It is lunchtime and Bloom is hungry. He walks through the city center looking for somewhere to eat, and his hunger shapes everything: how food in shop windows looks, how other people's bodies look, how the afternoon feels. He passes the offices where Blazes Boylan is preparing for his visit to Molly and crosses the street to avoid him: a small deflection that costs him something he cannot name.
He ends up in Davy Byrne's pub, ordering a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola cheese sandwich. The meal is modest and good. As he eats, his mind drifts back to a day on Howth Head with Molly, early in their courtship, when she fed him seedcake from her mouth and he kissed her and she said yes and yes. It is the most complete memory of happiness in the novel: specific, sensory, fully inhabited. The contrast with this afternoon is not commented on. It does not need to be.
Bloom also thinks about food in a larger sense: the city's feeding and excretion, the way restaurants and pubs manage the biological needs of thousands of bodies, the economics of hunger. He is genuinely interested in how things work: not pretentiously, but with the curiosity of someone who has never stopped finding the ordinary world remarkable.
The chapter's threat is almost comic: the Lestrygonians in the Odyssey are cannibals. Dublin at lunchtime threatens to devour Bloom in a different way: through casual anti-Semitism, through social indifference, through the knowledge of what is happening at his home. He survives it by going to the National Museum to look at Greek statues: specifically, to check whether the goddesses have anuses. They do not. He knew they would not. But the question got him through the afternoon.
Coming Up in Chapter 9
In the National Library, intellectual appetites take center stage as Stephen Dedalus presents his theory about Shakespeare's Hamlet to Dublin's literary elite, while Bloom hovers at the edges of their scholarly world Stephen is at the National Library arguing his theory of Hamlet. The audience is the cream of Dublin's literary intelligentsia: the librarian Lyster, the poet and mystic AE, John Eglinton, and others..
