All posts tagged Evening Telegraph

Ulysses by Hugh Kenner (1980)

The more we know of someone, the harder it is to say what he is about, he is about so many things…
(page 21)

Few writers have been more intensely, intimately autobiographical.
(p.171)

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner (1923 to 2003) was a Canadian academic who spent his time teaching at universities in the United States and writing a series of critical books about modernist literature. I read his masterpiece, ‘The Pound Era’ (1971), in the late 1970s and it changed my life. It gave me a deep grounding in the modernism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the rest of them, providing handy background info for my English A-level reading of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and helping me to ace my university entrance exams. ‘The Pound Era’ is not just a dazzling overview in the mindset of the modernist moment just before the Great War, packed with insights and arcane learning, but immerses you in a whole new way of seeing the world and books.

Although Kenner did his PhD thesis on James Joyce, published as a book in 1956, he only wrote about him periodically thereafter. This book was published in 1980 as part of the then-new Unwin General Library shortly after the publication of another Joyce book by him, ‘Joyce’s Voices’ – I wonder how much overlap there is between the two.

The Unwin General Library volumes were intended as study aids but Kenner’s book is every bit as opinionated and eccentrically informative as his other works. From the blizzard of digressions and divagations, here are the bits which stood out for me, starting with the obvious and moving on to the arcane and inspired.

Learnings

Bloomsday ‘Ulysses’ is set over the course of one long day, from 8am on Thursday 16 June to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June, 1904. The book’s millions of fans long ago christened 16 June ‘Bloomsday’, and celebrations are held in Dublin and elsewhere every year.

Victorian It’s worth stopping right there to reflect that although the novel was published in 1922 and had a huge impact on between-the-wars literature, it in fact depicts a world which was barely even Edwardian, was in fact late-Victorian in culture, economics and mindset (Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901; the Boer War had only just ended, May 1902).

Let’s go back to ‘Ulysses’ prequel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, and reflect that almost its entire action takes place in the reign of Queen Victoria. For example, the scene where Stephen Dedalus watches a girl on the beach is supposed to take place in 1898. Only the very last scenes in the book are not Victorian, as Kenner reckons the scenes where Stephen prepares to quit Ireland take place in 1902. So although it became a totem of the Jazz Age, all the music in ‘Ulysses’, the clothes, the culture, the political and social mood, are late-Victorian.

Daylength An awful lots happens in the minds of the protagonists of ‘Ulysses’ but then they have a lot of time. At the latitude of Dublin, the sun rises at 3.33 am and sets at 8.27 pm. The action of the novel actually starts at 8am on top of the Martello Tower at Dalkey on Dublin Bay and continues until 3am the following morning.

Mourning Both the book’s male protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, are dressed in mourning black for the entirety of the novel, Stephen mourning his recently deceased mother, Bloom in black to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral. It is a novel about two men in mourning, or two Men in Black.

Locations Joyce began writing ‘Ulysses’ in Trieste sometime in 1914 and continued for the next 8 years, in Zurich (during the Great War) then Paris (after the war). It was published in Paris on 2 February 1922, the author’s fortieth birthday. It was promptly banned by the authorities in Britain and the USA, where it was only allowed to be published in 1936, and 1933 respectively. (It was never banned in Ireland because the authorities new they didn’t need to; no respecting publisher dared publish it or bookshop sell it.)

Modernist peers Of Joyce’s three great modernist peers:

  • T.S. Eliot admired what he called ‘the mythic method’ of basing the novel on Homer’s Odyssey, welcoming it as a whole new way of ordering ‘the panorama of anarchy and futility that is the contemporary world’ (‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, 1923)
  • Ezra Pound, on the contrary, dismissed the mythic method but welcomed the novel as an encyclopedia of contemporary stupidity, a kind of grotesque continuation of the realism of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet (‘James Joyce et Pechuchet’, 1922)
  • Wyndham Lewis saw it as a sign of how the modernism he’d helped inspire with Vorticism had gone off course, into trivia and technique, dismissing the use of interior monologue as a simple extension of Charles Dickens’s Alfred Jingle (‘Time and Western Man’, 1927)

Sui generis Kenner considers ‘Ulysses’ one of the small number of great modernist works which created a new genre for themselves, much as ‘The Waste Land’, ‘The Cantos’ and Molloy did. Personally, surveying the literary output of the 2020s and earlier, it feels like the modernist moment was a great digression or diversion. Much was learned and much fanfare was made about the revolutionising of the novel but with a decade novels, by and large, settled back into a 20th century version of the traditional mould (Waugh, Orwell, Greene).

Thoms For the geography of Dublin, Joyce in exile relied very heavily on ‘Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ published in 1904.

Chiasmus Joyce is fondness for chiasmus, the ‘a rhetorical device where grammatical structures or ideas in a sentence are repeated in reverse order, creating a mirrored or X-shaped pattern (A-B-B-A)’. Here’s a not quite perfect example.

An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs. (‘A Portrait’)

Kenner points out that the overall structure of ‘A Portrait’ is chiasmic in the sense that it both opens and closes with fragments (p.68).

Technology Ulysses is notably more mechanical than ‘Portrait’ in the sense that there is more modern technology in it. Stephen takes an electric tram into the city centre, the newspaper office has enormous printing machines, people use typewriters, telephones. In ‘A Portrait’ all transport is horse-drawn. Reflecting the sweeping technological innovations which came in between completing ‘Portrait’ in 1914 and writing ‘Ulysses’ in the later teens.

Performance Much can be made of the opening sentences:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Mulligan is an actor Kenner makes two points: 1) Mulligan is acting, he is prancing and performing for his own pleasure; 2) and he is performing a mockery of the Catholic Mass, a mockery Kenner goes so far as to say is like an invocation of the Satanic Black Mass. This feels unlikely to me, it feels more like youthful high spirits. But I agree with Kenner’s diagnosis that it 1) introduces the entire novel as an enormous performance and 2) is a cultural critique, suggesting that Ireland and Irishmen are all playing a part, cheerfully and humorously, but somehow alienated from their true selves.

Inside, outside and in-between The narrative never gives Mulligan free indirect speech from his point of view because he has no inside. He is all performance, a mummer, a mocker, a clown. In this he is in stark contrast to Stephen who is almost entirely inside, and whose stream-of-consciousness thoughts reach an early peak in chapter 3. So Stephen and the Buck are yin and yang, chalk and cheese. From this perspective, Bloom comes along, in chapter 4, as a synthesis of opposites, a happy balance of the internal (psychological) and external (sensual) worlds. Very neat. Although in later chapters, this simple model is itself superseded (p.45).

Divisions The division of the book into three parts, of 3, 12 and 3 chapters each, is clear for everyone to read in its table of contents. Kenner suggests it’s also in two parts: the first ten or so chapters are all done in a roughly similar stream-of-consciousness style: Kenner calls them ‘the naturalistic episodes’ (p.53) and tells us that Joyce himself referred to them being in ‘the initial style’ (p.62). From ‘Sirens’ onwards however, each individual chapter has not only a style, but a format of its own. And a possible reason for this? Because between chapters 11 and 12 Boyle sleeps with Molly. Up to then all the chapters are a sort of anticipation and show Bloom in what Kenner insists is virtually a state of shock; afterwards, they become extremely idiosyncratic.

Bloom’s Jewishness Kenner points out that Jewish affiliation is passed down through the mother but Bloom’s mother was Ellen Higgins, herself the daughter of Fanny Hegarty i.e. no Jewish female inheritance there. Moreover, his (Jewish) father converted to Protestantism in which Leopold was raised, and Poldy himself converted to Catholicism before marrying Marion Tweedy. So he is doubly an outsider: although he played with Jewish friends as a boy, and although he has a Jewish name and appearance, he is not part of Dublin’s small Jewish community (p.43). But although he has been baptised a Catholic, on the one occasion he briefly pops into a church, there is plenty of time to make clear that he’s never taken communion, so he is also an outsider to Dublin’s cradle Catholic culture (p.71). ‘Most readers never realise that Bloom by Jewish standards isn’t Jewish’ (p.152).

Narrative skips Despite bombarding us with ‘its din of specificity’, ‘Ulysses’ is oddly silent about key facts. I was puzzled in chapter 4 by the way we get Bloom giving milk to his cat and popping out to buy a pork kidney and then having a poo in his out-house – but we do not get a description of him running, getting into or out of his bath, although he refers to having had a bath many times later on. It is oddly omitted. Far more significant is how Bloom comes to know that Blazes Boylan is popping round to plook his wife at 4pm. He knows and all the commentators know, but how? He doesn’t take a sneaky peek at Boylan’s letter, and in fact it is weirdly absent from the entire final colloquy between Bloom and Molly before he leaves the house for the day. For all its bombardment with facts, many key aspects of the narrative are mysteriously glossed over. (p.49)

Where’s Blazes? The more commentary you read, the more central the event of Boylan shagging Molly becomes, and yet not only is this central scene not described, but Boylan himself is barely even a fleeting presence in the novel, only briefly glimpsed on a couple of occasions (chatting up girls in ‘Wandering Rocks’ and ‘Sirens’). His, also, is a deliberate and glaring absence (p.53).

Timetable of Stephen’s day

  • 8am: Stephen gets up ‘displeased and sleepy’, having been kept awake by Haines raving about shooting a black panther. Since Haines actually has a gun and Stephen is wearing black in mourning for his mother, he is justified in feeling anxious. He refuses to bathe in the sea with Buck and Haines, and makes a date to meet Mulligan at the Ship pub at 12.30.
  • 9 to 10.30am: walks to his school in Dalkey and gives a history lesson, then has the interview with the school’s head, Mr Deasy, who gives him a letter to take to the newspaper.
  • 10.30 to 12 noon: tram to Haddington Road where he toys with going to see his Aunt Sara to ask if he can stay the night with her but instead goes for a walk on Sandymount Strand.
  • 12 to 12.30pm: decides not to meet Mulligan and sends a telegram telling him so. Instead walks across the river to the offices of the Evening Telegraph.
  • 12.30 to 1pm: delivers Deasy’s letter to the newspaper editor.
  • 1 to 1.30pm: drops into Mooney’s bar a few doors down from the Ship.
  • 1.30 to 4pm moves onto another bar then goes to deliver another copy of Deasy’s letter to A.E. at the Irish Homestead where he is (probably) told the A.E. is in the National Library. So Stephen goes to find him there which is where the narrative finds him again in chapter 9 trying to impress A.E. and John Eglinton with his Shakespeare theory. Leaves the Library with Mulligan, bumps into an Italian acquaintance who tells him he should become a professional singer, bumps into his impoverished young sister Dilly but doesn’t give her any money. Given to highfalutin’ rhetoric about Irish nationalism and escaping nets, he lacks charity or fellow feeling for his own family.

Stephen’s plight Kenner sums up Stephen’s situation by 4pm, the cardinal hour when Boylan is plooking Molly: Stephen has nowhere to stay, barely has a job and no prospects, has given it his best shot to impress Dublin’s literary elite and failed miserably. It is flashy superficial Mulligan who will be going that night to George Moore’s gathering of ‘the best wits in town’. His is the bitterness of the outsider. Very depressed, he decides to carry on drinking, accepting his fate as his fluent but shiftless father’s son. We don’t meet him again till 10pm, at the maternity hospital, by which time, having been drinking all day and eaten no lunch, he is shitfaced.

David Hayman and The Arranger Kenner says the critic David Hayman was the first to nail Ulysses’ main technical innovation which was the irruption half-way through the book into the text of a voice which belongs to none of the characters nor to any narrator, but just intrudes. For example, the 63 newspaper captions in ‘Aeolus’, who is ‘saying’ that? No-one. And as the narrative continues, you realise that, yes yes yes we are getting the famous ‘stream-of-consciousness’ thoughts of the leading characters, but that there is another voice who adds phrases in among the characters’ thoughts. Hayman gives it a name, calling it The Arranger and Kenner devotes a whole chapter to describing its effects.

Parallax Parallax means viewing the same thing from different positions. Kenner explains that thousands of details, moments, perceptions, scraps of speech occur multiple times in ‘Ulysses’, but often seen from two or more angles, described hundreds of pages apart. No one reading can spot all these repetitions, but each rereading leads you deeper into the vast labyrinth of correspondences and correlations Joyce has constructed, building up the impression of infinite interconnection.

Delays Classic detective stories delay the explanation until the end, when Holmes or Poirot make everything clear in One Big Reveal which shows how all the pieces of the puzzle are connected. One Big Revelation explains everything. In ‘Ulysses’, by contrast, there are thousands of little revelations, repetitions and correlations which shed a little light on this or that mystery from earlier in the text. Not one big reveal but thousands and thousands of small reveals because ‘Joyce is all trivia’ (p.76) so no individual one of them transforms our reading, but taken together all immeasurably deepen the experience.

Songs performed in Sirens The primary songs performed or mentioned in the ‘Sirens’ chapter, in chronological order of their appearance or performance:

  • The Bloom is on the Rye, hummed or thought of by Bloom as he watches the barmaids
  • ‘Love and War’, a duet performed by Ben Dollard (bass) and Father Cowley (tenor) shortly after Bloom enters the dining room
  • ‘Tutto è sciolto’ (from Bellini’s La Sonnambula), whistled by Richie Goulding as he and Bloom sit in the dining room
  • ‘M’appari’ (from Flotow’s Martha): the emotional centre of the episode, sung by Simon Dedalus at the piano
  • ‘The Croppy Boy’: a nationalist ballad performed by Ben Dollard toward the end of the episode as Bloom prepares to leave
  • ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’: although not fully performed in the bar, its melody and lyrics recur throughout the episode in Bloom’s thoughts and are associated with Molly Bloom and Blazes Boylan
  • other musical pieces referred to or hummed include ‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ and various motifs from operas like ‘Don Giovanni’ (specifically the minuet played by Father Cowley)

Circe After long trying days, both Stephen and Bloom need purging. According to Aristotle’s classical theory, the form which purges emotions is the drama, the play, so a play is needed to purge his characters. And both men need to confront their ghosts so this shall be a ghost play, wherein Stephen  will confront the accusing ghost of his mother and Bloom will see the ghost of his dead baby, now grown to be an 11-year-old boy. These themes were first mooted when Stephen himself dwelled at length on the nature of theatre in his long disquisition about Hamlet and Shakespeare at the National Library

The nightmare of history Kenner makes one really big point about ‘Circe’. You remember Stephen’s famous declaration to the Unionist headmaster Deasy, which is often quoted out of context, that: ‘History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake’? Well, maybe ‘Circe’ can be seen as a dramatisation of the nightmare of history, with its trials and revolutions and politics and crowning of kings and burning at the stake and haunted terrors. Maybe it is the nightmare of history come to life.

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: (Raises high behind the celebrant’s petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.

John F. Taylor and the Gaelic revival It was a commonplace of Irish nationalism to equate the small oppressed Irish nation with their its subaltern language and zealous about its religion struggling to be free, with the Israelites in Egypt, small in number, with their own minority language, struggling to be free. This comparison did all kinds of things, giving the struggle for Irish independence the authority of the Bible, guaranteeing that each generation’s independence leader would be dubbed the ‘Irish Moses’, and so on. In the area of language it supported calls for the revival of Gaelic to accompany campaigns for independence.

On 24 October 1901 the lawyer, orator and man of letters John F. Taylor delivered a speech to the Law Students Debating Society pointing out that if Moses had given in to reason, learned Egyptian and aspired to a high place in the Egyptian administration, we’d have never had the ten commandments, Judaism or Christianity. Well, it is this speech which Professor MacHugh recreates in the office of the Freeman’s Journal in ‘Aeolus’.

Gaelic and Hebrew In questions 98 and 99 of ‘Ithaca’ this topic is treated to debunking irony when Bloom and Stephen try to demonstrate their ancestral languages (Hebrew and Gaelic) to each other and it turns out they can both only manage a few lines of songs, and then scrawl down a handful of characters, of their supposed ancestral tongues. Comedy of mutual ignorance.

Ithacan program Kenner usefully pulls together the thoughts scattered in Ithaca’s question and answer format to clarify that Bloom has parental fantasies about Stephen. Bloom fantasises that he will:

  • become a permanent lodger at Eccles Road
  • pay rent
  • take singing lessons from Molly in return for which he’ll tutor her in Italian
  • distract her from Boylan
  • pass evenings of civilised conversation with him, Bloom
  • become a successful and profitable tenor in Bloom’s travelling troupe of singers
  • in time fall in love with and marry Bloom’s daughter, Milly
  • and produce a little light literature on the side

It’s quite the package, then, for a drunk, depressed young man completely adrift in life, the offer for him to become a son-in-law for Bloom and a replacement for Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. But when you list all the elements like that, you can also see it’s a trap, closing off all of Stephen’s ambitions. When it’s put like this you can see why Stephen politely walks away.

Is Bloom Jewish?

For:

  • he has a Jewish name
  • almost everyone treats him as Jewish i.e. with antisemitic slurs
  • in ‘Cyclops’ he becomes angry and says persecution of ‘his people’ is going on right here, right now
  • and the chapter climaxes with him yelling at the Citizen that ‘Christ was a Jew like me’
  • he owns some of the paraphernalia of Jewish ceremonies inherited from his father and grandfather
  • in ‘Eumaeus’ he delivers a defence of the Jews to Stephen

Against:

  • he is uncircumcised (Nausicaa)
  • nowhere is a bar mitzvah mentioned
  • the novel opens with him buying and eating as pork i.e. no-kosher kidney
  • his mother wasn’t Jewish but Irish and so was his grandmother (Ithaca)
  • he has received not one but two Christian baptisms (as a Protestant and a Catholic)
  • crucially he rolls back from his shouted taunt at the Citizen, in Eumaeus telling Stephen: ‘I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.’
  • and in ‘Ithaca’ question 68:
    • What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? is answered thus:
    • He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

So in a religious (christenings) and biological (mother and grandmother) and dietary and ceremonial way, Bloom is not a Jew. And yet in a cultural and self-identifying kind of way Bloom clearly still identifies with ‘his people’, his ‘race’, feels their persecution (and experiences it for himself), stands up for them whenever he can. So yes and no.

Molly’s lovers Question 275 in ‘Ithaca’ asks ‘What preceding series?’ and the answer proceeds to list 25 men. For 40 years or more these were taken at face value as a list of Molly’s lovers. Only in the 1970s was the list reinterpreted and came to be seen as anyone who had given Bloom any cause at all to be jealous, and since jealousy can be completely irrational it explains why the list includes a priest (her confessor), her doctor, Simon Dedalus (a drinker not a swiver), and others of the same ilk. And so the list is nowadays reinterpreted as anyone who got close to sexy Molly and triggered jealousy in young Bloom, and so Molly’s reputation has been completely rehabilitated. Scholars have returned Blazes Boylan to his rightful place as the only man Molly has been unfaithful with which also, of course, makes far more sense of why it’s such a big deal for Bloom (p.143).

Bloom’s books ‘Ithaca’ contains a number of catalogues or lists. Kenner notes that the list of (23) books on Bloom’s shelf (in answer to question 292) shows that he does not own a copy of The Odyssey.

Archaeology In a characteristic stretch, Kenner associates the list of memorabilia Bloom finds in his drawers with archaeology. Archaeology reached a golden age in the late nineteenth century; it was in the 1870s that Schliemann excavated Troy in Turkey, capturing the public imagination. Kenner points out that the detailed inventory ‘Ithaca’ makes of the contents of Bloom’s house, in one way treats it as an archaeological site.

Sherlock A little more obvious is the fact that the list of Bloom’s books contains one by Conan Doyle (The Stark-Munro Letters) which makes us think of Sherlock Holmes, and the rather more obvious idea that ‘Ulysses’ is, as well as everything else, a book which is packed with clues which we are meant to find and decipher, starting with the way the parts and chapters of the book are deliberately left unnamed. Whether this world of clues in the end reveals anything beyond the astonishing ingenuity of its own creation – well, that’s a different type of question.

The acme of naturalism Kenner ends with some high-level meditations. In one way ‘Ulysses’ took the late-nineteenth century passion for naturalism (think Émile Zola) to a logical conclusion in a novel where very little happens but we are overloaded with thousands upon thousands of details. The line of thinking anticipated by Ezra Pound.

Eternal recurrence Joyce gets his characters to mull over whether life is predestined and fated, a question of eternal recurrence. Odysseus returns, maybe everything returns.

Picasso, Einstein, Joyce They’re often grouped together because they all removed the distance between the observer and the observed, and so demolished he old-fashioned notion of ‘reality’.

Art: Picasso’s works are rarely and barely ‘about’ the subject (still lives, women in his studio, bullfighters) in the old way that the artist painted a separate reality: the cubist works in particular declare that the subject of the work of art is the work of art itself; the interesting thing is the style and the treatment. (Which explains what, in my opinion, is Picasso’s boring poverty of subject matter, the same half dozen subjects again and again – because the interest is in the style and treatment.)

Physics: In Newtonian physics the observer walked through a fixed, mechanical universe and the two (observer and universe) were completely separate. In Einstein’s view, the observer, their position and speed, create the world. The classical separation between observer and observed is eliminated.

Joyce: in the traditional novel the author writes about something, they are separate from the world and depicting it. Joyce takes late-nineteenth century realism and pushes it to the max and beyond, in a text which became notorious for his pedantic attention to detail, for verifying every aspect of the Dublin of June 1904. But in doing so, he created a text which doesn’t depict the world so much as become a world.

And following from that thought is the idea that at just the moment that the novel reached a peak of naturalism, in Joyce’s idiosyncratic hands, it became an utterly verbal construct. The reader may think they’re reading about the street layout or businesses of Dublin but that world of details’ deeper purpose is to create an encyclopedic system of self-referencing verbal nodes – a vast system of references and clues which no reader can hope to encompass and decipher in just one reading, which demands multiple readings, at each of which the reader notices new details and makes new connections. Each reader writes their own version of ‘Ulysses’.

Somehow it manages to be a vast concordance of objective facts and a Rorschach test of subjective responses, at the same time.

Key books about Ulysses

In a useful appendix, Kenner lists and summarises the main scholarly books written about ‘Ulysses’ in the decades between its publication (1922) and this one (1980).

1920: Joyce sent a schema of ‘Ulysses’ i.e. the Homeric title and parallels for each chapter, along with what happens in each, they style and other structural aspects, to Carlo Linati to help him prepare a lecture. In 1921 Joyce sent a comparable schema to Valery Larbaud for a book he was writing. The key thing is that the two schemas differed in many details.

1930: James Joyce’s Ulysses by Stuart Gilbert: helped by Joyce himself, this was a semi-official guide to the book. It revealed an intensely detailed schema Joyce claimed to have worked to, which showed not only the hour-by-hour events of the day, but revealed that they all take place under a specific Symbol, Colour, Bodily Organ, Art and so on, plus the Homeric parallels. So for a while it set everyone looking for systems and structures.

1931: Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson set ‘Ulysses’ in the wider context of late nineteenth century European symbolism and modernism. Wilson was puzzled by the aspects which wouldn’t yield to ‘a naturalistic-psychological interpretation’.

1934: James Joyce and the making of Ulysses by Frank Budgen, an ex-sailor and painter, a non-literary type which is why Joyce liked him. Budgen took a more down-to-earth approach, making Bloom an ordinary everyman, the centre of the narrative. It contains accounts of many conversations Joyce had with Budgen about his book as he wrote it in Zurich during the years 1918 to 1920.

1937: Word index to James Joyce’s Ulysses by Miles L. Hanley: meticulously lists and locates every word in James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’, acting as a foundational reference for understanding its complex vocabulary and linguistic patterns.

1939: James Joyce: The Definitive Biography by Herbert Gorman: a modest account, heavily edited by Joyce himself who wanted to present himself as a visionary martyr to art.

1941: James Joyce by Harry Levin: Levin was able to take account of the recent publication of ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, which made ‘Ulysses’ no longer the climax of Joyce’s oeuvre but a way station on the road to something even bigger and weirder.

1947: Fabulous Voyager by Richard M. Kain: used both the Word Index and Thom’s Directory to showcase Ulysses’ amazing amount of local fact and detail, and link these with the book’s larger themes.

1958: Joyce among the Jesuits by Kevin Sullivan: analyzing James Joyce’s early life, education and writings, focusing on the profound impact of his Jesuit schooling (at Clongowes Wood and Belvedere College) on his works, particularly ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, exploring themes of faith, rebellion, and the Catholic tradition he later rejected.

1959: James Joyce by Richard Ellmann: transformed Joyce studies with its scale and detail (it contains 50% more words than ‘Ulysses’). In the context of this immense biography, the works shifted from being standalone masterpieces to being episodes in Joyce’s heroic life.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by Hugh Kenner was published by George Allen and Unwin in 1980.

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 4, 2026

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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: Wandering Rocks

—Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried,
(Stephen Dedalus’s father Simon is given many vivid curses throughout the book, this one is addressed to the man ringing his handbell outside Dillons auction house while Simon’s having an argument with his small daughter, Dilly)

Here’s a quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Pretty much all discussion of the book needs to reference them. But note: none of the Greek chapter titles are indicated in the actual text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and they have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since, but none of them actually appear in hard copies or online versions of the text.

Part 1. Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus

  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 or Return

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Homeric parallel

Most of the other chapters in ‘Ulysses’ have a central figure and a central narrative but ‘Wandering rocks’ is an exception to this rule.

Chapter ten marks the mid-point of this 18-chapter novel and so is a sort of interlude or resting point. Joyce had the bright idea of basing it on the wandering rocks episode in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. In the poem the Planctae (Greek for ‘wanderers’) were a group of rocks which constantly moved about, stirring up the sea and smashing any ship which tried to navigate between them, leaving only floating timber and flames. They are sometimes confused with the Symplegades or clashing rocks.

As Odysseus prepares to depart from the witch Circe, she warns him that the wandering rocks have only once been successfully navigated, by Jason and his argonauts. The rocks are one of only two routes onwards to Ithaca, the other route going by Scylla and Charybdis. Jason chooses to sail through the rocks, Odysseus avoids them and goes the Scylla and Charybdis route.

Joyce’s adaptation

Joyce’s adaptation of the episode is very characteristic in that he takes what he needs and simply abandons whatever doesn’t fit. Thus he uses the idea of wandering as the basis of 18 short vignettes, each about a different Dublin character, as they potter about central Dublin bumping into each other, seeing each other, thinking about each other, including three of the main protagonists, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (section 5), Stephen Dedalus (section 6) and Leopold Bloom (section 10). So ‘wandering’ yes, but as to the danger part of the Greek legend Joyce just ignores it. There’s no clashing involved, there’s no danger anywhere. Bloom/Odysseus is never threatened. No-one is getting crushed.

Instead the chapter is like the novel in miniature. It even contains 18 episodes to match the novel’s 18 chapters (plus a coda, 19 sections in all).

The narrative’s clever interlocking of characters and incidents is widely admired. This is increased by the way each vignette contains references or entire paragraphs referring to incidents taking place in other vignettes, in other parts of the city, at the same moment. Critics call these sudden eruptions of another stories into each vignette, often in the form of one unexplained sentence, ‘interpolations’.

Many readers and critics have thought of this as a cinematic technique which builds up to give a sort of panoramic overview of an entire city at the time it is set, the hour from just before 3pm till a little after 4pm.

I have a major reservation about this, and ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, which I’ll explain at the end of this review.

Church and state

The chapter, like many before it, takes as a key foundation the binary of church and state. Thus it opens with a friendly priest walking through the streets of Dublin and bumping into various acquaintances, before popping up in the background of subsequent vignettes; while in the second half we catch steadily more glimpses of the progress of the Viceroy of Dublin riding in his carriage to open a bazaar, glimpses which lead up to its full presentation in the 18th and final vignette.

So the narrative is topped and tailed by a representative each of Church and of State, types which lay down a kind of conceptual frame of the chapter, which is then fleshed out by the appearances of the 20 or 30 other characters.

Mocked

And they are both mocked, gently but steadily. With Father Conmee Joyce does it with the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth squeaky cleanness of Conmee’s conversation:

Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed.

With the Viceroy, the mockery is implicit in the generally indifferent reaction to his passing-by of the various Dubliners. The job is largely done without resorting to large-scale parody (unlike the chapters which follow).

Material rebukes

The final response to the Viceroy in the chapter is the Italian music teacher Almidano Artifoni going into his house and, in effect, turning the bum of his trousers to the august carriage as it trots by.

Father Conmee receives a more obvious rebuke to his values and worldview when he is suddenly confronted by a couple stumbling out of some bushes, flushed because they’ve just had sex. Sex, in comedies, especially farces – or more precisely all the fussing and fretting surrounding it – is the great puncturer of pompousness and pretension.

Heart

If you visualise Dublin as a heart, as the first headline in ‘Aeolus’ suggests:

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Then the 30 or so characters we meet in this chapter can be thought of as blood corpuscles circulating round it and bumping into each other.

Binaries

Both our protagonists are looking at books, according to their intellectual levels: Bloom is buying a popular romance, Sweets of Sin, for Molly; Stephen is looking through Abbot Peter Salanka’s book of charms and spells, specifically ones designed to attract a woman’s love. Love and sex.

Bloom’s anxiety

You can’t understand this chapter or ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, unless you realise that for the whole long day which it describes its central character, Leopold Bloom, is traumatised by the fact that he knows that his voluptuous wife, Molly, is preparing herself to have sex with the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Somehow (it’s really not made clear) he knows Blazes’ visit to his house is timed for 4pm, so for all the chapters leading up to then, he is in agony of anticipation, at around that time he is crushed by humiliation, and for the hours afterward, he is haunted by the fact the deed has been done.

We see Boylan at his flashy flirtatious best, in section 5. We see Bloom feeling sorry for himself in section 10.

Summary

Section 1: Father Conmee heads north

We first met Father John Conmee as the symapathetic rector of Clongowes Wood College who young Stephen appealed to after he was unjustly pandybatted by sadistic Father Dolan. Here we find him strolling through Dublin, mild and kind. He thinks about Martin Cunningham’s letter requesting help in securing a school place for the late Paddy Dignam’s son, ‘oblige him if possible’; he see a one-legged sailor begging, he stops and talks to the wife of Mr David Sheehy MP who is away in Westminster; thinks of fellow Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan’s cockney accent; he bumps into three schoolboys from Belvedere school and asks one to post a letter in the letterbox across the road; he sees the flamboyantly dressed dancing master Denis Maginni; he is bowed to by stately Mrs M’Guinness whose posh appearance belies the fact that she runs a pawn shop (mentioned again in section 4).

He passes a closed-up free church and laments the ignorance of protestants; a bunch of Christian brother schoolboys raise their caps to him; he walks past a grocer’s and a tobacconist’s, noting the newsboard about a disaster in New York (a real life disaster: the General Slocum steamship fire, 15 June 1904, the day before the events of the novel, in which over 1,000 people, mostly women and children, died); past Daniel Bergin’s publichouse, past H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook (Corny who will play an important role at the end of ‘Circe’ 10 hours later).

He salutes a policeman then passes a butcher’s shop. In the canal he sees a turfbarge and the bargee resting and smoking. He catches an outward bound tram because he doesn’t like walking through the dingy neighbourhood of Mud Island. He regards the other passengers. An older woman who forgets to get off at her stop reminds him of the poor of his parish, worn down by cares, always worrying.

A poster of a blackface minstrel triggers thoughts about Christian missions to Africa. He thinks of the millions of men and women who die without ever hearing the Word of God, and mildly and superficially thinks it a ‘waste’; he thinks about a book on the subject by the Belgian Jesuit Auguste Castelein SJ, ‘The Number of the Elect’.

He alights at Malahide Road whose name triggers thoughts of aristocratic families and glorious old days when priests like himself held real power. He’s written a book about it, Old Times in the Barony. He thinks about Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere, who was accused of adultery with her husband’s brother (adultery is a central theme of the novel, as of so many novels: compare Stephen’s joke about Admiral Nelson being the one-handled adulterer, or the fate of Charles Stewart Parnell, on one level the political tragedy of a nation, on another yet another of the book’s examples of adultery).

Which leads into reminiscences about his time as rector of Clongowes Wood College, reading his holy books and looking up at the calm clouds, listening to the boys playing. He realises he has forgotten to read one of the holy offices at the correct time, and so he pulls out his breviary and is reading the psalm of the day as he walks when, out of bushes beside the road, emerge a young man and woman, flushed after a roll in the hay. Later in the novel they are revealed to be Stephen’s friend Vincent Lynch and a girl called Kitty. Father Conmee blesses them then returns to his reading about sin. It’s important to note the sentence:

The young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

Note this phrase, which will recur later, in section 8.

Section 2: Corny Kelleher in the funeral directors’

Father Conmee ‘passed H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay’. Now we join Corny Kelleher a few minutes later as he examines a new coffin, before strolling over to the streetdoor and looking out (just as Father Conmee is getting into the tram).

A policeman ambles up and they pass a cryptic exchange. This tends to confirm gossip in earlier chapters that Corny has an ‘in’ with the police i.e. is some kind of informant to the force which are unpopular enforcers of British colonial rule.

Short though it is, this vignette contains an ‘interpolation’, the intrusion of a sentence which seems to come from another section, thus:

Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin.

Only in the next section will we discover that the white arm belongs to Molly Bloom throwing a penny to a passing beggar.

Section 3: The one-legged sailor begs

A handicapped veteran of the British Navy (seen and blessed by Father Conmee in section 1) stumps the streets, grunting snippets of a patriotic song. He grunts towards Larry O’Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, swings past Katey and Boody Dedalus, a stout lady drops a coin in his cap, two barefoot urchins chewing ‘long liquorice laces’ stare at his stump, ‘a plump bare generous arm’ throws a coin from a window in Eccles Street onto the pavement and an urchin picks it up and puts it in the beggar’s cap.

The text doesn’t specifically tell us it’s number 7 Eccles Street, so it’s left to us to work out that it’s Molly Bloom’s arm. We are told that in a window is a card advertising ‘Unfurnished Apartments’ for rent in their home, as the Blooms try to make money now their daughter Milly has left home.

Section 4: The Dedalus sisters are destitute

Stephen’s sisters, Katey and Boody Dedalus return home from school, entering the kitchen where sister Maggy who is cleaning shirts in a pot of boiling. They are really destitute and have just tried to pawn Stephen’s books at M’Guinness’s shop (the same stately Mrs M’Guinness that bowed to Father Conmee in the opening section).

They only have anything to eat (pea soup) thanks to the charity of Sister Mary Patrick. When Maggy tells them another sistr, Dilly, has gone to meet their father, Boody blasphemously says ‘our father who art not in heaven’ and Maggy chastises her.

The section ends with another interpolation as we cut away to a shot of the handed-out sheet of paper given to Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’ which he crumpled up and threw in the river, continuing its passage under Loopline bridge.

Probably the crumpling and wrecking of the sheet of paper is a diminished, mock heroic parody of the action of the crushing rocks.

Section 5: Blazes Boylan flirts with a shopgirl

Considering that Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan’s having sex with Bloom’s wife, Molly, is the central event in the novel, it’s striking that we see and hear so little of him throughout. Surprisingly, this brief vignette is our longest moment in his presence.

He is shopping in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop on Grafton Street, where he buys a bottle and a jar to be placed in a basket, topped with fruit (plump pears and peaches), to be sent in advance to Molly. He smells other ripe fruit and veg while outside the window the five sandwichboard men advertising HELYS that Bloom first saw in ‘Lestrygonians’ file past.

The shopgirl asks for the address the basket is to be sent to then tots up the bill while Boylan looks ‘into the cut of her blouse’ and thinks ‘a young pullet’.

As with most of the sections, there is a brief ‘interpolation’, an out-of-context sentence describing ‘A darkbacked figure under Merchants’ arch scanned books on the hawker’s cart.’ You’d never know without the commentators to help you that this is Bloom scanning second-hand books to find some romance novel for Molly to read.

Inserting a sentence about Bloom searching for second-hand fictional descriptions of seduction, while his rival, Boylan, is going about the practical mechanics of real-life seduction, is full of ironies.

The section ends with Boylan asking if he can make a phone call (see section 7).

Section 6: Stephen and Artifoni the music teacher

Stephen encounters his Italian voice instructor, Almidano Artifoni. While two tramcars full of tourists trundle past, Artifoni tells Stephen his voice would be a good source of income for him. True to his character as The Refuser, Stephen demurs. Another tram unloads soldiers who are members of a Highland regimental band who are heading through the gates of Trinity College. The pair shake hands but then Artifoni realises the conversation has caused him to miss his tram which he forlornly trots after.

Section 7: Miss Dunne

Miss Dunne is Blazes Boylan’s secretary. We find her sitting in her office where (like Molly) she has been reading a library copy of Wilkie Collins’s classic, ‘The Woman in White’ while the boss is away. It’s a bit too mysterious for her and she thinks she’ll swap it for something easier by Mary Cecil Haye.

She inserts a piece of paper into the typewriter and types out the date. This is the only direct reference to the famous date of the novel, 16 June 1904.

The five Hely’s sandwichboard men spelling HELY’S, seen by Boylan from the fruit shop, pass by, turn round and return again.

She stares at a poster of Marie Kendall. This was a real-life English music hall singer and comedian and the poster was for a real-life performance at Dan Lowry’s music hall in Dublin on June 16, 1904.

Miss Dunne thinks about her evening plans, a man who has caught her attention, and a skirt she wishes she could buy, thinking how attractive it made her friend Susy Nagle to ‘Shannon and all the boatclub swells’.

Boylan calls (the phone call we saw him asking the shopgirl if he could make in section 5). We hear her end of the conversation as she instructs her to book travel for two to Belfast and Liverpool (for Molly and himself during the upcoming concert tour), and he gives her permission to leave work at 6:15.

Then she tells Boylan that Lenehan has been looking for him and will be at the Ormond Hotel Bar at 4. (We will see Boylan meet Lenehan there, among other notable characters convene, in the next episode, ‘Sirens’).

Section 8: Ned Lambert, Reverend Love and J. J. O’Molloy

I was hopelessly at sea with this section until I read the commentaries. It takes place in the last remaining room of a 10th century abbey which now serves as a seed and grain warehouse where Ned Lambert works. (We met Lambert earlier at Dignam’s funeral in ‘Hades’ and reading out the overblown patriotic speech by Dan Dawson in the newspaper offices in ‘Aeolus’).

Ned is showing the building to a vicar named Hugh C. Love who is writing a book about the Fitzgeralds. St. Mary’s Abbey is relevant to Love’s research because it was here that Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (nicknamed ‘Silken Thomas’) proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534.

What makes it confusing is that Ned is in the middle of showing Love this when his pal, the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy, enters the dark room, lighting a match to find his way. Ned suggests to the reverend a couple of places where he can get good angles for a photograph.

It’s further complicated because the scene contains not one but two one-sentence interpolations. Suddenly:

From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.

We don’t know it yet but this is John Howard Parnell, brother to the late politician Charles Stuart Parnell, who we will meet playing chess in section 16.

The reverend thanks Ned and departs, and New and J. J. exit the warehouse into the bustling forecourt:

With J. J. O’Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary’s abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal, O’Connor, Wexford.

Then, with just as little warning, the second interposition:

The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

If you recall, this phrase applies to the young woman emerging from the bushes after a roll in the hay with Vincent Lynch, as the come face to face with Father Conmee. The implication being that that is happening at this exact moment in another part of Dublin.

Back to Ned who realises he forgot to tell the clergyman a good joke:

—I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? I’m bloody sorry I did it, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside.

Ned confidently slaps a passing horse on the haunches then turns to J. J. who has come to scrounge money off him, but makes him wait a second while he loudly sneezes.

—Well, Jack. What is it? What’s the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an instant, sneezed loudly.
—Chow! he said. Blast you!
—The dust from those sacks, J. J. O’Molloy said politely.

But Ned says it’s that he caught a cold last night and it didn’t help hanging round at Paddy Dignam’s funeral this morning, holding up his hankie ready to sneeze again.

Once all this is explained to you, it’s easy, really easy. But it’s devilish hard to make sense of if you try to read and puzzle it out by yourself.

Section 9: Tom Rochford’s Invention, then Lenehan and M’Coy

Tom Rochford is explaining his invention for indicating which act is currently on stage in a vaudeville act to his mates, Nosey Flynn, Lenehan and M’Coy. Lenehan is impressed a promises to pitch it to Blazes Boylan who we know, from section 7 is meeting in the Ormond Hotel at 4pm, because Boylan is, it’s sometimes easy to forget, a successful music concert producer.

M’Coy and Lenehan leave together, passing Dan Lowry’s music hall displaying a poster for Marie Kendall the singer, the same poster we saw Miss Dunne staring at.

As they walk on Lenehan tells the story of how Rochford rescued a man stuck in a drainage hole. M’Coy waits outside Lynam’s while Lenehan nips in to get the final odds on Sceptre, the horse he backed in the Ascot Gold Cup. While waiting in the street, M’Coy nudges a banana peel into the gutter lest someone slip on it.

This simple narrative is then interrupted by not one, or two but three distinct ‘interpolations’. First a sentence showing the cavalcade of the Viceroy commencing its journey across the city.

Lenehan emerges and announces his horse was evens. They walk on through Merchants arch and spy ‘a darkbacked figure scanning books on the hawker’s cart’ which they both identify as Bloom. M’Coy describes a fine book Bloom bought for 2 bob whose fancy plates alone were worth more than that. Then, suddenly, the second interpolation:

Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.

This refers to the eldest of recently deceased paddy Dignam’s five children. Lenehan launches in on a long story about something that happened at the annual dinner at Glencree reformatory but he’s barely got going before there’s another interpolation:

A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street.

This is Bloom’s house and, since he’s out and about, it must be Molly who replaces the card in the window, the card we’d seen in place when she threw a coin to the beggar in section 3.

Lenehan continues with his story about how everyone got hammered at this reformatory dinner and came home in the early hours in a horse-drawn taxi cab. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one seat and on the seat opposite Lenehan sitting next to Molly. She’s had a skinful and at every jolt of the cab he was pressed up against her ample bosom.

Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
—I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
—The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that’s only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.

Lenehan can’t know it but much, much later Molly will give her side of this event in the long monologue which makes up chapter 18 in which she describes Lenehan as a creep.

To some extent, whether you really like ‘Ulysses’ or not depends on whether you find this kind of blatant crudity and vulgarity funny or not. I do, and I do. But it’s more subtle than that because M’Coy, a married man himself, recoils a bit at the tale and Lenehan notices it. He backtracks and in an attempt to save face changes tack to praise Bloom.

—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.

Is that not how human interactions often are? Complex, error-strewn, embarrassing, miscalculating, self-correcting?

Section 10: Mr. Bloom

Having caught two glimpses of him through the eyes of other characters, we finally come to Leopold Bloom browsing a second-hand book stall. In chapter 4 Molly asked him to get her a new book to read. He looks at some saucy ones but the one which triggers his thoughts is Aristotle’s Masterpiece with its anatomical images of foetuses curled up in the womb:

Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.

The last name referring to Mina Purefoy who Josie Breen told him is in maternity hospital having a prolonged and difficult delivery of her baby (more of that in chapter 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, which is set in the same maternity hospital and during which Mina finally has her baby.) This also has its ‘interpolations’. In among Bloom’s book browsing, suddenly the sentence:

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

which is clearly written in the affected style in which Mr Maginni regards himself.

Back to Bloom at the bookstall, assessing whether books are suitable for Molly’s erotic tastes. He opens ‘Sweets of Sin’ and reads a few extracts at random, which describe a married woman dolling herself up for her exotic lover, Raoul. Sounds like the right kind of thing. And repeats the theme of adultery which, as we know, is central to ‘Ulysses’.

Bloom starts to get a little worked up, in a heady mix of the text’s soft porn cliches mixed with his own earthier knowledge of the stinks and mess of sex, all of which is interrupted by another interpolation:

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.

It would be overdoing it to say that everything is connected to everything else, but this is clearly Joyce giving the impression of an overview of the city, a gesture towards all the things taking place at the same time in different locations.

Back in the shop the phlegmy old owner hawks and gobs on the floor, then wipes it with his boot. This is Joyce rubbing into his reader’s middle-class faces the unforgiving materiality of human existence. This is what it is.

It ends on a mildly comic note as the bookseller approves Bloom’s choice:

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
—Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.

We need to take note of this title, Sweets of Sin, as it will recur again and again through the rest of the book, as a mocking title for Boylan’s tupping of Molly, but all other instances of adultery as well.

Section 11: Dilly and Simon Dedalus

The lacquey outside Dillon’s auction rooms shakes his handbell.

The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
—Barang!

Not the first and not the last time Joyce transcribes the sound of an inanimate object. Also, this had appeared as an unexplained interpolation back in section 4.

Young Dilly Dedalus, one of Stephen’s 9 or so younger siblings, is waiting outside the auction rooms for her dad to arrive. Bloom saw here there back at the start of ‘Lestrygonians’. Simon has been drinking with the newspapermen in The Oval, just up O’Connell Street and around the corner from Dillon’s. Ashamed of keeping her waiting, like many a parent he goes on the offensive telling her off for her bad posture. When he imitates bad posture, Dilly is embarrassed and tells him everyone is looking.

He gives her a shilling but, hardened, she demands more and he sheepishly hands over a few pennies, telling her to buy a milk or a bun. The family really is destitute as Simon asks his daughter what she wants him to do, go along Connor Street scouring the gutter for stray coins.

Ignored by everyone the Viceregal procession passes by.

There are the following interpolations:

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.

This is based on a report of a real-life half-mile bicycle handicap race that took place in Dublin on this day and at this time, as reported in the Evening Telegraph for 16 June 1904. The next one is:

Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James’s street.

This is explained or followed up in the very next section.

Section 12: Tom Kernan

We met Tom Kernan in the funeral scene in chapter 6. In fact we met him way back in Dubliners, in the short story Grace where his friends were trying to cure his alcoholism.

Here we see him emerging from a business meeting, running over the conversation he’s just had in a pub with the publican Mr Crimmins about the shocking tragedy at New York, the explosion of the Slocombe steamship with over 1,000 killed.

Kernan stops to admire himself in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser, thinking his secondhand coat was well worth half a sovereign. He admires his grizzled moustache, he looks like an officer back from India. He notes the impressed looks he’s drawn from a few important people.

In the kind of stylistic innovation which so many people copied, Kernan is dazzled by the reflection of sunlight off a passing car:

Is that Ned Lambert’s brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He’s as like it as damn it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn like him.

He passes the site where the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet (1778–1803) was executed by the British after failing to overthrow British rule in the failed 1803 Dublin rising, which triggers pondering whether or not Emmet was buried at Glasnevin.

He see a carriage without a horse tied up outside the Dublin Distillers Company’s stores at the same moment, the text tells us, as poor mad Denis Breen with his legal books, tired of waiting at the offices of lawyer John Henry Menton’s office, is leading his wife over O’Connell bridge, heading towards another lawyer’s office in his obsessive quest to get justice for being sent the anonymous postcard reading U.P. up.

We are given unusually intimate access to Kernan’s stream of consciousness which is a mashup of nationalist heroes and poems and risings and gambling and so on, very reminiscent of the half-educated ramblings of Bloom.

Interpolations:

  • Simon Dedalus greets Father Cowley
  • next stage of the downriver journey of the crumpled-up flyer Bloom threw into the Liffey in ‘Lestrygonians’ which is, as I suggested, a mocking reference to the clashing rocks
  • the Dennis Breen scene

Kernan is pro-Britain as we learn when the Viceregal Cavalcade jingles past the end of the road and he is just a fraction too late to see it, damn!

Section 13: Stephen and Dilly Dedalus

Stephen’s section is, predictably, the most impenetrable one, opening with seven paragraphs so cryptic and oblique as to be impenetrable without commentary and annotation.

This tells us that they are the thoughts of an over-educated man peering through a series of shops windows at various wares. The prose emerges into something like lucidity when he stops at a second-hand book cart (four for sixpence) wondering whether he’ll find his schoolbooks which his family have pawned to buy food. They really are abjectly poor.

Stephen pauses over ‘Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter Salanka’. Unexpectedly he is spoken to by one of his sisters, Dilly, suddenly appearing by his side. He remembers her face as she crouched over the fire they’d made from useless boots. She shows him a French primer she’s just bought (with one of the pennies their dad gave her back in section 11) and he recognises his own urge to learn in her, but without the advantages of a private education which he enjoyed.

Stephen sees her utter poverty, of life and hope and is fraught with misery. But, as usual, he rejects and fights off any feeling, any temptation to become involved. His inner cry of Misery! Misery! is, on one level, for me, the truest thing in the entire book.

There’s an interpolation. In the middle of Stephen’s thoughts, suddenly a sentence describing:

Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.

Section 14: Simon Dedalus, Father Bob Cowley and Ben Dollard

We saw Simon Dedalus greet Father Cowley as in interpolation in section 12. Father Cowley says he’s barricaded into his house by two men because he owes money to the shark Reuben J. Dodd (seen and cursed by the men in the funeral carriage back in chapter 6, ‘Hades’) who has set two men outside Cowley’s house to collect the debt.

Cowley has asked a friend, Ben Dollard, to ask ‘long John’ Fanning, a subsheriff, to intervene. Just then Simon spots the very same Ben crossing a bridge towards them.

—There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.

Ben Dollard ambles over to them scratching his bum, they all hello each other, while Simon is critical of Ben’s outfit, while Ben defends it. By now the reader is getting used to the one-sentence interpolations. In the middle of these three’s conversation, the text cuts away for a moment to the madman Bloom pointed out to Josie Breen in chapter 8:

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.

He will reappear in section 17. Meanwhile, Cowley asks after Ben’s famous bass voice and Ben emits a low note for them to admire. There’s another interpolation (another character walking somewhere else):

The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint Mary’s abbey past James and Charles Kennedy’s, rectifiers, attended by Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of hurdles.

Ben announces he’s been to see the lawyer John Henry Menton about helping Father Cowley. Cowley explains that he owes rent to his landlord (who happens to be the Reverend Love we have just seen in the interpolation) and Ben says this changes things, because Love’s claim takes priority over Dodd’s. Or as Ben colourfully puts it:

—You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts.

Section 15: Martin Cunningham, Mr Power and John Wyse Nolan

Cunningham, Power and Nolan are walking. Cunningham has been working to make financial and other arrangements on behalf of the Dignam family. He tells the others he’s asked Father Conmee for help placing one of the Dignam boys in school, and we know from section 1 that Conmee intends to help.

John Wyse Nolan, looking at the ledger, notes that Bloom has put his name down for 5 shillings and Cunningham says he’s actually paid up.

—I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he [John Wyse Nolan] quoted, elegantly.

They see Jimmy Henry, the assistant town clerk, who Cunningham promptly buttonholes to join the cause. They arrive at the office of ‘long John’ Fanning, Dublin’s sub-sheriff. Henry’s corns are hurting and he passes Fanning and up the stairs. Fanning didn’t know Dignam, so Nolan describes him as ‘a decent little soul’ as they walk up the stairs.

They’re half way up the stairs when they hear harnesses and hooves and turn to see. Nolan goes downstairs back to the door and watches the Viceregal procession pass by, shouting up to the others to tell them what it is.

Interpolations of other scenes:

  • Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
  • On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
  • Outside la Maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brother-in-law [Bob Doran], humpy, tight, making for the liberties.

Section 16: Buck Mulligan and Haines

At the end of the preceding chapter, chapter 9 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Buck Mulligan left the National Library with Stephen. Now he has met up with the Englishman Haines, who we met in chapters 1 and 2, for a snack at the Dublin Bread Company (D.B.C.).

As they enter the restaurant, Mulligan points out John Howard Parnell, Dublin’s city marshall, playing chess at another table. We saw the chess-playing Parnell as an interpolation back in section 8.

Buck and Haines each order a melange (a drink like a cappuccino), scones and cakes and Mulligan jokes they call it the DBC because it makes damn bad cakes.

Mulligan tells Haines he missed Stephen’s presentation about Shakespeare, to which Haines quips:

—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.

Mulligan laughs that when he gets drunk, Stephen becomes unsteady on his feet.

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

Mulligan analyses Stephen’s mind, saying the Jesuits planted a permanent fear of hell in him, which will prevent him ever capturing the pure Attic note, the note of Swinburne et al.

Haines replies to all this with prissy Englishness, quick with references to authorities, in this case saying Stephen’s idee fixe reminds him of the theories of professor Pokorny of Vienna (is this a reference to Freud?).

The cakes arrive, Mulligan slices and butters his and laughs that Stephen claims he’ll write something in ten years! (In fact ten years after 1904 is 1914 and that’s the year Joyce published ‘Dubliners’ and began work on this novel, ‘Ulysses’.) Haines is unexpectedly sympathetic and says he wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen does write something.

Interpolations:

  • we see the one one-legged sailor at his latest location, singing his shanty and begging
  • our last sighting of the religious leaflet Bloom scrunched up and threw in the Liffey, as it arrives at Dublin Bay and passes the Rosevean, the three-masted ship Stephen saw over his shoulder back in chapter 3

Section 17: Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell

We briefly glimpse the Italian music master on his way, but this short section follows the lunatic Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell as he walks along Merrion Square, gets as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, turns and comes back the way he came.

As he passes a dentist’s surgery belonging to a Mr Bloom (no relation to our Bloom) his flying coattails bang the stick of the blind man we saw Bloom help across the road in chapter 8 ‘Lestrygonians’ but he walks heedlessly on. The blind young man curses Farrell.

—God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!

Section 18: Patrick Dignam

Deceased Paddy Dignam’s son, also Patrick – ironically but also tenderly referred to as Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam – has escaped the stifling atmosphere of the house of the dead, full of sniffling old women eating cake, sipping sherry and endlessly jawing, to come out and buy a pound and a half of porksteaks. En route home he sees sights and sounds, including a poster advertising a boxing match, but then realises it took place on 22 May so he’s missed it. He’s a fan of boxing and ponders which current fighter is best.

In two mirrors in the shop window of Madame Doyle the milliner, he catches sight of himself dressed in mourning, and smartens himself up (as Tom Kernan did in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser in section 12).

Master Patrick spots the poster advertising Marie Kendall, as Miss Dunne did in section 7, and M’Coy and Lenehan in section 9.

(Note the persistent presence of posters, advertising hoardings, newspaper hoardings and so on in the modern city, plus the memorable moment when sunlight off a car windscreen dazzling Tom Kernan – it is this sense of the city as a sensorium of random, fragmentary sights and sounds which would influence so many other authors of the 1920s and ’30s, including John dos Passos and Alfred Döblin.)

He sees a toff with a red flower in his mouth. He doesn’t know it but this is Blazes Boylan who we saw put the stem of the flower between his teeth in section 5. Boylan is apparently listening to a street drunk telling him something and, characteristically, grinning.

He sees some schoolboys with satchels and notes that he’s off school till the following Monday (it being Thursday) and that Uncle Barney is meant to get news about his father’s death into the papers so everyone knows why he’s absent.

Suddenly his mind flicks to concrete and disconcerting details of seeing his dead dad laid out: how his face had gone grey instead of its usual red; a fly walking over his face up to his eye; the scrunching sound at they screwed the screws of the coffin; the bumping sound it made being carried downstairs, and his Uncle Barney instructing the men how to manage it in the tight space.

The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he’s in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.

Pathos.

Section 19: The Viceregal cavalcade

As this chapter began with an extended description of a representative of the Catholic Church (Father Conmee) it ends with an extended description of the chief representative of the British state in Ireland, William Humble, Earl of Dudley, as he rides with his wife in one carriage, followed by dignitaries in several more, out from the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park and across the city on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital.

According to the commentators, Father Conmee’s movement is from south to north, while the Viceregal Cavalcade processes from Phoenix Park in the west across to the east side of Dublin, so that the two miniature odysseys form a cross over the geography of the city. In Joyce everything falls into patterns and schemas.

In a massive paragraph Joyce records the reactions to the cavalcade as it passes by of every one of the characters we’ve met so far in this chapter, plus some new ones: Tom Kernan; Dudley White (a real-life barrister); Richie Goulding Stephen’s uncle and down-at-heel lawyer; Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, the barmaids we’ll meet in the next chapter; Simon Dedalus doffing his hat, which His Excellency returns; the reverend Hugh C. Love similarly doffs his hat but unnoticed; Lenehan and M’Coy watch the procession unmoved; Gerty MacDowell is irritated because her view of what the Viceroy’s wife is wearing is blocked by parked vans; John Wyse Nolan smiles coldly; Tom Rochford notices Lady Dudley looking at him and quickly takes his hands out of his pockets; Marie Kendall stares down at the procession from her much-mentioned poster; Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely watch the procession from the window of the DBC, the customers crowding to the window casting a shadow on John Howard Parnell’s chessboard; Dilly Dedalus looks up from her second-hand French primer to watch the wheels spin by; John Henry Menton watches from the door of his business; Mrs Breen pulls her husband back from stepping in front of the horses, he hastily salutes the carriages and the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp replies; the five sandwichboard men spelling HELYS stop to watch; Mr Denis J Maginni walks on, unaffected.

With typical confidence Blazes Boylan doesn’t unhat but admires the pretty women in their carriages. From their carriage the Viceroy and wife hear the band of Highland soldiers playing on College Green (the ones we saw getting off a tram in section 6).

Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stares over the top of the procession; Hornblower, a Unionist, doffs his cap; Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam sees other people taking their hats off and so doffs his own dirty black cap. The cavalcade passes the blind stripling and the mysterious man in the brown mackintosh who keeps cropping up. Then on past Mr Eugene Stratton, two ladies and two small schoolboys.

Mockery The grandiosity of the Viceroy is mocked in at least two ways. First, the entire thing is done in a parody of a Court Circular or official report, complete with the full qualifications of everyone involved. Second, the list includes satirical figures and gestures, the best of which is:

From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage.

And after this long list of people reacting to the parade, the whole thing builds up to an image of rude indifference:

On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.

How beautifully and amusingly this complicated set-piece of interlocking parts and references comes to a comic closure.

Caveat: when is a panoramic view not a panoramic view?

In all the commentary I’ve read, among all the fine words about Aristotle, Hume and Vico, I haven’t come across anyone pointing out how rough Joyce’s characters are. The novel is overwhelmingly about the lowlife of Dublin and impresses on you a sometimes crushing sense of a world of failures and cadgers, blowhards, parasites and drinkers.

The most impressive chapters in ‘Ulysses’ are 1) the encounter in Barney Kiernan’s pub with the drunk citizen and his little court of drunk sycophants; 2) ‘Circe’ which is set in a brothel among prostitutes and ends in a drunken fight with a squaddie; 3) 40-pages spent inside the head of Molly Bloom who middle-class professors claim to love but I wonder if they’d really invite the semi-literate, slovenly, sex-mad wife of a failing advertising canvasser to their nice dinner parties.

Even when we meet characters which ought to be solidly middle-class like the editor of the Evening Telegraph, he turns out to be crude and tipsy. The authors A.E. and John Eglinton in the National Library ought to raise the tone, but for some reason they don’t, instead the arrival of Buck Mulligan with his play about masturbation significantly lowers it. Any of the supposedly middle class characters are swamped by the world of cadgers, racing tipsters, loan sharks, debtors, pawners and beggars which is where Joyce’s imagination really lies.

Stephen may be a great intellectual but he comes from a family which has gone right down the tubes, is reduced to pawning its curtains and books, and relies on out-and-out charity to have anything to even eat. It’s all surprisingly close to the sense of threadbare impoverishment which Samuel Beckett picked up and made his own in the 1940s and 50s, it’s overwhelmingly bereft and immiserated.

Where are the middle classes? Where are the fine dinner parties and posh young ladies going to private school, the balls, the visits to the theatre, the recitals? Where are the well-paid, well-dressed officers in the army and in the administration? (making a fleeting appearance only to be mocked, in the finale of this chapter.)

It’s characteristic that (in the National Library chapter, and later) Stephen is embittered at not being invited to George Moore’s literary soirèe and so Joyce doesn’t show it. That would require a whole chapter of fine talk along the lines of George Eliot or Henry James. In its place we get the unbelievably rough and crude ‘Circe’ chapter.

Dublin was and is a port city but where are the business meetings and professional dealings of importers and exporters and customs officers and so on? Scenes set in the big companies that own the ships and the ships’ captains, educated capable men? Instead of them we get the scene in the cabman’s shelter in ‘Eumaeus’, among the roughest of the rough, notable for the threatening bluster of the tattooed sailor, the drunken argument about Parnell everyone gets into, and that the place is run by a convicted terrorist.

Bearing all this in mind, I don’t see how the book as a whole, let alone this chapter, can be said to give a ‘panoramic view’ of the city. It gives a cleverly interlocking and cross-referencing portrait of Joyce’s level of Dublin society, of the lower middle class, working class, hard drinking, scrounging and begging classes, yes. But an overview of all the people in the city, including the genuinely middle, upper and aristocratic classes? Emphatically not.

Credit

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

Related links

Joyce reviews

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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

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/11/ulysses-james-joyce-eumaeus/

Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe

BLOOM: It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.
(A reasonable summary)

THE BAWD: Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.
(A mild example of the chapter’s studied obscenity)

In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her feet apart, pisses cowily.
(A more typical example)

Cunty Kate
(Name of one of the characters and a full-on example of the chapter’s deliberate obscenity)

BLOOM: I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
(In the courtroom sequence, Bloom defends his fondness for BDSM)

VIRAG (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
(Example of the chapter’s many sound effects)

(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG’S HEAD: Quack!
(Example of the chapter’s Dada absurdism)

STEPHEN: (Looks up to the sky.) How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of selfpretence.
(Typical cleverclogs punning from the master refuser, just after he’s been knocked to the ground by an angry squaddie)

The ‘Circe’ chapter of James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ is by far the longest, the strangest and the most outrageous of Ulysses’ 18 chapters. If you thought Bloom masturbating in chapter 13 was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The chapter is packed with countless examples of bluntly crude and transgressive sexuality, but that’s only the one aspect of what amounts to one long, vast, often completely demented, hallucination.

The ‘Circe’ chapter is huge. At 150 pages in the average paperback edition it’s as long as the first 8 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ put together. When it has been dramatised on the radio, it takes at least 4 hours to perform. Perform? Yes, because the entire chapter is cast in the format of a play, it is a play script.

There are several ways of thinking about all this which are best laid out here before we get lost in the tsunami of grotesque incidents.

1. A ghost play

After long difficult days, both the novel’s main protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, need purging. According to Joyce’s hero, Aristotle, the literary form designed to purge dangerous human emotions is the drama, the play. A play is needed to purge his characters. Moreover, Stephen has banged on about ghosts in Hamlet and both men need to confront their ghosts, so these problems combine to ensure it will be a ghost play, a play wherein Stephen will confront the accusing ghost of his mother and Bloom will see the ghost of his dead baby, now grown to be an 11-year-old boy.

(Hugh Kenner throws in a historical point that the Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth century had centred on a series of plays staged at the new Abbey Theatre and so ‘Circe’ represents Joyce tackling the sentimental Oirish mythologising of his Celtic revivalist opponents in their own genre, Kenner p.118.)

So Circe is written as a play, in the form of a script, with names of characters appearing in CAPITALS followed by their speech, with actions described in italics in brackets, exactly as in a script.

2. The climax of the accretive method

By accretive method all I mean is Joyce’s obsession with continually adding to his texts.

Joyce’s letters, essays, conversations with friends and testimony from his publishers all agree that Joyce’s method was accretive (meaning ‘a gradual increase, growth or the addition of new layers‘). In other words, once the basic structure of the narrative was created, Joyce went carefully back over the whole thing and added detail everywhere, and couldn’t stop adding more.

This explains why the text of ‘Ulysses’ is such a mess, because at every stage of the publication process, first as instalments in The Little Review, and then as it was readied for publication in Paris, Joyce compulsively more and more details to the printer’s proofs, adding words, phrases, paragraphs, sections, continually spotting new opportunities to add symbolism, quotes, references, filling the interstices of the narrative to amplify its encyclopedic networks of references and symbols.

Some chapters were set up in proof as many as ten times. (It didn’t help that all the print-setters and publishers were foreign, non-English speakers who couldn’t read Joyce’s crabbed handwriting and so introduced thousands of textual errors which textual scholars have made entire careers out of trying to fix.)

As the Ulysses Guide puts it:

Joyce estimated that he wrote a third of Ulysses at the proof stage of the revision process (Beach 58), arranging co-dependent details all over the novel and weaving a web of intratextual puzzles.

a) Sentence level

Joyce’s accretive method contributes to making the text so hard to read, because individual sentences would have new phrases or words added, some would cut in half or cut off in mid-sentence. Loads of passages became more ‘bittified’, adding to the never-ending Tower of Babel scale of the text’s internal references and correspondences but also the challenge of making sense of so many individual sentences or paragraphs.

b) Section level

He made significant changes on a macro level, too. For example, it was only late in the composition, after the book had been serialised in The Little Review, in summer 1921, that it crossed Joyce’s mind to punctuate the entire ‘Aeolus’ chapter with parody newspaper headlines, 62 of them.

c) The evolution of ‘Circe’

The accretive method reaches a kind of climax with ‘Circe’ which kept on growing, to its current monstrous proportions. The commentaries tell us that 1) Joyce had had the brainwave of setting his modernisation of the Circe legend – the legend of the woman who used her magic to enchant Odysseus and change his men into swine – in a contemporary Dublin brothel with the brothelkeeping madam as Circe. Good. A clever joke and in line with the trend of the novel to reincarnate classical legends as debased and degraded modern equivalents.

Then 2) we are told that he had the inspiration to cast it in the form of a play script – taking further the imposition of formats and styles on his subject matter which we had seen applied more and more thoroughly in the preceding chapters, Aeolus, Cyclops and Oxen of the Sun. Good. With you so far. Apparently, with this clear plan in mind, Joyce thought it would only take two or three months to write but it ended up taking six months and ging through at least eight drafts, swelling and bombasting with each iteration. Why?

Because it dawned on him that the chapter would act not only to purge his two central figures of their demons, it would purge the entire book too. It would purge the entire book of its ghosts and nightmares. And so to achieve this would require walk-on appearances by every character who had appeared in the novel so far, whether as a talking character or even the briefest of passing references. Everyone would appear, everyone would have a place in this grand finale. Here comes everyone! And not just characters but ideas, too, and topics from the novel’s many conversations. As the Ulysses Guide puts it:

As David Hayman puts it, Joyce seems to have taken the whole book, jumbled it together in a giant mixer and then rearranged its elements in a monster pantomime’ (Hayman 102).

This is what I mean by the climax of the accretive method. Whenever he thought he’d finished, he remembered someone else who could be made to appear in a further scene or vignette. And so the thing grew to its current gargantuan and exhausting size, with a bewildering number of characters appear in a bewildering variety of gross and grotesque scenes.

3. What is real any more?

‘Ulysses’ opens by describing the real world and real characters more or less realistically – admittedly in a mannered style but you more or less understand what is going on, you can decipher the ‘reality’ behind the style.

But as the work proceeds the events being described become increasingly hard to make out through the din of Joyce’s free indirect style before the entire approach arguably falls to pieces in the ‘Sirens’ episode.

Then, with ‘Aeolus’, something entirely new enters the picture because the 62 newspaper headlines the text is punctuated with are obviously a) not spoken or thought by any of the characters but b) don’t read as traditional authorial narration either. So who put them there?

Hence critic David Hayman’s invention of the figure he calls The Arranger. The Arranger it is who creates the newspaper headlines in ‘Aeolus’ and goes on to place the passages of mock heroic prose in ‘Cyclops’ which satirise the Citizen; and then arranges for the entire text of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ to consist of a series of extended pastiches of English as it evolved from Anglo-Saxon prose to Cardinal Newman. Note the steady increase in the ambition of the Arranger’s interventions:

  • Aeolus: limited to one-phrase headlines, albeit 62 of them
  • Cyclops: extended to create occasional blocks of parody
  • Oxen of the Sun: The Arranger takes over the entire text which consists of a series of historical pastiches

OK, so we understand the steady growth of The Arranger’s control. But despite it, all three chapters nevertheless retain the sense that, beneath or behind the interventions, something real is still happening, that, for example, behind the series of elaborate pastiches in ‘Oxen’ it’s still fairly obvious that there is a ‘real’ scene – half a dozen medical students and drifters getting drunk and bantering.

In ‘Circe’, by contrast, this sense of a reality lying behind the extravagant stylisations of the Arranger disappears. The incidents of ‘Circe’ are so extravagant, so demented, so hallucinatory, that there has ceased to be a behind, ceased to be a ‘reality’ which the reader can decipher their way back to. What you see is what you get. It is all on the surface.

The critic Hugh Kenner summarises attempts by various commentators to distinguish different levels of reality in the chapter:

  • The opening scene as Stephen and Bloom enter nighttown, some of the dialogue with the prostitutes, and Stephen getting into a fight with a squaddy right at the end, these can be said to be ‘real’ i.e. correlate with real life as we know it.
  • At the next level you have hallucinations of ‘real’ people i.e. when Stephen hallucinates his dead mother or Bloom hallucinates a sequence of women he’s sexually assaulted or sent rude letters to, these might be said to be based on real-world events.
  • And thirdly there are the out-and-out fantastical hallucinations such as the central event where Bloom turns into a woman and the brothelkeeper, Bella Cohen, turns into a man, along with countless other incidents where inanimate objects or animals talk, human beings appear in fancy dress or in changed shape, and so on.

This sounds plausible enough but in my view is a big mistake. In my opinion we have to accept the fact that The Arranger has taken over. Or to put it in different but equally hyperbolic terms: it is the book itself speaking. There is no longer any reality it relates to; the chapter is a festival of itself and its own imaginative possibilities, which are unlimited.

Kenner goes on to concede as much when he makes the one big Killer Fact about the chapter which is this: in the two chapters featuring Stephen and Bloom which follow ‘Circe’, neither of the characters refer to any of its central contents.

A visit to a brothel where Stephen smashes the chandelier, then a fight with a squaddie in the street, Yes. This handful of external events are referred back to but believe me these only occupy ten or less pages of the 150 and as to the other 140 pages of delirious hallucination, No, no later reference is made. It is as if they never happened because, in my view, it never did happen. Or, to put it better: it all did happen but we are now on a different plane of fiction. We are no longer in anything like a realist mode of fiction or reading. The book has moved way beyond the boring old reaching after factual verification. Kenner seems to lament this:

Deprived of reliable criteria for ‘reality’, we have no recourse but to read the text as though everything in it were equally real. (Kenner, p.126)

This sentence is immensely revealing. ‘No recourse’ Kenner says he has, but why does he need recourse? Why this obsession with seeking for a ‘reality’, for trying to distinguish the ‘real’ from the fantastical in the chapter. It’s all made up, Hugh! It’s all a book. It’s a novel. None of it happened. When I read a James Bond novel I don’t think: well that bit sounds plausible but that bit, no that’s obviously made up. The whole thing’s made up. Stop shackling yourself to this model of Realism or plausibility: the whole thing is a mad farrago, give in to it.

Kenner mentions The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Flaubert which had also crossed my mind as a forebear of ‘Circe’. Surely no critic reads the ‘Temptation’ carefully weighing up which bits are true and which are false: the whole thing is a mad hallucination. Same here. When insulted Kitty eggs the soldier on to punch Stephen why is that any more ‘real’ than the octopus which represents the end of the world or the talking belt buckles or the singing moth or Bloom turning into a woman and Bella into a dominating man? They all exist on the plane of the text and the text is a fiction, a fabrication, in all its elements.

The novel finally forces its reader to read and understand and live on its own terms and I don’t experience this as a cause for regret, reluctantly admitting I have ‘having no recourse’ but to accept this option. I accept it as a liberation. Relax and enjoy this mad fantasia.

4. The urge to offend

Reading through it slowly and carefully it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Joyce set out to offend everyone he could think of. The Catholic Church, the British state, the British King, the Celtic revival, all believers in sexual norms or morality, all believers in sense and meaning, everyone is offended and here again, unlike the prissy self-conscious moralising of Hugh Kenner or Richard Ellman, as a child of the punk years, I found it hilarious from start to finish. Just the existence of the character Cunty Kate was going to offend church, state, censors, bourgeois moralists, feminists and that’s a fraction of its offensive material.

Example: The Croppy Boy

As a teeny tiny example, take The Croppy Boy. This is a sentimental Irish nationalist ballad commemorating the 1798 Rebellion, representing the tragic, betrayed and often anonymous sacrifice of young Irish rebels (‘croppies’) fighting against British rule. It has been performed millions of times by pious tearful nationalists lamenting Ireland’s subjugation to the brutal British etc.

But here’s how Joyce deals with it here. First he has the Croppy Boy appear in one of the countless visions or hallucinations standing on a scaffold with a rope around his neck and reciting the most famous lines from the ballad, pious nationalist sentiments:

I bear no hate to a living thing,
But I love my country beyond the king.

At which point the hangman jerks the rope and:

(The assistants leap at the victim’s legs and drag him downward, grunting: the croppy boy’s tongue protrudes violently.)
THE CROPPY BOY:
Horhot ho hray hor hother’s hest.

Which is offensive and funny in a disrespectful Monty Python kind of way. But it gets a lot worse, because as the assistants tug him down to asphyxiate him, the Croppy Boy gets a spontaneous erection and ejaculates, spraying semen on the ground below. OK, that’s very bad but then… a handful of posh ladies we’ve been introduced to earlier in the play, scramble to mop up his semen in their handkerchiefs.

(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)

Worse still, the hangman admits that hanging the boy has given him an erection too, so that he also is close to coming. And all the while the figure of King Edward VII dances round the scene rattling a bucket.

Who has this little scene not offended? And there are hundreds more like it. In a moderately offensive passage, in the brothel, after scores more hallucinations, Bloom gets into a long rambling argument with his long-dead grandfather, which rotates around sex and Bloom’s fetishes, with Bloom at one point observing of female genitals.

BLOOM: (Absently.) Ocularly woman’s bivalve case is worse. Always open sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things.

Women fearing creepy crawlies that might creep up inside their vulvas! Talking of vulvas, at another point when Bloom has transformed into a woman and Bella into a man, he (Bello) shoves his fist deep into she-Bloom’s vulva then waves his smelly fist round at potential customers.

BELLO: Trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!

Offended yet? Disgusted yet? That appears to be Joyce’s aim.

5. The Homeric parallel

In The Odyssey Odysseus and his crew land on the island of Aeaea and a team of scouts discover the palace of Circe, a witch goddess. Circe invites Odysseus’s men inside for a drink and then magically turns them into pigs. One man escapes to tell Odysseus about their comrades’ fate and Circe’s trickery. Odysseus plans to rescue his men from Circe’s enchantment and receives help from Hermes who equips him with moly, a magical herb that will protect him from Circe’s witchcraft. The plan works: the moly counters Circe’s magic, she falls in love with wily Odysseus and agrees to change his crew from pigs back into men. In return Odysseus pledges to stay with her for a year, fathering two children on her during that time. Finally, some of Odysseus’s crew talk him out of his long entrancement and make him resume the journey home to Ithaca.

‘Circe’ synopsis

Here’s my summary of ‘Circe’ which doesn’t begin to do justice to the madness of actually reading it. This summary makes it sound rational and lucid, which it emphatically isn’t.

Into Nighttown Stephen and his friend Lynch, both plastered after a night drinking at the maternity hospital, walk into Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district which is like a nightmare Hieronymus Bosch landscape.

(A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a child wails.)

Stephen tells Lynch he’s heading for the brothel of Georgina Johnson. Bloom enters flushed and panting from hurrying, running across a street where he is nearly hit by two cyclists and then run down by a tram. He sees an orange glow to the south and wonders whether Dublin is burning which triggers a chorus of children singing the nursery rhyme. The bicycle bells and motorman’s footgong have speaking parts and are among the 40 or so inanimate objects which get to speak.

THE BICYCLE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.

THE TRAM GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.

Or Vince Lynch’s cap which has a speaking part and expresses surprisingly profound opinions, for a cap:

THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!

I like the Kisses which fly about him like birds and then settle on his clothes like sequins.

Bloom’s father Bloom hallucinates his father, Rudolph, come back to life to tick him off for his imprudence with money, for being in Nighttown, for leaving Judaism.

(A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face.)

Mum and Molly Swiftly followed by his mother (In pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, widow Twankey’s crinoline and bust) and then by Molly, wearing the sexy Turkish outfit he fantasises about her in, accompanied by a camel which peels her a mango. She accuses him of being a stick in the mud, the joke phrase from Nausicaa. The bar of soap in his pocket starts to sing.

THE SOAP:
We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.

He is accused in turn by his old flame Mrs Breen and Gerty before a pair of black and white minstrels dance onto the stage and sing to a banjo.

Costume changes It’s important to note that Bloom keeps changing costume, wearing in quick succession:

  • a dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings
  • a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon
  • an oatmeal sporting suit
  • a red fez when he is transformed into a Turkish dentist
  • a lascar’s vest and trousers
  • court dress
  • a caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an emigrant’s red handkerchief bundle in his hand
  • becomes a baby wearing ‘babylinen and pelisse’
  • and many others

And that most of the other characters appear in non-naturalistic, absurdist outfits too. Myles Crawford appears as a chicken.

Hellscape Descriptions of the surrounding persistently link it with Dante’s hell and Bosch’s nightmareworld.

(Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden playfight.)

The Trial Bloom is put in the dock to answer charges by a variety of women including the scullerymaid Mary Driscoll, Mrs Yelverton Barry, Mrs Bellingham and the Hon Mrs Mervyn Talboys. J.J. O’Molloy defends him.

Bloomusalem Bloom is exonerated in the trial which turns into a grand eulogy to him in which he King of his own city named Bloomusalem. Bloom imagines himself being loved and admired by Bloomusalem’s citizens.

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

Coronation In which Bloom is wearing yet another costume, a dalmatic and purple mantle. He is crowned in a grand ceremony, fireworks go off, he holds a sceptre and orb, a vast palace is built for him etc.

Bloom’s downfall But as quickly as he was raised, he falls, with religious leaders denouncing him and a crowd more characters joining in.

THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!
(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom.)

Bloom gives birth All the medical students from ‘Oxen of the Sun’ line up to accuse Bloom of being sexually abnormal. (They will reappear later as the Eight Beatitudes.) Bloom announces that he has become a woman and is pregnant and then: Bloom embraces Mrs Thornton the nurse tightly and bears eight male yellow and white children before an Italian Papal Nuncio gives an absurdist list of his ancestry.

Bloom is stoned and set on fire ‘All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him’ presumably that last phrase means piss on him. Then the head of the Dublin Fire Brigade sets him on fire.

At Bella’s After a lot, lot, lot more of this, Bloom eventually tracks Stephen and Lynch to Bella Cohen’s brothel (at 82 Tyrone street, lower). The prostitute Zoe Higgins greets him at the door and takes him onto the building where he meets Florry Talbot and Kitty Ricketts and encounters Stephen drunk at a piano and Lynch sprawled on a sofa. Here the hallucinations of other characters and situations continue, I liked the newsboys outside shouting about the safe arrival of the Antichrist, and reeled at the Hobgoblin who speaks in French (as hobgoblins obviously do, while appearing to destroy the solar system.

THE HOBGOBLIN: (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C’est moi! L’homme qui rit! L’homme primigène! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)

Which is the cue for another favourite, the End of the World, who turns out to be an octopus which speaks with a Scottish accent.

(Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.)
THE END OF THE WORLD: (With a Scotch accent.) Wha’ll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row?

(This is actually a nightmare reworking of a bizarre snippet Bloom overheard the mystic A.E. discussing with an acolyte in the street back in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter.)

Do you see why I think that trying to find a ‘rational’ or ‘realistic’ interpretation of all this is a fool’s errand. You should enjoy the show.

Enter Bella Cohen At the end of the hallucinations, Bloom is talking to Zoe-Kitty-Florry when he hears a sound coming from downstairs. He hears heels clacking on the staircase and observes what appears to be a male form passing down the staircase. He speaks with Zoe and Kitty for a moment, and then sees Bella Cohen come into the brothel. He observes her appearance and talks with her for a little while.

Bella and Bloom change gender But this conversation morphs into another hallucination, in which Bella becomes a man named Mr Bello and Bloom imagines himself to be a woman. New female Bloom willingly imagines herself being dominated by Bello, who both sexually and verbally humiliates Bloom. Bloom interacts with other imaginary characters in this scene before the hallucination ends.

A lucid moment When this hallucination ends, Bloom sees Stephen overpay Bella and suggests that he holds onto the drunk young man’s money safekeeping.

Stephen’s mother’s ghost Stephen hallucinates that his mother’s rotting cadaver has risen up from the floor to confront him. He cries Non serviam! and uses his ashplant walking stick to smash a chandelier before running out the room. The shattering of the chandelier deliberately repeats a phrase first occurring in Stephen’s thoughts in chapter 2, an image of the apocalypse, ironically repeated here in bathetic circumstances.

Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.

Payment Bella insists that Bloom pays for the damage, demanding 10 shillings but Bloom only throws a shilling on the table before himself running out the house in pursuit of Stephen.

Argument with a soldier A few streets away (in Beaver Street) Bloom finds Stephen engaged in an argument with an English soldier, Private Carr. This scene drags on surprisingly long with Carr claiming to be angry not just because Stephen, in a throwaway remark ‘insulted’ the King but also one of the prostitutes he, Carr, is chatting to. After a prolonged confused argument, Carr finally punches Stephen in the face, knocking him backwards and down onto his back.

Threat of arrest Two officers of the watch (the same pair we met at the start of the chapter) arrive and threaten to arrest Stephen but at this point another Dublin character arrives, Corny Kelleher. He alights from a horse-drawn carriage which, since he is an assistant at H.J. O’Neill’s funeral parlour, I took to be a funeral carriage. But Corny also (seems to) work as a police informant on the side and he manages to smooth things over with both the soldiers and the cops, who tell the excited crowd which has assembled to disperse. Bloom is very grateful, and so with much thanks and handshaking, Corny departs leaving Bloom alone with Stephen who’s still lying prone on the street.

Rudy’s ghost Bloom is pondering what to do with Stephen and just realising that he’s going to have to heave him up and take him somewhere safe to recuperate, when he is transfixed with the last thing which happens in this long, mad chapter – a sudden vision of his deceased son, Rudy, as an 11-year-old.

Cast

As a gesture towards the madness and to give you a sense of the scale of the thing, here is a full cast list of every person and object which speaks or appears, in order of appearance:

  • Children
  • The Idiot
  • A Crone
  • A Gnome
  • Cissy Caffrey
  • The Virago
  • Private Compton
  • Private Carr
  • Stephen Dedalus
  • Vincent Lynch – ‘his jockeycap low on his brow, attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face’
  • The Bawd
  • Edy Boardman
  • Leopold Bloom
  • The urchins
  • The motorman
  • Rudolph Bloom – Poldy’s father
  • Ellen Bloom – Poldy’s mother
  • Molly Bloom – Poldy’s wife
  • The lemon soap
  • Sweny – the chemist
  • Bridie Kelly – who Bloom lost his virginity to
  • Gerty MacDowell – who Bloom masturbated to in Nausicaa
  • Mrs Breen – former girlfriend of Bloom’s
  • Dennis Breen – her mad husband
  • Wisdom Hely’s sandwichboards
  • Tom and Sam Bohee – ‘coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes’
  • Alf Bergan
  • Richie Goulding – ‘three ladies’ hats pinned on his head’
  • Pat the waiter
  • The Gaffer (Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout)
  • The Loiterers (Guffaw with cleft palates)
  • The whores – shawled, dishevelled
  • The Navvy
  • The Shebeenkeeper
  • The wreaths
  • First watch
  • Second watch
  • The gulls
  • Bob Doran
  • Towser – bulldog
  • Signor Maffei – ‘passionpale, in liontamer’s costume with diamond studs in his shirtfront, steps forward, holding a circus paperhoop, a curling carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the gorging boarhound’
  • The Dark Mercury
  • Martha – (Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck) ‘My real name is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable.’
  • Myles Crawford – as a chicken
  • Mr Philip Beaufoy – ‘palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers and patent boots’
  • A voice from the gallery
  • First Cryer
  • Mary Driscoll – scullerymaid Bloom assaulted – ‘a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand’
  • George Fottrell – Clerk of the crown and peace
  • Longhand
  • Shorthand
  • Professor MacHugh
  • J. J. O’Molloy – in barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest
  • Moses Dlugacz – ferreteyed albino in blue dungarees
  • Mrs Yelverton Barry – in lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair – claims Bloom wrote her a rude anonymous letter
  • Mrs Bellingham – in cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff – ditto
  • The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys – in amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly – ditto
  • Sluts and Ragamuffins
  • Davy Stephens – Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph, with the Saint Patrick’s Day supplement
  • The very reverend Canon O’Hanlon in cloth of gold cope
  • Father Conroy
  • The reverend John Hughes S. J.
  • Clock/Timepiece
  • The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle
  • The Nameless One
  • The Jurors, namely: Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M’Coy and the featureless face of a Nameless One
  • The Crier
  • His Honour, Sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded
  • Long John Fanning
  • H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner’s apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder
  • The bells of George’s church
  • Hynes
  • Paddy Dignam – dead, dog-eaten face
  • John O’Connell – caretaker, stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape
  • Father Coffey – chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff of twisted poppies
  • Tom Rochford
  • The Kisses
  • Zoe Higgins – a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat
  • Midnight chimes
  • An elector
  • The Torchbearers
  • Late Lord Mayor Harrington – in scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large white silk scarf
  • Councillor Lorcan Sherlock
  • A Blacksmith
  • A Paviour and Flagger
  • A Millionairess
  • A Noblewoman
  • A Feminist
  • A Bellhanger
  • The Bishop of Down and Connor
  • William, Archbishop of Armagh – in purple stock and shovel hat
  • Michael, Archbishop of Armagh
  • The Peers
  • John Howard Parnell
  • Tom Kernan
  • The Chapel of Freeman Typesetters
  • John Wyse Nolan
  • A Bluecoast Schoolboy
  • An Old Resident
  • An Applewoman
  • Thirtytwo workmen representing all the counties of Ireland
  • The Sightseers
  • The Man in the Mackintosh
  • The Women
  • The Babes and Sucklings
  • Baby Boardman – Edy Boardman’s baby, met in Nausicaa
  • The Citizen
  • Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk
  • Paddy Leonard
  • Nosey Flynn
  • J.J. O’Molloy
  • Pisser Burke
  • Chris Callinan
  • Joe Hynes
  • Ben Dollard – rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped
  • Larry O’Rourke
  • Crofton
  • Alexander Keyes
  • O’Madden Burke
  • Davy Byrne
  • Lenehan
  • Father Farley
  • Mrs Riordan
  • Mother Grogan
  • Hoppy Holohan
  • The Veiled Sibyl
  • Theodore Purefoy
  • Alexander J. Dowie
  • The Mob
  • Dr Mulligan – ‘In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow’
  • Dr Madden
  • Dr Crotthers
  • Dr Punch Costello
  • Dr Dixon
  • Mrs Thornton
  • Brother Buzz
  • Bantam Lyons
  • Brini – Papal Nuncio
  • A Deadhand writes on the wall
  • Crab – in bushranger’s kit
  • A Female Infant – shakes a rattle
  • A Hollybush
  • The Irish Evicted Tenants – ‘in bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs’
  • The Artane Orphans
  • The Prison Gate Girls
  • Hornblower – ‘in ephod and huntingcap’
  • Mastiansky and Citron
  • George R Mesias, Bloom’s tailor, appears, a tailor’s goose under his arm,
  • Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son,
  • The Fire Brigade
  • Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade
  • The Daughters of Erin – ‘in black garments, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands’
  • A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O’Brien, sings the chorus from Handel’s Messiah Alleluia for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn
  • The Male Brutes
  • Kitty Ricketts – young prostitute working in Bella Cohen’s brothel
  • Zoe Higgins – ‘a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand’, also working in Bella Cohen’s brothel
  • Florry Talbot – ‘a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry’, also working in Bella Cohen’s brothel
  • Lynch’s cap has a speaking part
  • Reuben J. Antichrist – phantasm
  • The Hobgoblin
  • The Gramophone
  • The End of the World – a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man (with a Scotch accent)
  • Elijah
  • The Beatitudes (Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students’ gowns)
  • Lyster
  • Best (from the National Library)
  • John Eglinton – literary man from the National Library
  • Mananaun MacLir – broods
  • The Gasjet speaks
  • Lipoti Virag – Bloom’s grandfather
  • The moth – performs a little moth song
  • Henry Flower – ‘He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob’s pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour’s face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia.’ Bear in mind that Henry doesn’t exist.
  • Almidano Artifoni – ‘holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework’
  • Siamese twins
  • Philip Drunk and Philip Sober – two Oxford dons with lawnmowers
  • Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley aka the Virgins
  • The Virgins
  • The Flybill
  • His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus – phantasmal Primate of all Ireland
  • The Doorhandle
  • Bella Cohen – a massive whoremistress: she is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops. Bloom says:

Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination.

  • The Fan
  • The Hoof (Bella has grown hooves)
  • Bello – Bella transformed into a man
  • Mrs Keogh – the brothel cook, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men’s grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand
  • BLOOM-as-a-woman – a charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth (It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister’s stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.’)
  • The Sins of the Past:
    • he went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black church
    • unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D’Olier street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox
    • by word and deed he frankly encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises
    • in five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males
    • and by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see?
    • did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot?
  • (Bello bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!
  • A bidder
  • The Lacquey (from outside Dillon’s auction house, chapter 10)
  • Charles Alberta Marsh
  • A darkvisaged man
  • Sleepy Hollow
  • Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf in the seawind simply swirling,
  • The Circumsised (M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen)
  • The Yews
  • The Nymph
  • The Waterfall
  • John Wyse Nolan – in the background, in Irish National Forester’s uniform
  • The Echo
  • The Halcyon Days (Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn)
  • Staggering Bob
  • A Nannygoat – ‘plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants’ – (Bleats.) Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny!
  • The DummyMummy
  • Councillor Nannetti – alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his hand in his waistcoat opening
  • Bloom’s back trouserbutton
  • the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan – who pandybatted Stephen at Clogowes School in ‘Portrait’
  • Don John Conmee – mild, benign, rectorial, reproving
  • Black Liz – a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle
  • The Boots
  • Blazes Boylan
  • Shakespeare
  • Mrs Dignam and her children:
    • Freddy Dignam whimpering
    • Susy Dignam with a crying cod’s mouth
    • Alice Dignam struggling with the baby
  • Martin Cunningham
  • Mrs Cunningham – in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown
  • Simon Dedalus
  • The Crowd watching a foxhunt
  • The Orange Lodges
  • Garrett Deasy
  • The Green Lodges
  • Professor Goodwin – in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room
  • Professor Maginni – inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcoat, stock collar with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves. In his buttonhole is an immense dahlia
  • The Pianola
  • The morning hours – run out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance, twirling their skipping ropes
  • The noon hours follow in amber gold, laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing
  • Cavaliers
  • The Twilight Hours
  • The Night Hours
  • The Bracelets
  • The Choir
  • Stephen’s Mother, May Goulding
  • Buck Mulligan
  • The Hue and Cry
  • Lord Tennyson – gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded
  • Dolly Gray
  • Biddy the Clap
  • Cunty Kate
  • King Edward the Seventh
  • Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o’-day boy’s hat
  • Patrice Egan
  • Don Emile Patrizio Franz Rupert Pope Hennessy – in medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his helm,
  • The Croppy Boy
  • Rumbold, Demon Barber – accompanied by two blackmasked assistants,
  • Old Gummy Granny in a sugarloaf hat
  • Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals
  • Father Malachi O’Flynn
  • The Reverend Mr Haines Love
  • The Voice of all the Damned
  • Adonai
  • The Voice of all the Blessed
  • The Retriever
  • A Hag
  • The Horse
  • Rudy

Inanimate objects speak

I particularly enjoyed the inanimate objects which have speaking roles. Back in ‘Aeolus’ Bloom remarked in his inner monologue that ‘everything speaks in its own way’ and here that rule is wonderfully brought to life.

THE FAN: (Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see.

(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)
THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.

(The bells of George’s church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)
THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!

There are nearly 40 of these speaking objects and all very entertaining exercises of Joyce’s ingenuity. Here’s an old-style gramophone where the needle has played the whole record and gone to that bit in the centre.

THE GRAMOPHONE: (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh… (The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)

THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!

Stephen can’t stop making grand declarations

In ‘Portrait’, remember how Joyce has Stephen make a series of grand declarations: ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow’; that the artist is like God ‘invisible, refined out of existence’; that he will go into exile and express himself as freely as he can ‘using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning’ etc etc.

Stephen carries on making the same kind of declarations throughout ‘Ulysses’. In fact sometimes it seems like whenever Stephen Dedalus opens his mouth, he makes another grand statement. He is a grand statement machine. Here in the ‘Circe’ chapter many of these become garbled and incoherent although he still manages to make manifesto pledges which are routinely cited by the commentators as indicators of his and Joyce’s intentions.

STEPHEN: (Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

You die for your country. Suppose. (He places his arm on Private Carr’s sleeve.) Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me.

My point is that Joyce critics tend to take these ringing declarations at face value, and also equate them with Joyce’s own views. Whereas, reading ‘Portrait’ and ‘Ulysses’ together, situating Stephen among the wider Dublin society portrayed in the latter book, and also comparing him with the easy-going and genuinely kind figure of Bloom, has steadily put me off Stephen. In my opinion, as the book progresses, Stephen comes to appear smaller, more bitter, more self-centred and selfish, and his grand statements ring increasingly hollow.

He is a legend in his own mind. He goes ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ and yet when he bumps into his impoverished little sister, with pounds in his pocket, he doesn’t even give her a penny because he is saving all his money to squander it on booze and prostitutes. There’s a name for that kind of brother and it isn’t ‘hero’.

Cuckolding

It seems pointless zeroing on any particular set of sexual references since the whole thing overflows with obscenity. But the soft porn references to Boylan shafting his wife are particularly germane to the ‘plot’ and Bloom can’t stop thinking and fantasising about it.

BOYLAN: (To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds out an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower…? Lukewarm water…?

LYDIA DOUCE: (Her mouth opening.) Yumyum. O, he’s carrying her round the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.

BLOOM: (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!

Later on, Bella-turned-into-Bello fondles Bloom’s limp little willy, then describes Blazes tupping Molly:

BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds of Bloom’s haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where’s your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It’s as limp as a boy of six’s doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man’s job?
BLOOM: Eccles street…
BELLO: (Sarcastically.) I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world but there’s a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He’s no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it’s kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don’t it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon!

And much more in the same vein. The theme bleeds through into the next chapter where Bloom and Stephen blunder off to a late-night café and find themselves in an argument about the great Lost Leader of Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell who fell from power after being named as the third party in a divorce case. The point is that Bloom sticks up for Parnell as being a Real Man, a proper stud, who stepped in to swive horny Kitty O’Shea when her husband (Captain O’Shea) was unable to do the deed. So a situation very like Bloom’s only with Bloom rooting (sic) for the cuckolder, rather than being the cuckoldee.

Stephen’s broken glasses

Hugh Kenner points out a key fact which is only now revealed but impacts our entire reading of the book. We knew that Stephen, like his creator, was short-sighted. But only here, late in the novel, do we discover that he broke his glasses the day before. In other words he’s been barely able to see for the entire novel!

STEPHEN: (Brings the match near his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the visible.

What does that say, how does that qualify his repeated insistence on the importance of the appearance of things, the fact that he can barely see the appearance of anything!

Facts

Despite the delirious nature of most of the content, Joyce still chose to secrete a number of key facts about the entire novel into this chapter, for example, our heroes’ ages:

BLOOM: (Points to his hand.) That weal there is an accident. Fell and cut it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen.

So Bloom is 38.

STEPHEN: See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. (He winces.) Hurt my hand somewhere.

So Stephen is 22.

Credit

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

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by Simon on February 9, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 9, 2026

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