I found that the dives into subconscious, within Circe enabled new ways to conceive of native and foreign and their implication and interaction. Though it has been clearly established by this point the degree to which Bloom has been paralyzed by his lack of definition according to this divide, and the abuse that he endures because of it, this is the first time that we are shown the degree to which Bloom, because of the trauma he has experienced, must now navigate that divide within his own mind. At least in the first part of Circe, we see from the degree and frequency with which he is rejected and/or treated as alien, monstrous, magical etc., even within the nightmarish imaginative realms where he finds himself that Bloom has come to appear even to himself as an outsider due to his unclassified status in native vs. foreign terms. Though the degree to which Bloom belongs within his hallucinations and thus feels at home within his mind shifts drastically in the episode, these shifts consistently reflect the severity of that trauma, and the difficulty in harnessing power from the complexity of his position, and in healing from his trauma without severing himself entirely from his reality that is charged by this divide.

More specifically, I was interested in mentions and descriptions of, as well as allusions to apocalypse within the episode, considering the prevalence representations of the apocalypse as being produced from a fundamental opposition between native and foreign elements (often masked as good vs. evil). Though Stephen eventually casts the final fight, after tensions have reached their peak, in apocalyptic terms (488), he does not do so until after both he and Bloom have recognized the absurdity of each of the three positions involved.

While there’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding sexuality and gender in terms of the scene in which Bello/a dominates a feminized Bloom, I’d like to focus on the use of animal imagery in that scene.

Most consistent is Bloom’s transformation into some kind of hog within this sequence. Bloom “sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at [Bello’s] feet”(15.2851-2852) after a shout of “Truffles!” in reference to the act of a hog rooting for truffles in the earth. Throughout the scene, Bloom squeals, bleats, and crawls under a table. Aside from the most obvious meaning of this animality as the ultimate form of subhuman subjugation, there also seems to be a reference here to the pig’s feet that Bloom carries in his pocket earlier in the episode, and even to the pork kidney that he eats in Episode 4. The reference is at the same time a nod to Bloom’s perceived lapse in Judaism – in not keeping Kosher – and to the “piggishness” of his unrestrained gustatory and, especially, sexual appetites.

Bello, however, is also given animal characteristics within this fantasy. Even before Bloom’s newfound piggishness is introduced, Bello’s foot is transformed into a “plump buskined hoof”(15.2810) which speaks to Bloom directly, and later he develops “purple gills”(15.2857). These references seem harder to pin down, given their vagueness of species, although they might be expressions more of a fleshly monstrosity than any particular animal. Despite this, however, it is only parts of Bello’s body that become inhuman in this way, as opposed to Bloom, who seems wholly transformed in shape and behavior.

While numbers play less of a role in Circe than in some parts of the book, there is nonetheless quite a bit to draw on, especially in the episode’s second half.

Throughout Circe, it is in statements about money that numbers are most frequently used. This is not much different from most of the previous chapters. Where it gets interesting is in the second half of Circe, when Bloom takes over Stephen’s finances. Previously, amounts of money were mostly mentioned in passing, and swept up in the lurid mayhem of Blooms hallucinations: the ten shilling maidenhead, Bloom spending “one and eightpence too much” on the pigs feet, and so on. When he assumes control over Stephen’s wallet, however, there is a definite change. As Bloom slowly rebuilds his senses of identity and masculinity, his ability to manage money allow him to once again assume the roles of Bloom the businessman and Bloom the father. Consider how around line 4290, Bloom confidently dismisses Bella’s claim that Stephen inflicted ten shillings worth of damage.

We also get an indication of both Blooms and Stephen’s ages, on lines 3711 to 3721. Bloom says that 22 years ago, at the age of 16, he fell and cut his hand. Stephen then muses on the fact that 16 years ago, Bloom would have been 22, his own age at present. Apparently, then, Bloom is 38 and Stephen is 22, their births separated by 16 years. I haven’t been able to find much significance to these numbers, but I’m sure they were chosen deliberately. It gets more interesting when one notes that several pages before, Stephen mentions how sixteen years ago (when Bloom was 22), he broke his glasses. Several pages before that, Bloom mentions that he has “sixteen years of black slave labor behind me” (3474-5). (I suspect that Bloom may be referring to his conversion to Catholicism and/or marriage to Molly in 1888, sixteen years ago.) Going back further, on line 3180, Bloom says “ten and six, the act of low scoundrels,” which makes little sense in its immediate context until one begins to see the significance of the number 16.

Finally, “32 feet per second per second” makes two appearances in Circe (That I counted). As the “law of falling bodies,” it takes on extra resonance in this context of lust, guilt, and decay, surrounded by what one might call “fallen bodies.” The number 32 is also, of course, 16 times two.

The problem I have with consolidating my ideas is that most of my blog posts have been pretty close together in both purpose and content. Looking back, I’ve been gathering examples of American racism showing up in Ulysses. While this is a topic I am interested in for a final project and while I think there is enough content worth delving into, I’m worried that consolidating may be the opposite of what I need to do.

Essentially, I’ve only analyzed the presence and instances of racism, looking at the history and context behind the blackface performances or the racism contained in the newspaper advertisement. The problem is, with the arguments I’ve been constructing in my blog posts, I feel as though I’m setting myself up to write an essay about American racism that uses Ulysses as an example, not as much about racism and blackness in Ulysses. I’m thinking instead of consolidating, I may need to go back and look more at the context surrounding these instances of blackness and think about how they function within their place in the novel, instead of simply pointing them out and analyzing where they may be coming from in the real world. Additionally, I think it would be beneficial if I could make more of a claim about the characters interacting with these images of blackness instead of merely providing a background explanation of them.

Circe has given me the chance to begin to analyze and make a claim about Bloom’s attitude toward blackness and his own subconscious racism. With the instance I analyzed in my blog post from Tuesday, I was able to make a claim that Bloom’s thinking of the minstrel performance in a fit of jealousy over Molly’s interest in Black men is a demonstration of his using racist images and ideas to build himself up. It is one thing to think that this is his only idea of blackness, but another to consider that he purposefully uses this image to degrade the black men he imagines her being with. My goal is to dig back into the context around examples from past blog posts to develop more of an idea of characters’ relationships to the images of blackness rather than doing a project on the historical context surrounding the images.

Where the first half of Circe was centered around Bloom’s anxieties and desires by putting him under hallucinatory scrutiny and attack, the second half then turns to Stephen and does the same. The hallucinations seem to to target an individual in a way that makes that individual seem unstable or off-balance–“My centre of gravity is displaced,” Stephen says. “I have forgotten the trick” (589). Where Bloom was othered, ostracized, and inspected so closely by his manifest anxieties that he seemed the one unnatural thing in the given world (even though that given world made no sense), so Stephen is attacked by Privates Compton and Carr and scrutinized and discussed by others (“He expresses himself with much marked refinement of phraseology,” says Biddy the Clap; “And at the same time with such apposite trenchancy,” says Cunty Kate).

I found it strange that during this section Bloom (very paternally) justifies and explains Stephen to the various characters with an ease that runs counter to the estranging scrutiny he was subjected to earlier. Now he seems comfortable in this world, talking “softly” to the privates and commanding Cissy Caffrey to “speak” with confidence. I think this is the first time I’ve seen Bloom act instead of react in Circe, and the effect is to make him seem like an agent instead of an object.

I thought it was interesting, too, that the crescendoing violence and apocalypse in Circe peaked before the end of the chapter (with the death of Dublin) and ended instead in a moment of inaction, where Bloom sees his son Rudy as he’s standing by Stephen. The whole chapter seemed really structured, action-wise–there seemed to be a kind of parade of increasingly menacing characters (from the decaying dog to “The End of the World” to Stephen’s dead mother) that ended, post-culmination, with a moment that seemed counterintuitively quiet and even holy.

In reading the first section of Circe, I was really interested in a desire of Bloom’s that appears in the italicized–and unspoken–narration. Admittedly, many weird desires are given voice here, but I found Bloom’s wish to “return to nature as a purely domestic animal” (15.903) particularly striking in the context of this masochistic episode. Many of Bloom’s fantasies revolve around the most extreme punishments, in which he is utterly powerless and made a spectacle in front of many.

These punishment fantasies climax in the scene with Master Bello, in which Bloom imagines himself in two identities that have historically lacked power: as a slave and a woman. The point of this masochist fantasy is crystallized when the Sins of the Past “speak”, a moment for me that clarified why Bloom is punishing himself; he feels enormously guilty for his sexual deviance. Yet the pleasure of this masochist fantasy comes from, quite obviously, the extreme punishment that Bloom imagines, but also from Žižek’s concept of the terror of “radical agency” and the paradoxical freedom that it allows Bloom, through the nature of punishment itself. This desire is never articulated by Bloom, but through these masochist fantasies that he enacts, we can see that his desire to “return to nature as a purely domestic animal” (15.903) somewhat explains these extreme imagined punishments.

Artmaking in Ulysses seems to be inexorably pulled toward the domain of the political, and the Circe episode in many ways represents the continuation as well as the vexation of this theme. The episode contains Bloom’s surprising declaration that he is, in fact, an “author-journalist.” (15.802) This at once represents a grandiose overstatement of Bloom’s actual profession in advertising, as well as a window into what he imagines to be his own artistic sensibilities. Interestingly, what follows another assertion from Bloom, that he is “connected with the British and Irish press.” (15.804-5) Almost immediately after Bloom’s claim to international connections, Philip Beaufoy, author of episode IV’s prize Titbit story, appears to revile Bloom as a plagiarist. Later in the episode, the confounding of Shakespeare and Martin Cunningham creates another connection. Cunningham and Shakespeare seem to be confused based on the psychic dominance of their wives, a qualification that Bloom surely shares. Thus Bloom, the “author-journalist” with British connections transitively collides with Shakespeare, the British writer who dominates the mind of Stephen Daedalus. The episode completes the domination of Irish art with the introduction of physical violence. Despite Bloom’s protests that Steven is “a gentleman, a poet,” (15.4488) the British soldier Private Compton responds, “We don’t give a bugger who he is,” (15.4495) and ultimately knocks Steven to the ground.

Circe has actually been my favorite episode of Ulysses so far, and in trying to figure out why, I’ve arrived at the tentative conclusion that it’s because it just goes places the rest of the book hints at but doesn’t develop explicitly. Perhaps the most memorable examples of this trend are sexual (the Bella/Bello/Bloom scene; the Blazes/Molly/Bloom keyhole scene) but I want to draw attention to how representations of haunting and ghosts in Circe are outrageously portrayed as well. When Stephen’s mother appears (4157), she is depicted in a far more bodily disgusting way than ever before. Pre-Circe, her character was signified mainly by smells (wet ashes, flowers) and Stephen’s fragmentary, fleeting memories of her deathbed. But in this episode her corpse literally takes the stage in explicit fashion: “her face worn and noseless, green with gravemould.” This grotesque description is reminiscent of the one we are given of the Paddy Dignam-dog creature on line 1208: he is “scorbutic…putrid…Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.”

These hauntings don’t evoke ethereal ghostliness as much as the rotting grotesquery we now associate with zombies. I think that zombies are more visually repellant to us partially because they obey the law of decomposition (a word we’ve heard before!) They decay and are very certainly dead as opposed to ghosts who tend to appear as transparent but pristine versions of themselves, or formless altogether. In Circe, we are forced to reckon with the awful reality of death and the inevitable decomposition of our body, our most vital possession. What Circe expresses that previous depictions of ghosts in Ulysses have not is that we are all going to look as gross as Stephen’s mother one day. (See the excellent horror movie An American Werewolf in London for a cinematic depiction of haunting that achieves a similar feeling.) When we are made aware of our own repulsive mortality, an off-the-page ghost doesn’t need to exist for us to feel haunted.

A huge contrast to these two depictions of haunting occurs at the very end of the episode when Bloom sees his dead son (4962). Rudy is a “fairy,” “smiling,” “delicate,” and clad in ivory and white. In fact, the depiction of Rudy that ends this momentous episode is another one of the outfit-focused descriptions we’ve seen in other places throughout Bloom’s visions. I have a few ideas about why Rudy appears so differently than the other ghosts in this episode. Probably the best one is: while Bloom doesn’t have much emotional investment in Dignam’s death and Stephen seems to truly reckon with the reality of his mother’s death (even if it still freaks him out,) Bloom has not come close to accepting and understanding Rudy’s death in a healthy way. Whenever his thoughts approach his son in the rest of the book, he tends to change subjects quickly (like his mind hand touched a hot memory stove, to borrow a phrase.) Since he hasn’t reckoned Rudy’s death, his vision of his son is markedly not dead. He has aged like a living person would and shows none of the decay the other dead characters in the episode do. I’m really curious to whether we’re going to see more of Rudy before the ending. It would be nice if Bloom could find a scrap of closure.

While reading the second half of “Circe”, there was one portion that caught my eye and brought me back to the “Sirens” chapter. Bella asks “Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul?” (U 15.3500) to which Zoe replies “Me. Mind your cornflowers” (U 15.3501). This particular question is interesting because previously, we had no knowledge that Zoe was playing this song (probably) until this moment. This causes the audience to question whether or not it actually happened or if it was an unspoken occurrence.  However, such a song makes one think of a depressing or somber scene, which had occurred previously with Stephen’s illusion of his mother as well as the appearance of the Sins of the Past. This makes me wonder if the funeral march was in reference to this scene like a soundtrack playing in the background.

Right after this, we see Stephen ask for his potato back from Zoe, “Give me back that potato, will you?” (U 15.3509). He then follows by saying that the potato is a memory of his mother, which is interesting, seeing as how in our previous class we discussed the sexual innuendo of it’s presence. The phrasing of this question is very curt and almost dominating. Zoe then replies with, “Give a thing and take it back / God’ll ask you where is that / You’ll say you don’t know / God’ll send you down below” (U 15.3515-3518). This is a very childlike response to Bloom’s request for something that is both associated with Bloom’s mother and sexual innuendos.

In tracking the narrative paths of both Stephen and Bloom over the course of the novel, I found it notable that in Circe, particularly in the final scene, both men finally exist together within the same narrative and physical space.

After being totally emasculated by his hallucinatory interactions with Bello in the second half of the episode, Bloom reclaims his masculinity in the “real time” narrative by taking on a father-like role toward Stephen at the end of the episode. Bloom’s paternalistic instincts lead him care for Stephen, and he “(undoes the buttons of Stephen’s waistcoat) To breathe” (l. 4936), and caring for Stephen leads him to hallucinate an image of his own son (“Rudy!” [l. 4961]). Bloom appears quite powerful at the conclusion of the episode as he “stands erect … holding the hat and ashplant” (l. 4945). Bloom’s masculinity seems to be in part fueled by the possession of the physical ashplant – “the ashplant marks his stride” as he leads the “pack of bloodhounds” (l. 4328) – implying that Bloom’s masculine identity is materially dependent on Stephen’s presence.

While in previous chapters Stephen’s and Bloom’s narratives have been relatively distinct, here we see their identities start to become connected and balance each other out when their paths meet. Stephen’s mother is “beastly dead” (l. 4170), we know from her “emaciated” (l. 4157) spirit that rises through the floor, and Bloom’s son Rudy is dead as well. It seems that, in this final scene, Stephen and Bloom balance each other out by each fulfilling the role of the missing person in their lives, Bloom as Parent and Stephen as Son.