The Stakes of Stephen’s Gambit in “Scylla and Charybdis”

Abstract

In a sense, the beginning of Stephen’s day—as we track it through breakfast at the Tower, teaching a class at the Dalkey school, a walk on Sandymount Strand, delivery of Deasy’s letter to Myles Crawford followed by two pub sessions, both at establishments called ‘Mooney’s’—can be considered as “preparatory to anything else.” That “anything else” would be the events at the National Library of Ireland that unfold in the episode we call “Scylla and Charybdis” and which arguably constitutes one of the climaxes in the story of Stephen’s day in Ulysses. What, precisely, is a “climax” in narrato-logical terms? Marie-Laure Ryan offers one of the more intriguing discussions of this question in the provocative context of “story generation”—that is, the creation of models of storytelling that might effectively be deployed in Artificial Intelligence computer program design. Instead of a simple definition, Ryan offers a series of characteristics of the narrative climax whose most interesting one she calls “functional polyvalence.” “The events with the greatest number of functions are likely to form the highlights of the plot,” she writes (249). These include the solution of a problem, the source of a problem, an infraction worthy of punishment, as well as merit and reward, and the possibility of offense and revenge. There is no question that Stephen Dedalus has a problem on June 16, 1904—indeed, a number of problems worthy of a quick recapitulation.