On his way to the outhouse, Bloom notices a void in his
memory: "Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on
the peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny, I don't remember
that. Hallstand too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak.
Picking up the letters. Drago's shopbell ringing."
Acknowledging these discontinuities in consciousness is one
aspect of the realism of Joyce's prose style, and in this case
it probably registers the shock that Bloom received upon
seeing Boylan's letter.
The narrative has represented his return to 7 Eccles Street:
"Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and
gathered them. Mrs Marion
Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand. Mrs
Marion." It has also showed his return to the bedroom,
upstairs: "Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and
walked through warm yellow twilight towards her tousled head."
The time between, however, is a blank.
In "The Rhetoric of Silence," JJQ 14.4 (Summer
1977): 382-94, Hugh Kenner observes that "Novelists normally
don't know where characters' hats are. The heady experience of
frequenting a novelist who does know may encourage us to turn
back, expecting to find out more about Bloom than Bloom knows
himself." In this case, Kenner notes that Bloom has been
gripped, in the street, by a vivid apprehension of old age and
death, and when he emerges from it he wants only "to smell the
gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near
her ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes." But when he enters the
front door, his attention is arrested by another "unpleasant
jolt," from seeing Boylan's letter. "Not only is 'Mrs Marion'
a way of affirming that there is no Mr. Leopold worth
considering, the 'bold hand' is recognizably Boylan's, and we
are having our first experience with the principle that any
irruption of Boylan into Bloom's field of attention has the
effect of suspending his faculties. That is why he is not
aware of what he did with his hat" (384).
The gap in the narrative, then, corresponds to a blankness
in Bloom's mind that is best conveyed by silence. Bloom's
remark on his mental lapse—"Funny I don't remember
that"—points both to an interesting feature of
human psychology and to the "rhetoric of silence" by which
Joyce's prose style evokes that psychology.
