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.