JOYCE'S ULYSSES FOR EVERYONE

The fourth chapter takes place at his home at 7 Eccles St. (50, 192), where Bloom prepares liver for himself for breakfast after purchasing it at a nearby butcher shop (and ogling the ample hips of a female customer, 48f.), meanwhile engaging in his usual routine of waiting on the cat at his feet and on Molly, who is upstairs lolling around in bed with the mail.  Bloom reads a letter from their daughter Milly which cheers him (54).  When he brings Molly her tea and toast, he notices an opened letter and she informs him that her promoter Blazes Boylan is coming by that afternoon to plan her next singing tour (52).  Bloom realizes they will begin a sexual relation then -- "Will happen, yes.  Prevent. Useless:  can't move. [...]  He felt the flowing qualm spread over him." (55)  His wife is taking a lover for the first time on this day, and thus we have the second plot, infidelity, that staple of every sentimental 19th Century woman's novel and every 20th Century soap opera.  Why is it happening?  What can Bloom do about it?  What will he do?

Pay close attention to Molly's dialogue in this chapter.  It is the only time in the entire novel we see her through a reliable omniscient narrator's eyes.  The remaining conversation between her and Bloom is unrecorded for us readers, and even that fact itself is not made explicit until the final chapter, Molly's soliloquy in "Bed," (in, for example, her recollection of Bloom saying, "im dining out and going to the Gaiety" 610; see also 600, 605, 618, etc., for other snatches of their morning talk).  We do receive occasional information about what was said as we go along, for example, when Bloom remembers the assignation is at 4:00 (214).  And there are frequent mentions of the anguish it causes him, as well as portrayals of how he tries to handle that pain.  He also remembers details of the beginning of their romance.  But practically nothing of the causes of the impending infidelity or the motives of the three involved is given until toward the end.  And the question of what Bloom is going to do about it is also postponed until late in the novel.  We do get an intriguing glimpse into Molly's and Bloom's sex life when she asks him to get another soft-core porn book by Paul de Kock; "Nice name he has," she says (53).

The chapter ends with Bloom relieving himself in the outdoor privy, a scene which repulsed Virginia Woolf but delights me as I remember wondering as a child when fictional or cinematic characters did it.