Scylla is peppered with strange stylistic
innovations suggesting an impatience with the "initial style":
a narrator acting
like a character, a snippet of Gregorian chant notation,
two imitations of theatrical posters (the second followed by a
list of dramatic characters), a section of dramatic dialogue.
None of these is stranger than what happens after Stephen
pauses in his barrage of arguments and challenges his
listeners to make arguments of their own. Explain, he demands,
Anne Hathaway's poverty in Stratford at a time when her
husband was living richly in London. Explain the "swansong
wherein he has commended her to posterity":
To whom thus Eglinton:
You mean the will.
Content-wise, what follows is Eglinton's defensive but
confidently rational argument that bequeathing your "secondbest
bed" to your wife need not imply a sense of sexual betrayal. But
content plays a dull second fiddle here to the formal element: a
radically indented "You mean," introducing what look like twenty
lines of verse. A little farther down the page, the eye sees
what look like the "shared," "split," or "dropped" lines found
in many Shakespeare plays, in which a half line of one
character's dialogue quickly follows a half line of another's,
represented in printed texts by dropping down a line and
continuing to the right.
The way in which "You mean" is positioned on this website
suggests that it may be part of such a dropped line, but not all
editors have positioned it in quite the same way. Some put it
several spaces to the left of the colon, and the Gabler edition
includes no drop at all. My text reproduces the look of the
Shakespeare & Company first printing, which Joyce oversaw.
But even if these ten syllables are not a dropped line—they do
differ from Shakespeare's usage, since only one person is
speaking—they nevertheless arguably make up a single
line
because they scan as highly regular iambic pentameter: "to WHOM
thus EG-lin-ton: you MEAN the WILL."
Shakespeare's verse works constant changes on its underlying
metrical pattern, following the shifting rhythms of human
speech and avoiding metronomic regularity. The presence of a
"pyrrhic" foot of two unaccented syllables in the line above
is neither unusual nor disruptive of the pattern. The
beginning of the next line ("That has been explained") is so
roughly irregular that it is hard to hear any iambic pattern,
but the rhythm is quickly re-established. It is not much
disrupted by the extra unaccented syllables in "jurists" and
"dower" (such so-called "feminine endings" are common in
Shakespeare's lines), by the extra syllable in "knowledge"
(substituting "skill" or "lore" would produce a line of
perfect pentameter), or by the reversal of stress in "She was"
(initial trochees are perhaps the most metrical common
variation in all of Shakespeare). But after these three and a
half lines the rhythm is very strongly disrupted:
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker:
These words form parts of two dropped lines, suggesting that
some other voice has briefly broken into the speech of the first
one. Another fact adds to this impression: roughly stressed
rhythms (/ / u / / u) intrude here, tearing apart the smooth
iambic flow of the first voice.
Regular iambic rhythm returns at "And therefore he left out" and
continues through "The presents for his granddaughter." But then
it begins to die out over the next two and a half lines, as
extra syllables and prose rhythms crowd in. Finally, four short
lines—progressively more truncated, as if the very structure of
verse is being whittled down—bring the pentameter down to
nothing. Three and a half feet, then two, then one, then one
half, and finally nothing at all:
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
Punkt
"Punkt" is German for "period" or "full stop"—a
punctuation mark consisting only of a "point" or "dot,"
a single small puncture of the page. Here it suggests
that the diminishing verse lines are approaching a vanishing
point, like the daylight consciousness of Bloom at the
end of Ithaca. Hans Walter Gabler, altering the
practice of earlier texts (including the first edition), puts
a period after this word, but surely this is a mistake. Rather
than a sentence requiring a full stop, it is a full
stop. Like the large dot in Ithaca, it declares a
decisive end to something—the argument advanced in the iambic
lines.
This word does not seem to be spoken, and there is no
indication that it is even thought by any of the men
in the library office. From whose consciousness does it arise?
Perhaps the only good explanation is that it represents an
intervention by the author—or the narrator, or the "Arranger,"
or the text itself, assuming that there is any real difference
among those entities. A similar foreign-language intrusion has
occurred earlier in Scylla when Mulligan enters the
library office: "Entr'acte." This French
term for an intermission between the acts of a drama could
come from Stephen's internal monologue, as he anticipates that
the arrival of the garrulous Mulligan will interrupt his
lecture. But it probably makes more sense as a kind of
authorial stage direction, announcing that the next few pages
will be given over to chatter. "Punkt" seems even more clearly
cut from that cloth.
It is strange to imagine the narrative commenting on itself,
or the author entering into dialogue with his characters, but
the passage under discussion invites such thoughts. Who, after
all, has organized the passage as lines of verse and contrived
to make Eglinton speak in a semblance of blank verse? Who
rudely interrupts his speech? ("Him Satan fleers, / Mocker"
makes no sense whatsoever as something Stephen would say or
think, but it makes good sense as a narrative description
of Stephen: the young man who likes to think of himself as the
Devil is said to be mocking Eglinton's thought process.) Who
diminishes the pentameter lines, making them shrivel away to
nothing? All of these things represent the hidden hand of the
author or narrator, brazenly upending what by the ninth
chapter have become well-established rules of narration. If
this entity can announce its presence with such arbitrary
narrative acts, it may well permit itself to say to Eglinton,
"Punkt," Enough!
The narrative tricks are not quite yet finished. The
stylistic legerdemain that has produced a sonnet's worth of
blank verse concludes with six short lines of pure doggerel
that sound like a mockery of that stately language. A series
of strongly stressed short "e" sounds hammers out a kind of
maniacal parroting of Eglinton's closing words:
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
These repetitive, reeling, increasingly incoherent compounds
cannot be Eglinton's speech. Nor do they sound like Stephen's.
Whatever narrative consciousness pronounced "
Punkt,"
putting an end to Eglinton's speech, now seems to be shaking its
head in disbelief at the inanity of his claim that it was
entirely normal for Shakespeare to bequeath his secondbest bed
to his wife. Having made Eglinton sound a bit like Shakespeare
himself, it first stifles his speech and then declares it to be
stark raving nonsense.
