Ulysses

Bloom is at the Ormond Hotel for a late lunch, and Joyce writes the chapter as music. The prose mimics the structure of a fugue per canonem — themes introduced, developed, inverted, recapitulated. Words repeat with variation. Sentences move in rhythmic phrases. The barmaids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, are the sirens: beautiful, knowing, drawing men toward them without particular effort or cruelty. Blazes Boylan stops in for a drink before proceeding to Eccles Street. Bloom watches from the dining room, unable to stop himself, as Boylan — brash, cheerful, oblivious to the damage he causes — tosses back his drink and leaves. The clock advances: it is now approaching four o'clock. Bloom knows what is happening at his home. He cannot bring himself to leave. He orders food and writes a letter to Martha Clifford under his pen name Henry Flower. He composes carefully, choosing words, constructing a mild fantasy. The letter writing is a way of not thinking about what he is thinking about. It works partially. What it actually reveals is the gap between the life Bloom lives inside his imagination and the life he cannot act on in the world. Meanwhile, various Dublin men sing sentimental Irish ballads in the bar room — nostalgic for a past that never quite existed. Bloom listens and thinks about the power of music to manufacture emotion, to make people feel things that have no precise object. He is moved despite himself. He is always moved despite himself. The chapter ends with Bloom releasing a fart as the distant cannon fires the time signal — a small, private, biological fact against the chapter's elaborate musical architecture. Joyce will not let the beauty float free of the body that contains it.