In Ithaca Bloom attributes Stephen's "collapse" in Circe to his having consumed too little food and too much alcohol, and to "the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere"—i.e., the mad whirling dance he and his companions performed in the brothel. Stephen, however, blames it on "the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both from two different points of observation, Sandycove and Dublin) at first no bigger than a woman's hand." He is referring to the cloud that both men saw covering the sun at about the same time early in the morning. Now, having been terrified by a violent rainstorm earlier in the evening, he sees the cloud as an omen of divine judgment to come. The "woman's hand" alludes to a passage in the Hebrew Bible in which a small cloud similarly grows into a violent storm manifesting the presence of God. But Stephen changes the "man's" hand of the Bible to a woman's. He is thinking of one particular woman—his mother—but to recognize and understand this implication one must return to passages in earlier chapters.

In chapter 17 of 1 Kings, the prophet Elijah announces a drought whose effects will punish the wicked king Ahab. In chapter 18, after years of famine, God calls off the terrible drought and sends rain. Elijah summons his servant to look toward the sea and the servant (after six unsuccessful tries) tells him, "there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. And he [Elijah] said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down, that the rain stop thee not. And it came to pass in the mean while, that the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain" (18:44-45). This rain comes as a sign of divine forgiveness, but for Stephen the omen is not so favorable. When a violent thunderclap shakes the hospital in Oxen of the Sun he cowers in fear, hearing in it God's rebuke for the drunken blasphemies he has been uttering.

Bloom tries to calm Stephen in that episode, telling him that the thunder was only a "natural phenomenon." Now, in Ithaca, he again advances scientific explanations for Stephen's collapse in Circe. Stephen is equally consistent. By blaming his collapse on a cloud in the morning sky he constructs a fantastical narrative reaching all the way back to Telemachus. The cloud, he infers, swelled with divine menace throughout the day and came to strike him down. It revisited him first in the hospital and then in the brothel.

The change of a man's to "a woman's hand" points to an important detail in this narrative that critics have never noticed—the hallucination that immediately precedes his psychotic break in Circe. When Stephen, Lynch, Bloom, Bella, and the three girls are dancing to the strains of My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl, his mother returns from the grave as a halfeaten corpse. This "Lemur," "ghoul," or "Hyena" acts as the agent of an angry God, demanding that Stephen repent his intellectual sins: "Beware! (She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly towards Stephen's breast with outstretched fingers.) Beware God's hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen's heart.)... (Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately.) O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart!" A woman's hand—cancerously malignant, piously accusatory—stabs Stephen in the heart. It is "God's hand!"

As often in Ulysses, to discover the hand's meaning one must read retrospectively, and the retrospection does not stop there. It turns out that the cloud too has been associated with May Dedalus from the beginning. When it blocks the sun in Telemachus, Dublin Bay becomes shadowed in "deeper green," and Stephen sees "a bowl of bitter waters" similar to the china bowl filled with green vomit that stood beside his mother's deathbed. This reflection leads him to recall her tearful responses to a song he was singing in a nearby room, but soon the tenderness turns to horror when he remembers her ghostly return from death in a dream, reproaching him for his sins: "Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!" When May returns as a ghoul in Circe, stretching out her hand to pierce his heart, the cloud is absent but implicit. Stephen brings it back in Ithaca: "a matutinal cloud...at first no bigger than a woman's hand."

Joyce shows both Stephen and Bloom experiencing a small cloud blotting out the morning sun and feeling their moods darken for a moment in order to develop his idea of parallactic or stereoscopic vision—seeing things from slightly different angles. In Ithaca it becomes clear just how much difference those two angles encompass. For Bloom the cloud has presaged a day in which the weather gods act to relieve Dublin's drought through a confluence of atmospheric conditions. For Stephen it has presaged his mother returning as an agent of the retributive God of Irish Catholicism, making the day itself rebuke and threaten him. A little later the chapter asks, "What two temperaments did they individually represent?" Answer: "The scientific. The artistic."

The passage in 1 Kings occupied Joyce's imagination early and late. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that it inspired the title of the Dubliners story "A Little Cloud." The little cloud returns in Finnegans Wake (157-59) as Nuvoletta, one of Issy's instantiations. The Italian word comes from Dante's Inferno, where Elijah's chariot ascending to Heaven is pictured as a "flame alone / ascending like a cloud (nuvoletta) into the sky" (26.38-39). Attentive readers will note that this ascent to heaven is imitated at the end of Cyclops—and Elijah, of course, is the prophet who predicts the rainstorm.

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John Hunt 2025