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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Bloom thinks about the time and what the bells mean:  quarter to 9, an hour and fifteen minutes until the funeral.  His last thought is of Paddy Dignam, who is to be buried.

And so the episode ends the way it began:  with the bells of St. George’s, again, marking the passage of time and the shift from one episode, one hour, into another.

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THE KIDNEY!!

Bloom’s precious kidney is saved from imminent ruin.  He shoves the book in his pocket so he can return it to the lending library later and get Molly something new, and he stubs his toe on the chamberpot (which you can see on the floor on page 37).  The narrator describes Bloom digging in in a most poetical fashion, while Bloom recalls something from Milly’s letter that troubles him:  “a young student.”  This is Alec Bannon, whom we hear about briefly in Telemachus (he’s a friend of Buck Mulligan’s, so of course immediately suspect); Mulligan describes getting a card from Bannon where he talks about having met a “photo girl” in Mullingar.

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The narrator takes care of Bloom’s eating while he reads Milly’s letter more closely.

The carefree and girlish style, the slangy and informal teenage-girl-speak (“we did great biz,” “getting on swimming,” “on the pop”) gives us a whole new register, a new voice.  It prompts reflection on the part of her father on how she is getting older, and remembrance of her birth.

But the letter also brings Bloom’s dead son to mind:  Rudy, dead 11 years ago at the age of 11 days.  The midwife who brought Milly into the world also knew Rudy wouldn’t live–another female figure with connections to both life and death.

Milly never appears in person in the novel, and this letter, along with Bloom’s memories of her, are pretty much all we get of her.  It always sort of bothered me that Joyce people talk about Bloom’s father issues, his quest for a son in Stephen Dedalus, etc.:  does having a daughter make a man any less of a father?

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