All posts tagged Vincent Lynch

Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks

—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

  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 or Return

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. 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

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Posted by Simon on February 18, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/18/ulysses-james-joyce-wandering-rocks/

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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Posted by Simon on February 9, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/02/09/ulysses-james-joyce-circe/

Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun

Sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars’ hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup.
(Leopold Bloom’s character done in medieval style)

morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher
(Stephen Dedalus’s character in Romantic style)

A plumper and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock.
(Vincent Lynch in demotic mode)

The words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly understood and not often nice.
(Too true)

Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English chinashop.
(Stephen Dedalus unwittingly summarising the format of the entire book: Irish content causing mayhem in the English language and literary tradition)

A quick reminder of the chapter numbers and names in ‘Ulysses’. (Note: none of the Greek chapter titles are actually indicated in the text of ‘Ulysses’; they were given by Joyce to early commentators who published them in books and articles about the novel and 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

  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 or Return

  1. Eumaeus
  2. Ithaca
  3. Penelope

Plot

Middle-aged advertising salesman Leopold Bloom visits the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street in Dublin, where a friend of his family’s, Mina Purefoy, is giving birth. She has been in the hospital for several days having a difficult labour and he is worried about her (kindly Bloom cf his active charity to Paddy Dignam’s widow). Here he finally meets over-educated, unemployed graduate Stephen Dedalus, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of of his frenemy Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan. As the only father in the group of men, Bloom is concerned about Mina Purefoy in her labour. He starts thinking about his wife, Molly Bloom, and the births of his two children. He also thinks about the loss of his son and heir, Rudy, who died aged just 11 days.

The young men are drunk and rowdy, and start discussing topics relating to fertility, contraception and abortion. There is also a suggestion that Milly, Bloom’s daughter, is in a relationship with one of the young men, Bannon. Half way through a nurse announces that Mina has given birth to a son so, after some more banter, the drunken crew leaves the hospital to go on to a pub to continue drinking.

Homeric (and literary) parallels

In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew land on the island of Thrinacia, home of Helios the sun god’s immortal sheep and longhorn cattle. Both Circe and Tiresias have warned Odysseus to avoid the island but if they go there, not to harm Helios’s oxen – sacred symbols of fertility – or the gods will punish the offenders with annihilation. After making his crew swear that they will leave the cattle alone, Odysseus hikes inland, prays to the gods for help getting home and falls asleep. Meanwhile, contrary to orders, his men kill and eat some of the oxen of the sun. Odysseus returns and is horrified and as his ships leave the island, Zeus strikes them with a devastating lightning storm, killing everyone except Odysseus, the only one innocent of violating sacred fertility.

In ‘Ulysses’ the rowdy behaviour of the gang of drinkers – Stephen Dedalus, Dixon, Lynch and Madden, Lenehan, Punch Costello, and Crotthers – effectively ‘profanes’ the sanctity of the maternity hospital, resulting in their ‘annihilation’ in the form of a collapse into complete incoherence at the end of the chapter. Bloom alone remains compos mentis by virtue of not having drunk anything and acted respectfully throughout.

On another level, you can see it this way. The inconsiderate drunk party not only disturbs the mums-to-be, it represents waste as against fertility. The pregnant women have fulfilled their destiny, whether you see that as ordained by God and his Catholic Church or Darwin and the scientists, women are made to breed and the women in the maternity hospital have fulfilled their fate. Which is completely unlike the eight or so young men who should be setting off on productive careers but instead are frittering away their evenings in dissipation.

It is an allegory of Fertility versus Infertility and this rings throughout the varied topics of conversation, underpinning for example Bloom’s memory of losing his virginity to a prostitute, or the couple of pages of facetious banter about contraceptives, or the story about the bull sent to fertilise Ireland’s women, or Mulligan’s joke plan to set up a fertility clinic.

Even tiny details contribute to this binary. Even the fact that it was flashy but shallow Buck Mulligan who was invited to George Moore’s soiree while Stephen spaffs away his God-given talents getting pissed with medical students, is an avatar of the central opposition between fruitful labour (literally labour, as in women giving birth) and sterile drunken wasters.

The oxen theme is present throughout insofar as the drunken party discuss the foot and mouth outbreak among Ireland’s cattle, prompted by Lenehan’s news that the letter Stephen took to the newspaper from Mr Deasy on the subject has been published in the evening paper.

So it is this theme, this binary between purposeful fecundity and funny sterility, which is subjected to a comic variation when the crew pile in to elaborate a long drunken comic fantasy about a mighty bull sent to Ireland which turns out to be sexually attractive to women. This is a farcical allegorical skit about papal bulls and Henry VIII, the Reformation and England’s relationship to Ireland.

But when Stephen jokily describes it as ‘an Irish bull in an English chinashop’ he is unwittingly summarising the format of the entire book: anarchic boisterous Irish content barely contained in a genre associated with England (the novel) and causing mayhem with the English language (a concern of Stephen’s ever since the ‘tundish’ episode in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’).

Also, anyone who remembers one of the most unruly books in the English literary canon, Tristram Shandy, knows that it ends after 500 pages with the comic punchline that the whole thing has been a story about a cock and a bull.

Format

As explained, all the chapters subsequent to ‘Sirens’ are subject to big formatting ideas (over and above the challenges of the stream of consciousness technique which Joyce deployed in the first 10 or chapters, the so-called ‘initial style’).

The dominant mode of these later chapters is parody and let’s just remind ourselves what that means. Parody = ‘an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.’ I think the key word here is exaggeration.

Thus it is that the text of Aeolus, set in a newspaper office, is punctuated by 63 newspaper headlines giving mockingly exaggerated summaries of the sections they precede. The text of Cyclops is interspersed with 33 extended passages which describe the main narrative’s events in the style of, among many others, Irish mythology and legend, legal jargon, journalism (again), sports commentaries and gossip columns, the Bible and even nursery rhymes.

It’s no surprise, then, if still striking, to find that most of the next chapter, Nausicaa, which describes a series of events focused round a naive and sentimental young woman, is written entirely in the style of a popular ladies romance ‘with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.’ Previously the parodic elements had been episodic: now they take over the first half of an entire chapter. And so it is with the next one.

Parody in the Oxen of the Sun

Chapter 14. Oxen of the Sun, is something else again. From start to finish a third-person narrator or the ‘initial style’ don’t make an appearance, as the entire chapter consists (after an initial invocation) of a tissue of parodies which recapitulate the entire history of the English language. There are parodies of Anglo-Saxon, medieval romance, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose, Daniel Defoe, Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Gothic prose, Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincy, Charles Dickens and Cardinal Newman to mention only the highlights. I can’t find online an exact list of the targets of all of the paragraphs; this is the nearest I could find, which omits half a dozen of the early ones.

That in itself is a graspable idea, and in fact I found it very enjoyable. But the chapter opens with a sort of invocation and there’s no way you could understand this (or the chaotic way it ends) without consulting a guide.

The opening incantations

The chapter opens with a made-up incantation which mixes Gaelic and Latin elements:

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

You have to look this up to discover that ‘Deshil is an Anglicization of the Irish deasil which carries the general meaning of ‘turning to the right’ or ‘turning toward the sun’, while Eamus is Latin for ‘Let us go’ – so ‘Deshil Eamus’ means something like ‘Let us turn to the right’ or possibly ‘toward the sun’. Since ‘Holles’ Street is the location of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital, the whole thing can be broadly translated as ‘let us turn to the sun in Holles Street’, which both references the oxen of the sun, but also the book’s insistent theme of paternity, namely the son Stephen looking for a father, and the birth of a baby boy which happens half way through the chapter.

This incantation is followed by two more incantatory sentences, each of them performing a threefold repetition of a threefold sentence: 3 x 3 x 3. Which are themselves followed by two paragraphs of highly Latinate prose, one in the prose style of historians Sallust and Tacitus, the second in medieval Latin prose. All this before we get to the start of the parodies.

It always confused me that the chapter didn’t just start at the beginning with Anglo-Saxon, but the commentaries explain that these preliminaries amount to 1) a parody of a religion incantation (fair enough) and 2) combine Celtic, Latin and English as a kind of forewarning of the three linguistic elements out of which Irish English grew.

Also, I couldn’t detect a distinctly Viking-Danish section, which I thought odd because it was the Vikings who founded Dublin: the internet tells me they established a fortified settlement around 841 AD at the ‘black pool’ (the Dyflin or Dubh Linn) where the Rivers Liffey and Poddle meet. But maybe it’s there and I just didn’t get it.

To recap: there is 1) a religious invocation, 2) 3 paragraphs representing the Latin of the Roman conquerors of ancient Britain, before 3) Anglo-Saxon announces the start of the series of paragraphs each of which represents a different era in the development of English prose.

And this chronological sequence is mapped onto the growth of a baby in the womb because we are in a maternity hospital.

The plot

In the plot what seems to have happened is Bloom caught a tram from Sandymount into the centre of Dublin meaning to check up on Mina Purefoy. He bumped into a Dr Dixon who treated him the previous month for a bee-sting and tells him to come along to the common room where a few of the lads are gathered and are drinking and carousing so this is what Bloom does, although he is careful to tip his glass away without drinking, just as he dodged having to drink anything in Cyclops (‘For he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his neighbour nist not of this wile.’)

Stephen is there and he is hammered. He has been drinking for 6 hours on an empty stomach, victim of all kinds of frustrations and resentments. He is the wildest of the crew. His heart is full of bitterness – ‘for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.’

Further to the numbers mentioned above (3 x 3 x 3), Hugh Kenner points out that it takes Bloom 11 paragraphs to get into the common room; there follow 40 paragraphs of prose pastiches, representing the 40 week gestation of a foetus; and then 11 paragraphs describe the breaking up of the party in the common room and everyone going their separate ways – Bloom and Stephen separately making their way into Nighttown, the red light district of Dublin. So it is another example of Joyce’s favourite rhetorical device, chiasmus: ‘a rhetorical device that reverses the order of words, phrases or ideas in two parallel clauses, creating an A-B-B-A pattern’. In other words, symmetry: 11 opening, 40 central, 11 closing.

The parodies

So the chapter consists of forty paragraphs each one done in the styles of different eras of English prose, presented in chronological order. Apparently, Joyce relied heavily on reference books like Saintsbury’s ‘History of English prose Rhythm’ (1912). To see what happens (if patterns emerge), and as a quick overview you can skim through to get the effect, I’m going to quote the first sentence of all 40:

Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship…
(Anglo-Saxon alliterative prose of Aelfric)

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming.
(Anglo-Saxon)

Of that house A. Horne is lord [see Cast, below]. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God’s angel to Mary quoth.
(Medieval)

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid…
(Alliterative Middle English of Piers Ploughman)

Loth to irk in Horne’s hall hat holding the seeker [Bloom] stood. On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine years had long outwandered…

As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was…

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman…

The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed…

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon.
(Medieval travel stories from the 1400s)

And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.
(Arthurian legend from the 1400s)

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each..

This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied fast.

Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be drunken an they might.

For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen other as touching birth and righteousness…

But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art could save so dark is destiny.

About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray.
(Elizabethan history chronicles)

Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would sing a bawdy catch Staboo Stabella about a wench that was put in pod of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack… [until Nurse Quigley comes and tells him to stop singing]

To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he had not cided to take friar’s vows and he answered him obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days….
(Miltonic Latinate prose from the 1600s)

Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly Etienne chanson but he loudly bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler.

But was young Boasthard’s fear vanquished by Calmer’s words? No, for he had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be done away.
(Religious Allegorical prose of John Bunyan)

This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and know her.

So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won’t sprout, fields athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too…
(17th century English diarists such as Samuel Pepys)

Lenehan announces that the letter Mr Deasy gave Stephen in chapter 2 has indeed been published in the newspaper which triggers a long discussion about one of the real life issues of the book, the outbreak of foot and mouth disease among Ireland’s cattle and how to treat it.

With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter was in that night’s gazette and he made a show to find it about him (for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on Stephen’s persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near by which he did mighty brisk.
(English journalist Daniel Defoe)

Enter Buck Mulligan and Alec Bannon. They’ve been caught in a shower of rain.

Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon, who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars.
(Early 1700s periodical essays in the style of the Tatler and Spectator)

Mulligan presents a farcical plan to set up a hospital to inseminate women wanting a baby.

He proposed to set up there a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he take a penny for his pains.

He’s gone so far as to have a card printed:

Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell’s bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator. Lambay Island.

After which he is referred to by various jokey names such as Le Fécondateur. Back to the first sentences of each paragraph:

Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had advanced.
(18th century Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne)

Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and, having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with a profound bow to the company…
(18th century Anglo-Irish novelist, poet, and playwright Oliver Goldsmith)

At this point Nurse Callan comes to announce that Mrs Purefoy has finally had her child:

The young surgeon [Dixon], however, rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was enceinte which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had given birth to a bouncing boy.

After Nurse Callan leaves, Costello makes rude comments about her which triggers Dixon to make a long facetious defence of her honour and womanhood.

To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity…
(18th century Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke)

But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal polity?
(18th century satirist Junius)

This is a paragraph unexpectedly containing sustained criticism of Bloom, including his penchant for masturbation: ‘A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life’ and ticks him off for flirting with the serving girl Gerty when he has a fine wife at home, ‘Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare?’ and again: ‘The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for a consort neglected and debauched…’

The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation that an heir had been born…
(Philosophical historian Edward Gibbon)

Then a parody of Gothic:

But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them…
(Gothic novelist Horace Walpole)

This deals with the sudden appearance of the Englishman Haines in the common room. He’s come to tell Mulligan to meet him at the Westland Row station at 11.10pm to catch the last train back to Sandymount (location of the Martello Tower) and get back to the Martello Tower.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood…
(Romantic essayist Charles Lamb)

Bloom reminisces about losing his virginity to Bridie Kelly, a symbol of fruitless sterile sexual encounters, compared with inseminating Molly and the next two paragraphs continue Bloom’s thoughts.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived…
(Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey)

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood.

The next one cuts to Stephen and a query about old schoolfriends triggers an important statement of the power of the author to conjure up characters.

Francis [Costello] was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee’s time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life.
(In the style of Walter Savage Landor’s ‘Imaginary Conversations’)

‘Bullockbefriending bard’ being the joke nickname he imagines funny Buck Mulligan giving him after he’s told him about the letter from Deasy about foot and mouth disease. But also continuing the theme of oxen of the sun, and the cock and bull joke thread. In fact this paragraph evolves away into a detailed description of the Gold Cup race in which Lenahan and others lost money when the outsider Throwaway won in the final furlongs.

However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the case at all…
(Essayist and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay)

The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne’s house had never beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopaedic…

Which of course refers to this chapter, this text itself, with its encyclopedic ambition.

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus’ (Div. Scep.) contentions would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to accepted scientific methods…
(Biologist and essayist Thomas Henry Huxley)

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had manfully helped…
(Charles Dickens)

There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait…
(Cardinal Newman)

The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an unhealthiness, a flair, for the cruder things of life…
(English essayist Walter Pater)

Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent.
(Art critic John Ruskin)

After a lull, Stephen suggests they leave the hospital and move on to a local pub:

Burke’s! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not…
(Scottish essayist and satirist Thomas Carlyle)

And they pile out of the boozy common room and into a corridor of the hospital.

Nurse Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news of placentation ended… The door! It is open? Ha! They are out, tumultuously, off for a minute’s race, all bravely legging it…

Only Bloom pauses to tell the nurse to give his best wishes to the mother, and then asks Nurse Callan: ‘Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?’

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee.

Coda

The procession of historical parodies having (apparently) reached the present day, as the drunken crew bursts out into the night air, the text disintegrates into drunken chaos, barely comprehensible. As stated at the start, this collapse of thought and expression into complete chaos is Joyce’s equivalent of the annihilation of Odysseus’s sailors by the angry gods, in Homer.

All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides. Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil’s sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o’ me knows.

You need a guide to understand almost all of this. As well as the Homeric parallel, maybe it’s also intended to reflect the atmosphere of a packed pub in central Dublin near to closing time?

Query. Who’s astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week gone. Yours?

Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw Hielentman’s your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot boil!

Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like, seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He’ve got the chink ad lib.

’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam, two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn!

You move a motion? Steve boy, you’re going it some. More bluggy drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate one expensive inaugurated libation? Give’s a breather. Landlord, landlord, have you good wine, staboo?

I think closing time comes to the pub and everyone’s chucked out onto the street:

Closingtime, gents. Eh?… Bonsoir la compagnie… Where’s the buck and Namby Amby?Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e’en gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower.

‘King to tower’ meaning Buck Mulligan has left the group to catch the last tram back to his Martello tower.

Golly, whatten tunket’s yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What’s he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James.

Your attention! We’re nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.

Which Hugh Kenner annotates: ‘The Leith police dismisseth us’ is a test the police administer to late night revellers to test how drunk they are. And Yooka, yook and ook are Joyce’s words for someone puking.

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes. Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

In which Pflaaaap! indicates a clap of thunder. In other words this is an ironic (and quite submerged) reference to the thunder and lightning Zeus sent after the departing Odysseus and his men after they had slaughtered the sun god’s cattle (see above).

The final paragraph indicates that drunk Stephen persuades drunk Lynch to accompany him to Nighttown, Dublin’s red light district, to seek out a brothel:

Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o’ me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is. Righto, any old time…

And so off they stagger towards the next chapter, ‘Circe’:

Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!

Cast

The group of drinkers are listed several times, in different voices, in styles appropriate to the era being parodied:

So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon, Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer.

Leop. Bloom of Crawford’s journal sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy’s, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom there for a languor he had but was now better

As to individual characters in the chapter:

Leopold Bloom – ‘Mr Canvasser Bloom’, ‘staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds’, the main protagonist of ‘Ulysses’. The Oxen of the Sun directly follows Nausicaa in which Bloom was on the beach at Sandymount Strand outside Dublin and had a sexual encounter with a young woman he’d never met before (he masturbates while she, from a distance, shows him her stockinged legs and knickers).

In the gap between the two chapters he catches a tram back into central Dublin and walks to the maternity hospital in Holles Street because he’s concerned for a family friend, Mina Purefoy, who’s been in labour for several days. Here a doctor he knows, Dr Dixon, recognises him and invites him to join a drinking party in the doctors’ common room. Here half a dozen lads-about-town are having a riotous party, led by young Stephen Dedalus who Bloom has heard about but never met.

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years [i.e. past 35] that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and a man of rare forecast he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at..

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

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

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

Vincent Lynch – friend of Stephen’s when they were students. Recipient of Stephen’s long disquisition about aesthetics in ‘Portrait’, now just another drunk medical student – ‘Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature wisdom.’

Lenehan – ‘He was a kind of sport gentleman that went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women, horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose gossip.’

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

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

Stephen Dedalus – ‘of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the most drunken that demanded still of more mead’ – ‘he was of a wild manner when he was drunken’ – ‘so grieved he [Bloom] also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered his goods with whores.’ Stephen is very drunk and dominates the table with a series of facetiously learned disquisitions. He is very frustrated that after his clever Shakespeare presentation at the National Library it was flashy, superficial Mulligan who was invited to a soirée at the home of Irish writer George Moore (4 Upper Ely Place, just a few blocks from the maternity hospital). Using his wits to entertain drunk medical students is a pitiful waste of his god-given gifts.

Suddenly I realised that Stephen isn’t Hamlet, as he fancies himself to be. He is young Prince Harry, son of Henry IV, isn’t he? An educated man wasting his days hanging round with lowlifes and routinely getting trolleyed – except, unlike young Prince Hal, Stephen has no kingdom to inherit to redeem himself.

Frank ‘Punch’ Costello – ‘Costello, the eccentric’ – ‘From a child this Frank had been a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor, then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on the roads with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire’s heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids’ linen or choking chicken behind a hedge.’

Malachi Buck Mulligan – ‘the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John Mulligan’. Comes fresh from a literary soiree at the house of George Moore which Stephen jealously wishes he had been invited to. ‘Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man of person’ he wears a primrose vest. His coat is spotted with rain because they were caught in a shower. Eternal joker.

Alec Bannon – ‘the figure of Bannon in explorer’s kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues’ – in ‘Calypso’ we learned that he is dating Bloom’s daughter, Milly, from a letter she sent him (Bloom)

Nurse Callan – a nurse working at the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street. She is an acquaintance of Leopold Bloom who opens the gate for him and provides updates on Mina Purefoy’s difficult, three-day labour.

Haines – the Englishman, staying with Buck Mulligan in the Martello Tower. Terrified Stephen overnight with his nightmare shoutings, then in the morning insulted him with his casual English dismissal of our mistreatment of Ireland for centuries.

Bridie Kelly – young working class woman Bloom lost his virginity to and reminisces about here (she also appears in Circe and Eumaeus), in one of the Gothic paragraphs described as ‘the bride of darkness, a daughter of night’.

Credit

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

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Posted by Simon on February 6, 2026

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Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction

‘You have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it’s injected the wrong way.’
(Buck Mulligan arguing with Stephen Dedalus)

Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
(Stephen’s credo)

‘Your own name is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.’
(John Eglinton responding to Stephen’s lecture about Shakespeare)

Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man…
(Stephen’s self-mocking self description in the same scene)

I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.
(Simon Dedalus threatening to write a letter to Buck Mulligan’s mother exposing him, and demonstrating his vivid and generally comic turn of phrase)

—I beg your parsnips, says Alf.
(In the Cyclops chapter)

James Joyce is a world class literary giant on the basis of his 1922 novel ‘Ulysses’. It’s monster long – around 700 pages in most editions – and has a fearsome reputation for being a ‘difficult’. In many senses it is difficult, often very difficult, but I’m going to have a go at explaining it as simply as I can.

Joyce’s previous and much more conventional novel, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, (published in 1916) told the life story of a transparently fictional version of Joyce himself, named Stephen Dedalus, from toddlerdom to university. When described like that it sounds very straightforward; what complicates it is Joyce’s phenomenal intellectual powers and his increasingly experimental way with prose.

As in his set of short stories, Dubliners (published in 1912), on the surface all is realism, with realistic characters pottering round Dublin, getting into realistic scrapes and having realistic conversations. However, what was clear to perceptive readers of Dubliners from the get-go was that these stories are extremely carefully organised: at a meta level they are arranged so that the collection as a whole describes different stages of life – from boyhood japes in the early stories, to young manhood, maturity, through to the final story, titled The Dead. And within each story, there is also careful structuring and symbolism: for example, the short story ‘Grace’ opens with a middle-aged man passed out pissed in the toilets of a popular bar. He’s helped home by some mates and put to bed while his pals work with his wife to persuade him to go on a religious retreat to try and help him give up the booze. So far so mundane, until someone points out that the three locations of the story – downstairs toilet, bedroom and church – can be seen as the three locations of the afterlife: hell, purgatory and paradise. And once you know this, you are able to spot further little clues which have been sprinkled about the story, symbols or Latin phrases which subtly reference and gesture towards this concealed structure.

Well, magnify this method a thousandfold and you have ‘Ulysses’. I’ll consider it in three ways: first, the literal story; then the structure which underpins (or has been imposed) on it; thirdly, (some of) the linguistic innovations introduced in ‘Ulysses’, innovations which start slowly but spread to become completely rampant. It’s these innovations in prose style and structure which are the real stumbling blocks of the novel, often making it hard to read on the sentence, paragraph and page levels, presenting countless challenges to comprehension, and from relatively early on. But first, a look at the structure:

Structure

‘Ulysses’ is divided into 18 chapters, which are themselves gathered into three parts: part 1 contains 3 chapters; part 2 12 chapters; part 3 has 3 chapters.

What happens

Part 1: Chapters 1 to 3

At 8am on Thursday 4 June 1904 young Stephen Dedalus wakes up in the Martello Tower on Dublin Bay where he’s been dossing with a friend, medical student Malachi ‘Buck’ Mulligan. He’s cross because he was kept awake by the noisy nightmares of a third guest, the Englishman Haines. He’s also in a bad mood because Mulligan teases him because his (Stephen’s) mother recently died, and Stephen refused, on principle, to kneel by the bedside of his dying mother, something which now haunts him with guilt. This trio of young bucks go for a quick dip in the sea (well, fastidious Stephen doesn’t take part) then (in chapter 2) Stephen goes on to the school where he teaches part time, takes a history lesson, gets paid by the pedantic headmaster. In chapter 3 we are alone with Stephen and his thoughts as he walks along the beach.

Part 2: Chapter 4 to chapter 15

Cut back to 8am in the household of Leopold Bloom in central Dublin. Bloom is a middle-aged seller of newspaper advertising, a job which involves tramping the streets of Dublin touting for business. He’s married to Molly. He makes her breakfast in bed, fries breakfast for himself and then sets off on his day’s work. His day includes:

  • a trip to the Post Office
  • attending the funeral of a friend
  • visiting the office of a newspaper to place an ad
  • popping into Davy Byrne’s pub for a sandwich lunch
  • going to the National Library to look up an ad in an old newspaper, where his path doesn’t quite cross Stephen who is in the office of the Head Librarian, delivering another one of his literary theories, this time about the true meaning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to representatives of Dublin’s literary elite
  • Bloom has dinner at the Ormond Hotel while listening to other characters playing the piano and singing
  • Bloom moves on Barney Kiernan’s pub where he meets a character referred to only as The Citizen who is a pugnacious Irish nationalist who ends up trying to attack him
  • Bloom wanders out to Sandymount Strand on the seashore, and watches a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, who’s with some friends; aware of him watching her, Gerty deliberately flashes her legs in a sexy way and arouses Bloom so much that, watching from a safe distance as night falls on the beach, he masturbates to a climax: although it’s a little difficult to make out through Joyce’s highly-mannered prose what’s happening, it was this chapter which got ‘Ulysses’ banned in America and Britain
  • Bloom visits a maternity hospital where a family friend named Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the arrival of his frenemy Buck Mulligan
  • when the maternity hospital drinking party breaks up, Stephen and his friend Lynch walk into Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district, where Bloom follows them into Bella Cohen’s brothel; everyone is quite drunk by now and the scene is extremely long and filled with grotesque hallucinations, climaxing with Stephen being kicked out onto the street where he manages to get into an argument with a British soldier who knocks him to the ground where Bloom comes to his rescue

Part 3: Chapters 16 to 18

  • To sober him up, Bloom takes Stephen to a nearby cabman’s shelter by Butt Bridge where they encounter a drunken sailor
  • Bloom takes Stephen back to his place, makes him a cup of cocoa and they have a post-drunk conversation about the educational and cultural differences between them; they both go outside to pee in the garden; Stephen refuses Bloom’s offer of a bed for the night and staggers off into the night while Bloom goes to bed next to his sleeping wife
  • Chapter 18 is famous because it consists solely of Molly Bloom’s thoughts as she lies in bed next to her passed-out husband: the 40 or so pages contain only eight paragraphs with no punctuation in a tour-de-force of the relatively unknown technique of stream-of-consciousness: she remembers her various boyfriends and reminisces about courting and having sex with them, before the novel ends with a description of her having an orgasm, marked by the words yes yes yes which conclude this vast epic novel

There is One Big Fact I haven’t found space to explain yet and this is that, right from the start of his day, Bloom has known that a rival of his, the music impresario and flashy man-about-town, Hugh ‘Blazes’ Boylan, is going to call by his house, at 4pm that afternoon, supposedly to discuss details of the concert tour he’s arranged for Molly, but in reality to have sex with her. Bloom knows she is taking Boylan as her lover and yet feels powerless to stop it. And so he spends his entire day in a state of anxiety and suspense, continually looking at the clock at every venue he visits, in anticipation of zero hour; and then, after 4pm, reluctant to return to his house afterwards 1) lest he encounters the couple still at it of Boylan just leaving and 2) because he won’t know what to say to his wife.

So it’s a long book, and there’s a lot of words to read but I hope this summary shows that, on a basic narrative level, the story is relatively straightforward. All the events are highly realistic and plausible, if not actively boring and mundane, and once you’re told that this is the sequence of events the book describes, you can approach it with a lot less trepidation. What daunts people is the buried symbolism and above all the difficult prose style. Next: the Greek myth connection, or: why is it called Ulysses?

Ulysses and the Odyssey

Like every educated person, Joyce had read the two great epic poems of the ancient Greek author Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad is a tragic account of the key episode at the heart of the ten-year-long Trojan War when the Greek hero Achilles, furious at the Greek leader Agamemnon, retires to his tent and refuses to fight. This has tragic consequences because when the Trojans counter-attack and make it as far as the Greek tents, Achilles lets his friend and soul-mate Patroclus put on his armour and rally the troops; Patroclus does this until he comes face to face with the Trojan hero Hector who slaughters him like a beast and the rest of the poem describes Achilles’ immense fury and bottomless grief.

But if the Iliad is tragic, the Odyssey has a very different feel. After the ten-year Trojan War ended, the Greek hero famous for his wily cunning, Odysseus, the man who came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse which led to the final defeat of the besieged city, it takes him ten further years to get home to his wife Penelope and his young son Telemachus (i.e. Odysseus is away from his kingdom of Ithaca for 20 years).

The poem actually opens near the end, with his last adventure, washing up on the shore of Princess Nausicaa, being discovered, bathed and dressed, then invited to a feast in her palace and it is here that he tells all the other guests his amazing adventures – being enslaved by Circe the magician, being held prisoner by the one-eyed Cyclops, sailing past the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis, having to be tied to the mast in order not to give way to the seductive song of the Sirens, and many more.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, the Odyssey tells us how, throughout these ten long years, Odysseus’s faithful wife Penelope remained at home in their palace, putting off the many suitors who wanted to marry her and so inherit Odysseus’s kingdom. And it tells us how towards the end of this long period his son, Telemachus, come of age during his father’s absence, sets out on a quest of his own to find his father.

So with that understood, back to Joyce. Apparently Joyce had begun a story which he intended to be another short realistic yarn to join a revised edition of his short story collection ‘Dubliners’, about a Jewish advertising salesman with an unfaithful wife who wanders the streets in a peculiar frame of mind as he knows his wife is preparing to meet her lover, in his marital bed.

One thing led to another as Joyce wondered what if this advertising salesman met the young avatar he had created of himself in ‘A Portrait’, Stephen Dedalus? What would they discuss, what would they make of each other? And at some point he had the Eureka moment when it occurred to him that maybe this fellow Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin could be mapped onto Odysseus’s ancient adventures, maybe those ancient stories could give it a structure and, more than that, a kind of deep literary resonance, of the kind he was used to concealing in his Dubliners stories (like ‘Grace’, as described above),

When I tried to read ‘Ulysses’ at school I found it a great struggle because 1) I had no idea what was going on and 2) as the text progresses, the prose becomes difficult to read (see next section). You really need to know that the three central characters are modern avatars of Homer’s three characters: Bloom is wily old Odysseus; Stephen plays the role of his son, Telemachus; and Molly is the faithful Penelope waiting at home for her man. Except that they’re not a perfect match, are they? Stephen isn’t actually Bloom’s son and when, at the end, Bloom suggests a closer friendship Stephen mumbles something and wanders off into the night. No reconciliation there. And Molly, she is hardly the model of a faithful wife, in fact the whole point is that she is the exact opposite. And Bloom is hardly a macho Greek warrior, very much the reverse, he is a shy and diffident Jew in a Catholic country, liable to be discriminated against and picked on. So the novel’s central characters are in no way like-for-like matches of the Homeric epic, they are something more like ironic reincarnations, satirical avatars, reflecting the comic bathos of modern life.

But if I didn’t understand the roles played by these characters, the biggest single stumbling block to grasping the mythic resonances of the novel was the way the 18 chapters in Joyce’s text have no titles. Just giving them titles, and a sentence of explanation, would have transformed my experience.

As soon as I came across a book which explained that each of the chapters reflects or is based on a specific episode from the Odyssey, and clearly indicated which one was which, my whole reading experience was transformed. Augmented by the knowledge that the 18 chapters are further grouped into three parts which themselves are based on the main thematic elements of the Odyssey story, as follows:

  1. the first three chapters, describing Stephen waking in the tower, going to school and wandering into Dublin, are titled the Telemachia or wanderings of Telemachus
  2. the 12 central chapters can be thought of as the Odyssey proper, describing the many adventures of Bloom during the day
  3. the final three chapters, when Bloom takes Stephen home, can be grouped as the Nostos, Greek for return so the ‘Return’ part of the story, reflecting the final chapters of Homer’s poem which describe the homecoming of the long-absent hero

Why Ulysses and not Odysseus?

The ancient Romans not only co-opted many of the Greek gods, subsuming them into the existing Latin pantheon, they did the same with many of the mortal heroes of ancient Greece. When the Romans translated the Greek legends from Greek into Latin, they sometimes found it easier to change the names as well, to make them easier to pronounce. The early Latin translators of Homer probably adapted the Greek Ὀδυσσεύς into the Sicilian Οὐλίξης, and then the Etruscan Uluxe, before arriving at the shorter, more Roman-friendly Ulysses.

So that’s why you see two names being used for the same person: Odysseus is his original Greek name as used by Homer; Ulysses is the name used by Roman authors, such as Virgil, when describing the Tale of Troy.

So why did Joyce use the Latin name? Apparently, when he was a boy of 12, Joyce’s thoughts on the subject were crystallised when he first read the story in Charles Lamb’s book ‘The Story of Ulysses’ (1808), and that version of the name stuck. Having been brought up in a heavily Catholic school, Latin was all around him, in the Mass and liturgy and so on, and so he took to the Latinate forms (unlike late Victorian English Protestant private schools of the time, where there would have been as much emphasis on ancient Greek and so the Greek names are preferred by English writers).

Plot structure version 2

So here’s the chapter structure again, but this time indicating the episode from the Odyssey which each one is based on and explaining the parallels with the Homeric episode, such as they are:

Part 1: The Telemachia (the wanderings of Telemachus / Stephen)

Chapter 1: Telemachus

8am. Introducing Stephen Dedalus, bunking in the Martello Tower being rented by Buck Mulligan. Breakfast. Stephen should be mourning his recently dead mother and so borrows an all-black suit from Mulligan. In other words, he is dressed in mourning for the whole of the novel.

Chapter 2: Nestor (wise king of Pylos, advisor to the heroes)

Stephen’s encounter with school headmaster Garrett Deasy, who asks him to take a letter to the newspaper about foot-and-mouth disease. (Which gives rise to Stephen’s mortified expectation that Mulligan will mock him as ‘the bullockbefriending bard’, which becomes one of many recurring phrases, not to mention later cattle-related jokes such as someone being a bull in a china shop etc.)

[Myth parallel: Remember I mentioned that Bloom, Stephen and Molly are not direct avatars of their heroic predecessors but more like satirical, ironic modern versions. Well, as you can see here, the pompous Unionist headmaster Deasy is far indeed from being an avatar of wise old king Nestor of Greek mythology. Quite obviously he is a comic parody and yet there are commonalities: Nestor trained young horses, Deasy’s career is training teenage boys.]

Chapter 3: Proteus (the shape-shifting sea god from Greek myth)

Stephen wanders down to the seashore at Sandymount Strand and his mind wanders, free-associating ideas and memories from school and university, shreds of knowledge, quotes in various languages, perceptions and the rhythmic sound of the waves all melding in his mind to make this one of the most daunting of all the chapters to read, certainly in the first half.

[Myth parallel: You can see how the concept of the shape-shifting god maps nicely onto the endless shape-shifting of the protagonist’s mind.]

Part 2: the Odyssey (the wanderings of Ulysses / Leopold Bloom)

Chapter 4: Calypso

Cut back to 8am and Leopold Bloom, waking up, having breakfast, reading his mail, taking a letter from Blazes Boylan to his wife Molly in bed.

[Myth parallel: Calypso was a nymph from Greek mythology, famous for holding the hero Odysseus captive on her island, Ogygia, for seven years. Note that here, at the start of Bloom’s novel, Molly is Calypso. In the final chapter the same Molly stands in for the completely different figure of Penelope. Which shows you how Joyce’s parallels are exact in some respects but can be very loose if needs be.]

Chapter 5: Lotus Eaters

Bloom has an hour to kill before he has to attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral at 11am so he does a handful of chores in a lazy sensual mood: he goes to the Post Office, posts a letter, wanders into a Catholic church (incense and gold), buys a bar of lemon soap at a chemist and fantasises about paying a visit to Dublin’s Turkish baths.

[Myth parallel: The Lotus Eaters were a mythical people from Homer’s Odyssey, living on an island where they ate the narcotic lotus flower which caused blissful forgetfulness, a desire to stay, and loss of ambition. This is one of the more oblique of the Homeric parallels.]

Chapter 6: Hades or hell

Along with three friends, including Stephen’s father Simon Dedalus, Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam, taking the long journey by funeral carriage across Dublin to the burial in Glasnevin cemetery. This triggers in Bloom thoughts of his own son, Rudy, who died young, and of his father who committed suicide with poison.

[Myth parallel: This is one of the more obvious and direct allusions, matching Odysseus’s trip to the Greek underworld and a modern funeral.]

Chapter 7: Aeolus, the god of wind

This chapter is notable for the way the text is broken up by no fewer than 63 captions in the style of newspaper headlines, ironically summarising the content of each section.

At the office of the Dublin newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, Bloom walks past the huge printing machines to the editor’s office where he attempts to place an ad for a client. Stephen arrives at the same office bringing (as promised) Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease. Bloom notices Stephen and that his boots are dirty but they do not actually meet. Instead the chapter mostly consists of long wordy conversations between half a dozen editors, hacks and scroungers, about each other, Dublin gossip, and racing tips.

[Myth parallel: In Greek mythology Aeolus was the keeper of the winds, ruling from the island of Aeolia where he held the violent winds captive in a bag. Control of the winds of information and opinion is an ironic or satirical way of thinking about a newspaper, and gassy windiness also describes the banter of the 7 or 8 characters gathered in the office.]

Chapter 8: Lestrygonians (a race of giant, cannibalistic ogres in Greek mythology)

Bloom wanders the streets feeling hungry, bumps into an old flame, Josie Breen, notices the (real life) author A.E. walking past him with a lady acolyte. He enters Burton’s restaurant but is overwhelmed by the smell and sight of so many people eating, so leaves and pops into Davy Byrne’s pub for a light lunch of a cheese sandwich and a glass of Burgundy wine. When he leaves, 4 or 5 other characters discuss his character.

Out on the street, he helps a blind man (who we later learn is a piano tuner) to cross the road and ponders at length all the implications of being blind – then walks on to the National Library. Thinking about food has led him to consider the human body as a machine, food in-poo out, which leads to the eccentric speculation whether traditional Greek statues were depicted with anuses. As he enters the National Library he has a quick squint up at the big statues flanking the entrance, to check.

[Myth parallel: obsession with food links the classical reference and the modern chapter.]

Chapter 9: Scylla and Charybdis

Cut to Stephen in the head librarian’s office at the National Library delivering another one of his literary theories, this time about the true meaning of Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, appropriately enough because he is dressed in mourning (though for a dead mother not a dead father, as is the case with the Danish prince). Stephen and Bloom’s paths nearly cross as the latter pops in to look up an ad in an old newspaper but, again, they don’t actually meet.

[Myth parallel: In the Odyssey Odysseus’ ship has to sail the narrow channel between the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. I’ve read a clever interpretation pointing out that the two monsters can be mapped on to the two types of aesthetic theory dramatised in this chapter: Stephen’s theory of Shakespeare insists that the Bard’s great plays arose from the tribulations of his own sometimes squalid personal life but he’s presenting it to the older generation of Dublin critics who believe art should be about beautiful timeless spiritual ideals – so it’s these two opposing theories which represent the two legendary monsters, and which Joyce the author had to navigate between. Clever. There might also be a canny little micro-parallel because, as Bloom enters the Library, he walks between Stephen and his friend Mulligan exiting, who also represent two ends of a spectrum, Mulligan all glib flashy smartness, Stephen, deep but gloomy introspection.]

Chapter 10: Wandering Rocks

Nineteen short vignettes describe the movements of the central figures and about 30 secondary characters through the streets of Dublin. The episode begins by following kind-hearted Father Conmee, a Jesuit priest, walking north and stopping for a kind word for various parishioners, and ends with an account of the cavalcade of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, William Ward, Earl of Dudley, processing through the streets on his way to inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer’s hospital, and with the response of the 19 or so characters described in the preceding vignettes to his carriage as it passes.

[Myth parallel: Wandering rocks and wandering Dubliners.]

Chapter 11: Sirens

Bloom has dinner at the Ormond Hotel whose bar is dominated by the ministrations of two barmaids, dark-haired Miss Kennedy and brunette Miss Douce, while other characters gossip and then play the piano and sing some airs in the hotel’s dining room. Bloom gets a pen and paper to write a furtive reply to his lover Martha’s letter to him.

[Myth parallel: In Greek mythology the sirens were enchanting beings, half-woman, half-bird, who lured sailors to shipwreck and death with their irresistible songs; so the sirens are represented by the two barmaids, who don’t themselves sing but the scene is full of characters playing and singing, not least Stephen’s father, Simon.]

Chapter 12: Cyclops

Up till now the chapters have been cast in what you could call basic stream of consciousness, albeit often difficult to follow. The remaining six chapters of the novel are all longer and each one has its own individual format. Chapter 12 breaks the convention of the novel up to now by being narrated by an unnamed Dubliner who has a completely different ‘voice’ or style from either Stephen or Bloom.

This narrator works as a debt collector and goes to Barney Kiernan’s pub where he meets a character referred to only as ‘The Citizen’ who is a vehement Irish nationalist. When Bloom arrives at the pub, he is subjected to an antisemitic rant by the Citizen and various other characters come to his defence.

[Myth parallel: The Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey was Polyphemus, a giant, one-eyed son of the sea god Poseidon who captured Odysseus and his men in his cave. This monster eats several of the sailors before Odysseus manages to get him drunk then blind him with a sharpened stake, and escaping. So the Citizen is the Cyclops and the one-eyed reference is a satirical take on the bigoted monomania of Irish nationalism.]

Chapter 13: Nausicaa

Bloom wanders out to Sandymount Strand where he watches a young woman, Gerty MacDowell, who flashes her legs to excite him. The first half is written as a parody of a romance magazine, the second half more realistically from Bloom’s point of view.

[In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausicaa was daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of Phaeacia, famous for discovering and helping the shipwrecked Odysseus, giving him clothes, food, and guidance to her father’s palace. So the reincarnation of the elegant princess as a flirty young woman is obviously full of ironies and a vivid example of the general idea of how ‘fallen’ or degraded the modern world is.]

Chapter 14: Oxen of the Sun

Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends. At the end the drinking party breaks up, Mulligan catching the train back to his tower while Stephen drunkenly blunders off to the red light district accompanied by his pal, medical student Vincent Lynch. Worried about him, a much more sober Bloom follows.

[In the Odyssey Odysseus and his men come to the island of the sun god Helios, and are warned not to touch his holy cattle. When Odysseus goes off to pray for guidance his hungry men slaughter, roast and eat some of the cattle. Odysseus returns and tells them to flee but their ships are pursued by the sun god’s anger and most of his men are wrecked and drowned. The parallel is loose here, as this chapter is famous for mimicking the growth of the foetus in its mother’s womb by parodying the evolution of English from the original Anglo-Saxon onwards.]

Chapter 15: Circe

Bloom follows Stephen and his pal Lynch into a brothel where they both experience a series of grotesque Rabelaisian hallucinations. After smashing the chandelier with his walking stick, Stephen is kicked out onto the street where he gets into a fight with a British soldier and is knocked down, leaving Bloom to pick him up and sort him out.

[In the Odyssey, Circe was a powerful sorceress who used her magic to turn Odysseus’s men into swine and keep them imprisoned for years. Obviously there are no years here, just one night, and there is no crew, just Stephen, Lynch and Bloom. But the monstrous brothelkeeper Bella Cohen is a fittingly grotesque parody of the beautiful magical Circe of Homer.]

Part 3: Nostos (the Return)

Chapter 16: Eumaeus

[Myth parallel: in the Odyssey, Eumaeus is the loyal swineherd of Odysseus, a man of noble birth kidnapped as a child who had become a trusted friend of the master and is the first point of contact for the disguised hero upon his return to Ithaca.]

In the novel, having saved Stephen from arrest after his altercation with the soldier, Bloom takes Stephen to the cabman’s shelter near Butt Bridge where they encounter a drunken sailor: so the drunken sailor is the parallel to Eumaeus.

Chapter 17: Ithaca

[Myth parallel: In the Odyssey, Ithaca is Odysseus’s kingdom to which he returns.]

In the novel Ithaca it is Bloom’s house, to which he brings Stephen for a cup of cocoa.

Chapter 18: Penelope

[Myth parallel: In the Odyssey, Penelope is Odysseus’s loyal wife who waits for 20 long years for her husband to return, spurning the advances of numerous eligible suitors to replace the husband they all claim is dead.]

In the novel, Penelope is reincarnated as Molly Bloom, and the novel ends by abandoning the men and the male perspective altogether and ending with the huge seamless stream-of-consciousness flow of Molly’s falling-asleep thoughts.

Technical innovations

So far I’ve talked about the ‘structure’ of the novel but I have barely mentioned the technical or style innovations which make it such a demanding read on the page, made it so notorious in its time, and for a generation afterwards made it feel as if Joyce had not just revolutionised the novel with his elaborate system of symbols and references, but had revolutionised English prose as well.

Two or three of these quirks or innovations had already appeared in ‘A Portrait’ but in ‘Ulysses’ they are cranked up to the max, along with new novelties.

1. Formal, studied prose

Not an innovation as such, just the foundation on which everything else sits: but Joyce’s prose, even at its least experimental, is surprisingly formal and stiff and mannered. He consistently writes sentences not as you’d expect them to flow but with a deliberate stiffness. He consistently puts words into a counter-intuitive order. After a while I realised he always puts the adverb where you don’t expect it, counter to its usual position in everyday English. As in: ‘He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs…’ where putting ‘slowly’ after ‘inhaling’ makes you linger on it longer, process it more, gives it more weight. Or:

The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.

You’d expect ‘again’ to come after ‘stiff wheels’; you’d expect ‘more quickly’ to come after ‘beard’ and so on. He does this even in his plainest sentences and it gives them a studied, calculated movement. You argue he does so in order to describe things, especially people’s actions, with a finicky super-precision. Here’s the start of chapter 6:

Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after him, curving his height with care.

Also, he enjoyed avoiding the common word and using the slightly more official or officious word or phrase. After helping him with his sums, Stephen watches Sargent hurriedly change and run out onto the sports field.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him.

‘Where sharp voices were in strife‘ is not the easiest most colloquial way to describe a bunch of boys shouting on a football pitch. It is studied and formal. Ditto the third sentence which contains the odd phrase ‘voices again contending’. You or I might write ‘the sound of the boys arguing again’ but Joyce prefers this much more stiff and formal arrangement: ‘voices again contending’. And note ‘again’ in the unusual position, you or I would say ‘voices arguing again’, but putting it before the verb, this time, has the effect of making every word feel more studied and carefully presented, as at an exhibition of sentences.

So we must bear in mind that even when he’s trying to write relatively ‘straight’, before he got up to any formal tricks, Joyce’s prose style was already oddly stiff, spavined and constricted: highly self-conscious and ornately arranged. This lends even the most supposedly straightforward passages a certain stiff, presentational feel, before we get to any of his party tricks.

2. No speech marks

Joyce had a foible about/well thought-out intellectual objections (delete where applicable) to speech marks / quotation marks / inverted commas. In all the texts Joyce had final say over he replaced the conventional introduction of speech by double apostrophes with an em dash, with no indication where a piece of dialogue ended. Just this one change is surprisingly confusing. It has the cumulative effect of meaning you’re never quite sure where a piece of speech ends and the narrative, or a character’s thoughts, begin.

—Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand. These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.

3. No hyphens

Just as he disliked speech marks, so Joyce early on decided to dispense with hyphens and just to run two hyphenated words together. ‘A Portrait’ is full of examples like illfated, selfrestraint, rosesoft and hundreds more. And so it is here, as indicated by the novel’s famous 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.

Innocent though this foible first appears, like dispensing with speech marks it is the first stirrings of the disintegration of language the book is going to deploy on a massive scale. For just as dispensing with speech marks makes it increasingly hard to know where direct speech ends and free indirect speech (i.e. the character’s own thoughts) begins; so dispensing with hyphens where they ought to go marks the start of start of not knowing where one word ends and another begins; in practice, it marks the start of Joyce’s running words together in original and increasingly inventive ways.

It starts with dropping hyphens in a phrase like:

He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow at the lowered blinds of the avenue.'(chapter 6).

But then it moves on to sticking together words which should never be joined to create new words:

… an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane

You can see in this example how he realises he’s stumbled across a new piece of grammar, the portmanteau noun, and as the novel progresses, the technique of jamming 2, 3 or more words together becomes more outrageous. So as Stephen walks by the sea in chapter 3, he fancifully imagines everyone in the world linked back to their mothers via a ghostly umbilical cord:

The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh…

And then drops the first of his made-up, portmanteau words, imagining the early Christian heretic Arius:

Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality.

After all, if you can glue two words directly together, why not three or four or five words? This is a taste of things to come…

3. Learnèd allusions

We could be here all week describing this one but the basic idea is simple. Joyce was hyper well-read and developed the habit in ‘A Portrait’ of dropping allusions to his learning into the narrative bits of text. Quite regularly the supposed narrative in fact contains no narrative at all, just a tissue of allusions, as if giving you direct access to the flux of (super-literate) thoughts in the main protagonist, Stephen’s, head. So you have potentially three elements: 1) old-fashioned third-person narration; 2) speech without speech marks; 3) the protagonist’s thoughts reflected in indirect speech.

Example 1

The opening of chapter 2 demonstrates all three elements: both the abolition of speech marks, a brief appearance from a conventional narrator, then an abrupt jump into Stephen’s hyper-educated mind.

(1: no-speech-marks speech)
—You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
—Tarentum, sir.
—Very good. Well?
—There was a battle, sir.
—Very good. Where?
(2: third-person narrative)
The boy’s blank face asked the blank window.
(3: straight into Stephen’s thoughts)
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake’s wings of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?

There has been no narrative lead-in or introduction, no text explaining that we are in a school classroom and Stephen is taking a lesson. Only from the dialogue can we deduce this is what is happening and that it is a lesson about ancient history. ‘The boy’s blank face asked the blank window’ is a neat way of describing the poor schoolboy’s blank ignorance of Stephen’s question, but look what happens next.

We are thrown straight into Stephen’s ‘stream of consciousness’. I admit I had to stop and puzzle this out and have only got parts of it. The two sentences using ‘fabled’ I think reflect Stephen thinking that the battle referred to has gone down in history and yet, he reflects, was probably not as ‘memory’ tells fables about it.

What battle? He will go on to quote the Roman General Pyrrhus who won a battle in 279 BC where the Romans losses were so bad he is supposed to have said: ‘Another victory like that and we are done for.’ This is where we get our phrase ‘A Pyrrhic victory’ from. Stephen is (I think) reflecting that this phrase expressed not so much the general’s despair as his ‘impatience’.

I know the poet William Blake wrote in praise of excess: in his ‘Proverbs of Hell’ he wrote that ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ Maybe Stephen is conflating the disastrous outcome of the Roman battle, its excessiveness, with the ‘wisdom’ contained in the general’s phrase which led to it becoming a proverb.

As to the next bit, ‘I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame’ I don’t think this is particularly tied to Pyrrhus or this history lesson, although I know it is a phrase which will be repeated throughout the novel at various moments. So it is more like an early appearance of an idée fixe of Stephen’s and, if we consider ‘Ulysses’ as a work of art, it is like a motif which is being introduced early on so that it can be repeated with variations later on.

There’s probably more going on here than I’ve indicated and I might have got some of this wrong, but you see how it works: just elements – bits of dialogue which are not at all clearly demarcated, minimal amount of narrative explanation, then chunks of Stephen’s internal monologue which is ferociously learned and allusive – are already combining to make it a tricky read.

Don’t panic

As a bookish person, who’s read a lot of the same books as Joyce, I get some of his references and/or I’ve taken the trouble to look (some of) them up – but there is one key principle to bear in mind here, which is: Don’t be afraid.

Tens of thousands of academics have spent their entire lives elucidating ‘Ulysses’ and nobody has got all the allusions buried in it. It doesn’t matter. If you like puzzles, you can stop at each paragraph and look up the allusions. Or you can read the novel with a page-by-page guide (online or hard copy) open beside it to explain them. (If you have the patience, that’s probably the way to get the most out of reading ‘Ulysses’.)

As Canadian academic Hugh Kenner puts it, the book’s innumerable correspondences and patterns ‘adds fun to our endless exploration of this book’ – if, that is, endless exploration of a vast tissue of learnèd references and internal echoes is your idea of fun.

But if you’re not that kind of person, don’t worry. Read at the book, forge on through it, and let its unusual methods creep up on you. At various points you’ll recognise the same quotes or allusions cropping up and begin to get a feel for them, how they recur and give structure to the text, like motifs returning in a long piece of music. As in the ‘Cantos’ of Ezra Pound you don’t even have to understand what they mean (quotes from foreign languages, for example) for their repetition to start to have a haunting and evocative effect.

Also: it is as well to be clear that Stephen is not a god, he is not the prophet of some challenging religion: he’s just a character in a book, and his character is that of a cleverclogs, a callow young man too clever by half. He’s read all the books in the world but has little or no life experience, and it shows. Therefore, to some extent his thoughts are probably intended to be offputtingly clever-clever.

Example 2

Here’s another example of the method. Stephen stays after class to help a poor schoolboy, Sargent, with his sums. But as he does so, his overworking, over-educated intellect reflects that the symbols used in algebra are Arab in origin, in fact the word ‘algebra’ is itself Arabic, and this prompts him to think of the two great medieval philosophers – Ibn Rushd (1126 to 1198) Latinized as Averroes, and Moses ben Maimon (died 1204), commonly known as Maimonides. This is at least part of what is going on in this passage:

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands, traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

The dance of symbols across the page is described as a ‘morrice’ which is an antique adjective for Moorish or Arab, but has echoes of Morris dancing, a connotation reinforced by the word mummery, which is an olde English word for acting. Both of them clearly refer to the algebraic symbols Stephen is trying to teach the boy Sargent about and which he fancifully envisions dancing hand in hand with each other, bowing to their partners and so on.

The second half of the paragraph is, as far as I can see, a poetic evocation of the effect of the medieval scholars’ writings, which was itself so complicated and full of learned allusions that Stephen envisions it as mirrors. Maybe the two wise men’s learning is referred to as a darkness because 1) they were both dark-skinned non-European men and 2) maybe Western Europe is the brightness and lightness in which their complex, dark-skinned wisdom made little impression. I’m not sure. Something like that…

Anyway, this kind of thing happens thousands and thousands of times throughout the book. It makes up most of the long the novel’s texture, so it helps if you yourself are bookish and like spotting allusions. But, as I keep emphasising, it’s not absolutely necessary to get every allusion to enjoy the book, in fact it’s probably impossible. It’s perfectly valid to read the whole thing without ‘getting’ any of the allusions because there is plenty of other stuff going on – the structure of the plot itself (as outlined above) but also tens of thousands of places where the prose is so unexpected and inventive that you can enjoy it on the surface, for it mysteriousness and multitudinous rhythms, as much as for this riddling Sudoku element.

The internet / AI changes everything

As I wrote the preceding paragraphs it began to dawn on me that nowadays, of course, the whole experience of reading, especially reading difficult or demanding books, has been transformed by the internet and not just the old internet but the shiny new world of artificial intelligence.

Nowadays if you’re puzzled by anything in ‘Ulysses’, from the overall structure to the tiniest word, you can ask an LLM like Chat GPT and chances are it will explain everything. For example, I was not understanding the scattered references to Bloom’s father in chapter 6 (Hades) and so I simply asked Chat GPT: ‘In James Joyce’s Ulysses, did Leopold Bloom’s father commit suicide?’ and Chat came right back with ‘Yes’ along with details such as the method (poison) and location (the Queen’s Hotel).

So there’s now the facility to look up everything – from the granular level of individual words, foreign quotes, odd phrases, through to the macro level of my Bloom query – on an AI (Chat, CoPilot, Gemini) and have answers delivered on a plate.

Whether this is an appropriate way to read the book, whether it short circuits the time and effort Joyce intended his readers to invest in it, whether it undermines the experience of slowly constructing your own version from the fragments you notice or understand, and replaces it with a fully explained, Sam Altman-friendly version, is open to debate. But there’s no denying AI’s help in immediately solving thousands of niggling details or impenetrable obscurities, for example: who is Hynes? What does ‘De mortuis nil nisi prius’ mean? Can I find a recording of ‘Those lovely seaside girls? (Yes – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4IpDMyox2Y).

After a while I began to rely on it more heavily because the broken-up prose and elliptical style of so many of the conversations often mean it’s very hard to figure out what’s going on, and even what people are saying to each other.

But academic books will remain useful…

Where books, even quite old guides to ‘Ulysses’, score over the internet, is that they will offer useful and interesting opinions and insights. Chat will 1) only answer the question you asked; it might answer it fully and give you more detail than you expected, but at the end of the day the answer is limited by how you phrase your initial question or ‘prompt’. And 2) it will only give you other people’s opinions, neatly summarised and tied up in a bow.

By contrast a book-length guide will tend to introduce you to ideas and interpretations you’d never thought of before. They let you share, and follow the logic behind, distinct and maybe idiosyncratic interpretations, by expert scholars. LLMs tend to repeat and confirm the biases or expectations you bring with you whereas (good) books open the mind to all kinds of new possibilities.

So AI has already revolutionised the process of reading difficult works of literature like ‘Ulysses’ (and many more). But good books of criticism or analysis or just good quality guides, will for the foreseeable future still have the advantage of opening your mind to new ideas. Which, back in the olden days, was often considered an element point of studying literature…

Credit

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

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by Simon on January 30, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 30, 2026

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