Stephen Dedalus’s Anti-Semitic Ballad: A Sabotaged Climax in “Ithaca”

Abstract

What is the narrative climax of the meeting of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in the closing chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses? It depends, perhaps, on the definition of “narrative climax.” Gerald Prince’s Dictionary of Narratology calls it “[t]he point of greatest tension; the culminating point in a progressive intensification” (14), but Wayne Booth cautions us that a narrative climax may not always be self-evident. To the question of “How can an author achieve dramatic intensity?” he adds the question: “How can an author make sure that his most important dramatic moments will be heightened rather than obscured by their surroundings?” (64).¹ This is, of course, the difficulty in Joyce’s “Ithaca” chapter, where the rhetoric of catechism frequently obscures rather than elucidates what is going on between Bloom and Stephen. And perhaps this obfuscation muddies and even conceals the moment one could arguably posit as a climax in Ulysses: Stephen Dedalus singing an anti-Semitic ballad to Leopold Bloom in the kitchen of his host. The ballad of “Little Harry Hughes”—based on the legend of the ritual murder of “little” Hugh of Lincoln—tells of a Jew’s daughter who punishes a little boy that broke her home’s window by inviting him into the house and cutting off his head with a penknife. The delivery of this song is excruciatingly problematic on so many counts that it requires considerable discussion to lay them out before its significance can be fully assessed.