Fargnoli & Gillespie, A Critical Companion to James Joyce (NY: 2006)

Source: “Scylla and Charybdis” [, in A. Nicolas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie, A Critical Companion to James Joyce: A Literary Reference to His and Work (NY: Facts on File 2006) [rev. edn. of The Essential Reference to His Life and Work, 1995].

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This is the ninth episode of Ulysses, and the sixth of the Wanderings of Ulysses section. An early version of the chapter appeared in serialization in the April and May 1919 issues of the LITTLE REVIEW.
According to the SCHEMA (see Ulysses schema in the appendix on page 392) that Joyce loaned to Valéry LARBAUD, the scene of the episode is the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF IRELAND. The time at which the action begins is 2 p.m. The organ of the chapter is the brain. The art of the chapter is literature. The episode’s symbols are Stratford and London, the two locations associated with Shakespeare. Its technic is dialectic.
The chapter derives its name from the dual perils, described by the enchantress Circe in book 12 of The Odyssey—the six-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. In choosing to avoid the more unpredictable and far more dangerous hazard, the Wandering Rocks, Odysseus confronts instead [184] the twin challenges of Scylla and Charybdis between which Odysseus must navigate after leaving Circe’s island. The challenge involves more than overcoming danger. It forces Odysseus to make a life-and-death decision regarding his crew. Rather than risk the possible loss of the entire ship by sailing near the whirlpool, Charybdis, he elects to sail close to the lair of the ferocious Scylla, although in doing so Odysseus intentionally sacrifices six of his crew whom the six-headed monster will seize and devour.
The Scylla and Charybdis episode in Ulysses itself emphasizes the need to make choices and the inevitability of having to skirt danger in order to succeed, though these are of an intellectual rather than a physical nature. The chapter takes place in the office of the director of the National Library of Ireland. There Stephen Dedalus presents his theory of the creative forces in the work of William SHAKESPEARE to a small (and sometimes hostile) group of Dublin intelligentsia, made up at various times of Thomas Lyster, the chief librarian; Richard Best, another librarian; John Eglinton (William MAGEE), an assistant librarian; the writer and editor George RUSSELL (AE); and Buck Mulligan.
The narrative is organized around Stephen’s presentation of his Shakespeare theory, previously mentioned to Mulligan’s English friend, Haines, in the Telemachus episode (chapter 1). Stephen’s talk seems to be a desperate attempt to impress these men with his erudition and perhaps to show them the mistake that was made when he was not invited to the literary evening scheduled to take place that night at the home of George MOORE. This drive for recognition becomes most evident with the appearance of Buck Mulligan, who attempts to command attention with an improvised comic performance. Within a short time, a thinly veiled competition for the approbation of their shared audience emerges between the two young men. Despite these efforts, however, the episode ends with little apparent change in the attitude of either Russell or Eglinton and with the rivalry of Stephen and Mulligan lurching forward under the ambiguous cover of a dubious friendship.
Like the opening of the novel, the chapter begins in an epic mode, in medias res, with Stephenholding forth in front of Lyster, Best, Eglinton, and Russell. From the start of the episode, it is clear that Stephen’s views already have begun to provoke the animosity of Eglinton and Russell, both of whom respond to Stephen’s remarks by pontificating about the nature of Irish art. Stephen can bear their highly critical commentaries with equanimity only by carrying on an internal, unvoiced dialectic that pointedly rebuts and rebukes their assessments. Stephen’s mind rages at the rapid succession of slights and insults offered by Russell and Eglinton, and his intellect conjures up a number of equally tart rejoinders. At the same time, he is fully aware of the power they exert within local intellectual circles, so he holds his anger in check and keeps his thoughts to himself. Instead of lashing out, he replies to their derision with studied politeness while determinedly endeavoring to turn the discussion back to his theory on the nature of Shakespeare’s creativity and to its consequent effect upon Shakespeare’s process of composition.
Stephen’s disquisition, in fact, shows more scholarship than creativity. It is a mix of ideas liberally drawn from a number of well-known Shakespearean critics of the day—most notably George Brandes, Frank Harris, and Sidney Lee, whose work Joyce consulted while composing the chapter. The resultant conglomeration of ideas, suppositions, and facts forms not so much a lucid argument as an occasion for the display of Stephen’s wide-ranging knowledge of diverse details of Shakespeare’s life and work.
Stephen’s talk moves widely and freely around accurate and apocryphal biographical details that serve as the foundation for broad, far-reaching metaphors of conception, birth, and paternity. On the surface these allusions convey Stephen’s scholarly erudition, but they also betray his own profound insecurity when forced to confront issues like the sources of artistic creation and the extent of an artist’s imaginative debt to his predecessors. Stephen’s relentless focus upon intellectual independence, his near-obsessive concern with artistic influences, and even his passing reference to Christian heresies on the Trinity all relate to his desire to establish himself as an independent artistic force.
Despite the intensity of Stephen’s feelings and the intellectual dexterity of his argument, however, [185] the response from his audience is at best mixed. Russell seems openly hostile to Stephen’s approach, and he does not hesitate to voice his broad dissatisfaction with Stephen’s methods of interpretation. In a more punctilious though no less disruptive fashion, Eglinton objects to Stephen’s treatment of diverse literary and biographical details that emerge during the talk, repeatedly interrupting Stephen’s exposition to carp about various points in an aggressively querulous tone.
Stephen, though his mind is raging at these insults, maintains a polite façade. Nonetheless, his disquisition has no more than minimal impact upon his audience. While Best and Lyster remain polite, if somewhat distracted, Russell abruptly decides that he has heard enough and rudely gets up to leave. Stephen continues his presentation despite Eglinton’s sniping, but the force clearly seems to have gone out of the young man’s argument. When Mulligan abruptly enters the director’s office, however, Stephen’s tone changes markedly.
Mulligan’s irreverence punctures the solemnity that has stifled the discourse up to this point. His bawdy humor counters the sententiousness of Eglinton and challenges Stephen to work that much harder to hold the attention of the audience. As the conversation continues, both Stephen’s and Buck’s roles as performers become quite clear, as does their competition for their listeners’ approval.
In the end, however, the efforts of both prove fruitless. The humorless Eglinton is unmoved by Mulligan’s buffoonery and at the same time is unwilling to disregard his resentment of Stephen to take a comprehensive view of the argument. When the talk is finished, Eglinton pointedly asks Stephen if he believes his own theories. Stephen, at this point no longer disposed to restrain himself, provocatively answers no. Eglinton takes the reply at face value—rather than as an acknowledgment of the subjectivity of all criticism and all art. As a result, with a pronounced measure of satisfaction, he dismisses all that Stephen has said.
As Buck and Stephen are leaving the library, the mercurial Mulligan once again shifts his ground to play a double role. In a vulgar poem, he mocks Eglinton’s solemnity and speculates on his inclination toward masturbation. Continuing that theme, heexpresses his desire to write a play entitled “Everyman His Own Wife, or A Honeymoon in the Hand”. With an abrupt shift in tone, he then voices his admiration of Stephen for standing his ground against the pompous Dublin literati even as he chides his friend for his lack of delicacy. Mulligan pragmatically advises Stephen to mix a greater measure of diplomacy into his artistic demeanor: “Couldn’t you do the Yeats touch?” (U 9.1160–1161). In a final mercurial twist, when Bloom and Mulligan pass on the portico of the library, the latter cannot resist anti-Semitism and calculated crudeness. “The wandering jew ... O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad” (U 9.1209–1212).
Over the course of this chapter, Joyce has gone to great pains to integrate the formal and contextual features of the struggle among Stephen, Russell, and Eglinton, into a skillfully arranged dramatic framework. A series of literary puns and dramatic allusions give a structure to the Scylla and Charybdis episode that both reinforces its Shakespearean topic and also reminds readers of its own dialectical process. Stephen’s unvoiced concerns about his own creative potential, about his guilt over his mother’s death, and about his uneasy relations with his father mirror the concerns he articulates about Shakespeare’s life and creative methods and about his own artistic reputation.
The chapter also highlights another theme that has been running through the narrative: Stephen’s pressing need to gain the esteem of his fellow Dubliners. With “A PISGAH SIGHT OF PALESTINE, OR THE PARABLE OF THE PLUMS,” the story that he relates to Myles Crawford and Professor Hugh MacHugh in the offices of the Freeman’s JOURNAL during the Aeolus episode (chapter 7), we begin to see evidence in Stephen of the urge to perform and to be taken seriously. His holding forth on Shakespeare is another manifestation of that drive, and in the Oxen of the Sun episode (chapter 14) and the Circe episode (chapter 15), he will again attempt to gain public recognition. (In these latter instances, however, his drunkenness makes his efforts more laughable than anything else.)
For further details relating to the Scylla and Charybdis episode, see Letters, II.38n.1, 108n.1, 110, 436, and 448n.2, and III.73.184-86

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