Figure of speech. As William Brayden ascends the stairs of the newspaper office, Bloom sees "Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat, neck." Clearly Joyce is practicing some artful manipulation of language in the second sentence, but it is not clear which rhetorical figure he may have had in mind. The most likely candidate is epimone, the insistent repetition of a word, phrase, or clause.

Epimone (eh-PIM-o-nee, from Greek epi- = upon + meno = to remain, dwell) means "staying on" or "dwelling on" the same word or words. A synonymous Latin term is perseverantia, or persistence. The general idea behind the rhetorical figure seems to be that when words or phrases are insistently repeated they may begin to lodge in listeners' heads and influence their opinions. Many a demagogic politician will keep saying the same thing even when it does not advance a sensible argument ,on the theory that when people hear something over and over they will begin to think there must be something to it. Shakespeare's Iago does that when he repeatedly tells Roderigo, "Put but money in thy purse." Brutus does the same thing in his funeral speech, and Antony devastatingly turns the device back on him with his increasingly ironic statement, "For Brutus is an honourable man."

Richard Nordquist (thoughtco.com) quotes from Daniel Miller's Rhetoric as an Art of Persuasion: From the Standpoint of a Lawyer (1880) the view that epimone normally renders words or thoughts "ridiculous," but that "This fallacy is often resorted to by unscrupulous men during the excitement of political contests, when some idea or point is assumed without proof to the detriment and prejudice of a man or party; and though it may have no just foundation for support, yet is dwelt upon and commented on so frequently, that the ignorant assume that the charge must be true, else it would not receive so much consideration; they apply to the matter under consideration the old adage: 'That where there is so much smoke there must be some fire'."

All of this is coherent and interesting in the arena of rhetorical persuasion, but it appears to have little to do with Joyce's mind-numbing alternation of two words. He seems instead to be evoking a kind of dull impersonality in the obese editor of the Freeman's Journal as he lumbers through the office and heads upstairs, step by heavy step: "It passed statelily up the staircase, steered by an umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back ascended each step: back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck, Simon Dedalus says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat, neck." The editor's heavy steps are first evoked in the repetition of "back," and then in the regularly alternated "fat" and "neck." This plodding repetition perhaps achieves some of the "ridiculous" effect mentioned by Miller.

Ancient rhetorical theory invented many terms for different kinds of repetition, some of which might possibly challenge epinome and perseverantia for ownership of Joyce's phrase. Gideon Burton defines several: conduplicatio ("The repetition of a word or words in adjacent phrases or clauses, either to amplify the thought or to express emotion"), diacope ("Repetition of a word with one or more between, usually to express deep feeling"), epizeuxis or palilogia ("Repetition of the same word, with none between, for vehemence"), polyptoton or paregmenon ("A general term for the repetition of a word or its cognates in a short sentence"), and ploce ("A general term for the repetition of a word for rhetorical emphasis"). Stuart Gilbert sees "neck fat neck fat neck" as an example of anaphora.

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