Search

For a long time, discussion of "Scylla and Charybdis" has tended to be over-mindful of the "[n]o" that Stephen answers when John Eglinton asks him whether he believes his theory about William Shakespeare (LI 9.1067).1 For some, in fact, it is as if the whole production had turned out to be a shaggy-dog story with a weak punchline. I question this evaluation and begin by suggesting that Joyce would not willingly have wasted his reader's time like that, especially in an episode that he considered the final curtain of his book's first half.2 After all, that word "believe" is one that Ulysses has invited us to fuss over ever since Haines asked Stephen, "You're not a believer, are you?" (U 1.611), and received no straight answer. In "Scylla and Charybdis/' the word's chief exponent is, again, Eglinton, who uses some version of it nine times, often with significantly dif ferent senses. For instance, right after the question to Stephen, he remarks of one Herr Karl Bleibtreu that "he believes his theory" (U 9.1077), That is, he, at least, believes his theory, unlike a certain young person present whom Eglinton could mention. Bleibtreu's theory was that Shakespeare's plays were written by Roger Manners, the fifth earl of Rutland, He had other beliefs too. He was a highly vocal anti-Semite (it was he who informed Joyce, doubtless with scorn,3 that the original name of the eminent Shakespearean Sir Sidney Lee was Simon Lazarus Lee?JJII 411), a paranoid Teutonophile obsessed with protecting Germany's volkische literature from foreign contamination, and, by the time "Scylla and Charybdis" was being written, someone who was literally identifying with Napoleon.4 Bleibtreu was, in short, a nut and is clearly to be taken as one. Indeed, the whole library discussion occurs against a background of nutty ideas about Shakespeare, all devoutly believed in by various cranks. In the episode's dialectic, this lot occupies the hard right. True believers, they correspond to the Scyllan rock-monster?the one with six maws for swallowing you up. They represent one way of getting Shakespeare wrong. At the other extreme is the woozy whirlpool

'Well!' thought Alice to herself. After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down-stairs! How brave they'll all think me at home!' --Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland As the Odyssey's Circe turns from treacherous witch to helpful advisor and takes it upon herself to warn Odysseus against, first, the Sirens, and, second, the twin dangers that are Scylla and Charybdis, she curiously does not immediately proceed to discuss the latter pair. In her preamble, Circe begins by claiming that Odysseus's path is a matter of choice: one leads to the Clashing Rocks or Planctae, the other to Scylla and Charybdis (Od. 12.56-8). It quickly emerges, however, that Odysseus does not, in fact, have a choice: the Planctae, which spare not even the doves carrying ambrosia to Zeus, have only once been successfully crossed, and even so, only thanks to Hera's direct intervention (Od. 12.69-72). How formidable these rocks are can be glimpsed in the fact that the Planctae are known only by a name the gods have given them. In only one other instance does the Odyssey refer to this divine taxonomy--what scholars have called the "language of the gods"; it is when Hermes introduces the molu plant to Odysseus and discusses what makes it unique: (1) [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (2) (And the gods call it "molu"; for mortal men / It is hard to dig up; the gods, however, are capable of everything, Od. 10.305-6). Like steering a ship through the treacherous Planctae, to find and dig up the molu is a simple matter for the gods; for mortals, the same task is not so easy. It is implicit in Odysseus's subsequent questions to Circe about how best to tackle Scylla that he does not for a moment consider the Planctae to be a real alternative. (3) Odysseus thus gives up beforehand on a trajectory that is doomed to failure as it leaves no room for him, as a mortal, as a hero without the direct divine protection enjoyed by the likes of Jason, to exercise his famed resourcefulness. There is a strong suggestion here that the Clashing Rocks may belong to a heroic past that cannot be revisited by Odysseus. Circe's introduction is thus significant, for it frames the hero's encounter with Scylla and her counterpart as, unlike the Planctae, a challenge that is not beyond remedy--provided he follows her advice to steer clear of Charybdis and thus stay closer to Scylla. And not only did Odysseus follow the advice, so have most commentators. The pair has been the object of many fruitful studies, but common to these treatments is a stress on Scylla, often to the neglect of Charybdis. Both monsters are, scholars agree, female, engulfing mouths, but Homer's own tendency to humanize Scylla while leaving Charybdis as landscape rather than fully gendered creature has slanted the traditional reading, favoring an interpretive close-up of Scylla. (4) Scholarly discourse, at its most fleshed-out, interprets the whirlpool as an extreme example of the anthropophagous, one of the Odyssey's main structuring themes, and largely leaves it at that. Yet, equally central to the description of Charybdis as a voracious mouth is the tall fig tree perched atop the lower crag that lies in the middle of the vortex. I argue in this paper that a close analysis of Charybdis, and of her unique combination of whirlpool, rock, and fig tree is essential for making sense, first, of the pair of which she is part, and, second, of the role that these two interconnected monsters play in shaping Odysseus as a distinctive kind of epic hero. (5) I suggest that Charybdis's importance lies not merely in being a danger of greater magnitude than Scylla, but in embodying a new type of monster. Charybdis is the threatening (although not absolutely fatal) landscape that Greek navigators must contend with in the real world, the world Odysseus seeks to return to. Scylla, by contrast, represents the old, perhaps even obsolete, model of the nightmarish monster, the kind encountered in the Theogony s catalogue of monsters, and the kind that Odysseus leaves behind, as he left behind Polyphemus in his shattered Golden Age. …

Although it is a commonplace among Joyceans that the “Aeolus” episode in Ulysses is concerned with classical rhetoric, the degree and manner of the concern has not been well understood. This essay addresses both, arguing first that, besides the often-mentioned attention to rhetorical figures, the episode as a whole mirrors formally—and thus parodies—classical treatises on rhetoric like Cicero’s De Oratore and Plato’s Phaedrus and, second, that, with “Scylla and Charybdis,” “Aeolus” constitutes yet another entry in the ancient debate between the philosophers and the sophists. Unlike its classical forebears, however, Ulysses offers no easy answers to the problem of rhetoric, underscoring its dangers in “Aeolus” and its aesthetic potential in “Scylla and Charybdis.”

Much criticism of Joyce falls into three camps: one that understands Joyce as an exemplar of artistic autonomy; another that finds in the author’s language a hybridity that resists the logic of colonialism; and a third that locates his works’ politics in their narrative material. This essay argues for a fourth position: that a distinct anti-imperial politics can be located in the style of Ulysses , if style is construed not at the level of the sentence but rather at that of the word. In the inauguration (in “Proteus”) and strategic and asymmetrical deployment (in “Scylla and Charybdis”) of the portmanteau, Joyce attempts to create a language that surpasses Standard English and the political project it supports.

The Word Known to All Men; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love James Joyce Kiberd, Declan. 2009. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece. New York: Norton. $28.95 hc. $17.95 sc. xi + 400 pp.Utell, Janine. 2010. James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire. New York: Palgrave. $75.00 hc. x +177 pp.John Lennon-a closet James Joyce scholar who even subscribed to the James Joyce Quarterly in the 1970s-claimed in the 1967 hit song by The Beatles that "all you need is love." Since its original publication in 1922, some critics have suggested that love is all you need to break through the thorny thicket of complexity presented by Joyce's experimental style in Ulysses (not to mention the subsequent, and even more daunting, Finnegans Wake in 1939), a style that shifts and evolves from episode to episode. Joyce himself hinted that the novel was his epic affirmation of that "[w]ord known to all men," as his literary alter-ego Stephen Dedalus puts it in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses (Joyce 1986,429-430). That "word" is widely interpreted as love, and love is the subject of Joyce's great, human epics.Reading Ulysses simultaneously as Joyce's treatise on the nature of love and as a kind of love letter to love is nothing new. The most widely accepted theory on why Joyce selected June 16, 1904 as the date his epic of a single day takes place is because that was possibly the date that he first went out with his lifelong partner and future wife, Nora Barnacle. Such a reading makes the book, on one level, a kind of anniversary present, a token of love for the love of Joyce's life. One of the originators of the theory that the date of Ulysses had this biographical origin, Richard Ellmann, is also one of the first proponents of the idea that, in spite of all the stylistic bells and whistles, the "theme in Ulysses was simple" (Joyce 1986, ix). Ellmann and others have established an interpretive tradition that Ulysses is essentially about love, the entire spectrum of love from the eros to agape. According to this interpretation, Joyce's epic fits into a tradition of narratives of love and reconciliation in an attempt to apply epic conventions to subject matter that is all-toohuman. Or, as Ellmann himself puts it, "Ulysses revolts against history as hatred and violence, and speaks in its most intense moments of their opposite" (xiv), namely Stephen's "word known to all men." Despite ostensible differences in tone, style, and method, Declan Kiberd and Janine Utell both recognize that Ulysses is concerned with love as the most complex and the most human of emotions. Each text offers a critical reappraisal of Joyce's work emphasizing what one can still learn from reading Joyce in the early twenty-first century, and how one might learn again to love reading Joyce. As a result, their books represent an important step in restoring a sense of humanity to an author whose texts have been relegated to the status of relics for specialists."Ulysses" and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece, Declan Kiberd's ode to the ordinary in Ulysses, attempts to find some middle ground between the extremes of unabashed praise and unqualified contempt by arguing that what makes the book great is exactly that which it celebrates: its humanness. Kiberd's task, taken up by others before him, is to save Joyce's book from its abstraction into inscrutable theory by "specialist elites" (2009, 10) and to return it into the hands of the ever-elusive "common reader" (17). He argues that Ulysses "should be accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet" (21). Making an argument that Joyce was as much Romantic as Modern in his celebration of the minutiae of everyday life, Kiberd claims that "[i]t is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people," for it-according to Kiberd- still has much to teach "real people" (11). …

����� ��� idway through Stephen Dedalus’s famous analysis of Hamlet in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses, Buck Mulligan appears in Mr. Lyster’s office to read aloud from the telegram Stephen sent to him at the Ship: “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done” (U 9.550-51). Stephen has signed the telegram himself, but he does not reveal to Mulligan that he has cribbed the definition from George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel; moreover, since the cryptic sentence is, in fact, a misquotation, the actual authorship of the quotation becomes further obscured. 1 Even more confusing is the fact that neither Stephen nor the text of Ulysses ever bothers to make clear to whom he refers in the telegram. Is the telegram intended to apply to Buck Mulligan, or does it refer to Stephen himself, the acknowledged debtor both to Mulligan and to the poet George Russell? 2 Does it, perhaps, refer to both men simultaneously? 3 Finally, what does the quotation suggest is to be “enjoyed,” and what would constitute an “immense debtorship for a thing done”? The more closely we look at the definition of a “sentimentalist” that the quotation offers, the less definitive it truly seems. The term's full meaning remains strikingly still in abeyance. The definitions not only of a sentimentalist but also of sentimentalism, sentimentality, and sentiment itself have yet to be satisfactorily addressed in Joyce’s fiction. In a crucial article, Clive Hart argues, “The Joycean modes of sentimentality require closer and more careful scrutiny than they have hitherto received.” 4 While certain Joyceans have given passing attention to the presence of sentimentality in Joyce’s corpus in the thirty-five years since Hart’s call, a full inquiry into what the term “sentimentality” means with regard to Joyce’s position as a modernist has largely remained unaccomplished. 5 This stands as an especially important task for Joyce scholarship in that Ulysses questions what constitutes sentimentality and its related terms, a pressing engagement both for the 1904 bourgeois Dublin the novel depicts and for the 1916-1922 modernist milieu in which Joyce composed the text. This essay traces the sentimental novelistic tradition within which Ulysses is situated to show why the identification of

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, Part 1. Trans. Mike Smith. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2012.205 pp.Mike Smith, author of three volumes of poetry and assistant professor of poetry at Delta State University, has produced a new English translation of the first part of Goethe's Faust. Given the sheer volume of Faust translations, in prose and in verse, and of annotated English editions, the appearance of a new translation may raise some difficult questions. What, after all, does a new version of Faust offer that cannot be readily found in the dozens of available English versions?Smith is aware of these possible objections to the mere existence of his book, and he responds to them in his translator's note, writing that a new version of Faust "may seem difficult to justify" before calling his work "a project that has become deeply personal" (11). This remark speaks to why it is necessary to translate Faust anew: By and large, those for whom Faust is an object of literary-historical interest either read German or will be satisfied with any one of a number of adequately accurate translations. But for those to whom the play offers a chance to be "unsettled," as Smith puts it, every new version is a new chance to experience the text in a slightly different way, or else a new possible point of entry to Goethe's creation. Smith testifies that the process of translating Faust can be deeply personal; it should go without saying that to do so is to open the door to the complementary personal experience of reading it. Translation as the multiplier of potential personal encounters with the text: this sounds closely akin to Goethe's own support of translation as the basis for intercultural communication at the personal and national level, as "eines der wichtigsten und wurdigsten Geschafte in dem allgemeinen Weltverkehr" (GA 14:933). A new translation is not a competition with previous translations but a reminder of the freshness of the classic text and a renewal and expansion of its presence on our bookshelves and in our minds.As for the mechanics of this particular translation, Smith lays out some of the choices he has made. His translation is in verse, but it is not a transposition of Goethe's meter. He writes that he sought "to represent the sense and fluidity of Goethe's variable line in a thoroughly contemporary idiom. To accomplish this, I have collapsed and broken lines for my own purposes and frequently relied on off-rhyme" (11). I consider this a sound strategy-sailing between the Scylla of slavish duplication of meter and rhyme and the Charybdis of inattention to the text's poetic resonance. Nevertheless, the off-rhyme is so frequent that the ear must strain at times to catch even a hint of true rhyme. One notable stanza in Faust's first soluoquy offers nine lines near-rhymed in an ababacdcd pattern, in which every single combination except the third and fifth rhymes is imperfect (the analogous lines in the German rhyme perfectly in pairs, with Smith having inserted a stanza break to disrupt the first pair). …

unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort E. M. Forster, Maurice Why Speak of Lorrain Today? It is difficult, even today, to speak of Jean Lorrain without embarrassment. Those aspects of his life and works that appeared scandalous to his contemporaries, such as his openness about his homosexuality, his ostentation of any and all kinds of perversity, and his notorious bad taste, may seem to invite rather than repel current critical interest. (1) Nevertheless, even for a position that has revalued artifice, sentimentality, and "vice," Lorrain's writing may prove to be unpalatable: his clamorous antisemitism, his vociferousness as an anti-Dreyfusard, his insistent misogyny, his approval of colonialism, and his concomitant reveling in the worst forms of late nineteenth-century Orientalism are almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of a permanent revaluation of Lorrain as a "good" writer. Why write of Lorrain at all then? Some previous attempts to revive interest in his work sanitizes it by presenting it as quaint: so, Philippe Jullian's biography, Jean Lorrain Cu le satiricon 1900, admirable as it is, tends to make Lorrain seem ready for a nostalgic and neutralized mass consumption, rather like the art nouveau that Lorrain himself relished. Other influential discussions of Lorrain, such as Mario Praz's in The Romantic Agony, turn Lorrain into a practitioner of art brut, a pathological writer who can be classified and contained within an established counter-tradition. For Praz, Lorrain's oeuvre is to be savored as symptomatology, and the disease is the man: Praz contrasts Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with Lorrain's best-known novel to the advantage of the latter because it supposedly "bears witness to a profoundly troubled and painful state of mind" (345). Praz denigrates the "inopportune decorative images" that flourish in Dorian Gray, and he cites them as evidence that Wilde was as "gr eedy and capricious as an irresponsible child" (344). An abrupt transition to Wilde's putative cultivation of "scandal" and his "second trial" (344) makes it clear that for Praz style signals an author's sexual orientation. Pathological where Wilde is decorative, "troubled" where Wilde is "irresponsible," Lorrain appears as nothing less than the homophobe's homosexual. (2) It is exactly between the twin closets of decoration and pathology--the Scylla and Charybdis of aesthetic homophobia--that reception of Lorrain's work has been divided. That both ornamentation and deviance function as markers of an erratic desire is clear from Praz's discussion of Wilde and Lorrain, as if the one metonymically supposed the other, no matter how seemingly opposed their modalities. That both Wilde and Lorrain were not only homosexuals, but also homosexual writers is not quite as apparent from Praz, although his treatment of both writers relies on the unstated knowledge of their sexuality. Recent gay criticism and queer theory has reappropriated and triumphantly reclaimed Wilde. Eve Sedgwick, Ed Cohen, William Cohen, Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Kopelson, and especially Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield have all forced a reconsideration of Wilde. (3) But despite the frequent linkage of their names and their texts (Lorrain, for example, inspired Wilde's Salome (4)), Lorrain remains unexamined and largely unread, perhaps partly because of his disastrous political allegiances. (5) Lorrain moreover occupies an anomalous position in the history of gay literature: while his sexuality was a secret neither to his contemporaries nor to us, his prose writing, for all its excessiveness, never really comes out. Thus in a great deal of writing about his writing, Lorrain can be maintained as the signifier of a free-floating "homosexuality" to which, then, an inevitably phobic signified gets ascribed. A striking example of what Lorrain has come to signify can be found in Michel Leiris's 1946 autobiography, L'age d'homme. …

DiPietro, Cary. 2006. Shakespeare and Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $85.00 hc. 234 pp.Intended for scholars of Shakespeare, Modernism, and Performance studies, Gary DiPietro's Shakespeare and Modernism is an examination of the Bard's role as a source of authority and controversy during British High Modernism (roughly defined here as 1890 to 1940).The work's intended purpose, to discuss "how artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England engaged with the cultural traditions of Shakespeare as a means of defining . . . their own distinct historical experience" (7), is reliant upon three "frameworks" (12), each appropriate to DiPietro's focus: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Of these three, Marx plays the largest and most consistent role as the author sees the various attempts to render Shakespeare commonly available or intellectually exclusive in the context of class tensions that arose in the Victorian era and collapsed during the Modern period. Although not clearly divided into separate sections, the book follows three phases of discussion: critical responses, performance history, and gender. The author's reliance on these thinkers produces a work that has pedagological worth, even to those instructors of survey courses rather than period specialists.The first two chapters focus upon modernism's creative and scholarly reevaluation of Shakespeare. In Chapter One, DiPietro presents his argument that focuses on George Bernard Shaw's and T. S. Eliot's, and other modernsrespective writings on Shakespeare. DiPietro refines his argument that certain moderns intended to "topple Shakespeare" from his paramount role as cultural icon (42) and does an excellent job of exposing the complex interrelations between Shaw's and Eliot's respect for (or envy of?-there is enough internal conflict in their critical approaches to suggest both) Shakespeare and their desire to recreate the canon in a less dominated form; Shaw, as we are reminded, coined the term "bardolatry" to denigrate the Shakespeare criticism of his day (15). Chapter two focuses less upon the critical theory of modernists and more upon the literary criticism of the period. Here DiPietro's range of study is dazzling. Those authors immediately expected, such as A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy [Palgrave MacMillan 1992]) and Freud ("the Oedipus complex in Hamlet" [Interpretation of Dreams (Modern Library 1995, 55]), are discussed alongside lesser-known contemporary critics. Of these, biographic scholarship, exemplified by Frank Harris's The Man Shakespeare (Kessinger 2004), are considered in detail and this is a discussion that usefully contextualizes the recent flourish of Shakespeare biographies. Hamlet looms large throughout this section, and as it is the quintessential modernist Shakespeare, DiPietro deftly shifts his consideration of psychoanalytic approaches to Hamlet and Ulysses.The relationship between biographic speculation and canonization is demonstrated through a close reading of the "Scylla and Charybdis" section of Joyce s masterwork and illuminates Shakespeare's reception in the period, and the novel.DiPietro then moves from criticism to theatrical theory and performance. Chapter three considers the changes to British theater in the period, with some brief discussion of Continental European and U.S. influences. DiPietro's focus on the rise of cinema as a competing and more mass audience form of dramatic presentation, as well as the radical approaches to stage design and costuming-modern dress performances are discussed ably in these two chapters-is rewarding and logical. …