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.
