The reading stopped at ". . . drake and duck." (14.712)
Summary:
By now we realise that this episode takes place simultaneously in two time frames, one referring to the time of the day (it is 10 pm) and the other to the time frame of the history of literature.
Buck Mulligan, who has been attending a party at Mr Moore’s, is on his way to the maternity hospital to meet his friends, when he comes across Alec Bannon, who has come from Mullingar, where he had met Bloom's daughter, Milly. Mulligan knows Bannon as his (Mulligan's) brother is staying with the Bannons. Both Mulligan and Bannon head to the hospital.
With the change in style imitating that of Daniel Defoe, the 18th century English writer, the topic changes to describing the behavior/character of Lenehan, who is interested in horse races, and who always has many stories to tell. Lenehan says that he has made sure that Mr. Deasy's letter on the foot and mouth disease, which Stephen had brought earlier, is in that night's gazette. On hearing that the cows are to be butchered, Bloom, who had once worked for Mr Joseph Cuffe, a cattle, corn and wool salesman, questions whether the cows indeed have the foot and mouth disease.
What follows is a play on the word “bull”. In the style of Jonathan Swift, the 18th century Anglo-Irish writer, the assembly talks in turn of a bull that's Irish, of an Irish bull in an English chinashop and of the papal bull. The word, bull, becomes just an excuse to discuss Irish history at length.
It is at this time that Mulligan appears with Bannon. Mulligan comes in again as a harbinger of fun, of lightheartedness. He announces that he plans to set up a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos (14.684) and to offer his services to the poorest kitchenwench no less than the opulent lady of fashion (14.689). Here Joyce is taking on the controversial topic of eugenics of which a chair had been established in the early 1900s at the London university.
Mulligan's description of the project entertains his audience, except for Mr. Dixon, who thinks that it is a useless exercise like carrying coals to Newcastle.
(Excerpted from Ulysses for the Uninitiated)
