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Molly, with this heightened corporal awareness, knows “by his appetite” that Bloom “came somewhere”-that is, she taps into a far more immanent (and correct) vein of truth than his circumspection and parallax ever reveal (18.34-5). From the first, the reader sees Molly’s wholehearted embrace of physicality pitched against Bloom’s more complicated, sometimes fearful relation to the body. This request for breakfast launches Molly on an equivocal tally of Bloom’s habits, the civic hospitality she “likes in him” paired with the contemptuous detail that “if his nose bleeds youd think it was…” (18.16, 24). “Penelope” opens with a characteristic denial of the confines of its physical setting, implicating immediately multiple past epochs and spaces: Bloom has “never a thing like that before as ask…since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending…” (18.1-3). The episode is in no small way a rebuke to the ambitions of “Ithaca’s” catechism (impersonal) style, frequently revising insights it records as fact and, with palpable humanity, finally giving a voice to the novel’s most conspicuously mute and absent character, Molly Bloom. Yet at its heels comes “Penelope.” The episode famously lacks punctuation it substitutes instead eight massive ‘sentences, ’ a transcription of Molly’s thoughts as Bloom climbs into the sheets and asks her to serve him breakfast in bed. With its mannered dialectical mode, “Ithaca” can be read as a self-conscious attempt to explain, or rationalize, ‘universal’ themes such as the differences and similarities of perception, the cosmos, water, and adultery.