Grafton Street, then as now the most upscale shopping arcade
in Dublin (the closest competition is Henry Street), stretches
from the northwest corner of St. Stephen's Green to the
southeast corner of College Green. The poshness of the shop is
suggested immediately as the young female employee places
"rustling fibre" in the bottom of a "wicker basket," places a
"bottle swathed in pink tissue paper and a small jar" in the
bottom, and then arranges plums and peaches above them.
The scene also immediately becomes charged with Boylan's
rakishly seductive sexuality. The wicker basket is "bedded"
with fiber. The girl "bestowed fat pears neatly, head by
tail, and among them ripe shamefaced peaches," as Boylan
walks about the redolent shop, "lifting fruits, young juicy
crinkled and plump red tomatoes, sniffing smells." When
he comes back to the counter to pay, food and sexuality are
again linked: "Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her
blouse. A young pullet." Flowers are pulled into this
orbit too, as he extracts a red carnation from a glass and
suggests that it might be included as a lagniappe: "This for
me?" Flowers held coded symbolic meanings for
Victorians and Edwardians, and Boylan ensures that the
carnation will be regarded sexually by putting it in his mouth
for the blushing shopgirl's benefit: "Bending archly she
reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches. / Blazes
Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of
the red flower between his smiling teeth." He looks at
the girl's breasts with "more favour" because she has agreed
to give him the flower, and later in the book both Miss Douce
and Molly will be enticed to wonder "who gave him that
flower."
Boylan also rattles coins in his pants, "merry money," as he
stands at the counter, adding a jingling sound to the sexual
synesthesia. The richness of shop windows on Grafton Street
has already made Bloom think, in Lestrygonians, of men
buying things for their lovers: "Grafton street gay with
housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints, silkdames and
dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing.... All
for a woman, home and houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits
spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim. Wealth of the world." All
of this sensual seductive wealth is precursor to Molly being
plowed by the "well off" Boylan.
Ithaca and Penelope sketch the aftermath. The
pantry shelves in the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street hold "an oval
wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey
pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co's white
invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue
paper." In addition to various everyday foodstuffs that were
no doubt on the shelves before the basket's arrival, the
catalogue in Ithaca appears to identify the nature of
the "small jar" that the shopgirl put in next to the port:
Bloom sees an "empty pot of Plumtree's potted meat" on
the shelves. When he gets into bed at the end of the chapter
he finds some crumbs scattered on the new clean sheet, and
also some flakes of potted meat. Molly recalls a final bout of
lovemaking "after we took the port and potted meat it
had a fine salty taste yes."
In section 5 of Wandering Rocks several narrative
fragments interrupt the symphony of food, flowers, money, and
sex. As Boylan strolls about the shop, "H. E. L. Y.'S filed
before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane, plodding
towards their goal." This feels like an interpolation,
but the sandwichboard men are said to be passing "before"
Boylan, so they must be visible through the shop windows.
Tangier Lane is a short dingy alley between numbers 61 and 62
Grafton Street, so obscure that Google Maps has not heard of
it. (This is the first of several moments in Wandering
Rocks in which readers will be asked to navigate through
obscure urban corridors.) In Lestrygonians Bloom saw
the men at the bottom of Westmoreland Street, near the river.
Now they have worked their way south and are nearing the end
of Grafton Street, passing first Thornton's and then Tangier
Lane. Their "goal" is identified
in section 7: when they reach the corner of St.
Stephen's Green, they will turn around and go back the way
they came.
In James Joyce's Dublin, Clive Hart observes that the
narrative does not make clear whether Boylan actually looks
through the window and sees the plodding advertisers, but "The
passage in which they appear in this section has the character
of an interpolation without in fact being one; like the
description in section 2 of Conmee's boarding the tram, it
belongs on the fringes of the context into which it is
introduced. That it is indeed a minor part of the context is
suggested by Corley's remarks in Eumaeus, in which he
reveals that Boylan acts as an agent for sandwichboard men and
that he has approached Miss Dunne in vain in the hope of
finding employment as one. Those advertising Hely's are
presumably supplied by Boylan" (49). He may be wrong about
this last point: in Lestrygonians Bloom has thought,
"They are not Boyl: no, M'Glade's men." But since he does make
some of his money by hiring miserably poor wretches to perform
this demeaning work, their sad parade provides a telling
counterpart to his lavish displays of wealth.
Shortly afterward comes a true interpolation: "A
darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the
hawker's cart." This is Leopold Bloom, seen in section
10 thumbing through a bookseller's wares before finally
discovering The Sweets of Sin, which describes a
beautiful woman conducting an affair with the exotically named
Raoul and spending her husband's money on rich clothes to
entice him. The story sexually excites the
soon-to-be-cuckolded Bloom, so the intrusion strongly echoes
the action in section 5. Boylan has just asked the shopgirl,
"Can you send them by tram? Now?" Both he and Bloom are
spending money to feed Molly's carnal appetites and in the
process experiencing arousal themselves. Gunn and Hart note
that sending things by tram was "a regular way of sending
parcels in Dublin at the time. The cost would have been 2d"
(49).
Section 5 concludes with Boylan asking the shopgirl for one
more favor: "— May I say a word to your telephone,
missy? he asked roguishly." Section 7 will show this
call taking place, presumably a minute or two later, as Miss
Dunne picks up the phone in Boylan's office and conducts
several items of business with her employer. Other than this
not-quite-simultaneous connection, and Boylan's wish to have
the basket delivered "Now" (so that it will arrive in advance
of his planned 4:00 meeting with Molly), section 5 contains no
temporal markers.
