O'Neill's

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In section 1 Father Conmee passed "H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay. A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted the constable." In section 2 Corny Kelleher is again seen "chewing his blade of hay" and talking to the constable, but this cannot be the same moment because the priest has now moved slightly farther along the road out of the city: "Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge," where the North Strand Road crosses the canal and leaves the central city. The sentence echoes a very similar one in section 1––"On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee...stepped on to an outward bound tram"––but there it came four sentences after the ones about seeing Corny and saluting the constable. Additional evidence of time passing is provided by the fact that Corny Kelleher now closes "his long daybook," whereas in section 1 he "totted figures in the daybook" as Conmee passed by.

The temporal and spatial disjunctions reinforce the sense of an interpolation––a jump to a different scene. But Clive Hart argues that what feels like an interpolation from section 1 actually is not: "Although Conmee is some distance away, Corny Kelleher would nevertheless have had no difficulty in seeing him board the tram, had he taken the trouble to look. This passage, which belongs on the fringes of the same narrative and topographical context, is not therefore strictly speaking an interpolation" (James Joyce's Dublin, 48). Joyce performs the same trick in section 15, when a sentence describing three men meeting on the steps of City Hall sounds like it is intruding on the action of Martin Cunningham and his friends descending Cork Hill––until one stops to realize that Cork Hill goes directly past the steps of City Hall, so the two scenes are in fact identical.

In section 2 the proximity is not quite so immediate as that, but Hart's observation is accurate. O'Neill's was one of several buildings on the North Strand Road destroyed when a German bomber dropped four high explosive bombs on the area on the night of 31 May 1941, and there has been a lot of reconstruction since then, so the precise location may be a little uncertain, but it would have been on the south side of the road just 300-400 feet away from the Newcomen Bridge. In a personal communication, Matt Rudge, who lives nearby, observes that "Number 164 would have existed on the site of the existing James Larkin House.... From that vantage point, it would have been quite possible for Corny Kelleher to see Fr. Conmee board the tram. They are on a similar elevation."

One can still make a case for the sentence being an interpolation, however. In addition to its close linguistic echoing of a sentence in section 1 (a feature of every interpolation in Wandering Rocks), and the way it jogs time forward a little (another feature of many interpolations), there is the discontinuity between the two actions. Even if Kelleher could have spotted Conmee boarding the tram "had he taken the trouble to look," it seems narratively significant that he does not look. He is shown "looking idly out" of the shop, evidently concerned not to be seen looking very intently at anything in the presence of this constable who is pumping a covert informant ("It's very close") for news of a "particular party." Since Kelleher is not straining to catch sight of Conmee, it does not seem quite right to say that the two stories share "the same narrative and topographical context." The effect of the sentence about Conmee boarding a tram is to make readers suddenly recall an action from the first section, and that is the essence of Joyce's interpolations.

The other intruding sentence is quite unambiguously an interpolation: "Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin." Here the prose asserts exact simultaneity ("while") with an action happening in a very different place, nearly a mile to the northwest. The next section shows this action happening at the Blooms' house: "A plump bare generous arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area railings." The two passages are linked by the "arching" descent of the spit and the coin. Hart observes also that "Kelleher is concerned with death, Molly with life" (Critical Essays, 203).

The simultaneity feels plausible because section 2 is so brief and section 3 comes immediately after. When the Eccles Street scene reappears via interpolation in section 9, however, the narrative distance is reflected in a temporal gap comparable to the one created by Conmee's progress up the North Strand Road. When Molly opens her window to fling a coin to the beggar, a card advertising Unfurnished Apartments falls from the sash. In section 9 the card reappears in the window. By such mechanisms the interpolations in Wandering Rocks can create impressions not only of simultaneity but also of forward motion, advancing action along the arrow of time as traditional novels do.