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.