Onelegged sailor

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The first sentence of the section reads, "A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell's corner, skirting Rabaiotti's icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street." Thom's 1904 directory listed a pharmacy owned by Andrew MacConnell at 112 Lower Dorset Street, the last address of that block on the west side of Dorset before the intersection with Eccles––though, as Clive Hart notes and Ian Gunn shows on the first map here, the pharmacy was not in fact on the corner, that spot being occupied by 1 Eccles Street. Across Eccles Street, on the south corner, "Larry O'Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway," watches as the sailor, growling out his song, moves west along the street. He swings "violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus," stops, and bawls out more of the song. A "stout lady" gives him a coin and he thanks her before lurching onward and baying his song "towards a window," through which another singing voice, this one a "gay sweet chirping whistling," can be heard.

The singing in the house stops and someone opens the window, after which "A card Unfurnished Apartments slipped from the sash and fell" and, in a sentence that has already been anticipated in section 2, "A woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area railings." Only later, in section 9, will an interpolated echo of this scene identify the number of the house: "A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street." And only in Ithaca will this be identified as the Blooms' address. A reader may suspect that the Eccles Street singer with a "plump bare generous arm" (generous in two senses) who throws a coin to the beggar is Molly Bloom, but this hunch can only be confirmed by looking to a later section in the chapter and a later chapter in the novel.

Similar uncertainties attend the sailor himself, among them the question of how he arrived at the corner of Dorset and Eccles. At the beginning of section 1 Father Conmee ran into him on Upper Gardiner Street, where he was begging in front of "the convent of the sisters of charity" next to St. Francis Xavier's church. A map will show that in the intervening time the sailor must have walked west along Upper Gardiner to its intersection with Lower Dorset, and there turned south toward Eccles. Still later in the chapter, section 16 is interrupted by the sentence, "The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street." The beggar's trick of hurling his song at Molly's housefront was not a one-off, then. He apparently has continued to visit residences further up Eccles Street before turning left and continuing on Nelson Street.

By having the same people pop up in different locations as the chapter moves forward––it has already done this with Father Conmee, who greets the constable at an undertaker's shop in section 1 but then is seen several blocks farther along the North Strand Road when the constable talks to Corny Kelleher in section 2––Wandering Rocks invites its readers to estimate temporal gaps as well as spatial distances. In most cases this could only be accomplished by walking Dublin's streets with a watch in hand (the method Clive Hart resorted to), but the text makes it possible to measure the sailor's trip from Upper Gardiner Street to Eccles Street much more directly. According to Father Conmee's watch as he comes down the steps of the presbytery, it is "Five to three." According to Molly in Penelope, it was "¼ after 3" when she saw Katey and Boody Dedalus outside her window. Between the time that the sailor unsuccessfully begs money from the priest and the time that he brushes past the Dedalus girls, then, 20 minutes go by. So maniacally exact, and indirect, is the spatiotemporal patterning in this chapter.

Section 3 contains one interpolation, an echo of section 8: "J. J. O'Molloy's white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was in the warehouse with a visitor." To discover why this interpolation should appear in this section, one must ask why O'Molloy has come to Saint Mary's abbey. Hart observes that it is because he wants to ask Ned Lambert, who works in the seed business there, to lend him money. Hence "Both the sailor and J. J. O'Molloy are begging" (Critical Essays, 204). Hart also notes that "There is an ironic contrast between the sailor's song," which extols England, "and the tales of insurrection being told in Mary's abbey."

Section 1 shows Father Conmee walking from St. Francis Xavier's church to a spot on the Royal Canal almost a mile to the east. Section 3 shows the crippled sailor, who also started at the church, having walked some distance to the west, and the interpolation in section 9 shows him still farther west. Section 4 shows the Dedalus girls, whom the sailor bumps past in section 3, considerably farther west and north. These early sections are spread across the northern perimeter of Dublin, but most of the interpolations in them look to the south, where later sections of the episode will be set.