Surveillance: education, confession and the politics of reception.

In any consideration of Joyce's representation of reception, indeed, of his construction of a literary politics in general, ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ must be a key document. In the middle of that episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus lists to himself the characters who have been significant readers of or listeners to his work and ideas. ‘Where is your brother? … My whetstone. Him, then Cranly, Mulligan: now these’ (U 9.977–8). The list casts an identity, or role, onto the assembled group, that of audience to Stephen; but it is also a reflection on some of Joyce's actual readers and the transformation which his work has cast on their responses. The earliest extant draft version of this chapter gives a fuller list including Davin and Lynch, and specifies that the brother was the first reader. This earlier draft assembles the fictional versions of Stanislaus and those college friends who had read and appeared in Stephen Hero (Clancy, Byrne, Cosgrave) and brings them up to date via Gogarty and now ‘these’ figures in the National Library (Lyster, Best, Magee and Russell). The list is a characteristic grouping of readers as both collective and other (Joyce would do the same with critics in Finnegans Wake), but it is also a list that has been carefully compiled and ordered. Like any archive, it has form. Divided into two, it broadly distinguishes different cultural groups: the earlier named readers plus Gogarty and the current audience, ‘these’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]