Episode X
Wandering Rocks
Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields…
3:00 PM, Streets of Dublin (citywide). Style: Labyrinth.
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Summary
Nineteen short scenes track minor and major characters crossing the city at the same hour, stitched together by glimpses of a viceregal procession.
- 1
Nineteen scenes
The chapter is built from nineteen short scenes that fan out across Dublin between roughly 2:55 and 4:00 PM, each shot through with little 'interpolations' from the other scenes.
- 2
Conmee opens, viceroy closes
It opens with Father Conmee, S.J., walking north on a small charitable errand and closes with the Lord Lieutenant's cavalcade rolling east toward a charity bazaar. Church and Crown bookend the city.
- 3
The Dedaluses
Stephen's sister Dilly meets her father Simon on the street and tries to coax money out of him; she buys a French primer at a stall on the quays.
- 4
Bloom and Boylan
Bloom browses the bookcarts for a novel for Molly and chooses 'Sweets of Sin.' Boylan, elsewhere in the city, buys fruit and wine for his afternoon at 7 Eccles Street and flirts with the shopgirl.
- 5
The city as machine
Minor characters — Master Patrick Dignam, the one-legged sailor, the Misses Kennedy and Douce — appear in glimpses. The chapter behaves like a clockwork model of Dublin.
Gabler lines 10.1–1282
How Wandering Rocks unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Wandering Rocks is built from nineteen short sections, each following a different Dubliner across the same stretch of afternoon, with fragments of other sections cutting into them. The map groups those sections into three movements so the pattern is visible: church at one end, Crown at the other, and the whole city in between.
The Jesuit superior walks from Gardiner Street toward Artane, greeting parishioners and thinking benign, slightly complacent thoughts.
1. Conmee sets out
lines 1–100Father Conmee leaves to arrange a place for one of Dignam's sons at Artane, saluting people as he goes.
Why it matters:The episode opens with the Church's representative moving smoothly through a city that mostly is not doing well.
Notice:His charity is real and costs him nothing. Joyce lets both halves of that stand.
2. The one-legged sailor and the coin
lines 8–60A one-legged sailor growls for alms; a woman throws a coin from a window in Eccles Street.
Why it matters:The first fragment planted in another section — the arm at the window will read differently once you know whose it is.
3. Conmee in the fields
lines 200–320Reading his office on the country road, Conmee disturbs a flushed young couple climbing out of a hedge and blesses them gravely.
Why it matters:Bodies intrude on the breviary; the Church absolves and walks on.
4. Boylan orders the fruit basket
5. The Dedalus girls and the pawnshop
6. Bloom at the bookcart
7. The procession sets out
8. The city salutes, ignores, or misses it
9. Almidano Artifoni's trousers
The shape underneath
Wandering Rocks runs Church → city → State, with nineteen sections and a web of interpolations linking them. It is the book's only episode with no central consciousness: Dublin itself is the protagonist, measured in minutes and yards. Read it as the hinge where the novel stops following people and starts following systems. See the Homeric parallel below for the hazard Homer left out.
In modern prose
Three in the afternoon. Instead of following one person, the chapter shatters into nineteen short scenes happening at the same time all over Dublin, with characters glimpsing each other across the cuts. A self-satisfied priest walks east across the city while the British Viceroy's carriage processes west, and between them: Boylan flirting with a shop girl while he picks out fruit and wine to take to Molly; Stephen's younger sisters at home trying to sell their father's books to buy soup; Bloom in a second-hand bookshop choosing a piece of mildly racy fiction to bring Molly as a peace offering; priests, beggars, sailors, lovers, the one-legged sailor begging up the street, the throwaway leaflet floating down the river. Nothing in the chapter is more important than anything else. It's the first time in the book Dublin itself becomes the main character — the city as a single huge organism, all of it moving simultaneously, indifferent to any one person's day. Today it would read like a perfectly cut montage sequence, or a city's worth of social media posts at 3pm, all happening at once and only occasionally noticing each other.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Streets
- Hour
- 3:00 PM
- Organ
- Blood
- Art
- Mechanics
- Colour
- —
- Symbol
- Citizens
- Technic
- Labyrinth
- Correspondence
- Wandering Rocks
Themes: Nationalism, Religion, Modernity.
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Wandering Rocks.
- Beginner's guide to UlyssesWhere to start, and how to keep going.
- How to read UlyssesPractical ways through the book's hardest stretches.
- All 18 episode summariesSee where this episode sits in the whole day.
- Daily Companion, Day 69: Father Conmee sets out across DublinJoyce switches gears completely: instead of following one mind, we get nineteen short scenes scattered across the city, all happening around the same time.
- Daily Companion, Day 74: Simon Dedalus, charming and brokeWe see Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father, moving through the streets with his usual wit and warmth toward acquaintances, entirely separate from any thought of his struggling children.
- Daily Companion, Day 78: The viceregal cavalcade closes the episodeThe episode ends with a grand finale: the Lord Lieutenant's carriage procession rolls through Dublin's streets, and nearly every character we've just met reappears for a moment, glimpsed bowing, watching, or simply passing by as the cavalcade goes past.
- Who's who in UlyssesLeopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the cast of Dublin.
- Themes in UlyssesThe ideas that run beneath every episode.
- Dublin locations in UlyssesWhere Streets of Dublin (citywide) sits on Bloom's day.