Narrative Summary
This Episode begins in Leopold Bloom’s kitchen. He is setting up a breakfast tray to take to his wife, Molly, who is still in bed. He gives the cat some milk, and thinks about what he should eat for breakfast, deciding to pop out to the butcher to buy a pork kidney while the kettle is warming for his wife’s tea. He grabs his hat, checks that a white slip of paper is still tucked into it, and goes out, leaving the door unlocked because his keys are in another pair of pants in the bedroom and he doesn’t want to disturb his wife.
He crosses the street to walk in the sunshine. He thinks it will be a warm day, and that his black clothes will make him feel it more. He imagines traveling east, circling the globe before the sun, never growing older because the day never changes. He thinks about scenes in other lands, the people, the buildings, the moon seen from there. Then he thinks “Probably not a bit like it really.”
He thinks about the buildings around him, are they better or worse from a real estate value perspective. He approaches a shop owned by one Larry O’Rourke, and Bloom recalls that Simon Dedalus (Stephen Dedalus’ father) can mimic O’Rourke well. He considers discussing Dignam’s funeral, which will rake place later in the day, with O’Rourke, but simply wishes him good day instead. He wonders where O’Rourke gets his money, and calculates how much he can make selling porter.
Bloom stops in front of the butcher’s window and stares at all the meat, enters inside and takes his place in line. There is one pork kidney left in the case . Bloom worries that the girl in front of him will buy it. He picks up a newspaper or magazine and reads an advertisement for buying farmland near Tiberias, in what is now Israel. He admires the girl’s figure while she orders (she is his neighbor’s maid), thinks about her skirts swaying as she whacks the rugs to clean them.
He tries to give his order quickly so that he can follow the girl and watch her walking, but the butcher moves slowly. Once he’s outside he does not see where the girl went. He continues reading about the land near Jaffa, for sale by the Turkish government. The proposal is to buy the land, choose what to have people who live there plant (olives, oranges, almonds or citrons), and they send some of the crop to you every year. He thinks “Nothing doing,” but that there is still an idea there.
The citrons in the advertisement make him think of a friend with that name, and he reminisces about times spent with him and others. Bloom thinks about the citron fruit, thinks about the country where the land is being offered for sale, how it is old and dead, its people wandering. He calls it “the grey sunken cunt of the world.”
Bloom turns his attention back to what’s around him, how he’s feeling, real estate values. He thinks about being in bed with his wife.
When Bloom gets home, he sees the mail has come. There is a letter for his wife (it makes his heart slow) and a letter to him and postcard to his wife from Milly (their daughter). His wife calls down, asks about the mail, and he brings hers to her. She tucks the letter under her pillow while he adjusts the window shade, and tells him to hurry up with her tea.
He returns to the kitchen, continuing to prepare the tray and putting the kidney in a pan to cook, briefly scanning the letter from his daughter. He turns the meat over in the pan, and takes the tray, now ready, up to his wife, checking to make sure everything is how she likes it.
When Bloom brings the tray into the bedroom, Molly comments on how long she had to wait. The bed springs jingle as she sits up, and he looks calmly at her large breasts, noticing how her warm smell mingles with the smell of the tea she is pouring. He sees the edge of a torn envelope beneath her pillow, knows she’s read her hidden letter, and instead of leaving he straightens the bedspread and asks her who the letter was from.
Molly is a singer, and she says the letter is from her accompanist, Boylan, discussing the program for a coming performance or tour. She points to something at the end of the bed, indicating Bloom should give it to her, and because there are clothes strewn on the bed he is unsure what she’s pointing at. Bloom starts to hand her different items of clothing, but it’s a book she wants. Molly flips the pages, finds the right spot, shows Bloom a word, “metempsychosis,” and asks him what it means. He says “the transmigration of souls” but she still doesn’t understand so she asks him to explain “in plain words.” Bloom explains again – it’s like reincarnation. He leafs though the book, which seems to be a cheap novel. It takes place in a circus, and is somewhat erotic/sadistic. Molly has finished it and asks him to get her another, by author Paul de Kock (!).
Molly smells something burning and Bloom remembers his cooking. He hurries downstairs to find that the kidney is only a little burned. Bloom scrapes off the burnt bits and gives them to the cat. He sits down and reads the letter from Milly, his daughter, more carefully. Milly turned fifteen the day before, on the fifteenth of the month. This is her first birthday away from home. Bloom thinks about when Milly was born, and we learn that he had a younger son who died while still a baby. Bloom remembers scenes from Milly’s childhood, and reads the letter two more times. He worries about her. She mentions a boy in the letter and Bloom frets about what she’s doing and not doing. His thoughts shift to his wife, the letter, Boylan, what he thinks will happen. Bloom thinks about taking a trip to visit his daughter and he pets the cat.
Bloom needs to relieve himself and decides not to go upstairs, gathers a paper to read and goes to the back garden, heading for the outhouse. In the outhouse, he opens the paper and reads a story, the winner of a writing contest the paper had run. Details of his bowel movement. Of the story, Bloom thinks they’ll “print anything now,” but envies the writer the prize money awarded. Bloom thinks about writing something himself, and remembers when he tried to write down the mundane and random things his wife said while dressing. He thinks about her dressing, and about their conversation on the morning after she first met Boylan.
Bloom tears a part of the story out of the paper to wipe himself. He exits the outhouse and checks his pants to make sure they’re clean for the funeral. He hears the bells of a clock tower, and thinks “Poor Dignam.”
Thoughts and Impressions
Another short Episode, this one, for the most part, easier to understand. But still, so much here, and it’s hard to summarize succinctly. I am conscious that the summaries are getting longer. I think I’m getting bogged down. . . But the further in I go, the more I worry about leaving out something significant. I think about how children tell stories, including every detail even if it doesn’t impact the narrative, and I know I don’t want to do that . . .
Our first impression of Bloom is so distinct! “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I had to stop and just marvel at Joyce’s determination to frame our view of Bloom in this way. His appetite for food and his focus on what to eat are striking, perhaps signaling other things he hungers for? While I’ve never gotten this far in Ulysses, I know that Molly Bloom is not a faithful spouse, and so I wonder how much of what I see in Bloom and his exchanges with Molly is there because I know a bit of what happens later. Joyce foreshadowing. At any rate, Bloom’s focus on pork, given that I know he’s Jewish (as I am), is striking to me.
When Bloom checks to make sure the slip of paper is still hidden in his hat, I don’t know what the significance of that is but it’s so odd that I assume it’s important later on. I wondered why Joyce makes sure to tell us Bloom is wearing black. Reading later that he is going to a funeral explained it. Perhaps, in Joyce’s time, wearing black was an obvious sign of something to do with death — mourning (like Dedalus) or a funeral? Would the original readers have known right away what I realized later?
The advertisement for buying land in modern day Israel is a surprise to me, as is the discussion of the citron fruit: “Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. . . . Always the same, year after year.” — A reference to the Jewish festival of Sukkot, when as part of the observance a citron is held together with a palm frond and shaken and sniffed. I know this because I do this every year, but I am not expecting Bloom’s Judaism to resonate with me, since Joyce is not Jewish. I feel a qualm that I’ve underestimated Joyce! and I wonder how many readers understand this reference, thinking back to the latin that I didn’t quite get in the first Episode.
What else is here that we still don’t know about, or don’t understand as Joyce meant it to be understood? There’s a sentence, when he is returning home, about a girl running down the path to meet him, and I can’t tell if it’s something Bloom is experiencing right then (she does not stop to talk with him) or if it’s a memory. Sources I checked later were conflicted about it — one said a memory of his daughter, the other a girl in the street running past him. Does it matter which? Maybe Joyce didn’t even care? Is this more of his mediation on all we experience being perception — Aristotle’s modality of the visible from the previous Episode?
Molly’s lack of gratitude for the breakfast tray, her lack of appreciation of Bloom, her slovenliness and taste for cheap novels (Paul de Kock? Really?) are all conspicuous to me, and I try not to dislike her automatically because I already feel sorry for Bloom. Again I wonder what I would have thought of her had I not known anything about the plot. I go back and re-read the part where Bloom’s heart, quickened at the idea of being in bed with Molly,“slow[s] at once” when he sees the letter that has come for her. Later, he thinks about Molly and Boylan, and feels “[a] soft qualm regret” for what will happen. I can stop worrying about this at least: Joyce means for the reader to think badly of Molly.
Bloom’s letter from Milly is a paragraph long. She says “I am getting on swimming in the photo business now” and that she’s had her photo taken, but I can’t tell if she’s trying to become a photographer or a model for the pictures. One of the boys bathing in the first Episode mentioned pictures of a girl and, according to a source I checked at the time, that girl turns out to be Bloom’s daughter.
The graphic description of Bloom in the outhouse was extremely shocking when first published, and in fact was one of the focuses of the Ulysses obscenity trial. Today, it is still extraordinary, both bold and matter-of-fact. Joyce intersperses the narrative of Bloom’s bodily functions with other things Bloom is thinking about — the story he’s reading in the newspaper, Molly’s dressing rituals — as if to say, ‘Well, why not? What’s the big deal?’ It’s brilliant mischief.
Blogging Ulysses 