Abstract
Two chapters, Scylla and Charybdis and Penelope, in James Joyce's Ulysses are crucial to an understanding of the novel as a whole. Scylla and Charybdis stands midway in the novel, the ninth of eighteen chapters, and is designed to serve as a kind of exegesis of the writer's methods and intentions. An analysis of that chapter helps to explain the meaning of the controversial final chapter, Penelope, and to clarify its thematic and stylistic relation to the text as a whole. Ulysses is the story of a quest, actually of many quests that all coalesce into a single goal: the search for value in a modern world that is somehow diminished and constructed in comparison with the Homeric world where mortals strode the universe in company with gods and goddesses. How, in this dwarfed setting, can men and women redefine heroism in secular humanistic terms relevant to twentieth-century life? Almost by definition a quest narrative culminates in the attainment of the goal or in the potential for its attainment; Joyce's Ulysses affirms this possibility in Penelope.
Highlights
Two chapters, "Scylla and Charybdis" and "Penelope," in James Joyce's Ulysses are crucial to an understanding of the novel as a whole
Joyce has provided us with a way to approach "Penelope" by explaining the aesthetic, the modus operandi that informs the total work, in "Scylla and Charybdis," though in relying on "Scylla" for a perspective it is essential to make certain discriminations
We are introduced to a new character who, like the Ghost in Hamlet, will be the architect and controlling force of all that happens. This character is Joyce, the completed artist, who makes his authorial presence consistently felt "Scylla and Charybdis" to a degree not apparent in the previous eight chapters. With his punning, his word play that mimics or parodies the movements and speeches of the characters, and his stage directions, he is very much in the foreground as he will continue to be in varying degrees until "Penelope." In “Scylla and Charybdis," we have a theory of art presented by a character who is not yet an artist, written by an artist who in many ways can be identified with Stephen, and who uses, through Stephen, the supreme artist, Shakespeare, to explain how the book Ulysses could ever have been written at all
Summary
"Scylla and Charybdis" and "Penelope," in James Joyce's Ulysses are crucial to an understanding of the novel as a whole. This manipulation of symbols is characteristic of the way Joyce draws our attention to the connection between Stephen and Bloom so that we will see their metaphorical coming together as the end of their quest.
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