All posts tagged Corley

Ulysses by James Joyce: Cast list

One obvious way of thinking about a book is not the plot, narrative or style, but slicing it up by characters and actions. This is especially handy for ‘Ulysses’ in which a cast of over 200 named characters weave in and out of the narrative as they weave their way around Dublin. You could get cute and say that many phrases and individual key words recur like characters, weaving in and out of the text to create complicated resonances and motifs, which is true, but listing them would take a book. Just creating this cast list deepened my own understanding of the characters and their significance.

The list is in order of first appearance – I wasn’t sure whether to put it into alphabetical order but Wikipedia already has an alphabetical list, if you want one:

I omitted chapter 15, ‘Circe’, because it is a beast unto itself, with over 100 characters with some of them of questionable nature (for example the various inanimate objects who have active or speaking parts) and would make this list unmanageably long. You can read my Circe review with its cast list, separately.

Chapter numbers and names

Here’s a reminder of the 18 chapters and their Homeric titles i.e. the episodes from Homer’s Odyssey which they are based on or reference. (Always worth emphasising that these titles don’t actually appear in any edition of ‘Ulysses’ where the chapters are just given as plain numbers; they are the names given by Joyce to early promoters of his book and which have been used by scholars and fans ever since they became known in the 1930s.)

Part 1. Telemachiad

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

  1. Calypso
  2. Lotus Eaters
  3. Hades
  4. Aeolus
  5. Lestrygonians
  6. Scylla and Charybdis
  7. Wandering Rocks
  8. Sirens
  9. Cyclops
  10. Nausicaa
  11. Oxen of the Sun
  12. Circe

Part 3. Nostos

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Cast

Numbers in brackets refer to chapters the characters appear in. They’re as complete as I could make them but probably not definitive.

1. Telemachus: at the Martello Tower

Stephen Dedalus (1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17) aged 22, hyper-intelligent, extremely well-read, bookish young man with literary ambitions – described as ‘a lithe young man, clad in mourning, a wide hat’, mourning his recently dead mother. Called back from a brief sojourn in Paris by his father’s telegram telling him his mother is dying, Stephen caused scandal by refusing to kneel and pray at her bedside. Earns a bit teaching at Deasy’s school. In the National Library propounds his Shakespeare theory to sceptical traditionalists who aren’t impressed (10). Depressed, he appears to spend the rest of the day drinking, reappearing in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode, making drunken smart remarks in the gang of drunk medical students when sober Bloom arrives. He is mortified that it is superficial Buck Mulligan who gets invited to the important literary soiree of George Moore and not the much more clever him. When the party in the maternity hospital breaks up, Stephen staggers off to the red light district where he encounters Bloom again, who rescues him from a confrontation with a British soldier and takes him home for cocoa and a chat.

On this reading of ‘Ulysses’ I realised that Stephen, for all his smarts, is a frustrated loser, stymied at every turn. By the time we get to the later chapters, his highfalutin quoting of Aquinas or whoever which felt impressive in the opening chapters, has come to seem a pathetic compensation for his failure.

I don’t feel sorry for Stephen, he’s had plenty of advantages to his start in life; I feel sorry for his impoverished younger brothers and sisters. He encounters one in chapter 10, Wandering Rocks, Dilly (Delia) Dedalus, at a bookseller’s cart, where Dilly has bought a French primer. He feels pity for her pathetic attempts to educate herself and he has his wages in his pocket to help her… but he doesn’t; he prefers to spend all his wages on alcohol and then on prostitutes. So no sympathy for Stephen.

Mary Dedalus – Stephen’s mother, recently dead. Mulligan castigates him for refusing to kneel and pray by her bedside as she was dying, a refusal that leaves him plagued by guilt throughout the novel, climaxing in the Circe chapter where he hallucinates her reproaching him. Her recent death explains why for the whole of Bloomsday Stephen is dressed in mourning. For me the often-overlooked fact is that his poor mother had 13 pregnancies, from which there are nine surviving children.

Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan (1, 10, 13) – plump, witty young medical student who has rented a Martello tower to live in and is letting Stephen rent a room. Mockingly dismissive of Stephen’s literary pretensions, he crops up again in the Scylla and Charybdis in the National Library taking the mickey out of Stephen’s Shakespeare theory. Stephen is repelled by his flashy cynicism. Hugh Kenner points out he is given no interior monologue i.e. he has no insides. Yet again he appears mid-way through an episode in the maternity hospital in Oxen of the Sun, yet again upstaging Stephen, before disappearing off to catch the last train out to the tower at Sandymount.

Haines (1) – Englishman temporarily staying at the Martello tower. Prone to nightmares which have kept Stephen up all night and put him in a grumpy mood. Well-meaning but imperceptive upper-class Englishman who typifies the colonial attitudes Stephen resents.

The old milk woman (1) – appears in ‘Telemachus’ when Haines tries to speak Irish to her which she can’t understand, asking if he’s speaking French: so, the comedy of a British Gaelic revivalist trying to use a half-dead language that the genuine locals don’t speak any more. For context, see:

2. Nestor: at Clifton Boys’ School, Dalkey

Cyril Sargent (2) – at Clifton Boys School, Stephen gives a history lesson then keeps this boy, Sargent, back after class to help him with sums, prompting the simple comment ‘Futility’. Stephen reflects that nonetheless his mother loves him, that a mother’s love is the one consistency in life, and then feels racked with guilt at hurting his dying mother.

Garrett Deasy (2) – pompous antisemitic Unionist headmaster of the (unnamed) school in Dalkey where Stephen is teaching in ‘Nestor’. As a ‘West Briton’ (remember, this was the insult levelled at Gabriel Conroy in ‘The Dead’) he represents unionist, Protestant and capitalist views, and so is a foil to Stephen’s nationalist, Catholic, artistic temperament. We see him a) paying Stephen his wages (£3 12s 0d) and b) finishing writing and then handing to Stephen a letter regarding foot-and-mouth disease which he wants him to take to the offices of the Evening Telegraph (and which we see Stephen deliver in chapter 7, Aeolus, and facetiously discussed by the drunken crew in chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun).

4. Calypso: at the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, 7 Eccles Road

Leopold Bloom (4 and onwards) – aged 38. Used to work for Wisdom Hely’s, where he was a traveller for blottingpaper, now he is a freelancer canvasser for adverts i.e. advises clients about design and then tries to place them in newspapers. In Nosy Flynn’s view ‘He’s not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He’s been known to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O, Bloom has his good points.’

Crucial to understanding the entire book is that Bloom knows his wife, Molly, is going to have sex with her concert impresario Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boyle, who’s popping round to her house around 4pm. All day long Bloom is haunted by this knowledge and from time to time sees Boyle in the street (signalled in the text by Boyle’s trademark straw hat).

Bloom himself is fleetingly seen in passing by other characters as ‘A darkbacked figure’. According to Lenehan ‘He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom’. According to the narrator of Cyclops who sees him hesitate about taking a cigar, ‘he’s a prudent member and no mistake’ and, later, as he gets impatient with Bloom’s endless talk, describes him ‘with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about’. He is similarly cautious in Oxen of the Sun where he accepts a drink from the other roisterers but then quietly pours it into his neighbour’s glass, thus proving the only respectful man among them.

As the book proceeds we come to realise Bloom is quite highly sexed and has numerous sexual fantasies. In the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter he apparently masturbates to the sight of a young childminder displaying her stockinged legs and knickers (although there is apparently scholarly debate about whether this actually happens or is just Bloom’s fantasy). And then in the extended ‘Circe’ chapter, among other transformations, Bloom is humiliated and turned into a woman for the sadistic pleasure of hallucinated prostitutes. This confirms the sense that he is actively conspiring in his own cuckolding (why doesn’t he confront Molly about it? turn up at the house at the appointed time, to prevent it?) because he gets a kick from sexual humiliation (see his correspondence with Martha, below).

Molly Bloom (4 and onwards) – née Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy and an unnamed mother from Gibraltar. She is a soprano singer, ‘Dublin’s prime favourite’ and going on a concert tour arranged by the producer Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan who has a date to come round her house that afternoon and have sex with her. Molly is plump. Leopold ‘looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder’. John Henry Menton says ‘a good armful she was’. Lenehan describes sharing a taxi ride with her and says ‘She has a fine pair, God bless her.’ The lowlife narrator of chapter 12 calls her a ‘fat heap’. In the spoof Celtic Revival style she is described as ‘The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.’ Molly reads popular romances and Bloom spends some time at a second-hand stall looking for new ones to buy her. Her first appearance is lazing while Leopold beings her breakfast in bed. The novel famously ends with a long chapter devoted entirely to her freeflowing stream-of-consciousness thoughts as she falls asleep.

Milly Bloom (4) – Leopold and Molly’s 15-year-old daughter, recently left home to work as a photographer’s assistant in Mullingar, where she is seeing a young man named Alec Bannon. This Bannon turns up in Oxen of the Sun.

Rudy Bloom (4 and thereafter) – the infant son of Leopold and Molly Bloom who died at just 11 days old, about a decade before the events of Ulysses. As the couple’s only son, his death haunts Leopold, triggering recurring feelings of loss, guilt and regret at the lack of an heir.

Martha (4) – married woman who Bloom is having an ‘affair’ with via post, under the assumed name of Henry Flower. He’s never actually met her, he just enjoys exchanging risqué correspondence in which she calls him her naughty boy and threatens to spank him, more evidence of Bloom’s wish to be sexually humiliated.

Rudolph Virág (4) – Leopold’s father, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant who converted to Protestantism, which explains why despite being nominally Jewish Bloom has very few thoughts about Jewish history, theology, traditions or practices. What he does ruminate on is the fact that Rudolph committed suicide by taking poison. Rudolph appears as a hallucination in Circe to criticise his son.

Athos (4) – Rudolph’s dog, pined away and died after his owner killed himself.

Dlugacz (4) – Bloom’s local butcher (referred to as the ‘ferreteyed porkbutcher’). He is a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, similar to Bloom’s own background, yet he sells pork. He wraps Bloom’s kidney in a sheet of newspaper that advertises a Zionist land-settlement project named Agendath Netaim (Hebrew for ‘Union of Planters’) which Bloom reads and whose name recurs.

Sweny’s (4) – specifically, F.W. Sweny & Co. Ltd, the chemist’s shop where Bloom goes to order a lotion for his wife, Molly, and buys a bar of lemon-scented soap, promising to come back later and pay, which he doesn’t, despite nagging thoughts.

Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (mentioned in 4, 10, 11) – flashy, popular concert promoter who’s arranging a concert tour for Bloom’s wife, Molly. In chapter 4, ‘Calypso’, Bloom picks up a letter from his doormat from him to Molly and hands it to her in bed. Somehow he knows that they’ve made a date for today, 4pm, when Boylan is going to come round and have sex with her, and is haunted by the knowledge all day and keeps catching glimpses of him in the street. Boylan is a ‘spruce figure’ wearing ‘a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a suit of indigo serge’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ we see him buying fruit as a present for Molly and, characteristically, flirting with the salesgirl. In ‘Sirens’ he flirts with the barmaids and buys drinks for himself and Lenehan.

5. Lotus Eaters: Bloom wanders round central Dublin, from Sir John Rogerson’s Quay through Lime Street toward Westland Row, Lincoln Place (near Sweny’s pharmacy) and ending near Merrion Square

Charlie M’Coy (5, 10, 15) – small-time local conman, swindler and acquaintance of Bloom’s; asks Bloom to add his name to the list of Dignam’s mourners, despite not attending the funeral. Crops up in ‘Wandering Rocks’ accompanying Lenehan.

Bantam Lyons (5, 8) – a shabby gambler. In ‘Lotus Eaters’ (5) while looking for racing tips, Lyons asks to borrow Bloom’s newspaper, Bloom tells him to keep it because he was ‘going to throw it away’ which Lyons interprets as ‘Throwaway’ being the name of a horse to bet on. When Lyons mentions this to others, Bloom acquires a spurious reputation for having ‘inside information’. The joke outcome of this little storyline is that the horse ‘Throwaway’ actually wins the race, much to the vexation of Lenehan and other characters.

6. Hades: Paddy Dignam’s funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery

Paddy Dignam (6) – dead, died a few days before the novel starts, dropped dead of ‘apoplexy’ probably meaning heart attack. We learn that Dignam had mortgaged his life insurance policy to pay off debts, leaving his wife and five orphans penniless. His funeral is a central event in the first half of the narrative, attended by Bloom, Simon Dedalus and others. ‘As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said.’ His young son, Patsy, pops up briefly in Wandering Rocks. He may be an avatar of the Homeric figure of Elpenor in The Odyssey, who dies after he drunkenly falls overboard. After the funeral ‘Wandering Rocks’ shows Bloom visiting the Dignam home on Newbridge Avenue to offer assistance, but he also seems to visit her again. The reason Bloom looks into Barney Kiernan’s pub is he’s looking for Martin Cunningham to jointly pay her another visit; they are going to fiddle Paddy’s insurance policy to get her some of the money Paddy had mortgaged away.

Patrick Aloysius ‘Patsy’ Dignam (6, 10) – young son of Paddy Dignam, appears in ‘Hades’ and again in ‘Wandering rocks’. Represents the pitiful next generation, impoverished by this generation’s fecklessness.

Simon Dedalus (6, 7, 10, 11) – Stephen’s father. According to ‘Portrait’ was affluent enough in his early married years to send Stephen to a fee-paying school, but then went steadily downhill, unable to keep a steady job and continuing to impregnate his wife (who endures 13 pregnancies!). In ‘A Portrait’ Stephen gives a comic resumé of his father’s career:

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes. —A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Now he mostly makes money by pawning family possessions. He’s one of the three others with Leopold in the carriage to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Bloom thinks: ‘Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son’ but also: ‘Most amusing expressions that man finds’. Wears glasses. Pops up in the newspaper office in Aeolus, in the National Library in Scylla and Charybdis, briefly in Wandering Rocks, and at the Ormond Hotel in Sirens, eating, drinking and then singing along with other characters who play the piano and perform. He sings the aria ‘M’appari tutt’amor’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, a song about lost love that moves Bloom thinking about his own marital situation.

Martin Cunningham (6, 12) – one of the three others with Leopold in the funeral carriage, a kindly sympathetic friend to Leopold Bloom. He organises help for the Dignam family and defends Bloom against antisemitic slurs in ‘Hades’ and ‘Cyclops’. He has a beard and looks a bit like Shakespeare. He has to cope with an alcoholic wife.

Mr Power (6) – one of the three others with Leopold in the funeral carriage – a Dublin official associated with the Royal Irish Constabulary at Dublin Castle – good looking – keeps a mistress – commits a faux pas when (in the funeral carriage with Bloom and two others) he opines that suicide is ‘the greatest disgrace to have in the family’ unaware that Bloom’s father, Rudolph, committed suicide.

Corny Kelleher (6, 10, 15) – an undertaker’s assistant working for H.J. O’Neill’s funeral parlour, a shadowy figure connected to both death and the police, maybe an avatar of Charon the ferryman. He appears in ‘Hades’ (6) and ‘Wandering Rocks’ (10). In ‘Circe’ (15) he helps handle the police but doesn’t offer to take drunken Stephen home, that’s left to Bloom.

Ned Lambert (6, 7) – at the cemetery, a cheerful, well-connected Dubliner, a friend of Simon Dedalus. He is a seed and grain merchant who manages a grain store in St. Mary’s Abbey. He appears at Paddy Dignam’s funeral (6) then the Evening Telegraph offices (7) then showing the reverend Hugh Love around the Abbey in ‘Wandering Rocks’. Known for his wit and boasts about his influential relatives like his uncle, the Vice-Chancellor.

Father Coffey (6) – officiates at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, muscular, and ‘jowly’. Bloom thinks he ‘barks’ the funeral mass. Insofar as he mediates between the world of the living and the dead, maybe an avatar of Cerberus the dog at the entrance to Hades in Greek mythology.

John O’Connell (6) – real-life Superintendent of Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, a respected local figure known for telling humorous stories e.g the one about the two drunks and Mulcahy’s statue. Insofar as he presides over the cemetery, an avatar of the Greek god of the underworld (Hades in Greek, Pluto in Latin).

Tom Kernan (6, 10) – tea salesman, agent for Pulbrook Robertson & Co. tea merchants. He was the central figure, the heavy drinking alcoholic who his friends set out to reform in the Dubliners short story ‘Grace’. Here we learn that Kernan is a Protestant, a detail that surfaces when he is part of the funeral party in ‘Hades’ and critically comments on the ‘rushed Catholic services’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ he discusses a recent shipping disaster with Bloom and then in ‘Sirens’, encourages the baritone Ben Dollard to sing ‘The Croppy Boy’. His friends mock him for his use of pretentious phrases.

Joe Hynes (6, 7, 12) – unreliable, small-time reporter for the Freeman’s Journal who covers Paddy Dignam’s funeral; in his subsequent report he misspells Bloom as ‘Boom’, an error which rings through the rest of the story. Similarly, he asks for the name of a mystery man at the funeral and mishears the reply that he’s wearing a mackintosh for the man’s name, which he reports incorrectly as ‘M’intosh’, another joke error which recurs. Known for his financial unreliability, he borrows three shillings from Leopold and doesn’t repay it. Previously appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’.

John Henry Menton (6, 15) – a petty, arrogant solicitor and commissioner of affidavits who we meet in the ‘Hades’ chapter. He holds a long-standing grudge against Bloom who beat him in a game of bowls and so coldly rebuffs Bloom’s attempt to fix his dented hat after the funeral. Insofar as he spurns the hero (Bloom/Ulysses) he is maybe an avatar of Ajax, a Greek hero spurned by Odysseus, who ignores him when Odysseus visits the underworld. He appears in the hallucinated jury of the ‘Circe’ chapter.

Reuben J. Dodd (6) – a real-life Dublin solicitor and moneylender, portrayed by other characters as an avaricious Jew. At the cemetery other characters discuss rumours of his son’s suicide attempt in the River Liffey.

7. Aeolus: in the newspaper offices of the Freeman’s Journal on Prince’s Street

Red Murray (7) – a minor character in ‘Aeolus’, an employee at the Freeman’s Journal office who helps Bloom arrange for a newspaper paragraph to appear about his client, Alexander Keyes.

Joseph Nannetti (7) – a real-life historical figure, a rising Dublin politician and printer who was working as the foreman at the Freeman’s Journal where Bloom encounters him. The real Nannetti went on to be Mayor of Dublin (1906 to 1908).

Professor McHugh (7) – brilliant but lazy, haphazard academic. Encountered hanging out in the Freeman’s Journal office bantering with other time wasters like Ned Lambert, Simon Dedalus and J.J. O’Molloy. ‘Professor MacHugh’s unshaven blackspectacled face’. His most significant moment is reciting a (real) speech by barrister John F. Taylor which compared the Irish language revival movement to Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land.

For an interesting article about all the characters found in the newspaper office, see:

J. J. O’Molloy (7, 10) – a once-promising but now struggling Dublin lawyer, portrayed as down on his luck and in debt, haunting newspaper offices like the Freeman’s Journal, for loans while maintaining a veneer of respectability and knowledge of oratory. Crops up in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

Myles Crawford (7) – pompous, alcoholic editor of the Evening Telegraph and Freeman’s Journal, dismisses Bloom’s polite approaches but fawns over Stephen when he later appears.

Matthew Lenehan (7) – a parasite, hanger-on, freelance journalist and horse-racing tipster. One of the two characters in the Dubliners story, ‘Two Gallants’ where he leaches on a fancy man who screws money out of his girlfriend. Desperate scrounger. He appears in ‘Aeolus’, ‘Wandering Rocks’, Sirens’ and among the medical students in ‘Oxen of the Sun’. He is obsessed with the Ascot Gold Cup, backs a horse called Sceptre and is infuriated when Bloom’s tip, Throwaway, wins instead.

Mr O’Madden Burke (7) – a smooth, sophisticated music critic and reviewer who we first meet in the Dubliners story ‘A Mother’ and who here appears in the newspaper office in ‘Aeolus’). He reappears in ‘Cyclops’, ‘Ithaca’ and is mentioned in ‘Penelope’. Pretentious and self-interested.

8. Lestrygonians

Bloom wanders central Dublin, walks past the Irish House of Parliament and Trinity College, moving from O’Connell Street toward Grafton Street and Kildare Street, deciding not to have lunch at Burton restaurant but grabbing a gorgonzola sandwich and glass of Burgundy at Davy Byrne’s pub on Duke Street, before walking on and ducking into the National Library to avoid Blazes Boylan.

Mrs Josie Breen (née Powell) (8) – former flame of Leopold Bloom and friend of Molly Bloom, long-suffering wife of the mentally unstable Denis Breen, ‘beauty and the beast’. When Bloom encounters her in ‘Lestrygonians’, he is sad that she looks shabby and haggard-looking.

Denis Breen (8) – Josie’s mentally ill husband – ‘Denis Breen in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison’s hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke earnestly.’ He has recently received an anonymous postcard with ‘U.P.: up’ on it which has made him panic. Scholars interpret it to mean ‘Your time is up’ or ‘You are all washed up’ and more broadly, in the context of the novel, to symbolise failure, paranoia, mockery and modern confusion – recurring themes in the novel.

Little Alf Bergan (8, 12, 15) – a Dublin character and assistant to sub-sheriff Long John Fanning. In ‘Lestrygonians’ he spots Denis Breen and explains the story about the ‘U.P.: up’ postcard. He plays a role in ‘Cyclops’ by bringing to Barney Kiernan’s pub a cache of applications for the job of state hangman which triggers a tipsy discussion about hangings. Crops up (like everyone else) in Circe.

Nosey Flynn (8) – a greasy, gossipy Dublin pub regular, often found at Davy Byrne’s, known for his intrusive questions and snuffling manner. First appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Counterparts’.

Davy Byrne (8) – owner of the eponymous bar where Bloom drops in for a ‘gorgonzola cheese sandwich with mustard and a glass of burgundy’. A careful, moral man who doesn’t gamble. The sandwich and wine give Bloom wind which he passes under cover of a passing tram at the end of ‘Sirens’.

Paddy Leonard (8, 15) – minor character seen around the pubs who crops up in ‘Lestrygonians’ and ‘Circe’.

Tom Rochford (8) – struggling inventor who in ‘Wandering Rocks’ shows off his device, designed for music halls to show which act is on stage, which he hopes to promote to Blazes Boylan.

Sir Frederick Falkiner (8) – a real Dublin magistrate (Recorder of Dublin) known for his antisemitic judgments, appears as a symbol of legal hypocrisy and judicial bias, particularly towards Jews like Bloom. Bloom encounters him in ‘Lestrygonians’ and later hallucinates him sentencing him to prison in ‘Circe’.

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (8, 10) – a real-life Dublin eccentric known as ‘Endymion’, appears in ‘Lestrygonians and ‘Wandering Rocks’, recognized by his long name, tight hat, and dangling stick-umbrella-dustcoat.

9. Scylla and Charybdis: in the director’s office of the Irish National Library on Kildare Street

The quaker librarian (9) – unnamed Head Librarian of the National Library, tiptoeing in and out of Stephen’s lecture about Shakespeare in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’.

John Eglinton (9) – fictional name for real-life essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, a literary figure and librarian, who listens sympathetically to Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture.

Mr Best (9) – another of the auditors of Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture, based on the real-life Irish Celtic scholar and librarian Richard Irvine Best, he is depicted as a refined but shallow young man, signalled by his frequent use of the phrase ‘don’t you know’.

A.E. (9) – pseudonym of the real-life Irish poet, writer and mystic George Russell, who used the pseudonym Æ, a central figure in literary circles and a spiritual advisor. He is the main audience for Stephen’s Shakespeare lecture where he represents the old, spiritual, platonic view of art and so is unsympathetic to Stephen’s aggressively realist and autobiographical reading of Shakespeare.

10. Wandering Rocks: 19 vignettes depicting numerous Dubliners, many of them real-life figures

John Conmee S.J. (10) – ‘The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.’ first figure we meeting in ‘Wandering Rocks’ having a series of encounters with passersby in which he is blandly polite. Real-life figure, rector at Clongowes Wood College who was kind to a young James Joyce and instrumental in securing scholarships for Joyce and his brothers to Belvedere College.

Master Brunny Lynam (10) – boy who Father Conmee gets to post a letter for him at a postbox across the road.

Mr Denis J. Maginni (10) – a real-life Dublin dancing professor – ‘professor of dancing &c, in a silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots’. In ‘Circe’ when Stephen dances with prostitutes in Bella Cohen’s brothel, he imagines Maginni is there coaching him.

Mrs M’Guinness (10) real-life figure who owned a pawn shop, M’Guinness’s, where Stephen’s sisters (Katey and Boody) attempt to pawn some of Stephen’s books to buy food. Mrs M, ‘stately, silverhaired’, is greeted and bows to nice Father Conmee.

Katey, Boody and Maggy Dedalus (10) – boiling clothes, making yellow peasoup, living in poverty, shaming clever Stephen who had all the advantages in life.

Almidano Artifoni (10) – a music teacher and singer who appears briefly in ‘Wandering Rocks’, bumping into Stephen and suggesting he pursue a lucrative professional singing career, which Stephen rejects.

Miss Dunne (10) – typist, secretary to Blazes Boylan, sits in her office daydreaming or reading a romance novel. Types the date ’16 June 1904′, the only confirmation of the date on which Ulysses takes place (Bloomsday). She speaks with Blazes Boylan via telephone, relaying that Lenehan will be at the Ormond Hotel at four o’clock.

The reverend Hugh C. Love (10) – amateur historian being shown round St Mary’s Abbey by Ned Lambert, who’s in charge of the grain store in the abbey’s cellar.

Dilly Dedalus (10) – one of Stephen’s impoverished siblings. He bumps into her in ‘Wandering Rocks’, where she asks if he’s seen their father, then shows him a tatty French primer she’s bought at a second-hand stall, prompting Stephen’s feelings of pity and guilt.

Ben Dollard (10, 11) – large, good-natured and formerly successful Dublin bass singer with a big beard, often called ‘Big Ben’. Friend of Simon Dedalus, appears in ‘Wandering Rocks’, plays the piano and sings the sentimental ballad ‘The Croppy Boy’ in ‘Sirens’.

John Wyse Nolan (10, 12) – a minor nationalist character in ‘Cyclops’ who shares anti-British nationalistic views with the but is more moderate and briefly sympathetic to Bloom.

Long John Fanning (10) – fictional subsheriff of Dublin, first referenced in the Dubliners story ‘Grace’, appears here being discussed in ‘Aeolus’, appears briefly in ‘Wandering Rocks’ then appears in his role as sub-sheriff in Bloom’s masochistic court fantasy in ‘Circe’.

John Howard Parnell (10) – real-life figure, the brother of the superfamous Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell who, at the peak of his power, was ruined by being cited as the co-respondent in a divorce case and died soon after, in disgrace, in 1891. John was a city marshal in Dublin and the registrar of pawnbrokers but his role in the novel is to be a ghostly figure symbolising the haunting memory of Irish political failure. He is spotted by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’. In ‘Wandering Rocks’ he is seen in a bar playing chess against himself.  Inward-turning, failed, paralysis, all Joyce’s themes. In the phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’ Bloom imagines him offering a blessing, linking the ordinary, fading John Howard with the immense, mythic status of his dead brother.

11. Sirens: the bar and dining room of the Ormond Hotel on Ormond Quay on the north bank of the River Liffey

Richie Goulding (11) – Stephen’s uncle, brother of Stephen’s dead mother, May, married to Sara hence Aunt Sara. A struggling solicitor’s clerk, depicted as a slightly pathetic figure, with a bad back, often weighed down by a legal bag but enthusiastic about music. In ‘Sirens’ Bloom has dinner with him at the Ormond Hotel.

Miss Mina Kennedy (11) – one of the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in the Sirens episode who align with the sirens of the Odyssey. Golden-haired in contrast to Lydia Douce, who is bronze-haired. The pair are like ‘malicious mermaids’ coolly observing the (useless) men in the bar. She is more reserved than the flirtatious Miss Douce.

Miss Lydia Douce (11) – the other of the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in the Sirens episode who align with the sirens of the Odyssey. Bronze-haired barmaid in contrast to golden-haired Mina Kennedy. She is the more outgoing, flirtatious of the two: acting in a suggestive behaviour such as reaching up to emphasise her bosom, snapping her garter for Lenehan, suggestively stroking the phallic-shaped beer pull, and flirting with Blazes Boylan who pops in for a drink and who she has a crush on.

Pat (11) – waiter at the Ormond, old, bald and hard of hearing, moving between the dining room (where Bloom has dinner) and the bar. ‘Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait.’

The piano tuner (11) – young, unnamed character known as the ‘blind stripling’. Kindly helped across the road by Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’; rudely bumped into by Cashel ‘lamppost’ Farrell in ‘Wandering Rocks’; arrives at the Ormond Hotel to retrieve the tuning fork he’d left behind, and where he plays the piano, among others.

George Lidwell (11) – real-life Dublin solicitor and acquaintance of Joyce’s father. Offices nearby on Upper Ormond Quay, Lidwell is a ‘suave solicitor’ flirts with the barmaids. (Joyce consulted Lidwell in 1912 regarding legal issues with the publisher of ‘Dubliners’.)

12. Cyclops: Barney Kiernan’s pub

Narrator (12) – drops into Barney Kiernan’s pub to see the Citizen.

Geraghty (12) – doesn’t appear but is described as a ‘foxy’ (red-haired) plumber and a debtor who has stolen goods from a merchant named Moses Herzog.

The Citizen (12) – dominant figure in chapter 12, Cyclops. Supposedly based on Michael Cusack, the real-life founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association though scholars argue he’s more of a composite of radical nationalists of the era. The Homeric parallel is with the Cyclops Polyphemus because, like the one-eyed giant, the Citizen is depicted as narrow-minded, aggressive and blinded by his own prejudices.

Garryowen (12) – the Citizen’s mangy dog whose constant rumbling and occasional barking put everyone on edge. At the end of the chapter the Citizen sets him on Bloom who only just manages to jump onto a cab and make his escape. Comedically, Garryowen is mentioned by Gerty MacDowell in the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter (13) as actually belonging to her grandpapa Giltrap, and she calls him ‘a lovely dog’, really bringing out her rose-tinted view of everything.

Bob Doran (12) – first appeared a respectable, anxious employee in a wine-merchant’s office in the Dubliners short story ‘The Boarding House’. Since then he’s gone downhill and is now encountered as a drunk, weeping, rambling figure in Barney Kiernan’s pub, getting maudlin about the death of Paddy Dignam, adding to the general atmosphere of degraded chaos.

Terry O’Ryan (12) – bartender in Barney Kiernan’s pub – ‘Same again, Terry’.

Pisser Burke (12) – nickname of Andrew Burke, minor character and associate of the Cyclops narrator, known for spreading gossip around Dublin, tells stories from when he knew the Blooms when they lived at the City Arms Hotel.

13. Nausicaa: Sandymount Strand

Cissy Caffrey (13) – one of the three young women on the beach, looking after her young twin brothers, Jacky and Tommy. A non-nonsense straight-talking contrast with Gerty (see below) for example the way she goes straight over to loitering Bloom to ask him the time. In ‘Circe’ she returns in degraded form, apparently working as a prostitute while interacting with British soldiers.

Edy Boardman (13) – one of the three young women on the beach, the only mother so pushing a pram, she represents reality and maturity in contrast with Gerty’s self-deceiving romanticism. Makes cutting remarks which irritate Gerty. She and Cissy equate to the retinue of fine ladies who accompanied Princess Nausicaa in Homer’s Odyssey.

Tommy and Jacky Caffrey (13) – boisterous twin brothers looked after by their much older sister, Cissy.

Gerty MacDowell (13) – the young woman on the beach who Bloom watches from a distance, provocatively posing for him as he masturbates and while her head overflows with romantic, reality-denying fantasies.

14. Oxen of the Sun: National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street

Dr Horne (14) – a real-life figure, Sir Andrew J. Horne, a prominent Dublin obstetrician and the Joint Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

Nurse Quigley (14) – continually telling the drunken gang off for keeping the pregnant women in the ward above awake with their racket, inn the Homeric parallel, for disrespecting the sacredness of fertility – ‘an ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage’.

Dr Dixon (14) – junior doctor at the hospital. Recognises Bloom and invites him to join the party in the common room. Later goes to attend Mrs Purefoy who’s finally had her baby.

Crotthers (14) – ‘the Scotch student, a little fume of a fellow, blond as tow’ – ‘Crotthers was there at the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway’.

Madden (14) – ‘the squat form of Madden’ – another drunk medical student.

Frank ‘Punch’ Costello (14) – medical student, the drunkest member of the party, frequently interrupting the quiet of the hospital with ribald drinking songs. Nicknamed ‘Punch’ from his habit of ‘dinging’ any table he’s sitting at with his fist.

Alec Bannon (14) – brought along by Mulligan to the hospital. Boyfriend of Bloom’s 15-year-old daughter, Milly.

Nurse Callan (14) – nurse working at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, half-way through the chapter announces the birth of a son to Mina Purefoy.

Bridie Kelly (14, 15, 16) – young working-class woman Bloom lost his virginity to and reminisces about in ‘Oxen of the Sun’ (she also appears in ‘Circe’ and ‘Eumaeus’). One of the chapter’s Gothic paragraphs describes her as ‘the bride of darkness, a daughter of night’.

15. Circe

Too many to be listed. See my standalone review of Circe.

16. Eumaeus

Gumley (16) – nightwatchmen asleep in his ‘sentrybox’ by the docks.

Corley (16) – unemployed, scrounging son of a Dublin police inspector who asks Stephen for money – first appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Two Gallants’, extracting money from a naive girlfriend – nicknamed Lord John Corley because his mother was a servant in the house of an aristocrat

D.B. Murphy (16) – a sailor, teller of tale tales, possessor of impressive tattoos.

Skin-the-Goat (Fitzharris) (16) – owner of the shelter.

Streetwalker (16) – ‘glazed and haggard under a black straw hat’, briefly looks through the door of the shelter and makes Bloom duck behind the newspaper in embarrassment so is she Bridie Kelly who he tells us he lost his virginity to.

17. Ithaca

Stephen and Bloom.

18. Penelope

They don’t actually physically appear, but present in Molly’s thoughts are quite a few final characters:

Mrs Riordan (18) – who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’.

Mary Driscoll (18) – the Blooms’ scullerymaid.

Bartell DArcy (18) – tenor singer who kissed her in church.

Mrs Hester Stanhope (18) – adult friend when Molly was a girl.

Lieutenant Mulvey (18) – ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion, they kissed.

Mrs Rubio (18) – elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio.

Lunita Laredo (18) – Molly’s mother, a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent.

Mrs Fleming (18) – useless cleaner they had, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work.

Dr Collins (18) – Molly’s gynaecologist, impressed her with his long learnèd words.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 25, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/25/ulysses-james-joyce-cast-list/

Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus

Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added, the chinks does.
(Tall story-telling traveller D.B. Murphy)

—Then, Stephen said staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles triangle miss Portinari he fell in love with and Leonardo and san Tommaso Mastino.
(Joyce satirising his own character, and technique)

It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular.
(Part of Leopold Bloom’s extended soliloquy about toleration and fairness)

Intellectual stimulation, as such, was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind. Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row, old salt of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the world we live in…
(Bloom’s thoughts giving one of the many summaries of ‘Ulysses’ itself)

give us this day our daily press.

‘Eumaeus’ is the 16th of the 18 chapters in James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the book’s chapter numbers and names:

Part 1. Telemachiad

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

  1. Calypso
  2. Lotus Eaters
  3. Hades
  4. Aeolus
  5. Lestrygonians
  6. Scylla and Charybdis
  7. Wandering Rocks
  8. Sirens
  9. Cyclops
  10. Nausicaa
  11. Oxen of the Sun
  12. Circe

Part 3. Nostos

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Place in the sequence

‘Eumaeus’ follows the longest chapter, ‘Circe’, which is an extended fantasia which sees the book’s two protagonists, young intellectual Stephen Dedalus and middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, meet in a brothel in Dublin’s red light district.

Time

Each of the chapters covers about an hour in the course of one day, Thursday 16 June 1904, and into the early hours of the following Friday. ‘Eumaeus’ takes place roughly between 12.45 and 1.40 am i.e. in the early hours of the morning of the next day, Friday 17 June.

Context

‘Circe’ had ended with Stephen, very drunk, getting involved in a fight in the street with a British soldier. After a prolonged standoff, the soldier, Private Carr, punches Stephen in the face, knocking him to the ground. The pair are surrounded by a shouting crowd and the cops turn up, threatening to arrest Stephen. But the situation is defused by the fairy godmother-like arrival of a character met much earlier in the story, Corny Kelleher, who has some influence with the cops and gets them a) not to arrest Stephen and b) to disperse the threatening crowd.

This leaves Bloom looking down at the prone, mumbling figure of Stephen wondering what to do with him. He can’t leave him there on the street but is in a quandary where to take him. Eventually he thinks of a late-night café for nightworkers down by the docks, hoists Stephen to his feet and helps him stagger there.

Homeric parallel

Each of the chapters in ‘Ulysses’ is based on an episode from the Odyssey of Homer, the famous epic poem composed some 750 years BC, which describes the ten-year-long voyage back from the Trojan War of the Greek hero Odysseus and his crew which was packed with encounters with mythical creatures and legendary figures such as the giant Cyclops or the witch Circe.

This chapter, coming near the end of the story is loosely based on the Homeric character of Eumaeus. In the Odyssey, Odysseus finally makes it home to his kingdom of Ithaca but his palace is occupied by a horde of fit young men all vying to marry his wife, Penelope and thus gain control of his kingdom. Odysseus can’t just walk in so he disguises himself as a beggar and goes to the hut of Eumaeus, his faithful swineherd. Eumaeus had been bought as a slave as a baby by Odysseus’s father and the two men had grown up together. In other words, Eumaeus knows Odysseus better than anyone except his wife, Penelope.

After he has told Eumaeus a few old stories designed to test his faithfulness, Odysseus reveals his real identity to his delighted servant. Soon afterwards, in Eumaeus’s hut, the hero is reunited with his son, Telemachus. Together the three men plan how to take on the small army of suitors which are occupying his palace.

Modern equivalent

Back to the novel and Bloom helps Stephen on quite a long walk through the streets of Dublin to the all-night café where they encounter a drunken sailor named D.B. Murphy, who tells tall tales of his many sea journeys to exotic destinations.

So the parallel with Homer is there but, as you can see, is quite loose: Murphy is Eumaeus (even though he has not known Bloom/Odysseus since they were boys); and they take shelter with him but not in his hut or shelter, in a public café; and Bloom and Stephen certainly take shelter together but they do not meet there, they first back met in the maternity hospital in chapter 14 and then again in the brothel in chapter 15.

So the Homeric parallel is there but loosely applied and, like a cinematic effect, fades in and out of focus.

Style

After the mayhem of ‘Circe’, which is cast in the form of a surrealist absurdist play, ‘Eumaeus’ is much, much more restrained. It’s a return to traditional prose cast in sentences and paragraphs, all done in a unified tone of voice with no dramatic interruptions. This style is in a distinctive narrative voice completely different from any previous chapter but it is admirably clear and understandable compared to the clotted, truncated and often impenetrable style of earlier chapters.

Instead it’s written in a style variously described by commentators as ‘old’, ‘tired’, ‘worn out’ or ‘threadbare’ which, after all, is entirely appropriate to two protagonists who have had a long, trying day, particularly to Stephen who is sobering up after an all-day bender.

The tiredness is indicated by the way it is stuffed with clichés and worn-out expressions.

It was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and simple, upsetting the applecart with a vengeance…

The night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit weak on his pins.

That kind of thing. Thus after they enter the shelter:

A few moments later saw our two noctambules safely seated in a discreet corner only to be greeted by stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collection of waifs and strays and other nondescript specimens of the genus homo already there engaged in eating and drinking diversified by conversation for whom they seemingly formed an object of marked curiosity.

The effect is of a not-very-educated person, possibly a bit tipsy, striving to sound intelligent, or to put on their best style. Some critics suggest it’s what Leopold Bloom would sound like if he tried to write a piece of fiction. Not stupid, just clichéd and, as you can see from that one excerpt, also quite rambling.

Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His (Stephen’s) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman’s shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral.

As you can see it’s not just Readers Digest/Titbits magazine clichés (‘bucked him up’, ‘not exactly what you would call’), several other things are going on. Among other things, the sentences are long and rambling, and you can hear the base note of Joyce’s characteristic clunkiness of phraseology, his tendency to bolt several shorter sentences together into a clumsy longer one. In fact, so long and rambling, it often feels like a kind of dress rehearsal for Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy which ends the book. Here is just one sentence from Bloom’s thoughts on how hardworking men and women need a nice holiday once a year:

There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow, rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly wheelmen so long as it didn’t come down, and in the wilds of Donegal where if report spoke true the coup d’œil was exceedingly grand though the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the signal benefits to be derived from it while Howth with its historic associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O’Malley, George IV, rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt with all sorts and conditions of men especially in the spring when young men’s fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour’s run from the pillar.

In fact at one point Bloom himself ponders the possibility of him writing up an account of his mad day, specifically the events in the cab shelter, strongly hinting at the Bloom-as-author theory.

He wondered whether he might meet with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken down in writing suppose he were to pen something out of the common groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per column. My Experiences, let us say, in a Cabman’s Shelter.

Hugh Kenner points out that Bloom speaks like the narrator, in the same mix of long-winded cliches and rather pompous phraseology, indicating either that he is speaking the style he would write (unlikely) or that, as in many other places by now, the narrative style has taken over the characters (Kenner p.130).

Cast

  • Leopold Bloom
  • Stephen Dedalus
  • Gumley – nightwatchmen asleep in his ‘sentrybox’ by the docks
  • Corley – unemployed, scrounging son of a Dublin police inspector who asks Stephen for money – first appeared in the Dubliners story ‘Two Gallants’, extracting money from a naive girlfriend – nicknamed Lord John Corley because his mother was a servant in the house of an aristocrat
  • Skin-the-Goat – alias ‘the keeper’ – owner of the all-night café
  • D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe – an occasional stammer and his gestures being also clumsy – teller of tall stories about his travels
  • a figure who may or may not be town clerk Henry Campbell, Bloom can’t decide (theme of confused identities)
  •  a streetwalker ‘glazed and haggard under a black straw hat’ makes a brief appearance

Detailed summary

Walking It’s further to the cabman’s shelter than summaries imply. They walk there in a passage which shows off Joyce’s command of Dublin’s street layout, you can imagine him carefully poring over a map: they walk along Beaver Street (more properly Lane) as far as the farrier’s, encountering the distinctly fetid atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of Montgomery Street; turn left into Amien Street near Dan Bergin’s pub, where they see a four-wheeler cab outside the North Star Hotel. Bloom whistles for it but it doesn’t budge. So they head off for in the direction of Amiens Street railway terminus by way of Mullett’s and the Signal House.

Trams A Dublin United Tramways Company’s sandstrewer passes by which prompts Bloom to tell Stephen how he nearly got run over by a tram at the start of ‘Circe’ – so that incident, at least, was ‘real’ (within the terms of a fictional narrative). They pass the main entrance of the Great Northern railway station and the backdoor of the morgue, arriving at the Dock Tavern before turning into Store Street, famous for its C division police station. They continue past the tall warehouses of Beresford Place, past the turning on the right into Talbot Place, and Bloom enjoys the smell coming from James Rourke’s city bakery nearby.

Corny Bloom tells Stephen how lucky he was that Corny Kelleher turned up to sort things with the police, and rambles on to comment on the well-known corruption of some parts of the constabulary and snipe at the way you could never find one in the rough parts of town but there were plenty protecting the rich areas; and generally cautions against getting drunk and wasting your money on prostitutes. (Bit late for advice since we know from ‘Portrait’ that Stephen has been frequenting prostitutes since he was 16 i.e. 6 years.) Then he laments the way Stephen was ‘abandoned’ by all his pals, the drunk medics we met in ‘Oxen of the Sun’.

The sleeping nightwatchman On they walk, passing behind the Custom House, under the Loop Line Bridge, spotting the corporation watchman inside a sentrybox who, after some effort, Stephen remembers is a friend of his father’s, Gumley who, now he recognises him, he walks away so as to avoid. (Gumley having this job as nightwatchman is mentioned among the crew in the Evening Telegraph offices in chapter 8 ‘Aeolus’, and explicitly noted by Stephen.)

Lord John Corley But Stephen is hailed by a dubious figure who emerges from the shadows and proves to be Corley, an impoverished scrounger, nicknamed Lord John Corley because one of his female ancestors was a serving woman in a fine country house where, malicious rumour had it, she was impregnated by the aristocratic owner: hence the joke that noble blood runs in his veins and the facetious nickname.

Corley begs Corley now begs, saying his mates have abandoned him, he hasn’t a penny in the world and nowhere to sleep. As it happens, neither has Stephen: he suggests he tries for a vacancy coming up at Deasy’s school, then gives Corley a random coin from his pocket thinking it a penny, it’s in fact a half crown so Corley promises to pay it back. Corley carries on about needing a job, he asks Stephen to ask Bloom to ask a certain Boylan if he can get a job as one of the sandwich board men we’ve seen walking about Dublin earlier. This may or may not be the ‘Blazes’ Boylan who is at the centre of the narrative, but the name gives Bloom a turn.

Where will Stephen stay? Stephen quits Corley and rejoins Bloom who summarises the accommodation situation. 1) Stephen walking out to Sandycove, to the Martello Tower where he’s been sleeping, is out of the question (why? it’s only about 3 miles?). More importantly, if he did walk there, Mulligan wouldn’t let him into the tower. Why not? Because. Bloom reminds him, of ‘what occurred at Westland Row station’. What was this?

Bloom’s witness Bloom goes on to describe how he himself witnessed Buck Mulligan and Haines dodging among the crowd to avoid Stephen.

the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row terminus when it was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan, that is, and that English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred their third companion, were patently trying as if the whole bally station belonged to them to give Stephen the slip in the confusion, which they did.

Did Stephen punch Mulligan? But critic Hugh Kenner thinks something more happened: he thinks Stephen’s bubbling resentment at Mulligan finally boiled over and Stephen hit Mulligan. This would explain why a) there are scattered references to Stephen’s hand hurting him in ‘Circe’ and this chapter] and b) explain why he absolutely cannot go back to the tower. The rupture is now final.

Family Why doesn’t he go and stay the night with his family? Bloom assures him his father, Simon Dedalus, often speaks proudly of him. This triggers a vivid memory in Stephen of his family’s poverty, of:

His family hearth the last time he saw it with his sister Dilly sitting by the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he could drink it with the oatmealwater for milk after the Friday herrings they had eaten at two a penny with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper,

Mulligan Meanwhile Bloom is rambling on about what an up-and-coming man Mulligan is, destined for a fine career, plus the story of him bravely rescuing a man from drowning. Stephen doesn’t say anything but we can imagine his inner chagrin.

Ice cream Italians The pair come up to an ice cream car (parked next to the men’s public urinal?) around which a group if Italian men are volubly arguing. They walk past them and enter ‘the cabman’s shelter’. It’s always described in these terms but the owner sells hot coffee, there’s a printed price list, and quite a few people are sitting around in it, so the word ‘shelter’ seems pretty misleading. That’s why I envision it as more of an all-night café, albeit of primitive wooden construction.

Skin-the-goat The owner of the shelter/café is said to be ‘Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris, the invincible’, a real-life historical figure famous because he was the getaway driver for the gang of nationalists who committed the notorious Phoenix park murders i.e stabbed to death the British officials, permanent undersecretary Thomas Henry Burke and Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish.

This Fitzharris was mentioned in chapter 8, ‘Aeolus’, as part of the story of Gallaher’s scoop told by the editor of the Evening Telegraph, Myles Crawford.

The fog of history Fitzharris symbolises several of the chapter’s themes, namely ambiguity and shifting identities. 1) Nobody knows whether the shelter keeper is the famous Skin, it’s just a widely held assumption; and 2) nobody is totally sure of his history, how long he was sentenced to prison, when he was released, some people said he emigrated to America etc. I.e. a fog of uncertainty. 3) The Phoenix Park murders themselves are long enough ago (1882, being discussed in 1904) for all kinds of other rumours and legends to have gathered around it, some of which the characters discuss.

Coffee The pair take a seat, Bloom orders Stephen a cup of coffee and a roll, and they settle back and review the shifty looking clientele. Bloom asks Stephen why, if he understands Italian, he doesn’t write poetry in it, such a beautiful language. Stephen explains that the Italians were arguing over money (in other words, just like so many of the Dubliners we’ve met).

Shocking coffee The café owner brings over ‘a boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun’.

Red-haired man One particular red-haired, half-drunk bloke at a nearby table, a seaman by the look of him, asks Stephen what his name is. When he replies Dedalus, the sailor asks if he knows Simon Dedalus (i.e. Stephen’s father). With studied detachment, Stephen says he’s heard do him. Irish nationalism, and Stephen’s steady resistance to it, flare in the brief exchange about Simon:

—He’s Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same way and nodding. All Irish.
—All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.

D.B. Murphy The sailor launches into an anecdote about seeing a man named Dedalus shoot eggs over his shoulder, as part of a travelling circus. Then introduces himself as D.B. Murphy of Carrigaloe, tells his listeners he has a wife down in Carrigaloe that he hasn’t seen for seven years. Which triggers thoughts in Bloom of various stories about sailors returning after long absences, obviously invoking the Odysseus parallels.

Chews tobacco Murphy asks one of the surrounding jarveys i.e. drivers of horsedrawn taxi cabs, for a wad of tobacco; the keeper gives him one, he bites a big hunk and starts chawing it. And Murphy embarks on a series of sailor yarns. If you think about it, it’s characteristically clever of Joyce to have a seasoned old sailor tell his yarns in a chapter characterised by knackered, cliched, threadbare prose. They suit each other.

A crocodile bites Remember how many inanimate objects got to talk in ‘Circe’? and Bloom’s general principle that ‘Everything speaks in its own way.’ Something similar here, for a moment, as Murphy re-enacts the sight of a crocodile biting off part of an anchor.

—I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor same as I chew that quid.
He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his teeth, bit ferociously:
—Khaan! Like that.

South American tribes Murphy shows round a postcard of primitive tribespeople in the south American jungle. This triggers Bloom’s long-held ambition to go on a sightseeing tour of England, which morphs into the idea of setting up his own travelling music company, with his wife Molly the soprano at its core. Which morphs into the general idea that the hardworking people of Dublin need an annual holiday (see the long quote above).

The sailor’s tattoo After a few more tales, the sailor declares he’s had enough, he’s sick of the sea, he wants a nice cushy landlubber job, like his mate who’s a gentleman’s valet. He laments that his son Danny abandoned a good apprenticeship and ran away to sea. He opens his shirt to show everyone a tattoo of an anchor on his chest, with a face above it (the face of the tattooist, named Antonio who was later, in a farfetched detail eaten by sharks). He shows how, if he pinches his skin, the face makes different expressions. A symbol of changeable identities, a central theme of the novel.

Prostitute appears A haggard streetwalker opens the door and peers in, maybe touting for business. Bloom recognises her and hides behind someone reading a newspaper. Commentators claim this is Bridie Kelly, the degraded prostitute who years earlier, Bloom lost his virginity to, although her name doesn’t occur her in text. But it would explain why Bloom ducks. Anyway, the shelter owner tells her to beat it.

Bloom’s plan to vet prostitutes This triggers Bloom to tell Stephen how shocking it is that such diseased women can haunt the streets, they ought to be vetted by the authorities, which leads on to speculation about the difference between soul and body, which triggers in Stephen a typically over-learned and satirical reply. Bloom replies to Stephen’s super-sophisticated theology with everyman common sense.

Motherly Bloom Bloom prompts Stephen to try some of the (revolting) coffee and stirs it to whisk up the sugar settled on the bottom. He also advises the young man to eat regular meals. He sounds like everyone’s mum.

Tall tales Bloom goes on to reflect about the sailor’s tall tales and wonder whether all manner of stories are true, such as Sinbad et al, describes visiting museums etc. In other words, the chapter brings together all manner of stories to question the nature of storytelling itself.

National characteristics Bloom rambles on to talk about national characteristics e.g. the Spanish for being hot-blooded and tells Stephen his wife is half-Spanish, born in Gibraltar.

Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and then the others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog, collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing.

The sailor swigs and pees Bloom watches the sailor bestir himself, ask others to move out of the way, go to the shelter door and exit, take a swig of the booze in one of the bottles in his pockets, then take a prolonged piss so loudly it wakes up a horse in the cab rank and disturbs the nightwatchmen slumbering in the sentrybox, previously mentioned.

Shipping news Meanwhile the other patrons of the shelter carry on discussing ships, the decline in the shipping trade and shipbuilding, along with famous wrecks and disasters at sea.

Irish nationalism The sailor re-enters the shelter and spits out his wad of tobacco, bringing an atmosphere of booze and starts singing a sea shanty. The owner, Skin-the-goat (if it is indeed him) launches on a setpiece speech about the rise of Ireland, about Ireland’s strong economy milched for generations by England, but how England’s day is nearly over, symbolised by her near failure to win the Boer War, how Germany and Japan are on the rise etc.

His advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.

Nationalists argue This, as we know from ‘Portrait’ and earlier in ‘Ulysses’ is the diametric opposite of Stephen’s view, who knows the only thing he must do is escape. More to the point, Murphy the old salt disagrees with the view that England’s power is about to collapse (‘—Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond’) and this triggers an argument between the two (demonstrating the futile, inward-looking internecine argumentativeness of Irish nationalism which Stephen wants to escape).

Memories of the Citizen’s abuse All this triggers a chain of thoughts in Bloom which leads him to remember the incident with the Citizen in ‘Cyclops’. He tells Stephen the Citizen accused him of being a Jew whereat Bloom pointed out that his God (Jesus) and all his followers were Jews, which was the final straw which made the Citizen leap to his feet and make to attack Bloom, who ran out the pub. But his account includes a very important phrase for the book as a whole.

—He called me a jew and in a heated fashion offensively. So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.

Bloom is not a Jew Bloom does not think of himself as a Jew, as he is not, either ethnically (his mother being a non-Jew) or religiously (having been brought up a Protestant and converted to Catholicism before marrying Molly). But this is confirmation of the fact in the man’s own words.

(Further confirmed in ‘Ithaca’ where we are given Bloom’s heritage: ‘only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently Rudolph Bloom) of Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and Dublin and of Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins (born Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty)’).

Bloom’s politics Bloom goes on to enunciate his belief in pacifism and non-violence, his liberal toleration, which has endeared him to all right-thinking readers ever since:

—Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak.

But fine speeches by fictional characters, loved by all bienpensant readers, don’t change anything. ‘Great hatred, little room’ as Yeats wrote about the civil war that was ravaging Ireland as Joyce wrote his novel. ‘Only’ about 1,500 people died in the Irish Civil War. it was the long legacy of resentment and intolerance it left which bit.

Bloom’s defence of the Jews And Bloom then whispers (so as not to be overheard) an extended defence of the Jews:

—Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen’s ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are proved to be so. I don’t want to indulge in any because you know the standard works on the subject and then orthodox as you are. But in the economic, not touching religion, domain the priest spells poverty.

Bloom’s socialism And then goes on to avow a kind of socialism based on a universal income:

I’m, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of £300 per annum. That’s the vital issue at stake and it’s feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man. At least that’s my idea for what it’s worth. I call that patriotism. Ubi patria, as we learned a smattering of in our classical days in Alma Mater, vita bene. Where you can live well, the sense is, if you work.

Stephen the aesthete Interesting suggestion, right? But it is entirely characteristic of Stephen that he doesn’t process Bloom’s words in the way intended, instead perceiving them in purely aesthetic terms, in fact in terms of their colours.

He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to.

Difference between Bloom and Stephen This moment crystallises the differences between then: Bloom the earnest common sense everyman is on a completely different wavelength from Stephen the fastidious aesthete for whom meanings, in themselves, are passe, who is only interested in their sounds and shapes and patterns. And Joyce has Stephen make a joke which made me laugh out loud. Bloom, sensing Stephen’s reluctance at his ideas, hastens on to say that Stephen, too, would be rewarded in his scheme of universal work and payment, his writing being as important as the work of the peasant.

—You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.
—I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.
—But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.

Eccentrics and scandal Bloom doesn’t think he can have heard this right and withdraws into his mind to process it, which gives rise to a long ramble which starts with Irish eccentrics (which he takes Stephen to be the latest in a long line of) but quickly segues into gossip about the sexual peccadilloes of the rich, in particular the British Royal Family, namechecking some scandalous court cases which dogged the young prince of Wales (future Edward VII) in the 1880s and 90s (sex, and naughty kinky sex, is never far away in ‘Ulysses’).

Reading the paper Abruptly, Bloom is distracted by a copy of ‘The pink edition extra sporting of the Telegraph’ which has been left on the table nearby. He scans the headlines (and so does the text) then settles to read the account of Paddy Dignam’s funeral written by Hynes. This contains several errors: in the list of attendees it misnames Bloom as Boom and includes Stephen Dedalus BA who was not, in fact, present.

Brief reversion of style With the entry of the newspaper something interesting happens to the style: it reverts to the more sober, clipped and telegraphic style from much earlier in the novel, the so-called initial style, just locally, just a little outbreak, which makes you realise how indebted the initial style is to the whole concept of pithy headlines and truncated snippets:

First he got a bit of a start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H. du Boyes, agent for typewriters or something like that. Great battle, Tokio. Lovemaking in Irish, £ 200 damages. Gordon Bennett. Emigration Swindle. Letter from His Grace. William ✠. Ascot meeting, the Gold Cup. Victory of outsider Throwaway recalls Derby of ’92 when Capt. Marshall’s dark horse Sir Hugo captured the blue ribband at long odds. New York disaster. Thousand lives lost. Foot and Mouth. Funeral of the late Mr Patrick Dignam.

Parnell, again It’s just a local eddy, like a backwash in a river near a weir, then the text reverts to the ‘tired’ style. Meanwhile, in a very cryptic connection, the text implies that while Bloom’s been reading all this the conversation among the other customers has wheeled round, with a certain inevitability, to the tired old subject of the death of Charles Stewart Parnell, the great leader of the Irish independence movement who was brought down by being cited in a divorce case and so was immediately dropped by the Church and all good Catholic nationalists, lost his position and soon afterwards died of pneumonia on October 6, 1891, at the age of 45. Or did he? Aha!

Parnell will return! And this is the section of the tired old round-and-round-in-circles subject which the others have arrived at when Bloom notices what they’re discussing. They’ve just got to the urban legend that it wasn’t Parnell’s body that was buried, that his coffin was full of stones and that Parnell is just waiting for the right moment to return from his exile across the water (or South Africa among the Boers, where many swear they saw him) and lead the Irish to glorious independence.

Bloom and Parnell Turns out Bloom met the great man once, was present when the authorities smashed up the typesetting machines of his independence newspaper. In the mayhem, Parnell’s hat was knocked off and Bloom, with characteristic kindness, retrieved it and handed it back to him, at which the Lost Leader said Thank You. A characteristically humble and kind Bloom anecdote. (The incident of his presses being smashed up was a true event took place on 11 December 1890.)

More Parnell The Parnell passage rumbles on at length, Bloom describing the way the whole affair came out (Parnell had an affair with Katherine ‘Kitty’ O’Shea wife of Captain William O’Shea, for ten years, before the affair was revealed to the press in 1890, leading to the sensational divorce case, Parnell’s fall from political power, and death the next year). Bloom blames the husband, thinking him inadequate compared with the 6-foot, commanding Parnell who Bloom clearly identifies with, as a reformer and gentleman. But as to the idea of Parnell returning, Bloom thinks it wouldn’t be the panacea the nationalists think, it would only stir up the same mess of problems:

Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if they didn’t set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of shillyshally usually followed,

The possible return of Parnell prompts Bloom to think about stories about missing husbands who returned after long absences or were imposters, as in the case of Roger Charles Tichborne. These obviously pick up the chapter’s theme of long-delayed returns, and false identities.

Infidelities As Bloom’s account proceeded I realised that the issue of marital infidelity raised by Parnell strikes close to home with Bloom, given that his whole day has been dominated by knowledge of his wife’s unfaithfulness to him. When he summarises the Parnell love triangle you realise he is summarising his own:

It was simply a case of the husband [O’Shea/Bloom] not being up to the scratch, with nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man arriving on the scene [Parnell/Boylan], strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms [Kitty/Molly] and forgetting home ties…

Molly and Blazes Can Bloom still love his wife Molly after he knows she has shagged Blazes Boylan?

The eternal question of the life connubial… Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in the case, exist between married folk? Poser.

To university professors who have to follow strict moral codes, and their woke students quick to judge inappropriate behaviour of all kinds, No. To anyone who’s knocked about a bit, Yes, because love is complicated, love is strange and unpredictable. Also, if you really love someone, it’s for life, no matter what American divorce lawyers tell you.

Photo of bosomy Molly Given his earlier thoughts about hot-blooded Mediterranean types, Bloom wonders whether Kitty O’Shea had Spanish blood and this leads him back to thoughts about his wife, and so he gets a proper studio photo of Molly out his pocket and shows it to Stephen. It confirms the impression we’ve got earlier of Molly’s amplitude.

Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was In Old Madrid, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue.
—Mrs Bloom, my wife the prima donna Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ninety six.

Naked statues Yes, ‘her symmetry of heaving embonpoint’ triggers associations with the naked bosomy statues he saw outside the National Library, and then on to wondering whether she’ll be asleep by the time he gets back.

More Parnell And for some reason this triggers another page-long recap of the Parnell scandal, and another memory of the smashing up of the presses which he was present at, this time we learn he received a nasty poke in the ribs from the rioters – which triggers a memory of Bloom earlier that day pointing out the dent in John Henry Menton’s hat at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, a kindly gesture curtly rejected by Menton, in contrast with Parnell’s gentlemanliness.

Don’t consort with prostitutes Bloom’s thoughts turn to concern for Stephen and the risks to health and wallet of consorting with prostitutes. As to their relationship, his and Stephen’s:

The queer suddenly things he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the other’s senior or like his father…

Back to Bloom’s? Bloom’s thoughts finally turn to practical matters and where Stephen is going to sleep for the night. He can’t see any alternative but to take him back to his place, offer him a nice cup of cocoa and make a bed on the sofa – although they mustn’t make a noise given that Molly has quite a temper on her and would dislike being woken up in the early hours.

Newspaper snippets Bloom pays the keeper the bill, while tired old jossers around the room read out various snippets from the newspaper, to general apathy (repeating the mood of worn-out lassitude). There’s still a bit more business to get through. The ‘ancient mariner’ as he is now jokingly referred to by the text (showing signs of the name-changing shapeshifting of the ‘Circe’ episode) asks for the paper and carefully puts on some striking green glasses, which resemble ‘seagreen portholes’.

They leave the shelter So Bloom pays up 4 pence for the coffee and roll and helps Stephen out of the shelter. He nips round to Stephen’s right side, always preferring to be on the right:

So saying he skipped around, nimbly considering, frankly at the same time apologetic to get on his companion’s right, a habit of his, by the bye, his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles.

Their musical tastes And they set off across Beresford Place, walking back to his place. Bloom takes the opportunity to share some of his thoughts about music. He shares with Stephen his favourite pieces of classical music (Mozart’s Twelfth Mass, Mendelsohn) along with popular airs, among them the one he heard Simon Dedalus sing in the Ormond Hotel yesterday. Surprisingly for a man who’s been silent for most of the chapter, Stephen pipes up but, characteristically, evinces a fondness for the more recondite lute music of Shakespeare’s day.

Sweeper horse They pass a horse dragging a sweeper which makes such a racket they can’t hear each other. Bloom feels sorry for the horse. Once it’s past he conversationally tells Stephen his wife would like him, she’s a musician etc. Surprisingly, Stephen sings a song, an old German song of Johannes Jeep about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men, which boggled Bloom a bit:

Von der Sirenen Listigkeit
Tun die Poeten dichten.

Clearly, this links together a number of threads: the sea – across which Odysseus sailed and which has been the theme of this chapter; and the sirens who we met in chapter 11.

Stephen’s singing impresses Bloom Anyway, Stephen’s tenor singing voice enormously impresses Bloom who immediately thinks Stephen could make a living from it, and be a social hit, getting entrance to all the finest houses, and (being Bloom) stirring the cockles of many a fine lady – ‘causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes of the fair sex and being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation’.

The horse poos In Joyce sex, or gross physical functions are never far away, because ideologically he is committed to the materiality of life. We’ve had the old sailor taking a swig of his grog before liberally pissing against a wall. Now this big horse pulling its sweeping chain is here, mainly for its turds:

The horse having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and, rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on the floor which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full crupper he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had ended, patient in his scythed car.

Walking on Bloom helps Stephen step over the loose chain fence which separates the dock from the road, then carefully step over the horse’s poos and so into Gardiner Street lower while Stephen continues softly singing the German ballad.

And the driver of the sweeping car watches the odd couple walk of into the night.

This is all very beautiful. I far prefer the later, long, highly stylised chapters to the early ones, which I found very hard to follow. Nothing difficult at all here. Simple scenes described in an entertainingly parodic style.

The significance of newspapers

In his 1980 book about Joyce, American academic Hugh Kenner makes another simple but typically insightful point: if ‘Circe’ amounts to a monstrous dramatisation of ‘the nightmare of history’, ‘Eumaeus’ can be said to be the newspaper coverage of it, following the old proverb that history is repeated twice: first as tragedy, then as superficial and inaccurate newspaper coverage (p.131).

Full of tired cliché and ‘hail fellow well met’ pub bore locutions, the central symbol of the chapter is the evening edition of the Telegraph which Bloom finds left on a nearby table and which contains numerous inaccuracies, not least the misspelling of Bloom’s name as Boom. If a journalist who was actually there (at the funeral) can’t get the facts straight, what hope for people writing about events years or decades later i.e. historians?

This theme is dramatised in the prolonged passages about Parnell, which demonstrate the fog of rumours and urban myths which spring up around any historical event, the bigger and more traumatic, the more numerous and garish the rumours (nowadays, in 2026, more than ever with the proliferation of fake news across social media). Which also explains the parodies of Biblical phrases which are slipped into the text:

Sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof.

Give us this day our daily press.

Obviously the chaos of the press is explored in hugely more detail in the ‘Aeolus’ chapter. But Kenner’s point remains true that ‘Eumaeus’ gives concrete examples of the media’s tendency to trigger and then place on record all kinds of misleading information.

Not finishing the

As discussed, the prose style of ‘Eumaeus’ is distinctive and carefully chosen to reflect the exhausted subject matter. However it does retain certain elements of the tricky, difficult ‘initial style’ and one of these is the habit of not finishing sentences in Bloom’s stream of consciousness. This is a deliberate tactic to reflect the fast-moving nature of thought which leaps onto a new idea without finishing the current one.

The horse was just then.

Last joke

Having thought about it once, the scene with the Citizen recurs to Bloom several more times throughout the chapter. I particularly like this formulation of it, which made me laugh out loud:

He [Bloom] inwardly chuckled over his gentle repartee to the blood and ouns champion [the Citizen] about his god being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender Achilles. ‘Your god was a jew.’ Because mostly they appeared to imagine he came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

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Posted by Simon on February 11, 2026

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Dubliners by James Joyce (1914)

Dublin is such a small city: everyone knows everyone else’s business.
(The Boarding House)

Dubliners, that book of traps…
(Literary critics Hugh Kenner)

‘Dubliners’ is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, written between 1904 and 1907, and published as one volume, after various problems and delays, in 1914. The earlier ones are mostly pretty short and so have been described as vignettes, a vignette being ‘a brief evocative description, account or episode.’ The later ones are longer and more complex.

On the face of it the Dubliners stories present naturalistic depictions of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early twentieth century, although some readers, and subsequently a small army of academic scholars, have detected all manner of subtle symbolism and clever structuring in all of them.

  1. The Sisters (9 pages)
  2. An Encounter (9 pages)
  3. Araby (7 pages)
  4. Eveline (6 pages)
  5. After the Race (7 pages)
  6. Two Gallants (11 pages)
  7. The Boarding House (8 pages)
  8. A Little Cloud (14 pages)
  9. Counterparts (12 pages)
  10. Clay (8 pages)
  11. A Painful Case (10 pages)
  12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room (17 pages)
  13. A Mother (13 pages)
  14. Grace (22 pages)
  15. The Dead (41 pages)

1. The Sisters

A young boy is taken to see the lying-in of his dead priest.

A young boy who lives with his philistine uncle and aunt, reacts to the death of an old priest, the reverend James Flynn, who taught him much. From the start he is very alert to words, he lives through words which are as real as people:

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

The title comes from the fact that the narrator is taken by his aunt to visit the two spinster sisters who looked after the dead man, Eliza and Nanny, to be shown the corpse in his coffin, then have a glass of sherry and a gossip.

2. An Encounter

Two schoolboys run into a flasher.

Another story about boyhood but told in a much more stilted and pompous style:

A spirit of unruliness diffused itself among us and, under its influence, differences of culture and constitution were waived. We banded ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these latter, the reluctant Indians who were afraid to seem studious or lacking in robustness, I was one.

Three boys bunk off school to go swanning round Dublin.

We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay.

Except one of them, tubby Joe Dillon, doesn’t show up. So the narrator and Mahony roam round town till they come to rest in a field. Here they approached by a furtive old pervert, ‘a queer old josser!’ He asks about their girlfriends, talking about girls in a strange obsessive way. He excuses himself and goes off to a corner of the field and, it is strongly implied, masturbates.

After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim: “I say! Look what he’s doing!”

Then he comes back to the boys and, when Mahony goes off chasing a cat, launches into a monologue about how such boys should be whipped, repeating the word and idea obsessively.

It’s an encounter with a ‘flasher’, a case of indecent exposure, for sure, and creepy. But the man is also a type of mental blockage and paralysis, unable to get beyond his maundering obsessively repetitive phrases about girls and whipping. Perversion as paralysis.

3. Araby

An adolescent boy tries to impress an older girl he has a crush on but fails.

Everything around Joyce becomes charged with meanings and symbolism. So the apparently simple opening sentence is both realistic and symbolic:

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free.

One way to start with Joyce is not the awe-ful weight of the intellectual frameworks and symbolism, but more simply responding to his lyricism.

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.

The narrator is a pubescent boy who is romantically obsessed with the sister of his schoolfriend Mangan, who lives in the house opposite. He takes her image in his heart everywhere, amid the hurly-burly of the Dublin streets and shops, giving rise to the famous sentence:

I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.

A bazaar comes to town. In an unclear passage, the narrator thinks Mangan’s sister says she wishes she could go but her convent are going on a retreat, so he promises to go and bring her back a present. All weeks he shirks schoolwork, burning to perform his quest for beautiful Mangan’s sister.

When Saturday comes he waits for his uncle (who’s gone out) to get home and give him a little pocket money to go to the bazaar but uncle, a bit drunk, doesn’t get home till past nine, and has to be reminded to give the boy some money.

He hastens to the train station to catch a train out to the bazaar and doesn’t make it till nearly ten, as it’s closing up, desolate and empty. He walks among different stalls, is asked whether he wants to buy anything by a bored shop assistant, reluctantly says no, and walks back through the now-empty bazaar, burning with humiliation.

Another story about frustration and paralysis and unfreedom.

4. Eveline

Young Evelyn is invited by her boyfriend to elope abroad and escape her closeted life, but at the last minute bottles out.

Eveline Hill is about to elope with a young fellow. She takes a last look round the family home, at the rooms she’s dusted once a week, at the estate of new houses which used to be fields where she played with her childhood friends, all grown up and moved away now. Reflecting on the weekly struggle to pool her own earnings at the department store where she is routinely demeaned, with whatever she can extract from her drunken bully of a father. She promised her dying mother to keep the home together as long as she could but the time has come. She’s been walking out with a young sailor named Frank, tall and handsome who’s back in Ireland on holiday from the merchant ships. Her father found out about the affair and tried to ban it. But now she’s written goodbye letters to him and to her surviving brother, Harry. When she remembers her mother’s final descent into madness, she is overcome with panic:

She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.

The short text cuts to her standing with Frank amid the swirling quay by the huge ship set to sail across the sea to Buenos Aires and when it comes to it, she has a panic attack, clutches the railing, and cannot move.

5. After the Race

Swept up into a glamorous international set, a rich young man gambles away the money entrusted to him by his father.

Crowds are gathered to watch an international car race through the roads around Dublin, a place characterised by ‘poverty and inaction’. The story focuses on the four young men crewing one of the motor cars.

  1. Charles Ségouin, the owner of the car
  2. André Rivière, his cousin, a young electrician of Canadian birth – both about to start a motor establishment in Paris with Rivière
  3. Villona – a huge Hungarian devoted to his food
  4. Jimmy Doyle – a neatly groomed young man, with a soft, light brown moustache and rather innocent-looking grey eyes

After the race, the four young men go on a prolonged binge. It starts with dinner at Doyle’s house where they are indulged by Doyle senior, a wealthy businessman who made his money the hard way. It is emphasised that Doyle senior has been grooming his son to take over the family business, sent him to posh private (Catholic) school in England, then to Cambridge where an indulgent father picked up the tab for young Jimmy’s moderate debauchery. Doyle senior has encouraged Jimmy’s friendship with Ségouin and this has crystallised into an agreement that the Doyles will invest in Ségouin’s new car company in France.

They had already bumped into an English chum, Routh who they bring to dinner. Afterwards, out on the town, they bump into another pal in the street, a rich American named Farley and drunkenly row out to his yacht anchored in the bay. Here there is heavy duty drunken gambling and, the implication is, Doyle gambles away all the money which was meant to be his family’s investment in Ségouin’s business.

The unsung hero of the piece is the Hungarian Villona who is on the face of it a greedyguts only interested in food but turns out to be knowledgeable about English madrigals, of all subjects, and is wise enough to sit out the card game and play the piano. Wisdom.

6. Two Gallants

A parasite waits for a cocky ladykiller to inveigle money out of his latest squeeze.

Lenehan is a leech, a ravaged-looking hanger-on, a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles who inveigles himself into partying groups. One evening he’s walking along with Corley, a swaggering police inspector’s son, who’s telling him all about a tart he picked up and has been seeing regularly; that they catch a tram out to the fields to have sex (he’s vaguely worried about her getting pregnant) but as important as the sex is the free fags and cigars she brings to every rendezvous. Lenehan listens and applauds and is all oily servility.

They walk through Dublin towards Corley’s rendezvous with the woman, Corley all the way regaling Lenehan with stories of past conquests. They come to the place where the girl is waiting and Lenehan gets a good look at here, minutely described. She looks like a tarty pig. Corley and she stroll off leaving Lenehan to kill time, because for some reason he is anxious to meet up with Corley afterwards, he is counting on Corley to pull off some kind of scam.

He pops into a cheap eatery, has a plate of hot peas, a ginger beer and laments his lot. He’ll be 31 next birthday and has no job or career and is fed up of leeching off people. Incidentally, all the stories reveal or display Joyce’s detailed knowledge of Dublin’s street layout.

He paid twopence halfpenny to the slatternly girl and went out of the shop to begin his wandering again. He went into Capel Street and walked along towards the City Hall. Then he turned into Dame Street. At the corner of George’s Street he met two friends of his and stopped to converse with them… He left his friends at a quarter to ten and went up George’s Street. He turned to the left at the City Markets and walked on into Grafton Street.

The aim of the story is to build up to a comic anticlimax. All the way through the narrative, every detail of his behaviour and thoughts rams it into our minds that Lenehan is desperately anxious that Corley ‘brings it off’, succeeds, achieves his goal, gets a result. Lenehan marches up and down the corner where he’d agreed to meet his palm long before he’s due there, it starts to rain and he begins to think it’s ‘no go’ bit then he sees the couple approaching. He ducks out of sight, watches the girl go down into the area (the low area in front of Georgian terraced houses), then sees her come out of the main door and skip down the steps and confer with Corley before disappearing back inside.

The bathetic anticlimax is that all this cloak-and-dagger behaviour has all been simply to extract some money from the poor girl. This, the story tells us, is the pitiful amount of time and nervous energy a leech and parasite expends on earning even a fraction of money.

‘Can’t you tell us?’ he said. ‘Did you try her?’ Corley halted at the first lamp and stared grimly before him. Then with a grave gesture he extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.

Squalid and pathetic. Lenehan goes on to appear in several chapters of ‘Ulysses’.

7. The Boarding House

A young man is intimidating into marrying the landlady’s daughter, who he’s unwisely had sex with.

At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat:

The situation is simple: a youngish (35) boarder in a boarding house (Mr Doran) has got into a relationship with the pretty daughter and servant in a boarding house (Polly Mooney) and had sex with her i.e. ‘taken her virginity’. Her mother and landlady of the house, the big solid no-nonsense Mrs Mooney, has got wind of the affair, obtained a full confession from her daughter. This vignette first of all gives a lot of backstory about Mrs Mooney (how she had to flee her drunken husband, and what became of him), how she set up the boarding house and how it became a popular venue for young artistic and musical types – before moving on to describe the tense mood of both young Polly and Mr Doran as they wait for Mrs D to call the young man in for an interview in which she will demand that he ‘does the decent thing’ and marries Polly i.e. half an hour which will change both their lives forever.

8. A Little Cloud

A flashy man who’s made his name abroad returns to Dublin and upstages his quiet sensitive friend who stayed at home.

Eight years ago Ignatius Gallaher left Dublin to start a career in the Press in London. Now he’s back in Dublin for a flying visit and has invited one of his old friends, shy timid Thomas Malone Chandler, to meet up with him at the loud garish Corless’s bar. Chandler fancies himself as a passionate poet but he is in reality ‘a delicate and abstinent person’, a chaste and methodical clerk, who long ago earned the nickname ‘Little Chandler’, timid and hesitant.

Predictably, the London man is large and hearty, wearing a vivid orange tie, and proceeds to regale timid Chandler with racy tales of life not only in London, but Paris and Berlin. When Chandler suggests he’ll settle down sooner or later, once he finds the right girl, Gallaher boomingly laughs off the idea.

Cut back to Little Chandler at home, at the end of the evening. He has irritated his prim wife, Annie, by forgetting to bring home some coffee. She’s loaded him with the sleeping baby and gone out. He looks at a photo of his wife and notes her pretty features, pretty but cold and prim. Compare with the lurid erotic fantasies conjured up by brassy Gallagher’s brave talk of rich Jewesses with dark oriental eyes, full of passion and voluptuous longing!

Dandling the baby he opens a book of Byron’s poetry and is transported. Why can’t he write poetry like that? The baby awakes, starts crying, refuses to be quieted and suddenly he feels trapped.

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life.

So he shouts ‘STOP’ at the baby which, after a moment of amazement, starts screaming even louder. And that’s when his wife walks back in, horrified and demanding to know what he’s done to the baby. Yes, he is trapped forever.

The story contains a line that may have been heartfelt for Joyce, who himself felt stifled by Dublin’s parochial and nationalist culture:

There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin.

Which is, of course, precisely what Joyce did, moving to Trieste in the 1900s, Zurich during the Great War and then onto Paris (1920 to 1940).

9. Counterparts

Angry frustrated man, humiliated at work and hard up, gets angry drunk and returns to take it out on his poor young son.

Farrington works as a clerk and copyist in the offices of Crosbie & Alleyne and hates it. He is:

tall and of great bulk. He had a hanging face, dark wine-coloured, with fair eyebrows and moustache: his eyes bulged forward slightly and the whites of them were dirty.

Farrington is a slacker and a drinker. Despite being warned he must finish off a long copying job before 5.30, he nips out to a nearby snug for a quick pint of porter. He is a little tipsy, stressed and discombobulated when the owner calls him out in front of the entire staff for not including two letters in an important tranche of documents he gave him. But he turns the moment into a crisis by choosing to answer back to the boss. The exchange is, in modern terms, hard to understand.

‘Tell me,’ [Mr Alleyne] added, glancing first for approval to the lady beside him, ‘do you take me for a fool? Do you think me an utter fool?’
The man glanced from the lady’s face to the little egg-shaped head and back again; and, almost before he was aware of it, his tongue had found a felicitous moment: ‘I don’t think, sir,’ he said, ‘that that’s a fair question to put to me.’
There was a pause in the very breathing of the clerks. Everyone was astounded.

Not the snappiest reparteee I’ve ever heard, but 5.30 comes and Farrington 1) pawns his watch and chain for six shillings, then 2) makes a beeline for his favourite pub, Davy Byrne’s, where he keeps a succession of arriving friends in awe with recounting of this devastating wit. His mates are: Nosey Flynn, O’Halloran and Paddy Leonard, and Higgins from the office who retells the story with great drama.

They pub crawl on to another bar called the Scotch House where they are introduced to Weathers, an acrobat in the Tivoli, and Farrington buys another round. When the Scotch House closes, they go round to Mulligan’s, to a parlour room at the back. Here Farrington spots a couple of dolled-up ladies and a man who come in and sit at a nearby table; he spends some time ogling one of the women and is irritated when they leave and she fails to turn round and give him an encouraging glance. He’s also irritated that he’s spent all his money on drinks for the others, who he now thinks of as spongers, instead of saving some to impress a lady.

The conversation turns to physique and Weathers shows off his strong arms. The others call on Farrington, the biggest there, to defend Irish national honour and so they stage an arm-wrestling contest. Weathers wins twice, which makes Farrington even angrier.

Drunk and angry, Farrington gets a cheap tram back to his house. It is a squalid household. His wife, Ada, is a little sharp-faced woman who bullies her husband when he is sober and is bullied by him when he is drunk. They have five children.

One of the small boys come down and tells him his mother’s gone to chapel. Farrington, boiling over with rage, takes it out on the harmless child, blaming him for letting the fire in the kitchen go out, taking his walking stick and mercilessly beating the poor child on his thighs.

I needed Wikipedia to explain to me that the story is titled ‘Counterparts’ for two reasons:

  1. For Joyce’s the term ‘counterparts’ could be expected to suggest (hand-written) duplicate copies of legal documents.
  2. At the story’s end, Farrington is seen as the ‘counterpart’ of Mr. Alleyne because just as his superior at his workplace humiliates him, so he, Farrington, abuses his child at home.

10. Clay

The timid life of a mousey spinster.

‘Maria is a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin.’ She is a small, middle-aged spinster, very popular at the laundry where she works, Dublin by Lamplight.

It’s Halloween which Irish Catholics celebrated with a party and traditional games. The story follows her helping with evening tea at the laundry, distributing slices of ‘barmbrack’ to all the ladies, then being toasted and cheered, she is so popular.

As soon as that tea is tidied away, she sets off by tram for the house of a man called Joe Donnelly who she nursed when he was a boy, along with his brother Alphy.

She goes to several shops on the way spending a lot of time worrying about which cake to buy to take with her eventually choosing a big slice of plumcake. On the tram to Joe’s she is made room for and shown great courtesy by a stout gentleman wearing a brown hard hat, with a square red face and a greyish moustache, a ‘colonel-looking gentleman’. The implication is he’s a bit tipsy and flirtatious.

She is welcomed with fanfare and affection at Joe’s house by him and his wife and children and plunges straight into tea and games. but when she goes to look for the plumcake can’t find it, asks the children if they’ve hidden or eaten it, and only finally realises the colonel looking gentleman must have stolen it off her.

Joe is keen to brush over this and so gets on with the main Halloween game which is being blindfolded and led to a table on which are a variety of objects. these include a Bible and a ring, and what you select predicts your future. Blindfolded, Maria puts her hands in something soft and squidgy, leading to silence and then a hurried taking of it away. Only later did I realise this is the clay of the story, clay brought in from the garden by the children and put into one of the saucers, clay which, in the symbolism of the game, stands for Death. Which is why there’s an embarrassed silence, then it’s quickly taken away and Maria told to have another go.

She moved her hand about here and there in the air and descended on one of the saucers. She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seconds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering. Somebody said something about the garden, and at last Mrs Donnelly said something very cross to one of the next-door girls and told her to throw it out at once: that was no play. Maria understood that it was wrong that time and so she had to do it over again: and this time she got the prayer-book.

The prayer-book symbolising a life of spiritual vocation (service at a convent, suggests Joe’s wife). After more games for the children and wine for the adults, Maria is asked to sing. Mrs Donnelly plays the piano while Maria sings ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ from the opera The Bohemian Girl by Michael Balfe.

The narrative tells us that she by ‘mistake’ sang the first verse twice. Characters in Joyce might make mistakes but Joyce never does. In a story fraught with symbolism this omission, too, is symbolic, because in the second verse of the song the singer imagines being beset with lovely suitors, thoughts and imagery inappropriate to the confirmed spinster status of little old Maria.

In an ironic conclusion, Joe is so moved by her singing that he can’t find a corkscrew and has to ask his wife where it is. Much earlier Maria had said she loved Joe except when he drank, for then he became a different person.

Only she hoped that Joe wouldn’t come in drunk. He was so different when he took any drink.

Very subtly it’s implying that some men can only cope with emotion by drinking, thus channeling emotion into the familiar channels of inebriation. Given the horrible violence drunken frustration triggers in Farrington in the previous story, this casts a small shadow over the narrative (as did the tipsy colonel-type nicking her cake).

Not only is Maria, like so many of the characters, trapped in her condition, but she is hemmed round by these threats and risks, mostly from men.

11. A Painful Case

An emotionally constipated would-be intellectual starts an affair with a married woman but as soon as she becomes really engaged, backs off, with tragic consequences.

A portrait of a middle-aged man painfully isolated life, even from his own life, who begins a platonic affair with a married woman but, when she starts to have feelings for him, hurriedly breaks it off.

Mr Duffy is a middle-aged bank cashier of extraordinarily rigid lifestyle, every aspect of his life meticulous and ordered so as to incur as little social contact as possible. One night at a concert he meets a Mrs Emily Sinico, a middle-aged married woman. They strike up a conversation, arrange to meet again, and again.

These meetings are perfectly chaste and mostly an opportunity for Mr Duffy to sound off about his abstruse intellectual concerns. He feels uneasy about the surreptitious nature of the meetings and so asks to be invited to the family home, where me meets the husband, Mr Sinico, who mistakenly thinks his regular visits are by way of wooing their daughter. And so their friendship continues with Duffy sounding off and impressing her with his many intellectual interests.

Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all.

In a scene which shows what a gulf there is between Joyce’s Edwardian times and our own, in the areas of sex and relationships, one night at a meeting, Mrs Sinico displays unusual levels of ‘excitement’ and then impulsively takes Duffy’s hand and presses it to her cheek.

This shocks our man in two ways, that he realises the lady hasn’t been listening to his lectures in the high-falutin’ way he intended but also that she’s getting sticky and he risks being sucked into human contact and emotion. So he arranges one last meeting, they walk round the park for three hours as he painfully extricates himself from the relationship. When she shows signs of getting emotional he jumps on the nearest tram and legs it.

As in a fairy story, four years pass and Mr Duffy has reverted to his utterly inflexible, chilly lifestyle when one evening he sees an item in his evening paper. Joyce quotes at length a fictional newspaper report about Mrs Sinico who was knocked over by a train while crossing the line at a station. The train wasn’t going very fast and obliquely from witnesses at the coroner’s enquiry it emerges that in the last few years she had changed character and taken to drink.

The title of the newspaper article is ‘A Painful Case’ which gives the story its title.

Duffy is at first disgusted by the report, dismissive of Mrs Sinico and thinking it weakness that led to her drinking. He is agitated enough to go out for a walk and drops into the local pub for a drink but as he reflects on their time together more, and then leaves the pub to walk into the park up a hill and looking out over Dublin, he slowly, guiltily, starts to think maybe it was his rejection of her which led to her drinking and, ultimately, her death.

He spots young people lying by the wall of the park, no doubt engaged in amorous activities and suddenly realises how lonely he is. ‘He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life’s feast’.

Unrelentingly sad aren’t they, these stories.

12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room

Rambling portrait of ten or so Dublin characters involved in a local election campaign.

The stories get steadily longer. This one is a sort of portmanteau piece, introducing us to quite a number of Dublin characters, men involved in the half-hearted politics of a local election, being:

  • Old Jack – the caretaker, ‘an old man’s face, very bony and hairy. The moist blue eyes blinked at the fire and the moist mouth fell open at times, munching once or twice mechanically when it closed’
  • Mr O’Connor – ‘a grey-haired young man, whose face was disfigured by many blotches and pimples’
  • Mr Richard J. Tierney – the Nationalist candidate
  • Mr Hynes – ‘a tall, slender young man with a light brown moustache’
  • Mr Henchy – ‘a bustling little man with a snuffling nose and very cold ears’
  • Father Keon – pops in, in search of someone, then pops lout again
  • Crofton – ‘a very fat man whose blue serge clothes seemed to be in danger of falling from his sloping figure. He had a big face which resembled a young ox’s face in expression, staring blue eyes and a grizzled moustache’
  • Lyons – ‘much younger and frailer, had a thin, clean-shaven face. He wore a very high double collar and a wide-brimmed bowler hat’

One by one they enter like actors onto a set, coming through the door to the outside where it’s a wet cold October day, and into the hall where there’s a fire, stoked by Old Jack the caretaker. For me, the overall impression of the thing is the slack amateurism of all involved but chances are it’s an accurate description of political canvassing in Dublin circa 1908 because, apparently, Joyce’s own father did just such canvassing. The Wikipedia summary is thus:

In a committee room, Matthew O’Connor, a canvasser for Richard Tierney, a candidate in an upcoming municipal election, discusses child-rearing with Old Jack, who tries to keep a fire going. Joe Hynes, another canvasser, arrives and needles O’Connor on whether he’s been paid for his work yet. He proceeds to defend rival candidate Colgan’s working-class background and maintains that Tierney, although a Nationalist, will likely present a welcome address at the upcoming visit of King Edward VII to which, as the spokesman for the working class, he objects. This sparks a debate about whether they, Dubliners, the Irish, should welcome the King or not.

When Hynes points out that it is Ivy Day (October 6), a date appointed to commemorate the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell, a nostalgic silence fills the room. Another canvasser, John Henchy, enters and criticises Tierney for not having paid him yet. When Hynes leaves, Henchy voices a suspicion that the man is a spy for Colgan.

A priest, Father Keogh, makes a brief appearance, asking after a Mr Fanning and, when told Fanning’s at a certain pub, exits, triggering gossip about the priest, some wondering whether he’s even a priest at all.

A ‘boy’, in fact 16, enters to deliver a crate of stout from the nearby pub, the Black Eagle. He’s asked to pop out and fetch a corkscrew for the bottles, upon his return old Jack opens three of them and, reluctantly, one for the delivery boy, who finishes his off and exits with the corkscrew.

Henchy badmouths another canvasser, Crofton, just before Crofton himself enters with Bantam Lyons. Crofton had worked for the Conservative candidate until the party withdrew and gave their support to Tierney. Henchy offers Crofton and Lyons a drink but they realise they have no corkscrew to open the bottles. So Henchy shows them a trick, he places the bottles on the hob of the fire and, once they’ve warmed up enough, the corks pop out by themselves. This struck me as dangerous – what if the bottles crack before the corks pop out – and disgusting – drinking fire-warmed beer? Yuk.

The talk of politics drifts to Charles Stewart Parnell, who has his defenders and detractors in the room. Hynes returns and is encouraged to read his sentimental poem dedicated to Parnell. The poem is in simple ballad form and criticises those who betrayed Parnell, including the Catholic Church, and places Parnell among the ancient heroes of Ireland. All applaud the performance and seem to forget their differences for the moment.

Commentary

Apart from the air of amateurishness and laziness, the other thing that comes over, and which is odd for a story about canvassing for an election, is the lack of politics. Nobody really discusses political policies except objecting to a possible visit to Dublin by King Edward; some object they shouldn’t truckle to a German king (Edward’s father was the German Prince Albert); others say he’s a good fellow coming on a well-intentioned visit to meet and talk to his subjects, so they shouldn’t reject or heckle him before they’ve even met him, it will only confirm negative English stereotypes of the Irish.

In other words, the only thing close to a policy they discuss is their response to the English monarchy, on which they’re largely split. And the only thing that gives them all a temporary unity is sentimental nostalgia for the disgraced nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell.

But tipsy nostalgia is not a political platform. The lack of debate, the lack of readiness or preparation, the lack of discussion of any policies at all, is interesting background to the confusion and disagreement which afflicted all parties when radical political change was triggered by the Easter Uprising 6 or so years later.

13. A Mother

Pushy mother embarrasses her young singer daughter at a public recital.

The mother in question is Mrs Kearney. With characteristic thoroughness, Joyce gives us her backstory, how she was an educated, romantic, accomplished young lady named Miss Devlin, who intimidated man of her acquaintance and so ended up marrying the solid, reliable , who was very accomplished at a young age but found that the young men of her class were intimidated by her, which prompted her to marry the working class Mr Kearney, who was a bootmaker on Ormond Quay, ‘out of spite’.

So she becomes a mum and raises her girls with his educational and cultural standards. When the Irish Revival comes along in the 1890s she gets her girls educated in Gaelic and folklore. Her daughter Kathleen becomes an accomplished enough pianist to be offered gigs as an accompanist at concerts.

And that’s where the narrative proper commences: A Mr Holohan, assistant secretary of the Eire Abu Society, is organising a series of four concerts and approaches Mrs K to ask if Katherine could be the pianist. Mrs K agrees and sets the price at 8 guineas, and this is the core of the story because the concerts turn out to be very badly planned and publicised. Although Mrs K lends a lot of shrewd help to the creation of the posters, the night of the first concert is very poorly attended.

The second one has a larger audience but Mrs Kearney is bothered by both the behaviour of the audience and the casual attitude of the society’s secretary, Mr. Fitzpatrick, ‘a little man, with a white vacant face. She noticed that he wore his soft brown hat carelessly on the side of his head and that his accent was flat.’

The third concert is cancelled and Mrs Kearney now becomes concerned that her daughter will not be paid the full contracted price but is unable to get a straight answer on the matter from Holohan or Fitzpatrick. She brings her husband to the final concert, anticipating a confrontation.

She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed…

and confrontation there is. In readiness for this final night, we get a full list of the performers, being:

  • The bass, Mr Duggan, was a slender young man with a scattered black moustache. He was the son of a hall porter in an office in the city and, as a boy, he had sung prolonged bass notes in the resounding hall. From this humble state he had raised himself until he had become a first-rate artiste.
  • Mr Bell, the second tenor, was a fair-haired little man who competed every year for prizes at the Feis Ceoil. On his fourth trial he had been awarded a bronze medal. He was extremely nervous and extremely jealous of other tenors and he covered his nervous jealousy with an ebullient friendliness.
  • Miss Healy, the contralto.
  • Madam Glynn, the soprano, wearing a faded blue dress which was stretched upon a meagre body.

In addition there are some gentlemen from the press:

  • the man from the Freeman – a grey-haired man, with a plausible voice and careful manners. He held an extinguished cigar in his hand and the aroma of cigar smoke floated near him – due to miss the concert in order to attend a lecture by an American priest
  • Mr O’Madden Burke who will write the notice

So you can see that there’s a narrative of sorts, but that arguably the point of the story is the range of characters, the sense of the variety of Dublin society.

Anyway the crisis of the story is that as the theatre fills up and then audience start to get restless, Mrs Kearney absolutely refuses to let her daughter go on until she is paid the contracted 4 guineas. At last, after a lot of feverish whispering and haggling, Haloran manages to return from the mysterious ‘committee’ he’s always talking about, with four pounds (a guinea is a pound and a shilling so he’s four shillings short).

At this point young Kathleen intervenes and insists on going onstage with the performers despite her mother’s wishes, and the first half of the concert is a triumph

The first part closed with a stirring patriotic recitation delivered by a young lady who arranged amateur theatricals. It was deservedly applauded; and, when it was ended, the men went out for the interval, content.

In the climax tempers get out of control and when Holohan tells her the committee will pay the remained the following Tuesday, Mrs Kearney says that’s not good enough and refuses to allow her daughter to go back onstage. At which all the performers, Holohan, Fitzpatrick et al roundly condemn her. Timid Miss Healy agrees to play one or two accompaniments, and when the performers troop back onstage for part two and the first act commences, Mrs Kearney forces her husband and daughter out the side entrance and into a cab in a blazing fury.

14. Grace

Four kind-hearted men try to talk their friend into reforming his alcoholic ways, employing comically ignorant Catholic theology along the way.

The story opens with two men helping to his feet a man who’s passed out drunk in the downstairs toilet of a pub. Carried upstairs, and a policeman called, he’s identified by a pal of his, a Mr Power, who identifies him as Mr Tom Kernan and promises the copper to get him home to his wife, which he does, in a cab. They carry him up to bed then Power is embarrassed before the hapless wife, used to Kernan’s drunkenness and who has nothing to offer him by way of hospitality. As if to make amends for this, Power tells her that he and Kernan’s other buddies will help Kernan turn over a new leaf.

And that’s what they do. Powers organises a plan with two other buddies, M’Coy and Cunningham, to get Kernan along to a Catholic retreat with them. The long central part of the ‘story’ consists of an extended dialogue between these four guys, as the three in on the plan chip in with various suggestions and pledged until Kernan is shamed into agreeing to join them. His wife tries hard to conceal her delight at the prospect of her husband stopping being such a pitiful drunk.

Cut to the third scene, which sees all four chaps in the Jesuit church in Gardiner Street and the arrival of the priest, Father Purdon, in the pulpit to deliver a sermon. Far from the high-falutin’ theology of redemption you might have expected, the priest’s approach is surprisingly mundane and worldly:

He came [Father Purdon said] to speak to businessmen and he would speak to them in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.

Commentary

1. Characters As so often, in one sense the most interesting part of the narrative is the backstory of the central characters. These are stated clearly and bluntly, as in a presentation: I mean they aren’t conveyed with subtle and scattered hints, but all plonked down in one interest bio.

Mr Kernan was a commercial traveller of the old school which believed in the dignity of its calling. He had never been seen in the city without a silk hat of some decency and a pair of gaiters. By grace of these two articles of clothing, he said, a man could always pass muster. He carried on the tradition of his Napoleon, the great Blackwhite, whose memory he evoked at times by legend and mimicry. Modern business methods had spared him only so far as to allow him a little office in Crowe Street on the window blind of which was written the name of his firm with the address—London, E.C. On the mantelpiece of this little office a little leaden battalion of canisters was drawn up and on the table before the window stood four or five china bowls which were usually half full of a black liquid. From these bowls Mr Kernan tasted tea. He took a mouthful, drew it up, saturated his palate with it and then spat it forth into the grate. Then he paused to judge.

Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline, but Mr Kernan’s decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character. Mr Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

Mrs Kernan… was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr Power’s accompaniment. In her days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast. They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money. The other children were still at school.

See how much time and detail, precision and effect, Joyce spends on each character. They are highly defined and positioned. As many people have pointed out, in ‘Dubliners’ Joyce feels like he’s taken nineteenth century naturalism as far as it can go. Nobody could write more careful detailed descriptions of his characters. Which is why, having reached the end of the line, he burst through the boundaries of the genre into something post-naturalist, experimenting with free indirect speech in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and then bursting the bounds of what a novel even is, in ‘Ulysses’.

2. Catholic dogma A good deal of the long central section consists of the three would-be conspirators struggling with various aspects of the Catholic faith, from the mottos of various popes to the role of the Jesuits, the difference between Catholics and Protestants, and so on.

Why is it called ‘Grace’? Is it a sympathetic view that the grace of spiritual rebirth stems from pretty much as low as one could go, a man falling down dead drunk in an underground toilet? Or is Joyce mocking religion, suggesting that there is no grace, here or anywhere? That fits the spirit of irony and satire which informs the entire collection.

15. The Dead

Beautiful extended description of a traditional Christmas party which ends with a sensitive husband suddenly made aware of the tragic death of his beautiful wife’s first love.

The Dead is routinely described as one of the greatest short stories in the English language. It is noted for its tenderness, and lyrical acceptance of lost love, death and bereavement. The main character is Gabriel Conroy who takes his beautiful wife Gretta to the annual Christmas party thrown by his lovely aunts, Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan, ‘in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island’. The narrative describes the preparations, the arrival of the guests, numerous conversations, dancing and singing, the big Christmas dinner at which Gabriel carves the roast goose, and then makes a movingly gracious speech of thanks to the old aunts, and then the slow winding down towards thank yous and farewells.

Cast

As usual, Joyce pays scrupulous attention to each of his characters’ backstories and appearance.

  • Gabriel Conroy – ‘plump’, ‘a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat’ — Gabriel is ‘son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks’ — he is a college teacher and book reviewer
  • Gretta Conroy – Gabriel’s wife
  • Kate Morkan and Julia Morkan – Gabriel and Mary Jane’s aunts – ‘two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.’
  • Mary Jane Morkan – niece of Kate and Julia, teaches music, ‘Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line’
  • Lily – the caretaker’s daughter, ‘a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair’
  • Freddy Malins – an alcoholic and friend of the family – ‘a young man of about forty, was of Gabriel’s size and build, with very round shoulders. His face was fleshy and pallid, touched with colour only at the thick hanging lobes of his ears and at the wide wings of his nose. He had coarse features, a blunt nose, a convex and receding brow, tumid and protruded lips. His heavy-lidded eyes and the disorder of his scanty hair made him look sleepy’
  • Mrs Malins – Freddy Malins’ mother, ‘a stout feeble old woman with white hair. Her voice had a catch in it like her son’s and she stuttered slightly’, lives with her married daughter in Glasgow and comes to Dublin on a visit once a year
  • Molly Ivors – a long-time acquaintance of the family – ‘a frank-mannered talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes. She did not wear a low-cut bodice and the large brooch which was fixed in the front of her collar bore on it an Irish device and motto’
  • Mr Browne – only Protestant guest at the party, ‘A tall wizen-faced man, with a stiff grizzled moustache and swarthy skin’
  • Bartell D’Arcy – a tenor, ‘a dark-complexioned young man with a smart moustache’
  • Other guests: Miss Furlong, Miss Daly and Miss Power, Mr Bergin and Mr Kerrigan

Incidents include:

– Upon arrival Gabriel tries to joke with his aunts’ maid, Lily, which doesn’t work out.

– He goes upstairs to join the rest of the guests, where he worries about the speech he has to give, worrying about too highfalutin’ reference to the poetry of Robert Browning, still, in the 1890s, considered difficult.

– When Freddy Malins arrives drunk, as the aunts had feared, Aunt Kate asks Gabriel to make sure he doesn’t cause trouble.

– As the party gathers pace, Gabriel is twitted by Miss Ivors, an Irish nationalist, because she has figured out that he is the GC who writes book reviews in the Unionist newspaper The Daily Express. She teases him by calling him a ‘West Briton’, repeatedly. Gabriel tries to reply but can’t come up with a convincing argument.

– Miss Ivor tells Gabriel she and some friends are organising a reading week in the West of Ireland. He says he can’t go but when he then tells his wife, she is excited at the thought of revisiting her childhood home of Galway.

– Dinner begins, with Gabriel seated at the head of the table. He boisterously carves and hands round the plates while the guests discuss music and theology. Once the eating is over, Gabriel rises to his feet again and makes his speech, courteously referring to Aunt Kate, Aunt Julia and Mary Jane as the Three Graces. The speech ends with a toast and the guests sing ‘For they are jolly gay fellows’.

– The party winds down and the guests leave one by one. Having got his coat Gabriel goes to the foot of the stairs and from the dark well looks up to see his wife lost in thought at the top of the stairs, listening to a song coming from the living room. She is listening to the famous tenor Bartell D’Arcy singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’.

– They walk part of the way back to their hotel, then get a cab. Gabriel has rarely seen his wife looking so beautiful and suddenly he is overcome with lust. He can’t wait till they are back in the hotel room alone together. There is what I suppose for the time was fairly graphic description of his desire, specifically the fact that he needs her to want it too:

If she would only turn to him or come to him of her own accord! To take her as she was would be brutal. No, he must see some ardour in her eyes first.

– BUT once they are alone in their hotel room, Gabriel’s lust reaches a peak and then is utterly dashed. Gretta sits on their bed but not in the heat of desire at all; instead she is crying. She tearfully admits that the song she was listening to reminded her of her first true love, reminds her of a young boy, just 17, named Michael Furey who had courted her in her youth in Galway. He, too, used to sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for her.

– The boy fell ill as she was leaving for the big city, but insisted on getting out of his sick bed to come to her house and stand under her window in the winter rain just to see her. He returned to bed even sicker and died soon after.

– Gretta is overcome with grief and cries herself to exhaustion and then to sleep leaving Gabriel dismayed that there was something of such importance in his wife’s life that he never knew about. Now alone in the bedroom he reflects that we will all die, Aunt Julia, Aunt Kate, all of them – and finds this strangely comforting. He can almost feel the presence of the dead:

His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

And in the story’s famous last lines the narrative picks up on him looking out the window at the snow falling, to describe how it is falling all across Ireland.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

There should not, by these closing lines, be a dry eye in the house.

When I first read this as a boy, I wished my Christmases were like this, festive and convivial with lots of singing, and I wished I would grow up as soulful and sensitive as Gabriel…

Swayed by their beauty, for years I remembered the story for the haunting beauty of its closing lines. I had completely forgotten that the key passages beforehand give a surprisingly frank expression of Gabriel’s desire, nay lust. He becomes really inflamed with lust and desperately wants to ‘take’ his wife as soon as they get back to the hotel. Everyone remembers the poetic ending. Not so many people comments on the way it is also a story about the inappropriateness of male desire; a description of how male desire flares up but then is crushed, mortified and embarrassed by superior female sensitivity.

Commentary

Human life

The stories offer a loosely chronological overview of the different stages of human life, starting with:

  • boyhood (in The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby)
  • young adulthood (After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House)
  • maturity (Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, A Mother)
  • old age and mortality (The Dead)
  • with slyly comic digressions into contemporary politics (Ivy Day in the Committee Room) and the arts (A Mother)
  • before the grand meditation on mortality (The Dead)

Sociology

The light music of whisky falling into glasses made an agreeable interlude.

Fiction doesn’t have to be sociological i.e. comment on the social issues of its time (see Kafka or Borges) but realist fiction tends to do so because a realistic depiction tends to take time to fill in details of character or aspects of events, which themselves tend to reflect contemporary practice. The three themes which stick out for me are drunkenness, Irish nationalism and the broader one of paralysis and trapment.

1. Drunkenness is shown in numerous aspects:

  • the youthful exuberant party drunkenness of young Jimmy Doyle who gambles away his inheritance
  • the hardened middle-aged drunkenness of the angry failure Farrington, who takes out an evening of humiliations by beating his poor son
  • the pathetic fall-down-drunk inebriation of Tom Kernan
  • the sad, pitiful drunkenness of Mrs Sinico after Mr Duffy dumps her

In a number of other stories, nobody gets drunk but drink plays a role. Thus:

  • it’s notable how the bottles of beer are a necessary emollient which take the edge off the political frictions in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’
  • Joe’s occasional drunkenness is a threat lurking at the edge of ‘Clay’
  • the scenes in which Little Chandler is compared with big brassy Ignatius Gallaher are set in a noisy bar where Gallaher not only knows his drinks but gets the bartender’s attention in a second whereas Chandler struggles to be seen etc

2. Paralysis Not much need be said because I’ve pointed out in individual stories where their guiding theme or mood is one of entrapment and paralysis. Almost all the characters are trapped in their behaviour patterns; when offered escape like Evelyn, they are too scared to take it. And entrapment becomes a way of life, for timid characters like Little Chandler or Maria; or underpins the alcoholic rage of a bully like Farrington.

Irish nationalism is well represented in the tales, notably in the character of Miss Ivors in ‘The Dead’ but the issues surrounding nationalism are most fully dramatised in ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’ – but in neither does the debate or argument get much beyond abuse – there doesn’t appear to be any plan or policy for how independence would be achieved, what steps are required, for example lobbying the Liberal government which was in power for most of the Edwardian period, and lobbying them for what, precisely?

In this way, the presentation of Irish nationalism – no doubt a massive issue in Joyce’s day and which flavours and sometimes becomes a dominant issue in all his writings – feels, ultimately, like a sub-set of the paralysis and stagnation which is the book’s central theme.

Lyricism

The volume concludes with the tremendous lyric vision at the end of ‘The Dead’ but this lyrical eloquence appears at key moments throughout all the stories. It is often very beautiful writing, worth savouring in its own right. It’s a large question for debate whether this lyricism can be said to underpin Joyce’s entire worldview, and how it is contained or subsumed in the more complex styles of his later works.

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by Simon on January 26, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 26, 2026

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