"Scylla and Charybdis" is a total farce on Stephen's part. Not only does he, of course, not actually believe a word he's saying, it's blatantly obvious he's projecting hard into his narrative of Shakespeare. Every worry and insecurity Stephen inserts into Shakespeare are really just his own worries and insecurities, that he's asserting onto a great man to make himself feel better.As George Russell says, it's just unseemly to try to pry into the life of somebody like Shakespeare. You have the plays and that's enough.Not to mention, I continue to be amused that Stephen considers himself an artist, and everybody else does too, but he hasn't written anything. He's an artist that hasn't produced any art. His telegram to Buck is farcical too, in this regard, because he, too, has no "thing done." He is the sentimentalist he accuses Buck of being.You know what Stephen is? Stephen is every Anon on /lit/.
Projecting your issues and your ideological worries on somebody else from another place and time has always been what lit crit and historiography were truly about. It's not a bug, but a feature.
>Stephen considers himself an artist, and everybody else does too, but he hasn't written anything. He's an artist that hasn't produced any artIt's something you know in your soul and in the marrow of your bones. A birthright, a blessing, a curse, a core identity. An arrogance or perhaps reverence in the attempt to imitate God by being an agent of creation. Seeing the world and the whole of your experience as your plaything, and the urge to rearrange and reconstitute it as something new. The passion for your craft and an almost pathological need for approval. You either have it or you don't.
>>25361258Vibes won't get your novel written, Anon.
>>25360658>but he hasn't written anything.Villanelle of the Temptress
>>25360658Real life Joyce had published some essays and poems at the time.
>>25363015Which is yet another way in which Stephen isn't Joyce, at least not the Stephen of Ulysses. Maybe in Portrait he's more Joyce's self-insert, but I think in Ulysses Stephen can't be equated with Joyce.
>>25363019>I think in Ulysses Stephen can't be equated with Joyce.Why not? Stephen is at least well known enough in the Dublin literary scene to hang out with George Russell. I don't think it's farfetched to think Stephen has some publications under his name.
Like Leopold, Joyce would have what it takes to stand up to and make a mockery of the Citizen. Stephen would not. I rest my case.
>>25360658Of course it's a farce anon, and it's intentionally so - the chapter is like the brain of the novel: while having a character prying into the life of an author while saying something to make himself feel better (thus revealing something about himself), Joyce legitimizes this kind of interpretation for his own book: at the time of writing he was also not a successful artist or writer, and the book is very heavily based on his life.It's as if he was saying that for every novel there are several circles of interpretation, each closer to the center which is the private mental life of the author, and that one can indeed approach that center if one tries to imagine how it feels to be the authors of the book. Shakespeare being cheated on mirrors Bloom's being cheated on and Joyce believing that he had been cheated on by Nora while traveling to Dublin.But you are not right in saying Stephen is every anon on /lit/, because most people here don't read. Stephen hasn't produced any art (yet?), but he has read plenty and can talk smartly about things, which most anons cannot.
