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Listen to the project guide for Scylla and Charybdis
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Before you listen
Synthetic browser narration of a project-authored guide, not a reading of Joyce’s novel. Full-episode spoilers and sensitive material follow, including misogyny, antisemitism, homophobic and sexual ridicule, incest discussion, prostitution and sexually transmitted infection references, racialized language, bereavement, childbirth and paternity anxiety, alcohol and vomiting, religious mockery, and colonial hierarchy. The guide paraphrases slurs and degrading sexual language rather than reproducing them.
Orientation
Scylla and Charybdis stages Stephen's Shakespeare theory inside a library conversation where biography, philosophy, grief, wit, mockery, money, and audience response keep changing what an argument is.
Who argues, listens, interrupts, and passes through?
Stephen presents his theory to John Eglinton, A. E. Russell, Mr Best, and the librarian Thomas Lyster. Buck Mulligan arrives, mocks, and redirects the exchange. Attendants manage the library's work, while Bloom briefly enters to consult newspaper files and later passes between Stephen and Mulligan outside.
Where is the theory performed?
The main exchange occurs in a room of the National Library of Ireland and continues through its corridor, reading room, turnstile, portico, and Kildare Street exit.
When does the exchange occur?
In the early afternoon of 16 June 1904, after Stephen's newspaper visit and while Bloom has just finished lunch and seeks a newspaper file. The guide preserves sequence without assigning precise minutes to the long discussion.
What changes when Stephen's theory meets an audience?
A chain of biographical and literary propositions becomes a live bid for attention, recognition, money, and position. Questions force Stephen to revise or intensify; private memories enter the case; laughter rewards some turns; Mulligan's performance competes with it; and Stephen finally separates ingenuity from belief.
Why keep an argument and performance ledger?
Because the episode continually shifts between claim and enactment. Stephen argues that artists transform family experience while transforming his own grief and rivalry into speech; his listeners demand evidence while performing taste and status; Mulligan mocks sentiment while staging his own routines; the library stores documents but does not settle interpretation.
The theory argues by performing itself
Scylla and Charybdis makes interpretation a social event. Stephen constructs Shakespeare as actor, father, son, husband, brother, proprietor, debtor, and writer, then uses recurrence across works to make biography feel like a hidden engine of art. At the same time, his own dead mother, uncertain fatherhood, absent home, debts, artistic ambition, and rivalry with Mulligan enter the performance. The theory gains force through staging, timing, memory, multilingual wit, and responsiveness to the room. Its most revealing evidence may therefore be not a solved Shakespeare but the public labor by which Stephen tries to become an author among men who can notice, publish, mock, or pay him.
The room sets competing rules for art
Lyster's cultural courtesy, Eglinton's skepticism, Russell's preference for spiritual essence, Mr Best's mediation, and Stephen's impatience establish different standards for what counts as a serious account of Shakespeare.
Stephen casts Shakespeare as the ghost
Stephen reconstructs a performance of Hamlet in which Shakespeare plays the dead king before an actor bearing the name of his dead son. He turns stage casting, names, absence, and family resemblance into a proposition about father and son.
Anne Hathaway becomes contested evidence
Russell resists prying into an artist's private life, while Stephen uses marriage chronology, sexual conjecture, literary figures, and the second-best bed to make Anne Hathaway central to the plays. Stephen's memories of his own mother repeatedly enter beside the argument.
Questions make Stephen perform method
Eglinton and Best question premises, examples, chronology, and motives. Stephen answers by moving among close reading, analogy, etymology, philosophy, biography, personal memory, and theatrical scene-making. The theory's method is produced in front of its judges.
Mulligan turns interruption into a rival show
Mulligan enters on a mock-liturgical cue, parodies the conversation, reads Stephen's telegram aloud, imitates voices, and attacks Stephen's seriousness. His comedy wins space by making the theorist and the theory into material.
Bloom enters as reader and target
Bloom asks for newspaper files and is guided through the library's working systems. Mulligan seizes his card and subjects him to antisemitic and sexualized mockery, while Stephen registers that Bloom knows his father.
Property, sexuality, and evidence tighten together
Stephen links marriage, inheritance, debt, the will, the second-best bed, sexual betrayal, literary property, and Shakespeare's commercial life. The argumentative net grows denser while its claims about women, Jewishness, and desire grow ethically more dangerous.
Fatherhood becomes the theory's void
Stephen turns from Shakespeare's dead father and son toward paternity as a legal, religious, biological, and imaginative uncertainty. His own family grief and need for intellectual lineage become audible within the universal claim.
Belief, payment, and exit come apart
Pressed directly, Stephen says he does not believe his theory, yet proposes publication for payment. Mulligan answers with further ridicule and an obscene playbill, then leads him out. Bloom passes between them at the doorway, and the episode ends with Stephen carrying the unresolved performance into daylight.
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