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
- Telemachus
- Nestor
- Proteus
Part 2. Odyssey
- Calypso
- Lotus Eaters
- Hades
- Aeolus
- Lestrygonians
- Scylla and Charybdis
- Wandering Rocks
- Sirens
- Cyclops
- Nausicaa
- Oxen of the Sun
- Circe
Part 3. Nostos
- Eumaeus
- Ithaca
- 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.
Books & Boots 