The Politics of the National Library

Schutte (1957) attempts to interpret the action in "Scylla and Charybdis" with an apolitical, scholarly approach. The presuppositions of his critical stance are worth noting because they reveal the lacuna that prevented him from seeing other parallels between the works of Shakespeare and Ulysses. Hamlet, the "beautiful ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts" (U.9.9-10) for Schutte is a sufficient model for Stephen Dedalus. He is not granted the moral legitimacy that might allow his rejection of Mulligan for his Art to be seen as a parallel to Hal’s rejection of Falstaff for his kingdom. As Reynolds (1991) notes in a critical reappraisal of Schutte’s seminal work:

An analysis of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory forms the core of the fourth chapter ("A Good Groatsworth of With"). Schutte treats it as an attempted scholarly discussion rather than the scaffolding of a theory of aesthetics; he concentrates on the accuracy of Stephen’s account of Shakespeare’s life and the writing of Hamlet . . . . A concern with the intentional fallacy was a dominant feature of criticism in the 1950s; "giving a biographical significance to events in the plays and poems" was held to be inadmissible. Reflecting such critical attitudes . . . Schutte’s analysis distorts some aspects of Joyce’s Library chapter. (p. 172)

In his sixth chapter, "The Artist’s Role: the God of Creation," Schutte (1957) does an excellent job of analyzing Stephen’s rejection of the institutional forces–the "big words . . . which make us so unhappy" (U.2.264). His summaries are precise, and should be insightful:

Side by side with his recognition of these claims is a gradually developing consciousness of the claim of Art, which he thinks has no roots in his environment and which ultimately requires, he believes, a rejection of the claims of that environment. One by one Stephen puts aside the blandishments of nationality and language, family, love, and sex. Finally he is able to reject the institution which of them all made by far the strongest claims, the Holy Roman Catholic Church. (p. 82)

Despite being a keen observer of Stephen’s intellectual strategies, Schutte never credits Stephen’s outlook as being an effective, or even necessary, stance for the situation he finds himself in. His final analysis of Stephen in the library revolves around the personal failing of Stephen to integrate with his community. It is such mundanities as Stephen’s rudeness and lack of respect that finally dooms his disquisition on Shakespeare. Aside from acknowledging Stephen’s antipathy to the Irish Revival, Schutte sees the characters in the library as little more than straw men to show off Stephen’s boorishness:

But they exist primarily as Stephen’s foils, both by virtue of their role in the scene and by virtue of the narrative technique which passes everything through Stephen’s consciousness and records his unspoken comments without recording theirs. They appear only in this one scene; hence they are characterized only enough to make their essential contribution to it. (p. 51)

Because of this presupposition, Schutte approaches Stephen’s argument as little more than an illumination of Stephen’s personality. Schutte’s stance is all the more ironic because he himself provides fascinatingly detailed biographical information to flesh out the characters of the librarians. The idea that Stephen may be facing real issues and real opponents remains unexplored:

[Schutte’s] treatment is ambiguous; Stephen is an isolated figure, but the reason is not made clear in the chapter except by indirection . . . . As Schutte describes the "ordeal," the onus really seems to be on the Establishment figures, who, he makes clear, have written off Stephen Dedalus. They are not judging his work or his ideas, they are judging his rudeness and brashness. (Reynolds, 1991, p. 173)

Within Schutte’s (1957) perception of Stephen as the model of a social failure, even Mulligan is "easy-going" and "has made a genuine effort to be a good friend" (p. 73); the breakup with Mulligan is merely another instance of Stephen’s paralyzed social skills. Though he thoroughly notes the ethical and aesthetic difference between the two, Schutte does not find these to be sufficient grounds for Stephen’s rejection of Mulligan.

In "The Voice of Esau: Culture and Nationalism in ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’" Platt (1992) argues that there are in fact serious issues of political, racial, and social power being played out among the disputants in the library. The library itself is historically steeped in the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy:

The National Library of the nation which, in 1904, had no legal existence, evolved from Anglo-Irish institutions; its antiquarian collection was a gift from the Royal Dublin Society. Members of the first antiquarian committee were drawn from the aristocracy and the Protestant Church and included the Bishops of Cloyne and Derry and Lord Moira; the first librarian of the Royal Dublin Society was the Rev. Dr. John Lanigan; when Dr. Daniel Murray, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin in the 1830s, applied for reader membership he was refused. (p. 740)

The scene is symbolic of the power relations of Ireland that Stephen is attempting to negotiate: "Stephen’s sense of the National Library as alien ground, of himself as an Irish-Jew in a colonized Egypt-Ireland reflects a Catholic sensibility" (p. 740). Within this precinct, Stephen is challenging the position of his Protestant listeners and especially challenging the cultural project of the Irish Literary Revival. Platt notes that the revival, although it had its most primitive roots in Catholic intellectuals, had been appropriated by the Anglo-Irish as their political supremacy over the Catholics had faltered in the nineteenth century:

It seems certain that Anglo-Ireland’s colonization of a mythic past was a means by which a declining class attempted to preserve for itself a cultural and intellectual position, but at the same time it was an affirmation of aristocratic nobility which scorned the "rampant, double-chinned vulgarity" of the Catholic middle class of which Joyce was a product, and which exercised a form of paternalistic landlordism over a romanticized Irish peasantry. (pp. 739-740)

Stephen’s foray into the private life of Shakespeare is parallel to his reaffirmation of the realities of Ireland’s colonial past that the Revival is attempting to erase from history. Stephen’s Shakespeare is a product of the adventurous empire-building culture in which he lived:

These images of Shakespeare as capitalist landowner, the idea of the histories ringing to English jingoism, of Hamlet and Macbeth pandering to the intellectual pretension and exotic vices of James I, and above all, the perception of "Patsy Caliban" in The Tempest, a conflation which links Amerindia with Catholic Ireland in a common history of cultural invasion, express the historical consciousness of an Irish Catholic. (p. 747)

Stephen’s assault on Anglo-Irish ideology is more than just rubbing the librarians’ noses in their own pretensions. To believe that Stephen might win over his listeners is to miss the very lessons of his dialectic. Eglinton and the others, like Mulligan, know that they must not bite the hand that feeds them. Stephen’s understanding of himself as a subject is the most important work he achieves in the library:

The John Bull Shakespeare is under the ownership of an Irish critic; the cuckolded Shakespeare, whose works are powered by feelings of resentment and bitterness, is the creation of an Irish artist, one who having refuted the authenticity of Anglo-Irish culture proceeds to signal his own intention to make art from the ignobility of usurpation. (p. 747)

Stephen’s remorseless contemplation of his condition in life is much more than masochistic self-martyrdom. His refusal to deny the state of things as they are gives him a cunning rhetorical advantage over those who would rewrite history so as to obscure the hard facts of existence. His appropriation of a Shakespeare retuned to reflect his own dispossession and critique his usurpers demonstrates the power he gains from embracing his oppression.