’s more likely that Stephen would be the source of Thomist thought in this discourse rather than Eglinton.

Stephen Dedalus v. the men in the library

Scholar Harald Beck, writing on the website James Joyce Online Notes, offers an alternative theory: the doctor is Professor Edward Dowden, Trinity College’s famed Shakespeare expert mentioned by Mulligan a few paragraphs earlier: “O, I must tell you what Dowden said!” Dowden went by Dr. Dowden among his colleagues, which was unusual at the time. Also, as the big Shakespeare Guy of his day, he could absolutely explain the riddle around Shakespeare’s secondbest bed, which Eglinton is steadfastly trying to focus on despite the abundant distractions in the room. He is annoyed that Stephen seems to be careening through wildly unrelated topics (in Eglinton’s view, implying that Shakespeare was Jewish. He wasn’t. We discuss it here) and then acting evasive when challenged by Eglinton directly. Dowden seems like the more straightforward path to the knowledge they seek.

There is one more wrinkle, though. Stephen’s remark about Mr Magee mentioning the new Viennese school appeared in the 1919 Little Review version of this episode, but Steadfast John’s retort about the Doctor was added a year later in the 1920 proofs. The Doctor passage could have been added to clarify Stephen’s comment, but I’m not sure it actually does. I buy that Eglinton is invoking Dowden, but it doesn’t solve the Viennese school mystery for me. They seem unconnected to me, especially since Dowden doesn’t have a clear connection to a Viennese school. To unravel the Viennese mystery, we wind up back where we started: Dr. Freud and psychoanalysis. In a paper entitled James Joyce and Otto Rank: The Incest Motif in “Ulysses”, scholar Jean Kimball offers another alternative: yes, this passage is about psychoanalysis, but, no, it’s not about Freud. As I mentioned earlier, Joyce wrote “Scylla and Charybdis” between 1918 and 1919 in Zurich, a time and place that his friend Frank Budgen called “the second capital of psychoanalysis.” Kimball cites the work of Otto Rank, another Viennese psychoanalyst, who wrote the 1912 book, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend. Rank considered Hamlet to be an “incest drama,” and his theories on Shakespeare’s work are “peculiarly congruent” with Stephen’s, in Kimball’s words.

One tell in Stephen’s theory of Hamlet and Shakespeare’s work more broadly is his focus, almost exclusively, on the Bard’s biography as the major inspiration for his artistic work, a focus shared by Freud and Rank. In psychoanalytic theory, Hamlet is interpreted as a tale of the Oedipus Complex, in short the unconscious desire of young men to murder their fathers and marry their mothers, inspired by the play Oedipus Rex. Freud’s book, The Interpretation of Dreams, contains a note that says Hamlet “has its roots in the same soil [as Oedipus Rex.]” In psychoanalysis, the Oedipus Complex is equated with incest, so Stephen’s mention of Vienna and incest in the same breath as Hamlet is consistent with psychoanalytic interpretation of the play. In Stephen’s conception of Hamlet, Shakespeare is represented by the Ghost, a murdered father, while Prince Hamlet is Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the unfaithful Queen Gertrude is Shakespeare’s wife, Anne. So, Prince Hamlet is seeking vengeance because Claudius murdered his father and married his mother, leaving Hamlet furious that Claudius is living the Prince’s Oedipal best life. And because to psychoanalysts, Shakespeare was working out his neuroses on the page, Shakespeare is actually writing about his own unconscious desires.

Freud wasn’t the only Austrian psychoanalyst hyperfixated on Oedipus, though. Back to Otto Rank. In his view, Shakespeare clearly had major conflict with his father that resulted in deep psychic pain. His father’s death marked a major turning point in Shakespeare’s art. Joyce would have encountered the notion that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in response to his father’s death in the scholarship of George Brandes, whom Stephen cites later in his sparring with Eglinton. This hypothesis is further supported by Freud’s belief that the most significant event in a man’s life is the death of his father. Rank wrote that fatherhood had no psychic reality for Shakespeare as he lived so far from his family during the years when his children (really just his son) were young, but that his father’s death changed everything. John Shakespeare’s death awakened a sense of fatherhood in William, intermingled with the dissolution of his sonhood, and so he wrote a story in which a son and his ghostly father team up to defeat the wicked queen (Anne) and the uncle (whoever Anne is sleeping with) who overstepped his bounds. This interpretation allows the Ghost to occupy both father and son roles simultaneously, with Shakespeare the Father and Shakespeare the Son rolled into one angsty apparition. Rank’s analysis also adds depth to Stephen’s comment earlier in the “Scylla and Charybdis” that, “…through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth.” This is further supported by the fact that Shakespeare portrayed the Ghost on stage, allowing him to artistically enter the Ghost’s consubstantial father-son headspace. Kimball writes, “Thus, through the creation of the Ghost, Shakespeare is, temporarily at least, freed from his half-comprehended feelings of guilt” related to his father.

This is all well and good, but did Joyce actually read Rank’s book? It was not in Joyce’s personal library in 1920 according to scholar Richard Ellmann. Joyce did own a book by Ernest Jones that included an essay on Hamlet and Oedipus which cites other Rank works, though not the book that Kimball wrote about. Kimball believes that Rank’s work would have been available to Joyce in Zurich’s library, though; there are a variety of scenarios where Joyce could have read Rank’s books but not owned them. Finally, Kimball also points to Stephen’s retort to Eglinton that “Shakespeare was made in Germany.” She believes that this is also a possible reference to psychoanalysis, which would make sense in the context I’ve elaborated here.

So, there is a link between Hamlet, the new Viennese School, and incest, all of which are thematically dominant in “Scylla and Charybdis,” and allow Joyce to develop the paternity theme found throughout the entirety of Ulysses. There’s still an awkwardness to this sentence, as if there is still context missing, but I feel safe claiming there is an undercurrent of psychoanalytic reasoning in Stephen’s Hamlet argument, whether it be from Freud, Rank, Jones or someone else. I think this allusion is necessary for it make sense that Stephen is pushing the conversation towards incest at this point, which he does thusly:

“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.”

*Saint Thomas Aquinas*, Carlo Crivelli, 1476

In case you forgot during our long psychoanalytic detour, this passage opens with Stephen introducing Aquinas’ views on incest. Stephen gives a pretty concise paraphrase of one of Aquinas’ reasons why incest is immoral, as enumerated in the Summa Theologica:

“The third reason is, because this would hinder a man from having many friends: since through a man taking a stranger to wife, all his wife's relations are united to him by a special kind of friendship, as though they were of the same blood as himself.”

This is a take on incest I have never heard before, but I suppose things ran very high in those days. Also, to be fair, Aquinas had no knowledge of genetics. Stephen teed himself up for this particular argument a few lines prior, thinking to himself in the original Latin:

“Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos.”

This statement is taken verbatim from another Aquinas work, the Summa Contra Gentiles, and translates as “Besides. It is most necessary in human society that friendship be among many.” This comes from another passage in which Aquinas makes arguments against incestuous marriage. Stephen continues to develop his argument:

“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.”

Stephen now argues that Jews, as an insular community, intermarry the most. Christians are demonstrating a different avarice, or greed, when they tax Jews unfairly. I don’t think it is accurate to characterize intracommunity marriage as incest, but I think Stephen’s logic is that by only marrying within their community, Jews are unable to establish the larger social network that marrying outside their community might bring, and thus have fewer friendships in society at large. Because the average Christian in turn doesn’t have any Jewish friends in their network, they might develop inaccurate or bigoted ideas about Jews. This persecution strengthens Jewish communities over time, rather than weakening them. Keep in mind that this is Stephen’s response to Eglinton’s demand to “prove [Shakespeare] was a jew” after Stephen’s Shylock argument. I promise Stephen is going somewhere with this:

“Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet.”

Basically, only God can judge the sins of the Jews or anyone else, “Nobodaddy” being William Blake’s name for God and doomsday being doomsday. Blake had quite a lot to say about the character of Nobodaddy, some of which would curl Thomas Aquinas’ tonsured hair. In the poem “To Nobodaddy,” Blake called him “Father of Jealousy.” Kimball believes jealousy in this context draws a correlation with the psychoanalytic notion of incest.

As an aside, In the poem “Let the Brothels of Paris be opened,” Blake wrote:

“[Then old Nobodaddy aloft
Farted & belchd & coughd
And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering
Every bit as well as war & slaughtering
(Damn praying & singing
Unless they will bring in
The blood of ten thousand by fighting or swinging)”

By quoting both Aquinas and Blake in this passage, Stephen is openly defying Eglinton’s exasperated retort that, “You cannot eat your cake and have it.” As an aside within an aside, Eglinton is using the correct iteration of this commonly misquoted idiom. Of course, Joyce would get it just right. In another time and place, the correct use of this phrase would be one of the clues that gave away the Unabomber’s identity. I guess the lesson is to not be overly pedantic about commonly mistaken aphorisms. To round things out, let’s have a little more fun with misquotations:

“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.”

And so we come to Stephen’s point: a man like Shakespeare, who is so strict about debts, as we learned in Stephen’s Shylock argument, would also be strict about his claim to his wife. He wouldn’t abide anyone making eyes at his wife, who is his property. Stephen drives this point home by riffing on the 10th commandment, which actually reads:

“Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's.”

Naturally, Stephen adds a little Shakespearean sass to his paraphrase. “Sir Smile” is taken from a line spoken by King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale:

“And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour.”

Leontes is paranoid that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful, in other words, that some grinning bastard has been “fishing” in his wife’s “pond.” I love the subtlety of Shakespeare.

Decoding Dedalus: Saint Thomas' New Viennese School

Further Reading:

Decoding Dedalus: He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket.