O'Neill's

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In section 1, Father Conmee passes "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." Thom's 1904 directory records that Harry J. O'Neill, "undertaker and job carriage proprietor," had a business at 164 North Strand Road. The location, people, and actions of these two sentences carry over into section 2, where Corny Kelleher is again seen "chewing his blade of hay" and talking to a constable. Readers may therefore assume that they are revisiting the moment in which Conmee passed by the shop in the previous section.

But that impression will prove to be mistaken, because the one-sentence second paragraph shows the priest slightly farther along the road out of the city: "Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge." This is several blocks farther along the North Strand Road, where it crosses the canal and leaves the central city, and indeed the corresponding sentence in section 1 comes four sentences after the ones about seeing Corny and saluting the constable. So the effect of this sentence is to bump a reader's attention a couple of minutes forward to another spot mentioned in the first section. Attentive readers may note that at the beginning of section 2 Corny Kelleher has just "closed his long daybook," whereas when Conmee passed by in section 1 he "totted figures in the daybook."

This one sentence intrudes action from a narrative (Conmee's journey) that is no longer intersecting with the narrative of Corny and the constable. A reader may therefore infer that it is one of the many narrative interpolations that give Wandering Rocks the feel of a movie with sudden quick cuts to other scenes. In James Joyce's Dublin (2004), however, Ian Gunn and Clive Hart argue 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" (48).

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the sentence both is and is not an interpolation. While Kelleher could have spotted Conmee boarding the tram "had he taken the trouble to look," the two men are three city blocks apart, and it seems narratively significant that he does not look. Apparently a police informant, Corny 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 him for information about a "particular party." Since he clearly is not straining to catch sight of Conmee, the effect of the single sentence about Conmee boarding a tram several blocks away is to make readers jump to an unrelated action recalled from the first section. It does not seem quite right to say that the two stories share "the same narrative and topographical context."

The sense that one is reading an interpolation is also fed by the wording of the sentence in section 2 ("Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge"), which so closely resembles the language in section 1 ("On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee...stepped on to an outward bound tram"). Throughout Wandering Rocks interpolated sentences reproduce sentences in the sections they are echoing either verbatim or very nearly so, and they also often jog time forward or backward a bit. This one typifies both practices. It could be said that Joyce is tricking the reader by aping his usual practice, but if the sentence works as an interpolation, why not regard it as one?

The other interpolation, this one quite definite, comes in the antepenultimate paragraph: "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 implies exact simultaneity ("while") with an action happening in a very different place, nearly a mile to the northwest, and indeed the next section will depict such a scene in front of the Blooms' home: "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 line of "arching" descent described by an object thrown outward and down.

The reader must infer that sections 2 and 3 coincide temporally, which is easy to do because they are narratively contiguous. When the Eccles Street scene reappears via interpolation in section 9, however, the narrative distance is reflected in a temporal gap: the card reading Unfurnished Apartments, which fell from the window in section 3, now 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.