Like Sindbad the Sailor, which figures prominently in
Ulysses, Turko the Terrible, or, The Fairy Roses
was a Christmas pantomime. Thornton notes that its first
Dublin performance was in 1873, initiating a long line of
pantomimes staged at the Gaiety
Theatre. He quotes from an 1899 review in The Irish
Playgoer that judged King Turko's ode to invisibility
the most successful song in the show, and he observes that in
Surface and Symbol Robert M. Adams suggests that the
show Joyce had in mind was not Turko itself, but an
1892 performance of Sindbad which reprised this one
highly popular song. The music survives, and in 2010 it was
given a spirited rendition in a café theater presentation of
Joyce’s songs in Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street. The artists,
Sinead Murphy and Darina Gallagher, bill themselves as the
Shannon Colleens.
These three lines of light verse may possibly spark some
serious thoughts in Stephen. Just after reciting them in
memory, he thinks of his mother "Folded away in the memory of
nature," a reference to the theosophical idea of a universal memory of all
events in the history of the cosmos, encoded on the spiritual
plane that a person enters after death. Since his mother has
entered that hidden dimension of existence, and is now
perfectly recalling all the events of her life, not to mention
those of all other lives, she might very well say, "I am the
girl that can enjoy invisibility."
Stephen may also be thinking about invisibility and perfect
mental possession in relation to himself. In part 5 of A
Portrait of the Artist, he described three
hierarchically ranked kinds of literary art: the lyric, the
epic, and the dramatic. The “dramatic” artist exceeds the
powers of the others because he transcends his own subjective
position, submerging authorial consciousness in the
presentation of how life is experienced by other people. This
transcendence of ego makes the dramatist comparable to God:
“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or
behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined
out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails.”
Stephen has thus far found no such sublime
self-effacement. But by characterizing it as divinely
creative he has given himself a goal to aim for, and the goal
remains the same in Ulysses. In Scylla and
Charybdis, he maps the figure of the self-effacing
artistic god onto the dramatic artist par excellence,
William Shakespeare, who in writing his plays (particularly Hamlet)
became “a ghost, a shadow now, the wind in Elsinore’s rocks or
what you will, the seas’ voice.” In Circe, as
Stephen and Bloom gaze into a mirror, “The face of William
Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial
paralysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer
antlered hatrack in the hall.” To Bloom, whose
cuckoldry the antlers reflect, the bard speaks: “Thou
thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible.”
The man in the macintosh who mysteriously appears in Hades,
and just as suddenly disappears, seems to share in this
uncanny power: "Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well
of all the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become
invisible. Good Lord, what became of him?"
