In Nestor Stephen replies to his students' clamoring for "A ghoststory" by telling them to wait till the lesson is completed. He never gives them such a story, though in Scylla and Charybdis his Shakespeare talk centers on the figure of Hamlet's father's ghost. (John Eglinton says derisively, "He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory.... Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep.") The riddle that Stephen instead tells the boys releases some of the emotional energy that he connects with ghosts, by imagining himself as a fox that has buried its grandmother.

In Telemachus Stephen twice remembers being visited "in a dream" by the ghost of his dead mother, and her specter returns to terrify him at a climactic moment in Circe. He gives the boys a tiny window onto his terror by posing an unanswerable riddle, itself echoed a little earlier in Circe:

The cock crew,
The sky was blue:
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for this poor soul
To go to heaven.

Citing Joseph Prescott's "Notes on Joyce's Ulysses," MLQ 13: 142-62, Thornton notes that a remarkably close version of this riddle can be found in P. W. Joyce's English as We Speak It in Ireland:

Riddle me riddle me right:
What did I see last night?
The wind blew,
The cock crew,
The bells of heaven
Struck eleven.
Tis time for my poor sowl to go to heaven.

The answer to the traditional riddle is "The fox burying his mother under a holly tree." Stephen's version is almost identical: "The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush."

Why change the mother into a grandmother? One explanation lurks in the terrible guilt that Stephen feels about having, as Mulligan puts it, "killed your mother". By swapping relatives Stephen can both express that guilt and mask it. Later in Nestor he thinks of "A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped." In Proteus he sees a dog furiously scraping in the sand and thinks, "Something he buried there, his grandmother." The riddle releases some of Stephen's torturing guilt while disguising him as a fox and his mother as a grandmother.

This idea that Stephen is enacting a kind of psychoanalytic confession squares with other literary and cultural images of dogs digging up bodies. Citing William Schutte's Joyce and Shakespeare (1957), Thornton notes two references in John Webster's plays to wolves digging up graves, in one of which the person is a murder victim, and an old folk superstition that wolves dig up murdered bodies. But the fact that Stephen makes his mother into a grandmother and imagines a fox putting a body into the ground rather than digging it up may alert readers to an entirely different dimension of meaning. In Helen of Joyce (2022), Senan Molony suggests that Joyce is calling attention quite literally to his grandmother, Helena Joyce. By this reading, Joyce was not simply weaving another thread into his psychological portrait of himself as a young artist. He was also laying a foundation for a symbolic structure in his narrative: the notion that Blazes Boylan's invasion of the Bloom household reenacts the Greek army's assault on Troy.

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John Hunt 2024