Ithaca
“What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?”
Bloom brings Stephen home. The chapter answers everything in cold catechism — kettles, water, urination under the stars — before Bloom finally goes to bed.
- Beat 01Question and answer
The whole chapter is written as a cold, mock-scientific question-and-answer, as if a textbook were being asked everything that happens between the two men.
- Beat 02Getting in
Bloom forgets his key, climbs over the railings of 7 Eccles Street, drops into the area, and lets Stephen in by the front door. He boils water and makes them cocoa.
- Beat 03Conversation
They talk — about music, about being Jewish, about Ireland, about themselves. They discover overlaps in their lives and discover, with equal calm, where they don't fit.
- Beat 04Under the stars
Bloom shows Stephen out the back door. The two stand in the garden, look up at 'the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,' and urinate side by side. Stephen leaves into the small hours.
- Beat 05An inventory of a life
Alone, Bloom takes a long inventory of the kitchen, of his desk drawer, of his marriage, of the day. He notes evidence of Boylan in the bedroom and decides on a kind of equanimity.
- Beat 06Into bed
He gets into bed feet-to-head beside Molly, kisses 'the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump,' answers her questions briefly about his day, and falls asleep. The chapter ends with a great black dot.
Two in the morning. Bloom brings Stephen home to 7 Eccles Street. The whole chapter is written as a deadpan series of questions and answers, like a school catechism or a science textbook or a Wikipedia article being compiled in real time — and that flat, factual surface is exactly the point. Underneath it, this is the most emotionally loaded chapter in the book. We learn precisely how Bloom boils the water and makes them cocoa; the exact contents of his bookshelf, his kitchen drawer, his locked box of personal papers; his thoughts on water, on the universe, on the Jewish people, on emigration, on his daughter, on his marriage, on the eleven years since he and Molly had full sex, on the men he believes she has slept with (including Boylan, calmly listed). Bloom offers Stephen a bed for the night; Stephen, just as politely, declines, and walks off into the dark. The two of them stand together in the back garden first, look up at the stars, and pee. Then Bloom locks up the house, eats a small slice of seed-cake, climbs into bed beside the sleeping Molly, kisses her bottom, asks her for breakfast in bed, and curls up to sleep head-to-foot beside her — at peace, somehow, with everything that happened today. The flat scientific style is a kind of armour: it lets the book look directly at things that would burn it to look at sentimentally.
- Scene
- The House
- Hour
- 2:00 AM
- Organ
- Skeleton
- Art
- Science
- Color
- —
- Symbol
- Comets
- Technic
- Catechism (impersonal)
- Correspondence
- Ithaca