Getting Past No in 'Scylla and Charybdis'

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