All posts tagged Rudy Bloom

Ulysses by Hugh Kenner (1980)

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

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

Hugh Kenner

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

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

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

Learnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modernist peers Of Joyce’s three great modernist peers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Performance Much can be made of the opening sentences:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Timetable of Stephen’s day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Bloom Jewish?

For:

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

Against:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key books about Ulysses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit

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

Joyce reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 4, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Stephen’s theories

One of the thousands of factors which make both ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and ‘Ulysses’ complicated reads is that in both of them the protagonist – the over-educated literature student Stephen Dedalus – expounds a detailed aesthetic theory. What complicates things further is that 1) the theories don’t really match the novels they’re embedded in, and 2) the two theories contradict each other. What are these theories and which, if either, reflects Joyce’s own position?

Theory 1: Aristotle and Aquinas

In Chapter 5 of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ Stephen Dedalus, now a student at the university, expounds his aesthetic theory during the course of a long walk round central Dublin with his friend Lynch. Stephen’s theory distinguishes between impure kinetic art – art which arouses emotions of desire or repulsion, movement towards or away from the artwork – and pure art which, in his opinion, creates a mood of aesthetic stasis.

In my review of ‘Portrait’ I say that I’m not particularly convinced by this because The Novel is not at all a ‘static’ art form unlike, say, a painting or a statue. The opposite: a novel is a dynamic art form because 1) as you read through it your understanding of everything – plot, characters, themes etc – is continually changing. And 2) because this dynamic process continues even after you’ve finished reading, as you reflect on the novel or maybe read reviews or essays or the Wikipedia article about it or any other random comments you happen to come across online. Or maybe 3) go on to read another book by the same author which radically influences your opinion of the first book. And so on.

Reading a novel is, in other words, a never-ending and dynamic process. Even if Stephen only meant to draw a distinction between 1) works which create a strong sense of attraction or repulsion (such as, for example, pornography at one end of the spectrum and horror stories at the other) and 2) the kind of work he has in mind which leaves an impression of clarity and detachment, with no emotions of any kind triggered – even this kind of model doesn’t really apply to novels, which people tend to either like or dislike for hundreds of highly personal reasons which could never be fully tabulated.

Theory 2: Shakespeare

So much for Stephen’s first theory as expounded in ‘A Portrait’. As to theory two, in chapter 9 (the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ chapter) of ‘Ulysses’, the very same Stephen Dedalus, now a few years older and having left university, expounds a drastically different theory, using the works of Shakespeare as his test bed.

There are some key facts to get clear about this. For a start, the Shakespeare theory isn’t abstract like theory 1. Theory 1 relies on Stephen’s clever redefinition of concepts first propounded in the aesthetic theories of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas – in other words, its comes directly out of his scholastic learning. Theory 2, on the contrary, is practical, in the sense that it arises not from the abstract aesthetic theories of ancient philosophers, but derives from Stephen’s own personal reading of the plays of Shakespeare. So straightaway the two theories inhabit a spectrum between abstract and applied.

But the content of the theories is also diametrically opposed. Theory 1 famously leads up to the conclusion that, if the ideal work of art creates a sense of stasis, then the ideal work of literature should strive to be as objective as possible, should be a work in which the personality of the author disappears. This theory posits that the highest genre of literature is drama because in drama (I’ve put in bold the really famous part of this speech, which is quoted in all discussion of the subject):

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood [in lyric poetry] and then a fluid and lambent narrative [in epic poetry], finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of aesthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

Theory 2, by contrast, is an elaborate statement of the exact opposite proposition, which is that all the key figures and all the key relationships in Shakespeare’s plays, derive from his own family, are fundamentally autobiographical. Far from being refined out of existence, Stephen now argues that Shakespeare’s personal biography is now everywhere present in his plays.

Stephen focuses on ‘Hamlet’ which he tries to persuade us is Shakespeare’s most autobiographical play. He says one driver for the play was Shakespeare’s trauma at learning about the infidelity of his (older) wife, Anne Hathaway. Many readers think of Hamlet the prince as somehow expressing Shakespeare’s own opinions about life (the powerful speeches about the meaning of life, suicide and so on) but Stephen says the real avatar of the middle-aged, successful playwright stricken with grief at the infidelity of his wife is not the young student prince, but the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father.

To put it in the rather convoluted language of the book, the idea is that Shakespeare was, like King Hamlet, cuckolded by his brother, Richard. Betrayed by his wife (Ann Hathaway/Gertrude) and betrayed by his brother (Richard Shakespeare/Claudius) Shakespeare is embodied in King Hamlet, the murdered father who returns as a ghost, and we know that Shakespeare played the role of the ghost in the first productions of the play, opposite a much younger actor playing the prince.

Far from refining himself out of existence, the author – in this theory – makes art out of the sordid mess and messy emotions of his own life.

Adding further evidence to the betrayal theme, in a passage about uncles, Stephen name-checks Shakespeare’s brothers Richard and Edmund, describes his assumed rivalry with them, and then goes on to point out how many wicked uncles (and wicked Richards and Edmunds) there are in his plays, notably Richard III and scheming Edmund in King Lear. Surely more evidence for his adulterous betrayal theory?

Having established his approach using ‘Hamlet’, Stephen goes on to talk about other Shakespeare plays, namely the so-called Romances written at the end of his career, which all feature the reconciliation of a father with his daughter (Prospero and Miranda (The Tempest), Leontes and Perdita (The Winter’s Tale), Pericles and Marina (Pericles). There must, Stephen insists, also be a biographical basis to this trope in Shakespeare, so long away in London, being reconciled with his alienated daughter (or grand-daughter?).

Disappointment

I remember being bitterly disappointed when I read this passage as a student. I was hoping one genius would have dazzling insights into another genius but it turns out Joyce had nothing of the sort. The idea that a writer uses his own experiences of his own family relationships in his works is so obvious as to be bathetic.

Far from giving new and unexpected insight into the creative process, the chapter suggests that all literature is autobiographical, is a projection of the artist’s (fractured) self and that the creator (Shakespeare / Joyce) is always present in his creations (Hamlet / Stephen-Bloom). This is not only not very interesting but, taken at face value, it diminishes both Shakespeare and Joyce.

In a dramatic context

To try and read Stephen’s presentation as a lecture or essay is to be disappointed so maybe a more profitable way to think about it is as part of the dramatic content of the novel. In other words, it is not interesting for what it tells us about Shakespeare (next to nothing, apart from a few details Stephen throws into his descriptions, for example of William’s daily walk to work along the Thames to the Globe theatre) so much as for 1) what it tells us about Stephen the fictional character, 2) the light it sheds on the themes of ‘Ulysses’, and 3) the broader artistic world of the day.

Fathers and sons

1. Regarding what the theory tells us about Stephen the fictional character, this is easy. It reveals that Stephen is obsessed with father-son relations, circling round and round the troubled relationship between Hamlet and his dead father, and the sad experience of Shakespeare and his dead son, Hamnet (who died aged 11 in 1596, as depicted in the current movie of the subject). Grandfathers, fathers and sons.

2. And this itself is, of course, entirely fitting in a novel which strongly features themes of fathers and sons: Stephen is anxious throughout the book that, instead of becoming the Great Writer he wants to be, he might instead be turning into a witty, garrulous drinker and failure like his father, Simon.

3. The novel also, of course, features Leopold Bloom who throughout Bloomsday repeatedly thinks about his own son, Rudy, who died when he was just 11 days old (Rudy 11 days, Hamnet 11 years – there are always patterns in Joyce). Bloom also resurrects his own father, Rudolf Virág, in one of the many ‘hallucinations’ in the delirious ‘Circe’ chapter.

4. And, of course, The Odyssey which ‘Ulysses’ is to some extent ‘based on’ (or aligned with or riffs off), is in part a poem about a young son (Telemachus) looking for his long-lost father (Odysseus).

5. Which is itself (sort of) echoed in the overall narrative arc whereby, in the final chapters of the book, young Stephen encounters Bloom in the role of father figure, and Bloom for a while takes a fatherly concern for Stephen (although, as is well known, the analogy doesn’t really hold because Stephen isn’t Bloom’s son and so, far from forging some kind of father and son relationship, Stephen in the end stumbles off into the night probably never to see Bloom again).

In other words, Stephen’s elaborate and contrived theory of Shakespeare not only need not be ‘true’ about Shakespeare, but doesn’t even need to be believable, because it’s not a public lecture or critical essay, it’s the speech of a character in a novel, and so only needs to 1) reflect the personality of the character (as it does) and 2) reflect or refer to some of the wider issues raised in the novel (as it does).

Performance, first aspect

Two more things undermine Stephen’s Shakespeare presentation as a theory. Most obviously, it is a performance. Stephen has arrived at Dublin’s National Library, in the head librarian’s office where are assembled some heavy hitters from the Dublin literary scene, the key figure being the poet A.E. (George Russell), an exponent of mysticism, Platonism, and emotive Irish nationalism. Also in the room are Mr Best (librarian, ‘tall, young, mild, light’) and John Eglinton (a pseudonym for real-life essayist William Kirkpatrick Magee, a literary figure and librarian).

These men know Stephen’s father, Simon Dedalus, and have heard tell of, but never yet met, his super-clever son (also promoted, among others, by his buddy Malachi Mulligan, as Eglinton attests: ‘—I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us…’).

And so the whole situation is by way of Stephen’s opportunity to impress (some of) his elders and betters from the (small) Dublin literary scene. This situation explains why Stephen is so nervous, why he rambles on, and why he overstates and muddles his case (as my rather muddled summary of it indicates) and so is not really believable. It is a dramatic situation in which our hero has to continually gee himself up and keep at it:

Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted, shone.

And, as his theory unfurls with increasing improbability, he comes to doubt it himself:

What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

A clash of worldviews

One of the reasons for his nervousness is because Stephen isn’t just confronting eminent figures but eminent figures with a completely opposed aesthetic worldview. It is easy to forget that the whole episode is set in a particular time and place, namely Dublin 1904. Now as I’ve emphasised previously, this means it is describing a society, culture and characters which are in almost every aspect still late Victorian. And one of these aspects is that many of the leading literary figures of the time were still in thrall to fin-de-siecle aestheticism, art for arts sake, and continental Symbolism, all flavoured with the high-minded nobility of the Celtic Revival.

Which means that buried beneath the maze of banter and learnèd references which all the characters in this scene throw around, there is a pretty straightforward clash going on, between the old world of mazy Celtic twilights and high aesthetic values, and Stephen’s aggressively rude insistence on the thumpingly material facts of life, on eating, drinking, peeing, pooing, sex and masturbation.

The elder statesman and poet A.E. represents the school which believes art to be intensely spiritual and to inhabit a realm of neo-platonic forms and perfections. For him and his ilk art must be uplifting and inspiring to take us out of the deadening quotidian world and raise us to the spiritual uplands. In this view, Shakespeare is a genius and genius has access to insights and worlds deprived us ordinary mortals. A.E. says:

—Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato’s world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

(Gustave Moreau, here, being used as the epitome of Symbolist painting.)

From my summary, above, you can see how Stephen (and by implication his creator) is against all this. For Stephen great art begins not in a realm of ‘formless spiritual essences’ but in the muck and mess of human existence. This is why Joyce venerated the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and wrote a long critical essay about his plays, even writing the man himself a fan letter. It’s because Ibsen represented a complete departure from late-romanticism with its fairies and legends, and instead portrayed messy real modern life, complicated relationships driven by his characters’ fierce internal psychological battles.

But Stephen goes further than this. Ibsen never portrayed someone having a poo or masturbating or farting or having a pee in the garden (all of which happen in ‘Ulysses’). In his own way, Ibsen still respected Victorian manners and conventions. Not so Joyce. Along with all the other achievements of ‘Ulysses’, it brought the crudest physical bodily activities within the realm of artistic discourse. The book sets out to cover all of human life and so how could he leave out the basics?

Ezra Pound wasn’t wrong to see ‘Ulysses’ as a continuation of the meticulous realism of Flaubert, the taking of that kind of realism and accuracy to the limit and then beyond, exploding the bounds of the late-nineteenth century realist novel and going on to invent something completely new.

Back to the theory: hopefully you can now see that it is less valuable as an interpretation of Shakespeare (as which, it is pretty worthless) than as a dramatisation of Stephen (and Joyce’s) fierce punk opposition to the nose-holding high-mindedness of the older, Victorian generation.

Performance, second aspect

OK, so when Stephen presents his theory, he is doing it to not just a sceptical older generation but a generation with fundamentally different ideas about art than he holds and who he is, to some extent, baiting with his transgressive ideas.

But then something else happens to make it even more complicated. This is the arrival half way through Stephen’s nervous presentation of his frenemy and contemporary, the young wit Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan, who we saw teasing and antagonising Stephen in the very first scene in the opening chapter.

Half way through Stephen’s presentation shallow Buck arrives in the room and joins in the chorus of witty banter which accompanies every one of Stephen’s propositions, often with barely concealed mockery, for example when he gives his own not inaccurate parody of Stephen’s idea:

—It is quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

In this respect the whole thing, although radically different in content, echoes in structure the presentation of theory 1 in ‘Portrait’. In that book, although Stephen’s theory is often quoted out of context as a standalone statement, it is actually delivered in a dynamic context, expounded during a long walk with a fellow student Lynch, who continually intervenes with deflating mockery of Stephen’s highfalutin theories.

Same here, only instead of just one set of interlocutors Stephen was already struggling to cope with – AE, Best, Eglinton, the occasional interventions of the chief librarian who pops in and out of the room – the arrival of Mulligan adds a whole new layer of mockery and chaffing to the mix.

So setting aside the radical dissimilarities of content, both theories have this in common, that they are delivered in the course of embattled dialogue with others.

Scylla and Charybdis

I’m aware I haven’t presented all these ideas in a perfect order. It’s quite difficult to do so when everything in the text is connected to everything else. But one last point. As I’ve reread it I’ve come to realise that the A.E. and John Eglinton’s traditional romantic neo-platonic theory is so clearly indicated or defended in its own right, that the chapter in effect contains not one but two aesthetic theories And when you come to think about it, this maybe sheds light on the Homeric parallel.

Scylla and Charybdis – who Joyce’s schemas tell us preside over this chapter – are famous sea monsters from Greek mythology, who lived on opposite sides of the narrow Strait of Messina. Scylla was a six-headed monster living on a cliff, who snatched sailors from passing ships, while Charybdis was a massive whirlpool that swallowed ships whole. Which is why they came to be used as a proverb symbolizing an inescapable dilemma, where avoiding one peril means falling victim to the other.

So: are these two aesthetic theories, the extreme of spiritual neoplatonism facing off against a theory of authorial autobiography, are these the Scylla and Charybdis of the title? In the Homer story, Odysseus’s ship has to sail a perfect middle course between the two perils. Does this suggest that Joyce does not stand behind Stephen’s theory, but somewhere between the two positions?

We know that Stephen has rejected his schoolboy theory of high aesthetic stasis and gone right over to the other end of the spectrum, deliberately shocking his fusty listeners with his insistence on the origins of Shakespeare’s works in the messy biographical details of sex and infidelity, jealousy and death.

But maybe this theory, theory 2, is also only dramatically appropriate to the character of Stephen Dedalus and didn’t represent Joyce’s own final view.

This interpretation is supported when, at the conclusion of his presentation, one of the auditors, John Eglinton, asks Stephen whether he believes his own theory and Stephen immediately (and with uncharacteristically blunt clarity) says No.

—You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?
—No, Stephen said promptly.

(The French triangle is Eglinton’s way of saying Stephen’s theory reduces the genesis of one of the masterpieces of European literature, ‘Hamlet’, to the author’s involvement in a sordid little affair of adultery and his wife’s infidelity, a ‘French triangle’.)

But the point of the exchange is obviously Stephen’s immediate ‘No’. Now on one level this reflects the witty tone of banter in which the whole thing takes place, in which everyone is hyper-aware of all the literary references they’re making, distorting and parodying for comic purposes, in which everyone is showing off. To spend an hour delivering a convoluted theory and then reply so bluntly that he doesn’t even believe it himself, is a stylish and witty manoeuvre – its Wildean brashness makes Stephen more worthy to be a member of this caste of witty litterateurs than the original theory.

But it also gestures towards the solution of the puzzle. When faced with a rock and a hard place the solution is neither. Or both. Or parts of both. Maybe the theory is included not just to further delineate Stephen’s character, or because Joyce identifies with it, but because it requires the worldview it’s opposing. Stephen can only express his debunking theory if he has something to debunk and so he needs A.E. and Eglinton and (appearing half-way through, Mulligan) to argue back or mock his theories because the real world is made out of precisely such conflicts and antitheses.

Maybe the point isn’t Stephen’s first theory or second theory or A.E.s platonic theory but a dynamic interplay between all three.

A ghostly answer

In his 1982 book about ‘Ulysses’, Canadian critic Hugh Kenner suggests a typically playful solution. Maybe Joyce’s aesthetic approach can be likened to the figure of Hamlet’s ghost who wanders through Stephen’s exposition of the play, as he, indeed, wafts in and out of the Shakespeare play itself. Like old King Hamlet’s ghost, maybe Joyce’s own autobiography moves in and out of the text, putting in appearances, disappearing but, like the ghost, dominating the entire action even in its absence. Which makes theory 2, instead of a rejection of theory 1 whereby the artist:

remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails

More like a subtle extension of it. Maybe the ghost author can drift in and out of the narrative at whim, trailing elements of autobiography like a ghostly cloak, at moments coming powerfully into focus, at others disappearing altogether and so allowing Joyce to believe in both his theories and neither. After all, as Richard Ellmann jokes in his 1972 book, ‘Ulysses on the Liffey’:

Whenever confronted by a choice between two possible things to include, Joyce chose both. (p.34)

So maybe that’s what he’s craftily doing here.

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 20, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope

of course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do
(Molly Bloom thinking her husband, Leopold, should count his blessings)

he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part
(Molly angry at Bloom’s weird habit of kissing her bottom)

Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year
(Molly’s friskiness)

what else were we given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young still can I
(Molly defends her natural urges)

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf
(Molly compares a woman’s lovely boobs with a man’s ugly bits)

wherever you be let your wind go free
(Molly celebrates the joys of farting)

I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are
(Molly’s body positivity)

God send him sense and me more money
(dismissing a boring old bishop she once heard deliver a moralising sermon, and sounding very like her irreverent namesake, Moll Flanders)

Lord the cracked things come into my head sometimes

‘Penelope’ is the 18th and final chapter of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’. Here’s a reminder of the complete chapter numbers and names. (Note that the names given here are not printed in the published book, they were assigned in guidance and schemas which Joyce sent to supporters and have been used by commentators ever since; but you won’t find them in any published or online edition):

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

As you can see, ‘Penelope’ is not only the final chapter but the third chapter of the third part of the novel, which is generally called ‘Nostos’, Greek for ‘The Return’, Joyce’s own name for it.

The preceding two chapters tell how (in ‘Circe’) middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom helped over-educated, drunk and depressed young Stephen Dedalus get away from Dublin’s red light district where he’d been involved in a fight with a soldier. In ‘Eumaeus’ Bloom helps Stephen to an all-night café down by the docks where he tries to restore him with a cup of (disgusting) coffee and a hot roll. In ‘Ithaca’ the pair leave the café and walk to Bloom’s home at 7 Eccles Street.

Here Bloom lets them in, makes Stephen a nice cup of cocoa and they talk about many things. Bloom offers to make up a bed on the sofa for Stephen and suggests all kinds of plans – that he could move in as a lodger and give his wife, Molly, Italian lessons, and maybe even join her as a professional singer in the music troupe Bloom fantasises about setting up and managing. But Stephen turns these offers down and, after the pair have gone for a pee in Bloom’s back garden, Bloom opens the garden gate and Bloom stumbles off into the night never to be heard of again.

Bloom re-enters his house, locks up, gets undressed interspersed with rummaging about in his drawers, looking at mementoes of his absent daughter and dead father, thinking about all kinds of subjects, not least extended fantasies about moving to a delightful cottage in the country. Then he finally gets into bed and thinks about the Central Event in the book which is that while he’s been out walking the streets of Dublin, his bosomy wife, Molly, stayed at home and was visited by the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, who had sex with her.

All day long Bloom has been aware of their tryst, set for 4pm, so that he’s spent the book in a kind of PTSD hyper-self-aware state (which partly explains the super stream-of-consciousness style of the novel). But during the course of his ponderings, Bloom gets over it. He registers his own mixed emotions of jealousy and anger but circles, in the end, round to equanimity and, finally, tenderness. And in this sleep forgiving mood, he kisses Molly on her bare bottom.

Unfortunately, this has the effect of waking her up from her sleep. Now half awake, Molly quizzes her husband about where he’s been and he proceeds to tell her a pack of lies, saying he spent the evening at the theatre then went on to a restaurant for supper where a fellow diner, Stephen, injured himself performing a gymnastic feat and so he brought him home, here, to Eccles Street, to patch him up, and that’s why he’s come to bed late. And having recited this pack of lies which omits everything important which happened during the day and replaces it with a set of fabrications, Bloom falls asleep and hands the novel’s narrative over to his wife. And it’s here that the final chapter, ‘Penelope’, consisting of Molly Bloom’s long monologue, begins.

First a few more facts, then we’ll look in detail at Molly’s chapter.

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 and the commentators tell me this marks 2.30 am. So assuming it takes Bloom about half an hour to lock up, get undressed, potter about and finally get into bed, ‘Penelope’ kicks off maybe around 3am in the morning.

Homeric parallel

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

In The Odyssey, Penelope is the wife of Odysseus who has waited 20 long years for her husband’s return, which we, the readers, know has been comprised of the ten years of the war itself, and then the ten years of Odysseus’s wanderings round the Mediterranean. During the last few years she has been fending off the horde of ‘suitors’ who have descended like locusts on her palace and are eating her out of house and home while they vie for her hand in remarriage, and so ownership of Odysseus’s kingdom of Ithaca.

Now the key point is that Penelope is every bit as cunning as her husband Odysseus, who is himself described as being the most cunning and many-minded of the Greek heroes. And so in her husband’s absence, Penelope has devised a series of strategies to put off the suitors. The most famous of these is that she tells them she must weave a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father, Laertes, and cannot listen to their suits until she’s finished. For three long years she dutifully weaves the shroud during the day but then carefully unpicks it during the night, so that the task is never finished. Clever, eh?

Molly, her modern reincarnation in the novel, shares many of Penelope’s traits. 1) For a start she represents the final aspect of Bloom’s coming home, his nostos or return. Sure he arrived at his actual house in the previous chapter, but in a sense it’s only climbing into bed and kissing her that marks the completion of his odyssey and his final arrival Home.

2) As to the suitors, Odysseus arrives back at his palace but still has to dispel the suitors and take possession, but there no hordes of suitors in the ‘Ulysses’ version. There was one (Blazes Boylan) but he’s long gone. Instead Bloom arrives home at his house but needs, in some subtle psychological sense, to retake ownership by a) touching all his precious possessions and b) working through in his mind his responses to Molly’s infidelity to him – both processes which are itemised in ‘Ithaca’.

3) Where Molly most resembles Penelope is in her own cleverness, in being every bit as smart as her husband. Because the real point of this chapter is that at long last we get to hear her side of the story and it is significantly, and at all points, different from her husband’s.

Because the ‘Penelope’ chapter consists of a long, long interior monologue by Molly in which she passes in a chaotic review over all the key moments in her life, before and after her marriage to Bloom, mentioning and describing her parents, her girlhood in Gibraltar, incidents from her career, the umpteen times she’s been propositioned or molested or flirted with – but above all, hundreds of comments about Bloom’s character and habits which show him in a completely different light from the entire preceding narrative.

It does a number of things, this final chapter. It rounds off the whole novel by bringing Bloom’s odyssey to a conclusion. But it also gives the woman’s version of a world up to now dominated by men and men’s opinions. More specifically, it gives a completely different portrait of Bloom than we’ve hitherto had, portrayed in detail by someone who knows him intimately (really intimately) and whose version is often at drastic odds with what we’ve learned so far.

First a brief reminder of the key facts of Molly’s biography, then I’ll go through the monologue in detail.

Molly key facts

  • current name Marion ‘Molly’ Bloom
  • born Marion Tweedy, daughter of Major Brian Tweedy, of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers
  • Molly was born and raised in Gibraltar because that’s where Major Tweedy’s regiment was stationed
  • age 33
  • earns money as a soprano singer and is fairly well known around Dublin
  • been married for 15 years to Leopold Bloom
  • two children: a daughter, Milly, who just turned 15 yesterday, and a son, Rudy, who died in infancy, aged 11 days, a decade ago, since when the couple haven’t had sex

Stream-of-consciousness

The latter 5 or 6 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ differ from the first ten or so in each being dominated by one big formatting idea. Thus ‘Nausicaa’ is written in the style of a lady’s romantic novel and ‘Circe is in the form of a play. Molly’s chapter is another case in point: it is the book’s purest example of the invention (often attributed to Joyce) of the stream-of-consciousness. It’s 24,000 words long, filling 40 to 50 pages of the book versions and yet it contains of just 8 unpunctuated sections i.e the words flow seamlessly together with no punctuation at all for thousands and thousands of words. The final section alone contains 3,680 words and no punctuation.

Why the initial style is hard

Surprisingly, though, it isn’t as hard to make sense of as the densest of the ‘initial style’. Brainy young Stephen Dedalus’s thoughts in ‘Proteus’ 1) contain loads of learned references, including 2) quotes from theology and literature, 3) often in foreign languages and 4) the references are often cut off halfway through, clipped and abbreviated, sometimes down to just one word, and all chopped up by continuous full stops into tight little fragments.

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

It’s the combination of these four elements which makes the ‘initial style’, and Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness in particular, often so impenetrable.

Why Molly’s style is much easier

By contrast, all these challenging elements are missing in Molly’s thoughts. There are no fancy-ancy quotes or foreign languages or tight truncations; instead, a soothing flow of words:

theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

In one of the book’s many commentaries I came across the highly revealing fact that Joyce originally wrote the chapter out as traditional prose and then went back and took all the punctuation out. Once you know that, you can kind of feel your way towards the missing stops. Maybe ‘full stop’ is being slightly too dogmatic, but you can feel the ghost of the missing punctuation. In other words, the prose isn’t really endlessly flowing, it’s actually made up – once you get a feel for it – from relatively traditional units. So the excerpt above could be loosely punctuated thus:

they’re all so different – Boylan talking about the shape of my foot – he noticed at once, even before he was introduced – when I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen, I was waggling my foot – we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter – I saw him looking with his two old maids of sisters when I stood up

Not that difficult after all, is it? In fact, surprisingly easy. Obviously there are plenty of passages which aren’t quite as easy to silently punctuate into traditional prose as this one, but a lot are, and once you get used to reading it while looking for these sentence-like units, you develop the knack for recognising them and so extracting the sense, relatively quickly.

While reading ‘Ulysses’ I came across the RTE radio dramatisation of the novel which was made for the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982. You can listen to each individual chapter as a separate track on Spotify.

Listening to this radio production of ‘Penelope’, what you almost immediately realise is the obvious fact that, if you’re going to read this text (or indeed anything) out loud, you regularly have to stop for breath. And any sensible reader will tend to stop for breath at the natural breaks of sense, at the end of cadences or phrases. So listening to someone read out Molly Bloom’s soliloquy really brings out the ghostly punctuation which, as I’ve suggested, in practice still exists in the text. Reading it out loud tends to naturally reintroduce the invisible punctuation.

In addition, this (marvellous) reading also brings out the changes of tone and expression which are continually occurring throughout the text, as appropriate for different phrases, and this, too, helps to chop up what at first seemed like page after page of solid text, into what are in reality much more manageable, understandable phrases.

The ‘Eternal Feminine’

As to the reason for this endless flow – in the schematic charts and diagrams which Joyce made about the book, he said ‘Penelope’ took the sign ∞ representing infinity, supposedly because she represents the Eternal Feminine.

Personally, I shy away from this kind of talk because discussing the ‘nature of woman’, ‘female psychology’ and so on was problematic and controversial at the time, and has only become more mired in four generations of feminist theory, not to mention the worldwide swamp of social media.

If you do a quick Google search and read any articles or commentary about Molly and her monologue you will quickly discover how the entire subject is infested by experts who cite the received ideas of our age, that Molly is a ‘strong independent women’ who ‘expresses her own sexuality’ in ‘defiance of the patriarchy’ and countless other clichés. You can find thousands of feminist interpretations at the click of a button.

What I noticed in the two commentaries I’ve tended to have open beside me, is that because they both go on at length about feminism, sexism, the patriarchy and so on, they completely ignore many other aspects and details which are just as important.

Therefore in my summary I will try to stick closely to what the words actually say and not wander off into sweeping generalisations about The Female Mind, Female Sexuality, the Patriarchy and all the other high-level issues which so many commentators instantly jump to. Their approach takes us away from the words on the page, which are not only funny and surprising but are deliberately designed to 1) recap information about quite a few characters we’ve met previously in the book and 2) prompt us to rethink everything we thought we knew about her husband, Leopold.

Yes yes

In that spirit, looking at the actual words on the page, there’s an obvious aspect of the concept of the infinite, which is that this big chapter starts with the word ‘yes’ and ends with the word ‘yes’. This is an obvious manoeuvre by Joyce to bring out the Eternity theme.

Pondering this I conceived a Kafkaesque nightmare of a hypothetical reader who finds themselves somehow condemned to read the chapter forever, because as soon as they read the final ‘yes’ they are transported back to the first ‘yes’ and so spend the rest of their lives stuck inside an endless loop of Molliness.

Section lengths

Precise definitions of the section lengths vary slightly on whether you’re referring to the 1922, 1961 or Gabler (1984) edition. I used an online word counter to count the words in each section of the Planet Gutenberg online edition.

Section 1: 3,746 words (opens with ‘Yes because he never did…’)

Section 2: 4,404 words (opens with ‘theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot…’ and makes up what is supposedly the longest sentence in literature)

Section 3: 921 words (opens with ‘yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty…’)

Section 4: 2,208 words (opens with ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’)

Section 5: 2,378 words (opens with ‘Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning…’)

Section 6: 3,619 words (opens with ‘that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free…’)

Section 7: 3,230 words (opens with ‘who knows is there anything the matter with my insides…’)

Section 8: 3,680 words (opens with ‘no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no nothing in his nature…’)

Summary

As explained, I am going to avoid wading into the many high-level feminist debates raised by the soliloquy (there’s no shortage of people doing that) and instead try to focus on the exact words and what they tell us.

Section 1 (3,746 words)

Molly is surprised that Bloom has asked her to make him breakfast in bed tomorrow morning. This request doesn’t occur in ‘Ithaca’ so is a puzzle.

Quickly she moves on to a sharp assessment of one of the many other people who appear in the monologue, Mrs Riordan who we met as Dante, nanny to young Stephen Dedalus in ‘Portrait’. In a surprising coincidence we discover she lived as an old lady in the same hotel as Molly and Bloom and the latter used to take her for excursions in her bathchair. I find this one of the most striking things in the entire monologue.

But Molly is cross because Dante never left them any money in her will when she died. Also, she was very moralistic, down on bathsuits etc so Molly is glad she’s not like that.

She likes Bloom for his kindness that way, mind you he’s useless when he’s ill, and so are men generally, ‘weak and puling’, compared to women who have to hide it all. Remembering Bloom being in hospital after he sprained his ankle at a party, she does the first of many shrewish comments about other women using their wiles to get close to Poldy, in this case Miss Stack buying him flowers to get into his bedroom, the implication she had a fancy for him or they even had sex (?).

She suspects he must have had an orgasm during the day because he asked for breakfast i.e. it gives him an appetite. But she’s equally sure it’s not an affair, it’s not ‘love’, so speculates it might be with one of the prostitutes from nighttown, which leads her on to think about all the little bitches Bloom’s picked up on the sly, ‘if they only knew him as well as I do’. She knows that’s why she kissed his bottom, it’s a tell-tale sign and remembers the smell of other women on his clothes.

Just recently she came into a room where he was writing which he hurriedly covered up with blotting paper, poor fool (we know it was probably a letter to his penpal lover Martha Clifford though Molly doesn’t know her name).

She hated it when he had a pash for their scullerymaid, Mary Driscoll, the pair of them flirting under her nose (we know about Mary because she appeared among the many accusers in Bloom’s dream trial in ‘Circe’) and was outraged when Bloom suggested Mary eat Christmas dinner with them, and driven to distraction by her queening round the place (singing in the WC) until she confronted Bloom with an ultimatum, her or me, he chose her and so she gave Mary her week’s notice.

She remembers the last time Bloom came on her bottom, on an evening when they’d gone for a walk with Blazes Boylan and the latter had squeezed her hand. She imagines seducing some young boy, then remembers Bloom’s insistent questioning of who is she thinking about.

She seems to go on and think that now she’s had sex with Boylan, the first time is over, now it will become more routine. She wonders why you can’t just get people to kiss and hug you, she loves kissing.

I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you

Then thinks about having to go to confession, the silly euphemisms the priest uses, then that she was a bit attracted to the priest with his bullneck.

Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope

Thinking back to her afternoon sex with Boylan, she wonders if he was satisfied with her, she didn’t like him slapping her on the bottom:

I laughed Im not a horse or an ass

A flower he was wearing reminds her of a funny tasting drink she associates with an American she knew, can’t figure out if he slept with her. She associates it with a thunderstorm which put the fear of God into her, thinks about the end of the world, what could you do except go to church and pray, which reminds her that Poldy isn’t religious, refuses to go to church, says there is no soul, just grey matter inside us. Which circles back to memories of sex with Boylan that afternoon:

he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst… no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up…

With a little recrimination to God:

whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye

But then a surprising debunkment of Boylan:

still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me

Surely the second he refers to Bloom (‘the last time’) since we thought Boylan had only done it once. Interesting to note she’s describing coitus interruptus in the first part. Then a complaint about condoms (?):

nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure

Thoughts of contraception lead to the opposite, of large families like Mina Purefoy‘s whose husband keeps getting her pregnant so she lives in a swarm of children. She wonders about having a child by Boylan but then considers that Poldy has more spunk in him.

Then she remembers coming across him flirting with Josie Powell, the unmarried name of Josie Breen, who Bloom had a thing with, at a dance, which Bloom tried to justify then led to a stand-up row about politics, something about Jesus being a carpenter and the first socialist. But generally how she managed the rivalry with Josie, how she knew Bloom liked her better. But still she ponders how she would win Bloom back is he resumed his passion for Josie, in ‘his plabbery kind of a manner’. How she’d revive him by little touches, getting him to fold down her collar, whereas she’d go and confront Josie directly.

Remembers the night Bloom almost proposed when she was in the kitchen making a potato cake, and how Josie was always embracing her, Molly, in front of Bloom, as if it was Bloom, one among many women who flirted with him. Molly used to tease Josie with how close she was to Bloom, then after they got married she stopped coming round.

She wonders what life is like for her now, with her mad husband, Breen. Last time they met, Josie told her he sometimes gets into bed with his muddy boots on. At least Poldy always wipes his feet on the mat, always blacks his own boots, always takes off his hat when he comes up in the street. Whereas Breen is mad about this postcard he got with U.P. on it.

No she’d rather die than marry another man, mind you Bloom is lucky to have her: ‘hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do’, and thinking of women driven to distraction by their husbands she thinks of Mrs Maybrick who poisoned her husband with white arsenic for love of another man. She was hanged.

Commentary: although there’s a fair amount about Bloom and Boyland, and their penises and spunk, in fact the section can be seen as Molly comparing herself with seven other women, with their different beliefs, moral values, and experiences of love and marriage. Knowing Joyce I imagine with a bit of effort you could work each of them up into symbolising different types or categories.

Section 2 (4,404 words)

its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover

She blames Bloom for having some new fad every week. She left her suede gloves behind in the toilet at the DBC Dame Street, Poldy suggested offering a reward. Boyle likes her feet, likes her crossing them, he liked watching her take off her stockings. But this segues into Bloom one time asked her to walk in the horses’ dung in the street, ‘of course hes not natural like the rest of the world’.

She remembers him saying she’d beat Katty Lanner (a real-life dancer). The tenor Bartell DArcy who kissed her in church, he liked her low notes. She thinks she’ll tell Bloom about it one day and show him the place where they ‘did it’ – surely she means had sex.

In particular Bloom ‘hes mad on the subject of drawers’, and stares at young girls on bicycles with their skirts blowing up to show their knickers as they ride. The time at a fair when a woman was standing against the sun and he stared even though he was with her and Milly. The hypocrisy of men who can go and get anything they like from anything in a skirt but insist on interrogating them (women) about where they’ve been and with who etc. ‘drawers drawers the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll to carry about in his waistcoat pocket’ (which of course links up with the subject of the ‘Nausicaa’ chapter where Bloom gets his rocks off watching Gerty show him her drawers).

The time they were in the rain and he begged her to lift her skirt a little and she touched his trousers ‘the way I used to Gardner’.

Bloom was always canny not like ‘that other fool Henny Doyle he was always breaking or tearing something in the charades’. Bloom sent her 8 poppies. But he could never embrace well ‘like Gardner‘. She hopes Boylan will come round again, on Monday, same time, 4pm.

She hates people calling at random times like the time Professor Goodwin found her flushed from cooking stew. We learn that Boylan sent ahead a gift of port and peaches (which we saw him buying in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop in ‘Wandering Rocks’.

She’s scheduled to go to Belfast with Boylan the following week; lucky Bloom is to go to Ennis to commemorate his father’s death, would be tricky being in rooms next to each other; if Bloom had sex with her, Boylan would know.

She remembers the time Bloom carried bowls of soup from the dining car along a moving train spilling them everywhere, and the steward locked them in their compartment in revenge. She hopes Boylan books first class tickets. Trains remind her of the nice workman who got her and Bloom their own compartment in the train for their outing to Howth.

She remembers patriotic concerts she did in support of the Boer War where she sang the Rudyard Kipling poem The Absent-Minded Beggar. This song is mentioned numerous times in Bloom’s thoughts earlier in the book. Funnily enough I devoted a blog post to it when I had my Kipling phase. She wore a brooch for Lord Roberts and had a map of the war. Which leads her to reminisce about ‘Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt’ who fought in the war and apparently died there of enteric fever.

he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty

She likes the army, after all she’s an army brat, her father was a major, so:

I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely… the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela

Interchangeable men I’ll note here where I’ve noticed it, that Joyce deliberately blends all the men in her life together under the one pronoun ‘he’. In consecutive phrases ‘he’ can refer to Bloom or Boylan or his or her father or various others. The implication (apart from Molly being dreamily half-awake) is that all men are the same. At a deeper level, maybe the implication is that all people are the same, that our identities are only skin deep, like name labels stuck on our chests at a conference which soon peel off.

She notes how Boylan’s father made money selling horses to the army and hopes he’ll buy her a nice present when they go to Belfast ‘well he could buy me a nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him’ i.e. sex. She’d love to go shopping with him. She’ll have to take her wedding ring off or risk being reported to the police (married woman with unmarried man) although:

O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care

She remembers that Boylan is heavy, hairy too, would be more convenient to have sex doggy position:

always having to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do

She remembers Boylan was beautifully dressed but for the first ten minutes in a foul temper because he’d just lost £20 on the Gold Cup horse race which reverberates through the novel. He got the tip from Lenehan and that reminds Molly of sitting in a coach next to Lenehan coming back from the Glencree dinner (in ‘Wandering Rocks’ Lenehan remembers this journey, pressed up against Molly so he could feel the outline of her fine breasts: ‘His hands moulded ample curves of air’, which gave him an erection). Unsurprisingly she thinks Lenehan is a creep. At that social do she was aware of the Lord Mayor staring at her with his dirty eyes. Molly’s fate is to be eyed up and chatted up wherever she goes.

She wishes she had cutlery as fine as the ones at that dinner and reflects she could have stolen a few by slipping them into her muff. Shopping: she wants two new chemises and a kidfitting corselet as advertised in The Gentlewoman. Which makes her reflect she’s getting a bit tubby, needs to lay off the stout at lunchtime. Mind you, the poor quality of the booze they get from Larry O’Rourke.

She’s got one pair of garters Bloom bought her, and he got her some lovely face cream which made skin ‘like new’, she asked him to buy a new bottle (which we saw him do right at the start of his part of the narrative). She only has 3 sets of clothes and one at the cleaners.

She feels sorry for herself wearing such shabby outfits and remembers she’ll be 33 this September i.e. 32 now. Mind you take Mrs Galbraith, older than her and a fine looking woman though on the turn. She remembers watching Kitty O’Shea brush her hair in the house opposite in Grantham Street. (This peripheral contact with Kitty parallels Bloom’s brief encounter with Charles Stewart Parnell, recovering his hat after it was knocked off in a riot.)

In another parallel her thoughts drift to Lily Langtry, the Jersey Lily, widely known to be having an affair with the Prince of Wales. So these two women mirror Molly in having extra-marital affairs: one with the leader of the nationalist Irish, one with the future King of England.

In a real digression she remembers Bloom buying a volume of Rabelais for her, and her not getting on with its absurdity and obscenity. (We know from ‘Ithaca’ that Bloom thinks he can educate Molly by leaving good books around.)

Back to the Prince of Wales, she knows he visited Gibraltar the year she was born, planted some tree. Back to Bloom and she wishes he’d change job ‘and go into an office or something where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count the money all the day’, instead he mooches round the house under her feet all the time.

Molly remembers going to Mr Cuffe to plead for Bloom’s job back after he was fired; Cuffe stared at her breasts (as more or less all the men seem to) and politely refused. What she remembers more is the shabby dress she had to make the visit in.

Bloom thinks he knows about women’s clothes but hasn’t got a clue and she remembers some terrible hats he thought she looked great in. Just like he’s rubbish at cooking, ‘mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it’.

Section 3 (921 words)

Molly ponders her breasts, thinking maybe Boylan made them firmer by sucking them, which leads onto the breasts on the grand statues of naked women you see everywhere, the woman often hiding one breast behind her hand. Mind you not as silly as men’s bits:

compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf

And she remembers various men who have exposed themselves to her:

  • that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market
  • that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side
  • theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station

She remembers popping into a men’s toilet in the freezing winter of 1893 coming back from a party and teasingly thinks ‘pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see me squatting in the mens place’.

Of men’s penises she thinks: ‘I tried to draw a picture of it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang’.

She remembers Bloom encouraging her to let herself be photographed nude when he lost his job to earn some money, which reminds her of the painting of a naked nymph they have above their bed, or the erotic photos he keeps hidden in his drawer (catalogued in ‘Eumaeus’).

She remembers him trying to explain the word metempsychosis which had cropped up in a book right at the start of Bloom’s narrative: ‘he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand’ and then he went and burned the bloody pan frying his kidney this morning. Sounds like any wife complaining about any husband.

Then she switches men and complains about Boylan biting her nipple till she screamed: ‘arent they fearful trying to hurt you’. She remembers having swollen breasts full of milk when Milly was born and Bloom (typically) saying she could rent herself out as a wetnurse. She remembers ‘ that delicate looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose’ nearly catching her washing naked through the window.

As to her full breasts she a) got Dr Brady to write her a prescription and b) got Bloom to suck the milk out of them, they were so hard and painful: ‘he said it was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything.’

Just one more of his outrageous suggestions, she thinks she should write them all in a book titled ‘the works of Master Poldy’. He used to suckle her for an hour at a time, the big baby: ‘hey want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a woman’.

Then a very explicit memory of the multiple orgasms Boylan gave her:

O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all

Though she had to restrain herself because you never know with some men, some men want you to remain coy and well behaved even while having sex. And she looks forward to more of the same with Boylan come Monday: ‘O Lord I cant wait till Monday’.

Section 4 (2,208 words)

Molly’s fourth sentence begins with her hearing a train whistle ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling’, the latest of Joyce’s hundred or so attempts to transcribe non-human sounds (the cat, the door, bells, gongs, clocks, the sea and many more).

Molly thinks of the men who work in trains, away from their wives at night. ‘Im glad I burned the half of those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes getting very careless’ – are these saucy magazines?

It was hot earlier, the rain shower was refreshing, she thought it was going to get as hot as Gibraltar. She remembers her father’s friend Mrs Hester Stanhope (a real-life historical figure) who sent her a nice frock from the B Marche Paris and her husband: they called each other Doggerina and Wogger, and she remembers a letter she wrote him.

She would give anything to be back in Gibraltar where life was free and easy. Take Edwardian clothes: ‘these clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way’.

She hated bullfights, the horses all getting ripped open. She was good friends with Hester, who showed her how to put her hair up, she slept in her bed the night of the storm and they had a pillow fight in the morning.

She remembers blushing the first time ‘he’ looked at her, when she was with her father and Captain Grove: ‘he was attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent looking disappointed and gay at the same time’. ‘She’ gave Molly The Moonstone to read. Reminds her she doesn’t like books with Molly in the title like that Molly Flanders.

She’s hot and uncomfortable, the blanket is too heavy and her nightdress has ridden up so she moves around to get comfortable. She remembers the mosquito nets in Gibraltar, how long ago it seems. She remembers in detail the day the Stanhopes left, the dress Mrs S was wearing, then how terribly dull life was after they both left.

Ships remind her of guns booming whenever a dignitary arrived at Gibraltar like General Ulysses Grant (Ulysses – a small connection). She remembers old Sprague the consul dressed in mourning for his son (echoing Bloom) and then Captain Groves and her dad having endless yarns over whiskey in the evenings about imperial battles.

Boredom and trying to get a reaction reminds her of how she’d dress up and put her gloves on in the window for the benefit of the young doctor in the house opposite, in Holles Street, but he never got the idea. Men are stupid.

there was a nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them… where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me

She thinks of recent letters and cards, including one from Milly, and a letter from a Mrs Dwenn in Canada who wrote out of the blue wanting to know the recipe for pisto madrileno (apparently the Spanish version of ratatouille). And one from Floey Dillon who wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect. And: ‘poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend more than mine poor Nancy.’

She thanks God Boylan has fucked her:

O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me

But she hopes he’ll write her a letter, she’d love a real love letter, ‘I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan.’ It just makes you so happy: ‘true or no it fills up your whole day and life always something to think about every moment and see it all round you like a new world.’

Then she’ll write an answer from bed where he can imagine her. Need only be a few words, in fact the less the better, lets the imagination work. Not like here friend Atty Dillon who wrote long elaborate letters copied from The Ladies Letterwriter to the fellow that was something in the Four Courts. He ended up jilting her. ‘A few simple words’ is best.

This section ends with a sudden spurt of bitterness at the fate of women to be pursued and worshipped when young, and then dumped and ignored once they get old.

as for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.

Note that it ends with a full stop, one of only two in the entire chapter.

Section 5 (2,378 words)

Section 5 opens with a similar passage to section 1 (intentionally?) in that it is a harsh character assassination of an older woman. In section 1 it’s Mrs Riordan (the Dante of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’). Here it is the elderly Spanish housekeeper of the Tweedy family in Gibraltar, Mrs Rubio. Molly condemns her as a:

disobliging old thing… with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a 100 her face a mass of wrinkles

and also, as with Mrs Riordan, feels threatened by / despises the old woman’s religious zeal:

with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed virgin with the silver dress

So Molly dislikes her on account of 1) her age (she seems ancient to Molly, who is only 15); 2) her religious zeal (which clearly Molly has no time for); and 3) also a Spanish nationalist reason. Apparently the Spanish Mrs Rubio is still angry that the British seized a part of Spain with just ‘4 drunken sailors’. (Incidentally the number 4 seems to have no historical provenance: the actual capture of Gibraltar was, as you might expect, a bigger bloodier affair.)

So one morning this ‘disobliging old thing’ brings her a letter from Lieutenant Mulvey who is clearly a ‘beau’ of the 15-year-old Marion. This Mulvey followed her in the street one day, but instead of scaring Molly this just excited her and made her want to ‘pick him up’. Then he wrote her a letter making an appointment to see her, which thrilled her to bits, she kept it on her and was so excited that she wanted to move the hands on the clock forward to make the appointment come quicker.

Now who does this remind you of? Of Blazes Boylan of course, whose letter Molly received at the start of this long day, setting his arrival for 4pm. Direct parallel. History repeats.

Cut to Molly being out with this Mulvey who kissed her ‘under the Moorish wall’ and ‘he crushed all the flowers on my bosom’. She considered him her sweetheart. Given the graphic sexual details everywhere else, I was intrigued by the phrase:

I put my knee up to him a few times to learn the way

What way? Well, For the flirtatious lolz she told him she was engaged ‘to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he believed me’.

Eventually he was posted away, in May (she remembers because she always feels like a new man in the spring: ‘Im always like that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year’). She knew precisely how far to flirt:

I had that white blouse on open in the front to encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just beginning to be plump

They were at some place up on some mountain among entrances to ancient galleries of St Michael’s caves, a beautiful sunny day and far from anywhere, and:

he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white ricestraw hat… my blouse open for his last day

Obviously he wanted to go further:

he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldnt let him he was awfully put out first for fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all

And remembers how she’s experimented with how it would feel to have a penis inside her by using a banana.

after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was up there for years

You can see why sex-averse Virginia Woolf loathed this book, can’t you? I’d forgotten it was stuffed (so to speak) with so much sexual crudeness or candour (depending on taste). As to men, well:

theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up

Back to Mulvey, she would have full sex but instead masturbated him to climax:

how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it

Yep, sounds like a penis alright. Amusingly, she can’t clearly remember Mulvey’s name, though this is consistent with her using the pronoun ‘he’ to refer interchangeably to many men (mainly Bloom and Boylan).

Molly darling he called me what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice

Lucky Jack Mulvey promised he’d come back for her and she promised she’d let him **** her, even if she was married. Twenty years ago it must be and he’s probably promoted and married and little does his wife know about his little sexual adventure with Molly Tweedy.

Far from anywhere she blew up the paper bag they’d brought biscuits in, then burst it with a bang which made all the pigeons take off. She wanted to fire his gun but he didn’t have one. HMS Calypso she thinks he was assigned to, because it was printed on his cap (note another sly Odysseus reference slipped in).

Cut to memories of some pompous old Bishop who delivered a sermon about the New Woman riding bicycle and wearing bloomers, which triggers her to think how funny she’s ended up with the surname Bloom. Her rival for Leopold, Josie Breen, used to joke that she was looking ‘blooming’ whenever they met, still better than names with bottom in them like Ramsbottom.

She doesn’t really remember her mother (who is a very shadowy figure in the whole book). Her name was Lunita Laredo and she was a Gibraltarian of Spanish/Jewish descent. A vivid memory of running down Williss Road and her boobs jiggling:

they were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them

She remembers the wonderful view from the Rock over the Straits to Africa. She was so infatuated with Mulvey, she kept the hankie the masturbated him into under her pillow for weeks, for the smell of it.

Mulvey appears to have given her a ring as a keepsake, ‘that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck’ that she then gave to another lover, Gardner, the soldier who went off to the Boer War where he died of enteric fever.

She has the impression of a moustache and for a moment thinks it was Mulvey’s but then realises she’s getting him mixed up with Gardner.

Another train whistles, reminding Molly of Love’s Old Sweet Song and her upcoming performance, which triggers a repeat of her scorn for the other singers:

Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much about as my backside

As the daughter of a soldier who’s lived abroad, Molly views herself as much more worldly than the daughters of bootmakers and publicans, ‘I knew more about men and life when I was 15 than theyll all know at 50’.

She reflects on her looks. Her father left her her English accent (raised among soldiers in garrison) but she has her mother’s eyes and figure. Let them get a husband and a lovely daughter and get a fine man like Boylan falling over her and swiving her 4 or 5 times. She thinks about the correct posture, neck and facial position to project her singing voice best, and considers which songs to sing: Love’s Sweet Song and Wind from the South but not My Lady’s Bower, ‘too long for an encore’.

She thinks she could have been a prima donna if she hadn’t married Bloom. She’ll dress to impress.

Ill change that lace on my black dress to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make them burst with envy

And then she realises she needs to pass wind and shifts position in the bed, carefully so as not to wake Bloom. (Remember the reference a few lines earlier to the song Wind from the South? A Joyce joke). So she softly passes wind, in another joke doing so in synch with the whistle from another passing train.

Section 6 (3,619 words)

Molly starts by being happy at having passed wind and wondering if it was the pork chop she ate earlier which gave her wind, she doesn’t trust that butcher.

She remembers being a girl in Gibraltar, the freezing cold nights, which leaps to being much older and stripping and creaming herself for the pleasure of the medical student living opposite (mentioned above).

Which links into her hoping Poldy isn’t going to fall in with the medical students, squandering money and getting drunk, what do they find to talk about?

We get more specifics on Bloom’s request for breakfast, which wasn’t reported in ‘Ithaca’. According to Molly, he ordered: ‘eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot buttered toast’ which leads onto how she enjoys hearing him clunking up the stairs with the rattling cutlery. Then onto the cat, licking itself but she doesn’t like its claws. (It strikes me as odd that the cat doesn’t have a name. Surely Joyce missed a trick, he could have given it an ironically Odyssey-connected name.)

Hunger: she thinks she’ll buy a nice piece of plaice, no cod, and some jam which flows into the thought of buying more and organising a picnic, which flows into memories of various outings, better at the seaside but not in a boat after he swore blind he could row and then got into so much trouble they nearly drowned, and the water flooding into the rowing boat ruined her shoes and the wind ruined her hat.

But the sea brings memories of Gibraltar, the smell of the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay all silver in the fishermen’s baskets.

She remembers all the grandiose plans Bloom made, saying he’d change their place into a musical academy, or a hotel, full of plans and schemes which all come to nothing.

he ought to get a leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving us here all day

She gets scared being alone in the house at night and remembers a vagrant who got 20 years for murdering an old woman, she’d castrate men like that. She remembers the night she swore she heard burglars and she made Poldy go downstairs with a candle frightened out of his wits, making as much racket as he could to scare them off, of course there was no-one.

Then she’s unhappy the way Bloom sent their daughter, Milly, away to Mullingar to get a job at a photographer’s, she thinks because he sensed Molly and Boylan’s impending affair. She should have been sent to Skerry’s Academy to study for the civil service.

She remembers Milly becoming a handful ‘with her roughness and carelessness’, breaking a statuette, refusing to peel the potatos, and Bloom taken to explaining things out of the paper to her and Milly pretending to play along. Cunning, like her dad. She’s started flirting with the boys and reminds Molly of herself at that age. She’d started to go beyond bounds for example to the skating rink and she smelled tobacco on her clothes.

all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age

And being prissy at the theatre, insisting Molly not touch her, which makes her remember men who’ve ogled and rubbed up against her at theatres. Milly didn’t even want Molly to kiss her at the station when she was leaving well – in the same tone as she said Bloom will never find anyone else like her, Molly thinks good luck to her daughter to find someone else who’ll dance attendance on her when she’s ill, like her old Ma.

I think Molly says she didn’t have a climax till she was 22:

of course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the wrong place (?)

Milly’s boyfriends including Conny Connolly and Martin Harvey. She thinks such devotion means a man’s a bit cracked in the head which reminds her of Poldy’s father, must have been cracked to commit suicide.

She thinks it’s Bloom’s fault for not getting a servant and instead having the two women in the family slaving away for him, apart from the useless cleaner they had, Mrs Fleming, sneezing and farting everywhere and you had to follow her round fixing her work, and the time she left a smelly old dishcloth behind the dresser.

All the friends Bloom brings back at all hours including Simon Dedalus, and his son who won all the prizes, what was he doing bringing him home, and why did he have to drop down into the area to get into the house, amazing he didn’t rip his grand funeral trousers, shame her old drawers weren’t hanging up for them both to see!

And we learn that Mrs Fleming, useless as she was, is now leaving them to look after her husband who’s got to have an operation.

Thoughts of the body circle round to Molly realising her period’s about to start, not surprising considering ‘all the poking and rooting and ploughing he [Boylan] had up in me’. Damn! That means she’ll be bleeding when Boylan next visits in just three days time (it’s Friday and he’s scheduled to come around on Monday). Menstruation she sees as a curse, out of action five days every three weeks, ‘simply sickening’.

She remembers the most embarrassing occasion when it came on when they were at the theatre, had been given a box by one Michael Gunn to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety, when it came on her and her struggle to concentrate with her husband yakking on next to her.

O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea

She’s very self-conscious about having sex in the bed with all the springs jingling so seems to say that when Boylan came round she put the quilt on the floor and a pillow under her bottom.

She thinks she’ll shave her pubic hair to look like a young girl again, that’ll surprise Boylan next time!

And during these thoughts she’s eased out of bed and is squatting over the chamberpot bleeding into it, hoping she won’t break it, thinking about rinsing it out and perfuming it in the morning, very self conscious about it making such a noise, and so the section ends.

Section 7 (3,230 words)

Molly continues menstruating on her chamber pot. She remembers encounters with a gynaecologist, Dr Collins, who she’d gone to see, worried about some discharges, during which she gets long medical words wrong like ‘omissions’ and is amused by the posh word he used for her bits, ‘vagina’: comedy at the expense of her illiteracy.

Which segues into the letters Bloom wrote her, quoting Keats and other poetry. She was so excited by him and the letters she masturbated 4 or 5 times a day. She was impressed by his high political talk about home rule and the Land League. She’s thinking all this while she’s still on the pot:

I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly

I think she says the Leopold kneels to masturbate, ‘I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits he has’; and then bemoans his habit for years of sleeping upside down in the bed, with his head at her feet and his feet by her head. The posture reminds her of him taking her to see an Indian god all yellow in a pinafore on his side, presumably a Buddha.

She reaches for a napkin which she ties round her parts, then slips back into bed, noting how deeply Bloom is sleeping, and repeating her hunch it’s because he had an orgasm today, and wondering who with, and waspishly pointing out he can only get it if he pays for it these days.

She laments the many moves of house they’ve had to make due to Bloom’s inability to keep a job or progress, including Raymond Terrace, Ontario Terrace, Lombard Street, Holles Street and then the City Arms hotel with the toilet out in the hall and you could always tell who’d used it before you by the stink. Things are always just starting to shape up when he puts his big foot in it, getting dismissed again and again, from Thoms and Helys and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies.

St George’s bells chime, saying its 2am (?) can that be right?

She describes Bloom’s poor attempts at cunnilingus:

when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one night… he does it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again

She wonders if the woman Bloom was with today was Josie, then decides he doesn’t have the guts to risk it with a married woman, despite her Josie Breen’s) mad husband. She thinks Poldy having sex was ‘the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral’ i.e. all those men all got hammered and went on somewhere and Bloom paid for a prostitute (she thinks; we know that’s not at all correct).

They think they’re so grand, those silly men in their little funeral parade and she rattles off a list of the male mourners at Dignam’s funeral who we met in chapter 6, but Molly says they’ve never seen a military parade like she knew back in Gibraltar, now that was impressive.

She feels sorry for poor Paddy’s wife and orphans which leads into memories of a dinner and formal singing, thoughts of Ben Dollard the base baritone, 5 shillings admittance to the concert, and then praises Simon Dedalus’s voice, untrained but effective (and we remember Simon singing at the Ormond Hotel in ‘Sirens’), she remembers he was married to May Goulding but a widower now.

She remembers seeing Stephen as a boy of 11, 11 years ago, when she was in mourning for poor Rudy, ‘he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage’ (‘prince’ of course reminds us of Stephen’s recent obsession with Shakespeare, Hamlet and the lecture at the National Library).

Suddenly she realises Stephen was predicted in the tarot cards she played with this morning and goes back through the cards in detail. She guesses at Stephen’s age and hopes he’s not a lank-haired poet, briefly imagining seducing him. Bloom claimed he’s a professor, Molly knows he’s surely too young, and hopes he’s not a professor like old Professor Goodwin whose specialist subject is whiskey.

Which segues into poetry, she likes poetry, and random quotes from favourite poems. It would be a nice change to have an intelligent person to talk to (Stephen) and not have to listen to Bloom’s endless talk about Billy Prescott’s ad and Keyes’s ad and Tom the Devil’s ad.

Instead she remembers seeing lithe young men at Margate bathingplace lazing on the rocks or diving into the sea, if only all men were that fit and handsome. Then some more rudeness:

I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger

If she’s never met the adult Stephen this must be a sort of sleepy fantasy Stephen of her imagination she’s imagining sucking off and swallowing. Quite staggeringly pornographic, isn’t it?

She resolves to throw the tarot cards again in the morning to see if they’re fated to be together and anyway she’ll read and study some poetry so as not to appear ignorant if they meet, while she’ll teach him about sex until he half faints, and then:

then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous

I’d forgotten that Molly has this quite graphic fantasy about Stephen. Remembering it sheds a whole new light on his character extending right back through ‘Portrait of the Artist’. What would happen if in the next few weeks Molly does meet Stephen, is taken by his strange intelligence and youth, while he sees sex sex sex in the older, voluptuous woman, and they ended up falling in love and eloping? Has anyone ever written a sequel to ‘Ulysses’ in which that happened?

Section 8 (3,680 words)

But then, what’s she going to do about Boylan? Thinking about Boylan makes her cross again at him slapping her on the bottom, such a peasant ‘he doesnt know poetry from a cabbage’. She criticises the way he just stripped off his shoes and trousers, might as well be an animal, he might as well have been an old lion. Well, maybe he was so excited because her boobs were so round and tempting. To be honest, they excite her sometimes, in fact she’d like to be a man:

I wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it

Men are lucky:

they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes

Whereas women are restricted and limited. Jealousy. Why can’t people remain friends while sleeping around? She’s glad she’s still young and excitable but frustrated that Bloom never touches her, never embraces her any more. Only kisses her on the bottom, where she has least expression, like kissing an inanimate object, one time he kissed the front door, she thinks Bloom is mad, ‘what a madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me’.

A woman needs loving and cherishing:

a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody

Sometimes she gets so sexually frustrated she fantasises about going down to the docks and picking up a sailor or maybe one of the dangerous looking gypsies from their camp in Rathfarnham, some stranger to ‘ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody’.

Men, eh? She remembers some fine KC giving her and Bloom a fish supper after winning a bet on a boxing match but later that night catching him coming out of a dingy alley (Hardwicke lane) followed by a common prostitute, then going back to his wife.

She is irritated with Bloom being such a big lump and tries to budge him over in the bed, and irritated at him expected to be waited on with breakfast in bed. A little feminist polemic:

itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them

Speaking of needing mothers she wonders what Stephen’s doing away from his books and home and study, keeping bad company now his mother’s died.

Which morphs into thinking about her son Rudy, going over the decision to bury him in ‘that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another’. She and Bloom have never been the same since.

Back to Stephen, she wonders why he wouldn’t stay the night (how does she know this, it feels like Joyce’s awareness bleeding into hers). Remember Hugh Kenner’s point that Molly never says something but she soon contradicts it? Well, barely a few phrases after her little feminist praise of women, the exact opposite:

I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy

She thinks Stephen could have slept on the sofa in the other room, mind you she’d have heard her filling the chamber pot, ‘arrah what harm’.

Dedalus, odd name. Makes her think of names of people on Gibraltar, she’s particularly tickled by a woman named Opisso, she’d die rather than have such a name.

small blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a day older than then

For the third time she laments that Stephen didn’t stay, she’d like to give him Spanish lessons then he’d see she’s not so ignorant after all: quite the persistent thinking about clean-cocked young Stevie.

And it goes on: she thinks Stephen was tired, and needed a rest, and she’d have happily brought him breakfast in on the sofa. She’s really taken with having Stephen as a lodger:

supposing he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for 1 he can make it for 2… Id love to have a long talk with an intelligent welleducated person

Which segues into needing to buy a new bed, and shopping triggers thoughts of going to the market early to get fresh fruit and vegetables, she’d love a fresh juicy young pear. And then another pornographic passage I can’t make out whether it starts about Stephen but it definitely becomes about Bloom, arousing him then making him feel guilty about Boylan:

Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress

So she’ll let Bloom know that his wife has been well fucked and the mark must be of Boylan’s spunk, but what does ‘make him do it out in front of me’? Force Bloom to masturbate in front of her to shame him, to make it clear that if he masturbates and refuses to fuck her then she will be unfaithful, ‘its all his own fault if I am an adulteress’?

Supercrudely she says if he wants to kiss her bottom, he can kiss her hole, and she’ll get a £1 or 30 shillings out of him to go shopping with. She’ll buy some fine new drawers and let him masturbate onto her from behind:

Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head… Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes… then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his omission’

She realise it’s getting late, they’ll be up in China, the nuns will be getting up soon, she should try and get some sleep. She’ll get up early go and buy some flowers to brighten the place up in case Bloom brings Stephen home again, I’m surprised how much longing for Stephen features in this last section.

She’ll clean the piano and they’ll have music, she’ll buy some cakes and has a passage thinking about her favourite types. Flowers,

I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violet

She dismisses Bloom’s highfalutin atheism, nature disproves it, and they all end up calling for the priest as they lie dying. Thoughts of God and nature line us up for the final passage in which she reminisces about the day she and Bloom spent outdoors on Howth hill.

the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life

What she remembers is genuinely liking him, but also her canny manipulation of him.

that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky

And Joyce gives her a magnificent passage recapping all her memories of her girlhood in Gibraltar, all the sights and sounds and words of the hot place, the castle and the multicultural society of Greeks and Turks and Jews and Arabs, and it ends with the famous magnificent climax:

and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Molly’s feminism?

If you summarise Molly’s soliloquy, it’s easy to speak in clichés about her being a strong independent woman or expressing her sexuality, as if that’s a fine and impressive thing like a speech or a declaration. But if you read it closely (and if you’ve read my summary) you’ll realise she’s far from being a role model for feminists, she’s far too bitchy and critical of other women for that, critical of old women and scornful of her rival female singers.

And ‘expressing her sexuality’ sounds fine in the abstract but when you read the detail of her thoughts (I’m tempted but won’t repeat the fruitier passages), again, it’s not necessarily such a fine and noble thing; it feels much muckier, messier, real and compromised than that, as actual sex tends to be.

Is Molly a male projection?

All the commentaries go on about Molly being a modern woman freely expressing her own sexuality and, having gone through it in this much detail, you can see how Molly is, indeed, staggeringly rude but totally honest and accepting of sex, the sex act, her own desires and fantasies, yes.

However, I could never forget that this whole thing is written by a man. I.e. is it just a man’s fantasy of how sexually frank and candid he’d like a woman to be? Is it purely a male fantasy to imagine a woman who goes to sleep fantasising about sucking a young man’s cock or having it done to her doggy fashion? Is Molly’s much vaunted sexuality in fact male projection?

In a sense, the most relevant criticism of Molly is what the woman Joyce based her on, his own partner, Nora Barnacle, thought of her, and Nora was famously unimpressed by Molly. (As, when I summarised some of the passages to her, was my wife.)

This is vanishingly tiny anecdotal evidence but it crystallises my feeling that Molly is a construct made of words, not always convincing, and the relentless dominance of sex fantasies… well, rather than capturing a woman’s thoughts, it just felt too relentlessly male to me.

Men, eh?

That said, I was struck by the number of thoughts Joyce gives his creation which diss or rubbish male sexuality:

  • theyre so savage for it
  • they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it
  • can you ever be up to men the way it takes them
  • only for the name of a king theyre all made the one way
  • arent they fearful trying to hurt you
  • arent they thick never understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for them
  • they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools
  • I suppose he thinks I dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies

All these sentences mocking men’s obsession with sex were written by a man. The steady stream of criticisms of the male sex, maybe that’s plausible in a woman’s passing thoughts? Or does it reveal a kind of self-obsession with masculinity on Joyce’s part? Is there something masochistic in Joyce the man writing quite so many passages slagging off men as sex-obsessed? Was it a form of self-critical therapy? Or was he simply bringing together lots of the criticisms you hear women say or women write about men, bundling them, along with much else besides, into Molly’s big boisterous character?

I’m not sure there’s any way of arriving at a conclusive answer, which is why I’ll note the questions but leave it at that.

Weaving contradictions

Hugh Kenner makes the point that Molly is a creature of contradictions, she doesn’t make a statement without somewhere else stating the opposite. Boylan is superb, Boylan is coarse. Bloom is inadequate, Bloom has more spunk in him than Boylan. The prospect of Stephen excites, then again he probably has long lank student hair. She’s proud to be a woman, she hates being a woman. She’ll bring Poldy breakfast in bed, she’ll throw it at him.

Kenner smartly compares this pattern of Molly stating then denying, with Homer’s Penelope weaving her shroud by day and unweaving it by night. Typically Kenner in being cute, insightful and amusing. I’ve written a blog post summarising Kenner’s book on ‘Ulysses’, coming soon.

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 16, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. A ghost play

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

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

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

2. The climax of the accretive method

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

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

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

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

As the Ulysses Guide puts it:

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

a) Sentence level

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

b) Section level

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

c) The evolution of ‘Circe’

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

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

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

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

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

3. What is real any more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The urge to offend

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

Example: The Croppy Boy

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

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

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

At which point the hangman jerks the rope and:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Homeric parallel

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

‘Circe’ synopsis

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

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

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

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

THE BICYCLE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cast

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

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

Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination.

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

Inanimate objects speak

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!

Stephen can’t stop making grand declarations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuckolding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen’s broken glasses

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

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

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

Facts

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

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

So Bloom is 38.

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

So Stephen is 22.

Credit

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

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

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