—Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried,
(Stephen Dedalus’s father Simon is given many vivid curses throughout the book, this one is addressed to the man ringing his handbell outside Dillons auction house while Simon’s having an argument with his small daughter, Dilly)
Here’s a quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel, ‘Ulysses’. Pretty much all discussion of the book needs to reference them. But note: none of the Greek chapter titles are indicated in the actual text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and they have been used by critics and commentators, including me, ever since, but none of them actually appear in hard copies or online versions of the text.
Part 1. Telemachiad or the odyssey of Telemachus
- Telemachus
- Nestor
- Proteus
Part 2. Odyssey
- Calypso
- Lotus Eaters
- Hades
- Aeolus
- Lestrygonians
- Scylla and Charybdis
- Wandering Rocks
- Sirens
- Cyclops
- Nausicaa
- Oxen of the Sun
- Circe
Part 3. Nostos or Return
- Eumaeus
- Ithaca
- Penelope
Homeric parallel
Most of the other chapters in ‘Ulysses’ have a central figure and a central narrative but ‘Wandering rocks’ is an exception to this rule.
Chapter ten marks the mid-point of this 18-chapter novel and so is a sort of interlude or resting point. Joyce had the bright idea of basing it on the wandering rocks episode in Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. In the poem the Planctae (Greek for ‘wanderers’) were a group of rocks which constantly moved about, stirring up the sea and smashing any ship which tried to navigate between them, leaving only floating timber and flames. They are sometimes confused with the Symplegades or clashing rocks.
As Odysseus prepares to depart from the witch Circe, she warns him that the wandering rocks have only once been successfully navigated, by Jason and his argonauts. The rocks are one of only two routes onwards to Ithaca, the other route going by Scylla and Charybdis. Jason chooses to sail through the rocks, Odysseus avoids them and goes the Scylla and Charybdis route.
Joyce’s adaptation
Joyce’s adaptation of the episode is very characteristic in that he takes what he needs and simply abandons whatever doesn’t fit. Thus he uses the idea of wandering as the basis of 18 short vignettes, each about a different Dublin character, as they potter about central Dublin bumping into each other, seeing each other, thinking about each other, including three of the main protagonists, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan (section 5), Stephen Dedalus (section 6) and Leopold Bloom (section 10). So ‘wandering’ yes, but as to the danger part of the Greek legend Joyce just ignores it. There’s no clashing involved, there’s no danger anywhere. Bloom/Odysseus is never threatened. No-one is getting crushed.
Instead the chapter is like the novel in miniature. It even contains 18 episodes to match the novel’s 18 chapters (plus a coda, 19 sections in all).
The narrative’s clever interlocking of characters and incidents is widely admired. This is increased by the way each vignette contains references or entire paragraphs referring to incidents taking place in other vignettes, in other parts of the city, at the same moment. Critics call these sudden eruptions of another stories into each vignette, often in the form of one unexplained sentence, ‘interpolations’.
Many readers and critics have thought of this as a cinematic technique which builds up to give a sort of panoramic overview of an entire city at the time it is set, the hour from just before 3pm till a little after 4pm.
I have a major reservation about this, and ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, which I’ll explain at the end of this review.
Church and state
The chapter, like many before it, takes as a key foundation the binary of church and state. Thus it opens with a friendly priest walking through the streets of Dublin and bumping into various acquaintances, before popping up in the background of subsequent vignettes; while in the second half we catch steadily more glimpses of the progress of the Viceroy of Dublin riding in his carriage to open a bazaar, glimpses which lead up to its full presentation in the 18th and final vignette.
So the narrative is topped and tailed by a representative each of Church and of State, types which lay down a kind of conceptual frame of the chapter, which is then fleshed out by the appearances of the 20 or 30 other characters.
Mocked
And they are both mocked, gently but steadily. With Father Conmee Joyce does it with the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth squeaky cleanness of Conmee’s conversation:
Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that. And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed.
With the Viceroy, the mockery is implicit in the generally indifferent reaction to his passing-by of the various Dubliners. The job is largely done without resorting to large-scale parody (unlike the chapters which follow).
Material rebukes
The final response to the Viceroy in the chapter is the Italian music teacher Almidano Artifoni going into his house and, in effect, turning the bum of his trousers to the august carriage as it trots by.
Father Conmee receives a more obvious rebuke to his values and worldview when he is suddenly confronted by a couple stumbling out of some bushes, flushed because they’ve just had sex. Sex, in comedies, especially farces – or more precisely all the fussing and fretting surrounding it – is the great puncturer of pompousness and pretension.
Heart
If you visualise Dublin as a heart, as the first headline in ‘Aeolus’ suggests:
IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS
Then the 30 or so characters we meet in this chapter can be thought of as blood corpuscles circulating round it and bumping into each other.
Binaries
Both our protagonists are looking at books, according to their intellectual levels: Bloom is buying a popular romance, Sweets of Sin, for Molly; Stephen is looking through Abbot Peter Salanka’s book of charms and spells, specifically ones designed to attract a woman’s love. Love and sex.
Bloom’s anxiety
You can’t understand this chapter or ‘Ulysses’ as a whole, unless you realise that for the whole long day which it describes its central character, Leopold Bloom, is traumatised by the fact that he knows that his voluptuous wife, Molly, is preparing herself to have sex with the flash man-about-town and concert promoter Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan. Somehow (it’s really not made clear) he knows Blazes’ visit to his house is timed for 4pm, so for all the chapters leading up to then, he is in agony of anticipation, at around that time he is crushed by humiliation, and for the hours afterward, he is haunted by the fact the deed has been done.
We see Boylan at his flashy flirtatious best, in section 5. We see Bloom feeling sorry for himself in section 10.
Summary
Section 1: Father Conmee heads north
We first met Father John Conmee as the symapathetic rector of Clongowes Wood College who young Stephen appealed to after he was unjustly pandybatted by sadistic Father Dolan. Here we find him strolling through Dublin, mild and kind. He thinks about Martin Cunningham’s letter requesting help in securing a school place for the late Paddy Dignam’s son, ‘oblige him if possible’; he see a one-legged sailor begging, he stops and talks to the wife of Mr David Sheehy MP who is away in Westminster; thinks of fellow Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan’s cockney accent; he bumps into three schoolboys from Belvedere school and asks one to post a letter in the letterbox across the road; he sees the flamboyantly dressed dancing master Denis Maginni; he is bowed to by stately Mrs M’Guinness whose posh appearance belies the fact that she runs a pawn shop (mentioned again in section 4).
He passes a closed-up free church and laments the ignorance of protestants; a bunch of Christian brother schoolboys raise their caps to him; he walks past a grocer’s and a tobacconist’s, noting the newsboard about a disaster in New York (a real life disaster: the General Slocum steamship fire, 15 June 1904, the day before the events of the novel, in which over 1,000 people, mostly women and children, died); past Daniel Bergin’s publichouse, past H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook (Corny who will play an important role at the end of ‘Circe’ 10 hours later).
He salutes a policeman then passes a butcher’s shop. In the canal he sees a turfbarge and the bargee resting and smoking. He catches an outward bound tram because he doesn’t like walking through the dingy neighbourhood of Mud Island. He regards the other passengers. An older woman who forgets to get off at her stop reminds him of the poor of his parish, worn down by cares, always worrying.
A poster of a blackface minstrel triggers thoughts about Christian missions to Africa. He thinks of the millions of men and women who die without ever hearing the Word of God, and mildly and superficially thinks it a ‘waste’; he thinks about a book on the subject by the Belgian Jesuit Auguste Castelein SJ, ‘The Number of the Elect’.
He alights at Malahide Road whose name triggers thoughts of aristocratic families and glorious old days when priests like himself held real power. He’s written a book about it, Old Times in the Barony. He thinks about Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere, who was accused of adultery with her husband’s brother (adultery is a central theme of the novel, as of so many novels: compare Stephen’s joke about Admiral Nelson being the one-handled adulterer, or the fate of Charles Stewart Parnell, on one level the political tragedy of a nation, on another yet another of the book’s examples of adultery).
Which leads into reminiscences about his time as rector of Clongowes Wood College, reading his holy books and looking up at the calm clouds, listening to the boys playing. He realises he has forgotten to read one of the holy offices at the correct time, and so he pulls out his breviary and is reading the psalm of the day as he walks when, out of bushes beside the road, emerge a young man and woman, flushed after a roll in the hay. Later in the novel they are revealed to be Stephen’s friend Vincent Lynch and a girl called Kitty. Father Conmee blesses them then returns to his reading about sin. It’s important to note the sentence:
The young woman abruptly bent and with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.
Note this phrase, which will recur later, in section 8.
Section 2: Corny Kelleher in the funeral directors’
Father Conmee ‘passed H. J. O’Neill’s funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay’. Now we join Corny Kelleher a few minutes later as he examines a new coffin, before strolling over to the streetdoor and looking out (just as Father Conmee is getting into the tram).
A policeman ambles up and they pass a cryptic exchange. This tends to confirm gossip in earlier chapters that Corny has an ‘in’ with the police i.e. is some kind of informant to the force which are unpopular enforcers of British colonial rule.
Short though it is, this vignette contains an ‘interpolation’, the intrusion of a sentence which seems to come from another section, thus:
Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin.
Only in the next section will we discover that the white arm belongs to Molly Bloom throwing a penny to a passing beggar.
Section 3: The one-legged sailor begs
A handicapped veteran of the British Navy (seen and blessed by Father Conmee in section 1) stumps the streets, grunting snippets of a patriotic song. He grunts towards Larry O’Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, swings past Katey and Boody Dedalus, a stout lady drops a coin in his cap, two barefoot urchins chewing ‘long liquorice laces’ stare at his stump, ‘a plump bare generous arm’ throws a coin from a window in Eccles Street onto the pavement and an urchin picks it up and puts it in the beggar’s cap.
The text doesn’t specifically tell us it’s number 7 Eccles Street, so it’s left to us to work out that it’s Molly Bloom’s arm. We are told that in a window is a card advertising ‘Unfurnished Apartments’ for rent in their home, as the Blooms try to make money now their daughter Milly has left home.
Section 4: The Dedalus sisters are destitute
Stephen’s sisters, Katey and Boody Dedalus return home from school, entering the kitchen where sister Maggy who is cleaning shirts in a pot of boiling. They are really destitute and have just tried to pawn Stephen’s books at M’Guinness’s shop (the same stately Mrs M’Guinness that bowed to Father Conmee in the opening section).
They only have anything to eat (pea soup) thanks to the charity of Sister Mary Patrick. When Maggy tells them another sistr, Dilly, has gone to meet their father, Boody blasphemously says ‘our father who art not in heaven’ and Maggy chastises her.
The section ends with another interpolation as we cut away to a shot of the handed-out sheet of paper given to Bloom in ‘Lestrygonians’ which he crumpled up and threw in the river, continuing its passage under Loopline bridge.
Probably the crumpling and wrecking of the sheet of paper is a diminished, mock heroic parody of the action of the crushing rocks.
Section 5: Blazes Boylan flirts with a shopgirl
Considering that Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan’s having sex with Bloom’s wife, Molly, is the central event in the novel, it’s striking that we see and hear so little of him throughout. Surprisingly, this brief vignette is our longest moment in his presence.
He is shopping in Thornton’s fruit and flower shop on Grafton Street, where he buys a bottle and a jar to be placed in a basket, topped with fruit (plump pears and peaches), to be sent in advance to Molly. He smells other ripe fruit and veg while outside the window the five sandwichboard men advertising HELYS that Bloom first saw in ‘Lestrygonians’ file past.
The shopgirl asks for the address the basket is to be sent to then tots up the bill while Boylan looks ‘into the cut of her blouse’ and thinks ‘a young pullet’.
As with most of the sections, there is a brief ‘interpolation’, an out-of-context sentence describing ‘A darkbacked figure under Merchants’ arch scanned books on the hawker’s cart.’ You’d never know without the commentators to help you that this is Bloom scanning second-hand books to find some romance novel for Molly to read.
Inserting a sentence about Bloom searching for second-hand fictional descriptions of seduction, while his rival, Boylan, is going about the practical mechanics of real-life seduction, is full of ironies.
The section ends with Boylan asking if he can make a phone call (see section 7).
Section 6: Stephen and Artifoni the music teacher
Stephen encounters his Italian voice instructor, Almidano Artifoni. While two tramcars full of tourists trundle past, Artifoni tells Stephen his voice would be a good source of income for him. True to his character as The Refuser, Stephen demurs. Another tram unloads soldiers who are members of a Highland regimental band who are heading through the gates of Trinity College. The pair shake hands but then Artifoni realises the conversation has caused him to miss his tram which he forlornly trots after.
Section 7: Miss Dunne
Miss Dunne is Blazes Boylan’s secretary. We find her sitting in her office where (like Molly) she has been reading a library copy of Wilkie Collins’s classic, ‘The Woman in White’ while the boss is away. It’s a bit too mysterious for her and she thinks she’ll swap it for something easier by Mary Cecil Haye.
She inserts a piece of paper into the typewriter and types out the date. This is the only direct reference to the famous date of the novel, 16 June 1904.
The five Hely’s sandwichboard men spelling HELY’S, seen by Boylan from the fruit shop, pass by, turn round and return again.
She stares at a poster of Marie Kendall. This was a real-life English music hall singer and comedian and the poster was for a real-life performance at Dan Lowry’s music hall in Dublin on June 16, 1904.
Miss Dunne thinks about her evening plans, a man who has caught her attention, and a skirt she wishes she could buy, thinking how attractive it made her friend Susy Nagle to ‘Shannon and all the boatclub swells’.
Boylan calls (the phone call we saw him asking the shopgirl if he could make in section 5). We hear her end of the conversation as she instructs her to book travel for two to Belfast and Liverpool (for Molly and himself during the upcoming concert tour), and he gives her permission to leave work at 6:15.
Then she tells Boylan that Lenehan has been looking for him and will be at the Ormond Hotel Bar at 4. (We will see Boylan meet Lenehan there, among other notable characters convene, in the next episode, ‘Sirens’).
Section 8: Ned Lambert, Reverend Love and J. J. O’Molloy
I was hopelessly at sea with this section until I read the commentaries. It takes place in the last remaining room of a 10th century abbey which now serves as a seed and grain warehouse where Ned Lambert works. (We met Lambert earlier at Dignam’s funeral in ‘Hades’ and reading out the overblown patriotic speech by Dan Dawson in the newspaper offices in ‘Aeolus’).
Ned is showing the building to a vicar named Hugh C. Love who is writing a book about the Fitzgeralds. St. Mary’s Abbey is relevant to Love’s research because it was here that Lord Thomas Fitzgerald (nicknamed ‘Silken Thomas’) proclaimed himself a rebel in 1534.
What makes it confusing is that Ned is in the middle of showing Love this when his pal, the lawyer J. J. O’Molloy, enters the dark room, lighting a match to find his way. Ned suggests to the reverend a couple of places where he can get good angles for a photograph.
It’s further complicated because the scene contains not one but two one-sentence interpolations. Suddenly:
From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.
We don’t know it yet but this is John Howard Parnell, brother to the late politician Charles Stuart Parnell, who we will meet playing chess in section 16.
The reverend thanks Ned and departs, and New and J. J. exit the warehouse into the bustling forecourt:
With J. J. O’Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary’s abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal, O’Connor, Wexford.
Then, with just as little warning, the second interposition:
The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.
If you recall, this phrase applies to the young woman emerging from the bushes after a roll in the hay with Vincent Lynch, as the come face to face with Father Conmee. The implication being that that is happening at this exact moment in another part of Dublin.
Back to Ned who realises he forgot to tell the clergyman a good joke:
—I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? I’m bloody sorry I did it, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside.
Ned confidently slaps a passing horse on the haunches then turns to J. J. who has come to scrounge money off him, but makes him wait a second while he loudly sneezes.
—Well, Jack. What is it? What’s the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an instant, sneezed loudly.
—Chow! he said. Blast you!
—The dust from those sacks, J. J. O’Molloy said politely.
But Ned says it’s that he caught a cold last night and it didn’t help hanging round at Paddy Dignam’s funeral this morning, holding up his hankie ready to sneeze again.
Once all this is explained to you, it’s easy, really easy. But it’s devilish hard to make sense of if you try to read and puzzle it out by yourself.
Section 9: Tom Rochford’s Invention, then Lenehan and M’Coy
Tom Rochford is explaining his invention for indicating which act is currently on stage in a vaudeville act to his mates, Nosey Flynn, Lenehan and M’Coy. Lenehan is impressed a promises to pitch it to Blazes Boylan who we know, from section 7 is meeting in the Ormond Hotel at 4pm, because Boylan is, it’s sometimes easy to forget, a successful music concert producer.
M’Coy and Lenehan leave together, passing Dan Lowry’s music hall displaying a poster for Marie Kendall the singer, the same poster we saw Miss Dunne staring at.
As they walk on Lenehan tells the story of how Rochford rescued a man stuck in a drainage hole. M’Coy waits outside Lynam’s while Lenehan nips in to get the final odds on Sceptre, the horse he backed in the Ascot Gold Cup. While waiting in the street, M’Coy nudges a banana peel into the gutter lest someone slip on it.
This simple narrative is then interrupted by not one, or two but three distinct ‘interpolations’. First a sentence showing the cavalcade of the Viceroy commencing its journey across the city.
Lenehan emerges and announces his horse was evens. They walk on through Merchants arch and spy ‘a darkbacked figure scanning books on the hawker’s cart’ which they both identify as Bloom. M’Coy describes a fine book Bloom bought for 2 bob whose fancy plates alone were worth more than that. Then, suddenly, the second interpolation:
Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan’s, late Fehrenbach’s, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.
This refers to the eldest of recently deceased paddy Dignam’s five children. Lenehan launches in on a long story about something that happened at the annual dinner at Glencree reformatory but he’s barely got going before there’s another interpolation:
A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street.
This is Bloom’s house and, since he’s out and about, it must be Molly who replaces the card in the window, the card we’d seen in place when she threw a coin to the beggar in section 3.
Lenehan continues with his story about how everyone got hammered at this reformatory dinner and came home in the early hours in a horse-drawn taxi cab. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one seat and on the seat opposite Lenehan sitting next to Molly. She’s had a skinful and at every jolt of the cab he was pressed up against her ample bosom.
Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
—I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
—The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She’s a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that’s only what you might call a pinprick. By God, he wasn’t far wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.
Lenehan can’t know it but much, much later Molly will give her side of this event in the long monologue which makes up chapter 18 in which she describes Lenehan as a creep.
To some extent, whether you really like ‘Ulysses’ or not depends on whether you find this kind of blatant crudity and vulgarity funny or not. I do, and I do. But it’s more subtle than that because M’Coy, a married man himself, recoils a bit at the tale and Lenehan notices it. He backtracks and in an attempt to save face changes tack to praise Bloom.
—He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden… you know… There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.
Is that not how human interactions often are? Complex, error-strewn, embarrassing, miscalculating, self-correcting?
Section 10: Mr. Bloom
Having caught two glimpses of him through the eyes of other characters, we finally come to Leopold Bloom browsing a second-hand book stall. In chapter 4 Molly asked him to get her a new book to read. He looks at some saucy ones but the one which triggers his thoughts is Aristotle’s Masterpiece with its anatomical images of foetuses curled up in the womb:
Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.
The last name referring to Mina Purefoy who Josie Breen told him is in maternity hospital having a prolonged and difficult delivery of her baby (more of that in chapter 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, which is set in the same maternity hospital and during which Mina finally has her baby.) This also has its ‘interpolations’. In among Bloom’s book browsing, suddenly the sentence:
On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.
which is clearly written in the affected style in which Mr Maginni regards himself.
Back to Bloom at the bookstall, assessing whether books are suitable for Molly’s erotic tastes. He opens ‘Sweets of Sin’ and reads a few extracts at random, which describe a married woman dolling herself up for her exotic lover, Raoul. Sounds like the right kind of thing. And repeats the theme of adultery which, as we know, is central to ‘Ulysses’.
Bloom starts to get a little worked up, in a heady mix of the text’s soft porn cliches mixed with his own earthier knowledge of the stinks and mess of sex, all of which is interrupted by another interpolation:
An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation.
It would be overdoing it to say that everything is connected to everything else, but this is clearly Joyce giving the impression of an overview of the city, a gesture towards all the things taking place at the same time in different locations.
Back in the shop the phlegmy old owner hawks and gobs on the floor, then wipes it with his boot. This is Joyce rubbing into his reader’s middle-class faces the unforgiving materiality of human existence. This is what it is.
It ends on a mildly comic note as the bookseller approves Bloom’s choice:
The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
—Sweets of Sin, he said, tapping on it. That’s a good one.
We need to take note of this title, Sweets of Sin, as it will recur again and again through the rest of the book, as a mocking title for Boylan’s tupping of Molly, but all other instances of adultery as well.
Section 11: Dilly and Simon Dedalus
The lacquey outside Dillon’s auction rooms shakes his handbell.
The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:
—Barang!
Not the first and not the last time Joyce transcribes the sound of an inanimate object. Also, this had appeared as an unexplained interpolation back in section 4.
Young Dilly Dedalus, one of Stephen’s 9 or so younger siblings, is waiting outside the auction rooms for her dad to arrive. Bloom saw here there back at the start of ‘Lestrygonians’. Simon has been drinking with the newspapermen in The Oval, just up O’Connell Street and around the corner from Dillon’s. Ashamed of keeping her waiting, like many a parent he goes on the offensive telling her off for her bad posture. When he imitates bad posture, Dilly is embarrassed and tells him everyone is looking.
He gives her a shilling but, hardened, she demands more and he sheepishly hands over a few pennies, telling her to buy a milk or a bun. The family really is destitute as Simon asks his daughter what she wants him to do, go along Connor Street scouring the gutter for stray coins.
Ignored by everyone the Viceregal procession passes by.
There are the following interpolations:
Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.
This is based on a report of a real-life half-mile bicycle handicap race that took place in Dublin on this day and at this time, as reported in the Evening Telegraph for 16 June 1904. The next one is:
Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James’s street.
This is explained or followed up in the very next section.
Section 12: Tom Kernan
We met Tom Kernan in the funeral scene in chapter 6. In fact we met him way back in Dubliners, in the short story Grace where his friends were trying to cure his alcoholism.
Here we see him emerging from a business meeting, running over the conversation he’s just had in a pub with the publican Mr Crimmins about the shocking tragedy at New York, the explosion of the Slocombe steamship with over 1,000 killed.
Kernan stops to admire himself in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser, thinking his secondhand coat was well worth half a sovereign. He admires his grizzled moustache, he looks like an officer back from India. He notes the impressed looks he’s drawn from a few important people.
In the kind of stylistic innovation which so many people copied, Kernan is dazzled by the reflection of sunlight off a passing car:
Is that Ned Lambert’s brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He’s as like it as damn it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn like him.
He passes the site where the Irish nationalist Robert Emmet (1778–1803) was executed by the British after failing to overthrow British rule in the failed 1803 Dublin rising, which triggers pondering whether or not Emmet was buried at Glasnevin.
He see a carriage without a horse tied up outside the Dublin Distillers Company’s stores at the same moment, the text tells us, as poor mad Denis Breen with his legal books, tired of waiting at the offices of lawyer John Henry Menton’s office, is leading his wife over O’Connell bridge, heading towards another lawyer’s office in his obsessive quest to get justice for being sent the anonymous postcard reading U.P. up.
We are given unusually intimate access to Kernan’s stream of consciousness which is a mashup of nationalist heroes and poems and risings and gambling and so on, very reminiscent of the half-educated ramblings of Bloom.
Interpolations:
- Simon Dedalus greets Father Cowley
- next stage of the downriver journey of the crumpled-up flyer Bloom threw into the Liffey in ‘Lestrygonians’ which is, as I suggested, a mocking reference to the clashing rocks
- the Dennis Breen scene
Kernan is pro-Britain as we learn when the Viceregal Cavalcade jingles past the end of the road and he is just a fraction too late to see it, damn!
Section 13: Stephen and Dilly Dedalus
Stephen’s section is, predictably, the most impenetrable one, opening with seven paragraphs so cryptic and oblique as to be impenetrable without commentary and annotation.
This tells us that they are the thoughts of an over-educated man peering through a series of shops windows at various wares. The prose emerges into something like lucidity when he stops at a second-hand book cart (four for sixpence) wondering whether he’ll find his schoolbooks which his family have pawned to buy food. They really are abjectly poor.
Stephen pauses over ‘Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter Salanka’. Unexpectedly he is spoken to by one of his sisters, Dilly, suddenly appearing by his side. He remembers her face as she crouched over the fire they’d made from useless boots. She shows him a French primer she’s just bought (with one of the pennies their dad gave her back in section 11) and he recognises his own urge to learn in her, but without the advantages of a private education which he enjoyed.
Stephen sees her utter poverty, of life and hope and is fraught with misery. But, as usual, he rejects and fights off any feeling, any temptation to become involved. His inner cry of Misery! Misery! is, on one level, for me, the truest thing in the entire book.
There’s an interpolation. In the middle of Stephen’s thoughts, suddenly a sentence describing:
Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.
Section 14: Simon Dedalus, Father Bob Cowley and Ben Dollard
We saw Simon Dedalus greet Father Cowley as in interpolation in section 12. Father Cowley says he’s barricaded into his house by two men because he owes money to the shark Reuben J. Dodd (seen and cursed by the men in the funeral carriage back in chapter 6, ‘Hades’) who has set two men outside Cowley’s house to collect the debt.
Cowley has asked a friend, Ben Dollard, to ask ‘long John’ Fanning, a subsheriff, to intervene. Just then Simon spots the very same Ben crossing a bridge towards them.
—There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.
Ben Dollard ambles over to them scratching his bum, they all hello each other, while Simon is critical of Ben’s outfit, while Ben defends it. By now the reader is getting used to the one-sentence interpolations. In the middle of these three’s conversation, the text cuts away for a moment to the madman Bloom pointed out to Josie Breen in chapter 8:
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.
He will reappear in section 17. Meanwhile, Cowley asks after Ben’s famous bass voice and Ben emits a low note for them to admire. There’s another interpolation (another character walking somewhere else):
The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint Mary’s abbey past James and Charles Kennedy’s, rectifiers, attended by Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of hurdles.
Ben announces he’s been to see the lawyer John Henry Menton about helping Father Cowley. Cowley explains that he owes rent to his landlord (who happens to be the Reverend Love we have just seen in the interpolation) and Ben says this changes things, because Love’s claim takes priority over Dodd’s. Or as Ben colourfully puts it:
—You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts.
Section 15: Martin Cunningham, Mr Power and John Wyse Nolan
Cunningham, Power and Nolan are walking. Cunningham has been working to make financial and other arrangements on behalf of the Dignam family. He tells the others he’s asked Father Conmee for help placing one of the Dignam boys in school, and we know from section 1 that Conmee intends to help.
John Wyse Nolan, looking at the ledger, notes that Bloom has put his name down for 5 shillings and Cunningham says he’s actually paid up.
—I’ll say there is much kindness in the jew, he [John Wyse Nolan] quoted, elegantly.
They see Jimmy Henry, the assistant town clerk, who Cunningham promptly buttonholes to join the cause. They arrive at the office of ‘long John’ Fanning, Dublin’s sub-sheriff. Henry’s corns are hurting and he passes Fanning and up the stairs. Fanning didn’t know Dignam, so Nolan describes him as ‘a decent little soul’ as they walk up the stairs.
They’re half way up the stairs when they hear harnesses and hooves and turn to see. Nolan goes downstairs back to the door and watches the Viceregal procession pass by, shouting up to the others to tell them what it is.
Interpolations of other scenes:
- Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head, appeared above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
- On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
- Outside la Maison Claire Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney’s brother-in-law [Bob Doran], humpy, tight, making for the liberties.
Section 16: Buck Mulligan and Haines
At the end of the preceding chapter, chapter 9 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, Buck Mulligan left the National Library with Stephen. Now he has met up with the Englishman Haines, who we met in chapters 1 and 2, for a snack at the Dublin Bread Company (D.B.C.).
As they enter the restaurant, Mulligan points out John Howard Parnell, Dublin’s city marshall, playing chess at another table. We saw the chess-playing Parnell as an interpolation back in section 8.
Buck and Haines each order a melange (a drink like a cappuccino), scones and cakes and Mulligan jokes they call it the DBC because it makes damn bad cakes.
Mulligan tells Haines he missed Stephen’s presentation about Shakespeare, to which Haines quips:
—I’m sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance.
Mulligan laughs that when he gets drunk, Stephen becomes unsteady on his feet.
—You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering Ængus I call him.
Mulligan analyses Stephen’s mind, saying the Jesuits planted a permanent fear of hell in him, which will prevent him ever capturing the pure Attic note, the note of Swinburne et al.
Haines replies to all this with prissy Englishness, quick with references to authorities, in this case saying Stephen’s idee fixe reminds him of the theories of professor Pokorny of Vienna (is this a reference to Freud?).
The cakes arrive, Mulligan slices and butters his and laughs that Stephen claims he’ll write something in ten years! (In fact ten years after 1904 is 1914 and that’s the year Joyce published ‘Dubliners’ and began work on this novel, ‘Ulysses’.) Haines is unexpectedly sympathetic and says he wouldn’t be surprised if Stephen does write something.
Interpolations:
- we see the one one-legged sailor at his latest location, singing his shanty and begging
- our last sighting of the religious leaflet Bloom scrunched up and threw in the Liffey, as it arrives at Dublin Bay and passes the Rosevean, the three-masted ship Stephen saw over his shoulder back in chapter 3
Section 17: Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell
We briefly glimpse the Italian music master on his way, but this short section follows the lunatic Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell as he walks along Merrion Square, gets as far as Mr Lewis Werner’s cheerful windows, turns and comes back the way he came.
As he passes a dentist’s surgery belonging to a Mr Bloom (no relation to our Bloom) his flying coattails bang the stick of the blind man we saw Bloom help across the road in chapter 8 ‘Lestrygonians’ but he walks heedlessly on. The blind young man curses Farrell.
—God’s curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you bitch’s bastard!
Section 18: Patrick Dignam
Deceased Paddy Dignam’s son, also Patrick – ironically but also tenderly referred to as Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam – has escaped the stifling atmosphere of the house of the dead, full of sniffling old women eating cake, sipping sherry and endlessly jawing, to come out and buy a pound and a half of porksteaks. En route home he sees sights and sounds, including a poster advertising a boxing match, but then realises it took place on 22 May so he’s missed it. He’s a fan of boxing and ponders which current fighter is best.
In two mirrors in the shop window of Madame Doyle the milliner, he catches sight of himself dressed in mourning, and smartens himself up (as Tom Kernan did in the sloping mirror of Peter Kennedy, hairdresser in section 12).
Master Patrick spots the poster advertising Marie Kendall, as Miss Dunne did in section 7, and M’Coy and Lenehan in section 9.
(Note the persistent presence of posters, advertising hoardings, newspaper hoardings and so on in the modern city, plus the memorable moment when sunlight off a car windscreen dazzling Tom Kernan – it is this sense of the city as a sensorium of random, fragmentary sights and sounds which would influence so many other authors of the 1920s and ’30s, including John dos Passos and Alfred Döblin.)
He sees a toff with a red flower in his mouth. He doesn’t know it but this is Blazes Boylan who we saw put the stem of the flower between his teeth in section 5. Boylan is apparently listening to a street drunk telling him something and, characteristically, grinning.
He sees some schoolboys with satchels and notes that he’s off school till the following Monday (it being Thursday) and that Uncle Barney is meant to get news about his father’s death into the papers so everyone knows why he’s absent.
Suddenly his mind flicks to concrete and disconcerting details of seeing his dead dad laid out: how his face had gone grey instead of its usual red; a fly walking over his face up to his eye; the scrunching sound at they screwed the screws of the coffin; the bumping sound it made being carried downstairs, and his Uncle Barney instructing the men how to manage it in the tight space.
The last night pa was boosed he was standing on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney’s for to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a good son to ma. I couldn’t hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he’s in purgatory now because he went to confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.
Pathos.
Section 19: The Viceregal cavalcade
As this chapter began with an extended description of a representative of the Catholic Church (Father Conmee) it ends with an extended description of the chief representative of the British state in Ireland, William Humble, Earl of Dudley, as he rides with his wife in one carriage, followed by dignitaries in several more, out from the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park and across the city on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital.
According to the commentators, Father Conmee’s movement is from south to north, while the Viceregal Cavalcade processes from Phoenix Park in the west across to the east side of Dublin, so that the two miniature odysseys form a cross over the geography of the city. In Joyce everything falls into patterns and schemas.
In a massive paragraph Joyce records the reactions to the cavalcade as it passes by of every one of the characters we’ve met so far in this chapter, plus some new ones: Tom Kernan; Dudley White (a real-life barrister); Richie Goulding Stephen’s uncle and down-at-heel lawyer; Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce, the barmaids we’ll meet in the next chapter; Simon Dedalus doffing his hat, which His Excellency returns; the reverend Hugh C. Love similarly doffs his hat but unnoticed; Lenehan and M’Coy watch the procession unmoved; Gerty MacDowell is irritated because her view of what the Viceroy’s wife is wearing is blocked by parked vans; John Wyse Nolan smiles coldly; Tom Rochford notices Lady Dudley looking at him and quickly takes his hands out of his pockets; Marie Kendall stares down at the procession from her much-mentioned poster; Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely watch the procession from the window of the DBC, the customers crowding to the window casting a shadow on John Howard Parnell’s chessboard; Dilly Dedalus looks up from her second-hand French primer to watch the wheels spin by; John Henry Menton watches from the door of his business; Mrs Breen pulls her husband back from stepping in front of the horses, he hastily salutes the carriages and the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp replies; the five sandwichboard men spelling HELYS stop to watch; Mr Denis J Maginni walks on, unaffected.
With typical confidence Blazes Boylan doesn’t unhat but admires the pretty women in their carriages. From their carriage the Viceroy and wife hear the band of Highland soldiers playing on College Green (the ones we saw getting off a tram in section 6).
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stares over the top of the procession; Hornblower, a Unionist, doffs his cap; Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam sees other people taking their hats off and so doffs his own dirty black cap. The cavalcade passes the blind stripling and the mysterious man in the brown mackintosh who keeps cropping up. Then on past Mr Eugene Stratton, two ladies and two small schoolboys.
Mockery The grandiosity of the Viceroy is mocked in at least two ways. First, the entire thing is done in a parody of a Court Circular or official report, complete with the full qualifications of everyone involved. Second, the list includes satirical figures and gestures, the best of which is:
From its sluice in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan’s office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage.
And after this long list of people reacting to the parade, the whole thing builds up to an image of rude indifference:
On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.
How beautifully and amusingly this complicated set-piece of interlocking parts and references comes to a comic closure.
Caveat: when is a panoramic view not a panoramic view?
In all the commentary I’ve read, among all the fine words about Aristotle, Hume and Vico, I haven’t come across anyone pointing out how rough Joyce’s characters are. The novel is overwhelmingly about the lowlife of Dublin and impresses on you a sometimes crushing sense of a world of failures and cadgers, blowhards, parasites and drinkers.
The most impressive chapters in ‘Ulysses’ are 1) the encounter in Barney Kiernan’s pub with the drunk citizen and his little court of drunk sycophants; 2) ‘Circe’ which is set in a brothel among prostitutes and ends in a drunken fight with a squaddie; 3) 40-pages spent inside the head of Molly Bloom who middle-class professors claim to love but I wonder if they’d really invite the semi-literate, slovenly, sex-mad wife of a failing advertising canvasser to their nice dinner parties.
Even when we meet characters which ought to be solidly middle-class like the editor of the Evening Telegraph, he turns out to be crude and tipsy. The authors A.E. and John Eglinton in the National Library ought to raise the tone, but for some reason they don’t, instead the arrival of Buck Mulligan with his play about masturbation significantly lowers it. Any of the supposedly middle class characters are swamped by the world of cadgers, racing tipsters, loan sharks, debtors, pawners and beggars which is where Joyce’s imagination really lies.
Stephen may be a great intellectual but he comes from a family which has gone right down the tubes, is reduced to pawning its curtains and books, and relies on out-and-out charity to have anything to even eat. It’s all surprisingly close to the sense of threadbare impoverishment which Samuel Beckett picked up and made his own in the 1940s and 50s, it’s overwhelmingly bereft and immiserated.
Where are the middle classes? Where are the fine dinner parties and posh young ladies going to private school, the balls, the visits to the theatre, the recitals? Where are the well-paid, well-dressed officers in the army and in the administration? (making a fleeting appearance only to be mocked, in the finale of this chapter.)
It’s characteristic that (in the National Library chapter, and later) Stephen is embittered at not being invited to George Moore’s literary soirèe and so Joyce doesn’t show it. That would require a whole chapter of fine talk along the lines of George Eliot or Henry James. In its place we get the unbelievably rough and crude ‘Circe’ chapter.
Dublin was and is a port city but where are the business meetings and professional dealings of importers and exporters and customs officers and so on? Scenes set in the big companies that own the ships and the ships’ captains, educated capable men? Instead of them we get the scene in the cabman’s shelter in ‘Eumaeus’, among the roughest of the rough, notable for the threatening bluster of the tattooed sailor, the drunken argument about Parnell everyone gets into, and that the place is run by a convicted terrorist.
Bearing all this in mind, I don’t see how the book as a whole, let alone this chapter, can be said to give a ‘panoramic view’ of the city. It gives a cleverly interlocking and cross-referencing portrait of Joyce’s level of Dublin society, of the lower middle class, working class, hard drinking, scrounging and begging classes, yes. But an overview of all the people in the city, including the genuinely middle, upper and aristocratic classes? Emphatically not.
Credit
‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.
Related links
Joyce reviews
- Dubliners (1914)
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope
Books & Boots 