Artfully Dull

Philip Kitcher takes up the usual complaint about "Eumaeus": that it is the most boring chapter in Ulysses and nothing happens. Leopold Bloom brings a very drunk Stephen Dedalus to a low-budget eatery run by a man said to have taken part in a famous Irish rebellion. A sailor tells tall tales, Stephen drinks a little coffee and eats almost nothing, and Bloom invites him home to Eccles Street for cocoa. That is the plot, and Kitcher grants it is not much of one.

What matters, he argues, is the language. It is not Bloom's, and it is dull on purpose, artfully dull. He reads one sentence aloud, a pile-up of cautions about nighttown and jiujitsu, and shows how it carries the mood of a man who has been on the go for hours, tormented by thoughts of Boylan, and is now anxious to make a conversation with Stephen succeed. Everything comes out at sixes and sevens. Stephen is unresponsive or rude, then says yes to the invitation, and the two set off for the house Bloom has avoided all day.