Bloom offers to give Lyons the paper: "I was just going to
throw it away." Lyons shoots him a significant look and
asks, "What's that?" After Bloom repeats his observation,
Lyons hesitates for a moment and then shoves the paper back in
Bloom's hands, saying, "I'll risk it. Here, thanks."
Joyce does not disclose anything about his thought process,
but the obscurity is mimetically justified. Bloom does not
mean to give Lyons a racing tip, and he is eager to be rid of
the man, so he does not think much about what "I'll risk it"
may mean. For his part, Lyons is planning to engage in illegal activity: in 1904
betting on horses was allowed only at racetracks and at
certain authorized bookmakers where credit was required, not
cash. In such an environment tips would have been offered and
taken quickly, quietly, even cryptically. Page 7 of the day's
Freeman, however, reveals what the narrative and the
interior monologue do not: the name of one of the horses
racing on June 16 was...Throwaway!
Ironies attendant upon this strange little coincidence unfold
throughout the novel. In Lestrygonians Lyons tells his
drinking companions that he is planning to bet five shillings
on the horse Bloom recommended. Such a bet would have made a
lot of money: Throwaway was a longshot running at 20 to 1
against. But in Wandering Rocks Lenehan says that he
ran into Lyons on his way to place his bet, and in Cyclops
he adds that he talked him out of it. Lenehan has a different
favorite in the race, running at odds of only 7 to 4 against.
He announces it in Aeolus: "—Who wants a dead cert
for the Gold cup? he asked. Sceptre with O. Madden up."
In Lestrygonians Nosey Flynn remarks that "Lenehan
gets some good ones. He’s giving Sceptre today. Zinfandel’s
the favourite, Lord Howard de Walden’s, won at Epsom. Morny
Cannon is riding him." (Zinfandel was indeed the
favorite, running at odds of 5 to 4 in favor.) In Wandering
Rocks Lenehan says "I want to pop into Lynam’s to see Sceptre’s
starting price," and Oxen of the Sun reveals that he
has placed a bet on the horse.
Lenehan also peddles his prediction to his friend Blazes
Boylan. In Sirens he tells Boylan that Sceptre "will
win in a canter," prompting Boylan to remark that he has acted
on the recommendation: "— I plunged a bit, said Boylan
winking and drinking. Not on my own, you know. Fancy of a
friend of mine." In Cyclops Lenehan discloses
that "Boylan plunged two quid on my tip Sceptre for himself
and a lady friend." Since early in the 19th century the
Gold Cup was known colloquially in England as Ladies' Day,
because women attended the race dressed to the nines. Boylan's
lady, of course, is Molly Bloom.
In his kitchen at the end of the day in Ithaca, Bloom
discovers "Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated
scarlet betting tickets, numbered 8 87, 8 86" on top of
the dresser and thinks of "coincidences, truth stranger
than fiction, preindicative of the result of the
Gold Cup flat handicap." Chief among these
"coincidences" are his misinterpreted words to Bantam Lyons
and a second "throwaway," the piece of paper announcing a
religious revival meeting placed in his hands at the beginning
of Lestrygonians. These events preindicated the result
because, in a stunning upset, Throwaway beat Zinfandel by a
length. Sceptre came in third, and Maximum II, Lyons' "French
horse," was fourth.
Bloom knows the results because in the previous chapter he
found them summarized on page 3 of the Evening Telegraph:
"Ascot Throwaway recalls Derby of '92
when Captain Marshall's dark horse, Sir Hugo,
captured the blue ribband at long odds.... Throwaway
and Zinfandel stood close order. It
was anybody's race then the rank outsider drew to the fore
got long lead, beating lord Howard de Walden's chestnut colt
and Mr W. Bass's bay filly Sceptre on a 2½ mile
course." Seeing the tickets in Ithaca makes
Bloom reflect that he held valuable information in his hands
that morrning. In a parody of Aeolus' account of
Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with "the light of
inspiration shining in his countenance," carrying stone
tablets "graven in the language of the outlaw" (i.e.,
Hebrew), Ithaca describes Bloom taking back from Lyons
a newspaper "which he had been about to throw away
(subsequently thrown away)" and walking on to the Turkish
baths "with the light of inspiration shining in his
countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the
race, graven in the language of prediction." Bloom
becomes Moses, and the divine secret of the Jewish race
becomes the secret of the Ascot race.
Bloom himself could have made a lot of money had he
recognized and acted upon the uncanny coincidence. This
reflection causes him some brief "perturbations" in Ithaca,
but they are "allayed" by reflecting on the difficulties of
recognizing occult signs and the benefits of not crying over
spilt milk. He quickly regains his equanimity: "He had not
risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he
was satisfied." What satisfied him? "To have sustained no
positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others.
Light to the gentiles." Bloom finds a quiet pleasure, in other
words, in having benefited the gentile Lyons while gaining
nothing himself. But the Dublin rumor mill manufactures a
precisely opposite story: since the Jew gave Lyons a tip on
Throwaway, he must have bet on the horse himself.
In Cyclops Lenehan explains Bloom's brief absence
from the bar: "The courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob
on Throwaway and he's gone to gather
in the shekels." This hypothesis is immediately accepted
as fact by all present, so, in an excruciating irony, Bloom's
exit to advance the charitable cause of donating money to
Paddy Dignam's widow and children becomes evidence of
stereotypical Jewish financial rapacity. When Martin
Cunningham comes in looking for Bloom, Lenehan says he is out
"Defrauding widows and orphans." When Bloom himself returns,
the narrator thinks, "Courthouse my eye and your pockets
hanging down with gold and silver. Mean bloody scut. Stand us
a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's a jew for you! All
for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to five." A
surly taunt follows: "— Don't tell anyone, says the
citizen." Bloom's supposed refusal to share his newfound
wealth leads to an outbreak of bawling, brawling antisemitism.
But in addition to this ugly promise of future hatred, the
novel builds into the Throwaway story one prediction of
possible happiness for Bloom, and it too begins in Barney
Kiernan's pub. When Lenehan says, "He's the only man in Dublin
has it. A dark horse," Joe Hynes (who owes Bloom money and who
fails to repay him even on this day when he has collected his
salary) replies, "He's a bloody dark horse himself."
The narrator then leaves the bar, and thoughts of Jews and
dark horses tumble about in his drunken mind as he urinates.
The bigoted Catholics in the bar think of Bloom as a dark
horse because his complexion is darker than theirs and his
motivations presumably are obscure and malign. But Throwaway
won his race, so Bloom too may be symbolically fated to win
the marital sweepstakes against long odds.
Joyce develops that logic by having Blazes Boylan bet on
Throwaway's rival Sceptre. The phallic connotations of the
name make Sceptre a good choice to enter the winner's circle
of the vaginally suggestive Gold Cup. Boylan does take Molly's
cup, repeatedly, on June 16, but the longer she thinks about
him in Penelope the less he seems like a possible life
partner. One trait that repels her is his angry reaction to
losing a bet, so different from Bloom's reaction to the news
from Ascot: "he was like a perfect devil for a few minutes
after he came back with the stoppress tearing up the tickets
and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost
over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on
account of Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits."
With a gambling addict's irrationality, Boylan does not curse
the loss of the single pound he bet on Sceptre, or even the
two pounds he laid down for himself and Molly. He feels
cheated out of the twenty pounds he could have
pocketed if he had picked Throwaway, even though the book
gives no indication that he ever intended to do so. And he
blames this financial catastrophe on Lenehan.
Circe's hallucinatory version of the race—"A
dark horse, riderless, bolts like a phantom past the
winningpost, his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars.
The field follows"—feels like a prediction of Bloom's
success, not at the seamy business of racetrack betting, but
at the more serious work of winning his wife's affections.
This dark horse, or "outsider" as Molly calls him, cannot be
counted out yet.
