Episode 9, "Scylla and Charybdis" in Joyce's schemas, takes place between 2 and 3 PM at the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street, which in 1904 was a vital gathering spot for intellectuals, writers, and students. Stephen has come to deliver the talk that Mulligan recommended to Haines in Telemachus, but the audience is quite small. Only the librarian, two assistant librarians, and George Russell are present as he starts talking about Shakespeare's life and works, and Russell does not stay long. Mulligan makes a flashy, disruptive entrance many minutes later, and Haines, who was in the library earlier, now has somewhere better to be. The listeners are skeptical, as well they might be: the talk displays a considerable amount of reading and is delivered with verve, but as biographical literary criticism it is slapdash and shamelessly unscholarly. Engaging in discussion with his listeners, Stephen often defers or gives ground. His real aim, though, is to articulate a broader conception of literary creation. As a vision of what great literature can be (Shakespeare's, or Joyce's own), the talk packs a punch. Homer contributes in one limited but crucial way to this conceptual power. His story of Odysseus steering close to a dangerous rock reinforces Stephen's idea that great fiction should be courageously autobiographical, facing the demons of embodied existence and making that personal "image" the "standard of all experience."

In book 12 of the Odyssey Circe tells Odysseus that if he wants to avoid the Wandering Rocks he will have to sail through another tight rocky strait. On one side, high in a cave on a towering cliff face, dwells a monster whose six heads will devour six men. On the other lurks a whirlpool big and violent enough to take down the entire ship. Later in this book Odysseus does as Circe advises and sails close to the cliff face. Scylla snatches six men from the ship and hauls them screaming up to the cave, but the voyage continues.

Joyce's text alludes to this story in some passages that seem more incidental than consequential. When Stephen is describing Shakespeare's sexual jealousy he fancies that different passions swirl in the poet's breast "and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool." It is hard to know what to make of this brief reference. The whirlpool is a metaphor for maddening mental obsessions, but does knowing of Homer's Charybdis somehow increase a reader's understanding of what Stephen is saying? Late in the chapter, as Stephen stands across from Mulligan at the front door of the library, he thinks, "My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between," and at that moment, "A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting." It is Leopold Bloom, the Odysseus of this fiction, but is there any symbolic significance in his sailing through a gauntlet of two younger men? Bloom hardly figures in this chapter and neither Stephen nor Mulligan is a dire threat to him, as his "bowing, greeting" passage makes comically clear.

In less overt ways, though, the Homeric story does figure in the chapter's intellectual structures. The "correspondences" listed in Joyce's second schema suggest that he was thinking of Scylla and Charybdis as emblematic of two broad conceptual oppositions. "The Rock," Joyce wrote there, corresponds to "Aristotle, Dogma, Stratford" and "The Whirlpool" to "Plato, Mysticism, London." These intellectual groupings play an important role in Stephen's thoughts. Russell and Eglinton, his most formidable opponents, cultivate strains of mystical spirituality and literary idealism that they associate with Plato. Stephen prefers Aristotle's empirically oriented and relentlessly logical "dagger definitions," arguing that the function of literature is not to reveal a "world of ideas" but to "Hold to the now, the here." Before the talk even begins, an opposition is thus established between fiction that traffics in abstractions and fiction concerned with empirical reality.

As Stephen begins his spiel, he maps these antinomies of empiricism and mysticism, realism and idealism, onto the facts of the playwright's life by investing Stratford and London with psychological significance. Shakespeare experienced a searing sexual betrayal in Stratford, he argues, and spent "Twenty years" in London recoiling from that pain. His geographical move effected a psychological divorce from sustaining family connections. Exiled from home, Shakespeare became a spectral shadow of his former self: "— What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris lies from virgin Dublin." But this alienation from human contacts—the metaphor also implies a sundering of spirit from body—did not release the playwright from his pain. Ghosts do not enter a domain of mystical peace. They remain attached to the unsatisfactory physical world.

Instead of pursuing escapist compensatory fantasy in his fiction, Shakespeare spent his time in London writing about what had happened in Stratford. Disappointed love was his devouring Scylla, and he wrote about Anne Hathaway in play after play, poem after poem. In Hamlet, Stephen argues, the author did not identify with Prince Hamlet, the idealistic young dreamer half in love with "a consummation devoutly to be wished." He wrote from the perspective of King Hamlet, a murderously this-worldly ghost returning to the scene of the crime in a hunt for vengeance. In his great tragedies Shakespeare revisited Stratford in just this bloodthirsty way, but by the time he wrote the late romances he had found a way to return in a spirit of "reconciliation," healing the breach of the original, generative "sundering." If Odysseus's story of Scylla and Charybdis figures in this biographical narrative, its arc has changed. Stephen's Shakespeare does not thread a needle between opposed dangers. He journeys from Stratford to London, and from London back to Stratford. "He goes back."

Shakespeare's works are filled with men who fear that the women they love are unchaste, but few Shakespeareans will seek insights into his plays and poems from Stephen's words. Joyceans, however, will find many interesting insights into the structures of Ulysses in this chapter. Unlike Shakespeare's protagonists, Bloom actually is a shamed cuckold and must confront the possibility that his familial home is irreparably lost. Stephen is an exile who has shamefully returned: "Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus." Joyce did the same, but later left Dublin for good and recreated it, brick by brick, in imagination. The novel's ghostly author creates an entire world of remembered people through the eyes of his avatars, just as Shakespeare did looking back on Stratford. "His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of all experience, material and moral." The pattern of exile and return is one way in which Stephen's Shakespeare talk lays out a kind of conceptual roadmap for the novel at whose center it sits. There are others.

For the materials for his argument, Stephen is indebted not only to many of Shakespeare's works but to three works of Shakespearean biography and criticism. Sidney Lee, an English biographer and critic, published A Life of William Shakespeare in 1898 and saw it through four more editions by 1905. The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story, by the Irish-American man of letters Frank Harris, was not published until 1909, but Harris printed much of it in the prominent London periodical Saturday Review which he edited from 1894 to 1898. The important Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published his widely acclaimed William Shakespeare: A Critical Study in 1898, in an English translation by William Archer. The influence of these works can be seen in particular details of Stephen's argument. Of the three, the greatest number of borrowings probably come from Lee, but the most powerful intellectual influence may be Brandes.

Like the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, Brandes despised fantasy, idealism, and mere aestheticism, arguing that in the modern era literature needed to provide piercingly realistic representations of life. Joyce greatly admired both writers. As a young man he regarded Ibsen's dramatic works as supreme monuments of literary truth-telling, relegating Shakespeare to second class. But by the time he was working on Ulysses he apparently had decided that the English playwright deserved his colossal reputation. Stephen presents him as a kind of archetypal literary creator, famed for the usual reasons: he brought hundreds of fictional people to life and through them communicated deep insights into human thought and behavior. But his Shakespeare is not a sage contemplating disembodied truths in the manner of George Russell. Largely "untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed," he writes because he has to. Every work is a confrontation with the green-eyed monster savaging his emotional life.

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Oil on canvas painting by Henry Fuseli ca. 1794-96 showing Scylla snatching men off the ship, held in the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Detail of a Bartholomew map of Dublin, with added arrow showing the location of the National Library. Source: Pierce, James Joyce's Ireland.

Plan of the library's first floor showing the librarian's office where most of the chapter takes place. Source: Gunn and Hart, James Joyce's Dublin.

1901 photograph of Sidney Lee, born Solomon Lazarus Lee . Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cropped detail from Alvin Langdon Coburn's 1913 photograph of Frank Harris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ludwik Szaciński's ca. 1890-1900 photographic portrait of Georg Morris Cohen Brandes. Source: Wikimedia Commons.