Notes

The Homeric correspondences are concerned with food. Odysseus loses all his ships but one at the island of the Lestrygonians. These people are cannibals and their king Antiphates sends his daughter to lure the sailors ashore to their death. All are eaten except OdysseusÂ’ own crew.

The Biblical correspondences have nothing to do with food, however. Continuing with the outline of Jewish history, Joyce takes us to the era of Solomon and the building of the great Temple of Jerusalem. There are many references to stones and building, including the first words, "Pineapple rock." Bloom is thinking about food and rock, as in "Brighton rock" which means hard candy. But it also means the foundation of the Temple or the foundation of the Christian Church. Jesus said to Peter in a famous pun, "thou art Peter (i.e. rocky) and on this rock" he would found the Church. Physically St. PeterÂ’s Church is the Vatican, in the gardens of which there is a famous pine- cone. The running theme of masonry invokes poetically the beautiful public building of Dublin. It also points to the major subject of Freemasonry, which will turn out to be the religious center of BloomÂ’s life.

The practical work of the stonemasons is also prominent in ‘Lestrygonians.’ The art of the chapter is architecture. Dublin is a city of splendid buildings in brick and stone, and this chapter pays a special tribute to this aspect of the city. It also describes many of the statues and monuments of Dublin: "He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. They did right to put him over a urinal: ‘meeting of the waters’." Joyce tells us that the symbol of the chapter is to be found in "constables." Dublin was a densely policed city, with many of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who later became the "Garda" and are there today. Many were of the Royal Irish Constabulary, a paramilitary force who were disbanded at once after the Treaty. The police are the embodiment of law and order: "A squad of constables debauched from College street, marching in Indian file. Goose step. Food heated faces, sweating helmets, patting their truncheons." If the D.M.P stands for the inevitable order of civilization, the R.I.C. stands for the brutality of conquest. Their phallic truncheons are associated with the overheated penis of Blazes Boylan, Molly’s conqueror.

The most frequent habit in "Lestrygonians" is for BloomÂ’s monologue to interrupt conversation. The stage directions are still intermittently present but in these passages they seem less noticeable than when Bloom is off stage. Thus after one almost uninterrupted page of BloomÂ’s conversation with Mrs. Breen we have two paragraphs of inner monologues. Then we return to dialogue for a half page before the interruption of another snatch of monologue, and so on to the end of the exchange between Bloom and Mrs. Breen.

The dialogue in "Lestrygonians" is fairly conventional, except for the insistent breaking in of BloomÂ’s monologue. To put it differently, the eighth chapter of Ulysses is really BloomÂ’s interior monologue interrupted by a narrator filling in objective details and by a series of dialogues, which dramatize situation rather than consciousness. Dialogue and authorial or narrative presence then work to suggest an intrusion from without on BloomÂ’s thoughts.

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