Circe
“(The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown…)”
Bloom follows a drunk Stephen into the red-light district. A hallucinatory play unfolds: shame, transformation, ghosts, and finally a quiet rescue.
- Beat 01Written as a play
The longest chapter in the book is set out as a stage drama with characters' names in capitals and italicised stage directions. The 'real' and the hallucinated share the same page.
- Beat 02Bloom in Nighttown
Bloom chases the drunk Stephen into Mabbot Street and the red-light district known as Monto. He is robbed of a kidney sandwich, splashed by a sandstrewer, and harassed by soldiers and prostitutes.
- Beat 03Bloom on trial
In a series of hallucinated set-pieces Bloom is crowned Emperor of the New Bloomusalem, put on trial by Dublin's society women, transformed into a woman in Bella Cohen's brothel, and humiliated in detail.
- Beat 04Stephen at the brothel
At Bella Cohen's, Stephen plays Yeats-y songs at the pianola, sees his dead mother rise out of the floor in green decay, and refuses, with a single shouted Latin word, to give in to her.
- Beat 05On the street
Stephen, drunk and grieving, smashes the brothel chandelier with his ashplant and runs into the street, where a British soldier — Private Carr — punches him to the ground.
- Beat 06Rudy
Bloom stands over the unconscious Stephen, fends off the police with quiet decency, and sees, in a final hallucination, his dead son Rudy as he might have been at eleven, reading a book.
Midnight, in Nighttown, Dublin's red-light district. Bloom has followed Stephen there and the chapter is written entirely as a hallucinatory stage play — characters, ghosts, objects and abstractions all speak, scenes morph into each other, the real and the imagined are given equal weight on the page. Real things happen: Bloom rescues some of Stephen's money from being fleeced, they end up in Bella Cohen's brothel, Stephen sees the ghost of his dead mother and smashes a chandelier with his walking stick in panic, runs out into the street, gets knocked down by a drunk British soldier in a fight over a misunderstood remark. But these real events are constantly interrupted by waking nightmares — Bloom put on trial for every secret shame of his life, crowned emperor of a new Jerusalem, transformed into a woman and humiliated, confronted by his dead father, visited by his dead infant son Rudy, who appears at the very end as the boy he would have been. Today we'd call it the unconscious made visible: every repressed wish, fear and shame of both men acted out on a public stage and then dispersed. After Stephen is knocked down, Bloom — without fuss, without anyone watching — stands over him in the road, refuses to let him be arrested, looks down at his face and sees, for an instant, the son he lost. That silent moment is the emotional centre of the book.
- Scene
- The Brothel
- Hour
- 12:00 AM
- Organ
- Locomotor apparatus
- Art
- Magic
- Color
- —
- Symbol
- Whore
- Technic
- Hallucination
- Correspondence
- Circe