The Economy of Belief Spencer Perkins McAvoy College

There are a variety of cues which encourage us to take Stephen Dedalus’s performance of his theory of Hamlet as sophistry, and to cast Stephen as a sophist. Stephen has been compared to Gorgias in “Aeolus”: Socrates and Plato make a number of appearances in the chapter, with Eglinton suggesting that Stephen write his theory up as a Platonic dialogue. The portions of my essay which discuss in detail allusions to Sophists and Sophistical argument are indebted to the work of Jean Kimball in her paper “ ‘Brainsick Words of Sophists’: Socrates, Anisthenes, and Stephen Dedalus,” but I want to insist that even without extensive excavation the presence of classical sophistry is as clear as it is enticingly neat. At least it provides us, as Kimball has it, with an answer to a question which must arise with any reading of “Scylla and Charibdis,” that is, Why does Stephen Dedalus perform this elaborate theory which he does not believe? But it seems to me that certain aspects of Kimball’s reading conflict with some of the most enigmatic and interesting moments of the chapter. To have that Stephen’s theory is merely an example of eristic, or “competitive and contentious argument,” a playing field for this battle of wits, is to ignore the...