Bloom moves through Dublin on his morning errands and Joyce uses his route to explore the city's various narcotics: the substances and rituals that dull people into comfortable inattention. The chapter's controlling metaphor is lotus: the plant from the Odyssey whose fruit made sailors forget their homes and lie down in pleasant stupor.
Bloom picks up a letter from a post office box he rents under a false name: Henry Flower. He is conducting a mild epistolary flirtation with a woman named Martha Clifford, who answered his newspaper advertisement. The letter is mildly suggestive, slightly disappointed in him, asking him to say what he would do to her. Bloom reads it with pleasure and tucks it away.
He wanders into a Catholic church mid-Mass and watches the congregation with the interested detachment of an outsider: noticing the ritual's narcotic quality, the congregation going through motions, receiving something that soothes without demanding thought. He is not contemptuous; he is observing. He registers that religion, like alcohol, like the letter in his pocket, like the horse racing that preoccupies Dublin, all serve the same function: they allow people to feel without fully reckoning with their lives.
At the chemist's he orders lotion for Molly and thinks about the bath he intends to take. The chapter ends with Bloom in the bathhouse, floating in warm water, at ease in his body with a serenity the novel rarely grants him again.
The chapter is formally loose, episodic, appropriately drifting. Its insight is not cynical: Joyce is not attacking religion or pleasure: but diagnostic: the lotus grows everywhere, and the question is whether you know you are eating it. Bloom, characteristically, knows: and eats it anyway.
Coming Up in Chapter 6
Bloom heads to Paddy Dignam's funeral, where he'll join other Dublin men in confronting mortality and the weight of social obligations. The carriage ride to Glasnevin Cemetery becomes a meditation on death, memory, and what we owe the living and the dead..
