When Bloom has collected his letter from the post office on
Westland Row, the narrative observes that "He strolled out of
the postoffice and turned to the right." This detail would be
unremarkable were it not that, after three more
right turns and a detour through a church, he ends up almost
exactly where he started—and then turns left. His
meandering steps, circling back on themselves, describe the
beginning of a second giant question
mark. Scholars have uncovered this pattern, suggestive
of extreme distraction and aimlessness, but for the casual
reader it is buried beneath a sea of textual details.
Turning right at the post office door means that Bloom is
traveling north along Westland Row, retracing the steps he
took a few minutes earlier albeit now on the east side of the
street. After an extended conversation with the annoying M'Coy
(approximately three pages of text in most editions), he
begins "strolling towards Brunswick street"
(today called Pearse Street), which runs east-west. We hear
that "Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes
wandering" over various advertising posters.
After several paragraphs of reflections on stage plays,
prompted by the posters, the text reveals that "Mr
Bloom went round the corner and passed the
drooping nags of the hazard." He is now moving east on Great
Brunswick Street, passing just north of the train station
where cabs pick up and drop off railway passengers, and
thinking, inevitably, about the lives of horses. He passes the
cabmen's shelter, and thinks
about their lives too: "Curious the life of drifting cabbies.
All weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their
own."
And now Bloom comes to still another street, and turns into
it as if he has no will of his own: "He turned into
Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the
lee of the station wall." South Cumberland Street
runs parallel to Westland Row, one block east. Standing in the
quiet "lee" of the railway station, sheltered from the noisy
comings and goings on Brunswick, he looks at "Meade's
timberyard" across the street (shown as "Saw Mill" on the
Thom's map featured here), checks to make sure that no one is
nearby, and then reads Martha's letter. Thinking about the
letter occupies him for another two pages.
A new feature of the cityscape ushers in a new series of
reflections. South Cumberland Street passes under the railway
station by means of a wide stone arch topped by a maze of
timber trusses that support the tracks above. As Bloom passes
through this short, dank urban tunnel he takes advantage of
the darkness and isolation to destroy the evidence of his
correspondent's identity: "Going under the railway
arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in
shreds and scattered them towards the road." As the shreds
flutter and sink, he thinks of tearing up checks, and of a
Guinness family member cashing a huge check, and how much
porter you'd have to sell to make that kind of money.
"He had reached the
open backdoor of All Hallows," the church whose
front entrance is on Westland Row. "Stepping into the
porch," Bloom completes a final right turn pointing
him back in the direction of Westland Row. After four more
pages spent thinking about Catholic religious practices in the
church, he passes "out through the main door into the
light." He is now only a few steps from where he
began when he left the post office. And, heading off in an
entirely new direction, "He walked southward along
Westland row."
These meanderings speak volumes about Bloom's state of mind,
but Joyce does not make it easy to notice them. He calls no
attention to the larger shape that his minute spatial
directions are tracing, and he scatters those details across
many pages of text. From the moment when Bloom steps out of
the post office (line 76 in Gabler's text) to the moment when
he emerges from the church (line 458), fully two thirds of the
chapter elapse (383 of 572 lines), and those pages are filled
with thoughts and experiences far more likely to engage a
reader's attention.
Left to their own devices, few readers will pay close
attention to the brief stage directions describing Bloom's
movements, and unless they are intimately familiar with
Dublin's streets they certainly will not realize that he is
literally walking in a circle. But such is the nature of
Joyce's fiction that attention to tiny things can reveal the
largest kinds of design. Like the
eaters of Homer's lotos plant, Bloom seems in this
chapter to have lost his way.
Charting Bloom's course from the bird's-eye perspective of a
city map yields a vivid illustration of the questions that
this long section of the chapter raises about his state of
mind.
