After creating an anonymous "I," Cyclops places this
"nameless"
man in known society by having him encounter Joe Hynes, the
newspaperman seen in Hades and Aeolus. But if
readers expect to enter familiar social territory, that hope
is soon dashed. The narrator rages at an unnamed chimneysweep
who was carelessly hauling his brushes and ladders up
Stoneybatter Road. When Hynes asks him who he was talking to,
he says that it was "Old Troy," a non-character
mentioned nowhere else in the novel. Hynes asks what he is
doing in the area and learns that he was trying to collect a
debt owed by "An old plumber named Geraghty" to a merchant
named "Moses Herzog." These two men were actual Dubliners, but
like Denis Troy they play no part in the novel's actions and
are mentioned nowhere else in it. They do spring vividly to
life in the narrator's meanspirited recollections, however.
In the parodic passage that follows the narrator's account,
Geraghty is identified more properly (though probably
misleadingly) as "Michael E. Geraghty, esquire, of 29
Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward,
gentleman." The 1904 Thom's directory lists an
M. E. Geraghty at 29 Arbour Hill, and the terms
"esquire" and "gentleman" cohere with the narrator's report
that Geraghty "said he had a farm in the county Down,"
implying that he is a country gentleman living off income
generated by his land. But Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner,
noting that Geraghty was listed as a "labourer" in the 1901
census, plausibly infer that his claim of owning such a farm
is a lie enabling him to obtain groceries on credit. Geraghty
does not act like a gentleman: "But that's the most notorious
bloody robber you'd meet in a day's walk and the face on him
all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain. Tell him,
says he, I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him
to send you round here again or if he does, says he, I'll
have him summonsed up before the court, so I will, for
trading without a licence. And he after stuffing himself
till he's fit to burst."
If the narrator is quick to condemn the brazen mendacity of
this "robber" who has made off with another man's goods, he is
equally quick to mock the merchant who has hired him to
recover the unpaid money. Jews who feel that Gentiles should
be obligated to pay them what they owe are beneath contempt:
"Jesus, I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt
out. He drink me my teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he
no pay me my moneys?" The grocer is "a
hop-of-my-thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near
Heytesbury street." Eric Partridge's Dictionary of
Catch Phrases, cited in Slote's annotations, and Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable both identify "hop of my
thumb" as slang for a dwarf. Heytesbury Street is on the
eastern edge of the Jewish quarter in south central Dublin.
The parodic paragraph more exactly places Herzog's address
half a dozen blocks west––"13 Saint Kevin's parade in the
city of Dublin, Wood quay ward"––and Thom's
confirms this address.
Saint Kevin's Parade is quite close to Clanbrassil Street,
where Bloom grew up. Like Bloom's father, and Bloom himself
for a time, the actual Moses Herzog was a traveling salesman,
peddling groceries from door to door. Vivien Igoe, relying on
census records and Louis Hyman's The Jews of Ireland,
describes him as "a one-eyed Dublin Jew and peddler, trading
as an itinerant grocer travelling around the city. He shared
the house with relations, Isaac Herzog, a Polish Jew and
widower, and his son Abraham, who were born in 1843 and 1882
respectively; both were also peddlers. Herzog was renowned for
slipping out of the synagogue at St Kevin's Parade during the
long services of the High Festivals to have a drink."
The narrator conjures vivid portraits of a violently
blustering thief with a potholed face who ludicrously claims
to be a country gentleman and an impotently outraged little
immigrant peddler with poor English and Shylockian demands to
be paid. The real-life models can add little to these
fictions. Nothing but a missing eye and a drinking problem
characterize the known Herzog, who left Ireland for South
Africa in 1908. Even less biographical information attends the
Irishman, and Joyce seems determined to make him enigmatic.
Geraghty died in 1905 at the age of 40 or 41, so it is odd
that the narrator calls him "old," and neither Thom's
nor census records identify him as a "plumber."
(Gifford suggests, without attribution, that this may be
"slang for a clumsy, brutal person.") These opening paragraphs
plunge readers into a disorienting realm of unfamiliar
individuals, obscure insinuations, rough talk, and shady
dealings. Things do not get any better when Hynes and the
narrator enter Barney Kiernan's pub in search of "the
citizen."
