retrospective arrangement

Ulysses, episode 10, Wandering Rocks

Ulysses is my Big Book of 2025, and here’s my check-in for Episode 10. You can find all previous Ulysses updates here.

enjoy Steve (not Dedalus) looking like a Penitent Magdalene

For nearly every episode of Ulysses, I’ve read it multiple times before I’ve moved on to the next one. But “Wandering Rocks” is, so far, the one that I’ve gone back over the most. I did one stuttering read through without annotations, one with Gifford’s annotations, one following this website that maps the locations and time in Dublin, once again only with my notes, trying to parse the interpolations (which Gifford glosses, but only at the beginning of each section, so if you are following along with the annotations, it is hard to see how things fit together) and then I listened to the episode being read twice.

If Scylla and Charybdis is a half way part as episode nine, Wandering Rocks is a miniature of the whole book, with 18 episodes and a baby.¹ In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus avoids the Wandering Rocks themselves, instead choosing to deal with Scylla and Charybdis and Joyce borrows this symbol of entropy from Odysseus’ reportage, rather than his experience. The first 18 sections of this episode follow characters we’ve met already in Dublin, somewhere between 2:55pm and 4:00pm and the last one follows a cavalcade including the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland linearly in time across Dublin and revisits the multiple moments in the episodes that intersect the parade (though not Father Conmee, who opens the episode, or either hero in Stephen or Bloom).

There are hints at how the time intersects, with a character seeing another for a brief moment across a square, or they both miss the same tram. These moments of parallax have been happening throughout the book, particularly between the binary star of Bloom and Stephen. But also, and the thing that felt like a puzzle to figure out, there are interpolations. These are narrative interruptions in the form of paragraphs, usually a few lines at a time, that tell us something that is happening at the exact moment, but somewhere else in the city. They share time, but not place. There’s no typographic indication that that is what is happening, so when you are reading, it is easy to think, “oh that’s an aside, describing someone else in the scene.”

When two of Stephen Dedalus’ sisters are speaking to each other about the soup they received as charity, a bell is heard.

—Peasoup, Maggy said.

—Where did you get it? Katey asked.

—Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.

The lacquey rang his bell.

—Barang!

Boody² sat down at the table and said hungrily:

—³Give us it here.

But the bell isn’t in the room with the Dedalus sisters, and they can’t hear it. It is actually being heard by their sister Dilly Dedalus, who is walking around Dublin, passing by an auction house, trying to get money out of her reprobate and drunken father.

Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.

The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:

—Barang!

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.

Dilly is listening to an auctioneer ring his bell, and she will successfully get only a shilling off her father. The two scenes get connected and show the destitution of the Dedalus family by the shared moment of the timeline.

The Ulysses Guide uses this example as an indication that both this chapter and Ulysses as a whole “expects the reader to have read it before reading it.” Until you parse the interpolations as a pattern, there’s no reason to think that the younger Dedalus sisters aren’t hearing some lackey ring a bell. One of the reasons I kept re-reading the episode is that I wanted to be able to catch the interpolations on my own. After a few reads, I started marking them as glossed in my edition, and in the process, the rhythm of the interruptions emerged.

Of course, there was the knowledge that I had of what the characters were now doing that helped, but there was also a feeling of formal disturbance where I could look at the shape of the paragraph and know it was an interrupting interpolation. They tend to break up thoughts or dialogue. They tend to mention another character distinctly. They began to jump out on the page based on their difference from the rest of the text.

The method of the audio version of the episode that I listened to had multiple narrators and the interpolation would be read by the narrator of the interceding passage. A helpful clue! But I’m glad I saved the audio for the end because the interpolations could become obvious when I let myself work them out.

The “young woman…” paragraph here is an interpolation; they often interrupt conversations or thoughts and are usually limited to 2-4 lines of text.

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Molly Bloom’s own reading habits were the theme I was most interested in this episode. She had earlier asked Bloom to return a book for her because there was nothing smutty in it, so he gets her something called Sweets of Sin, a book that appears to be some sort of romance or erotica based on the passages that Bloom reads to himself and arouses himself over. The scene he reads is one where a woman is cuckolding his husband, of course predicting Molly’s afternoon affair.

Bloom selecting the book is the interpolation present when we see Blazes Boylan preparing a gift basket for Molly, which he sends in anticipation of their afternoon sex appointment.

—Can you send them by tram? Now?

A darkbacked figure under Merchants’ arch scanned books on the hawker’s cart.⁴

—Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?

—O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.

When Boylan later calls his secretary, Miss Dunne, she is reading Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, but laments to herself “Too much mystery business⁵ in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion? Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.”⁶ This recalls Molly’s Bloom’s request to Bloom for a new book from episode 4: “There’s nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the first fellow all the time?” All the women of Dublin need a better romance lending library. But Bloom’s own selection seems to exceed the amount of romance promised even in a Mary Cecil Hay book.

He read where his finger opened.

—All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For Raoul!

Yes. This. Here. Try.

—Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her déshabillé.

Yes. Take this. The end.

—You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.

The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly.

Mr Bloom read again: The beautiful woman.

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him! For Raoul!). Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint!). Feel! Press! Crished! Sulphur dung of lions!

But in order to deliver the romance book to Molly, Bloom would have to return home and this is the mission he can’t quite do. So, now he’s got something else in his pocket, along with the potato and the soap. A totem of his role as cuckold and a book that edges on contraband, like Ulysses itself, will do once published. Obviously I’m hyper-focused on the image of Bloom carrying around a smutty penny novel in his pocket.

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A recent dust-up of film twitter being taken advantage of for clicks by a transphobic legacy publication (this has happened at least twice in the last two months)⁷ involved the Atlantic tweeting an article titled “Five Movies Worth a Repeat Watch” along with the QT prompt of “It’s rare to find a movie worth watching twice. So we asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors: What’s a film you can watch over and over again?” There was a lot of “buh!!” from film-y people, taking the bait.

I think nearly every movie is worth rewatching multiple times.⁸ I check in on movies that I didn’t love every few years to see if I get them now. But I don’t necessarily think that iterative watching indicates a more pure love of the medium. If anything, I think it might reflect access to streaming. I was once talking to my dad about Lawrence of Arabia, a movie he has professed as being one of his top 10 films of all time, and he couldn’t remember a plot detail and said something like, “I haven’t seen it in 20 years.”⁹ I had seen it twice in the past six months when we had the conversation. But Peter Labuza once said he tries to watch every money as if he is watching it for the last time, like the way we treat live theater, and as much as I love throwing on Pride & Prejudice (2005) in the background of my life, I respect the scale of intentional attention on the other end.

But when it comes to books, I addressed my rereading habits in my notes on the first episode of Ulysses. I tend to revisit chapters perpetually, picking up an old copy of a book and just opening it to the chapters I want to live in.

Reading “Wandering Rocks,” with its 18 + 1 episodes and characters that I’ve met before, but some of whom I don’t know the whole significance of, was like at once rereading the first half of Ulysses and peeking for the first time at a preview of the eight chapters I have yet to read. At the end of this episode, I realized that every section of Ulysses makes me feel like I am learning to read for the first time. I know the system of graphemes that I am looking at holds meaning, but it has to be extracted and mined, one corresponding phoneme at a time. But then the process that once seemed so opaque suddenly becomes intuitive and part of that pattern recognition that I find as second nature as reading.

This episode puts into the forefront the idea that there is a narrator (but not quite) of sorts of Ulysses, who knows everything that has happened or will happen, distinct from the characters who don’t know yet how they will intersect. The Arranger makes the interpolations possible. The role seems like the aspiration of a reader of Ulysses, to reach the level of all-knowing processor of text, connecting episodes across episodes because the Arranger is not the author, at least as identified by Hugh Kenner and David Hayman. These scholars took the role’s name from the phrase “retrospective arrangement,” which first appears here in “Wandering Rocks.”

These viewer and processor voices made me think of Bleak House¹⁰ more than anything, where Esther Summerson seems like she would be the limiting force in the dual narration, and the omniscient third-person narrator would be expansive. But Esther’s personality often encourages disclosures from people, and the third-person narrator can witness anything, but often does not connect the viewing actions with any interior clues, particularly to the mystery and coincidences of the plot.

Joyce’s Arranger seems to know the whole of the book, importantly, more than the whole of Dublin. The introduction of this concept and structural undoing also makes me think of War and Peace¹¹ and Tolstoy’s changing relationship to linear time in the back half of that book. The first book insists on linearity, refusing to double back on scenes, so we get reportage of information at dinner parties, rather than being present with the characters when something happens, whereas in the second half, especially around the Napoleonic invasion and the Battle of Borodino, we get redux and revisitations of the same moments in time, across Russia, over and over again. Excited to see what tumults out of time in the second half, especially as I manually set revisitations of time when I return to the beginning of an episode.

So now I’m in the back “half” of Ulysses, which is really two-thirds of the book, so I’ll see you when I see you and when I am ready to talk about “Sirens.”

1. This is what we call the extra bit of biscuit dough at the end of a batch. I can’t think of another way to describe the viceregal promenade structurally in this episode.

2. Boody Dedalus up there with Peepy Jellyby from Bleak House as far as younger siblings names go.

3. People always gripe about the lack of quotations. There are lots of indications when something is dialogue in Ulysses! The least of my worries!!

4. Bloom looking over the books for Molly.

5. [just like me fr fr]

6. From Mary Cecil Hay’s Wikipedia: “Hay's novels usually had a common structure. They were often set in Cornwall where Hay used to visit, but they also had locations near Birmingham and Liverpool. The story is usually set at an upper class residence and also includes urban locations. The lower class heroine finally gets to marry the higher class and elder hero, but there are usually some legal problem over maybe a will and another secondary character comes to an early and unusual death.” I honestly think I would love these.

7. My top ten movies of the 21st century: The Princess Diaries, Phantom Thread, La Chimera, Gosford Park, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Morvern Callar, Mr. Turner, Sunset Song, Catherine Called Birdy, Certified Copy

8. My most rewatched since 2018, for your perusal.

9. I once watched The Music Man three times in one month with this man.

10. Extreme “I’ve read at least two books” voice.

11. Extreme “I’ve read at least three books” voice.