Closesteaming kitchen

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It quickly becomes clear that the kitchen is a place not of gustatory richness but of desperate poverty. One of Maggy's two pots holds shirts which she is boiling clean. Boody's question "Did you put in the books?" momentarily makes a reader wonder whether one of the pots may hold paper pulp, but she is asking about Maggy's visit to Mrs. M'Guinness's pawnshop, and Maggy answers, "They wouldn't give anything on them." Boody's "Bad cess to her big face!" represents an acid rebuttal to Father Conmee's serenely complacent reflections on the pawnbroker's "queenly mien."

The section also glances more directly at the priest via interpolation, though now Joyce adds a new trick to his repertoire: "Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked ankles tickled by stubble." This is actually two jump-cuts in one. It goes back to the end of section 1, where Conmee was seen walking along the Malahide Road past hedges and fields of cabbages. There, his thoughts went back to his time as the rector of Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare: "His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the evening, and heard the cries of the boys' lines at their play, young cries in the quiet evening. He was their rector: his reign was mild."

The linkage here is not to any sentences immediately before or after the interpolation, but rather to the girls' thoughts about another father who is serenely removed from suffering and struggle––their own. A second interpolation makes the link explicit: "The lacquey rang his bell. / — Barang!" In section 11, this employee of the auction house repeatedly rings his bell to announce a sale as Dilly doggedly tries to get her father to hand over some of the money he has obtained. Boody's bitter joke, "Our father who art not in heaven," will be echoed in section 11 when Simon delivers his own version of her crack about an indifferent God: "— I'm going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave you all where Jesus left the jews."

Joyce has inserted still more ties between the two sections. When Boody angrily asks whether there is anything at all to eat, Maggy tells her that the other pot holds pea soup charitably donated to the family by "Sister Mary Patrick." As Dilly pesters her father outside the auction rooms, Simon says, "Was it the little nuns taught you to be so saucy?" (His word "saucy" echoes the "Peasoup" in the kitchen.) And: "The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn't do anything! O, sure they wouldn't really! Is it little sister Monica!"

A final interpolation also looks south toward the river: "A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains, between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay." This crumpled piece of paper enters three different sections of Wandering Rocks via interpolation, appearing next in section 12, but it floats free of narrative involvement, never taking readers to a section where it will be developed as part of a larger context. Clearly it has some connection to Leopold Bloom, who in Lestrygonians crumples a throwaway announcing Elijah's arrival and throws it into the river, and whose departure from Barney Kiernan's pub in Cyclops is compared to Elijah's ascent to heaven. In the present context it seems to comment ironically on the false promises of salvation offered by two distant fathers, Conmee and Dedalus, comparing them to a father who is not maddeningly distant.

In James Joyce's Dublin Clive Hart remarks that "The Joyce/Dedalus family is notable for being uncentred. Katey and Boody Dedalus have walked home from school via Eccles Street, Berkeley Road, North Circular Road, Cabra Road. The location of their school, left equally vague, may be at The Sisters of Charity Convent/Convent National Schools, 76 Upper Gardiner Street, close to Conmee's presbytery at St Francis Xavier's Church. The girls' walk home from there would then take them through Eccles Street, where they are seen by Molly at 3:15" (48). The Cabra address, which according to Hart they would reach about 10 minutes later, represents rock bottom––the last in a dismal series of more than a dozen progressively less respectable houses occupied by the Joyces during their patriarch's spectacular descent into poverty.

This is the house in which John Joyce's longsuffering wife died––represented fictionally in Telemachus when Stephen recalls the family vigil at his mother's bedside. Richard Ellmann observes that "The disarray that had marked the Joyce household since their move from Blackrock to Dublin a dozen years before, changed to near-chaos after May Joyce’s death. The house was in disrepair, the banister broken, the furniture mostly pawned or sold; a few scrawny chickens scrabbled at the back for food. John Joyce took out another mortgage for £65 on November 3, 1903, and knew that this would be the last and that nothing was left of the nine hundred pounds he had obtained a year before by commuting his pension. The house was to drop away from him in 1905. When the new mortgage money moved from his hands to those of the Dublin publicans, he sold the piano, a desperate act for a musical man and one which roused James to fury when he came home to discover it” (143).

The Cabra house also represents the end of this chapter's exploration of sites on the northern perimeter of Dublin. All future sections will take place farther south, closer to the river.