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The tenth episode in Ulysses, commonly referred to as "Wandering Rocks" in the Homeric context, deals with locations, places and space, with the movements of people or of objects, primarily within Dublin. The focus is on a bustling city as a collective of its citizens, individual characters become marginal. In pointed contrast to the preceding static episode in the National library this one does not engage in profound or fanciful interpretation, as when Shakespeare was being discussed. It remains on the surface and specifies locations that can be traced on a map of Dublin-or even verified by walking the streets of Dublin, book in hand, a century later. A modern, though provincial, city of 1904 is presented by nineteen vignettes chosen in various places, in a manner that is largely visual and cinematographic.
Joyce captures Dublin in dispersed, seemingly random close-ups but extends to Buxton or to Vienna "the African mission" of Jesuits (who were moving about a great deal), to the disaster of the General Slocum, sunk in the Hudson river, with a condescending reflection that America is the "sweepings of every country including our own." Even a hat called "Panama" evokes a distant country. We are afforded a glance at "the stars and the comets in the heavens, . . . the great star and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot," including "the milky way" (HI0.567).1 Significantly in a game of chess-which depends on prescribed movements of figures within given spaces-a white bishop is "translated" (H10.1050). Even the vocabulary takes a spatial turn: "translated" is used in the original sense of "carried across, transferred." Real bishops, as it happens, when "translated" are moved to a different see. So space, displacement, and movement abound.
Even those who no longer walk on earth have particular abodes. In the dominant Christian tradition, which pervades Joyce's works and achieves an impressive climax in the hell fire sermons in chapter 3 of A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, the options are between Heaven and Hell, with Purgatory as a temporary waiting room in between. Those "other worlds" occur in the episode and are worth a brief comment.
Outside of the Western tradition, American Indians are thought to have a more cheerful place...