EIGHTEEN:
9. SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS
SEPTEMBER 24
Switching to Stephen. He comes across as he did in his previous episodes... struggling to be acknowledged but falling short. Found the Hamlet/Shakespeare tedious... - A man of genius makes no mistakes... Stephen is so naive. He did not win anyone over to his views:
L372 Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under wrinkled brows.
Will he follow his own advice? Quoting Goethe "Be careful what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life."
The episode's conclusion is beyond me, full of common sayings dragging almost all of Shakespeare's writings into the strange dialogue that paints women in a terrible light.
SEPTEMBER 27
Yeah I just can't with this episode. This is my reaction to Stephen:
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Which isn't to say that I didn't read it or that I didn't spend plenty of time with my big book of annotations...
So, the ulyssesguide.com dude claims that in this episode "Just about every line contains a Shakespearean allusion!" Which felt like a dare...?
I cannot explain myself at all here; I was seized by an idea and I carried it out. Behold my data visualization of the Slote et al. annotations for Scylla and Charybdis:
I combed through more than 100 pages of annotations and made a spreadsheet with a data point for every single annotation. In the image above, the darker the line = more annotations.
I have no words; I spent a weird amount of time putting this together and I don't even know why any more. It seemed like a good idea when I started. I'm real tired now.
I have read episode 10—the Wandering Rocks—and if you haven't gotten there, it's relatively normal as far as Joyce goes. Ish. I can share my thoughts on it first if you need a prompting to continue sailing this winedark sea.
K.