As someone who wrote about the allusions to Oscar Wilde in the Telemachiad for my first blog post, I would like to explore the resurgence of the Wilde references (which were absent in episodes 4-8) in “Scylla and Charybdis,” which also alludes to homosexuality much more directly than previous episodes, particularly as an accusation directed at Bloom. It appears that the pattern of these references is that of a kind of recurrent anxiety, something that intrudes into characters’ thoughts or speech regularly but vanishes just as quickly, nagging and yet marginal.
What is particularly interesting is that while it isn’t particularly unusual to see Oscar Wilde’s work being referenced among a group of Irish artists in this time period (he was hardly an obscure figure!), what is interesting is that a book like Ulysses, so fixated on sexuality and death, would allude to his imprisonment and (in 1900, only 4 years before the novel is set) early death only subtly, even as the same episode probes the life of William Shakespeare for sexual secrets. Mr. Best’s effusive but vague praise of The Portrait of Mr. W.H. – the primary Wilde reference of the chapter – makes no note of Wilde’s biography, but we do see the jarring reference to “love that dare not speak it’s name” from Episode 3 joined by two more repetitions here, at 9.659 and 9.852. Each time, the thought is gone as soon as it arises – in the former instance, the suggestion that Shakespeare “as an Englishman […] loved a lord”(9.660-661) seems to merit no serious consideration, and the latter instance is as but one in a list of aberrations, the “incests and bestialities”(9.851) overshadowing the monstrous nature of paternity. The use of the phrase “love that dare not speak its name” ties these allusions to Wilde – the first repetition in Episode 3 did so directly, as “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name”, but the way that Ulysses shies away from these connections as soon as it makes them strikes me as peculiar.
I’d also like to bring up another aspect of Stephen’s thoughts that we see in Episode 9 as well as in Episode 3: the regular, brief irruption of memories of his friend Cranly into seemingly otherwise unrelated lines of thought. We have, for example, the “Smile. Smile Cranly’s smile”(9.21) wedged between a tease and a raunchy lyric, and the cryptic memory of “Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar”(9.136). Although these flashes of memory are not particularly unusual in their content, what is unusual is the refusal of Stephen to pursue them. As much as it may seem a reach, I would like to suggest that this represents anxiety about the friendship’s potentially homoerotic implications, based upon these cryptic lines from Episode 3, which insinuate much and confirm very little: “Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly’s arm.”(3.450-451).
The only places in this part of Ulysses where the text does not seem to shy away from the concept of homosexuality are the two moments in which Mulligan, glimpsing Bloom, suggests mockingly to Stephen that Bloom is “Greeker than the Greeks”(9.614) and that Stephen ought to watch out. Here, the taunt becomes intermingled not only with antisemitism – Mulligan openly calls Bloom a “sheeny” and asks “What’s his name? Ikey Moses?”(9.607) – but with the theme of Bloom’s sexual incompetence more broadly. The insult against his heterosexuality becomes one of many attacks on Bloom’s masculinity within the novel. I’m curious to look into what other scholars have written on how Joyce deals with (or rather, avoids dealing with) the concept of homosexuality within Ulysses, and how heterosexuality factors in to the novel’s concept of masculinity.
