Dillon's auctionrooms

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Early in Lestrygonians Bloom looks along the quay from his spot at the bottom of Sackville Street: "From Butler's monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor's walk. Dedalus' daughter there still outside Dillon's auctionrooms. Must be selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father. Lobbing about waiting for him." Not only does this sighting take place more than two hours earlier, but Bloom thinks that Dilly is "still" there. As Patrick Hastings observes in his Guide, this suggests that "he first saw her when he popped down there looking for Mr. Keyes during the Aeolus episode. So, Dilly has been here since just after twelve noon, and now, around 3:30, she finally meets her father" (115). The Lestrygonians passage also suggests a possible reason for Dilly's location: she has been in the auction house selling off some family possessions to raise money. When Stephen encounters her in the next section of Wandering Rocks he inspects the book she has bought and says, "Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you. I suppose all my books are gone." Dilly replies, "Some.... We had to."

In an interpolation in section 4, set in the Dedalus family's "closesteaming kitchen," the "Barang!" of the auctioneer's bell anticipates section 11. In that earlier section, too, Maggy tells Katey and Boody that Dilly has "Gone to meet father." After her wait of over three hours, Simon finally shows up, walking from the Oval pub in Middle Abbey Street to the quays, which will take him to more liquor in the Ormond hotel bar. Dilly hounds him for money to feed their starving family. Although she feels certain, looking into his eyes, that "You got some," and although Simon has no doubt sold family possessions before at this auction house, it does not seem that it has supplied him with the shillings in his pocket.

In the middle of section 11, an interpolation jumps forward to the following one: "Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along James's street." This detail comes immediately after Dilly's "You got some" and Simon's "How do you know that?," spoken with "his tongue in his cheek." Clive Hart comments on the juxtaposition: "Both men have been drinking. Leo Knuth points out a subtler reason: Mr Dedalus has his tongue in his cheek, while Tom Kernan had lost a part of his in 'Grace'. Molly remembers the incident. Kernan has made money; Mr Dedalus is presumed to have borrowed five shillings" (Critical Essays, 209). Another interpolation comes near the end of the section: "The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of Parkgate." Hart plausibly speculates that this reference to the beginning of section 19 may reflect the contrast of "Wealth and poverty" seen in Simon and his poor daughter. He notes also that the obsequiousness of the policemen mirrors Dilly's suppliant position toward her father (210).

A third interpolation, early in section 11, glances at something else happening in the final section: "Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint. J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library." This reference is odd in two ways. Like the recurrent references to a paper throwaway floating down the Liffey in sections 4, 12, and 16, it evokes a scene that no one in the episode ever sees. As the viceregal cavalcade drives down Nassau Street near the end of section 19, a bicycle race is going on behind "the wall" that separates Trinity's College Park from that street. A race was held there on June 16, and the article on it in the day's Evening Telegraph mentions the presence of "The band of the Second Seaforth Highlanders." Some of this band's members are seen getting off a tram in front of the College in section 6, and section 19 observes that "Unseen brazen highland laddies blared and drumthumped after the cortège."

The fact that the racers and the bagpipers are "Unseen" would seem to violate the chapter's usual practice of using interpolations to take readers to scenes that they have seen or will see in other sections. This spatial strangeness is matched by a temporal one: the two interpolated references to section 19 take readers to widely separated moments in time. The bicycle race, evoked first, comes near the end of what one sees of the cavalcade's procession. The later interpolation points to a much earlier time when the cavalcade is just leaving the Phoenix Park gate, frustrating a reader's expectation that all the interpolations will indicate simultaneous or near-simultaneous events. Despite the spatiotemporal oddities, the thematic resonances of the bicycle-race interpolation come through loud and clear. The race-minder's bell answers the auction-man's bell, and as Hart notes, this is the "last lap" for the desperate Dedalus family.