U

One of the turningpoints of Ulysses occurs offscreen, between chapters 14 and 15. Stephen and Lynch, on their way north to the redlight district, encounter Mulligan and Haines at the train station (Westland row, where Bloom picked up Martha's letter in ch5). M&H are apparently trying to sneak back to the Tower (south) without Stephen, and some sort of fight occurs-- witnessed by Bloom, who's following Stephen to keep an eye on him. Stephen apparently hurts his hand in the fight (or somewhere else?). But we only gradually get hints about this. Ch15 is written as the script of a play: [full text]

(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly. Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer.) THE CALLS Wait, my love, and I'll be with you. THE ANSWERS Round behind the stable.

Stephen and Lynch stroll past, talking esthetics. A minute later Bloom appears, trying to catch up (having gone too far on the train) but also stopping to buy food (for Stephen?):

...On the farther side under the railway bridge Bloom appears, flushed, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a side pocket... (He disappears into Olhausen's, the porkbutcher's, under the downcoming rollshutter. A few moments later he emerges from under the shutter, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In each hand he holds a parcel, one containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the other a cold sheep's trotter sprinkled with wholepepper. He gasps, standing upright. Then bending to one side he presses a parcel against his ribs and groans.)

Molly will later think "I hate an unlucky man" [Penelope] and here we seem Bloom at his unluckiest-- he's almost hit first by two bicyclists, then by a giant tramcleaner-car; he encounters sinister strangers including two boys who may be pickpockets; a mangy dog starts following him, smelling the meat. Unsuperstitious Bloom ignores these omens, urging him not to enter the redlight district, Nighttown. (They all correspond to Odysseus's encounter with helpful Hermes at the start of the Circe episode.) But his subconscious conjures up the first of many hallucinations, his judgmental father:

(...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.) RUDOLPH Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with drunken goy ever. So you catch no money. BLOOM (Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi.

The hallucinations also require endless 'costume changes' of Bloom:

BLOOM (In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips, narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver Waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one side of him coated with stiffening mud.) Harriers, father. Only that once.

Bloom's mother appears briefly, so stereotyped we have to wonder if he really knew her:

BLOOM Mamma! ELLEN BLOOM (In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey's crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind, grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net, appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand, and cries out in shrill alarm.) O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My smelling salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where were you at all, at all?

Followed by Molly:

(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet trousers and jacket slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free only her large dark eyes and raven hair.) BLOOM Molly! MARION Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me...

The dominant theme of this chapter is power-magic, starting with magic words:

MARION Nebrakada! Femininum.

Bloom's next hallucination combines Gerty MacDowell with his first prostitute at age 14:

(...In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled Bridie Kelly stands.) (Leering, Gerty MacDowell limps forward. She draws from behind, ogling, and shows coyly her bloodied clout.) GERTY With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. (She murmurs.) You did that. I hate you. BLOOM I? When? You're dreaming. I never saw you. THE BAWD Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you. GERTY (To Bloom.) When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer. (She paws his sleeve, slobbering.) Dirty married man! I love you for doing that to me.

The next hallucination is Josie Breen:

MRS BREEN (Holds up a finger.) Now don't tell a big fib! I know somebody won't like that. O just wait till I see Molly! (Slily.) Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you!

Bloom has to exercise his bag of salesman-magic tricks (flattery, showmanship, distraction) to dissuade her from telling Molly she saw him there. Next Bloom realises he looks foolish bringing food into Nighttown, and gives it to the dog:

BLOOM My spine's a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get all pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eightpence too much. (The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand, wagging his tail.) Strange how they take to me... Give and have done with it. Provided nobody. (Calling encouraging words he shambles back with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the setter into a dark stalestunk corner. He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the crubeen softly but holds back and feels the trotter.) Sizeable for threepence... O, let it slide. Two and six. (With regret he lets unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed, crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant. They murmur together.) THE WATCH Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom. (Each lays hand on Bloom's shoulder.) FIRST WATCH Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.

Bloom is so cowed by respectability that even feeding a dog on the street conjures a wild hallucination of being tried for his sins (the watch haven't really noticed at all). Over the course of the trial Bloom exercises all sorts of defensive 'magic' for exonerating himself-- pleading good intentions, lying about his identity, appealing to various sympathies. A stream of accusers rise up from his past, starting with Martha Clifford:

MARTHA (Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck, a copy of the Irish Times in her hand, in tone of reproach, pointing.) Henry! Leopold! Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.

And a housemaid Bloom flirted with many years back:

THE CRIER Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid! (Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand...) MARY DRISCOLL He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he interfered twict with my clothing. BLOOM She counterassaulted. MARY DRISCOLL (Scornfully.) I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: Keep it quiet! (General laughter.)

Bloom tries to make excuses but can't find the words, so he brings in an eloquent lawyer to speak for him. He tries invoking highly placed friends, but this triggers a wild fantasy of lust for and revenge from archetypal "Rich Ladies":

BLOOM (In court dress.) Can give best references. Messrs Callan, Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon, ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest... Queens of Dublin Society. (Carelessly.) I was just chatting this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball, astronomer royal, at the levee. Sir Bob, I said... 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.) Arrest him, constable. He wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the Theatre Royal at a command performance of La Cigale. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays... 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.) Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude senorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping... MRS BELLINGHAM (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o' nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.

The evidence of Molly's adultery is the last bit of evidence convincing the jury (mostly attendees of Dignam's funeral) to convict:

THE RECORDER I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! (He dons the black cap.) Let him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him... BLOOM (Desperately.) Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence. Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee. (Breathlessly.) Pelvic basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. (Overcome with emotion.) I left the precincts...

Here the hallucination seems to unwind, returning to the dog and meat:

SECOND WATCH (Points to the corner.) The bomb is here. FIRST WATCH Infernal machine with a time fuse. BLOOM No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a funeral. FIRST WATCH (Draws his truncheon.) Liar! (The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.) PADDY DIGNAM (In a hollow voice.) It is true. It was my funeral. Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from natural causes. (He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.) BLOOM (In triumph.) You hear? (...All recedes. Bloom plodges forward again through the sump. Kisses chirp amid the rifts of fog. A piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house, listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers, fly about him, twittering, warbling, cooing.)

Bloom hears a piano from one of the houses, correctly (somewhat occultly) guessing it's Stephen: [full text]

BLOOM A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here. (Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts him.) ZOE Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend. BLOOM Is this Mrs Mack's? ZOE No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse. Mother Slipperslapper. (Familiarly.) She's on the job herself tonight with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today...

Zoe is one of my favorite characters in the book. She's yet another Homeric Hermes, providing guidance that will allow Bloom to overcome Circe... but also reversing the parallel by depriving him of the magical herb 'moly':

(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.) BLOOM A talisman. Heirloom. ZOE For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh? (She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens...) BLOOM (Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat awkward hand.) Are you a Dublin girl? ZOE (Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil.) No bloody fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot? BLOOM (As before.) Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish device. (Lewdly.) The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed. ZOE Go on. Make a stump speech out of it. BLOOM (In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap.) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life! (Midnight chimes from distant steeples.) THE CHIMES Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin...!

As Bloom wallows in Zoe's temptations, he launches the most spectacular hallucination in the chapter, in which he ascends from mayor to king to messiah (and along the way inventories the various styles of political 'power-magic'):

A MILLIONAIRESS (Richly.) Isn't he simply wonderful? A NOBLEWOMAN (Nobly.) All that man has seen! A FEMINIST (Masculinely.) And done...! 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! ALL God save Leopold the First! BLOOM (In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and Connor, with dignity.) Thanks, somewhat eminent sir... My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future... (A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated finger at Bloom.) THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH Don't you believe a word he says. That man is Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins. BLOOM Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M'Intosh! (A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing committees, are reported...)

He has facile solutions to every problem:

CHRIS CALLINAN What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of Aldebaran? BLOOM Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. 11.

But the heckling revives, and opinion divides:

THE VEILED SIBYL (Enthusiastically.) I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth. BLOOM (Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she's a bonny lassie. THEODORE PUREFOY (In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature. THE VEILED SIBYL (Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.)

The euphoria gives way to a replay of the trial:

DR DIXON (Reads a bill of health.) Professor Bloom is a finished example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense. He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is about to have a baby. BLOOM O, I so want to be a mother.

A more personal, private sequence of accusations emerges:

A CRAB (In bushranger's kit.) What did you do in the cattlecreep behind Kilbarrack? A FEMALE INFANT (Shakes a rattle.) And under Ballybough bridge? A HOLLYBUSH And in the devil's glen? BLOOM (Blushes furiously all over from front to nates, three tears falling from his left eye.) Spare my past... (All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards at Bloom.) MASTIANSKY AND CITRON Belial! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah! Abulafia! Recant...! BLOOM (Rubs his hands cheerfully.) Just like old times. Poor Bloom! (...Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets fire to Bloom. Lamentations...) BLOOM (In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid phoenix flames.) Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin. (... Bloom becomes mute, shrunken, carbonised.) ZOE Talk away till you're black in the face.

There follows a puzzling sequence where Bloom is cynical and Zoe optimistic:

BLOOM (Bitterly.) Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle. I'm sick of it. Let everything rip. ZOE (In sudden sulks.) I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a bleeding whore a chance...

Bloom follows Zoe into Bella Cohen's house, and finds Stephen still debating esthetics with Lynch (or his cap), along with two other whores, Florrie and Kitty:

STEPHEN Here's another for you. (He frowns.) The reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible interval which... THE CAP Which? Finish. You can't. STEPHEN (With on effort.) Interval which. Is the greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which. THE CAP Which? (Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.) STEPHEN (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!

Lynch lifts Zoe's skirt, raising Bloom's level of inner turmoil in the form of a hallucination of his grandfather:

ZOE (...She stretches up to light the cigarette over the flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly at her cigarette.) Can you see the beautyspot of my behind? (...Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom, then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously, twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her spittle and, gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag, basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent. Two quills project over his ears.) VIRAG (Heels together, bows.) My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely. (He coughs thoughtfully, drily.) Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good. BLOOM Granpapachi. But...

Virag launches into a grotesquely hilarious routine dismissing the whores as subhuman, balanced eventually by a hallucination of the romantic esthete 'Henry Flower':

(From left upper entrance with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes forward to left front centre. 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. He settles down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his amorous tongue.) HENRY (In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar.) There is a flower that bloometh. (Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendent dewlap to the piano.)

Virag now adds a nasty anti-Catholic routine:

ZOE There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to him. I know you've a Roman collar. VIRAG Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. (Harshly, his pupils waxing.) To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I am the Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Why I left the church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. (He wriggles.) Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. (He cries.) Coactus volui. Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht...! (A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage, cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the pope's bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world.) A son of a whore. Apocalypse.... (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!

Henry Flower is revealed to be (cf Poe?) the Dublin murderer from whom Joyce (or Bloom?!?) borrowed the name:

HENRY (Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs.) Thine heart, mine love. (He plucks his lutestrings.) When first I saw... VIRAG (Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting.) Rats! (He yawns; showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward push of his parchmentroll.) After having said which I took my departure. Farewell. Fare thee well. Dreck...! HENRY All is lost now. (Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.) VIRAG'S HEAD Quack! (Exeunt severally.)

Stephen matches Bloom's hallucinations with a short one of his own-- father Simon as a cardinal. Then Bloom's paranoia about being discovered-- or meeting Boylan-- is reawakened: [full text]

(The trick doorhandle turns.) THE DOORHANDLE Theeee! ZOE The devil is in that door. (A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.) ZOE (Sniffs his hair briskly.) Hmmm! Thank your mother for the rabbits. I'm very fond of what I like. BLOOM (Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep, pricks his ears.) If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double event? (...In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the door. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a swift pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.) Go, go, go, I conjure you, whoever you are! (A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside. Bloom's features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.) BLOOM (Solemnly.) Thanks... (Takes the chocolate.) Aphrodisiac? But I bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red influences lupus. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. (He eats.) Influence taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.

Perhaps it's here that Bloom turns the corner toward his new life, of freedom from Calypso, but he still needs one more trial to prove himself:

(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters. 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.) BELLA My word! I'm all of a mucksweat. (She glances around her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.) THE FAN (Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see. BLOOM Yes. Partly, I have mislaid... THE FAN (Half opening, then closing.) And the missus is master. Petticoat government...

He kneels to tie her bootlace, and they exchange genders!

(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in midbrow. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.) BLOOM (Mumbles.) Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen... BELLO (With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of dishonour! BLOOM (Infatuated.) Empress! (...Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey... BELLO (Savagely.) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.) I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter. (He belches.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you...

We get to see all of Bloom's transvestite urges (and Joyce's as well, one suspects):

BLOOM (Her hands and features working.) 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... BELLO (Sternly.) No insubordination! The sawdust is there in the corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it standing, sir! I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds. THE SINS OF THE PAST (In a medley of voices.) 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, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order? BELLO (Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be candid for once. (Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny, Cassidy's hag, blind stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other the, lane the...) BLOOM Don't ask me! Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath... BELLO (Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing. Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr... BLOOM (Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant... BELLO (Imperiously.) O, get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak when you're spoken to...

Bello auctions Bloom off to a white slaver, and then torments him with a vision of 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! (...Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return and see... BLOOM (In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing, fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes, cries out.) I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he... BELLO (Laughs mockingly.) That's your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar student... (Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's... (Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowieknife between his teeth...) BLOOM (Clasps his head.) My willpower! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff... (He weeps tearlessly.)

This trial now confronts him with the nymph Calypso herself:

THE NYMPH (Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest! ...You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame... (Covers her face with her hand.) What have I not seen in that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?

The sins of the bedroom are traced to sins of adolescence:

BLOOM ...I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's operaglasses: the wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled downhill at Rialto Bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their crooked tree and I... A saint couldn't resist it. The demon possessed me. Besides, who saw? (Staggering Bob, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with humid nostrils through the foliage.) STAGGERING BOB (Large teardrops rolling from his prominent eyes, snivels.) Me. Me see. BLOOM Simply satisfying a need I... (With pathos.) No girl would when I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play... THE NYMPH (Loftily.) We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light. (She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in her mouth.) Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then could you...? BLOOM (Pacing the heather abjectly.) O I have been a perfect pig. Enemas too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia, to which add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's syringe, the ladies' friend...

We get some hints that Bloom's 1894 fall may have involved misbehavior while visiting a convent:

BLOOM It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. So womanly, full. It fills me full... THE NYMPH (Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and huge winged wimple, softly, with remote eyes.) Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount Carmel. The apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. (She reclines her head, sighing.) Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o'er the waters dull. (Bloom half rises. His back trouserbutton snaps.) THE BUTTON Bip!

Somehow this small mischance finally turns the tables (Joyce to Budgen: "As regards 'moly' it can be chance, also laughter, the enchantment killer. The knock out blow delivered at end brings all things back to their sordid reality."):

BLOOM (Coldly.) You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing, like an ass pissing... THE NYMPH (Her features hardening, gropes in the folds of her habit.) Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! (A large moist stain appears on her robe.) Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman. (She clutches again in her robe.) Wait. Satan, you'll sing no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. (She draws a poniard and, clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his loins.) Nekum! BLOOM (Starts up, seizes her hand.) Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat o' nine lives! Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What do you lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? (He clutches her veil.) A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good Mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard? THE NYMPH (With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks.) Poli...! BLOOM (Calls after her.) As if you didn't get it on the double yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it. Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on the nail? You fee men dancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a keen.) Eh! I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me. (He sniffs.) Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease. (The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.) BELLA You'll know me the next time. BLOOM (Composed, regards her.) Passée. Mutton dressed as lamb. Long in the tooth and superfluous hairs. A raw onion the last thing at night would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your eyes are as vapid as the glass eyes of your stuffed fox. They have the dimensions of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw propeller. BELLA (Contemptuously.) You're not game, in fact. (Her sowcunt barks.) Fbhracht! BLOOM (Contemptuously.) Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself. BELLA I know you, canvasser! Dead cod! BLOOM I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!

Joyce: main : fast portal : portal
major: FW : Pomes : U : PoA : Ex : Dub : SH : CM : CM05 : CM04
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