The Rocks Really Do Wander

"Wandering Rocks" is a strange chapter, and Philip Kitcher starts by asking why it is in the book at all. In the Homeric parallel Odysseus was offered a choice of routes home, Scylla and Charybdis or the Wandering Rocks, and he took the first, which Joyce has already given us with Stephen Dedalus in the library. Kitcher thinks James Joyce added the other route partly to have some fun and partly to enlarge the perspective of the novel.

The episode is a run of short, apparently straightforward narrations: Leopold Bloom buying a dirty book for Molly Bloom, Stephen urged to take up his singing again, Blazes Boylan's typist, Boylan himself with three words in his head, and lots of other characters great and small, from Father Conmee at the start to the Lord Lieutenant's procession at the end. Kitcher warns that it is full of traps. The rocks really do wander: a jet of juice spat from a man's mouth turns into the arc of Molly's arm throwing a coin to a beggar, and Dignam's court and Mr. Bloom the dentist have nothing to do with the people we know.

Kitcher's answer is that this is the point of view of Dublin itself, a city taking stock of what goes on at one moment on June 16, 1904, and arranging things as it sees them. Dublin is a great egalitarian, he says. You could write the same kind of novel about any of these people, and the episode does justice to all of them, from the Lord Lieutenant to the boys and girls who watch the procession go by.