Stephen’s Ashplant, Siegfried’s Sword
Adam Joachim Goldmann
Many characters in Ulysses feel as though they belong to other works of art. They see themselves as characters out of plays, operas and novels. Blazes Boylan, the impresario of Molly Bloom’s upcoming recital, is repeatedly identified with Don Giovanni. Leopold Bloom is often considered along with Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, which in turn implies Heine’s Wandering Jew. In his young, hyper-Romantic and not-altogether-uncharmingly-arrogant mind, Stephen Dedalus aligns himself with Hamlet. He devises a grand theory of Hamlet and tries to make sense of his life alongside the sad prince of Elsinore; however, the greatest way in which he parallels the melancholy dame is in his near-complete paralysis. The other figure with which we see Stephen most prevalently aligned is the tragic hero of Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle, Siegfried. To be certain, the identification with Siegfried is far less overt than with Hamlet, a fact which may often lead the reader to suspect that this is more Joyce’s imposition than Stephen’s actual belief.
In the following paper, I will examine the parallels between Wagner’s Siegfried and Joyce’s Stephen and the possible implications of a conflation of these two personages. The text of Ulysses provides numerous allusions to the Wagner’s operatic tetralogy, Ring Cycle. These references can be either strikingly overt or bafflingly vague; and Joyce’s skillful deployment of them proves helpful in tracing the Siegfried-Stephen parallel throughout the novel. Additionally, I will turn a critical eye to those places in Ulysses (as well as certain passages in Portrait of the Artist) where the identification – or overlaying of character – seems presaged or connected in a meaningful way.
One place I will spend a fair amount of time examining is the climactic bordello scene in Chapter 15 where Stephen breaks Bella / Bello Cohen’s chandelier by lashing out with walking at his mother’s ghost. As Stephen brandishes his walking stick, he cries out “Nothung!” The word is a false cognate for the English “nothing,” German for “needy” and the name of Siegfried’s sword. Appearing at the center of the book, there can be little doubt as to the importance of this allusion. Yet the lack of critical attention to this perplexing yet highly climatic moment is striking. It is easy and fair enough to see the outcry as yet another in a series of Joyce’s never-ending allusions. But I will argue that the moment represents the culmination of a systematic strategy of identification between Stephen and Siegfried, one that has far-reaching implications for the book as a whole. For while in a book as multi-faceted and at-times obscure as this, it is tempting merely to acknowledge the allusion and move on casually; to do so, however, would be to miss something key to the character of Stephen as well as an essential component of Joyce’s intent.
Before we ruminate about the value of the Stephen qua Siegfried identification, it appears to be prudent to give a basic character sketch of Siegfried and his place in Wagner’s epic. Standing firmly at the center of the third day of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Siegfried’s eponymous hero is the bastard offspring of the sister-brother coupling of Sieglinde and Siegmund, the half-human children of the God Wotan. Known as the Walsungs, they are kin to the God and favored by him, even though they eventually will bring about the Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung). Siegfried is raised by an evil dwarf named Mime, whose only motive for showing the orphan kindness is the knowledge that he will grow up one day to steal back the Ring from the dragon Fafner. For only one such as Siegfried who has never known fear can slay the dreaded beast that keeps guard over the ring of the Nibelungen. In the first act of Siegfried, the young, ardent, tempestuous youth who has never known fear finds the splintered shards of his father’s sword, Nothung, which was destroyed by Wotan’s shield (in Act II of Die Walküre). All the other swords that Mime forges for him are inadequate to his purpose and Siegfried asks for a sword that he cannot break. Mime is unable to forge Nothung from the fragments, but Siegfried forges the sword anew and goes forward to slay Fafner and win the gold for himself.
On a path, Siegfried encounters Wotan in the guise of a Wanderer. They cross blades, but Nothung destroys the God’s spear. The Götterdämmerung has begun. At opera’s end, Siegfried awakes the Walkure Brünnhilde (who rescued his pregnant mother from Wotan’s wrath) from atop the mountain where she’s spent decades in a deep sleep. We’ll stop our summary here; suffice it so say that – despite the rosy ending of Siegfried - things end very badly for Siegfried and Brünnhilde and all the Gods in Valhalla.
James Joyce was himself an avid opera buff and even considered a career as a tenor. His love of music comes across in both the rich musicality of his prose and his constant alluding to composers and their work. But no other figure in the history of music fascinated Joyce quite so as much as Richard Wagner. Even a cursory glance at any concordance of Joyce’s work shows the homage he pays the great German composer with the author’s incessant – almost compulsive - allusions. But on a deeper level, this love is manifest in Joyce’s unique style, technique and purpose.
Through his artistic output and his voluminous critical writings, Richard Wagner practically invented the notion of the “Artistic Genius” whose distinctive oeuvre bears the stamp of an inimitable artistic personality; a personality who defines both his generation and his culture. The dark underbelly of this artistic revolution was the creation of “the cult of the artist” and the slave-like worship that so stroked Wagner’s hyper-inflated ego. Along every post-Wagnerian artist, Joyce strove to create a unique artistic identity through his literary output: despite the extreme formal and stylistic differences between Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses, Joyce is forever treating the same themes. Indeed, many episodes in Ulysses bear a striking resemblance instances in Portrait. In this conscious striving for artistic integrity, we find a portion of Joyce’s debt to Wagner. Unlike Wagner, however, Joyce was not an artist who strove to attain, or even expected, a mass following.
Wagner’s artistic project was an intellectual and national attempt to merge high culture with popular beliefs. He incorporated Norse myths and German legends into his operas in order to achieve both artistic and propagandistic goals. Wagner saw himself as a messianic figure come to redeem both the impoverished state of German art and culture, and, more generally, the state of European music (which had fallen into the hands of Judaic composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer). While Joyce is certainly more subtly about advancing any national agenda through his work, there can be no doubt that he too sees his literature as playing some vital role in reinvigorating both Irish culture and the state of world literature as a whole.
Wagner’s antidote to the general decline of musical and artistic standards was his formulation of the Gesamtkunstwerk, “total artwork,” a total, all encompassing operatic experience wherein drama is no longer subordinate to music. Wagner’s main complaint against opera of his day was that composers ignored the dramatic content, delivering rather a string of pleasant yet frivolous tunes in place of one coherent piece of music. Wagner sought to elevate drama to the level it had enjoyed in Greek Tragedy, by fully integrating it with music. His response to previous operatic traditions (opera buffa, bel canto, grand opera) was a network of interweaving musical themes, which later came to be known as “Leitmotifs” (Wagner himself disapproved of the term). Wagner tagged both the characters and thematic material or his operas with short melodic phrases - at times, no more than a couple of notes – that repeat over and over either in isolation or along with other leitmotivs. The leimotivic structure of Wagner’s operas enabled his music to break the boundaries of traditional opera (with its aria-recitative-aria form) and become gloriously integral songs lasting upwards of six hours. These themes are fairly easy to identify when encountered alone, but harder to spot amidst densely orchestrated material or in tandem with other themes. At times, a given leitmotif may only be present in one melody-line (say, the violins): Wagner’s brilliant integration of his thematic material can at times make it difficult to analyze his work.
Through his dense web of recurring images, themes and allusions, Joyce is inventive enough to apply the Wagnerian leitmotif to literature. Many objects and references come with intense symbolic weight attached. The leitmotifs of Ulysses are as broad as Don Giovanni or Hamlet or as specific as Bloom’s potato or Stephen’s ashplant. They function in much the same way as Wagner’s melody-fragments, alerting us to the import of certain tropes and providing a means for us to keep a track of them as they float around in Joyce’s radically original prose.
Joyce’s narrative inventiveness is systematic of modernity’s attempt to synthesize it’s artistic inheritance from the 19th century and extending backwards and to expand upon the innovations of the various artistic schools of romanticism, naturalism, impressionism and symbolism, among others. Richard Wagner’s construction of the Gesamstkunstwerk (which he called the Art of the Future) forever changed the face of music and his opera Tristan und Isolde opened the door for the radical modernist experiments of Stravisnsky and Schoenberg. The so-called “Tristan Chord,” the four-note figure that opens that opera, cannot be technically classed as a chord; the notes that comprise it (F, B, D# and G#) together sound like a chord, whereas in reality they can’t be considered one. With the “Tristan Chord” Wagner instigated the reevaluation of tonal harmony that would reach its apogee in the 12-tone system of Arnold Schönberg. Quite unwittingly, Wagner opened a Pandora’s box of musical experimentation that would attack the very fundamentals of Western Music.
In his wildly complex and original prose, Joyce is engaged in a similarly revolutionary act of changing the face of literature by assimilating all the literary traditions of the past and stretching the written word to its logical extreme. Among Joyce’s strategies is the integration of other artistic genres and media into his prose. Thus music notation, verse and a one-act play invade the novel as if one genre alone cannot capture all that Joyce wants to communicate. We find in this a similarity with Wagner, whose unique combination of drama, music and theatrical spectacle make his the first ever multi-media artist. Wagner relied on a host of techniques designed to enthrall the audience entirely, forcing them to concentrate on the completed opera. While the more dictatorial of Wagner’s innovations have been discarded, many of the procedures he introduced - such as dimming the house lights and banning all interruption to the opera, such as eating and talking - have since become common practice. Analogous to this, Joyce relies on a host of techniques devised to force the reader to concentrate by working with the text and struggling to figure it out and extract meaning.
Joyce also aims to mimic and subvert Wagner’s project of building up a national epic. Many examples of the epic form are held up either to be exalted or lampooned or both. In the case of the Ring Cycle and its source material the Norse mythology of the Nibelungenlied, what Joyce seems to be going for mostly is parody.
The role of Siegfried is sung by a heldentenor, and he is meant as the embodiment of Wagner’s Teutonic ideal. He is the ultimate tragic hero of Wagner’s intricate and epic racial mythology. By aligning Stephen and Siegfried, Joyce is engaged in a very wry attack on Wagnerian notions of nationalism and racial supremacy. As the aspiring author of the Irish national epic, Stephen is one of two outsider characters who stand firmly at its center.
The extent to which Stephen can be said to resemble Siegfried is primarily in his naiveté and lack of experience. By suggesting that Stephen will be to Ulysses (the great Irish epic) what Siegfried is to the Ring (the great Germanic epic), Joyce is dealing Wagnerian mythology a striking blow.
Throughout Ulysses, Joyce seems to invite the reader to dislike Stephen. Stephen is arrogant, self-absorbed and unable to relate to those who show him kindness, including Bloom himself. It is important to bear in mind that the action of Ulysses takes place shortly after we last saw Stephen at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen has been away from home living in Paris for a little over a year when he is summoned back by his dying mother. Though the various interactions Stephen has throughout the course of the day, we come to understand that he’s essentially the same ambitious yet arrogant aspiring-artist who so boldly proclaimed at the end of A Portrait: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (p. 197).
I’d like to suggest this passage as a key point in the text where Joyce initiates a strand in Stephen’s thought that will be prevalent throughout Ulysses. The fire imagery of the smithy and or forging brings to mind Wagner’s tragic hero struggling to weld together the fragments of his father’s broken sword. It’s almost as if Joyce, as early on as at the end of Portrait is already laying the groundwork for the eventual understanding the Stephen of Ulysses by deploying overtly Wagnerian language. Furthermore, it’s not implausible that the young Stephen of Portrait would have familiarity with Wagner, especially being the young aesthete that he is. Joyce is giving us a clue into the nature of his protagonist.
When we get to Ulysses, we see Stephen struggling to deal with the recent death of his mother. His hyper-romantic Weltanschauung allows him to imagine himself as any number of historical and fictional characters, most obviously Hamlet. Stephen’s affinity for this vicarious association is mirrored by the fact that he is disguised throughout the day. His hat is a “Latin quarter” hat, that doesn’t seem to really suit him. His boots belong to Mulligan. And his sole accoutrement, a walking stick is referred to only as an “ashplant.” It is this walking stick which will magically transform – even if only temporarily – into Siegfried’s indestructible sword, Nothung. Joyce sets up for this eventual transformation by ascribing the walking stick with sword-like characteristics.
It is important to ponder a moment the importance of making Stephen’s walking stick out of the ashplant. As it happens, the ashtree occupies a central position In Norse mythology. The centrality and cosmic significance of the ashtree in Norse mythology is a topic that would merit a paper of its own. Suffice it to say that it serves a grand metaphysical purpose of connecting the various worlds of Norse mythology. The ashplant naturally feeds into many of the currents present in Wagner’s retelling of the Nibelungenlied; Wagner even inserts an ash-tree - “Welt-Esch” – theme into Das Rheingold to describe Wotan’s spear.
Stephen’s ashplant comes up time and again in the text and it would be untenable to provide the reader with an exhaustive list of all the allusions. What follows are some of the salient, meaningful places where Stephen’s ashplant is thought to become a sword. The first of these takes the form of a seemingly meaningless aside in the conversation between Mr. Deasy and Stephen. The reference to the Ring and to Wagner is ever more evident when one considers the parallel to Act 3 / Scene 2 of Siegfried, wherein Siegfried breaks Wotan’s spear. “I like to break a lance with you, old as I am” (2.424). This can be considered a moment where the characters seem forced into an epic that they can’t quite fathom. If Mr. Deasy is simply aware of the fact that he’s unaware that he’s in an epic makes an allusion that is lost on Stephen. He just doesn’t get it.
By following Stephen’s ashplant around with him, we see that it often becomes a sword-like object for an utterly inert and paralyzed (a la Hamlet) young man, as in “My ash sword hands at my side” (3.16), “He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly” (3.489), “Stephen looked down on…his ashplanthandle over his knee…my sword” (9.295-6). And “Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots. Stephanos, my crown. My sword” (9.946-7). In the final of these citations, Stephen’s imagination transforms his “Latin Quarter” hat and his walking stick into the accoutrements of Hamlet and Siegfried respectively.
The evolution of walking stick qua sword and Stephen qua Siegfried comes to a head in the Circe episode. In the nightmarish world of Ulysses’ 15th chapter, amidst all the enchantment, delusion and drunkenness, the walking stick momentarily becomes Siegfried’s indestructible sword, Nothung. Stephen’s invocation is not merely another allusion for the reader to put into his cap. Rather, the conflation of these two heroes serves to aid us in how we ought to understand Stephen in the throes of this climactic scene.
Here, in Nighttown where everything is possible including magical transformations, the identification of Stephen with Siegfried is complete and betrays to our hero the hubris and absurdity of the stature he’s given himself in his mind. For any number of reasons, it is telling that Joyce sets the scene as a play. One would like to think that he had Wagner - who calls theater “the epitome of the arts of representing” in his essay “The Music of the Future” – in mind.
In this pivotal scene, the connection with Siegfried extends past the identity of his walking stick. We first see the ashplant early on when Stephen “flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light all over the world.” Here, Stephen recalls no one as much as Siegfried sampling all the swords that Mime forges for him, but which ultimately prove inadequate. The aforementioned stage-description also brings to mind an argument between Stephen and MacCann in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword?” (p. 197). Here, we see Stephen asserting the superiority of his weapon over those of his opponents. The metaphor chosen shows us the extent to which Stephen has constructed a fantastical model in his mind. The retort MacCann gives cannot do much but bring him back to reality: “Metaphors! Come to facts!”
Back to the Circe episode, Lynch alludes to Siegfried when he calls Stephen, “the youth who could not shiver and shake” (15.3660). What makes Siegfried the pure hero who is able to slay Fafner and claim the ring for himself is precisely that he hasn’t known fear. Coming as it does during this moment of palmary, Lynch’s comment serves as dire prologue to Zoe’s proposed sorcery. While Siegfried is ignorant of fear (and also love), Stephen is deeply ignorant of the real world and blind to the degree of his own self-absorption. Thus, the implication of lacking works in the case of Stephen. Or perhaps, the reference to Siegfried is here to underscore just how far Stephen actually is from reaching that Teutonic ideal. He would like to be able to live free from fear, free from guilt. Yet, when his mother’s ghost appears before him, he cannot simply attack as Siegfried attacks Fafner. We get a sense of Stephen’s deep-seated instability and needfulness. Stephen so wishes he could conquer his fear and guilt and sense of having betrayed his mother as easily as Siegfried, now so blessedly free of bad conscience. Yet he is unable. This handicap is what ultimately makes him realize the dead-end nature of the hyper-romantic view in which he equates himself with Siegfried. He goes to the ghost to seek enlightenment and puts it to her the word known to all men. The answer remains unspoken and Stephen unenlightened. In his ignorance he charges at the ghost; “Nothung! (He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier)” (15:4242).
By the time Stephen hallucinates his mother he is intoxicated. There is a question of whether or not he is actually bewtitched. Here too, Joyce subtly plants a suggestion of identification between Stephen and the destructive Siegfried of Götterdämmerung who inadvertently brings about his own death and the twilight of the gods. In the heat of the moment, Stephen raises his walking stick and smashes Bella Cohen’s chandelier. Whether or not this is an intentional or an accidental action, Stephen seems to want to be in control of the situation any way he can. His preference would be to imitate the Wagnerian model. It’s possible he thinks he’s slaying his own dragons, his mother, his upbringing, his past; but inadvertently he brings about the twilight of the gods, at least symbolically. In the direct aftermath, we are told in stage directions: “Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (15: 4244). The scene described seems nothing less than complete and utter Armageddon-like annihilation. Yet the only thing that’s really coming to an end is June 16, 1904.
The Siegfried motif of Ulysses also proves useful and fertile in analyzing Stephen’s relationship with Bloom. Calling Stephen a Walsung makes him a demigod or at least of some sort of divinely privileged lineage. This can be twisted either way when it comes to interpreting how Bloom might fit into all this. The type of paternity that Bloom harbors for Stephen is a complicated issue. For sure, the connection is strengthened and reinforced by Stephen being the age of Bloom’s dead son Rudy, had Rudy not died. But the question of paternity is complicated, as it is in the case of Siegfried (at least on the surface). He is the spawn of an incestuous yet divinely sanctioned union, which links him to Wotan. He is also the adoptive son of Mime, the evil dwarf who is among Wagner’s most virulently anti-Semitic caricatures. Bloom is thus – at least temporarily – aligned with both the stereotypical, seething, conniving Jew who plots Stephen’s ruin or the great hero Siegmund, son of the god Wotan. Bloom is, of course, neither, yet Joyce suggests these identifications by the force of their Jewish association. (Joyce would not be the first to draw a parallel between the Volsungs of Wagner and German Mythology and the Jews. Thomas Mann did this somewhat more provocatively and overtly in his short story “Blood of the Volsungs”).
Of all the characters in the novel, Bloom comes closest to naming Siegfried. In chapter 12, we find Bloom thinking about Siegfried earlier in the Cyclops episode. In the midst of a long and puzzling list, the narrator imputes the thought to Bloom: “Kriegfried Ueberallgemein” (12.569). The German term is roughly cognate with Siegfried. The suggestion that Siegfried might – even in the most unconscious way possibly – be on Bloom’s mind adds to the general feel that a meeting between the two is preordained.
Bloom shows himself to be musically inclined towards Mozart and Meyerbeer. But the atmosphere of Nighttown has the effect of fomenting an affinity between Bloom and Stephen. For the first time in the novel, we find Bloom making a Wagnerian proclamation: “That’s the music of the future. That’s my programme” (15.1368). I suggest we see this sudden, almost impulsive admiration of Wagner as a clue into an almost preternatural attraction of Bloom to Stephen. It’s as if, in claiming Wagner’s ambitions for his own, were in some crude sense claiming some sort of ownership over Stephen.
After the disastrous climax inside the brothel Stephen surrenders his walking stick to Bloom, in whose hands the magical sword resumes is mundane identity as a walking stick. In the first line of Chapter 16 Bloom unceremoniously returns the walking stick to Stephen. By this point, Stephen seems sufficiently shaken by recent events to reevaluate his worth and character as measured against personages like Hamlet and Siegfried. The matter-of-fact way he has of reclaiming his walking stick indicates that Stephen may have relinquished, at least temporarily, his imaginative hubris and come to a sort of honesty about himself.
Though, initially in Chapter 16, the relationship between Stephen and Bloom seems to grow stronger we eventually witness the series of misunderstandings that occur later that same chapter. This lack of communication is reinforced through Bloom’s revised thoughts on Wagner’s music. “Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first go-off” (16.1735-7). This admission seems almost like reevaluation in light of Stephen’s increasing opaqueness. In other words, while pretending to assess Wagner’s music, Bloom is really scrutinizing Stephen.
An analysis of the overlay of Stephen Dedalus and Wagner’s tragic hero Siegfried bears particularly ripe fruit for understanding the infinitely clever and intricate text of Ulysses. Joyce uses the conflation between Stephen and Siegfried to subvert epic and genre conventions. Furthermore, Stephen qua Siegfried adds depth to our understanding of Stephen and his limitations. The identification with Siegfried, present in a latent sense, is only realized ultimately amidst the transformative power of Theater that the characters experience in Nighttown in the Circe chapter. When Stephen cries out “Nothung” to banish his mother’s ghost, he conjures the two acts of violence Siegfried performs with his father’s sword; the slaying of Fafner and the breaking of Wotan’s spear. Symbolically, this brings about Götterdämmerung. Yet, the only twilight it signals is the twilight of Tuesday, June 16, 1904. This is a false epiphany, a hallucination, brought about either by magic or intoxication (possibly both). In this regard, Stephen is similar to Siegfried, who will under an enchantment bring about his own demise in Götterdämmerung. Finally, understanding Stephen as Siegfried also adds an extra dimension to the father-son relationship of Bloom and Stephen.
It is the challenge of the attentive student of this work to probe the manifold allusions and themes therein for what they will yield. If in examining this particular aspect of a relationship more hinted at and intimated than declared outright I have contributed in a small measure to the decoding of the text, then I will have succeeded in my task.
