Circe was an interesting chapter due to its playlike structure and the deployment of hallucinatory scenes from Bloom. The hallucinations reflect various anxieties and desires that we have seen Bloom to have throughout the day. Similar to most of the chapters, food and cooking was referenced sparsely but not prominently.

Much of Circe does not remain constant throughout the chapters, characters move in and out constantly while Bloom goes through many different outfits. Bloom has a pig’s foot in his pocket throughout Circe which, along with the dog, ground the chapter by providing something constant.

One particular instance that i believed to feature food in a significant way was when Molly was eating a spiced beef sandwich (15, 564-565). Spiced beef elicits a masculine image which gives Molly- who is eating the spiced beef sandwich- a more masculine appearance. This serves in continuing Molly’s image as someone whose body is distinctly different from the slender figure of Gerty’s, while questioning the construction of femininity. Perhaps it could also be taken as a crass joke.

Bloom’s potato is also of interest as it appears twice throughout Circe. Initially a prostitute takes it out of his pocket. She later takes it out of her stocking. Bloom later reveals that the potato is of sentimental value claiming it as “a relic of poor mama” (15, 3513). It is interesting how the potato is seemingly sexualized while also relating to Bloom’s mother.

During Bloom’s hallucination involving him adopting a quasi Jesus identity, food appears as a measure of prosperity. This hallucination has a joyous tone; a baby is described as having milk flowing out of it’s mouth and later Bloom is offered a radish as praise. In this hallucination, food is used  as an object given to denote thanks as well as denoting prosperity.

Food appears more substantively in Circe than in other chapters. I found this to be a very engaging chapter.

When thinking about Circe for last class, there was an aspect about this hallucinatory episode that made me think about the notion of repression. And I got the sense in thinking about the instances where sports occurred in the first half of the episode, that sports were something that Bloom purposefully avoided. For example, in the moment when Bloom admits that he slipped and fell, losing a running race, blaming it on his poor footing, it seemed to me that there was a clear notion of shame that he associated with sports and that moment.

Another aspect of Circe that aids my thinking about this notion of athletic repression is that in previous episodes, Bloom has never been mentioned to play a sport or engage in some physical activity (in actuality–there have been a few instances of imaginary sport i.e. boxing). But in Circe, on page 447, around line 3325, Joyce depicts a young Bloom, with his peers who were playing football/soccer (in the wrong colored jerseys apparently). Bloom is described as being off to the side, as the others shout to him, physically located outside of the group.

This instance seems to speak similarly to the example in the first half of the episode, but also illuminates some potential early moments of Bloom’s masculinity coming into question. My thoughts exactly are still formulating on what these moments in Circe say about sport, masculinity, and Bloom, but it makes me wonder a lot about Bloom’s anxiety regarding masculinity and how we can better understand his complex relationship with Molly in relation to his repressed emotions that finally surface.

In the latter half of Circe, the reader witnesses the abject humiliation of Bloom and the full extent of his downtrodden, non-heroic status. Bella Cohen, or the acerbic and austere Bello, becomes a Circe like figure in the episode, ushering Bloom into an anxious series of hallucinations even more distressing and confusing than the imaginations from the previous lines.

Unlike the champion Odysseus who was able to combat Circe’s magical powers and ultimately best her, Bloom lacks fortuity and gumption and is utterly tyrannized by Bello’s chastisements, “Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you” (15 U. 3202-3203). So far, much of this episode has conveyed Bloom’s hollow identity and various persecutions, however, his interaction with Bello proves to be a culmination of his condemnation.

Bloom’s truly dejected state of being is articulated through an obviously Catholic inspired language of confession and reverence. During Bello’s interrogation of Bloom, he insists, “Don’t ask me! Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the…I swear on my sacred oath…” (15 U. 3049-3050). Bloom’s miserable status is epitomized in his weak resistance to Bello’s criticisms. As previously established in our past discussions, Bloom is distanced from both Jewish and Irish identities and the religions inexorably connected to them. When Bloom swears on his sacred oath to withstand Bello’s lambastes, he is difficult to say what sacredness he has an actual relationship with.

Interestingly enough, Bloom is able to find some relief and alleviate Bello’s taunts by reverently confronting the nymph, “I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring” (15 U. 3351-3352). Christianity and Judaism have only offered Bloom internal crises of identity. By finally acknowledging the feminized presence of the nymph and its divinity, Bloom is able to pull himself out of the hallucinations. This occurrence could possibly be something ideal to parallel with his relationship with Molly as the plot progresses.

From what I’ve seen so far, Circe seems to continue roughly the same patterns of number usage as the rest of Ulysses. The overwhelming majority of instances are related to money, which here takes a darker turn due to the fact that in many cases the monetary amounts in question are tied to prostitution.

One of the more interesting things I found is that apparently the line “sixtyseven is a bitch” on line 371 is a reference to Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian heretical astronomer/polymath. There’s even a whole academic paper about this one line. In short, Bruno apparently outlined a table of 150 numbered syllables, and number 67 is the sound “ME,” name “Circe,” and has the power “Fascinatrix.”

As has been the case throughout most of Ulysses, blackness appears in the form of blackface performers. However, the difference in “Circe” seems to be that instead of the narrator or characters reacting to performers in a brief, one-off reference moment, here the performers are willed into existence during Bloom’s hallucination. They come about early on, in the moment where he remarks that Molly is interested in “the exotic”. He says if she had money, she would have “Negro servants in livery.” Immediately upon thinking of the words “exotic” and “negro”, two blackface performers appear with banjos, and perform a rendition of “Someone’s in the house with Dina.”

What seems strange to me, though, is that the description of the performers is anything but exotic. The blackface practice was often used to portray Black American Slaves who had assimilated into the system of slavery, reinforcing the mythical idea of a slave becoming friends with his master. See in the excerpt here:

(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes, leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)

TOM AND SAM:

     There’s someone in the house with Dina     There’s someone in the house, I know,     There’s someone in the house with Dina     Playing on the old banjo.

 (They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling, chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.) (U. 15.362.408-426).

The physical description of the clothes they are wearing and their performance seems to portray a very domestic idea of African American behavior. So, it is strange to me that Bloom thinks of this as exotic, while there were minstrel shows popular in England during the late 1800s that attempted to portray Africans in the context of their own home nation, not through the context of American slaves. An example comes to mind exhibited in Bernard Pomerance’s play The Elephant Man, where amidst a circus freak show in 1884, people taken from African performed a song and dance number called Queens of the Congo. This fictional representation of a real life minstrel tradition makes sense to be called exotic, but the traditional American Blackface performance that Bloom imagines seems to be incredibly based on a desire of domesticity to me.

I think it would be interesting to examine Bloom’s behavior when coming into contact with racism throughout the book and compare it to this episode, in this moment where his inhibitions are cast aside and the slightest thought that he cannot control is told to us. I seem to remember him leaning toward unity of people rather than exclusion during the nationalist discussion in episode 12, but here, amidst his hallucination where he cannot control what bounces through his head, is this talk of the exotic and the apparent jealousy of the African men that Molly is interested in a different picture of Bloom? Does he keep his racism contained to himself until he is unable to control his rapid, racing thoughts? And are his racist grumbles here motivated by jealousy of the men Molly has desire for or are they deeper characteristics of Bloom not in the context of his relationship with Molly?

I found Circe’s play format really interesting and relevant to the different kinds of performances I thought were taking place in the book’s first half. Since I had trouble keeping track of what was going on, I tried to keep track of the different costume changes, especially Bloom’s. Costumes in Circe seem to be used to caricature or typify a person, which made the people around Bloom–who, unlike Bloom, have limited appearances in their given costume–seem like stock characters. Bloom’s mother “pantomime[s]” in her “dame’s stringed mobcap” (438); likewise Bloom’s father Rudolph is a Jewish caricature in “the long caftan of an elder in Zion” (437). Tom and Sam, the black men, wear “Sambo chokers” and do a minstrel routine (443). I was especially interested in Molly’s fetishized “Turkish costume” (439), which reminded me of Araby, and the way the protagonist projects exoticism onto the bazaar as a way to understand his own desires. It seemed like likewise Bloom’s hallucinating Molly in costume as a way of making his guilt and desire manifest.

I thought this guilt and desire was also projected into costume by the ways women appear in the section: they’re all menacing, accusatory, or repulsive in some way. Gerty is “bloodied” and “slobbering” (442), the bawd has “wolfeyes” (442), a woman “pisses cowily” near what Bloom thinks of as “hellsgates” (450, 449); otherwise they’re overwhelmingly powerful, like the trio of “honourable” women who accuse Bloom of unwanted advances (468). It seems like the only instances in which Bloom is comfortable or happy with female presences is when they’re so overcome by him they commit “enthusiastic” suicide (492); he’s also at ease with sex that’s disconnected from ideas of femaleness, like the harmless disembodied “kisses” that flutter around him (474).

Bloom’s costume, though, is ceaselessly shifting in response to other claims on his identity: to Molly’s friend he’s a “squire of dames” (445), to his mother he appears in “youth’s smart blue Oxford suit” (448); to his accusers he’s a foreigner with a pidgin accent in “lascar’s vest and trousers” (463). Instead of portraying these changes as positive indications of Bloom’s open-mindedness, however, I was surprised to find they seemed to indicate Bloom’s visceral, frenetic anxiety about himself–who he wants to be and who others demand him to be, and the extent to which his identity is constructed by the names other characters assign him.

I found the beginning atmosphere of Circe to be pretty ghostly and haunting. The first line of setting description mentions “will-o’-the-wisps” (3) and a gnome carries a sack of “rags and bones” (29). Everyone in the scene is transient or not-quite-there, and eerie disembodied voices echo from the sidelines. Later, Mrs. Breen refers to the area as “the haunts of sin.” (396) To me it almost seems like Bloom and the reader have entered a liminal halfway space that leaves plenty of room for fantasies and nightmares to play out. (When all the  accusatory figures begin coming forward to indict Bloom, I was reminded a little of A Christmas Carol with its cast of incriminating ghosts.)

I was really interested in the reappearance of Paddy Dignam (1204) in the form of a decaying beagle. Blamires explains the frequency of animal imagery in this episode via its connection to the men’s transformation at the hands of Circe in the Odyssey, but I want to think more about its significance. Paddy is accompanied by the “obese grandfather rat” (1256) we met earlier in the graveyard, which represents the characterization of an animal rather than the animalization of a character. This fluidity that exists between animal and human characters evokes the concept of metempsychosis, a word that repeats itself throughout the novel.

On line 2068 Lynch says “Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.” Since there are no lines or directions attributed to a ghost, Blamires takes this as a reference to Bloom. He’s been referred to as a ghost before (Wandering Rocks) and I’ve interpreted it as both a marker of Bloom’s social isolation and as symbolic of how we are told he has decayed since his son’s death. In this context in particular with the suggestion of sexual intercourse eminent, Lynch’s appraisal of Bloom as a ghost takes on a new aspect of impotence and passivity.

We could talk about the role of sex in the first half of “Circe” for an entire class and still barely scratch the surface, given how central it is in the episode, so for this post I’d like to talk about one specific aspect of how sexuality manifests in this section of Ulysses. Particularly through Bloom’s thoughts and hallucinations, we see in this episode a fixation on sexual guilt, sinfulness, and virginity.

In contrast to Bloom’s comparatively brazen act of masturbation in “Nausicaa,” the action of “Circe” is so broken up by Bloom’s hallucinatory bursts of sexual guilt that at times many pages pass between lines of dialogue or basic actions as we descend into Bloom’s thoughts of persecution. Despite Bloom’s own ambiguous religious status, the only redemption from the punishment/pleasure of these fantasies comes in his “stump speech” hallucination, when he imagines himself declared leader by a variety of bishops who declare “God save Leopold the First!”(15.1472-1473). While I’m not entirely sure how to articulate the religious aspect of Bloom’s sense of shame, I hope to mention it in my full blog post. Perhaps the most explicit merging of religion and sex comes later in the episode, when Zoe mentions a priest who purchased her services at some point in the past, and tried “to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up”(15.2541-2542) to hide his priest’s collar.

In particular, the theme of (female) virginity comes up several times in this section. Nagging at Bloom as he enters the red light district is “The Bawd” who offers him “ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched. Fifteen”(15.359), evoking a memory of the similarly youthful Gerty MacDowell, who seems to accuse Bloom of taking her virginity, torn between saying “You did that. I hate you.”(15.375-376) one second and “I love you for doing that to me”(15.385) the next. Later, we see, in a vulgar retelling of Christ’s birth, an echo of an earlier joke about Ben Dollard’s voice bursting an eardrum: “Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. [..] Messiah! He burst her tympanum”(15.2599-2602).

In Episode 15 of Ulysses, Joyce presents us with brief and bizarre illusions that occur in Bloom’s mind. It becomes apparent that in each illusion, there are elements from the story, that we’ve already seen, appearing once again (in almost a recap fashion). Not only that, we learn more about each character and about things that occurred before the story began.

In one of Bloom’s illusions, two police officers question his identity, to which Bloom responds with different answers. He starts off by saying that he is a highly-regarded dentist who owns half of Egypt. Interestingly enough, he does use his real name in this first “fake” introduction. However, following this, he does introduce himself afterwards as Henry Flower, a member of the Junior Army and Navy. This introduction is prompted only because a card falls out of his hat with the name Henry Flower on it (which I would argue could be a direct connection to his real name Leopold Bloom).

When asked for his alibi, Bloom pulls out a yellow flower from his jacket and simply states that,”This is the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don’t know his name. (plausibly) You know that old joke, a rose of Castile. Bloom. The change of name. Virag” (U 15.738-741). There appear to be many misconceptions of who Bloom is in this illusions of his that also seem to be projecting an “ideal” Bloom, no matter how ridiculous. These identities that Bloom takes on seem to all be interesting, well-regarded characters that he projects as admirable.

Circe was an interesting chapter due to its play-like structure and the deployment of hallucinatory scenes from Bloom. Similar to most of the chapters, food and cooking was referenced sparsely but not prominently.

One particular instance that i believed to feature food in a significant way was when Molly was eating a spiced beef sandwich (15, 564-565). Spiced beef elicits a masculine image which gives Molly- who is eating the spiced beef sandwich- a more masculine appearance. This serves in continuing Molly’s image as someone whose body is distinctly different from the slender figure of Gerty’s, while questioning the construction of femininity. Perhaps it could also be taken as a crass joke.

Bloom’s potato is also of interest as it appears twice throughout Circe. Initially a prostitute takes it out of his pocket. She later takes it out of her stocking. Bloom later reveals that the potato is of sentimental value claiming it as “a relic of poor mama” (15, 3513). It is interesting how the potato is seemingly sexualized while also relating to Bloom’s mother.

During Bloom’s hallucination involving him adopting a quasi Jesus identity, food appears as a measure of prosperity. This hallucination has a joyous tone; a baby is described as having milk flowing out of it’s mouth and later Bloom is offered a radish as praise. In this hallucination, food is used  as an object given to denote thanks as well as denoting prosperity.