Bloom's Lunch Hour

The Lestrygonians of The Odyssey are cannibals, and Joyce's eighth episode is all about eating: people gorging, slobbering, doing disgusting things with and around food, the kind of material that made Virginia Woolf wrinkle her nose. Philip Kitcher lays out what the episode is really about, which is appetite, sexual appetite included, and follows Leopold Bloom as he leaves the newspaper office, feeds the gulls, and goes looking for lunch on his way to the National Library.

Bloom turns away from the obvious places and settles somewhere decent, and while he eats his mind wanders. Blazes Boylan is on it. Then something different happens: the monologue fills with memories, a late-night conversation with Molly Bloom from a happier time, and the afternoon on Howth Head, among the rhododendrons, where he proposed to her. Kitcher argues that this is the scene that matters most for understanding Bloom, and he points ahead to Molly's own version of it in the last episode.

Not much happens, Kitcher says, and yet the episode shows Bloom's many-sided sympathies: the gulls, a conversation with an old friend of Molly's who once fancied him, and, at the very end, a blind boy helped across the street.