Episode 10 — Wandering Rocks

Three p.m. The chapter is the novel's structural set-piece. It is broken into nineteen short vignettes, each one tracking a different Dubliner through the same hour across the same streets. The vignettes are interrupted by short interpolations — single sentences from other vignettes, dropped into the wrong one — that show Joyce stitching the city together in real time. The viceregal cavalcade, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and his procession driving through Dublin on the way to a charity bazaar, threads through nine of the vignettes and ties the whole structure together.

Section 1 opens with Father Conmee, the Jesuit superior of Belvedere College, walking serenely from his presbytery toward the suburb of Artane on an errand of mercy — to find a place at a school for one of Paddy Dignam's children. His progress is described in a tone of quiet self-satisfaction Joyce dismantles sentence by sentence. He gives a coin to a one-legged sailor; he tips his hat to a respectful pedestrian; he boards a tram. Section 19 closes with the viceregal cavalcade, greeted with various levels of deference, indifference, and disrespect by the same characters we have just watched.

In between: Corny Kelleher the coffin-maker chatting outside his shop; Molly's hand at a window throwing a coin to the one-legged sailor on the street below; Boylan in a fruit shop on Grafton Street buying a basket of port and fruit for Molly; Stephen running into his sister Dilly outside a bookstall on Bedford Row — Dilly is starving and broke; Stephen, also broke, gives her some coins and walks away ashamed; Lenehan and M'Coy gossiping; Bloom at a bookstall along the Liffey quays settling on Sweets of Sin; Buck Mulligan and Haines having tea at the DBC. The chapter's argument is structural: no single consciousness contains the city. The city contains them.