Ithaca

This chapter is really beautiful. The detached fact-listing interview actually lends a lot of intimacy and emotion to the scene. Sometimes reading through the entire contents of Bloom's drawer can be tedious, but we've badly needed a perspective in this novel that at least tries to be comprehensive. And the lists that whisk us away from the setting of the story connect these insignificant events to the rest of the universe. When Bloom turns the water on, the whole infrastructure of Dublin participates. Bursting suns in the distant universe are a part of Bloom and Stephen's pissing contest. It's not a coincidence that Bloom has Spinoza in his library. Bloom's view of the world strives towards the one that Spinoza advocates: the perspective of eternity. He sees both sides and wants the best for everyone, not just his friends and family.

Bloom and Stephen as a pair aren't hopeless anymore. Joyce brings them together, but in an unexpected way. By emphasizing their differences, Joyce reconciles them in a way. It endows them with a kind of symmetry. Bloom writes out Hebrew. Stephen writes out Irish. Bloom sips his cocoa faster than Stephen, but in a consistent proportion: 3 to 1. Their educational histories may differ, but each would have excelled in the other's shoes. Stephen turns down Blooms offer to stay - mirroring Bloom's decline to Stephen a decade earlier.

I can't remember where, but I remember hearing that his was Joyce's favorite episode in the book. That's not surprising. Everything fits into place here without being predictable. This is modernist structure at its most poetic; a nonsensical kind of order that liberates and humanizes these characters. Nonsense words slip in towards the end like "handtouch" and "lonechill" as if the narrator is nodding off with Bloom. The scientific style gives way to the absurd rhymes that characterized earlier narratives: "plump mellow yellow smellow melons..." and "Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor...", etc.