Stephen, Prince of Dublin

"Scylla and Charybdis" takes place in the National Library and includes both Stephen (holding court amid a group of Dublin literati) and Bloom. What Joyce does here with the Homeric correspondence is quite remarkable. You may recall this Homeric episode: Ulysses must sail his ship safely between Scylla (a six-headed beast) and Charybdis (a huge whirlpool). Ulysses stays close to Scylla, losing six of his men, but later must return and loses his entire ship to Charybdis. Similarly, both Stephen and Bloom must navigate a "middle path" between two dangerous extremes. Recall their journeys thus far: Stephen has come to the library from the newspaper office, Bloom from lunch. Stephen must mediate between his Scylla - the crass, reductive world of newspaper reporting - and his Charybdis - the lofty, self-indulgent world of intellect and ideas (the Irish Revivalists of this chapter). In other words, Aristotle's actualities and Plato's abstractions. Bloom must mediate between his Scylla - the world of pure physicality and sensation (good ol' Buck Mulligan!) and intellect (Stephen). Notably, he passes between them upon exiting towards the end of the chapter.

Much of the chapter is dominated by Stephen's somewhat difficult "theory" with regard to Shakespeare: in short, Stephen theorizes that in playing the role of the Ghost in Hamlet, Shakespeare is speaking to both the "son of his soul" (Hamlet) and the "son of his body" (his deceased son Hamnet) about his (Shakespeare's) own wife's infidelities. Note that Odysseus, Bloom, and Shakespeare/Hamlet all go on journeys, return, and face the prospect of a wife being usurped. (If you really want to make your head spin, go ahead and throw Joyce's own biography into the mix!) For Stephen, Shakespeare - "the father of his race" (208) - is the consummate artist, both in terms of giving "birth" to literary/artistic creations (no female required!) and in merging the subjective with the objective: "He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible" (213). In other words, Shakespeare has reconciled the swirling whirlpool of inner thought and subjectivity that threatens to swallow us up (Charybdis) with the cold, hard, objective facts of the external world (Scylla).

One can't help but think that Joyce is speaking here of his own literary life as well. Like Stephen, Joyce successfully escapes the backward-looking Romanticism of the Irish Revivalists. The comment "Our national epic has yet to be written" (192) seems to imply two questions: Is Stephen the right man for the job? and Is Joyce's Ulysses that book? Finally, Stephen's great comment on Shakespeare sounds an awful lot like an assessment of Ulysses itself: "Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves" (213).

Out to Lunch

In "Lestrygonians," Joyce parallels Bloom's culinary experience with the episode of The Odyssey in which Ulysses/Odysseus parks his ship outside a harbor inhabited by giant cannibals, who proceed to attack all the ships save the hero's own and eat all of Ulysses's men except the ones on his ship. In addition to obvious food/meat correspondences in this section, to me the interesting parallel lies in both Bloom and Ulysses being men of prudence, men who choose the moderate, middle path. Ulysses's prudence causes him to refrain from sailing right into the harbor, as do the rest of his ships, while Bloom's moderation causes him to be repulsed by the cannibalistic "dirty eaters" in Burton restaurant, leaving it in favor of the "moral pub" Davy Byrne's, where he eats a semi-vegetarian meal of burgundy wine and a cheese sandwich (note also the pseudo-Eucharist here). There's a lot in this chapter about what it means to be human, including ruminations on the past versus the present ("Happy. Happier then" and "Me. And me now") and on digestion, for lack of a better term: "Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something fall see if she" (176). That is, Bloom will check the statues of gods and goddesses in the National Library courtyard to see if they have anuses! Bloom's memory of making love to Molly on p. 176 includes both food (the seed-cake that passes from her mouth to his) and defecation (the nearby goat that leaves droppings). It's a remarkable scene. Furthermore, we learn that Bloom hasn't had sex "since Rudy."

Other tidbits in this chapter worth noting include the "throw-away" flier concerning Elijah (recall the horse Throw Away, an inadvertent betting tip from Bloom to (I think) Bantam Lyons earlier); more "Who's getting it up?"; "U.P." (any ideas re: this puzzle?); mention of Mina Purefoy in the midst of a three-day delivery (we'll visit her late in the day); Bloom as God, delivering "manna" in the form of bread crumbs to the birds; and Bloom's sighting of Stephen's poor sister (we learn of the 15 impoverished Dedalus children).