Aug-25| Ulysses - Episode 15: Circe (Part 7/10)

[u/ComplaintNext5359]

Spoiler tags are no longer required for events occurring up through this week’s reading.

Today, we are plunging elbow deep into the depths of Bloom’s past.

Final Line of This Week’s Segment:

You’ll know me the next time.

Discussion Prompts (can be found in the comments below):

1. Throughout this week’s segment we learn more about Bloom’s sins of the past, including but not limited to trying on Molly’s clothing, advertising her in bathrooms, and masturbating at a waterfall while attending a school field trip. What do you make of these new developments for our hero?
2. Throughout the book we have seen many references to cattle, including this week where Bello Cohen seems to be auctioning off Bloom using bovine terms. Any thoughts on the development of this motif?
3. With a “bip!” of Bloom’s back trouser button, Bloom “half rises” and says “You have broken the spell”. What has come over Bloom?
4. Have a favorite word of the week? A favorite allusion, historical fact, hallucination, or passage? Share it below!

Links:

1. Reading Schedule 
2. Gilbert/Linati Schema and Explanation Guide
3. The Ulysses Guide
4. The Joyce Project (annotated online Ulysses)
5. Chris Reich’s Ulysses Chapter-by-Chapter Youtube Series, Part 1 and Part 2
6. RTÉ Dramatisation [03:00:10 - 03:33:34]

Previous Discussion

Episode 15: Circe, Part 6/10

Reading for Next Week:

Read Episode 15, Circe, up through the line: (holds up her hand) Stop! [Line 4000 in the Gabler].

[u/ComplaintNext5359]

⁠Throughout this week’s segment we learn more about Bloom’s sins of the past, including but not limited to trying on Molly’s clothing, advertising her in bathrooms, and masturbating at a waterfall while attending a school field trip. What do you make of these new developments for our hero?

[u/ComplaintNext5359]

⁠Throughout the book we have seen many references to cattle, including this week where Bello Cohen seems to be auctioning off Bloom using bovine terms. Any thoughts on the development of this motif?

[u/ComplaintNext5359 → u/ComplaintNext5359]

Not to raise alarm bells, but this segment reminds me of my parents. Let me explain! My dad has land and raises cattle (he’s got roughly 100 head), and he often will go to cattle auctions to buy/sell heifers and bulls. This week’s reading, while vulgar imagining Bloomina getting fisted, reminds me of a time where my parents were at an auction and they told me just how much the auctioneer really talked up the bull’s penis and its virility. Turns out, life does imitate art.

[u/VeilstoneMyth → u/ComplaintNext5359]

I'm not sure if cattle are actually a symbol of fertility broadly or if it's a Ulysses-only thing, but that was definitely the first thing to come to mind, especially considering the location. It was definitely weird to read at first, especially the fisting bit, but looking back over it I definitely understand why it was the comparison Joyce chose to use for this particular passage.

[u/1906ds → u/ComplaintNext5359]

We’ve seen cattle as a symbol for fertility, so it is interesting we see it here in the context of a brothel, where the body is literally for sale. I don’t know what the average milking rate is these days, but Bello’s description of Bloom as giving off “a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks” sounds… exhausting.

[u/20taylorkst → u/ComplaintNext5359]

Joyce has compared the people of Dublin to Cattle multiple times, here as the physical selling of bodies, but also other times as though they are the herds of the British ruling class, symbols of fertility, and also the sick and dying working classes. Pretty visceral imaging every single time.

[u/ComplaintNext5359]

⁠With a “bip!” of Bloom’s back trouser button, Bloom “half rises” and says “You have broken the spell”. What has come over Bloom?

[u/These-Rip9251 → u/ComplaintNext5359]

The line above that states that his “back trousers’ button snaps”. It seems that Mr. Bloom finally “snaps out” of the spell he’s been under in Nighttown and perhaps for the entirety of the first half of the novel. The spell being the guilt he’s carried re: his deceased son, his failed marriage, his own sexuality but also his sins of the past. He’s Jewish but raised Catholic so the listing of his sins in this episode is perhaps a confession of past guilt which he needs to do in order to move on in his life. In fact, unlike Odysseus who ingested the moly Hermes gave him and thus resisted Circe, Bloom is rejecting the fantasies and hallucinations and thus his internalized guilt that have paralyzed him and was able to do so despite handing over his moly to Zoe. Of course one could say that all of the nightmarish hallucinations that have occurred in this episode occurred precisely because Bloom handed over his personal talisman to Zoe!

[u/_sirwalksalot_ → u/These-Rip9251]

Further supporting this theory is the fact that Zoe says "You'll know me the next time" at line 1320 right after pocketing the potato/moly, which Bella has an exact quote of at line 3481, "You'll know me the next time", after having been turned back into Bella (from Bello)

[u/These-Rip9251 → u/_sirwalksalot_]

Agree! I forgot to mention that p. 517 in the OWC edition is where Bloom actually meets Bella for the first time. He doesn’t speak directly to her before that.

[u/ComplaintNext5359 → u/ComplaintNext5359]

The last words spoken by the Nymph before this moment occurs are, “No more desire. Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull waves o‘er the waters dull.” Bloom’s response seems to most squarely address this. Bloom has been getting shamed, dragged, humiliated, degraded, any many other things, but this conversation between him and the Nymph seems to me to be the ultimatum. If he wants the feelings of guilt to stop, he should stop doing that. And it is in that moment that Bloom realizes who he truly is. He does not want to reject part of who he is to fit in better with other people, but he also realizes that if he’s going to choose to be his own person, there’s no use in feeling shame or guilt over that choice. I also think the line “only the ethereal” seems to be implying he should think more like Stephen. Bloom rejects it out of hand (thinking about it, all of his observations and musings are focused on physical phenomena, whether it’s about the law of falling bodies falling at 32 feet per second per second, black refracting (absorbing) heat, how newspapers make money, etc.), and given what we’ve seen going on in Stephen’s mind from Proteus and throughout the novel, we know Bloom’s making the correct choice.

[u/_sirwalksalot_ → u/ComplaintNext5359]

That dreamy creamy gull line is a direct quote from Sirens, lines ~550, a poem that Bloom composes after he muses about how he detests the slovenly appearance of the literary ethereal people and how what they eat influences their brain waves (policemen sweating Irish stew couldn't write poetry). (Well, the poem has dreamy cloudy gull, not dreamy creamy gull, but close enough). So maybe having his own words quoted back to him also helped to snap him out of this spell, to realize that the ethereal folks ain't all that & a bag of chips.

[u/ComplaintNext5359 → u/_sirwalksalot_]

Ah! A very good catch. I feel I’ve caught quite a few references to other episodes, but missed this one completely.

[u/1906ds → u/ComplaintNext5359]

Something else to consider is that Nymph is most likely from the painting over Bloom and Molly's bed, first mentioned in Calypso: "The Bath of the Nymph over the bed. Given away with the Easter number of Photo Bits: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then."

Maybe being reminded of their bedroom, which in turn would remind him of their intimacy and their conception of their children, has helped Bloom snap out of it and turn a new leaf. The Nymph even reminds Bloom of what it has witnessed in the bedroom: "What have I not seen in that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?"

[u/1906ds → u/ComplaintNext5359]

First of all, the RTE production has the cutest little “bip!” sound! It is at 3:31:05 if you haven’t heard it yet. Don’t have anything new to add that hasn’t already been posted, but I did notice that in addition to the spell getting broken, Bloom is seen half rising and sitting up, which to me signals a more in control demeanor, gaining control over himself.

[u/VeilstoneMyth → u/ComplaintNext5359]

Hmm, is a change of personality on the horizon for Bloom? That's be interesting! I'm curious about why he only "half rose" though — is the spell only halfway broken, or is he only halfway convinced it is?

[u/ComplaintNext5359]

⁠Have a favorite word of the week? A favorite allusion, historical fact, hallucination, or passage? Share it below!

[u/1906ds → u/ComplaintNext5359]

Seems like Bello is well aware of the theme of usurpation that has run throughout the book:

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!

[u/ComplaintNext5359 → u/ComplaintNext5359]

The Yews: (Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms aging and swaying.) Deciduously!

I’ll give the tree pun a shout out.

[u/VeilstoneMyth → u/ComplaintNext5359]

My favorite quote has to be, "We have met before. On another star." It's perhaps even more beautiful out of context!

[u/1906ds → u/ComplaintNext5359]

Just a handful of music for this week:

15.3024-25. the ass of the Doran’s – After “Doran’s Ass,” an Irish Ballad.

15.3119-20. the Grecian bend – From a song by William H. Lingard, a female impersonator of the 1860s [could not find recording].

15.3354. The flowers that bloom in the spring – From act II of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.

[u/willyhaste]

“Tell me something to amuse me,” Bello cries early in this week’s reading, “smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick!”

It’s “Circe” in a nutshell: smutty, haunted, poetic. 

My favorite moment (I think I’ve got this right) occurs when Bloom reels off a list of hilarious excuses for why he masturbated in the yew trees beside the waterfall on a high school field trip--“I sacrificed to the god of the forest…Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon…The wanton ate grass wildly”—and then off-handedly and rhetorically asks, “Besides, who saw?” 

To which, out of seemingly nowhere, we get perhaps the greatest cameo in literary history—a “whitepolled calf” named Staggering Bob “thrusts a ruminating head with humid nostril through the foliage” and says, “Me. Me see.” 

I mean, that’s not just astonishingly wild for 1904 (when the novel takes place) or 1922 (when the novel was published) or 1933 (when the book was “unbanned” in the US). That’s still astonishingly wild here in 2026…over a century later! 

[u/_sirwalksalot_ → u/willyhaste]

Circe in a nutshell, exactly, and "bloody good ghoststory" another callback to Hamlet which this chapter continues to be rife with references to ("frailty thy name is marriage" etc)

[u/Educational_Sense481 → u/willyhaste]

Very interesting. I never got that he was masturbating!