Crampton Court

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Newcomers can easily become disoriented in the labyrinthine medieval streets of Dublin. The "tiny square of Crampton court" is one of its more obscure nooks. Two narrow alleyways between buildings on Dame Street in the south and Essex Street East in the north meet in a small courtyard at the back entrance of the Olympia Theatre, which in Joyce's youth was Dan Lowrey's Music Hall and, after 1897, the Empire Palace Theatre. Section 9 opens with Tom Rochford showing his three companions a device for letting music hall patrons know which number is currently being performed, and then Lenehan and M'Coy go "out" into this tiny courtyard, so they must be exiting from the back door of the music hall.

The subsequent street directions show that the two men do not walk down to Essex Street but instead go up to Dame Street, where they turn left and then left again on Sycamore Street. Joyce makes the journey more confusing by mentioning the music hall twice under its two names (one of them misspelled, as Slote notes): "They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile. / Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was." It sounds as if they are passing different buildings but in fact they are seeing the same establishment, which had entrances on both its Dame Street and Sycamore Street facades as indicated in Thom's 1904 directory.

When they get to Essex Street, they find themselves "At the Dolphin," a hotel and restaurant which once stood on the corner. Here, instead of turning left toward the Ormond Hotel, Lenehan takes a right toward "Lynam's," a bookmaker he knows. (No one today can say with certainty which building may have housed this illegal betting operation, and Joyce does not give readers much help.) Responding to Lenehan's asking what time it is, "M'Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses' sombre office, then at O'Neill's clock." They have now moved one block east to the meeting of Essex and Eustace Street, where rival tea merchants sat on opposite corners of the intersection. The time, M'Coy says, is "After three," which means that in England it is after 3:25. The race there was scheduled to start at 3, so it has already happened, but the news was not due to reach Dublin by telegraph until 4 so bookies were still taking bets. (Parallax and technology here add temporal wrinkles to the deepening spatial ones.)

Lenehan leads M'Coy forward into "Temple bar," which continues Essex Street East eastward under a new name––an omnipresent source of confusion to people visiting Dublin. (At its other end Temple Bar becomes Fleet Street. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of similar examples in this old city.) He leaves M'Coy standing there while he goes to talk to the bookmaker, returning shortly later to report that it's "Even money." Then he directs his companion "Through here. / They went up the steps and under Merchants' arch. A darkbacked figure scanned books on the hawker's cart." Merchants' Arch is another quirky, captivating feature of the old Dublin streets. It provides a mid-block pedestrian shortcut from Temple Bar to Wellington Quay via another narrow alleyway and a tall narrow archway.

The following section will show (almost certainly) that the "darkbacked figure" standing at the cart is Leopold Bloom, since he is seen there browsing in a nearby bookstore. Thus it may possibly seem that the sentence mentioning this man is an interpolation drawing attention to section 10, but Lenehan and M'Coy do actually see Bloom, as evidenced by the long discussion they have about him after passing by. The uncertainty a reader may feel here repeats the trick played in section 2, when a sentence about Father Conmee boarding a tram seems to be an interpolation echoing the previous section (it may in fact be one) but is also happening in present time and space.

Finally the narrative shows Lenehan and M'Coy coming out of the alley and moving west: "They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the riverwall." There is potential for a final bit of confusion here. The span called the Metal Bridge or Ha'Penny Bridge does cross the Liffey beyond the Merchants' Arch alleyway, so being told that the two men "crossed to the metal bridge" may create the impression that they take this bridge across the river. But in fact they only cross the road. Spurning the bridge, they turn left and walk along the riverine side of Wellington Quay. This will take them to the Grattan Bridge, which they could have accessed much more quickly from Crampton Court were it not for Lenehan's detour to visit the bookmaker.

Readers who follow all these spatial twists and turns must also recognize that they are not entering locations evoked by four interpolated passages. The first looks ahead to section 19: "Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the admiralty division of king's bench to the court of appeal an elderly female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of great amplitude." This scene is set farther west along the quays in the entrance hall of the Four Courts building, which lies beyond the Ormond on the north bank of the river. So far in this episode, every interpolation has borne some evident thematic connection to the section it interrupts, usually to sentences just before or after. This one is hard to make sense of in that way, and that is not its only puzzling feature. It also stands in a strange temporal relation to the next interpolation.

This one too anticipates section 19, glancing even farther west to Phoenix Park where the viceregal procession is setting out: "The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal cavalcade." The horses of the procession clearly echo the horses that Lenehan is betting on, but hearing about the cavalcade after hearing about the "Lawyers of the past" is odd, because readers have become accustomed to interpolations that either evoke simultaneity or move time slightly forward. Here, the order of the two interpolations appears to reverse the actual order of events. Section 19 shows Richie Goulding standing "In the porch of Four Courts" and watching the cavalcade go by, several sentences after the cavalcade is shown leaving through the gates of Phoenix Park––as well it should, since the parade moves east along the river, from the park to "Kingsbridge," to "Bloody bridge," to "Queen's and Whitworth bridges," to the Four Courts.

In section 9 one hears first of Richie Goulding in the Four Courts and then, oddly, of the procession leaving Phoenix Park. But this time there is an evident solution to the puzzle, though it does involve a narrative trick requiring readers to pay close attention. If one looks closely at the interpolation, it does not say that Richie Goulding saw the viceroy, as in section 19. It says instead that the lawyers in the entrance hall saw Richie Goulding. This means that the interpolation is representing an earlier moment in the action, unrepresented in section 19, when Richie had not yet made his way out of the building. After he emerges onto the porch that fronts the quay he sees the viceroy passing below its steps. So, by a sly trick, the forward movement of time is both threatened and preserved. Joyce uses this interpolation to jump to a moment earlier than the actions seen in the final section.

In his fourth interpolation he does the opposite, moving time forward to a later unrepresented moment. This one revisits the facade of the Blooms' house as glimpsed in section 3: "A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street." In section 3 the card advertising rooms for rent falls out of Molly's window. In section 9 it reappears in the window. The implication is that some time passes between the two sections. It is probably impossible to say how much time, but a sense of mimetic verisimilitude is engendered by imagining Molly noticing that the card has fallen out, going downstairs and walking outside to pick it up, taking care of other domestic tasks, and eventually replacing it in the window. (It is hard for me to imagine Hart's justification for saying that the card falls out at 3:16 and is replaced at 3:17. Surely more time has passed between section 3 and section 9?) This interpolation, unlike the one about the statues of lawyers in the Four Courts, also weaves a thematic continuity with other details in the section, as Lenehan is engaged in telling a lascivious story about Molly Bloom.

The third interpolation anticipates section 18, where Paddy Dignam's son Patsy will be seen leaving a butcher shop on William Street, quite a few blocks to the southeast: "Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks." Clive Hart observes that there is an "ironic similarity" between the Glencree Reformatory where Lenehan's story begins and the O'Brien Institute where Father Conmee is trying to find a place for young Dignam (Critical Essays, 208). This seems correct, but he also notes "The contrast in the quality of the foodstuffs." A contrast there certainly is (at the annual fundraising dinner there were "port wine and sherry and curacao," and "Cold joints galore and mince pies"), but I wonder if the funeral dinner at the Dignam house isn't in its own small way unusually extravagant.

Making sense of the spatial movements in section 9 is arduous work. The most crowded previous section, Father Conmee's walk to Artane, covered a lot of ground and glanced at many streets and now-defunct institutions, but it started and ended at prominent landmarks and followed a more or less linear course. Section 9, by contrast, starts in an unnamed interior space, moves into a small open-air nook unfamiliar even to many Dubliners, uses two names for one building, and follows a circuitous walking course that punches through city blocks but is by no means the shortest distance between two points. Two of its four interpolations jump to familiar places but tinker with the time, requiring readers to augment the narration with things that happen earlier or later, and what might seem to be a fifth interpolation taking readers to the following section in fact is happening in present time and space. Added to all these intricacies are the multiple thematic threads––sexual arousal, fine eating, harsh educational institutions, horseracing––that can be teased out of the interstices between interpolations and surrounding text.

It is almost as if, in this centrally placed section (number 9 of 19), Joyce wanted to maximize the disorienting jumps across space, time, people, and subject matters that he was exploring throughout the entire chapter. The reader who can get through the labyrinth holding on to all these threads deserves a medal. Things get easier in the next chunk of text. Much as Calypso provides comforting clarity to readers who have struggled through the obscurities of Proteus, section 10 provides some relief from the challenges of section 9. It stays in one spot, somewhere near the bookseller's cart.