BLOOM: It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.
(A reasonable summary)

THE BAWD: Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.
(A mild example of the chapter’s studied obscenity)

In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her feet apart, pisses cowily.
(A more typical example)

Cunty Kate
(Name of one of the characters and a full-on example of the chapter’s deliberate obscenity)

BLOOM: I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
(In the courtroom sequence, Bloom defends his fondness for BDSM)

VIRAG (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
(Example of the chapter’s many sound effects)

(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)
VIRAG’S HEAD: Quack!
(Example of the chapter’s Dada absurdism)

STEPHEN: (Looks up to the sky.) How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of selfpretence.
(Typical cleverclogs punning from the master refuser, just after he’s been knocked to the ground by an angry squaddie)

The ‘Circe’ chapter of James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ is by far the longest, the strangest and the most outrageous of Ulysses’ 18 chapters. If you thought Bloom masturbating in chapter 13 was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The chapter is packed with countless examples of bluntly crude and transgressive sexuality, but that’s only the one aspect of what amounts to one long, vast, often completely demented, hallucination.

The ‘Circe’ chapter is huge. At 150 pages in the average paperback edition it’s as long as the first 8 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ put together. When it has been dramatised on the radio, it takes at least 4 hours to perform. Perform? Yes, because the entire chapter is cast in the format of a play, it is a play script.

There are several ways of thinking about all this which are best laid out here before we get lost in the tsunami of grotesque incidents.

1. A ghost play

After long difficult days, both the novel’s main protagonists, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, need purging. According to Joyce’s hero, Aristotle, the literary form designed to purge dangerous human emotions is the drama, the play. A play is needed to purge his characters. Moreover, Stephen has banged on about ghosts in Hamlet and both men need to confront their ghosts, so these problems combine to ensure it will be a ghost play, a play wherein Stephen will confront the accusing ghost of his mother and Bloom will see the ghost of his dead baby, now grown to be an 11-year-old boy.

(Hugh Kenner throws in a historical point that the Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth century had centred on a series of plays staged at the new Abbey Theatre and so ‘Circe’ represents Joyce tackling the sentimental Oirish mythologising of his Celtic revivalist opponents in their own genre, Kenner p.118.)

So Circe is written as a play, in the form of a script, with names of characters appearing in CAPITALS followed by their speech, with actions described in italics in brackets, exactly as in a script.

2. The climax of the accretive method

By accretive method all I mean is Joyce’s obsession with continually adding to his texts.

Joyce’s letters, essays, conversations with friends and testimony from his publishers all agree that Joyce’s method was accretive (meaning ‘a gradual increase, growth or the addition of new layers‘). In other words, once the basic structure of the narrative was created, Joyce went carefully back over the whole thing and added detail everywhere, and couldn’t stop adding more.

This explains why the text of ‘Ulysses’ is such a mess, because at every stage of the publication process, first as instalments in The Little Review, and then as it was readied for publication in Paris, Joyce compulsively more and more details to the printer’s proofs, adding words, phrases, paragraphs, sections, continually spotting new opportunities to add symbolism, quotes, references, filling the interstices of the narrative to amplify its encyclopedic networks of references and symbols.

Some chapters were set up in proof as many as ten times. (It didn’t help that all the print-setters and publishers were foreign, non-English speakers who couldn’t read Joyce’s crabbed handwriting and so introduced thousands of textual errors which textual scholars have made entire careers out of trying to fix.)

• Ulysses manuscript timeline 1905-1922 at Genetic Joyce Studies

As the Ulysses Guide puts it:

Joyce estimated that he wrote a third of Ulysses at the proof stage of the revision process (Beach 58), arranging co-dependent details all over the novel and weaving a web of intratextual puzzles.

a) Sentence level

Joyce’s accretive method contributes to making the text so hard to read, because individual sentences would have new phrases or words added, some would cut in half or cut off in mid-sentence. Loads of passages became more ‘bittified’, adding to the never-ending Tower of Babel scale of the text’s internal references and correspondences but also the challenge of making sense of so many individual sentences or paragraphs.

b) Section level

He made significant changes on a macro level, too. For example, it was only late in the composition, after the book had been serialised in The Little Review, in summer 1921, that it crossed Joyce’s mind to punctuate the entire ‘Aeolus’ chapter with parody newspaper headlines, 62 of them.

c) The evolution of ‘Circe’

The accretive method reaches a kind of climax with ‘Circe’ which kept on growing, to its current monstrous proportions. The commentaries tell us that 1) Joyce had had the brainwave of setting his modernisation of the Circe legend – the legend of the woman who used her magic to enchant Odysseus and change his men into swine – in a contemporary Dublin brothel with the brothelkeeping madam as Circe. Good. A clever joke and in line with the trend of the novel to reincarnate classical legends as debased and degraded modern equivalents.

Then 2) we are told that he had the inspiration to cast it in the form of a play script – taking further the imposition of formats and styles on his subject matter which we had seen applied more and more thoroughly in the preceding chapters, Aeolus, Cyclops and Oxen of the Sun. Good. With you so far. Apparently, with this clear plan in mind, Joyce thought it would only take two or three months to write but it ended up taking six months and ging through at least eight drafts, swelling and bombasting with each iteration. Why?

Because it dawned on him that the chapter would act not only to purge his two central figures of their demons, it would purge the entire book too. It would purge the entire book of its ghosts and nightmares. And so to achieve this would require walk-on appearances by every character who had appeared in the novel so far, whether as a talking character or even the briefest of passing references. Everyone would appear, everyone would have a place in this grand finale. Here comes everyone! And not just characters but ideas, too, and topics from the novel’s many conversations. As the Ulysses Guide puts it:

As David Hayman puts it, Joyce seems to have taken the whole book, jumbled it together in a giant mixer and then rearranged its elements in a monster pantomime’ (Hayman 102).

This is what I mean by the climax of the accretive method. Whenever he thought he’d finished, he remembered someone else who could be made to appear in a further scene or vignette. And so the thing grew to its current gargantuan and exhausting size, with a bewildering number of characters appear in a bewildering variety of gross and grotesque scenes.

3. What is real any more?

‘Ulysses’ opens by describing the real world and real characters more or less realistically – admittedly in a mannered style but you more or less understand what is going on, you can decipher the ‘reality’ behind the style.

But as the work proceeds the events being described become increasingly hard to make out through the din of Joyce’s free indirect style before the entire approach arguably falls to pieces in the ‘Sirens’ episode.

Then, with ‘Aeolus’, something entirely new enters the picture because the 62 newspaper headlines the text is punctuated with are obviously a) not spoken or thought by any of the characters but b) don’t read as traditional authorial narration either. So who put them there?

Hence critic David Hayman’s invention of the figure he calls The Arranger. The Arranger it is who creates the newspaper headlines in ‘Aeolus’ and goes on to place the passages of mock heroic prose in ‘Cyclops’ which satirise the Citizen; and then arranges for the entire text of ‘Oxen of the Sun’ to consist of a series of extended pastiches of English as it evolved from Anglo-Saxon prose to Cardinal Newman. Note the steady increase in the ambition of the Arranger’s interventions:

• Aeolus: limited to one-phrase headlines, albeit 62 of them
• Cyclops: extended to create occasional blocks of parody
• Oxen of the Sun: The Arranger takes over the entire text which consists of a series of historical pastiches

OK, so we understand the steady growth of The Arranger’s control. But despite it, all three chapters nevertheless retain the sense that, beneath or behind the interventions, something real is still happening, that, for example, behind the series of elaborate pastiches in ‘Oxen’ it’s still fairly obvious that there is a ‘real’ scene – half a dozen medical students and drifters getting drunk and bantering.

In ‘Circe’, by contrast, this sense of a reality lying behind the extravagant stylisations of the Arranger disappears. The incidents of ‘Circe’ are so extravagant, so demented, so hallucinatory, that there has ceased to be a behind, ceased to be a ‘reality’ which the reader can decipher their way back to. What you see is what you get. It is all on the surface.

The critic Hugh Kenner summarises attempts by various commentators to distinguish different levels of reality in the chapter:

• The opening scene as Stephen and Bloom enter nighttown, some of the dialogue with the prostitutes, and Stephen getting into a fight with a squaddy right at the end, these can be said to be ‘real’ i.e. correlate with real life as we know it.
• At the next level you have hallucinations of ‘real’ people i.e. when Stephen hallucinates his dead mother or Bloom hallucinates a sequence of women he’s sexually assaulted or sent rude letters to, these might be said to be based on real-world events.
• And thirdly there are the out-and-out fantastical hallucinations such as the central event where Bloom turns into a woman and the brothelkeeper, Bella Cohen, turns into a man, along with countless other incidents where inanimate objects or animals talk, human beings appear in fancy dress or in changed shape, and so on.

This sounds plausible enough but in my view is a big mistake. In my opinion we have to accept the fact that The Arranger has taken over. Or to put it in different but equally hyperbolic terms: it is the book itself speaking. There is no longer any reality it relates to; the chapter is a festival of itself and its own imaginative possibilities, which are unlimited.

Kenner goes on to concede as much when he makes the one big Killer Fact about the chapter which is this: in the two chapters featuring Stephen and Bloom which follow ‘Circe’, neither of the characters refer to any of its central contents.

A visit to a brothel where Stephen smashes the chandelier, then a fight with a squaddie in the street, Yes. This handful of external events are referred back to but believe me these only occupy ten or less pages of the 150 and as to the other 140 pages of delirious hallucination, No, no later reference is made. It is as if they never happened because, in my view, it never did happen. Or, to put it better: it all did happen but we are now on a different plane of fiction. We are no longer in anything like a realist mode of fiction or reading. The book has moved way beyond the boring old reaching after factual verification. Kenner seems to lament this:

Deprived of reliable criteria for ‘reality’, we have no recourse but to read the text as though everything in it were equally real. (Kenner, p.126)

This sentence is immensely revealing. ‘No recourse’ Kenner says he has, but why does he need recourse? Why this obsession with seeking for a ‘reality’, for trying to distinguish the ‘real’ from the fantastical in the chapter. It’s all made up, Hugh! It’s all a book. It’s a novel. None of it happened. When I read a James Bond novel I don’t think: well that bit sounds plausible but that bit, no that’s obviously made up. The whole thing’s made up. Stop shackling yourself to this model of Realism or plausibility: the whole thing is a mad farrago, give in to it.

Kenner mentions The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Flaubert which had also crossed my mind as a forebear of ‘Circe’. Surely no critic reads the ‘Temptation’ carefully weighing up which bits are true and which are false: the whole thing is a mad hallucination. Same here. When insulted Kitty eggs the soldier on to punch Stephen why is that any more ‘real’ than the octopus which represents the end of the world or the talking belt buckles or the singing moth or Bloom turning into a woman and Bella into a dominating man? They all exist on the plane of the text and the text is a fiction, a fabrication, in all its elements.

The novel finally forces its reader to read and understand and live on its own terms and I don’t experience this as a cause for regret, reluctantly admitting I have ‘having no recourse’ but to accept this option. I accept it as a liberation. Relax and enjoy this mad fantasia.

4. The urge to offend

Reading through it slowly and carefully it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Joyce set out to offend everyone he could think of. The Catholic Church, the British state, the British King, the Celtic revival, all believers in sexual norms or morality, all believers in sense and meaning, everyone is offended and here again, unlike the prissy self-conscious moralising of Hugh Kenner or Richard Ellman, as a child of the punk years, I found it hilarious from start to finish. Just the existence of the character Cunty Kate was going to offend church, state, censors, bourgeois moralists, feminists and that’s a fraction of its offensive material.

Example: The Croppy Boy

As a teeny tiny example, take The Croppy Boy. This is a sentimental Irish nationalist ballad commemorating the 1798 Rebellion, representing the tragic, betrayed and often anonymous sacrifice of young Irish rebels (‘croppies’) fighting against British rule. It has been performed millions of times by pious tearful nationalists lamenting Ireland’s subjugation to the brutal British etc.

But here’s how Joyce deals with it here. First he has the Croppy Boy appear in one of the countless visions or hallucinations standing on a scaffold with a rope around his neck and reciting the most famous lines from the ballad, pious nationalist sentiments:

I bear no hate to a living thing,
But I love my country beyond the king.

At which point the hangman jerks the rope and:

(The assistants leap at the victim’s legs and drag him downward, grunting: the croppy boy’s tongue protrudes violently.)
THE CROPPY BOY:
Horhot ho hray hor hother’s hest.

Which is offensive and funny in a disrespectful Monty Python kind of way. But it gets a lot worse, because as the assistants tug him down to asphyxiate him, the Croppy Boy gets a spontaneous erection and ejaculates, spraying semen on the ground below. OK, that’s very bad but then… a handful of posh ladies we’ve been introduced to earlier in the play, scramble to mop up his semen in their handkerchiefs.

(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)

Worse still, the hangman admits that hanging the boy has given him an erection too, so that he also is close to coming. And all the while the figure of King Edward VII dances round the scene rattling a bucket.

Who has this little scene not offended? And there are hundreds more like it. In a moderately offensive passage, in the brothel, after scores more hallucinations, Bloom gets into a long rambling argument with his long-dead grandfather, which rotates around sex and Bloom’s fetishes, with Bloom at one point observing of female genitals.

BLOOM: (Absently.) Ocularly woman’s bivalve case is worse. Always open sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things.

Women fearing creepy crawlies that might creep up inside their vulvas! Talking of vulvas, at another point when Bloom has transformed into a woman and Bella into a man, he (Bello) shoves his fist deep into she-Bloom’s vulva then waves his smelly fist round at potential customers.

BELLO: Trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!

Offended yet? Disgusted yet? That appears to be Joyce’s aim.

5. The Homeric parallel

In The Odyssey Odysseus and his crew land on the island of Aeaea and a team of scouts discover the palace of Circe, a witch goddess. Circe invites Odysseus’s men inside for a drink and then magically turns them into pigs. One man escapes to tell Odysseus about their comrades’ fate and Circe’s trickery. Odysseus plans to rescue his men from Circe’s enchantment and receives help from Hermes who equips him with moly, a magical herb that will protect him from Circe’s witchcraft. The plan works: the moly counters Circe’s magic, she falls in love with wily Odysseus and agrees to change his crew from pigs back into men. In return Odysseus pledges to stay with her for a year, fathering two children on her during that time. Finally, some of Odysseus’s crew talk him out of his long entrancement and make him resume the journey home to Ithaca.

‘Circe’ synopsis

Here’s my summary of ‘Circe’ which doesn’t begin to do justice to the madness of actually reading it. This summary makes it sound rational and lucid, which it emphatically isn’t.

Into Nighttown Stephen and his friend Lynch, both plastered after a night drinking at the maternity hospital, walk into Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district which is like a nightmare Hieronymus Bosch landscape.

(A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes: a woman screams: a child wails.)

Stephen tells Lynch he’s heading for the brothel of Georgina Johnson. Bloom enters flushed and panting from hurrying, running across a street where he is nearly hit by two cyclists and then run down by a tram. He sees an orange glow to the south and wonders whether Dublin is burning which triggers a chorus of children singing the nursery rhyme. The bicycle bells and motorman’s footgong have speaking parts and are among the 40 or so inanimate objects which get to speak.

THE BICYCLE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.

THE TRAM GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.

Or Vince Lynch’s cap which has a speaking part and expresses surprisingly profound opinions, for a cap:

THE CAP: (With saturnine spleen.) Bah! It is because it is. Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life. Bah!

I like the Kisses which fly about him like birds and then settle on his clothes like sequins.

Bloom’s father Bloom hallucinates his father, Rudolph, come back to life to tick him off for his imprudence with money, for being in Nighttown, for leaving Judaism.

(A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face.)

Mum and Molly Swiftly followed by his mother (In pantomime dame’s stringed mobcap, widow Twankey’s crinoline and bust) and then by Molly, wearing the sexy Turkish outfit he fantasises about her in, accompanied by a camel which peels her a mango. She accuses him of being a stick in the mud, the joke phrase from Nausicaa. The bar of soap in his pocket starts to sing.

THE SOAP:
We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.

He is accused in turn by his old flame Mrs Breen and Gerty before a pair of black and white minstrels dance onto the stage and sing to a banjo.

Costume changes It’s important to note that Bloom keeps changing costume, wearing in quick succession:

• a dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings
• a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon
• an oatmeal sporting suit
• a red fez when he is transformed into a Turkish dentist
• a lascar’s vest and trousers
• court dress
• a caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an emigrant’s red handkerchief bundle in his hand
• becomes a baby wearing ‘babylinen and pelisse’
• and many others

And that most of the other characters appear in non-naturalistic, absurdist outfits too. Myles Crawford appears as a chicken.

Hellscape Descriptions of the surrounding persistently link it with Dante’s hell and Bosch’s nightmareworld.

(Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden playfight.)

The Trial Bloom is put in the dock to answer charges by a variety of women including the scullerymaid Mary Driscoll, Mrs Yelverton Barry, Mrs Bellingham and the Hon Mrs Mervyn Talboys. J.J. O’Molloy defends him.

Bloomusalem Bloom is exonerated in the trial which turns into a grand eulogy to him in which he King of his own city named Bloomusalem. Bloom imagines himself being loved and admired by Bloomusalem’s citizens.

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

Coronation In which Bloom is wearing yet another costume, a dalmatic and purple mantle. He is crowned in a grand ceremony, fireworks go off, he holds a sceptre and orb, a vast palace is built for him etc.

Bloom’s downfall But as quickly as he was raised, he falls, with religious leaders denouncing him and a crowd more characters joining in.

THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He’s as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!
(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom.)

Bloom gives birth All the medical students from ‘Oxen of the Sun’ line up to accuse Bloom of being sexually abnormal. (They will reappear later as the Eight Beatitudes.) Bloom announces that he has become a woman and is pregnant and then: Bloom embraces Mrs Thornton the nurse tightly and bears eight male yellow and white children before an Italian Papal Nuncio gives an absurdist list of his ancestry.

Bloom is stoned and set on fire ‘All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him’ presumably that last phrase means piss on him. Then the head of the Dublin Fire Brigade sets him on fire.

At Bella’s After a lot, lot, lot more of this, Bloom eventually tracks Stephen and Lynch to Bella Cohen’s brothel (at 82 Tyrone street, lower). The prostitute Zoe Higgins greets him at the door and takes him onto the building where he meets Florry Talbot and Kitty Ricketts and encounters Stephen drunk at a piano and Lynch sprawled on a sofa. Here the hallucinations of other characters and situations continue, I liked the newsboys outside shouting about the safe arrival of the Antichrist, and reeled at the Hobgoblin who speaks in French (as hobgoblins obviously do, while appearing to destroy the solar system.

THE HOBGOBLIN: (His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs.) Il vient! C’est moi! L’homme qui rit! L’homme primigène! (He whirls round and round with dervish howls.) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks.) Rien va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He springs off into vacuum.)

Which is the cue for another favourite, the End of the World, who turns out to be an octopus which speaks with a Scottish accent.

(Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man.)
THE END OF THE WORLD: (With a Scotch accent.) Wha’ll dance the keel row, the keel row, the keel row?

(This is actually a nightmare reworking of a bizarre snippet Bloom overheard the mystic A.E. discussing with an acolyte in the street back in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter.)

Do you see why I think that trying to find a ‘rational’ or ‘realistic’ interpretation of all this is a fool’s errand. You should enjoy the show.

Enter Bella Cohen At the end of the hallucinations, Bloom is talking to Zoe-Kitty-Florry when he hears a sound coming from downstairs. He hears heels clacking on the staircase and observes what appears to be a male form passing down the staircase. He speaks with Zoe and Kitty for a moment, and then sees Bella Cohen come into the brothel. He observes her appearance and talks with her for a little while.

Bella and Bloom change gender But this conversation morphs into another hallucination, in which Bella becomes a man named Mr Bello and Bloom imagines himself to be a woman. New female Bloom willingly imagines herself being dominated by Bello, who both sexually and verbally humiliates Bloom. Bloom interacts with other imaginary characters in this scene before the hallucination ends.

A lucid moment When this hallucination ends, Bloom sees Stephen overpay Bella and suggests that he holds onto the drunk young man’s money safekeeping.

Stephen’s mother’s ghost Stephen hallucinates that his mother’s rotting cadaver has risen up from the floor to confront him. He cries Non serviam! and uses his ashplant walking stick to smash a chandelier before running out the room. The shattering of the chandelier deliberately repeats a phrase first occurring in Stephen’s thoughts in chapter 2, an image of the apocalypse, ironically repeated here in bathetic circumstances.

Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.

Payment Bella insists that Bloom pays for the damage, demanding 10 shillings but Bloom only throws a shilling on the table before himself running out the house in pursuit of Stephen.

Argument with a soldier A few streets away (in Beaver Street) Bloom finds Stephen engaged in an argument with an English soldier, Private Carr. This scene drags on surprisingly long with Carr claiming to be angry not just because Stephen, in a throwaway remark ‘insulted’ the King but also one of the prostitutes he, Carr, is chatting to. After a prolonged confused argument, Carr finally punches Stephen in the face, knocking him backwards and down onto his back.

Threat of arrest Two officers of the watch (the same pair we met at the start of the chapter) arrive and threaten to arrest Stephen but at this point another Dublin character arrives, Corny Kelleher. He alights from a horse-drawn carriage which, since he is an assistant at H.J. O’Neill’s funeral parlour, I took to be a funeral carriage. But Corny also (seems to) work as a police informant on the side and he manages to smooth things over with both the soldiers and the cops, who tell the excited crowd which has assembled to disperse. Bloom is very grateful, and so with much thanks and handshaking, Corny departs leaving Bloom alone with Stephen who’s still lying prone on the street.

Rudy’s ghost Bloom is pondering what to do with Stephen and just realising that he’s going to have to heave him up and take him somewhere safe to recuperate, when he is transfixed with the last thing which happens in this long, mad chapter – a sudden vision of his deceased son, Rudy, as an 11-year-old.

Cast

As a gesture towards the madness and to give you a sense of the scale of the thing, here is a full cast list of every person and object which speaks or appears, in order of appearance:

• Children
• The Idiot
• A Crone
• A Gnome
• Cissy Caffrey
• The Virago
• Private Compton
• Private Carr
• Stephen Dedalus
• Vincent Lynch – ‘his jockeycap low on his brow, attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face’
• The Bawd
• Edy Boardman
• Leopold Bloom
• The urchins
• The motorman
• Rudolph Bloom – Poldy’s father
• Ellen Bloom – Poldy’s mother
• Molly Bloom – Poldy’s wife
• The lemon soap
• Sweny – the chemist
• Bridie Kelly – who Bloom lost his virginity to
• Gerty MacDowell – who Bloom masturbated to in Nausicaa
• Mrs Breen – former girlfriend of Bloom’s
• Dennis Breen – her mad husband
• Wisdom Hely’s sandwichboards
• Tom and Sam Bohee – ‘coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks, upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes’
• Alf Bergan
• Richie Goulding – ‘three ladies’ hats pinned on his head’
• Pat the waiter
• The Gaffer (Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout)
• The Loiterers (Guffaw with cleft palates)
• The whores – shawled, dishevelled
• The Navvy
• The Shebeenkeeper
• The wreaths
• First watch
• Second watch
• The gulls
• Bob Doran
• Towser – bulldog
• Signor Maffei – ‘passionpale, in liontamer’s costume with diamond studs in his shirtfront, steps forward, holding a circus paperhoop, a curling carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the gorging boarhound’
• The Dark Mercury
• Martha – (Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck) ‘My real name is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable.’
• Myles Crawford – as a chicken
• Mr Philip Beaufoy – ‘palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing, creased lavender trousers and patent boots’
• A voice from the gallery
• First Cryer
• Mary Driscoll – scullerymaid Bloom assaulted – ‘a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand’
• George Fottrell – Clerk of the crown and peace
• Longhand
• Shorthand
• Professor MacHugh
• J. J. O’Molloy – in barrister’s grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with a voice of pained protest
• Moses Dlugacz – ferreteyed albino in blue dungarees
• Mrs Yelverton Barry – in lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair – claims Bloom wrote her a rude anonymous letter
• Mrs Bellingham – in cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff – ditto
• The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys – in amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly – ditto
• Sluts and Ragamuffins
• Davy Stephens – Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph, with the Saint Patrick’s Day supplement
• The very reverend Canon O’Hanlon in cloth of gold cope
• Father Conroy
• The reverend John Hughes S. J.
• Clock/Timepiece
• The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle
• The Nameless One
• The Jurors, namely: Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton, Myles Crawford, Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M’Coy and the featureless face of a Nameless One
• The Crier
• His Honour, Sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded
• Long John Fanning
• H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner’s apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder
• The bells of George’s church
• Hynes
• Paddy Dignam – dead, dog-eaten face
• John O’Connell – caretaker, stands forth, holding a bunch of keys tied with crape
• Father Coffey – chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap, holding sleepily a staff of twisted poppies
• Tom Rochford
• The Kisses
• Zoe Higgins – a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat
• Midnight chimes
• An elector
• The Torchbearers
• Late Lord Mayor Harrington – in scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral chain and large white silk scarf
• Councillor Lorcan Sherlock
• A Blacksmith
• A Paviour and Flagger
• A Millionairess
• A Noblewoman
• A Feminist
• A Bellhanger
• The Bishop of Down and Connor
• William, Archbishop of Armagh – in purple stock and shovel hat
• Michael, Archbishop of Armagh
• The Peers
• John Howard Parnell
• Tom Kernan
• The Chapel of Freeman Typesetters
• John Wyse Nolan
• A Bluecoast Schoolboy
• An Old Resident
• An Applewoman
• Thirtytwo workmen representing all the counties of Ireland
• The Sightseers
• The Man in the Mackintosh
• The Women
• The Babes and Sucklings
• Baby Boardman – Edy Boardman’s baby, met in Nausicaa
• The Citizen
• Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk
• Paddy Leonard
• Nosey Flynn
• J.J. O’Molloy
• Pisser Burke
• Chris Callinan
• Joe Hynes
• Ben Dollard – rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped
• Larry O’Rourke
• Crofton
• Alexander Keyes
• O’Madden Burke
• Davy Byrne
• Lenehan
• Father Farley
• Mrs Riordan
• Mother Grogan
• Hoppy Holohan
• The Veiled Sibyl
• Theodore Purefoy
• Alexander J. Dowie
• The Mob
• Dr Mulligan – ‘In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow’
• Dr Madden
• Dr Crotthers
• Dr Punch Costello
• Dr Dixon
• Mrs Thornton
• Brother Buzz
• Bantam Lyons
• Brini – Papal Nuncio
• A Deadhand writes on the wall
• Crab – in bushranger’s kit
• A Female Infant – shakes a rattle
• A Hollybush
• The Irish Evicted Tenants – ‘in bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook fair shillelaghs’
• The Artane Orphans
• The Prison Gate Girls
• Hornblower – ‘in ephod and huntingcap’
• Mastiansky and Citron
• George R Mesias, Bloom’s tailor, appears, a tailor’s goose under his arm,
• Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded Iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his shoulders the drowned corpse of his son,
• The Fire Brigade
• Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade
• The Daughters of Erin – ‘in black garments, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles in their hands’
• A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O’Brien, sings the chorus from Handel’s Messiah Alleluia for the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn
• The Male Brutes
• Kitty Ricketts – young prostitute working in Bella Cohen’s brothel
• Zoe Higgins – ‘a bony pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in her hand’, also working in Bella Cohen’s brothel
• Florry Talbot – ‘a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry’, also working in Bella Cohen’s brothel
• Lynch’s cap has a speaking part
• Reuben J. Antichrist – phantasm
• The Hobgoblin
• The Gramophone
• The End of the World – a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man (with a Scotch accent)
• Elijah
• The Beatitudes (Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon, Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students’ gowns)
• Lyster
• Best (from the National Library)
• John Eglinton – literary man from the National Library
• Mananaun MacLir – broods
• The Gasjet speaks
• Lipoti Virag – Bloom’s grandfather
• The moth – performs a little moth song
• Henry Flower – ‘He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed bamboo Jacob’s pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour’s face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia.’ Bear in mind that Henry doesn’t exist.
• Almidano Artifoni – ‘holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous moustachework’
• Siamese twins
• Philip Drunk and Philip Sober – two Oxford dons with lawnmowers
• Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley aka the Virgins
• The Virgins
• The Flybill
• His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus – phantasmal Primate of all Ireland
• The Doorhandle
• Bella Cohen – a massive whoremistress: she is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like Minnie Hauck in Carmen. On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops. Bloom says:

Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination.

• The Fan
• The Hoof (Bella has grown hooves)
• Bello – Bella transformed into a man
• Mrs Keogh – the brothel cook, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men’s grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand
• BLOOM-as-a-woman – a charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large male hands and nose, leering mouth (It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister’s stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.’)
• The Sins of the Past:
  • he went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black church
  • unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in D’Olier street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox
  • by word and deed he frankly encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises
  • in five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males
  • and by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see?
  • did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot?
• (Bello bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!
• A bidder
• The Lacquey (from outside Dillon’s auction house, chapter 10)
• Charles Alberta Marsh
• A darkvisaged man
• Sleepy Hollow
• Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf in the seawind simply swirling,
• The Circumsised (M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen)
• The Yews
• The Nymph
• The Waterfall
• John Wyse Nolan – in the background, in Irish National Forester’s uniform
• The Echo
• The Halcyon Days (Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn)
• Staggering Bob
• A Nannygoat – ‘plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants’ – (Bleats.) Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny!
• The DummyMummy
• Councillor Nannetti – alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced, his hand in his waistcoat opening
• Bloom’s back trouserbutton
• the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan – who pandybatted Stephen at Clogowes School in ‘Portrait’
• Don John Conmee – mild, benign, rectorial, reproving
• Black Liz – a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle
• The Boots
• Blazes Boylan
• Shakespeare
• Mrs Dignam and her children:
  • Freddy Dignam whimpering
  • Susy Dignam with a crying cod’s mouth
  • Alice Dignam struggling with the baby
• Martin Cunningham
• Mrs Cunningham – in Merry Widow hat and kimono gown
• Simon Dedalus
• The Crowd watching a foxhunt
• The Orange Lodges
• Garrett Deasy
• The Green Lodges
• Professor Goodwin – in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the room
• Professor Maginni – inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins a silk hat. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcoat, stock collar with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary gloves. In his buttonhole is an immense dahlia
• The Pianola
• The morning hours – run out, goldhaired, slimsandalled, in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance, twirling their skipping ropes
• The noon hours follow in amber gold, laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing
• Cavaliers
• The Twilight Hours
• The Night Hours
• The Bracelets
• The Choir
• Stephen’s Mother, May Goulding
• Buck Mulligan
• The Hue and Cry
• Lord Tennyson – gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded
• Dolly Gray
• Biddy the Clap
• Cunty Kate
• King Edward the Seventh
• Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o’-day boy’s hat
• Patrice Egan
• Don Emile Patrizio Franz Rupert Pope Hennessy – in medieval hauberk, two wild geese volant on his helm,
• The Croppy Boy
• Rumbold, Demon Barber – accompanied by two blackmasked assistants,
• Old Gummy Granny in a sugarloaf hat
• Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals
• Father Malachi O’Flynn
• The Reverend Mr Haines Love
• The Voice of all the Damned
• Adonai
• The Voice of all the Blessed
• The Retriever
• A Hag
• The Horse
• Rudy

Inanimate objects speak

I particularly enjoyed the inanimate objects which have speaking roles. Back in ‘Aeolus’ Bloom remarked in his inner monologue that ‘everything speaks in its own way’ and here that rule is wonderfully brought to life.

THE FAN: (Flirting quickly, then slowly.) Married, I see.

(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)
THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.

(The bells of George’s church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)
THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!

There are nearly 40 of these speaking objects and all very entertaining exercises of Joyce’s ingenuity. Here’s an old-style gramophone where the needle has played the whole record and gone to that bit in the centre.

THE GRAMOPHONE: (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh… (The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)

THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!

Stephen can’t stop making grand declarations

In ‘Portrait’, remember how Joyce has Stephen make a series of grand declarations: ‘Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow’; that the artist is like God ‘invisible, refined out of existence’; that he will go into exile and express himself as freely as he can ‘using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning’ etc etc.

Stephen carries on making the same kind of declarations throughout ‘Ulysses’. In fact sometimes it seems like whenever Stephen Dedalus opens his mouth, he makes another grand statement. He is a grand statement machine. Here in the ‘Circe’ chapter many of these become garbled and incoherent although he still manages to make manifesto pledges which are routinely cited by the commentators as indicators of his and Joyce’s intentions.

STEPHEN: (Laughs emptily.) My centre of gravity is displaced. I have forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. (He taps his brow.) But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

You die for your country. Suppose. (He places his arm on Private Carr’s sleeve.) Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me.

My point is that Joyce critics tend to take these ringing declarations at face value, and also equate them with Joyce’s own views. Whereas, reading ‘Portrait’ and ‘Ulysses’ together, situating Stephen among the wider Dublin society portrayed in the latter book, and also comparing him with the easy-going and genuinely kind figure of Bloom, has steadily put me off Stephen. In my opinion, as the book progresses, Stephen comes to appear smaller, more bitter, more self-centred and selfish, and his grand statements ring increasingly hollow.

He is a legend in his own mind. He goes ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ and yet when he bumps into his impoverished little sister, with pounds in his pocket, he doesn’t even give her a penny because he is saving all his money to squander it on booze and prostitutes. There’s a name for that kind of brother and it isn’t ‘hero’.

Cuckolding

It seems pointless zeroing on any particular set of sexual references since the whole thing overflows with obscenity. But the soft porn references to Boylan shafting his wife are particularly germane to the ‘plot’ and Bloom can’t stop thinking and fantasising about it.

BOYLAN: (To Bloom, over his shoulder.) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot? (He holds out an ointment jar.) Vaseline, sir? Orangeflower…? Lukewarm water…?

LYDIA DOUCE: (Her mouth opening.) Yumyum. O, he’s carrying her round the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.

BLOOM: (His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself.) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot!

Later on, Bella-turned-into-Bello fondles Bloom’s limp little willy, then describes Blazes tupping Molly:

BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds of Bloom’s haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where’s your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It’s as limp as a boy of six’s doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man’s job?
BLOOM: Eccles street…
BELLO: (Sarcastically.) I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world but there’s a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He’s no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it’s kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don’t it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon!

And much more in the same vein. The theme bleeds through into the next chapter where Bloom and Stephen blunder off to a late-night café and find themselves in an argument about the great Lost Leader of Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell who fell from power after being named as the third party in a divorce case. The point is that Bloom sticks up for Parnell as being a Real Man, a proper stud, who stepped in to swive horny Kitty O’Shea when her husband (Captain O’Shea) was unable to do the deed. So a situation very like Bloom’s only with Bloom rooting (sic) for the cuckolder, rather than being the cuckoldee.

Stephen’s broken glasses

Hugh Kenner points out a key fact which is only now revealed but impacts our entire reading of the book. We knew that Stephen, like his creator, was short-sighted. But only here, late in the novel, do we discover that he broke his glasses the day before. In other words he’s been barely able to see for the entire novel!

STEPHEN: (Brings the match near his eye.) Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat. (He draws the match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks. Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the visible.

What does that say, how does that qualify his repeated insistence on the importance of the appearance of things, the fact that he can barely see the appearance of anything!

Facts

Despite the delirious nature of most of the content, Joyce still chose to secrete a number of key facts about the entire novel into this chapter, for example, our heroes’ ages:

BLOOM: (Points to his hand.) That weal there is an accident. Fell and cut it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen.

So Bloom is 38.

STEPHEN: See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. (He winces.) Hurt my hand somewhere.

So Stephen is 22.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg
• Ulysses guide: section 15
• Sparks notes: section 15

Related reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe