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?
