Lapwing

Near the end of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, Stephen realizes his lecture on Hamlet is rapidly disintegrating before his eyes. Not only are John Eglinton and the rest wholly unconvinced by his arguments, but he also has Buck Mulligan nipping at his heels, undermining him at every opportunity. Stephen looks to the heavens for inspiration, attempting to argue that the birth of William Shakespeare was heralded by “a star, a daystar, a firedrake, [that] rose at his birth.” Stephen knows his argument is fraudulent (“Don’t tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.”), and his audience has clearly lost patience with the young bard. Eglinton quips:

“—You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.”

Stephen’s thoughts swim and churn:

“Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus. Pater, ait. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be.”

TFW people don’t like your Shakespeare theory

The “fabulous artificer” and “hawklike man” are the Dedalus of myth. Like his namesake, Stephen once aspired to fly by the nets that held him back in Ireland. To this end, Stephen set out for Paris, but rather than soaring free on his fantastical wings, Stephen wound up broke and hungry with nothing to his name except a few volumes of French pornography. As his thesis crumbles in the face of Mulligan and Magee, Stephen is gripped by the realization that he is not Dedalus at all, but rather his imprudent, hapless son Icarus, falling and weltering into the sea due to his own immaturity and poor judgment. In the words of scholar Daniel Schwarz, “Stephen is imprisoned in a labyrinth of his own making.”

Stephen refers to himself more than anything else in this passage as a “lapwing.” Yes, a lapwing flies like the mythical Dedalus, but why does Stephen identify with this species in particular? Lapwings are a type of bird similar to a plover and are resident in Ireland. An Irish lapwing isn’t likely to set foot in Paris or really anywhere outside Ireland. It’s not the kind of bird you’d want to be if you were looking to fly away altogether.

The lapwing gets a shout-out in Hamlet. In Act V, Scene 2, Horatio comments to Hamlet upon Osric’s exit:

“This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head.”

Scholar George Geckle wrote that this saying existed as a proverb outside of the context of Hamlet. Lapwings, like many species of ground nesting birds, have a habit of squawking and running away from their carefully hidden nests in order to fool predators. To a casual observer, they might appear to be running around all willy-nilly in a state of confusion. Horatio’s comment implies that Osric is running away in a similar fashion, with a bit of shell metaphorically on his head unable to see what’s in front of him as he scurries away. In Stephen’s case, he flew off over the sea without any real plan and ended up coming home ashamed.

William Blake included a similar vision of the lapwing in his Gnomic Verses. Even more so than Shakespeare, Blake paints a picture of a creature so chaotic and foolish that it can barely live. Blake’s lapwing is also literally unable to evade the nets set out to thwart his freedom:

“O lapwing! thou fliest around the heath,
Nor seest the net that is spread beneath.
Why dost thou not fly among the corn fields?
They cannot spread nets where a harvest yields.”

Geckle digs even deeper than Shakespeare and Blake, though. In Stephen Hero, Stephen mentions reading Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary, which tracks the evolution of the word “lapwing” from Anglo-Saxon terms meaning “one who turns about in running or flight,” which matches our interpretation so far. The Skeat’s entry tantalizingly includes a reference to the 14th-century tract by Dan Michels of Northgate entitled Agenbite of Inwit, which we know that Stephen has read. Michels had an awful lot to say about lapwings, which he seemed to have found to be absolutely vile creatures, describing how they shun flowers but love dung. He quoted another medieval scholastic, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, who wrote that lapwings were evil, unclean things, obsessed with eating dirt. One might draw a parallel between this creature and Stephen/Joyce’s “cloacal obsession.”

Geckle cites a third medieval writer, John Gower, who declared that “a lapwing had lost his faith,” yet another quality shared by lapwings and Stephen Dedalus. Gower then calls the lapwing “the bird falsest of all.” The lapwing’s attempts to fool predators by luring them away from their nests seems to be the origin of this aspect of their bad reputation. Scholar William Schutte, quoting Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, notes that a Greek name for the lapwing was “polyplagktos,” meaning “luring on deceitfully.” Graves also records a proverb describing a dishonest person as “more beseechful than a lapwing.” We can interpret Stephen’s self-identification as a lapwing to mean that he has failed to live up to his youthful ambitions, but is he also deceitful? I interpret this to mean that Stephen is suffering from a bout of imposter syndrome as his argument flounders in the Library. He is afflicted by a creeping sense that he is a fraud, incapable of the intellectualism to which he aspires. He feels like he is just flapping aimlessly around the Library office, squawking to hoodwink men who clearly see through his ruse.

Scholar James McElroy has more recently attempted to rehabilitate the image of the poor lapwing among Joyceans. He counters that the lapwing is actually a gorgeous bird to observe in the wild, with its handsome crest and distinctive call. Lapwings do not in reality eat filth and dirt, preferring insects instead. Personally, I would like to emphasize lapwings are not evil, as they are birds and don’t possess human morality. They aren’t being deceitful by luring predators away from their nests but rather have developed a good defensive strategy for combating the harsh realities of the natural world. In the long run, it seems at least the government of the Republic of Ireland agrees with this assessment, as the lapwing was named the national bird of Ireland in 1990.

If European medievals’ disdain for the poor lapwing has stirred up Stephen’s self-loathing, he should look instead to the Muslim world for a pick-me-up. Graves describes a passage in the Koran that lauds the lapwing as “ the repository of King Solomon’s secrets and the most intelligent of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him.” This seems to me a much more fitting description of Stephen. Rather than a filthy, immoral dung-eater who doesn’t know his right from his left, Stephen is the most intelligent in his flock and prophetic to boot. We can appreciate this as readers even if Mulligan and Magee don’t.

Stephen has one more affinity with birds, lapwings or otherwise. As Stephen and Mulligan wrap up their time in the Library office, Mulligan calls Stephen away:

“—Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Ængus of the birds.”

Mulligan uses his second pet name for Stephen, Wandering Aengus, the meaning of which is revealed in “Wandering Rocks”:

“—You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Ængus I call him.”

It’s worth remembering that Stephen has shown up to the Library from his liquid lunch with the newspaper crew from “Aeolus,” three drams of whiskey deep on an empty stomach. A liquid lunch leads to liquid courage, I suppose. Mulligan recognizes that his pal is more than a little tipsy and leads him away from further humiliation, for now anyway.

The Irish god Aengus is traditionally depicted with the birds of inspiration circling his head. Any birds circling Stephen’s head at the moment might be more in line with a Looney Tunes character who's just been bonked on the head. Inspiration is exactly what Stephen needs most in the final moments of “Scylla and Charybdis.” As Stephen and Mulligan descend the front steps of the National Library, Stephen looks to the heavens once more, hoping to spot some birds for the purpose of augury but sees none. He calls to mind another time on these same stairs when he was able to summon the birds of inspiration:

“Here I watched the birds for augury. Ængus of the birds.”

Stephen is recalling a moment described in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the library to look at them, leaning wearily on his ashplant. They flew round and round the jutting shoulder of a house in Molesworth Street. The air of the late March evening made clear their flight, their dark darting quivering bodies flying clearly against the sky as against a limp-hung cloth of smoky tenuous blue.”

At that time, the birds did shine a bit inspiration onto Stephen:

“A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and have not perverted that order by reason.”

In this moment of augury, Stephen was not a confused, flailing lapwing, but a “fabulous artificer” able to access the secret wisdom of Agrippa and Swedenborg. He is the brilliant lapwing of the Koran, rather than the shameful lapwing slandered by Agenbite of Inwit. Stephen’s intellect has failed him on Bloomsday, just as the birds, the “things of the intellect” have also abandoned him. The “creatures of the air” live ordered, reasonable lives, unlike Stephen who is in freefall at the moment, crashing like Icarus into the sea. Back in Portrait, Stephen also thought of his namesake:

“And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight. The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings….”

Despite all this, Stephen remembers in the present that he was able to fly in his dream last night. In the dream world, he met a man and “a creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.” At just that moment, Stephen’s train of thought is derailed by Buck Mulligan commenting on the “Wandering Jew” passing out of the Library and past the two younger men. This is, of course, Leopold Bloom exiting the Library after his attempt to get ahold of that crossed-keys design in the Kilkenny People he’d like to mimic in his Alexander Keyes ad. He is the man with the melon that Stephen’s dream foretold, and they will meet once again in the “street of harlots,” the Wandering Jew and Wandering Aengus.

Further Reading:

A Shakespearean Ghoststory Part 3: Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund