One of Joyce's brain-twisters in Ithaca—"He thought
that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew
that he knew that he was not"—was clearly inspired by one of
Dante's ingenious linguistic constructions in the Divine
Comedy. Joyce pays the poet some exquisitely imitative
homage by adapting to the conversation of Bloom and Stephen a
line that Dante utters about Virgil in canto 13 of the Inferno,
"Cred'io ch'ei credette ch'io credesse."
In the circle of the violent Dante hears cries coming from a
thicket of leafless thorn bushes because people who have
committed suicide have been transformed into those plants.
Instead of telling him what is going on, Virgil challenges
Dante to use his eyes to see where the voices are coming from:
"Look well— / you will see things that, in my telling, / would
seem to strip my words of truth" (19-21). Thus commanded to
discover the truth for himself, Dante does the opposite. He
gauges his surmises against what he imagines to be his
master's surmises about them: "I think he thought that I
thought / all these voices in among the branches / came
from people hiding there" (25-27). We are not told that Dante
in fact thought people were hiding behind the bushes, or that
Virgil thought that he thought it, but both things must be
true because the narrative shows Virgil immediately reclaiming
the initiative: "And so the master said: 'If you break off / a
twig among these brambles, / your present thoughts will be cut
short" (28-30). Virgil does not merely think that
Dante thinks people are hiding among the thorn bushes, it
seems. He knows it.
Joyce inventively repurposes this exchange:
Did either openly allude to
their racial difference?
Neither.
What, reduced to their simplest
reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's
thoughts about Bloom and Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's
thoughts about Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?
He thought that he
thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that
he knew that he was not.
All of Dublin thinks of Bloom as Jewish, but the subject has not
yet come up in Bloom's kitchen, and in
Eumaeus he has
told Stephen that "
in reality I'm
not," presumably because his mother Ellen Higgins was an
Irish Catholic. So it makes sense for the narrative to refer
only to Bloom's thoughts about Stephen's thoughts. As in Dante's
text, however, the focus shifts to knowing: everyone knows that
Stephen is an Irish Catholic, so Bloom knows that Stephen knows
that he knows it.
Were the final two words of the question ("about Stephen")
omitted, a reader would be encouraged to explore a still more
subtle cogitation, inferring that what the two men know is
that Bloom is not a Jew (because they both remember the
conversation in the cabman's shelter). If Joyce had written
the passage in this way it might have become even more
evocative of Virgil and Dante in Inferno 13, with
Bloom possessing some awareness about his ethnicity that
Stephen is only beginning to fathom. But the maniacal logical
proliferation of this passage is no doubt already complex
enough for most readers!
