{"id":415,"date":"2016-10-27T06:04:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-27T06:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/?p=415"},"modified":"2016-10-27T06:14:45","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T06:14:45","slug":"415","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/uncategorized\/415\/","title":{"rendered":"Decomposing beagle men, zombie moms, eternal sons, wow!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em> 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)\u00a0but I want to draw attention to how representations of haunting and ghosts in Circe are\u00a0outrageously portrayed as well. When Stephen’s mother appears (4157), she is\u00a0depicted 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.”<\/p>\n

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\u00a0because they obey the law of decomposition (a word we’ve heard before!)\u00a0They decay and are very certainly dead <\/em>as opposed to ghosts who tend to appear\u00a0as transparent but pristine versions of themselves, or formless altogether. In Circe, we are forced to reckon with the awful reality of death\u00a0and the inevitable decomposition of our body, our most vital possession.\u00a0What Circe expresses that previous depictions of ghosts in Ulysses have not is that\u00a0we are all going to look as gross as Stephen’s mother one day. (See the excellent\u00a0horror movie An American Werewolf in London<\/em> for a cinematic depiction of haunting that\u00a0achieves\u00a0a similar feeling.) When we are made aware of our own repulsive\u00a0mortality, an off-the-page ghost doesn’t need to exist for us to feel\u00a0haunted.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0of the outfit-focused descriptions we’ve seen in other places throughout Bloom’s visions.\u00a0I have a few ideas about why Rudy appears so differently than the other ghosts in this episode. Probably the best one\u00a0is: while Bloom doesn’t have much emotional investment\u00a0in Dignam’s death and Stephen seems to truly reckon\u00a0with the reality of his mother’s death (even if it still freaks him out,) Bloom\u00a0has not come close to accepting and understanding\u00a0Rudy’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\u00a0is 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\u00a0of closure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":427,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415\/revisions\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}