Circe

Episode 15, "Circe," takes place around midnight (one schema has it ending at 12 AM, the other starting then). It is the witching hour. At the outset there are echoes of Goethe's Walpurgisnacht and Flaubert's vision-tormented St. Anthony. Later, Homer's story of an enchantress turning men into animals dominates. The scene is what Dubliners of Joyce's time called the Monto—a large, poor, and dangerous red-light district east of O'Connell Street. After the seemingly chaotic, reality-bending proliferation of narrative voices in Oxen of the Sun, Circe offers a series of wildly dramatic scenes, some of them more or less actual, others clearly hallucinatory. It is not always easy to tell the difference, or to say who may be hallucinating. The chapter is not difficult to read, as Oxen was, but it perpetuates Oxen's kaleidoscopic variety and its assault on traditional narration—the action being presented now as dramatic dialogue with stage directions. Astonishing effects share the stage: quasi-Freudian psychoanalysis (minus the analyst), hilarious comedy, matter-of-fact sex changes, nightmarish apparitions, grandiose wish-fulfillments and public disgraces. On every page—and there are many, filling nearly a quarter of the novel—phrases and preoccupations from earlier chapters reappear, creating a sense that all of June 16 is being recycled, tumbling about in a vast phantasmagoric washing machine.

Book 10 of the Odyssey tells how men sent out to investigate a palace on a strange island find, as they approach, mountain wolves and lions who act like friendly dogs. The goddess Circe invites the men into her home and gives them a drugged drink that turns them into pigs. Eurylochus, who has suspiciously remained outside, runs back to tell the others, and Odysseus goes to rescue his men. On the way, the god Hermes warns him not to attack Circe but to accept her offer of a drink, because a plant called moly will counteract its effect. Odysseus accepts the plant from Hermes and does as he advises, entering the house, drinking the potion, threatening Circe when she thinks to enchant him, and agreeing to her suggestion that they have sex, but only after extracting a promise "that she will not plot further harm for you— / or while you have your clothes off, she may hurt you, / unmanning you" (299-301, trans. Wilson). After this trust-building exercise, Odysseus persuades her to free his men. He goes back to his ship and, over Eurylochus's objection, leads the rest of the crew to the dreaded palace, where for one year all the men feast and drink and recuperate.

Crucial elements of this story make it into Joyce's chapter. Animal images are everywhere in Circe, and sometimes there are clear echoes of the Greeks turning into beasts. Perhaps the most overt comes when Zoe beckons Bloom into Bella Cohen's brothel:

(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)

THE MALE BRUTES

(Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro.) Good!

Like Odysseus going in to rescue his men, Bloom goes in after Stephen, whom he has followed from Holles Street. Inside, he is repeatedly threatened with "unmanning," most violently when he becomes an enslaved, degraded female prostitute at the mercy of the aggressive Bello. Bloom's eventual recovery of sobriety, fortitude, and masculine agency recall Odysseus's escape from danger. At the end of the chapter he heroically rescues Stephen from exploitation and violence and leads him away from the nightmarish district.

Many other literary works featuring hallucinatory magic, dramatic hyperrealism, and perilous sexuality inform the matter and manner of Joyce's chapter. A footnote in Gifford's volume of annotations supplies a partial list: Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony; Goethe's Faust; Hauptmann's The Assumption of Hannele; Ibsen's Ghosts; Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata and The Dream Play; Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs; Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex almost certainly belongs on this list.

Circe represents the fulfillment of one of Joyce's most cherished aesthetic ideas: that literary art achieves its most profound effects in drama. In the early essay "Drama and Life" (1900) he explored the notion that great dramatic works get at the most enduring truths of human existence. In part 5 of A Portrait of the Artist (1904-16) he had Stephen Dedalus elevate drama over lyric and epic by observing that the dramatic artist transcends his own emotional states, projecting his personality so self-effacingly into his characters that they take on "a proper and intangible esthetic life." In Exiles (1914-18) he produced an Ibsen-like stage play incorporating some of the concerns that would dominate Ulysses. In Scylla and Charybdis (1919) he had Stephen discuss Shakespeare as the archetypal literary creator. Circe (1920-21) can be seen as the fruition of all these years of thinking about drama as a vehicle for high literary aspirations. It is a spectacular achievement.

Readers can discover other features of this stunning closet drama on their own, but one final introductory observation may be helpful. At many points in Ulysses the phrase "a retrospective arrangement" recurs. Among other applications, the expression seems relevant to the way most chapters in the book build upon, and require precise recall of, earlier ones, explicitly alluding to things mentioned much earlier and forcing readers to remember when they first heard them. Circe takes this practice to dizzying extremes. For its best students, it offers a kind of comprehensive final exam: underline every phrase on page 1 that you have encountered elsewhere in the novel; in the margin, identify the chapter in which each occurs and describe the context and significance; repeat for the next 180 pages.

In their brief introduction to the chapter, Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner quote John Rickard's response to this feature of Circe: "virtually every notable occurrence, every word of significance in Ulysses is 'remembered' by the text and becomes available to the characters—not only to the character who originally experienced the event, but [also] to other characters and to the various, often limited, narrative voices in the novel. Thus, the text of Ulysses becomes a sort of Akasic memory 'of all that ever anywhere wherever was'" (Joyce's Book of Memory, 108). Rickard offers the analogy of Akasic memory in the speculative, guarded spirit appropriate to all discussions of Theosophical beliefs in Ulysses ("One could even argue that this model of memory underlies a complex textual memory in the novel..."). No matter whether a Universal Memory exists in nature: it offers one way of describing a striking literary effect.

The sense of retrospective totality achieved by this recycling of old elements does not end with the last page of Circe. Ithaca builds on it by subjecting countless details encountered earlier in the book to a catechetical logical examination that feels comprehensive, as if they are contributing to some vast Aquinian summa. At the opposite stylistic extreme—concrete, emotional, associative—Penelope achieves a similiar feeling of wholeness by revisiting the day's events through the swirling and intersecting mental orbits of one woman's reflections. The sense of totality begins in the vast historical sweep of Oxen of the Sun, and with the exception of Eumaeus persists to the end of the novel. Ulysses is not simply the record of one day. It is an encapsulation of human existence that teaches its readers how to hold it in memory, a unified interpenetrating whole.