Rob has done an amazing job here of playing out another of Joyce’s jokes, this one rather elaborate, about high and low culture and Joyce’s own identity as an author–as well as taking on the interesting artistic challenge of depicting someone taking a crap in comic book form.

The penny-weekly Tit-Bits would publish a “Prize Titbit” in each issue, and the author would get the payment quoted here; at one guinea a column, Bloom calculates a total payment of 3 pounds 13 shillings sixpence (now this would be worth about $367.50, a lot for a little sketch but almost as much as what Stephen makes as a teacher).  Again, as with “Bath of the Nymph,” art is cast entirely in commercial terms.

Furthermore, Gifford points out the following:  ”Matcham’s Masterstroke” is a reference to a story Joyce himself submitted to Tit-Bits as a teenager, for which he very much hoped to get paid.  Phillip Beaufoy was a real person who contributed to Tit-Bits, although like Paul de Kock, he was not the author of the actual piece referenced; his posh London address is somewhat at odds with the cheap publication he writes for.

But it’s that last thought bubble and the lower panel that adds another layer to the joke; unlike the “Prize Titbit,” Ulysses itself is monumental:  we hope it’s not too big.  Rob’s paralleling the narrator’s text boxes elaborating Bloom’s bowel movement point for point alongside Bloom’s thought bubbles on his reading illustrate beautifully Joyce’s playful attitude towards high and low culture.  Art and shit: it’s all the same.  And we don’t have to worry too much about what to do with Ulysses:  if we look at that last thought bubble and the final text box of the page on the lower right hand side, it seems the bigness and possible overwhelmingness isn’t the problem we thought it might be.

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Bloom continues his perusal of “Matcham’s Masterstroke”; the sentence he reads from the story is Joyce’s quotation from his own real-life submission for Tit-Bits (according to Gifford; if you want to read a dirty joke into the title of the sketch, be my guest).  Does the “Just right,” the “Neat certainly” refer to the story, or to what’s just fallen down the hole in the cuckstool?  Notice how Bloom uses this opportunity to perform a little amateur literary criticism, assessing the story the same way he assesses his bowel movement:  “Print anything now,” “Begins and ends morally,” “Smart.”

Suddenly writing for Tit-Bits doesn’t seem so hard, and Bloom begins thinking that he and Molly might collaborate on a sketch of their married life–perhaps a smaller, more manageable, “neater” version of Ulysses (without all the foreign languages, obscure references, and adultery).  Note he thinks of the two of them as Mr. and Mrs. L. Bloom, asserting their married state, in contrast to Boylan’s letter addressed to “Mrs. Marion Bloom.”  As he starts to tell a version of their story, he envisions Molly talking and dressing, the image and its thought bubbles taking on the yellow of the narrator’s text boxes as Bloom narrates his own life.  This page is a collage of storymaking:  the narrative of Bloom’s bowel movement, Bloom’s reading of the story in Tit-Bits, Bloom’s own stream of consciousness, and then Bloom’s composing his own sketch of his marriage in his head.

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This is the third time we have seen the tiled grid of images and associations–again, it’s a technique suited to those moments where Bloom is nostalgic, moving through a series of thoughts and pictures that take him someplace a little painful.  He remembers going to a dance with Molly, which turns into remembering that this was the first time she noticed Boylan.  This is not a story Bloom wants to tell.

The allusion to Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours comes from his opera called La Gioconda.  The plot involves the wife of the villain having a tryst with another man who turns out to be the hero (incidentally, Boylan will be referred to as “the conquering hero” in a later episode).  The villain tries to poison the wife in revenge, the wife in reality is only drugged and hidden, and then all resolves itself at the end (think The Winter’s Tale).  I hope by now you’re noticing that when Joyce refers to music, especially to opera, the rather convoluted plots involving seduction and mistaken identity usually echo what’s happening between Bloom and Molly:  this one, Don Giovanni, and another to come called Martha.

The Dance of the Hours, as Bloom points out in the lower left hand corner panel, is an elaborate ballet interpolated into La Gioconda, where different costumes represent the different times of day and their passing.  So Bloom’s imagined sketch becomes a much darker story of seduction and betrayal, and it also prefigures the passage of the day until he can come home; whether the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. L. Bloom will be righted remains to be seen.

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The music continues, and The Dance of the Hours parallels Molly’s looking in the mirror.  The passage of the time of day becomes the passage of her life, her getting older.  We have seen this motif elsewhere:  the milkwoman/crone in the desert, the shapeshifting of daughter into mother.  In the context of Bloom recalling Molly’s first encounter with Boylan, we wonder:  is this a way for Molly to feel young and attractive again?

We suggested that the O’Keeffe-like skull and flower in the desert earlier served as a kind of memento mori:  Molly’s mirror may be doing the same thing here, referring to a specific subgenre of the memento mori painting, the “vanitas” painting.  Mirrors are common symbols in such works of art, recalling the vanity of worldly possessions, the fleeting quality of time and beauty, and the inevitability of aging and death.

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Bloom wipes himself with the “prize story” and…so much for literary merit.  He checks his trousers, looks at the sky to figure the time.  The Dance of the Hours representing the passage of time with a “poetical idea” has become the practical question of getting to the funeral on time, itself a commemoration of passage.  Bloom has come out of the imagined world of his marriage, the smell of the outhouse, and prepares to begin his journey.  Like a wanderer might have done in the time of Odysseus himself, he looks at the sky for orientation.

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