In Homer's Odyssey: Before Odysseus leaves her, Circe tells him of two routes home, that which Odysseus chooses to follow, passing between Scylla and Charybdis, and the alternative which he decides not to chance, which would take him through very violent seas containing a number of large roving rocks that have smashed all ships attempting passage except for one, the Argo, sailed by Jason (of "Jason and the Argonauts" in Greek mythology).

Mechanics
[The Hostile Environment]

Bosphorus—Liffey

European bank—Viceroy

Asiatic bank—Conmee

From Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book:

• "This central episode of Joyce's book, built of nineteen short sections, is both an entr-acte between the two halves and a miniature of the whole. It is a small-scale labyrinth within which most of the characters of Ulysses appear, moving about Dublin between the hours of three and four. Their movements are set against the background of two journeys by the representative of ecclesiastical and civil authority respectively—that of Fr Conmee (section I) and that of the Earl of Dudley (section XIX). Links and cross-references between the various sections abound. Frank Budgen (James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses) tells us that 'Joyce wrote the Wandering Rocks with a map of Dublin before him on which were traced in red ink the paths of the Earl of Dudley and Father Conmee. He calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a given distance of the city'" (87).

Commentary from Clive Hart in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, eds. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974, 181-216:

• “’Wandering Rocks,’ following immediate on Stephen’s theorizing, is Joyce’s most direct, most complete celebration of Dublin, demonstrating succinctly his conception of the importance of physical reality, meticulously documented, as the soil from which fictions may best grow” (181).
  
  
• “While physical reality for Stephen is most directly represented by the presence of other human beings, for Bloom that reality is not only other people, but also the inanimate physical world which Stephen avoids” (185).
  
  
• Joyce “does not allow . . . his readers to relax but adopts, on the contrary, the persona of a harsh and awkward narrator whose difficult personality is the most salient thing about the chapter” (186).
  
  
• “The narrative manner of each of the sections is apparently simple, lucid, self-contained, unencumbered by allusion or linguistic complexity. The simplicity is, however, an illusion, a trap for the naïve reader. . . . While almost everything that he says is, strictly speaking true, there are many lies of omission, the narrator failing to provide essential connective information which we accordingly have to extrapolate for ourselves” (189).
  
  
• “The narrator’s failure to ‘explain’ is nowhere more obvious than in the interpolations from section to section” (193).
  
  
• “On the surface of ‘Wandering Rocks’ there are a great many statements which appear to be erroneous, but on closer examination almost all of these are resolvable in one way or another” (196).
  
  
• “Joyce took the utmost pains over physical details, even causing the throwaway, Elijah, to move at a speed which, according to the Dublin Port and Docks Board, is consistent with the probable rate of flow of the Liffey two and a half hours after high tide on that June day” (197).
  
  
• “The significance of the city, for Bloom and for the reader, is ambiguous. ‘Wandering Rocks’ celebrates its solidity, its shapeliness, its liveliness, its organic nature; it also, however, emphasizes its malice, its treachery, its shabbiness. While re-emergence from fantasy into the real world may be Bloom’s future salvation, the journey will be far from easy” (201-2).

In Homer's Odyssey: In another of the adventures in Book XII Homer drew upon ancient Greek myths of an island inhabited by beautiful singing nymphs (two in number in the Odyssey, sometime three to five in other sources), whose songs drew sailors irresistibly to their deaths. Odysseus is afforded the rare opportunity of hearing the sirens’ singing by chaining himself to his ship's mast while all his crew stuff their ears with wax so they cannot hear. The crew is under strict instructions not to unchain Odysseus under any circumstance.  

The Concert Room

4:00-5:00 p.m.

Ear

Music
[The Sweet Cheat]

[Coral]

Barmaids
[Promises, Feminism, Sounds, Embellishments]

Fuga per canonem

Sirens—barmaids

The Isle—the bar

[Ulysses, Menelaus, Leucothea, Parthenope, Orpheus and the Argonauts]

From Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book:

• “[T]he episode contains two charming siren barmaids as well as much song, and the style represents an elaborate attempt to imitate musical form in words. The musical devices parodied include: structural development of small figures and phrases; a continuous symphonic manipulation of sharply identifiable themes; the use of emphatic rhythmic figures and patterns; varied tonal contrasts; rich onomatopoeic orchestration which mimics the interplay of strings, brass and woodwind; repetition and partial repetition; echo and semi-echo; contrapuntal play of phrase against phrase; percussive explosions; recapitulations in various ‘keys’; and so on” (100).

Commentary from Jackson L. Cope in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, eds. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974, 217-42:

• "[I]n the course of 'Sirens' Bloom contemplates defeat, defection, remonstrance, to reject them in light of a new hope" (221).
  
  
• "[A]s Bloom becomes determined to act upon his own insights the reader is able to assume a superior vantage-point for the first time, enabled by the mythic narrator to see Bloom's wisdom within the perspective of its local limitations and ultimate validation" (225).
  
  
• "If Bloom's symbolic acceptance of a paternal role with Stephen has been signaled in the rising arc of the 'Siopold' fusion, it is this song ['The Croppy Boy'] of war and death and loss which brings him to react with love and sex and hope for another kind of paternity" (240).
  
  
• "Ulysses changes in every respect with this chapter. Joyce thought of it as opening a second half of the novel; Bloom reverses his psychic direction from passive to active; the symbolic construct of the sea and the shell is metamorphosed from the hopeless dichotomy it constitutes for Stephen into Bloom's song of union; Pound and others quite rightly recognized a drastic shift in stylistic technique. The style ceases to be traditional, if complexly counterpointed, narrative and becomes seriously imitative of the chapter's 'art,' which is 'music'" (241).
  
  
• "'Sirens' is the chapter in which the possibility of renewed communion is recognized and, as the final word of the prelude promises, the movement toward that renewal is begun" (242).

Thumbnail summary: This chapter, narrated by an unnamed first-person narrator, describes a scene in a pub where an obnoxious, bigoted, small-minded character called "The Citizen" verbally attacks Bloom. Bloom stands up for himself and leaves the bar to visit Dignam's widow. The chapter is punctuated by thirty-two interpolated parodies of various styles of writing or oral address, including sports writing, sensationalistic journalism, "legalese," biblical passages, parliamentary debate, etc.

In Homer's Odyssey: In Book IX, Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave of a giant one-eyed Cyclops named Polyphemus. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus by stabbing him in the eye with a wooden stake and then cleverly escapes by tying himself and his men beneath the bellies of sheep that the Cyclops lets out for feeding. Safely back aboard ship, Odysseus taunts the Cyclops and reveals his identity. It turns out that Polyphemus is Poseidon's son, and in vengeance for the blinding, Poseidon, with the sanction of the gods on Mt. Olympus, brings about a great many of the obstacles that make Odysseus's journey home so difficult.

Politics
[Surgery,
The Egocidal Terror]

Fenian
[Nation, State Religion, Dynasty, Idealism, Exaggeration, Fanaticism, Collectivity]

Gigantism [Alternating asymmetry]

Noman—I

Stake—cigar

Challenge—Apotheosis

["No one (I)," Ulysses, Galatea, Prometheus]

From Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book:

• “The Citizen in this episode has Polyphemus's one-eyed crudity. He can see no point of view other than his own. He is arrogant, cruel, and stupid. Polyphemus's gigantic stature is reflected in the Citizen's grossly inflated ego and his equally exaggerated claims. The episode is soaked in another form of gigantism, too. For though the events are recounted by a nameless narrator, the narration is punctuated by a series of commentaries in vastly different styles--but each style an inflated caricature of the legal, the epic, the scientific, the journalistic, and so on. The tonal effect is to set the gentle, pacific, charitable Bloom in lonely opposition to a barbaric, bigoted, and aggressive nationalist--and likewise to place Bloom's mildness and commonsense in lonely isolation within a world given over to vast excesses. The intemperate inflations represent many aspects of culture, many movements in our civilization, that are irrational, violent, or pretentious. The fact that the reader, as well as Ulysses-Bloom, feels swamped under it all is appropriate and of course intentional" (112)

Commentary from David Hayman in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, eds. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974, 243-75:

• "'Cyclops' is the 'mixed media' chapter. In it Joyce purposefully mixes diurnal and nocturnal modes, juxtaposing a conventional direct narrative voice with a jumble of mocking asides, the spoken and the printed word" (243).
  
  
• "Everyman and noman, the complete individual and the comic convention, Bloom is the active centre of the action in 'Cyclops' and its passive focus. To achieve this effect Joyce first built the particularized individual and then gradually, beginning with 'Aeolus,' diminished his role. The process culminates in the reversal of his consciousness in 'Circe,' but 'Cyclops' finds him in a medial position, at once a sympathetic character and an object of ridicule" (249).
  
  
• "The end of 'Cyclops' marks Bloom's first step toward the possible recovery of his self-possession and manhood, to say nothing of his return to Molly's man-warmed bed" (251).
  
  
• "Among the personae of this chapter, Bergan, Doran, Lenehan, and Breen contribute most to the impression that the context is farcical and the community a group of drifters, drunks, lunatics, clowns, and spongers. The impression is delusory; the humour is in the eye of the I-observer and most of the characters are solid enough citizens. Stripped of its asides and narrated objectively, the action would be funny and pathetic and perhaps dull, but certainly not hilarious. . . . The point is that we are entering a realm of more rather than less conventionally controlled presentation" (257-58).
  
  
• "The asides belong to a nocturnal decorum generated by a single impulse if not a single persona, a resourceful clown of many masks, a figure apparently poles apart from the self-effacing narrator. This figure may be thought of an an arranger, a nameless and whimsical-seeming authorial projection whose prsence is first strongly felt in 'Aeolus.' . . . In 'Cyclops,' where his prime effects are juxtaposed as asides to the predictable voice of the outcast narrator, he comes into his own, obliging us to equate his presence with the diminution of lucidity, the assertion of the unconscious and instinctual side of experience, the inexplicable realm of darkness through which light ultimately shines darkly. . . . [T]he asides are usually at variance with the meaningful content of the chapter" (265-66).
  
  
• "The farcical, which is most clearly embodied in Joyce's adaptation of pantomime conventions, overshadows but does not cancel out the serious or the simply comic dimension of 'Cyclops'" (273).