REPORT ON JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

EPISODE 15--CIRCE (429-609)

"Circe" has the structure of a written play complete with extensive narrative stage directions "of lbsenian amplitude, not Shakespearean sparseness" (Kenner, Ulysses 123). The play moves between a naturalistic description of events and simultaneous hallucinatory fantasies from the minds of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. The imagery of the play, both the naturalistic and hallucinatory events, is bestial; the characters are carnival grotesques.

It is midnight and the drinking party which moved from the hospital to Burke's public-house at the end of the "Oxen of the Sun" episode has now adjourned to Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Stephen has been abandoned by all of his friends but Lynch. Bloom is tailing him somewhat incompetently from a distance, and they enter Nighttown by train on Mabbot Street. Stephen, drunk on alcohol and absinthe, proclaims "gesture, not music not odours, would be a universal language" (Joyce 432). Regardless of Stephen's drunken and drugged musings, it is theatrical gesture indeed that will be the language of "Circe." Moreover, foreshadowing the content of the coming hallucinations, Stephen comments on the "shrewridden Shakespeare," "henpecked Socrates," and Aristotle, "the allwisest stagyrite . . . bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love" (432).

Having momentarily lost his quarry and suffering from "brainfogfag" (43 6), Bloom compulsively enters a pork butcher's shop in Nighttown and purchases innards, which he will later feed to a stray dog. Bloom's first hallucination is of a "Gaelic league spy" (436), an agent of the Citizen from Barney Kiernan's. He then encounters the ghost of his father as an exaggerated Jew, "an elder in Zion" (437), who scolds him for being a spendthrift. He is then haunted by a succession of women: his mother, his wife, and the most recent object of his lust--Gerty MacDowell. Throughout these encounters, we hear the real voice of the Bawd, hawking maidenheads in a Dublin fleshpot.

Next he recalls his earlier encounter with Mrs. Breen, yet his memory of the event dissolves into a fantasy of flirtation and then accusation. As he wanders Nighttown he wonders if his search for Stephen is a "Wildgoose chase" (452). In this moment of apprehension and uncertainty he is accosted in an hallucination by two policeman. After failing to evade them with lies, cliched excuses, and intimations of Masonic power, Bloom is made to stand in a show trial for sexual indiscretions and social pretensions, most of which he is only guilty of in thought.

Again, the play returns to reality with the whore Zoe informing Bloom that Stephen is inside Bella Cohen's brothel. Zoe relieves him of his talismanic potato, and he becomes lost in fantasies of popular acclaim. His increasingly absurd daydreams have him as the "world's greatest reformer" (48 1), "emperor, president and king chairman" (482), and a "hero god" (492). He is the munificent ruler of "the new Bloomusalem" (484). However, Bloom just as absurdly plummets from these lofty heights by abasing himself as hypocrite and masturbator. But he reclaims the sympathy of the people by giving birth to eight male children, all "handsome . . . respectably dressed and wellconducted" (494) and presumably messianic. It is the voice of Zoe which once more returns Bloom to reality.

The Homeric analogue of "Circe" is taken from Book X of Tlle Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his crew arrive on the island of the enchantress Kirke, a witch who turns men into beasts. Odysseus remains with his ship and sends a party of men under Eurylokhos to explore the island. All of the party except skeptical Eurylokhos are lured into the hall of Kirke where they are seated on thrones, fed a feast, and given wine laced with a drug "to make them lose desire or thought of [their] dear father land" (Homer 172). After they are drugged, the witch turns them into swine, "though their minds were still unchanged" (I 72). Odysseus approaches the hall after Eurylokhos escapes and reports to him. On the way Hermes meets Odysseus and bestows a talismanic root that will protect him from Kirke's drug. Hermes further instructs Odysseus that he must not decline her bed and that he must force her to swear not to trick him or else he will "be unmanned by her as well" (I 74). Odysseus does exactly as the god had instructed him and evades the enchantress' traps. He further appeals to her compassion to return to human form those of his men she has already sent to the sty. Robert Fitzgerald translates the subsequent Homeric catharsis:

Leopold Bloom too emerges from his dehumanizing scene with Bello, where he is ridden like a horse and threatened with being eaten "like a suckling pig" (Joyce 533), strangely stronger and bolder as he goes on to confront the whoremistress in her den and later Privates Compton and Carr in their street. Bello's earlier Circean claim that Bloom has been "unmanned" (535) is shown to be fallacious.

Other parallels with The Odyssey include Bloom's beloved potato, obviously analogous to the root plant amulet given by Hermes to Odysseus. The feral but gentle "wolfdog . . . with begging paws" (453), which Bloom feeds, recalls the wolves outside Kirke's hall which would not attack but only wag "their long tails . . . like hounds, who look up when their master comes with tidbits for them" (Homer 17 1). Finally, it is in "Circe" that Odysseus/Bloom reunites with Telemachus/Stephen for the return to Ithaca.

The "Circe" play, especially the ghost scene with Stephen and his mother, parallels or more accurately twists Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet the mad prince is haunted by the ghost of his father and the knowledge of his mother's complicity in the dead king's murder. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus the mad poet is haunted by the ghost of his mother and his guilt over his own possible complicity in her death. In Hamlet, the prince tries to convince his mother that the ghost of his father is in the bedroom with them. Hamlet tells the Queen, "look you how pale he glares!" (Shakespeare 1168). In a playful echo, Florry the whore points to the ghost-enthralled Stephen and says, "Look! He's white" (Joyce 581). In Shakespeare's play, Hamlet exhorts his very much alive mother to "Repent what's past, avoid what is to come" (Shakespeare II 69); while in Joyce's play it is the ghost-mother who exhorts the melancholy Irishman to "Repent! 0, the fire of hell!" (Joyce 581). Shakespeare even appears as a character in "Circe" to garble his lines from Hamlet: "Weda seca whokilla farst" (568).

Joyce apparently found Homer and William Shakespeare insufficient as sources and was compelled to mine yet another touchstone of the Western Canon: the Bible. In "Circe" the biblical parallels are numerous and strong, especially the imagery of death and resurrection. Bloom rises from the hangman Rumbold's grip as a savior to establish "the new Bloomusalem" (484). Elijah appears to prophesy "Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ" (507). And in the strongest death and resurrection imagery Stephen, betrayed by "Judas" (600) Lynch, carries his ashplant-cross through the crowd to be crucified by the legionnaires of English occupation. In opposition to the Christ imagery of Stephen a black mass replete with black candles

and an "epistle of horns" (599), is performed as a priest in "reversed chasuble . . . celebrates camp mass" (599) over the naked, pregnant body of Mina Purefoy, "goddess of unreason" (599).