All posts tagged M’Intosh

Ulysses by James Joyce: Cast list

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

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

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

Chapter numbers and names

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

Part 1. Telemachiad

  1. Telemachus
  2. Nestor
  3. Proteus

Part 2. Odyssey

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

Part 3. Nostos

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Cast

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

1. Telemachus: at the Martello Tower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Nestor: at Clifton Boys’ School, Dalkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Lestrygonians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Cyclops: Barney Kiernan’s pub

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Nausicaa: Sandymount Strand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. Circe

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

16. Eumaeus

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

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

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

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

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

17. Ithaca

Stephen and Bloom.

18. Penelope

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

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

Mary Driscoll (18) – the Blooms’ scullerymaid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit

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

Related links

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on February 25, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca

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

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

Part 3. Nostos

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Place in the sequence

‘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:

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?

Credit

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

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Posted by Simon on February 13, 2026

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