Episode 12, "Cyclops," takes place in the 5-6 hour, most of it in a pub several blocks north of the Ormond Hotel seen in Sirens. The chapter echoes in an unusually sustained way Homer's story of Odysseus and his men becoming trapped in the cave of a uncivilized one-eyed giant and barely escaping with their lives. Bloom enters a dark pub where a xenophobic and antisemitic nationalist verbally assaults and threatens to murder him, and Bloom uncharacteristically displays courageous defiance. Joyce echoed aspects of Homer's story from beginning to end, and he dreamed up two brilliant extensions of its central image: a garrulous first-person narrator with the meanspirited truculence of a troglodyte, and third-person parodic commentaries, animated by a spirit of gigantism, that satirize the ideals of the contemporary Irish Revival. These cyclopean innovations unleashed a kind of wild comedy not yet seen in Joyce's fiction. Both the acerbic narration and the monstrously overblown commentaries are hilarious, and they pioneered techniques that the author would return to.

In book 9 of the Odyssey, the hero recounts how he came to a land where giants live in mountain caves, barely civilized by animal husbandry and primitive social organization. Leading twelve men, he enters the cave of one, later called Polyphemus by his fellow Cyclops. Rather than steal his goods they wait to see if he will show them hospitality (!) and become trapped when he returns with his sheep and rolls a huge stone across the entrance. Polyphemus slaughters and eats two of the men on the first night, and again on the second. But on that second night Odysseus gets him drunk on wine, tells him that his name is "Noman," and in recompense receives a promise that Noman will be eaten last. After Polyphemus sinks into stupor, the captives blind him with a log that they have sharpened and heated in the fire. The giant screams for help, but when his neighbors rally to his cave and hear that Noman has harmed him, they leave. The next morning, Odysseus and his men escape by clinging to the bellies of sheep as they are let out of the cave. They return to their ship and weigh anchor, but Odysseus uncharacteristically lets down his guard, taunting the giant from the waves and telling him that it was Odysseus who cost him his eye. The blind giant hurls a boulder that nearly sinks the ship and calls down Poseidon's wrath on his tormentor.

Joyce's chapter sets the cautious, pacifistic, parallactic Bloom against a blustering, pugilistic, narrow-minded former shotput champion known as The Citizen. (Many commentators say that this man wears an eye patch, but I do not know what passage they are referring to. The narrative does note at one point that "he rubs his hand in his eye.") Tension showly builds as the drunken brawler scorns, then resents, and finally insults Bloom, while the sober Bloom progresses from timidly trying to get along to boldly opposing his antisemitism. At the end of the chapter, as Bloom leaves on a jaunting car, the Citizen puts his athletic training to use by hurling a biscuit tin at the Jew.

Imagistically, the chapter makes the single Cyclopean eye an emblem of the kind of thinking that can see things from only one point of view, and it shows binocular vision being mocked in the pub: "— Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes." Thoughts of blinding enter early on, when the narrator tells how "a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye," and they return when Bloom refuses to be treated to drinks but consents to accept a "knockmedown cigar," and lights it up. "Some people," he says while verbally sparring with the Citizen, "can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't see the beam in their own."

These narrative and imagistic strategies are consistent with what Joyce does in earlier chapters of Ulysses. But Cyclops adds two startlingly new responses to Homer's poem. It features a first-person narrator, prompting readers to wonder who the man is, just as Polyphemus craves to know the identity of Odysseus, but he remains nameless throughout the chapter, a kind of Noman. He is brilliantly loquacious, pouring out a flood of colorful talk, and he knows a lot: although he falls for Lenehan's false suspicion that Bloom has bet on a winning horse, and succumbs to some antisemitic prejudices, on many other issues he proves to be remarkably well-informed. He is also remarkably mean-spirited. Although he seems to get along well with other opinionated unreflective males, within the safe space of his thoughts he brims with aggressively demeaning insults and never has anything good to say about anyone. In this way he is a Cyclops—solitary, sullen, and suspicious, bound to others only by loose tribal ties.

As a young man Joyce extravagantly admired the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and he wanted to become a playwright himself, but Exiles made clear that his genius was not suited to writing for the stage. In Cyclops, however, he produced a long dramatic monologue as masterful as any ever written, and he used this voice to narrate a tightly unfolding dramatic action, pulling off the difficult theatrical trick of combining exposition with character development. The crackling, nasty energy of the narrator's voice never flags, and the confrontation between protagonist (Bloom) and antagonist (Citizen) builds inexorably to a passionate climax. Having found just how well he could create drama within the confines of prose fiction, Joyce attempted the trick again in Circe, this time writing a fantastical and wildly ambitious closet drama with elaborate stage directions, name tags for the dramatis personae, and dialogue that utterly supplants narration.

Not content with one radical innovation in narrative technique, Joyce also found a way to create a stylistic equivalent of gigantism by inserting over-the-top parodies into the prose at numerous points, interrupting the narration to hyperbolically exaggerate and enumerate things mentioned in it. The parodies vary in length and in style, but all of them echo the Citizen's blustery, chauvinistic overconfidence. Most, it not quite all, serve to mock the complacent provincialism of the nationalists in the bar and the cultural activists of the Irish Revival. The targets are as various as the sacred cows of the Revival: Irish heroic mythology, Irish landscapes, Irish crafts, Irish natural resources, Irish love of Theosophy, Irish celebration of martyred heroes, Irish language and sports, Irish representation in the British parliament, Irish holy men and women, Irish fisticuffs, Irish tribalism, Irish forests, Irish hospitality, and more. While Bloom is busy sticking his unwelcome opinions in the eye of a bullying barhound, these parodic passages are goring every conceivable cultural cow.

Like the strongly dramatic elements in Cyclops, the parodies proved consequential. Joyce went on to mock the style of sentimental women's fiction in Nausicaa. In Oxen of the Sun he took on the centuries-long evolution of prose styles that had made English a great literary language by writing a long series of imitations. In Eumaeus he mocked his own protagonist by writing an entire chapter in the kind of ineptly pretentious prose that Bloom might produce were he to affect authorship. And in Ithaca he adopted the format of religious and secular catechisms to write in the Latinate style of professional logicians. Not only the aping of prose styles but the long lists found in many of the parodies (quite likely themselves parodic responses to Homeric catalogues) became standard parts of Joyce's repertoire. In Circe and Ithaca, and in Finnegans Wake after them, he continued to employ these absurdly expansive, ludic catchalls. In all of these ways, Cyclops proved a portal of discovery for Joyce.

After Bloom leaves the Ormond bar in Sirens, somewhere around 4:30 PM, he walks west along the quays and then turns north toward Barney Kiernan's pub on Little Britain Street to meet Martin Cunningham and Jack Power. Having seen Boylan leave the bar for his rendezvous with Molly, he is anxious to avoid running into anyone he knows, so he takes an obscure route between the produce market and the fish market: "Dodge round by Greek street. Wish I hadn't promised to meet." But the narrator of Cyclops, who has been walking about in this area hunting for Geraghty, tells Joe Hynes that he has spotted Bloom: "— I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish." Bloom gets to the pub before Cunningham and Power and paces back and forth outside the window, where the Citizen spots him twice: "He's on point duty up and down there for the last ten minutes." A minute more and the stage is set:

     Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round the door.
     — Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.
     So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there.

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John Hunt 2025