What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?

‘Ithaca’ is the 17th of the 18 chapters in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the complete chapter numbers and names. (Note that the chapter names are not given in the published book, they were assigned in guidance and schemas Joyce sent to supporters and commentators and have been used by everyone, including me, ever since; but you won’t find them in any published or online editions, which only have chapter numbers.)

Part 1. Telemachiad

1. Telemachus
2. Nestor
3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

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

Part 3. Nostos

16. Eumaeus
17. Ithaca
18. Penelope

Place in the sequence

‘Ithaca’ is the second chapter of the third part of the novel. The first 14 chapters slowly build up to the long, mad fantasia of chapter 15, ‘Circe’, set in a brothel in Dublin’s red light district which is depicted as a version of hell, populated by the hideously poor and deformed, and that’s before the long sequence of bizarre hallucinations even begins.

The long phantasmagoria of ‘Circe’ ends with over-educated, drunk and depressed Stephen Dedalus getting knocked down by an angry English soldier and the next chapter, ‘Eumaeus’, describes the older figure of Leopold Bloom, a friend of Stephen’s father, helping him up and helping him along to an all-night café down by the docks where he tries to restore him with a cup of (disgusting) coffee and an apology for a roll.

Here they are buttonholed by a dodgy old sailor (D.B. Murphy) who tells a series of tall tales about his sailing career, which somehow triggers a long discussion about the Lost Leader of Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell, with much stream-of-consciousness free-associating by Bloom, who cautions Stephen about his dissolute life, reflects on his wife cuckolding him, and has his own views about the Parnell scandal.

Bloom eventually tells Stephen it’s time to leave, pays the café bill, and invites the young man back to his place, for a cup of cocoa and the offer of a bed for the night made-up on the sofa.

This chapter, ‘Ithaca’, describes the pair’s walk from the all-night café down on the Dublin waterfront to Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street, the route they take, their conversation, what they do (make a nice cup of cocoa) and (at great length) say when they get there.

Time

Each of the chapters of ‘Ulysses’ covers about an hour in the course of one long day, starting at 8am on Thursday 16 June 1904 and going through to the early hours of the following morning, Friday 17 June. (As Stephen remarks, ‘Every Friday buries a Thursday’.) ‘Ithaca’ takes place from about 2 to 3 am on the morning of Friday 17 June 1904. As Bloom lets Stephen out the back door of his garden, the bells of St George’s ring, the commentators tell me at 2.30 am.

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 and which featured 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 incidents surrounding Odysseus’s final arrival home. In Homer Odysseus discovers that his palace has been taken over by scores of ‘suitors’, living off the fat of his kingdom while they vie for the hand of his wife, Penelope, all insisting that the long-absent Odysseus must be dead by now.

Well, the novel’s unlikely Odysseus figure, Leopold Bloom, certainly arrives home, at the shabby house which is the ironic modern equivalent of the Greek hero’s palace. And his wife, Molly, the ironic modern reincarnation of Penelope is there, fast asleep, upstairs in the marital bed. But where are the hordes of suitors which Odysseus had to fight and defeat in the poem? Nowhere to be seen. So the chapter is only in a very high-level way a re-enactment of the Odyssey passage.

The cleverest commentary I’ve read points out that, in Homer’s poem, Odysseus arrives at his palace in disguise, pretending to be one more suitor, and has to take part in the ritual challenge the suitors have created, which is to fire an arrow through the hafts of twelve axes set up in a row. None of the suitors has managed to achieve this feat as it would have required a very steady hand indeed, requiring tremendous accuracy – and so the clever commentary I read suggests that Joyce chose to ignore the fact of the suitors and the challenge as such, but borrowed the theme of extreme accuracy as his concept for the entire chapter. Hence:

Conceit of precision

The later chapters of ‘Ulysses’ are characterised by large-scale conceits or concepts which dominate their form and style. ‘Nausicaa’ is written in the style of a romantic novelist. ‘Oxen of the Sun’ consists of a series of pastiches of English prose given in historical order. ‘Circe’ is entirely in the form of a surreal play. ‘Eumaeus’ is written in the deliberately bad, clichéd but at the same time pretentious style derived from popular magazines or local newspapers.

Following the trend, this chapter, ‘Ithaca’, is dominated by one of the more drastic and intrusive conceits: the entire chapter is cast in the form of (short) questions and (long) answers. It is a catechism.

What is a catechism? A catechism is ‘a summary of religious doctrine and teachings, traditionally structured in a question-and-answer format designed for instruction, memorization, and conversion’. Catechisms are commonly used by the Catholic Church, especially in schools, and Joyce was educated at Jesuit schools where he would have used catechisms on a daily basis.

But there’s another angle to the idea. The turn of the century when ‘Ulysses’ is set saw the creation and mass marketing of a number of popular encyclopedias and guides, and many of these were in effect secular catechisms, consisting of numerous short questions which prompted long encyclopedia-style answers. According to the scholars, Joyce was particularly indebted to Richmal Mangnall’s ‘Historical and Miscellaneous Questions’, which was immensely popular in the Victorian era and which is also mentioned in ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ Here’s an article about Mangnall:

• Richmal Mangnall Wikipedia article

And you can read her Historical Questions read online. The closest modern parallel is the sets of ‘frequently asked questions’ which we nowadays find in loads of contexts, from gadget instruction manuals to medical guidance.

So how does this all apply to the ‘Ithaca’ chapter? One example will make it clear:

What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?

At the housesteps of the 4th of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number 7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.

See? The text describes the events in the form of a rhetorical question, and a detailed and pedantic answer.

Now, we know that Joyce was extremely pedantic, a logician and a precisian. He was pedantic about words, spoken and thought, but right from the earliest Dubliners stories he was also extremely precise about the movements and actions of all the characters, often deforming the normal word order of his sentences in order to emphasise particular gestures. And very obviously he loads Stephen, in particular, with vast amounts of specialist knowledge, of theology, history, languages and much more.

So alighting on this catechistic format to structure an entire chapter allowed Joyce to combine his interest in precise description of movement and gesture, with encyclopedic (and often scientific) information. Take the moment when Bloom discovers he’s lost his front door keys and so lowers his body over the ‘area’, the sunken space in front of his house, then lets himself drop the few feet to the flagstones. As the text puts it:

Did he fall?

By his body’s known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman, pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9, dominical letters C B, Roman indiction 2, Julian period 6617, MCMIV.

So yes, he did fall, but with a great weight of pedantic, pedagogic impediments adding to the description.

This can be comic. The grotesquely exaggerated, pedantic precision of the answers and indeed the whole concept, is, if you have a certain bookish sense of humour, very funny. I liked it in the same way I liked the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter, I liked the wittiness of the conceit and the sustained inventiveness of the execution, smiling all through and laughing out loud in several places. For example when they have a pee in the garden.

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Just as importantly, it’s also extremely easy to understand what is going on because even the smallest gesture is explained in such pedantic detail. For this reason – for their high concepts, their comedy and the ease of understanding what’s going on and why – these later chapters are by far my favourites, much more than the first ten or so chapters whose fragmented stream of consciousness and oblique, truncated dialogue I often found frustratingly incomprehensible.

Cast

• Leopold Bloom
• Stephen Dedalus

Questions about questions

How many questions are there in the ‘Ithaca’ chapter? 309.

Falling in with Joyce’s obsession for pattern and structure, the 309 questions can perhaps be divided into four parts or sections:

Part 1: Bloom and Stephen (questions 1 to 171)

Bloom and Stephen get into his house, drink cocoa and chat, Bloom offers him a bed for the night, Stephen refuses, they go for a joint pee in the garden, then Bloom lets Stephen out through it and off he walks.

Part 2: Bloom alone (questions 172 to 269)

Ponders, tidies up, goes upstairs, reviews a variety of belongings (letters from Milly, life insurance), fantasises about owning a country cottage or emigrating, takes clothes off.

Part 3: Bloom gets into bed (questions 270 to 290)

Bloom gets slowly and carefully into bed next to Molly and ponders his own complicated responses to knowledge of her infidelity with Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. The outcome is a feeling of tenderness and he kisses her buttocks.

Part 4: Molly wakes up and asks him about his day (questions 291 to 309)

Molly asks him where he’s been and he lies: he doesn’t mention the fracas with the Citizen, his encounter with Gerty MacDowell, and certainly not his visit to the brothel. Instead he makes up a story about going to a performance the play ‘Leah’ at the Gaiety Theatre, then on to supper at Wynn’s (Murphy’s) Hotel, where after the meal ‘professor and author’ Stephen Dedalus put on a little gymnastic display but hurt himself so Bloom heroically stepped in to help him. In other words, a pack of lies. This is because they haven’t had sex for over ten years.

Incidentally, Molly’s questioning or inquisition obviously forms a series of questions within a series of questions, a catechism within a catechism, the kind of ingenuity Joyce loved and lovers of Joyce come to appreciate, too.

Ithaca questions

Is there any point trying to summarise the chapter? Or would it be easier and also more indicative just to list the questions?

Part 1: Bloom and Stephen

1. What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

2. Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

3. Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective like and unlike reactions to experience?

4. Were their views on some points divergent?

5. Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?

6. Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in the past?

7. What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at their destination?

8. As in what ways?

9. What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?

10. Was it there?

11. Why was he doubly irritated?

12. What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly (respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?

13. Bloom’s decision?

14. Did he fall?

15. Did he rise uninjured by concussion?

16. What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?

17. Did the man reappear elsewhere?

18. Did Stephen obey his sign?

19. What did Bloom do?

20. Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?

21. What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?

22. What did Bloom see on the range?

23. What did Bloom do at the range?

24. Did it flow?

25. What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

26. Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?

27. What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?

28. What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?

30. What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?

31. Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?

32. What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the agency of fire?

33. What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?

34. For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?

35. What advantages attended shaving by night?

36. Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?

37. What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting influence?

38. What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?

39. What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?

40. What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?

41. Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him?

42. What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?

43. His mood?

44. What satisfied him?

45. How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?

46. What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his guest?

47. Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of hospitality?

48. Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed, reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to complete the act begun?

49. Who drank more quickly?

50. What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?

51. Had he found their solution?

52. What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him, potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering of three prizes of 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively for competition by the Shamrock, a weekly newspaper?

53. Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?

54. What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?

55. What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic poet) sent to Miss Marion (Molly) Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?

56. What had prevented him from completing a topical song (music by R. G. Johnston) on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years, entitled If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin now, commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the valley of diamonds, of the second edition (30 January 1893) of the grand annual Christmas pantomime Sinbad the Sailor (produced by R. Shelton 26 December 1892, written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George A. Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan under the personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir, harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal girl?

57. What relation existed between their ages?

58. What events might nullify these calculations?

59. How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?

60. Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and afterwards seconded by the father?

61. Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a third connecting link between them?

62. Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?

63. Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?

64. What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years deceased?

65. Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the more desirable?

66. Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?

67. Did either openly allude to their racial difference?

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?

69. What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective parentages?

70. Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or layman?

71. Did they find their educational careers similar?

72. Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university of life?

73. What two temperaments did they individually represent?

74. What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards applied, rather than towards pure, science?

75. Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of kindergarten?

76. What also stimulated him in his cogitations?

77. Such as?

78. Such as not?

79. Such as never?

80. Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably conduce to success?

81. What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?

82. What?

83. What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?

84. Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or intuition?

85. Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?

86. Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to him, described by the narrator as A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums?

87. Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently engaged his mind?

88. What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?

89. What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?

90. What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?

91. How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?

92. With what success had he attempted direct instruction?

93. What system had proved more effective?

94. Example?

95. Accepting the analogy implied in his guest’s parable which examples of postexilic eminence did he adduce?

96. What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by Stephen?

97. Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a selected or rejected race mentioned?

98. What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts by guest to host and by host to guest?

99. How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages made in substantiation of the oral comparison?

100. Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?

101. What points of contact existed between these languages and between the peoples who spoke them?

102. What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple, ethnically irreducible consummation?

103. Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?

104. How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?

105. In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?

106. Did the guest comply with his host’s request?

107. What was Stephen’s auditive sensation?

108. What was Bloom’s visual sensation?

109. What were Stephen’s and Bloom’s quasisimultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?

110. What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with what exemplars?

111. Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange legend on an allied theme?

[Recite the first (major) part of this chanted legend.]

112. How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?

[Recite the second part (minor) of the legend.]

113. How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?

[Condense Stephen’s commentary.]

114. Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?

115. Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?

116. Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?

117. From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not totally immune?

118. Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member of his family?

119. What other infantile memories had he of her?

120. What endemic characteristics were present?

121. What memories had he of her adolescence?

122. Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?

123. What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly, if differently?

124. Why similarly, why differently?

125. In other respects were their differences similar?

126. As?

127. In what way had he utilised gifts (1) an owl, (2) a clock, given as matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?

128. In what manners did she reciprocate?

129. What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make to Stephen, noctambulist?

130. What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation of such an extemporisation?

131. Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew’s daughter?

132. To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest return a monosyllabic negative answer?

133. What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the host?

134. Was the proposal of asylum accepted?

135. What exchange of money took place between host and guest?

136. What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified, declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

137. What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually selfexcluding propositions?

138. Was the clown Bloom’s son?

139. Had Bloom’s coin returned?

140. Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?

141. He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

142. Why did he desist from speculation?

143. Did Stephen participate in his dejection?

144. Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?

145. What comforted his misapprehension?

146. In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?

147. With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?

148. What did each do at the door of egress?

149. For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

150. What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

151. With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

152. Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

153. Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

154. Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?

155. And the problem of possible redemption?

156. Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?

157. His (Bloom’s) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?

158. Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?

159. Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological influences upon sublunary disasters?

160. What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

162. What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom’s, who attracted Stephen’s, gaze?

163. How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?

164. Both then were silent?

165. Were they indefinitely inactive?

166. Similarly?

167. What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

168. What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?

169. How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal departer?

170. How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

171. What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their (respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?

Part 2: Stephen walks away, Bloom alone

172. What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?

173. Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to Glasnevin in the north?

174. Alone, what did Bloom hear?

175. Alone, what did Bloom feel?

176. Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind him?

177. What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?

178. Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?

179. He remembered the initial paraphenomena?

180. Did he remain?

181. What suddenly arrested his ingress?

[Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of furniture.]

[Describe them.]

182. What significances attached to these two chairs?

183. What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?

184. With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?

185. His next proceeding?

186. What followed this operation?

187. What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the mantelpiece?

188. What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and Bloom?

189. What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his attention?

190. Why solitary (ipsorelative)?

191. Why mutable (aliorelative)?

192. What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?

[Catalogue these books.]

193. What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of the inverted volumes?

194. Which volume was the largest in bulk?

195. What among other data did the second volume of the work in question contain?

196. Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?

197. What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?

198. What caused him irritation in his sitting posture?

199. How was the irritation allayed?

200. What involuntary actions followed?

[Compile the budget for 16 June 1904.]

201. Did the process of divestiture continue?

202. Why with satisfaction?

203. In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions now coalesced?

204. What additional attractions might the grounds contain?

205. As?

206. What improvements might be subsequently introduced?

207. What facilities of transit were desirable?

208. What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?

209. Could Bloom of 7 Eccles street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?

210. What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?

211. What lighter recreations?

212. Might he become a gentleman farmer of field produce and live stock?

213. What would be his civic functions and social status among the county families and landed gentry?

214. What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?

[Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth.]

215. How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?

216. What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate purchase?

217. Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?

218. Were there schemes of wider scope?

219. Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes become a natural and necessary apodosis?

220. What eventuality would render him independent of such wealth?

221. For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?

222. His justifications?

223. What did he fear?

224. What were habitually his final meditations?

225. What did the first drawer unlocked contain?

[Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for this thaumaturgic remedy.]

226. Were there testimonials?

227. How did absentminded beggar’s concluding testimonial conclude?

228. What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?

229. What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?

230. What possibility suggested itself?

231. What did the 2nd drawer contain?

[Quote the textual terms of this notice.]

232. What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the 2nd drawer?

233. What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those five whole words evoke?

234. What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?

235. Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?

236. As?

237. How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

238. What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom (deceased)?

239. Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these migrations in narrator and listener?

240. What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of amnesia?

241. What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?

242. What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?

[Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.]

243. With which attendant indignities?

244. By what could such a situation be precluded?

245. Which preferably?

246. What considerations rendered departure not entirely undesirable?

247. What considerations rendered departure not irrational?

248. What considerations rendered departure desirable?

249. In Ireland?

250. Abroad?

251. Under what guidance, following what signs?

252. What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?

253. What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

254. What tributes his?

255. Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?

256. What would render such return irrational?

257. What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?

258. What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an unoccupied bed?

259. What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?

260. What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?

261. What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?

262. Who was M’Intosh?

263. What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30 years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?

264. Where was Moses when the candle went out?

265. What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, charged with collected articles of recently disvested male wearing apparel, silently, successively, enumerate?

266. What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?

267. What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?

268. What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were perceived by him?

269. What impersonal objects were perceived?

Part 3: Bloom gets into bed

270. Bloom’s acts?

271. How?

272. What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

273. If he had smiled why would he have smiled?

275. What preceding series?

276. What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and late occupant of the bed?

277. Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal proportion and commercial ability?

278. With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections affected?

279. Envy?

280. Jealousy?

281. Abnegation?

282. Equanimity? [this is a particularly funny one where Bloom justifies to himself reasons why Blazes Boylan tupping his wife is not as bad as a whole list of natural disasters and wicked crimes.]

283. Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?

284. What retribution, if any?

285. By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments? [Many, but the key one is ‘the futility of triumph or protest or vindication.’]

286. In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

287. The visible signs of antesatisfaction?

288. Then?

289. The visible signs of postsatisfaction?

290. What followed this silent action?

Part 4: Molly half wakes and asks Bloom about his day

291. With what modifications did the narrator [i.e. Bloom] reply to this interrogation [by Molly]?

292. Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?

293. Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?

294. What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration? [it is ten years since Bloom and Molly last had penetrative sex]

295. How?

296. What moved visibly above the listener’s and the narrator’s invisible thoughts?

297. In what directions did listener and narrator lie?

298. In what state of rest or motion?

299. In what posture?

300. Womb? Weary?

301. With?

302. When?

303. Where?

Famously, the answer to the final question is just a big black full stop.

A discrepancy

All the commentaries say there are 309 questions but, as you can see, I went through carefully numbering them and came up with only 303. Either the commentators are all wrong or I am. As I read I noticed there are a small number of places where the text doesn’t have a question and answer, it has a command to describe something which the text then obeys, for example ‘Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of furniture.’ When I counted 6 of these and added them to the 303 questions, that totalled 309 ‘prompts’. But in the end there are 10 of them and that doesn’t quite work either. So at the time of writing, I’m puzzled.

Another synopsis with notable learnings

Part 1

Bloom and Stephen walk the 0.8 of a mile from the cabman’s shelter to 7 Eccles Street, chatting about miscellaneous subjects. Bloom has left his front door keys in the pocket of his other trousers so is forced to climb over the low railing, lower himself into the area, force the latch of the window, enter the house, emerge 4 minutes later from the front door, and let Stephen in.

(Forgetting his keys leads Bloom to be jokily described ‘as a competent keyless citizen’ but as the commentators point out, Stephen is also keyless, having been deprived of the key to Mulligan’s Martello tower, so they are both in fact keyless. They are a keyless couple.)

He lights the hob and makes Stephen a nice cup of (Epps’s soluble) cocoa. They talk about – and Bloom thinks about – a wide range of subjects and these, in the chapter’s pedantic style, involve paragraphs of information about a very wide range of subjects including:

• the date of Ireland’s conversion to Christianity
• Bloom’s height and weight (5 foot 11, 11 stone 4 pounds)
• the precise capacity of the reservoirs and pipes which supplied Dublin with water
• the importance and beauty of water in all its forms
• Stephen is a hydrophobe i.e. he hates water: astonishingly, he hasn’t had a bath since the previous October
• the contents of Bloom’s shelves
• poems and a song Bloom wrote when young
• the two occasions they’d previously met (when Stephen was a boy)
• the coincidence that Bloom lived in the same hotel and used to take for walks in her bathchair old Mrs Riordan, the same zealous Catholic who has the fearsome argument over the Dedalus family Christmas table in ‘Portrait’
• they write down for comparison letters from Gaelic and Hebrew
• prolonged memories of his daughter Millicent (Milly) as a girl
• Bloom returns Stephen’s money which he took for safekeeping in the brothel, one pound seven shillings
• Bloom invites Stephen to stay and sleep on the sofa but Stephen declines

They both go out into the backgarden for a pee, under what is memorably described as ‘The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’, which in turn prompts a series of extravagant speculations about the universe, life on other planets etc. Then Bloom unlocks the gate in the garden wall and Stephen departs.

Part 2

Alone, Bloom:

• undresses
• notices in the mirror the spines of his books, which the text lists (23 of them)
• thinks about his dream country cottage
• and becoming a landowner and JP, as which he will administer justice firmly but fairly to a long list of hypothetical malefactors
• reviews quite a few money-making schemes he’s dreamed up but never implemented e.g. reclamation of human faeces, construction of optimum tram lines
• reviews his documents, letters from his daughter, life insurance, letters from his dead dad
• fantasises about moving out of Dublin, to scenic parts of Ireland or exotic abroad
• he imagines a reward being issued for him after he goes missing

Part 3

In bed with Molly he ponders his complicated reactions to knowing that Boylan has slept with her. The overall outcome is tenderness and he kisses her on the buttocks, which half wakes her.

Part 4

They haven’t had sex in over ten years. Which explains why he prefers to sleep upside down i.e. with his head on a pillow by her feet, his feet at the head of the bed by her head.

Is Bloom a Jew?

No. Mentioned in ‘Eumaeus’, confirmed here.

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?
He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not.

Notable facts

Out of the blue, Bloom refers to the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney Parade railway station, 14 October 1903. This must be the same Mrs Sinico who features in the Dubliners story ‘A Painful Case’.

Followed by the revelation that Stephen’s mother, Mrs Mary Dedalus (born Goulding) was buried almost a year ago, on 26 June 1903. That’s a long time for Stephen to wear mourning.

My favourite fact about Bloom remains that he has to walk on the right-hand side of anyone he’s walking with.

Naughty

Bloom is incorrigibly sexual. a) In his drawer he keeps two erotic postcards (carefully described). b) Reflecting that he has flattering encounters with several women today (Mrs Josephine Breen, Miss Callan, Gerty) he fantasises about a high class encounter:

The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in the company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.

c) When he thinks about moving out of Dublin, one way of navigating would be by the moon, but this gets sidetracked into another horny fantasy, of:

a bispherical moon, revealed in imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice of the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating female

Where ‘carnose’ means ‘fleshy, pulpy, or succulent’. Naughty Poldy!

Beautifuls

What are the most beautiful of the 309 answers? My favourites are the ones about water, moon/women and dawn.

25. What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

160. What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

175. Alone, what did Bloom feel?

The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.

Who, having stayed up all night partying, has not known that spectral feeling?

A real discrepancy

The next chapter, ‘Penelope’, starts with Molly surprised that Bloom has asked her to make him breakfast in bed the next morning. This is puzzling because in the final paragraphs right up to Bloom falling asleep, he is recorded as making no such request. Is this a hint that the catechism is not complete? You’ve heard of the unreliable narrator, a fairly frequent device in modern novels, movies, TV dramas. Are we dealing here with an unreliable catechist?

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Credit

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

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg
• Ulysses guide: section 17
• Sparks notes: section 17

Related reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca