It’s Monday so it must be Ulysses time! This week I read episode 17, Ithaca. And just as Odysseus eventually makes it home, so does our intrepid hero Leopold Bloom.

It’s about 2 in the morning and Bloom arrives home with Stephen in tow. Bloom realizes he forgot his key and has to break in to his own house. His wife, Molly, is upstairs asleep. Bloom and Sephen go to the kitchen where Bloom makes some hot chocolate. They sit and talk for a bit. Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, but Stephen declines. The pair head outside and pee in the yard. Then Stephen leaves and Bloom goes back in the house and upstairs to his wife. As Bloom crawls into bed he realizes that Molly is having an affair with another man and that man had been in the bed before him. But Bloom is not upset by this, jealous, but not upset. Apparently he and Molly haven’t had sex in quite some time and Bloom is understanding about Molly finding someone who will satisfy her sexual needs.

The chapter is written in the style of a catechism, not in the sense of a religious catechism, but in the sense of questions and answers. The chapter moves along from question and answer to question and answer with lots of diversionary questions triggered by something in the answer. I am not managing to make it sound interesting, but it really is. And it has lots of funny bits and lots of wonderful language too. Shall I give you some examples?

At the beginning of the episode Bloom and Stephen are walking to Bloom’s house:

Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glow-lamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.

Then there are follow up questions that ask what they agreed on and what they disagreed on, and whether Bloom had had similar conversations during nocturnal walks with others.

As I mentioned there is much humor in this chapter. One of my favorite bits comes early, Bloom and Stephen are in the kitchen. Bloom washes his hands and asks Stephen if he would like to wash up a bit himself:

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?

That he was hydrophobic, haring partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach, and thenar or sole of foot?

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

Heh.

There is also a long series of amusing questions with Bloom imagining what he would do if he were rich and thinking of ways he might become so. It begins by saying he doesn’t want much but as it goes along things get more and more elaborate as they often do in my own daydreams when the lottery jackpot gets really large and I actually buy a ticket.

There is a definite sense of homecoming in this chapter and a feeling that all the hard parts of the book are over, that things are winding down. And indeed they are winding down as there is only one more chapter left. I am both relieved and melancholy about the prospect.