In the
Odyssey, the sorceress Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs. Odysseus manages to rescue them with the help of a magic herb from the god Hermes, but in the process, he goes mad and falls in love with Circe. The parallels to this episode should be clear: Bloom goes into nighttown to rescue Stephen, who has been transformed by drunkenness and despair. Bloom has a close call with a prostitute, but narrowly manages to escape. “Circe” is without a doubt the central episode in
Ulysses. It picks out every character, theme, and idea mentioned in the novel so far, then remixes them into a nightmare. It also builds up to the long-awaited moment in which Stephen and Bloom truly (if briefly) reunite in the new roles of father and son. Still, the plot of “Circe” really only takes up a small portion of the episode. The rest consists of a series of wild visions (which could also be considered fantasies, hallucinations, or nightmares). These visions dig up and explore Bloom’s deepest fears and desires. In a way, then, “Circe” is like
Ulysses’s unconscious. The novel’s other episodes focus on introspection in order to expose characters’ thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. But in “Circe,” Bloom’s repressed feelings and inner demons take human form and literally confront him. In order to get at this unconscious material, Joyce takes an entirely different approach to narrative and perspective: he writes “Circe” as a play. It’s set in Manto (“nighttown”), an extremely poor Dublin neighborhood that also served as Europe’s biggest red light district. According to the obscure, dystopian imagery in this opening scene, nighttown is more than just Dublin’s seedy underbelly: it’s a kind of horrific alternate reality full of death, despair, and cruelty. But it’s often extremely difficult to identify the line that separates reality from fantasy in this episode. In short, how literally should readers take
Circe? Does Bloom really see the hallucinations, or are they just metaphors for his inner turmoil? (It’s worth remembering that at the end of the last episode Stephen drank absinthe, which causes hallucinations, but Bloom did not.) Most importantly, what is the relationship between “Circe” and the rest of the novel? Whose perspective does it take? The play-within-a-play has long been used as a plot device, but there’s no window dressing in “Circe”— Joyce gives his readers no context or instructions for interpreting this lengthy script. While most plays are written to be acted out and viewed by an audience, this one clearly isn’t. Is it a real view into Bloom’s journey through nighttown, or is it a deliberately-inflated performance based on a loose interpretation of events? Joyce’s novel has been full of unreliable narrators so far (like the debt collector in “Cyclops” and Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa”). So the reader has little reason to believe that the playwright behind “Circe” is more reliable just because they don’t speak in their own voice. These important questions about voice and perspective don’t get resolved, but they do add another layer of mystery to this complex episode.