We will never learn whether the Bloom family will end up with a crisis involving an unmarried 15-year-old daughter pregnant with a man who is off in the foreign service somewhere, and we can only hope this is not the outcome of the day.
15. Circe
The next chapter is the “Circe” episode, arguably the most dramatic one in Ulysses—not only thematically, but also stylistically, since it adopts the conventions of written drama, with characters presented as speakers, their actions as stage directions, and their words as dramatic dialogue.
The episode takes place in the red-light district of Dublin called “Nighttown” in Ulysses, at the brothel of a Mrs. Cohen on Tyrone Street. Bloom has at first lost sight of Stephen and Lynch, but soon finds and enters the brothel they are visiting. But even before this, he becomes engulfed in dramatic and unrealistic fantasies that will continue in wilder and raunchier form throughout the chapter.
In a sense, the Odyssean analogue for “Circe” predicts this. Odysseus and his men have landed on the island of a sorceress with the magical power to turn men into swine. This is the fate of Odysseus’s men, who precede him to Circe’s palace. Fortunately, on his way there Odysseus himself receives a magic herb called “moly” from Hermes. It allows him to repel Circe’s magic and force her to turn his transformed crew back into men again, allowing them all to leave her island unscathed eventually.
Bloom is invited into Bella Cohen’s brothel by an English prostitute named Zoe Higgins, and he finds Stephen and Lynch there engaged in verbal play with two women named Kitty and Florry. Bloom’s first brothel fantasy acts out political dreams he might have had for himself of being an Irish hero. “My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn,” he tells an adoring audience, “I, Bloom, tell you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future” (395). However, this brilliant success soon takes a downward turn, as it historically did for Charles Stewart Parnell, with a mob yelling, “Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was” (402).
In the real world of the brothel, Bloom seems to have been prating on about something, until Zoe puts an end to it by saying, “Talk away till you’re black in the face” (407). Nonetheless, more fantasies ensue and they begin to take an erotic turn with the appearance of Bloom’s grandfather, Lipoti Virag, who notes immediately that “Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence hereabouts, eh?” (417). This sets the stage for the eventual appearance of the Madam—“Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters” (429) the stage directions tell us—who gestures to Bloom with her fan that she needs to have her bootlace tied. Once Bloom is on his knees to perform this task, it is not long before his masochistic fantasies turn the Madam into a masculinized dominatrix named “Bello,” and Bloom himself into her cringing victim, bullied and degraded, who eventually confesses “O I have been a perfect pig” (449), turned into Circe’s swine. The fantasy runs its course and Bloom emerges from it with his usual sobriety and good sense when Bella Cohen demands payment from the clients and appears to overcharge Stephen, something Bloom corrects. “You had better hand over that cash to me to take care of” (456), Bloom tells Stephen as he returns his money, now back in his paternal role.
Bloom’s fantasies resume, however, and although they continue to cast him into a masochistic role as a liveried servant in his own home, the topic now becomes decidedly painful as he is obliged to usher his rival Boylan in to see his own wife. “Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom dressed yet?” Boylan shouts as he jumps from his car and the servile Bloom replies, “Yes, sir. Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir” (461). Boylan generously offers to let him watch, “You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times” (462), and Bloom appears to do so with “eyes wildly dilated.”
Although Bloom has fretted about Boylan’s afternoon visit to Molly all day, this fantasy represents his first visualization of the affair, a confrontation—even if unconscious—that may actually have a perverse therapeutic effect and make him realize he needs to do something to get his relationship with Molly back on track. Bloom is not the only one to experience fantasies here, however, for soon Stephen’s begin as well. The party turns playful and festive when Zoe drops some coins into the pianola, and encourages everyone to dance to the tune of “My girl’s a Yorkshire girl” (471).
But for Stephen the dance soon becomes a “Dance of death,” and death conjures up his mother, whose appearance causes Stephen, “choking in fright, remorse, and horror,” to cry out: “They say I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny” (474). The Mother urges him to “Repent, Stephen,” and begins to frighten him when she approaches him with “smouldering eyes,” until he can no longer bear it. He turns on her, shouting, “Non serviam,” then smashes the salon’s chandelier with his walking stick.
The party has come to an end, Stephen runs out, and Bella Cohen furiously demands an excessive payment for the broken lamp. Bloom pays only what he thinks is owed, and runs out to catch up with Stephen, who has entered into an altercation with two British soldiers. Bloom tries to intervene and get Stephen to leave: “Come along with me now before worse happens. Here’s your stick” (490), but Private Carr punches Stephen in the face and knocks him out. The police arrive and Bloom worries that Stephen may be arrested, but a fellow he knows who has just arrived intervenes and gets the officers to back off. Stephen gradually becomes conscious again and then goes back to sleep. As Bloom wistfully looks at him, he suddenly has a vision of his own son as he might be now, “a fairy boy of eleven,” holding a book in his hand and reading it, as if it were in Hebrew “”from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the page,” causing Bloom to say his name, “Rudy!” (497).
Book III
16. Eumaeus
Book II comes to an end with this dramatic ending of “Circe,” and Book III commences, with the surprisingly uneventful and stylistically simple episode called “Eumaeus.”
Bloom has helped the now conscious but unsteady Stephen to his feet, and hearing him ask for something to drink takes him to a cabman’s shelter for a cup of coffee. On the way there they run into a fellow named Corley, familiar to readers of Dubliners, and known to Stephen, if not to Bloom. Corley is apparently just as penniless as he was then, and tries to borrow money from Stephen and get advice on possible jobs.
The chapter, with its early reference to Bloom as a good “Samaritan” (501) and allusions to the poverty-stricken members of society aided by the Salvation Army’s charity, is focused on a neglected and forgotten part of the social world. The Odyssean reference for this episode relates Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, where he is obliged to disguise himself and take refuge with Eumaeus, a swineherd who once worked for him, and who treats him kindly. After Odysseus reveals himself to Eumaeus, they are joined by Telemachus, who does not recognize his father until he reveals himself, and together they plan a strategy for reclaiming the palace.
The analogies between the Joycean and Homeric versions are a bit sketchier than they are in other chapters, but the basic element is there: Bloom, discovering that Stephen will not return to the Martello tower or to his father’s home, offers to take him back to his own home on Eccles Street. The “reunion” of the modern day “father” and “son” is not particularly uplifting in this episode. Bloom tries to ply Stephen with good advice, suggesting one can live well if “you work,” to which Stephen replies “Count me out” (526). Bloom points out that he means work in the widest sense, including literary work, or writing for a newspaper, for example. “You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has,” Bloom tells him, since both writer and peasant, brain and brawn, belong to Ireland. Stephen rudely dismisses this notion, saying “We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject” (527).
Fatherhood is not an easy task, this portion of the episode makes clear. Nonetheless,
his engagement with Stephen in the cabman’s shelter lets Bloom confide his views, arguably more successfully than at others times in his day. He tells Stephen of the citizen’s anti-Semitic attack on him, reporting with some pride his retort, “So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too.” “Am I not right?” (525). Although Stephen’s response concurs, it is made in a style Bloom may not grasp immediately, since it is offered in words from the Latin Vulgate: “Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent,” followed by the words Christus secundum carnem. Don Gifford and Robert Seidman translate this as “and from that race [the Israelites] is Christ” in their note in ‘Ulysses’ Annotated (549). Stephen could just have said “Yes” rather than showing off his erudition. Conversation between Bloom and Stephen is not easy in this chapter.
Joyce appears to pursue a number of agendas in this episode. The most prominent, as I have noted, is that surrogate fatherhood does not start out as a sentimentally satisfying experience for Bloom. And Stephen, who might appear an excellent candidate as an intelligent surrogate son, is not in the best spirits or on his most courteous or engaging behavior after his tumultuous and stressful day.
But the episode also allows for the introduction of a slew of complicated lower-class characters, including the jobless Corley, the intriguing sailor D.B. Murphy—who may or may not be who he says he is—and the mysterious keeper of the establishment, who may or may not be Skin-the-Goat, the driver of a decoy car in the Phoenix Park murders incident of 1882. Even Bloom’s identity becomes muddled when he is listed in the evening newspaper’s obituary of Paddy Dignam’s funeral as the attendee named “L. Boom” (529). The most woeful of the poor figures on the scene, who is not even permitted to enter the cabman’s shelter, is a haggard streetwalker in a black straw hat, presumably a former prostitute evicted from her brothel on account of syphilis, who is now homeless and who tries to survive by begging people to let her do their washing.
This world represents the social underside of society that persons like Bloom and Stephen encounter only on the margins of their experience, on a night like this. In addition to this social expansion, Joyce also continues his stylistic experiment in this chapter in a form that Terence Killeen considers “the most extraordinary” in Ulysses, even though it is prosaic and conspicuously ordinary. The events are recounted by a narrator who draws attention to the fact that he is telling his story by correcting some false information he may have given his reader or listener about some distant ancestral relative of Corley’s (504) and thereby also makes us self-conscious about our role as listeners to his account. His language is peppered with qualifications of what he tells us, as when he adds “not to put too fine a point on it” (502) to a statement, or “[t]hough this sort of thing went on every other night or very near it” (505) to add perspective to an event. He does not mind characterizing the people he talks about, saying of “Murphy:” “Whilst speaking he produced a dangerouslooking claspknife quite in keeping with his character and held it in the striking position” (514), and even giving the supposed sailor a nickname, “Shipahoy of course had his own say to say” (521). And he makes it difficult for us to decide whether he is clever or not at all clever, as when he characterizes Bloom as throwing “a nasty sidelight on that side of a person’s character, no pun intended.”
Terence Killeen reverses often held views that this narrative voice is as tired as Stephen and Bloom after their long day, by arguing that the style is “in fact, extremely active, indeed tireless” (205).
17. Ithaca
The stylistic change that marks the next chapter, “Ithaca,” is as dramatic as the one we previously encountered in “Aeolus,” because the text is immediately distinguished by being written in a question and answer format. “What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?” (544), the first voice asks and answers, and then goes on to pose a long string of questions and answers until the end of the episode.
The traditional model for such a textual question and answer design is, of course, the Catholic catechism, which traditionally relies on this format for presenting the church’s doctrines to children and adult converts so that they can memorize the correct responses. In this form, the Catechism presents itself as indisputably true and immune to questioning. In this respect, Joyce turns the “Ithaca” catechism upside down, by making its responses problematic in multiple ways—sometimes vague, sometimes irrelevant, sometimes inaccurate and marked by critical omissions, and therefore designed to evoke just those doubts and disputes that the Catechism is designed to block.
Relating this stylistic complexity to the Homeric parallel is therefore also challenging. Understanding that Stephen has no place to go, Bloom takes him from the cabman’s shelter to his home at 7 Eccles Street, where he lets himself in by lowering himself and jumping from the inside of the fence by the front steps into the lower area that leads into the kitchen. This is necessary because Bloom left his house key in his other pants when he donned a black outfit for the impending funeral visit that morning.
Bloom and Stephen appear to have had friendlier discussions on the way to Bloom’s house. After preparing and offering Stephen some hot cocoa, the two men continue to develop an amiable conversation that becomes quite jolly until it hits a surprising and disconcerting snag during an initially playful moment when they exchange songs related to each man’s race or ethnicity. Bloom sings the Zionist national anthem. Stephen responds by singing a horrible anti-Semitic ballad about a little boy named Harry Hughes who accidentally breaks the window of the home of a Jew, whose daughter invites Harry into the house and cuts off his head.
Joyce clearly wanted readers to pay attention to the ballad because it is printed both in italics and as a musical score with the lyrics written in Joyce’s own handwriting (566-7). We desperately need the Catechism at this point to explain to us why Stephen would sing such a song to a Jewish man. However, the answers fail miserably, telling us only that the ballad made Bloom, “the father of Millicent,” very sad, but giving us a troublingly unclear summary of Stephen’s commentary on the ballad. He appears to treat the victim in the ballad as possibly having courted his fate, “It leads him to a strange habitation, to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him, consenting” (567). Is Stephen referring to himself here, as a consenting victim of the man who saved him from having his money depleted by a greedy brothel madam and kept him from being arrested?
Critics inevitably struggle to come up with a reasonable interpretation, creating a variety of complex possibilities. Scholar Neil Davison, for instance, sees Stephen’s ballad as representing to him “his own victimization as a son, an outcast, and an Irishman,” thereby suggesting that Bloom in his Jewishness is in a similar situation. “Stephen feels he has escaped his own victimization, and seems to imply that Bloom should follow suit” (234). On the other hand, author Paul Schwaber suggests that “neither Stephen nor Leopold aimed to feel much during that strange moment, that their respective defenses against tumult—Stephen repressing and intellectualizing, Bloom obsessing and digressing—served each of them well just then” (189). I would argue that there is no simple explanation of the motive or justification of Stephen’s act and that of the ballad itself, and that leaving it mysterious may have been the point. Perhaps its function at a time when anti-Semitism was a not uncommon feature of modernist writing, was to urge readers to explore and deplore its possible causes and explanations and consider its possibly disastrous effects.
The chapter continues with a further surprise, as Bloom, the troublesome ballad notwithstanding, offers Stephen the chance to spend the night in a spare room in his home. Given what has just transpired, this is very kind, and yet Bloom’s offer of asylum is “[p]romptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully” declined by Stephen (570). This too is surprising since, given his situation, he has no place to go on this night. We know he had a row of some sort with Mulligan at the train station, and w
hen Bloom asked Stephen at the cabman’s shelter where his father lived, his response was “in Dublin somewhere” (507), implying that he may not even know his address.
Where Stephen spends the remainder of this night will remain one of the many unsolved mysteries in Ulysses. Bloom and Stephen part ways amicably after quietly urinating in the garden, and Bloom now goes back inside to get undressed and get into bed, where he kisses Molly’s bottom and thereby wakes her up, causing her to interrogate what he has been doing this evening until such a late hour. And so, lying on opposite sides of the bed, with Bloom’s head by Molly’s feet and vice versa, Bloom goes to sleep while Molly, wide awake, launches into the thoughts that comprise the last chapter of Ulysses.
So what does all of this have to do with the Odyssey? Homer ends his epic saga by having Odysseus, Telemachus, and Eumaeus return to his palace in Ithaca, where Penelope tests her possible suitors by requiring them to shoot an arrow through the holes of a series of arranged axe-handles, a feat she knows only her husband can successfully accomplish. The suitors inevitably fail while Odysseus succeeds, and the suitors are now at his mercy, Telemachus having locked the door to block their escape. The suitors are murdered, Odysseus fumigates the palace (Bloom lights an incense cone before going to the bedroom, 580), and prepares to join Penelope who, not sure of his identity as her husband, proposes to have the marriage bed moved outside the sleeping chamber on this night. Odysseus angrily tells her that this is impossible because he built the bed himself and it is constructed out of a living olive tree and cannot be moved. His revelation of this secret convinces Penelope that Odysseus is indeed her husband, and the couple is now reunited.
In Ulysses the slaying of the suitors takes place in Bloom’s head, in his possible willingness to understand his wife’s infidelity in the context of their marital difficulties, and his seemingly tacit decision not to accuse or reprove her for the events in their home on this day. The secret of the marriage bed appears to be the buried knowledge in each member of the couple that their sexual problems are rooted not in any dislike they have for each other, or in a lack of sexual attraction, but in the tragedy of losing a son. This shared understanding promises to pave the way to a possible forgiveness and reconciliation.
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