Faithfull Place, off Lower Tyrone Street, where this chapter is located. Image via The National Archives of Ireland.

CIRCE

TIME: 12.00 midnight.
SCENE: Bella Cohen’s Brothel, Tyrone Street in the red-light district, or ‘Nighttown’.
ORGAN: Locomotor apparatus
ART: magic
COLOURS: None
SYMBOL: Whore

TECHNIQUE: Hallucination

CORRESPONDENCES: Circe-Bella (The Beasts, Telemachus, Ulysses, Hermes. Zoology, personification, pantheism, magic, poison, antidote reel. Sense: L'Orca Antropofoba [man-eating or a morbid fear in the presence of other people??]).

HOMERIC PARALLELS: After visiting the LESTRYGONIANS, in book 10 of The Odyssey Odysseus tells of landing on Circe’s isle. On the island the crew splits into two groups, one of which, upon finding the hall of the witch Circe, are transformed into hogs. One man escapes and warns Odysseus who approaches Circe alone. Odysseus is intercepted by Hermes who gives him a herb, moly (Molly??), which will protect him against Circe’s “witch’s tricks” which might “unman” him. Odysseus demands that Circe release his men. She not only releases them, but entertains the whole crew “until a year grew fat”. Eventually his men tell him to shake off this trance, and he departs from the isle, following Circe’s advice to consult the shades in HADES.

SUMMARY: A ‘realistic’ synopsis of this episode is difficult, but, broadly… Mabbot Street opens onto Nighttown, a strange and sordid place. Stephen and Lynch stagger in drunk and are mocked by the denizens of the place. Bloom follows, events and characters (Gerty, Molly, his father and mother) stimulating his mind and sense of guilt in an hallucinatory fashion. Bloom is arrested for committing a nuisance and undergoes a protracted Kafkaesque trial. His identity constantly changes as characters from his past and ‘personifications’ of perverse desires enter the court. Bloom speaks with one of the whores, Zoe Higgins, who knows where Stephen is. This stimulates scenes of an imaginary triumph for Bloom, who becomes an example of the “new womanly man”, gives birth, and is then farcically pilloried after the temper of the court changes. He returns to ‘reality’ and finds Stephen in the music room, while also becoming his own grandfather and thinking about his past loves. In a discussion on theology Stephen metamorphoses into Cardinal Dedalus. Meanwhile, Bella Cohen the madame of the place appears. She and Bloom change sex and ritual sado-masochistic humiliations of Bloom ensue. Stephen, in his drunkenness, is attempting to settle his bill. Bloom ensures that he isn’t cheated. The ghost of Stephen’s mother appears, he breaks the chandelier, and they end up on the street. A fight with some English privates (he has allegedly insulted the King) leaves Stephen prostrate on the pavement. The police appear, but Corny Kelleher and Bloom smooth things over. Bloom gazes at the unconscious Stephen, and experiences a vision of his dead son Rudy.

–Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses