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Episode 8: Lestrygonians
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ulysses, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Alienation and the Quest for Belonging
Literature, Meaning, and Perspective
Love and Sex
Fate vs. Free Will
Religion, Atheism, and Philosophy
Irish Identity and Nationalism
Summary
Analysis
In the Irish National Library, the Quaker librarian William Lyster praises Goethe’s commentary on Hamlet in his novel Wilhelm Meister. Stephen Dedalus mocks Lyster’s obvious remarks, and in turn, librarian John Eglinton mocks Stephen’s ego by suggesting that he views himself as another Milton or Shakespeare. The poet George Russell comments that authors’ biographies and correspondences with their characters are irrelevant: what’s really important is how art expresses “eternal wisdom.” Stephen disagrees, referencing a long list of prominent scholars and concluding that “the life esoteric is not for ordinary person.” Stephen explains that he considers Aristotle superior to Plato, but Eglinton takes the opposite view.
In the Odyssey, Scylla is a sea-monster and Charybdis is a dangerous whirlpool. Odysseus has to carefully navigate between them. These opposite dangers are a metaphor for Stephen’s struggle to cope with many of the same dilemmas that Bloom faced in “Lestrygonians,” like identity versus change and the universe versus the individual. Lyster and Eglinton voice the literary establishment’s conventional view that literature is a reflection of a specific time and place, while George Russell takes the opposite view in the dilemma by viewing literature as a universal expression of “eternal wisdom.” In Stephen’s quest to become an artist, he has to find a way to split the difference between these two worldviews, just like Odysseus had to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis. (The views are Eglinton and Lyster’s, on the one hand, and Russell’s, on the other.) Namely, Stephen has to figure out how he can make art that both represents his individual genius and transcends his individuality to engage eternal truths. Of course, Joyce was asking the same question about combining the universal and the particular when he wrote Ulysses. His answer is to embody universal themes through an extremely particular, local portrait of a few men in one city. In other words, he firmly believes that normal people contain all the wisdom and beauty of the universe within them.
Themes
While Stephen mentally prepares his arguments, another librarian, Mr. Best, reports that Haines has left to go buy a book of Irish folk poetry. Russell argues that common people are the true source of all meaningful artistic and political movements, and Best comments on the French poet Mallarmé’s commentary on Hamlet, which leads the conversation to Stephen’s theory about the play, and specifically the identity of King Hamlet’s ghost.
Stephen is about to present the analysis of Hamlet that Buck Mulligan and Haines were chatting about in “Telemachus.” Ironically, however, Haines isn’t present—even though he was the one who wanted to hear Stephen’s theory. Russell’s comment about the source of true art revives the questions about true Irish identity from the beginning of the book: are rural farmers more “purely” Irish than highly-educated Dubliners like Stephen? Does this threaten to compromise the quality of Stephen’s art?
Themes
Recalling how Shakespeare played the role of King Hamlet’s ghost during productions of Hamlet, Stephen asks if he might not have really been speaking to his son Hamnet, who died as a boy just before Shakespeare wrote the play. Russell objects that the “the family life of a great man” is irrelevant to the man’s “immortal” works. Stephen feels conflicted, as he remembers that Russell loaned him money. He nearly convinces himself that he shouldn’t have to pay it back, since all the molecules in his body have changed since he took the loan five months ago.
With his idea that Shakespeare’s son inspired Hamlet, Stephen asserts that artists’ work is a mirror of their lives. He also returns to the questions that were occupying him during “Proteus” and Bloom during “Lestrygonians”: paternity, descent, change, and identity. Of course, the death of Shakespeare’s young son directly corresponds with the death of Rudy, Leopold Bloom’s young son. The motif of the father and the son also has religious resonances with God and Jesus Christ. All of Stephen’s ideas about Shakespeare are therefore also comments on fatherhood more generally. This means that Stephen’s theories have important implications for Bloom’s anxieties about fatherhood, Stephen’s anxieties about his own father, and Stephen’s desire to create a work of art. Russell once again asserts that art’s value must be totally independent of its creator. Not only is the artist’s life totally irrelevant to the work they produce, Russell thinks, but it’s wrong to even ask about it. Obviously, Joyce firmly rejects this idea, because Stephen Dedalus is just a slightly fictionalized version of Joyce himself.
Themes
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Eglinton insists that Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, has no literary significance and was merely “a mistake” in the man’s life. But Stephen disagrees: he thinks she clearly influenced Shakespeare, even if he spent most of his life living away from her in London. In fact, Stephen thinks that the older Ann Hathaway probably seduced Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s family continues to look just like Bloom’s: just like the discussion of Shakespeare’s son also answers questions about Bloom’s relationship with his dead son Rudy, the discussion of Ann Hathaway clearly evokes Molly Bloom, who is also emotionally estranged from her husband. (By giving Molly the last word in Ulysses, Joyce clearly takes a stand on Eglinton’s point: Molly absolutely has literary merit and significance.)
Themes
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Russell comments that he has to leave, then tells Eglinton that he won’t be able to make it to the party they’re both supposed to attend that night. Stephen thinks of Eastern mysticism and a whirlpool engulfing people’s souls. Lyster asks Russell about his upcoming anthology of young Irish poets’ work, and Stephen anxiously listens to their conversation about the Dublin literary scene. Stephen politely asks Russell to pass on Deasy’s letter about foot and mouth disease, and Russell goes out.
Stephen’s mental image of a whirlpool directly refers to Charybdis, the whirlpool from the Odyssey. Although he views himself as a poet, Stephen is neither invited to the party nor included in Russell’s anthology. Apparently, the literary men around him do not take him nearly as seriously as he takes himself. Like Bloom in “Aeolus,” Stephen is basically excluded from the profession he dreams of joining, and he can’t do anything about it. On an even more humiliating note, he presents Russell with Mr. Deasy’s letter instead of his own work. While he dreams of becoming a respected artist, Stephen is reduced to peddling someone else’s second-rate writing.
Themes
Lyster again asks Stephen about his “illuminating” theories of Shakespeare. Stephen thinks that Ann Hathaway betrayed Shakespeare, and he ponders the importance of academic debates about “what might have been.” Eglinton and Best agree that Shakespeare’s personal life was a great mystery and Hamlet was somehow a shadow of this life. Eglinton tells Stephen it’ll be difficult to convince him that Shakespeare identifies with Hamlet’s father, not Hamlet himself. Stephen argues that artists “weave and unweave” meaning in their work: they fixate on specific moments and images, which take on new meanings. One important example of this is the identity of the self, which is both the same and different between the past, present, and future.
Although he is passionately attached to his theory about Shakespeare, Stephen also starts to question its value. He understands that he is really just speculating about settled events from the past. Rather than presenting his theory because he genuinely thinks he’s right, Stephen seems to be driven by his sense of vanity, desire for social status, and need to process his estrangement from his father. Joyce also subtly explains his authorial strategy through Stephen’s commentary on the use of symbols and imagery in art: rather than having fixed correspondences, his symbols take on a range of meanings in order to create connections among otherwise disconnected ideas. Stephen returns to one of the novel’s central questions: the nature of identity, or how it is that people can both remain the same and change over time.
Themes
Eglinton and Best agree that Shakespeare’s later plays show a sense of reconciliation. Stephen argues that this points to how severe Shakespeare’s problems were in the middle of his life, when he wrote darker works like Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Eglinton thinks this eccentric theory is wrong and argues the conventional critics are right.
Stephen again looks for clues to Shakespeare’s life in his plays, but readers might think he is weighting Shakespeare’s biography too heavily as a factor in his work. Although Eglinton’s defense of the conventional theories may seem boring, it’s worth remembering that 22-year-old Stephen is fighting a lonely battle against centuries of careful scholarship.
Themes
Stephen strongly disagrees with Eglinton. He argues that Shakespeare found some resolution to his troubles in his final period because of the birth of his granddaughter, and that different women characters in his late plays symbolically represent her. Stephen believes that Shakespeare’s genius led him to believe in himself, but he lost this confidence when Ann Hathaway seduced him in a ryefield, which made him feel like a loser and which he could never overcome. But much like King Hamlet, who was killed in his sleep, Shakespeare never fully understood what happened to him—instead, as he constantly reflects on his own past in his plays, the real meaning reveals itself to his readers. Hence, he becomes a ghost of his past self, like the ghost of King Hamlet.
While Bloom links his troubles to not having a son, Stephen suggests that Shakespeare resolved his troubles by having a granddaughter. Like Stephen’s idea of the umbilical cord phone network in “Proteus,” this involves switching from a paternalistic concept of family and fulfillment to one based on maternity. When Stephen suggests that Shakespeare covertly exposes his life to his readers through his plays without meaning it, he’s suggesting that an artist’s life is so inseparable from their art that all good literary criticism is really also biography. Of course, this is significant for Ulysses, since Stephen Dedalus is really just James Joyce’s younger self. It’s notable that Stephen believes artists cannot truly understand what their work means, as this real meaning is only discernible in retrospect—this implies that Joyce’s readers will determine the meaning of his work. Of course, it’s also a reference to the way Joyce deliberately delays the reader’s gratification in Ulysses by leaving out essential details for understanding events until long after they happen. (For instance, the reader doesn’t fully learn about Stephen’s family’s poverty until the sixth episode.) Finally, the details of Ann Hathaway seducing Shakespeare in a field closely resemble the scene of conjugal bliss that Bloom recalled with Molly—but when this scene recurs later at the end of the book, it becomes clear that it has the opposite meaning. It represents true love, not deception.
Themes
Buck Mulligan suddenly arrives at the library, announcing his entrance with an “Amen!” As Buck mocks Stephen’s serious demeanor, Stephen mocks Buck’s lighthearted entrance, thinking about the Christian God who apparently sent Himself down to Earth, was killed by His own creations, resurrected Himself, and then went to Heaven to judge people. The musical notation for a hymn interrupts the text. Lyster asks Buck about his own thoughts on Shakespeare, and Buck jokes that he thinks he’s heard of the man. The librarians debate other theories about Shakespeare, such as Oscar Wilde’s theory that a man named Willie Hughes really wrote the sonnets. Stephen’s mind drifts to drinking, overspending, and women—specifically, Eve and the serpent.
Buck Mulligan again chooses the worst possible moment to step in with his comic relief—just like he mocked Stephen’s grief in the opening scene, here he mocks Stephen’s Hamlet theory right when he’s about to finish it. Stephen responds blasphemously, by comparing Buck’s foolishness to the God who managed to get Himself killed on Earth. But whenever Joyce mentions God, he’s also talking about the artist as creator. Stephen’s story also describes Joyce writing himself (Stephen) into this scene and then watching the other characters abuse him. In turn, it’s fair to assume that Stephen is projecting his own experiences and insecurities onto his story about Shakespeare. (This explains why he thinks about drinking, spending, women, and the seducing serpent.)
Themes
Buck produces a telegram from Stephen, who sent it in the morning instead of meeting him at the pub, like he promised. Mocking the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, Buck recounts waiting with Haines in the pub, and then he jokes with Stephen that Synge is going to murder him. Stephen thinks about the time he actually met Synge in a Paris café.
Stephen’s telegram is one of the many important events on June 16 that Joyce simply skips over the first time around. Like the meaning of art (according to Stephen), such events only become apparent later on, when readers encounter them in retrospect. The Irish playwright Synge is significant because his plays focused on Irish peasants and were often seen as demeaning them. Buck is essentially suggesting that Stephen is a lowlife for standing him up. In 1907, three years after the events of Ulysses (but well before Joyce wrote it), Synge wrote a controversial play about a man killing his father, which resonates with Stephen’s desire to define himself as an independent man with no ties to his father.
Themes
An assistant calls for Mr. Lyster, explaining that a visitor from the Freeman is looking for old copies of a newspaper from the town of Kilkenny. While Lyster leaves the office and goes to help the man, Buck Mulligan says that the mysterious visitor is a “sheeny” (an offensive word for Jewish people) and grabs his namecard: “Bloom.” Buck comments that he saw Bloom staring at a statue of Aphrodite in the museum, and that Bloom knows Stephen’s father.
It’s time for the third close call between Stephen and Bloom. (Bloom is looking for the old ad that he’s planning to use as the model for Alexander Keyes’s ad.) Unsurprisingly, Buck’s first reaction is anti-Semitic, and he confirms another event that Joyce hinted at but left out of the main narrative: Bloom actually did go to the museum and check out the statues of women after the end of “Lestrygonians.” (In the Odyssey, the goddess Aphrodite cheated on her husband, so it’s significant that she’s the one who Bloom was gawking at.)
Themes
Eglinton and Best ask Stephen to continue on with his theory about Ann Hathaway, whom they had always assumed to be “a Penelope stay-at-home.” Stephen explains that Shakespeare spent 20 years living lavishly in London, enjoying plenty of fancy food and women. Meanwhile, Stephen argues, Ann Hathaway was busy with other men. As evidence, Stephen cites Shakespeare’s sonnets and Hamlet, with its emphasis on broken vows. He asks why there is no record of Ann’s existence between her marriage and her death, besides her taking a loan from a shepherd. Moreover, in his will, Shakespeare left her nothing but his second-best bed. Eglinton thinks this was just a legal convention, but Stephen insists that Shakespeare omitted his wife’s name from the first draft of his will and was wealthy enough to leave her plenty of money (and beds).
The reference to Penelope, Odysseus’s wife in the Odyssey, furthers the parallel between the adulterous wives Ann Hathaway and Molly Bloom (whose soliloquy at the end of the novel makes up an episode called “Penelope”). Of course, Penelope went to great lengths to avoid committing adultery. Shakespeare, Odysseus, and Bloom all take long voyages away from home—Shakespeare spends twenty years in London, Odysseus spends ten years fighting the Trojan War and ten years returning during the Odyssey (also for a total of twenty), and Bloom spends almost twenty hours away from home on June 16. These correspondences clearly set up Bloom as an epic hero and also comment on the way patterns inevitably repeat themselves in literature and history.
Themes
Stephen goes on to argue that Shakespeare was a cruel, manipulative man who ran moneylending scams and shamelessly pandered to public opinion and flattered powerful people with his plays. Eglinton dares him to “prove that [Shakespeare] was a Jew.” Stephen offers his proof by absurdly combining St. Thomas Aquinas’s views on incest with the assumption that Jewish people are avaricious and frequently intermarry.
As Stephen’s theory becomes more and more outlandish, it is obvious that he and Eglinton are playing an intellectual game rather than having an honest debate. This supports the theory that Stephen is really more interested in proving his intelligence than making a compelling point—but it also challenges the reader to think about how much it’s reasonable to speculate about characters’ and authors’ true motivations. In fact, it’s possible to interpret this whole episode as Joyce taunting the reader who is looking for deeper meaning in his novel (and especially looking for correspondences with the author’s life).
Themes
Eglinton insists that Shakespeare would not involve his family in his work. Stephen thinks about Eglinton’s own father, an uncultured man from the countryside. Then, Stephen’s thoughts drift to his own father greeting him when he returned from Paris to Ireland. Fatherhood is “a necessary evil,” Stephen decides, a “mystical estate” that fathers pass down. But it’s not a “conscious begetting.”
When he calls fatherhood a “mystical estate,” Stephen is essentially saying that fatherhood is always an imagined relationship, because men can never prove that they are or are not fathers. (There were no paternity tests in Joyce’s day.) Therefore, fatherhood is an example of a “mythical” belief operating in everyday life: it fundamentally depends on a story people tell each other about their relationship, and there is no perfect way to verify that story.
Themes
Shakespeare cannot be Prince Hamlet, Stephen says, because his elderly mother cannot be “the lustful queen” and his father Simon cannot be the troubled King’s ghost. There is no true natural connection between fathers and sons, Stephen continues, and they are naturally enemies, fighting for control. Stephen thinks that, when their parents and sons die, men act as their own fathers, so when he wrote Hamlet, with his father and son both dead, Shakespeare was acting as “the father of all his race.” So he wrote his family members into his plays.
In this portion of his theory about fatherhood, Stephen gets into the critical analogies between Hamlet, Shakespeare, Stephen himself, Bloom, and Jesus Christ. All are fatherless and sonless, in their own differing ways. And they all seek to build their own legacies for the future. So Stephen is asking whether they can break free from the fate their fathers have set out for them and become truly independent, autonomous creators. (This is what he wants to do with his art and Bloom wants to do with his bloodline.)
Themes
In a short passage formatted as a play, Stephen argues that Shakespeare named his two greatest villains after his brothers, Richard and Edmund. He also argues that Shakespeare wrote himself into minor characters. Stephen asks, “What’s in a name?” He compares names to the stars under which people are born: they’re signs of people’s destiny. He starts thinking about his own name and destiny. When Eglinton points out that “Dedalus” is a curious name, Stephen thinks about the Greek myth of the master craftsman Daedalus. Stephen compares his own travels in Paris with the famous story of Icarus, Daedalus’s son, who flew too close to the sun, melted the wings his father built for him, and fell to his death in the sea.
The brief change in literary form again pushes the boundaries of the novel, and it also suggests that Stephen is having a brief moment of Shakespearean genius. Like numerous other lines throughout this episode, “What’s in a name?” is a direct quote from Shakespeare. Of course, since people’s parents choose their names, this represents one aspect of fate that will always tie sons to their fathers. Through Eglinton’s comment, Joyce analyzes the symbolism of Stephen’s name—again, this is one of the rare moments when Joyce actually makes these connections explicit for the reader. If Stephen represents Icarus in the tale of Daedalus and Icarus, this suggests that he was living out the destiny that his father set up for him—but if he melted the wings his father built for him, this means that he inadvertently throws off his father’s influence and becomes autonomous. Finally, when he comments that authors often write themselves into minor characters, Stephen deliberately opens an intriguing question for the reader: where has Joyce written himself in?
Themes
Lyster asks Stephen what exactly he’s saying about Shakespeare’s brothers, but then an attendant calls him away for library business. Stephen explains his theory to Eglinton instead. Shakespeare consistently wrote about adulterous brothers and men being banished from their homes. Eglinton concludes that Stephen thinks Shakespeare is “the ghost and the prince” all at once, and Stephen adds that Shakespeare is part of all of his characters. At the end of his life, he returned home to Stratford and died, and like all men, he truly encountered himself, as people do in Heaven or Hell, when they have to atone for their own actions.
When Eglinton summarizes Stephen’s theory, he’s referring to “the ghost” of King Hamlet and “the prince” Hamlet. But Stephen takes “the ghost and the prince” further, as a metaphor for Shakespeare representing the trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in Hamlet. He is also a ghostlike presence lurking everywhere throughout his work. According to Stephen, this work became a way for Shakespeare to confront his personal problems by proxy, through ideas rather than reality. But he had to finally confront them when it was time for him to go home to his family in Stratford. The theme of homecoming also recurs throughout this novel—it directly refers to Bloom’s journey home end in the final episodes (like Odysseus’s), but it’s also a metaphor for people fulfilling their destiny and achieving self-knowledge.
Themes
Buck Mulligan randomly yells out, “Eureka!” He explains that God is talking to him and starts writing on a piece of scrap paper. Eglinton asks Stephen if he believes in his own theory about Shakespeare, and Stephen says no. He starts thinking about where the impulse to believe comes from in the first place. Eglinton says that Stephen shouldn’t expect to be paid for publishing his theory if he doesn’t believe it. Stephen proposes that Eglinton could pay him to publish their conversation as an interview. Buck Mulligan mocks the idea and invites “Kinch” (Stephen) to leave the library with him. Buck promises Eglinton that he’ll see him at the party tonight, and he and Stephen walk out, passing the eccentric Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell on the way.
When Stephen admits that he doesn’t believe his theory, he also ties this in with a broader rejection of the whole system of Heaven and Hell where he postulated that Shakespeare would end up. Of course, it’s also worth asking why he’d come up with such an elaborate theory that he doesn’t believe in—the obvious answers are to make money or to prove his own intelligence. Either way, this suggests that he’s starting to explore ideas and create art for the wrong reasons (not to capture absolute beauty, which is what he always planned to do). Poverty seems to be getting in his way.
Themes
On their way out of the library, Buck sings in amusement and complains about Irish theater, while Stephen keeps thinking about Shakespeare. Standing in the doorway in front of the library, Buck declares that he’s started writing an obscene play about masturbation entitled Everyman His Own Wife, or, A Honeymoon in the Hand.
Buck’s play is in part an elaborate joke on Stephen, whose theorizing about Shakespeare resembled intellectual masturbation more than serious literary criticism, and whose anxieties about fatherhood could be resolved if people just masturbated instead of having sex. But more importantly, this play also foreshadows Bloom’s masturbation in the “Nausciaa” episode and strongly implies that he is an “Everyman.”
Themes
A man passes between Stephen and Buck. Stephen remembers watching the birds from this place “for augury” (fortunetelling) and remembers his dream about a “street of harlots” and melons from the last night. The man passing between them turns out to be Bloom, whom Buck calls “the wandering jew.” As he and Buck follow Bloom down the stairs, Stephen thinks about the end of Cymbeline, when Shakespeare writes about “ceas[ing] to strive” and making peace with one’s destiny.
Bloom’s presence, the reference to fortunetelling, and the flight of birds (which were associated with Bloom in “Lestrygonians”) strongly imply that Bloom will have something to do with realizing Stephen’s dream later in the novel. The anti-Semitic trope of “the wandering jew” who is doomed to roam around until the Second Coming fits well with the novel’s representation of Bloom. For one, he spends most of his day wandering around Dublin. And more importantly, he’s an exile who constantly feels alienated, no matter where he goes. Finally, when Stephen considers making peace with fate, he’s not only thinking about giving up his theory about Shakespeare: he’s also considering whether it’s still worth trying to exercise creative control over his own life and art.
Themes
