D. B. C.

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The Dublin Bread Company operated tearooms and restaurants at four locations in Dublin: at the base of O'Connell Street, on the northern edge of St. Stephen's Green, near the National Library on Kildare Street, and at 33 Dame Street. In Lestrygonians Bloom associates one of these with the bloviating of nationalist politicians and gets the name slightly wrong: "Want to gas about our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company's tearoom. Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government. That the language question should take precedence of the economic question." Although the location of this D. B. C. is not specified, it must be the Dame Street establishment given its proximity to City Hall. In section 15 of Wandering Rocks Jimmy Henry expresses impatience with council members endlessly discussing the "damned Irish language"––consistent with Bloom's account of nationalist political debates conducted in a tearoom.

One page later in Lestrygonians Bloom thinks of John Howard Parnell neglecting his job to play chess: "Must be a corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's uniform since he got the job.... Look at the woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a pain.... Drop into the D. B. C. probably for his coffee, play chess there." Gifford notes that the smoking room of the Dame Street restaurant was "a meeting place for chess players," and in a personal communication Vincent Altman O'Connor tells me that Joyce's friend J. F. Byrne regularly played chess there. In section 16 of Wandering Rocks Mulligan (who was told in Scylla and Charybdis that Haines had said "He'll see you after at the D. B. C.") directs his companion's attention to a man playing chess near their table in the tearoom. It is Parnell, looking just as dyspeptic as Bloom imagines him.

Mulligan jokes about the acronym for the restaurant: "We call it D. B. C. because they have damn bad cakes." The flippant Dub quip does not stop him from ordering "some scones and butter and some cakes as well" to go with the "Two mélanges" that he and Haines have requested. Clive Hart glosses this term (French for "mixtures") as "coffee made with milk or with sugar and whipped cream," and he remarks on the francophile sophistication of "the elegant D. B. C.," noting that "Haines places the first order and it may be that Mulligan is too little self-aware to notice that, in cooperating, he is himself participating in a 'Paris fad' of the kind that he had scorned in the morning" (James Joyce's Dublin, 53). 

From this upscale setting there is quite a comedown to the scene presented in the first interpolation. When last seen in section 3 the "onelegged sailor" was leaving Dorset Street and making his way up Eccles. Since then he has evidently continued crutching along on this trajectory, because now he is shown growling the same patriotic lyrics "at the area of 14 Nelson street," one long block west and half a block south. In addition to the obvious contrast between wealth and penury, the intruding sentence comes just after Haines dismisses Stephen's talk by observing that "Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds that have lost their balance," and just before Mulligan's joke about Stephen's drunkenness: "You should see him...when his body loses its balance." The sailor's body too has lost its balance––as Hart notes, crediting Leo Knuth (Critical Essays, 214). Stephen's tortured brilliance thus becomes associated with a handicapped beggar. Hart adds, more speculatively, that the words of the sailor's song, "England expects," may also be applied to Haines.

At the end of the section there is a second interpolation: "Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping street past Benson's ferry, and by the threemasted schooner Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks." When last seen, in section 12, this crumpled piece of paper was moving west––oddly, because high tide was reached at 12:42 PM, but it was "rocked on the ferrywash" and thus perhaps briefly swept off course. Now it has resumed the eastward course seen in section 4. The "threemasted schooner" is no doubt the sailing ship that Stephen saw over his shoulder in Proteus, and it has moved west on the incoming tide just as the throwaway has floated east on the river. The interpolation comes just after Haines tastes his mélange: "This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don't want to be imposed on." Hart cannot discern any thematic linkage here, but it seems ironically significant that a rich English tourist demands authentically Irish cream just as a workaday cargo vessel brings English bricks to construct Irish buildings. 

One narrative element is intriguingly absent. At the end of section 15 the viceregal cavalcade passed by on Parliament Street, not in an interpolation but as part of the present action. Although not represented in that section, the procession then turns left at City Hall onto Dame Street. Since section 16 is set on Dame Street, and since the sections seem to succeed one another in chronological order, one might expect to catch sight of the cavalcade once again through the windows of the D. B. C. Indeed, in section 19 Mulligan and Haines do look out the restaurant's windows at the carriages rolling by. But this sighting is not doubled in section 16. For reasons that I do not presume to understand, Joyce did not build on his striking innovation in section 15. Sections 17 and 18 likewise take place in the southeastern quadrant of central Dublin in places that the cavalcade passes by, and the people in them are shown gazing at the carriages in section 19. Joyce could certainly have provided glimpses of the procession throughout sections 15-18 before doubling that narration in section 19. He did not do that.