The reading stopped at "After him!" (15.4259)
Summary:
We feel on these pages quite bewildered at first, till we realize that the various happenings we see here are really echoes of earlier episodes. Not only do we meet many characters we had met earlier (and whom we do not expect to meet in the brothel) - Simon Daedalus (episode 5), Mr Deasy (episode 2), Maginni, the dance teacher (episode 10), Professor Goodwin, the piano teacher (episode 4), Buck Mulligan and finally Stephen's dead mother (episode 1) - but we also witness bracelets and hours of the day acquiring voices, and we encounter, in the brothel, scenes of fox hunting as well as horse racing! It looks as if Stephen is also hallucinating just as Bloom did earlier.
When Zoe asks Stephen to give them some parleyvoo, he starts off in great style, talking supposedly like how a Frenchman talks in English, when out of the blue he says, “I dreamt of a watermelon.” This is an echo of episode 3, in which Stephen on the Sandymount strand thinks of a dream he dreamt the previous night. According to Gifford*, melons are also the fruits the children of Israel long for in their wanderings.
The atmosphere turns gay with Professor Goodwin playing the piano, and dance steps being called out by the dance teacher, Professor Maginni to the song, My girl is a Yorkshire girl. Stephen, who starts to dance with Zoe, Florry is admonished by his father to think of his mother's people.
The word, mother, is the cue to what follows. Stephen's mother is dead. So naturally, he, while dancing, thinks of the dance of death. Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor like a ghost. We are back on top of the Martello tower (episode 1). With Buck Mulligan. Now in a jester’s dress of puce and yellow. And instead of bearing a bowl of lather, he is carrying a smoking buttered split scone. Stephen is still smarting at Mulligan's saying, "She’s beastly dead." He is also full of remorse at not having fulfilled his mother’s wish for prayer at her deathbed. His mother’s ghost does not make it easier for him and asks him to repent. He does not. He will not serve, and says, "Non serviam!"
