Ulysses: a first reading, and the apparatus built around it

The Itinerary

Ulysses — The Itinerary

Base document 03 · Place and hour, episode by episode Where the book stands at every moment of 16–17 June 1904, what each place is, and who is in the room.

HOW TO READ THIS

Each episode gives the opening hour and place, the movement through the day, the closing point, who is present, and what the places are.

Hours are Joyce's own, from the schemas he circulated privately; the text itself rarely states a time, and the minute-level timings below are reconstructions from internal evidence, not from the page. Treat the hours as firm and the minutes as approximate.

Three conventions carried over from the character map:

PART I — THE TELEMACHIA

Stephen. Three hours, all of them south-east of the city, all of them by the sea.

1 · TELEMACHUS — 8 a.m.

Opens 8:00 · the gun-platform on top of the Martello Tower, Sandycove Moves the parapet → down the dark stairs to the living room (breakfast; the milkwoman calls) → out along the path → down to the Forty Foot Closes ~8:45 · Stephen walking up to the road, leaving Mulligan swimming

Present Stephen · Buck Mulligan · Haines · the old milkwoman Recalled May Dedalus

The places

The Martello Tower, Sandycove. A squat circular stone gun-tower on the rocks about thirteen kilometres south-east of the city, one of a chain built around 1804 to repel a French invasion that never arrived. By 1904 the War Office was letting them out cheaply as lodgings, which is why three young men can live in a fortress. Stephen pays the rent; Mulligan holds the key.

Everything about the opening image is chosen. A mock-Mass performed on top of a fortification puts the two powers that rule Ireland — the Church and the British Army — into a single frame in the first paragraph, and turns them both into a joke being performed by a man who believes in neither.

The Forty Foot. A rocky bathing place directly below the tower, men only and traditionally nude. Mulligan swims; Stephen, who does not like water, does not. The sea here is "our great sweet mother" — the word mother being the one Stephen cannot get away from all day.

Joyce lived in this tower for about six days in September 1904 and left in the night after a shooting incident. It is now the James Joyce Tower and Museum.

2 · NESTOR — 10 a.m.

Opens ~9:45 · a classroom in Mr Deasy's private school, Dalkey Moves classroom (a history lesson on Pyrrhus, then a riddle, then sums with Sargent) → the playing field, hockey → Deasy's study (wages, advice, the letter) → out onto the gravel drive Closes ~10:45 · Deasy calling a last joke after him from the path

Present Stephen · Mr Deasy · the boys — Cochrane, Armstrong, Talbot, Sargent Recalled May Dedalus · Stephen's Paris year

The places

Dalkey. A prosperous coastal village a little beyond Sandycove, at the end of the tram and train line — sea views, retired money, and Protestant and unionist in character to a degree the city was not. Placing Stephen's employer here is precise social notation: he is teaching the sons of the comfortable, for pay he needs badly.

Deasy's study. A room full of Stuart coins in trays, apostle spoons, and prints of famous racehorses. A museum of loyalty and of other people's winnings. Stephen is paid here — three pounds twelve shillings, the only money he earns all day, and most of it will be gone by midnight — and receives, along with his wages, an anti-Semitic joke about Ireland never having persecuted the Jews because she never let them in. Joyce plants the bigotry two episodes before he introduces the Jewish hero.

The playing field. Hockey, shouts, a stick clashing. Stephen thinks: the same noise, always the same noise — history as a nightmare, not as a subject on a timetable.

3 · PROTEUS — 11 a.m.

Opens ~11:00 · Sandymount Strand, at the northern end near the Pigeonhouse Moves eastward along the tideline, past the cocklepickers and their dog → sitting on a rock to write on a scrap torn from Deasy's letter → up toward the city Closes ~11:45 · Stephen looking back over his shoulder at a silent ship

Present Stephen — alone. Two cocklepickers and a dog pass at a distance Recalled Kevin Egan in Paris · the Goulding household · his mother · his own younger self

The places

Sandymount Strand. A vast flat tidal beach on the south side of the bay, about five kilometres from the centre. At low tide the sea withdraws several hundred metres and leaves wet sand, rock pools, cockle beds and wrack. Stephen has come in from Dalkey by train and walked out onto it with three hours to spend and nowhere to be.

This is the book's most important repeated ground: the same beach returns at eight in the evening for episode 13. Morning on this sand is pure mind — a young man closing his eyes to test whether the visible world persists without him. Evening on the same sand is pure body. Joyce gives the identical location to the two opposite halves of human experience, twelve hours apart, and lets the reader make the connection.

PART II — THE WANDERINGS

Bloom, from his own kitchen, out across the whole city and back toward it.

4 · CALYPSO — 8 a.m.

Opens 8:00 · the basement kitchen, 7 Eccles Street Moves kitchen → the hall and out the front door → Dorset Street → Dlugacz's pork butcher, Upper Dorset Street (buys a kidney) → back along Dorset Street → home → up to Molly's bedroom (the letters, metempsychosis) → down to the kitchen (the kidney burns) → out to the privy in the back garden Closes ~8:45 · Bloom in the outhouse, reading a prize story, the bells of St George's striking

Present Bloom · Molly · the cat · Dlugacz Recalled Milly (her letter) · Boylan (his letter) · Rudy · Bloom's father · Gibraltar · the East

The places

7 Eccles Street. A four-storey Georgian terrace house on the north side, about a kilometre and a half from the centre — respectable but no longer fashionable, in a quarter that was sliding. This is the only house in the novel we are taken inside and shown completely, room by room, down to the contents of the dresser.

Two people will enter it today by irregular means. Boylan comes in the front door at four. Bloom, having left his key in his other trousers, will come home at two in the morning by climbing over the area railings and dropping down to the basement door. The master of the house enters his own home like a burglar. That is the whole novel in one gesture.

The real 7 Eccles Street was the home of Joyce's friend J. F. Byrne, and Joyce checked with him whether a man could safely make that drop. The house was demolished in the 1960s; the front door survives in the James Joyce Centre on North Great George's Street.

Dlugacz's. A pork butcher run by a Jewish Hungarian — historically improbable, and Joyce knew it. Bloom, a Jew who eats pork, buys from a Jew who sells it. On the counter is a wrapper advertising Agendath Netaim, a planters' company selling orange groves in Palestine, which sends Bloom's mind east to warm sand and Molly and then, abruptly, cold and grey and dead.

The privy. Joyce insisted on it. This is the first time in English literature that a hero is introduced eating fried kidney and then defecating, in detail, with a newspaper. It was a deliberate act of demolition: the epic hero, restored to a body.

5 · LOTUS-EATERS — 10 a.m.

Opens ~9:45 · Sir John Rogerson's Quay, on the south bank near the docks Moves the quay → Lime Street, Townsend Street → Westland Row Post Office (collects Martha's letter addressed to Henry Flower) → a doorway to read it, then a back lane to tear up the envelope → All Hallows (St Andrew's) Church, Westland Row (the tail end of a Mass) → Sweny's chemist, Lincoln Place (orders a face lotion for Molly, buys a cake of lemon soap) → out toward the Turkish baths, Leinster Street Closes ~10:45 · Bloom anticipating the bath — his body floating, "a languid floating flower"

Present Bloom · M'Coy (in the street) · Bantam Lyons · Sweny the chemist · the congregation Recalled Martha Clifford · Molly · Milly

The places

The Westland Row quarter. A tight loop around the south-eastern edge of the centre, beside Trinity College and the railway terminus. Everything on Bloom's route this hour is a narcotic, which is the episode's principle: a flirtatious letter, a Mass, a chemist's shelf of drugs, a hot bath, a cigarette, and the horses. Dublin drifting pleasantly through mid-morning.

All Hallows. Bloom watches communion from the back with the eye of a fascinated outsider — the wafer, the Latin, the kneeling — and reads it as a very effective business. He gets almost every detail slightly wrong, which is precisely why the passage is funny and precisely why it is not contemptuous.

Sweny's. A real chemist's shop, still standing at Lincoln Place and now kept open largely by readers of this book. The lemon soap bought here becomes one of the novel's running objects — it moves from pocket to pocket all day, is nearly forgotten, and eventually sings.

Bantam Lyons. On the steps, Bloom offers his newspaper with the words I was just going to throw it away. Lyons hears a tip on the horse Throwaway, which wins that afternoon at twenty to one. Bloom will spend the rest of the day being resented for winnings he did not make on a tip he did not give.

6 · HADES — 11 a.m.

Opens ~11:00 · Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount — the funeral leaving Dignam's house Moves the carriage crosses the entire city, south-east to north-west: Irishtown → Ringsend → over the Liffey → the quays → Sackville Street past Nelson's Pillar → Rutland Square → the Phibsborough Road → Prospect (Glasnevin) Cemetery — the gates, the mortuary chapel, the walk to the grave, the burial Closes ~12:00 · Bloom leaving the cemetery, thinking of warm fullblooded life

Present in the carriage — Bloom · Martin Cunningham · Jack Power · Simon Dedalus. At the grave — Joe Hynes · Corny Kelleher · Ned Lambert · Tom Kernan · John Henry Menton · Father Coffey · the man in the macintosh Seen from the carriage Stephen (near Irishtown) · Blazes Boylan Recalled Rudolph Bloom · Rudy · Dignam

The places

The route. This is the book's first complete traverse of Dublin, and Joyce uses it as a survey: the carriage passes the Grand Canal, the gasworks, the cabman's shelter (which will matter again at one in the morning), the Dodder, the Liffey, Nelson's Pillar, the Rotunda, and the statues of the great men, in order. A city seen from a moving vehicle, through the windows, by four men making conversation.

Twice the carriage passes people who matter. Stephen walks by in mourning black — Simon complains about the company his son keeps. Boylan appears on the pavement, and Bloom looks at his fingernails and says nothing at all.

Glasnevin (Prospect) Cemetery. The great Catholic burial ground, opened in 1832 at the instigation of Daniel O'Connell, because Catholics in Ireland had no dignified place to be buried. O'Connell lies under a round tower here; Parnell lies here too. The funeral party passes both. The two great constitutional leaders of Irish history are in this soil, and the men walking over them are talking about nothing.

The episode is the book's confrontation with death, and Bloom refuses every consolation on offer — no heaven, no resurrection, no romance about the grave. What he does instead is turn back toward the living. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Warm fullblooded life.

7 · AEOLUS — 12 noon

Opens 12:00 · the Freeman's Journal and National Press offices, Prince's Street North, immediately behind the General Post Office, off Sackville Street Moves the machine room (Bloom on the Keyes advertisement) → the news room → the editor's office → back out to the street → the group walking up toward Mooney's Closes ~1:00 · the men heading off for a drink, Stephen telling his parable, and the trams stalled outside

Present Bloom · Red Murray · Councillor Nannetti · Joe Hynes · Professor MacHugh · Ned Lambert · Simon Dedalus · J. J. O'Molloy · Myles Crawford · Lenehan · O'Madden Burke · Stephen (arriving with Deasy's letter)

The places

The newspaper quarter. Prince's Street sits at the exact centre of Dublin: the GPO on one side, Nelson's Pillar and the tram terminus at the top of the street, the Evening Telegraph and Freeman's Journal in the same building. Everything in the city radiates from this corner, and the episode opens and closes with trams departing and then jamming to a halt.

The first near-miss. Bloom is in this building chasing an advertisement. Stephen walks into the same building with a letter about cattle disease. They do not meet. Bloom leaves through one door as Stephen comes in another. The novel's two halves are within a few metres of each other at noon and nothing happens.

Why "wind." The organ of this episode is the lungs, and everyone in it is talking: speeches, quotations, recitations, a great set-piece about Moses and the Egyptians in which Egypt stands for England and Israel for Ireland. Rhetoric as air — magnificent, constant, and moving nothing.

8 · LESTRYGONIANS — 1 p.m.

Opens ~1:00 · O'Connell (Carlisle) Bridge, Bloom crossing south Moves Westmoreland Street (a throwaway handbill; the sandwich-board men) → past Trinity College → meets Josie Breen → Grafton Street → the Burton restaurant, Duke Street (recoils from the men feeding) → Davy Byrne's, Duke Street (gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy; the Howth memory) → Dawson Street → helps the blind stripling across at Molesworth Street → sees Boylan ahead → bolts through the gates of the National Museum, Kildare Street Closes ~2:00 · Bloom fleeing into the museum, hand fumbling in his pocket

Present Bloom · Josie Breen · A.E. (passing in the street) · Nosey Flynn · Davy Byrne · Paddy Leonard · Bantam Lyons · the blind stripling Recalled Molly on Howth Head · Milly · the early marriage

The places

Grafton Street. The fashionable shopping street of the south side — silks, jewels, warm human plumpness — and Bloom walking down it very hungry with eightpence and a funeral behind him. The prose swells with food and appetite and then curdles.

The Burton. A cheap eating-house. Bloom looks in, sees men shovelling food, gristle, wet moustaches, a man cleaning his plate with bread, and leaves without ordering. It is one of the few moments where his tolerance fails.

Davy Byrne's. A "moral pub," and still trading on this page. Here Bloom eats cheese and drinks burgundy and the novel opens into its first great memory: Howth Head, the rhododendrons, Molly passing him seedcake from her own mouth. This is the memory Molly will return to in the last pages of the book, from the other side. Between them lie nine hundred pages and sixteen years.

Molesworth Street. Bloom takes a blind young man's arm and walks him across the road, thinks carefully about what blindness must be like, and moves on. No one sees him do it. The novel's method for establishing goodness is to show it unwitnessed.

9 · SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS — 2 p.m.

Opens 2:00 · the librarian's office, the National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street Moves the office → the entrance hall and the porch Closes ~3:00 · Stephen and Mulligan going out through the porch — and Bloom passing between them

Present Stephen · John Eglinton · A.E. (George Russell) · Thomas Lyster · Richard Best · Buck Mulligan · Bloom (passing through on business) Recalled Shakespeare · Anne Hathaway · Stephen's mother · Stephen's own debts

The places

The National Library. A domed reading room on Kildare Street, opened in 1890 — the working headquarters of literary Dublin, and the men in this room are real people who really worked there. Next door stands the National Museum, into which Bloom fled an hour ago. Across the street, Leinster House. Learning, antiquity and government in a hundred metres.

The second near-miss. Bloom comes in to consult a back number and goes out through the porch. Mulligan sees him and makes a filthy joke. Stephen barely registers him. The two men pass between the pillars — Scylla and Charybdis — and each goes his own way. The novel has now failed to introduce them twice.

What Stephen is doing. Performing a theory he does not believe: that Shakespeare is not Hamlet the son but the ghost of the father, writing out of the wound of a wife's betrayal. He is talking about fathers, sons, and cuckoldry to a room that does not care, while the actual betrayed husband walks past the door. Joyce puts the argument and its living illustration in the same building and lets neither notice the other.

10 · WANDERING ROCKS — 3 p.m.

Opens ~2:55 · Father Conmee setting out from the presbytery in Upper Gardiner Street, north-east through Mountjoy Square and out along the Malahide Road toward Artane Moves nineteen short sections scattered across the whole city, cross-cut so that fragments of one intrude into another Closes ~4:00 · the Viceroy's cavalcade driving out from the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, along the quays, through the centre, and south-east toward Ballsbridge

Present effectively the entire cast. Among them: Corny Kelleher · the one-legged sailor (and Molly's arm flinging him a coin from the window of 7 Eccles Street) · Katey and Boody Dedalus · Boylan buying fruit to send ahead · Stephen with Almidano Artifoni, and later with Dilly at a bookseller's cart · Boylan's typist · Tom Rochford, Lenehan and M'Coy · Bloom at a bookcart choosing Sweets of Sin · Simon Dedalus · Tom Kernan · Ben Dollard and Father Cowley · Cunningham, Power and John Wyse Nolan · Mulligan and Haines at a tearoom · the blind stripling · Master Patrick Dignam

The places

The whole city, at once. This is the only episode with no protagonist, and its subject is simultaneity: what a city is when nobody is at its centre. Joyce composed it with a map and a stopwatch, timing the walks, and deliberately planted small errors for anyone checking.

The frame is political and it is exact. The episode opens with the Church walking out through the north side, thinking benign thoughts about the poor for approximately four seconds, and closes with the Crown driving through in a cavalcade to open a charity bazaar, while the citizens salute or fail to salute. Between those two authorities, everybody else moves — begging, borrowing, buying pornography, going hungry, arranging an adultery.

Two moments to hold for the presentation. Boylan, in a fruit shop, sends a basket ahead to Eccles Street and flirts with the shopgirl — and at almost the same moment, in another part of the city, Bloom is choosing an erotic novel to bring home to the woman Boylan is about to visit. And Molly's arm, appearing at a window to throw a coin, is the only glimpse we get of her between eight in the morning and two the next night.

11 · SIRENS — 4 p.m.

Opens ~3:55 · the bar of the Ormond Hotel, Upper Ormond Quay, on the north bank of the Liffey — the barmaids at the window watching the cavalcade pass Moves Bloom outside on Wellington Quay (buys notepaper at Daly's) → into the Ormond dining room, next door to the bar → Boylan drinks, is called away, and leaves → the singing in the bar (The Croppy Boy, M'appari) → Bloom writes to Martha → out onto the quay past Lionel Marks's antique window Closes ~5:00 · Bloom on the quay, alone, with a tram passing at exactly the right moment

Present Miss Douce · Miss Kennedy · Bloom · Richie Goulding · Simon Dedalus · Ben Dollard · Father Cowley · Lenehan · Boots the pageboy · Boylan (who leaves) · the blind tuner arriving at the end

The places

The Ormond Hotel. A middling hotel on the quays, with a bar at the front and a dining room behind it. Bloom eats in the dining room, deliberately out of sight, and listens to the singing through the door — present at the music and excluded from it.

The cruellest geography in the book. At four o'clock Boylan's hired car jingles north across the river to Eccles Street. Bloom knows the hour. He sits by the Liffey, a mile and a half away, listening to Simon Dedalus sing an aria about a lost love, and writes a furtive letter to another woman while it happens. Joyce places the betrayal offstage and gives us instead the sound of a man being sung to.

Richie Goulding, sitting opposite Bloom at dinner, is Stephen's uncle. Neither man mentions it. The two families touch at this table and nobody notices.

12 · CYCLOPS — 5 p.m.

Opens ~4:45 · a street corner in the north inner city, the nameless narrator meeting Joe Hynes Moves to Barney Kiernan's public house, 8–10 Little Britain Street → the long argument → out into the street, Bloom driven off in a car toward Green Street Closes ~6:00 · the biscuit tin thrown, the sun in the assailant's eyes, and Bloom ascending to heaven at an angle of forty-five degrees

Present the nameless narrator (a debt collector — the book's only first-person voice) · the Citizen · Garryowen · Joe Hynes · Alf Bergan · Bob Doran · J. J. O'Molloy · Ned Lambert · John Wyse Nolan · Lenehan · Martin Cunningham · Jack Power · Crofton · Bloom

The places

Little Britain Street. A short street in the north inner city, near the markets and beside the Green Street courthouse — which is why the pub is full of court hangers-on and talk of hangings and writs. Barney Kiernan's was real.

Joyce could not have improved on the address. The high priest of Irish nationalism does his roaring in a street called Little Britain. He never draws attention to it.

The confrontation. Bloom, cornered, argues that force and hatred is not life for men and women, and that the opposite of it is love. He is laughed at. Pressed on what his nation is, he says: Ireland. I was born here. Ireland. Then, leaving: Christ was a jew like me. A biscuit tin follows him down the street.

This is the episode where the novel's ethics are stated out loud, by the least impressive man present, in a room where nobody is listening — and it is the only place in the book where Bloom raises his voice.

13 · NAUSICAA — 8 p.m.

Opens ~8:00 · the rocks at the far end of Sandymount Strand, near the Star of the Sea church Moves stationary — the three girls and the children on the sand, Bloom on the rocks a little way off; the Benediction service audible from the church; the Mirus Bazaar fireworks going up over Ballsbridge Closes ~9:00 · Bloom resting, his watch stopped at half past four, and a cuckoo clock in the priest's house striking nine

Present Gerty MacDowell · Cissy Caffrey · Edy Boardman · the Caffrey twins · baby Boardman · Bloom. In the church: Canon O'Hanlon, Father Conroy Recalled Molly · Milly · Boylan · Martha · Mrs Breen

The places

Sandymount Strand again — twelve hours later. This is Stephen's morning beach from episode 3, and the pairing is the whole design. In the morning, a young man closes his eyes on this sand to test whether the world exists without him. In the evening, a middle-aged man opens his and masturbates. Mind at eleven, body at eight, same grains of sand.

Star of the Sea Church, Sandymount. A real church a short walk from the beach. The service of Benediction is audible from the rocks, so that the litany to the Virgin — Mary, star of the sea — runs simultaneously with what is happening on the sand. Joyce times the climax to a Roman candle bursting overhead and the choir reaching its height at the same instant. It is blasphemous, it is very funny, and it is also — the part that is hardest to hold — entirely without contempt for either party.

The fireworks come from the Mirus Bazaar at Ballsbridge, the charity event the Viceroy set out to open at the end of episode 10. The day's threads are drawing together.

Bloom's watch stopped at half past four — approximately the hour of Boylan's arrival. He notices this and thinks about magnetism.

14 · OXEN OF THE SUN — 10 p.m.

Opens ~10:00 · the doorstep and then the common room of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street Moves the common room, drinking and blaspheming while a woman labours upstairs → the thunderclap → the birth is announced → the whole party spills out at closing time into Burke's public house at the corner of Holles Street → out again, scattering toward the Westland Row train for Nighttown Closes ~11:00 · Stephen and Lynch heading for the last train; Bloom following them

Present Bloom · Nurse Callan · Dr Dixon · Stephen · Lenehan · Lynch · Madden · Crotthers · Punch Costello · Buck Mulligan · Alec Bannon. Upstairs and unseen: Mina Purefoy, giving birth

The places

Holles Street. The National Maternity Hospital, founded in 1894, on the south-east edge of the centre near Merrion Square, and still there. Bloom has come to ask after a woman he barely knows who has been three days in labour. Nobody asked him to. Nobody thanks him. That is why he is in the room.

Where the book turns. After nine hundred pages of near-misses — a newspaper office, a library, the streets — Bloom and Stephen are finally in the same room, and it is a place where a woman is giving birth while young men mock fertility. Thunder breaks; Stephen, who is terrified of thunder, goes white; and Bloom quietly calms him. It is the first fatherly act in the novel, and neither of them remarks on it.

Burke's. The pub at the corner, where the party goes at closing time. Stephen is buying, with what is left of Deasy's wages, and by the end of the hour it is gone.

15 · CIRCE — midnight

Opens 12:00 midnight · the entrance to Mabbot Street, at the edge of Nighttown — the Monto district, north-east of Sackville Street Moves the streets of Nighttown (Bloom pursuing Stephen, buying a pig's crubeen, nearly run down by a sandstrewer) → Bella Cohen's house, Tyrone Street — the music room, the trials, the transformations → out into the street → Beaver Street, where Private Carr knocks Stephen down Closes ~1:00 a.m. · Stephen unconscious on the cobbles, Bloom standing over him, and Rudy appearing in the dark

Present in the flesh Stephen · Lynch · Bloom · Zoe Higgins · Bella (Bello) Cohen · Kitty Ricketts · Florry Talbot · Cissy Caffrey · Privates Carr and Compton · the watch · Corny Kelleher Present as apparition Rudolph · Ellen · Molly · Gerty · Josie Breen · Martha · Boylan · Paddy Dignam · M'Intosh · Mulligan · Deasy · May Dedalus · Rudy — and the soap, a fan, a waterfall and the End of the World, all of which speak

The places

Monto. Dublin's red-light district, occupying a few streets north-east of Sackville Street — Montgomery Street (which gave it the name), Mabbot Street, Tyrone Street, Mecklenburgh Street. It was reputedly the largest such district in Europe at the time, tolerated by the authorities because of the nearby barracks, and it operated openly a few hundred metres from the General Post Office. It was closed down in 1925 and the streets were renamed. Mabbot Street is now James Joyce Street.

The geography matters: this is not a hidden vice in a distant suburb. It sits beside the imperial post office and the tram terminus, in the middle of a city that regarded itself as the most Catholic in Europe.

What happens here. The episode is written as a play script and everything hallucinates. Bloom is put on trial, crowned emperor of a new Bloomusalem built in the shape of a pork kidney, denounced, burned, turned into a woman, and degraded by Bello. Stephen's dead mother rises through the floor, green with the grave, and asks him to repent; he shouts Non serviam! and smashes the chandelier with his ashplant.

Then Carr knocks him down in the street, and Bloom — who could walk away, and has no reason not to — stands over an unconscious young man he met three hours ago, fends off the police, and keeps watch. And sees his dead son.

Everything in the book has been building to that stretch of pavement.

PART III — THE NOSTOS

Home. Two men walking north-west across a sleeping city.

16 · EUMAEUS — 1 a.m.

Opens ~1:00 a.m. · Beaver Street, Bloom getting Stephen to his feet Moves north-east through Amiens Street and Store Street → the cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge, under the Custom House at the eastern end of the quays → coffee and a bun, the sailor's stories, the photograph of Molly Closes ~2:00 a.m. · the two men walking off arm in arm toward Eccles Street, watched from a distance by a driver who cannot hear a word

Present Bloom · Stephen · Murphy the sailor · the keeper (reputedly "Skin-the-Goat" Fitzharris) · jarvies and night men · a streetwalker at the door Recalled Parnell and Kitty O'Shea · Molly · Gibraltar

The places

The cabman's shelter. A real Dublin institution — a wooden hut where cab drivers could get coffee and shelter through the night. This one stands at Butt Bridge, under the shadow of the Custom House, one of the most magnificent buildings of the Ascendancy. Joyce sets the meeting of his two heroes in a shed beneath a monument to the power that governs them, at the worst hour of the night, over undrinkable coffee.

The keeper is rumoured to be James "Skin-the-Goat" Fitzharris, who drove the getaway car after the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. History's assassin, pouring coffee and saying almost nothing.

The three adulteries. In one hour the talk turns to Parnell and Kitty O'Shea, to a knife murder over a woman, and — silently, in Bloom's head — to his own afternoon. Then he takes out a photograph of Molly and shows it to Stephen, and lingers over it. The gesture is impossible to fully explain, which is why it is good.

The style is the hour. The prose is exhausted, cliché-ridden, endlessly qualified, losing its own thread. One in the morning, written out.

17 · ITHACA — 2 a.m.

Opens ~2:00 a.m. · walking north-west from Butt Bridge — Beresford Place, Gardiner Street, Mountjoy Square, Temple Street, Hardwicke Place, Berkeley Road Moves arriving at 7 Eccles Street → Bloom, keyless, climbs the area railings and drops into the basement → lets Stephen in the back → the kitchen (cocoa) → the back garden (urinating together, the star, the shooting star) → the front door — Stephen declines a bed and leaves, and the bells of St George's strike → the front room and then the bedroom Closes ~2:45 a.m. · Bloom in bed, head to Molly's feet, and the answer to the final question is a large black dot

Present Bloom · Stephen (until he leaves) · Molly (asleep, then half-waking) Recalled everyone. The catechism reviews the entire day and much of two lives

The places

The area railings. Bloom has left his key in his other trousers. He climbs over, drops five feet nine and a half inches into the area, and enters his own house through the back. Stephen gave up his key that morning and has not been home; Bloom has mislaid his and must break in. Both men are locked out of their own houses, and one of them takes the other in.

The garden. They stand in the dark and urinate together and look up, and the prose gives the sky its most beautiful sentence — the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. Two men, a small back garden in a north Dublin terrace, and the universe. The book's whole argument in one image.

Then Stephen refuses the offer of a bed, and goes. Where he goes is never said.

The bedroom. Bloom finds the crumbs of Boylan's seedcake in his own bed, gets in the wrong way round, and considers, in order, every possible response — rage, divorce, violence, exposure — and rejects each in turn as futile. He kisses her, tells her a partly edited version of his day, asks for breakfast in bed, and falls asleep.

Who was M'Intosh? In an episode that catalogues the contents of every drawer in the house and calculates the age of a man in 1904 relative to a man born in 1866, the question is asked and not answered. The most exhaustive chapter in literature leaves one thing unknown, deliberately.

18 · PENELOPE — no hour

Opens — · the bed at 7 Eccles Street Moves nowhere. Molly does not get up. Her mind travels: Gibraltar — the Alameda Gardens, the fig trees, the Moorish wall, the bullfight at La Línea — and Howth Head, the rhododendrons, the seedcake; and Mullingar, and the streets of Dublin, and twenty years of her own life Closes on yes

Present Molly, awake. Bloom, asleep beside her Recalled Boylan · Bloom · Mulvey · Stephen (imagined) · her father · her mother · Milly · Rudy · the whole cast

The places

The bed. The only fixed point in the novel, and the destination of everything. Joyce gave this episode no hour in his schema, and no place beyond the bed — and it covers more ground than all seventeen others put together.

This is the structural joke and the structural argument at once: the two men have walked eighteen hours across a city and got nowhere in particular; the woman has not moved at all and has crossed the Mediterranean, two decades and a whole life. The book's motion was never geographic.

The two great places of her memory are Gibraltar (Mulvey, first love, the rock, the sun) and Howth (Bloom, the proposal, the flowers) — and in the last paragraph they merge, until the young officer under the Moorish wall and the husband among the rhododendrons become one man asking one question. The man who asked is Bloom.

Trieste — Zurich — Paris, 1914–1921.

THE DAY AS A WHOLE

The two routes

Bloom is on the page for almost every waking hour from eight in the morning until he falls asleep — an unbroken thread across the entire city, out to the north-west for a funeral, back into the centre, down to the south-east coast, into the north-east slums, and home. The novel never loses him.

Stephen appears for three hours in the morning, an hour at noon, an hour at two, a fragment at three — and then vanishes for seven hours. From three in the afternoon until ten at night we do not see him at all. We are told afterwards that he was drinking. The book abandons him, and the gap is the point: this is a young man disappearing into a night he cannot afford, until an older stranger goes looking.

Molly is on the page for forty-five minutes in the morning, has one arm out of a window at three in the afternoon, and is then absent for eleven hours — and is given the last forty pages of the book. The most absent character speaks last and longest.

The near-misses, in order

Hour Place What happens
~11:30 a.m. Irishtown, from the funeral carriage Simon sees Stephen through the window; Bloom looks
12 noon The Freeman's Journal Both in the building. No meeting
~3 p.m. The National Library porch Bloom passes between Stephen and Mulligan
~3 p.m. Wandering Rocks Both crossing the same small city
10 p.m. Holles Street hospital They finally meet

Where the city is used against itself

Base document 03. Companion visual: the map and the timeline.