9.Scylla and Charybdis

It’s 2 pm Stephen is in the director’s office of the National Library. Present with him are A.E. (George Russell), the poet, John Eglinton, and Lyster.

In book 12 of the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men return from the land of the dead (Hades), to Circe’s isle where they fulfill Odysseus’s promise to bury Elpinor’s body (the crew member who was forgotten until found in Hades). Circe gives Odysseus ‘sailing directions’ She tells him about the Sirens and offers him a choice of roots: one by way of the wandering rocks, the other by way of the passage between Scylla and Charybdis.

Origins in general, and of names in specific, are important in this highly analytical and philosophical chapter.

Stephan remarks about his own name:
“Stephanos, my crown. My sword.”
“-You make good use of the name.” (210)
Stephanos is of Greek origin, and its meaning is "crown, garland". Variant of Stephanos. Biblical: Stephen was the first Christian martyr. Common until the late 18th century. Stefan is a German, Scandinavian, and Slavic form. Steffan and Steffon (STEH-fen) are Welsh forms.
Megeeglinjohn says “ Names! What’s in a name?” (209) A reference to Shakespeare’s famous ‘A rose by any other name…’ speech in Romeo and Juliet, which makes sense since this chapter is steeped in Hamlet and other Shakespearian references and interpretations.
“But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.” (189)
The idea of memory has an interesting origin. ‘Mnemosyne’ in Greek mythology was the daughter of Gaia and Uranus and the mother of the muses by Zeus. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Kings and poets receive their powers of authoritative speech from their possession of Mnemosyne and their special relationship with the muses.
Zeus and Menmosyne slept together for nine consecutive nights and thereby created the nine Muses. Mnemosyne was also the name for a river in Hades, counterpart to the river Lethe (dead souls drank from the river Lethe so they would not remember their past live when re-incarnated). Memory is extremely to (the basis of) religion. “So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.” (194) Time here is imagined as circular not unlike the Midgard serpent or world serpent, or a mobius strip.

Four additional themes/ motifs stood out in my reading:
1). Fertility: Eggs, children, parents, warmth (statues like Venus are cold)
“-People do not know how dangerous love songs can be, the auric egg of Russel Warned occultly” (186)
“Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk’s egg, prize of their fray.” (196)
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2). Sleep + death: sleep-walking:
“The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night.” (207)

3). Shadows + Ghosts:
Bloomsday says:
“Stephen obliges. He defines a ghost as ‘one who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners’. In this sense, the Shakespeare who returns to Stratford after his sojourn in London is a ghost, and the Stephen (for Joyce) who returns to Dublin from Paris is a ghost. Likewise Bloom, long sexually impalpable in relation to Molly, is a ghost in his own home.” (78)

“-If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over hell of time of King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, look to see when and how the shadow lifts.” (195)
“He is a ghost, a shadow now, wind by Elsinore’s rocks or what you will, the sea’s voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of the shadow, the son consubstantial with the father.” (1970

4) And OBVIOUSLY The Father + The Son:
Bloomsday says:
“Old John Shakespeare, the poet’s father is securely at rest, not an unquiet ghost. Stephen returns to formulate his doctrine of fatherhood. There is no such thing as an act of conscious begetting in which a man knows himself a father. Rather fatherhood is a ‘mystical estate’ handed down from begetter to begotten. This is the true mystery on which the Christian Church is founded. Love of mother is grounded in an evident physical relationship; but the mystery (in every sense) of paternity grounds a son’s allegiance on incertitude as the world itself is founded upon a void.” (86-87)
Here Bloomsday connects both the idea of the ghost and that of paternity and the father. This elucidates the fact that where mother’s and motherhood were the focus of the previous chapter here fathers are the subject.
“Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” (207)
“The son unborn mars beauty: born he brings pain, divides affection, increases care.” (207)