Episode 12, "The Cyclops"

It is 5 p.m., and Bloom joins a group of men who are drinking in Barney Kiernan's pub. This blathering claque includes an unnamed narrator and someone named "the citizen," who, supposedly helped revive Irish sports (based on the historical character Michael Cusack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association), but who proves to be a bigot, who soon picks on Bloom for being Jewish and a big talker. The entire group also comes to mistakenly believe that Bloom has given a winning tip on the day's big horse race and has also won lots of money for himself, although he neither drinks nor buys rounds of drinks for these miserable lay-abouts, who resent Bloom for both things. Bloom has dropped by the bar to meet Martin Cunningham, to discuss Dignam's insurance, which seems to have been squandered on drink., leaving his widow and children penniless. Bloom takes much abuse from the fellows at the bar - especially the citizen - who ends up throwing a biscuitbox at the car bearing Bloom and Cunningham (who saves him from a rapidly escalating threat of violence) and two other men away from the bar. And while in the bar, Bloom seemed oblivious to the growling, resentful response the group gave him when he expressed his long-winded opinions. The men's resentment quickly built up to anti-Semitic slurs and attempts at violence. We are meant to see Bloom as the Messiah or Elijah, but instead he seems totally hapless to me. The bit of the ongoing myth which we are meant to see as the basis of this episode was Odysseus' escape from the one-eyed monster, the Cyclops. Interspersed with the dialogue between the characters are long paragraphs of mock-heroic or mock-journalistic prose, which do nothing to move the story forward, as they are based on extraneous characters and useless historical trivia. We are now on page 346, out of a total of 783 in the book, and we are about to start episode 13, out of a total of 18. I am reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" at the same time, and I must say it is much more fun than "Ulysses," but it does have its challenging moments too - keeping the long list of Vanger relatives straight, for instance. But, I digress...