“ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP”

The scene: outside the offices of the Freeman’s Journal, a Dublin newspaper. A professor, Hugh MacHugh, is speaking to Stephen Dedalus, who has visited the newspaper on behalf of his employer, Mr. Deasy. Stephen is to use his (supposed) pull with his literary friends to see that Mr. Deasy’s letter about foot-and-mouth disease gets into the paper. Stephen has been telling an odd story of his making about two old women who climb the stairs to the top of Nelson’s pillar. Too tired to look up or down, they sit there munching plums. From the “Aeolus” episode, in which each small section of the narrative receives a headline, my favorite:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

As Elaine noticed, Stephen makes the names of the two Penelopes into something of a palindrome.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Gorgias: Greek Sophist and rhetorician. Of Helen and Penelope is a lost work: “in it Antisthenes apparently argued that Penelope’s virtue made her more beautiful than Helen, whose virtue was somewhat less solidly demonstrated.” Penelope Rich (c. 1562–1607): an unwilling and openly unfaithful partner in an unhappy marriage, and the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. Source: Don Gifford, Ulysses Annotated.]