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Ulysses 

873 

of

 1305 

ZOE:  (Promptly) Your boy’s thinking of you. Tie a 

knot on your shift. 

(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides 

over her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the 

curled caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. 

Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to 

the front.) 

STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance 

whether Benedetto Marcello found it or made it. The rite 

is the poet’s rest. It may be an old hymn to Demeter or 

also illustrate Coela enarrant gloriam Domini. It is susceptible 

of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and 

mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping 

round David’s that is Circe’s or what am I saying Ceres’ 

altar and David’s tip from the stable to his chief bassoonist 

about the alrightness of his almightiness. Mais nom de nom, 

that is another pair of trousers. Jetez la gourme. Faut que 

jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at Lynch’s cap, smiles, 

laughs) Which side is your knowledge bump? 

THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen) Bah! It is because it 

is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. 

Death is the highest form of life. Bah! 

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Ulysses 

874 

of

 1305 

STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my 

errors, boasts, mistakes. How long shall I continue to close 

my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone! 

THE CAP: Bah! 

STEPHEN: Here’s another for you. (He frowns) The 

reason is because the fundamental and the dominant are 

separated by the greatest possible interval which ... 

THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can’t. 

STEPHEN:  (With an effort) Interval which. Is the 

greatest possible ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate 

return. The octave. Which. 

THE CAP: Which? 

(Outside the gramophone begins to blare The Holy City.) 

STEPHEN: (Abruptly) What went forth to the ends of 

the world to traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, 

a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality 

itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait a second. 

Damn that fellow’s noise in the street. Self which it itself 

was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco! 

LYNCH:  (With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at 

Bloom and Zoe Higgins) What a learned speech, eh? 

ZOE:  (Briskly) God help your head, he knows more 

than you have forgotten. 

(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.) 

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Ulysses 

875 

of

 1305 

FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this 

summer. 

KITTY: No! 

ZOE: (Explodes in laughter) Great unjust God! 

FLORRY:  (Offended) Well, it was in the papers about 

Antichrist. O, my foot’s tickling. 

(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past, 

yelling.) 

THE NEWSBOYS: Stop press edition. Result of the 

rockinghorse races. Sea serpent in the royal canal. Safe 

arrival of Antichrist. 

(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.) 

STEPHEN: A time, times and half a time. 

(Reuben I Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open 

on his spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim’s 

wallet from which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured 

bills. Aloft over his shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the 

hook of which the sodden huddled mass of his only son, saved 

from Liffey waters, hangs from the slack of its breeches. A 

hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello, hipshot, crookbacked, 

hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper 

nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering darkness.) 

ALL: What? 

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Ulysses 

876 

of

 1305 

THE HOBGOBLIN: (His jaws chattering, capers to and 

fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with 

outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face 

through the fork of his thighs) Il vient! C’est moi! L’homme qui 

rit! L’homme primigene! (He whirls round and round with 

dervish howls) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches 

juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont 

faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks) Rien va 

plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. 

He springs off into vacuum.) 

FLORRY:  (Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly) 

The end of the world! 

(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous 

obscurity occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the 

gramophone blares over coughs and feetshuffling.) 

THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem! 

Open your gates and sing 

Hosanna ... 

(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star fills from 

it, proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming 

of Elijah. Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to 

nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, 

busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over 

heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.) 

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