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238

E

UR

A

MERICA

Kiernan’s, where Bloom is conversing with them in the

meantime. Before he squanders the “[s]weat of [his] brow”

(244), we observe him working in “Hades”: he attends

Dignam’s funeral and takes the names of the mourners. The

account of the funeral published in the

Evening Telegraph

that

Bloom reads in “Eumaeus” is shot through with errors:

Bloom’s name is stated as L. Boom, the name of the person in a

mackintosh is jotted down as M’Intosh, and M’Coy and

Stephen, who never showed up to the obsequies, are curiously

listed among the mourners (529). “L. Boom” could be a

misprint, an error not imputable to the reporter, and M’Coy

was said to be present because Bloom, at the absentee’s request,

asked Hynes to include the name; nevertheless, the mistakes

about the mysterious M’Intosh and Stephen could simply be

ascribed to carelessness or indifference. Hynes may be as clever

with the pen as O’Connor claims, yet he can hardly be called a

qualified or committed journalist: he works for a living, not

because he feels called to the vocation. Hynes may be more

politically consistent than many Dubliners; as Joyce’s depiction

reveals, however, he is as inadequate as the other journalists.

Despite Hynes’s problematic account of the funeral, he at

least does his work on 16 June 1904, yet we hardly see

Lenehan work as a journalist.

11

A sports reporter for the

Freeman

-affiliated

Sport

, Lenehan also makes his first

appearance in

Dubliners

, where he is portrayed as an idling,

unashamed, and inveterate sponger:

Most people considered Lenehan a leech . . . He

was a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of

stories, limericks and riddles. He was insensitive to

all kinds of discourtesy. No one knew how he

11

Joyce borrows the name from a reporter on the

Irish Times

and the

personality from a friend of his father who worked for the racing paper,

Sport

. For the sponger who inspires Joyce’s creation of his character, see

Ellmann (1982: 365-366).