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A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand. Chapped: washing soda. And a pound and a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothes line. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack.

The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there like a stallfed heifer.40 Bloom's perception of the girl herself is very strikingly synecdochic— he sees her in terms of her chapped hands, vigorous hips, strong arms and skirt: parts standing for the whole. Also his thought proceeds by associating items that are contiguous rather than (as in the case of Stephen) similar. The girl is linked with her master (Woods), the master with the mistress, the age of the mistress with the youth of the girl, the youth of the girl with the jealousy and repressiveness of the mistress who forbids her to have male visitors. In the second paragraph we appear to have metaphor rather than metonymy:

ferreteyed, sausagepink, like a stallfed heifer. But is is significant how

heavily these similitudes depend upon contiguity and context. The physical juxtaposition of the butcher's fingers and the sausages he is

The comparison of the butcher to a stallfed heifer makes a substitution from the same vocabulary area of meat, butchery etc., and even ferret is associated with the killing of animals for human consumption. These are all, in fact, weakish metaphors or similes precisely because, in each case, the two terms of the figure, the tenor and the vehicle, are drawn from essentially the same context, not from 'different spheres of thought', in Ullmann's phrase,41 _{as are, for instance, the umbilical}

cord and the telephone cable in the passage just quoted from 'Proteus'. Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness is still more 'metonymic' than her husband's, inasmuch as she seldom makes any metaphorical connections between items. Such metaphors and similes as occur in her discourse are rarely coined by her, but are colloquial or proverbial cliches. She is very literalminded, pragmatic, down-to-earth. Bloom's speculative, whimsical thought is as far removed from hers as Stephen's complex, ironic and cultured intelligence is from Bloom's. Molly is always asking Bloom to explain words to her, but is dissatisfied with his answers because they refer the question of meaning to the system of language rather than to reality.

—Metempsychosis?

—Yes. Who's he when he's at home?

—Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Greek: from the Greek. That means the transmigration of souls.

—O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.42

This exchange in 'Calypso' is recalled in Molly's soliloquy at the end of the novel:

Arsenic she put in his tea off flypaper wasnt it I wonder why they call it that if I asked him he'd say its from the Greek leave us as wise as we were before43

She is correspondingly contemptuous of the prurient periphrases of the priest hearing her youthful confession of petting:

he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldn't he say bottom right out and have done with it44

'Bottom', as Stuart Gilbert has pointed out, is one of the keywords of the 'Penelope' episode, which mark transitions in Molly's conscious- ness from one train of thought to another.

The movements of Molly Bloom's thoughts in this episode appear, at first sight, capricious and subject to no law. But a close examination shows that there are certain words which, whenever they recur, seem to shift the trend of her musings, and might be called the 'wobbling points' of her monologue. Such words are 'woman', 'bottom', 'he', 'men'; after each of these there is a divigation in her thoughts, which, as a general rule, revolve about herself.45

Gilbert ingeniously compares this process to the movement of the earth through space. Molly (an Earth-mother figure) revolves on her

James Joyce 143 own egocentric axis, but is subject to other forces in the planetary system to which she belongs. Another way of putting it would be to compare Molly's monologue to a long-playing gramophone record to which we, as readers, are listening, each track or band of which is concerned with a particular phase of her life and usually with a particular man. There is the track about the young Leopold and his courtship of her, the track about their married life, the track about her youth in Gibraltar and her lover Lieutenant Gardiner, and the more recently recorded tracks concerning her sexual encounter with Blazes Boylan the previous afternoon and Leopold's behaviour since returning to the house with Stephen in the early hours of the morning. The stylus or pick-up arm of Molly's consciousness, as she lies half- awake in bed, does not follow these tracks in chronological order, but jumps backwards and forwards across the surface of the disc. It will be following one track and then provoked by some psychic vibration (usually marked by one of the key words) suddenly 'skate' across to settle in the grooves of another track. When we first tune into her thoughts she is thinking about Bloom's behaviour on coming to bed, asking to have his breakfast in bed the next morning:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs

As becomes clear later, Molly suspects that Leopold has had some sexual encounter during the day which has given him an appetite (hence the 'Yes because') but the image of Bloom having breakfast in bed jogs the pick-up and sends it skipping back to an episode much earlier in their married life:

since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually

The transition of thought here from the present to the past is triggered by a perceived similarity between Bloom having breakfast in bed the next morning and Bloom having breakfast in bed in the past, but this is not a metaphorical kind of similarity. The two events belong to the same order of reality, the married life of the Blooms; one occasion on which Bloom orders breakfast in bed reminds Molly of another. That is in fact all the events have in common, since the earlier breakfast in bed had nothing to do with sexuality at all. Molly's 'because' in the first line of her monologue is therefore characteristically lacking in any real logical force. Her memory plays over Mrs Riordan's character, but always egocentrically:

she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope I'll never be like her a wonder she didn't want us to cover our faces but she was a well educated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to old women like that46

The recollection of Bloom 'pretending to be laid up with a sick voice'