Discernible by daylight

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Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that "Aristotle claimed in the De Generatione Animalium that stars could be seen in the daytime if an observer were placed at the bottom of a deep shaft or well (708b21)." After remarking that various people have disproved the idea, starting with Robert Hooke in the 17th century, they quote from chapter 20 of the Pickwick Papers, arguing that Joyce's passage "follows from" one in which Dickens describes four men "catching as favourable glimpses of heaven's light and heaven's sun, in the course of their daily labours, as a man might hope to do, were he placed at the bottom of a reasonably deep well; and without the opportunity of perceiving the stars in the day-time, which the latter secluded situation affords."

The Dickens passage predicts Joyce's only vaguely. A statement of the idea by Sir Robert Ball, noted by Harry Manos in "Physics in James Joyce's Ulysses," The Physics Teacher 60 (1922): 6-10, does so much more precisely. In Lestrygonians Bloom calls Ball's Story of the Heavens (1886) that "Fascinating little book," and Ithaca reveals that it sits on his bookshelf. In a passage of his later book Starland (1899), Ball claims that stars can be seen in daylight, after imagining a quite long hole in the earth:

These groups of stars extend all around the sky. They are not only over our heads and on all sides down to the horizon, but if we could dig a deep hole through the earth, coming out somewhere near New Zealand, and if we then looked through, we should see that there was another vault of stars beneath us. We stand on our comparatively little earth in what seems the centre of this great universe of stars all around. It is true we do not often see the stars in broad daylight, but they are there nevertheless. The blaze of sunlight makes them invisible. A good telescope will always show the stars, and even without a telescope they can sometimes be seen in daylight in rather an odd way. If you can obtain a glimpse of the blue sky on a fine day from the bottom of a coal pit, stars are often visible. The top of the shaft is, however, generally obstructed by the machinery for hoisting up the coal, but the stars may be seen occasionally through the tall chimney attached to a manufactory when an opportune disuse of the chimney permits of the observation being made (Fig. 24). The fact is that the long tube has the effect of completely screening from the eye the direct light of the sun. The eye thus becomes more sensitive, and the feeble light from the stars can make its impression, and produce vision. (59-60)

I do not know of any inspiration for Bloom's length of nearly one mile, but the idea of such a long shaft descending "from the surface towards the centre of the earth" does appear in one famous literary work. The Divine Comedy pictures the earth as holding land in the northern hemisphere and water in the southern, with Jerusalem in the former diametrically opposed to the purgatorial mountain in the latter. Along one half of this immense diameter lies a tunnel through which Virgil and Dante climb from the earth's center back to the surface in the final canto of the Inferno. Its length, according to Dante's own science, would be more than 3,000 miles, but he does not dwell on the impossibility of covering all this ground in the short time he gives his character. He merely shows himself arriving at a point close enough to the surface to glimpse the stars through a pinprick in the earth's crust:

we climbed up, he first and I behind him,
far enough to see, through a round opening,
a few of those fair things the heavens bear.
Then we came forth, to see again the stars.  (34.136-39)

As Joyce surely knew, Ball's fancy of a tube bored from Britain to New Zealand finds a remarkably close analogue in Dante's plumb line from Jerusalem to Purgatory, and both writers imagine gazing from such a tube through a round aperture (un pertugio tondo). Readers who feel inclined to dismiss the correspondences as merely coincidental should consider what happens immediately before this in Ithaca. Just as Virgil leads Dante out of the darkness of Hell via a tunnel, "he first and I behind him," Bloom leads Stephen out of the darkened "house of bondage" on Eccles Street into his back yard via a hallway and a "door of egress": "first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden." Dante passes from the darkness of Hell to the starlit surface of the earth where he and Virgil behold "those fair things the heavens bear." Bloom and Stephen––"doubly dark," because both are dressed in black––go out into the shadowy garden to behold "The heaventree of stars."

These echoes of Dante are quite precise (though no one has ever noticed them until now), and they are reinforced by others. As the two men exit the house Stephen chants the first verse of Vulgate Psalm 113 (114 in other versions of the Bible) in modus peregrinus––details that evoke the beginning of Purgatorio as Dante puts the "house of bondage" behind him and begins the next phase of his journey. "Heaventree" loosely suggests the celestial architecture through which Dante ascends to God in Paradiso. Three paragraphs after this word, Bloom's fancy of human beings living on the seven planets of the solar system much more exactly echoes the seven spheres of the solar system (the first of nine celestial spheres) in that poem. Joyce's dense clustering of Dantean allusions in this part of Ithaca suggests a deliberate and intricate intertextual design.