Bloom’s comments to himself on the impropriety of wearing a summer suit to Dignam’s funeral echoes Stephen’s thought about the inappropriateness of wearing a gray suit in Telemachus (or his unwillingness to do so). The sight of the bread van prompts a further comment about warmth: hot loaves and turnovers. The narrator’s observation of Boland’s bread van shows how the narrator and Bloom often push up against each other: doesn’t it seem like they’re mixing into each other a bit in that central text box?

There’s a little bit of mixing between the Dublin street scene and an Eastern landscape too, in the bottom half of the page. We’re starting to slip into a fantasy of the Orient, reminiscent of both Molly’s origins in Gibraltar and Bloom’s imagined and cultural background as a Jew. Rob uses a profile shot of Bloom here and on the next page, similar to profile shots used at the Martello tower as Stephen looks out over the sea in Telemachus.

We could say that if the top of the page is the cardinal direction north, then Bloom really is facing east. The word “east” comes from a Germanic word meaning “dawn,” which recalls our title card and time of day; but it also draws us into Bloom’s fantasy of the East, continued on the next page–kind of neat his face is turned in the direction of that next page, too.

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We’ll take a closer look at the visual inspirations for these images on the next page, but this is not the only source Joyce draws upon. Some of Bloom’s imaginings here come from the pantomime, a 19th-early 20th century form of popular theater–specifically, Turko the Terrible, first done at the Gaiety Theatre in 1873. You may recall that this panto forms part of Stephen’s memory of his mother in Telemachus. Tidbits and trivia from popular theater and music-hall show up quite a lot in Joyce (here and in Finnegans Wake, too). Turko the Terrible is a bit of popular culture so much a part of the fabric of Dublin life at the time that it emerges in the memories of two very different men at very different times in their lives. What’s interesting too is that for Stephen, it is part of his memory of his mother; for Bloom, the pantomime, and all the other pop culture flotsam and jetsam, like songs and postcards and pornography, is entirely transformed by his imagination. We could say the same about Joyce, too.

We also have here another mention of Molly’s father’s name, Tweedy, who melds into the figure of Turko the Terrible. It strikes me that Bloom has thought of his wife’s father’s name before he has said her name to himself; we’re on page 11, and he still has not thought the word “Molly.”

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Bloom’s exotic imaginings (and Rob’s drawings) come from Victorian Orientalist paintings, postcards, and travel narratives.  The British artist Frederick Goodall and the French artist Jean-Leon Gerome, both Academic painters, were major influences here.  Their idealized depictions of slave markets, casbahs, and Arabs of varied assortments were part of a school of art influenced by academies, the Royal Academy in the case of Goodall and the Academie des Beaux-Arts in the case of Gerome.  These painters sought to depict allegorical or historical scenes as ideals, rather than through mimetic representation; these were considered the most suitable themes for art.  In the hierarchy of Academic painting, history paintings were at the top, then portrait, still life, and landscape.  By the time Bloom is consuming visual culture at the turn of the century, these works were the stuff of postcards, bordering on kitsch.

The joke doesn’t stop there:  Bloom’s Oriental garb is the same color as Buck Mulligan’s bathrobe.

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This is the first page where we see Molly’s name uttered in Bloom’s interior monologue; it is also the first time in Joyce’s actual text. I think this is important for a couple of reasons. First, I think it’s significant that Bloom’s first mental “mention” of his wife’s name occurs during an exotic fantasy and in conjunction with her underwear. It makes her seem kind of mysterious and sexy (she goes out and buys herself new purple garters–ah, but for whom?). Joyce was kind of obsessed with his wife Nora Barnacle’s underwear, too. Nora is considered by some to be a model for Molly, and underwear shows up throughout Joyce’s letters. It is, frankly, a bit of a fetish. For example, during a difficult period in their relationship (Joyce–probably mistakenly–believed Nora had been unfaithful, an incident I believe was really critical for the writing of Ulysses), Joyce wrote from Ireland to Nora in Trieste that he wished she wouldn’t leave her underwear lying around for others to see, that he preferred that she keep her intimates intimate, for his eyes only.

There’s another female image here, too: Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated points out that Bloom’s thoughts about the girl playing the dulcimer, and the quote “In the track of the sun,” comes from a book called In the Track of the Sun: Diary of a Globe Trotter, published by Frederick Diodati Thompson in 1893. It is a travel narrative of the Near and Far East, and Bloom has it in his library. The dulcimer also echoes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fantastical poem “Kubla Khan”: “A damsel with a dulcimer/In a vision once I saw:/It was an Abyssinian maid,/And on her dulcimer she played,/Singing of Mount Abora.”

But by the bottom panel, Bloom has emerged from this world. His final comment is pretty ironic: he’s noting that there’s a rather big gap between the real world and what you get in books. Ultimately, Bloom has a clear-eyed view of the world, and he lives in a pretty mundane place.

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Our narrator is back, breaking through Bloom’s reverie and thought balloons with its black-bordered box. It gives us a helpful reminder of place: we are reaching the end of Eccles Street and about to round the corner where Larry O’Rourke’s grocery is. Bloom decides not to bug him about buying an ad for the Freeman’s Journal.

This is probably a good moment for the narrator to jump in, because we are shifting away from internal Bloom to external Bloom. This is the Bloom who feels himself being watched, and watches himself interacting with people, “prepar[ing] a face to meet the faces that you meet,” to quote T. S. Eliot’s 1917 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Rather than the unrestricted access to Bloom’s consciousness of the previous few pages, there feels like there might be a filter, and a fear of potential social awkwardness.

Bloom is always a little bit different; some of this has to do with his Jewish background, some of it has to do with people’s suspicions about his marriage, and some of it has to do with Bloom being, well, ordinary but not quite. “There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom,” as one character will say in a later episode. Here Bloom thinks about mentioning Paddy Dignam’s funeral later in the morning, and even imagines what he might say. What we’ll see on the next page is…

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