Scylla and Charybdis

Scylla and Charybdis is one of the two central episodes of Ulysses in terms of chapter count, and it is also one of the most heady and difficult parts of the novel. It is a "Stephen episode," and so instead of Bloom's wandering but down-to-earth stream of consciousness we are chasing Stephen's cryptic trains of thought. In the past this seemed to me an unwelcome digression from our travels with Bloom, but now I come to it with a new understanding. As I said earlier, Ulysses is not solely about Bloom; in fact, one could make the case that it is more a continuation of the semiautobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but a kind of prismatic split-image autobiography, because Joyce 's life was passing faster than he could record it, and so we have young and old together in the same fictional moment, Stephen and Bloom.

It is exactly this world of multiple identities and comingling of fact and fiction that is the theme of Scylla and Charybdis. It is like a dazzling nexus where different strands come together and different layers are superimposed upon each other. Stephen is in the National Library discussing Shakespeare with A. E. and John Eglinton, two contemporary Irish literary figures; he argues that Shakespeare wrote himself into Hamlet as the ghost of the king, and that he identified himself with that role because Ann Hathaway had been an adulterous wife. This father-son-unfaithful wife triad in Hamlet echoes the triads of Bloom-Molly-Stephen and Odysseus-Telemachus-Penelope (though Penelope was not unfaithful, even if she was besieged), and also perhaps God-Christ-Holy Ghost. Other father-son relationships are touched on in the course of the literary discussion: Plato and Aristotle, and author and creation.

Far from being a digression, this episode focuses on one of the central concepts of the entire work, which is that each individual is all things at once. In his fatherhood Bloom shares a kind of spiritual unity with all fathers throughout the ages, from Odysseus to God himself.

When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson, who by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Later:

Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are [...] is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

Note that there is a nascent postmodern tone here as well, for of course Joyce is thinking of his own paternity in authorship, and so all at once he is Stephen, Bloom, and the father of Stephen and Bloom...and so in this way he is father to himself, even while Stephen is father to Joyce in the way that the child is father to the man.

Over and over we see the motif of father, son, and unfaithful wife. They are like a musical triad that ring through a symphony, slightly altered and in different keys, but always recognizable.

Unfortunately for the reader, the episode is a very difficult one. It is full of puns, euphemisms, innuendos, ellipses, hintings, references and every way of saying something without coming straight out and saying it.