“O tell me where is fancy bread?”

It is now Friday, June 17, 1904, sometime after midnight. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus make their way to a “cabman’s shelter,” a coffeehouse where Bloom aims to set Stephen right with a cup of coffee and something to eat. (As we will soon learn, Stephen hasn’t eaten since June 15.) Here’s a wonderful passage showing Bloom’s and Stephen’s utterly different responses to their surroundings. From the “Eumaeus” episode, written in the meandering, sleepy sentences one might be speaking in the wee small hours of a hard day’s night:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Four notes:

~ “Ibsen, associated with Baird’s”: an association established in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916):

as he went by Baird’s stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty.

Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated notes that Joyce changed the real-life D.G. Baird and J. Paul Todd’s engineering works to “the stonecutter’s” and cites Joyce’s essay “Ibsen’s New Drama” (1900), describing the wife of a sculptor in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (1899):

Her airy freshness is as a breath of keen air. The sense of free, almost flamboyant, life, which is her chief note, counterbalances the austerity of Irene and the dullness of Rubek.

~James Rourke’s city bakery: a real Dublin bakery.

~ The faithful Achates, “fidus Achates,” is Aeneas’s companion in the Aeneid.

~ “O tell me where is fancy bread”: a play on Shakespeare.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)