Episode 15 - "Circe" - Men Behaving Badly

This almost 200-page section is written as if it were the script for a play. It is midnight, and the group of drunken young men, including Stephen Dedalus, head for Nighttown - Joyce's name for Dublin's Red Light District. Bloom follows, to try to keep Dedalus out of trouble in the brothel they choose. There is very little real action here - rather, almost everything is LSD-like hallucinations, mostly Bloom's, but several belong to Dedalus. No reason is given for Bloom's hallucinations, in which every sort of depravity is visited upon him (he even changes sexes and gives birth to eight babies.) Following this comes a hallucination in which Bloom is hailed as the leader of Bloomusalem. More craziness ensues in the brothel where Bloom hunts for Dedulus, and then one of the prostitutes takes Bloom to see him. The young man is very drunk and he gets himself in trouble with two soldiers, who knock him out. Bloom tends to him, safeguards his money and possessions and keeps him from being "written up" by the police. At the very end of this lengthy and mind-bending episode, Stephen lies in the street, much the worse for drink and the assault by the soldiers, when suddenly Bloom's dead son, Rudy, appears to him in another apparition. We are told in the sparknotes and wikipedia entry that this "underlines the parental feelings Leopold has built up toward the younger Stephen." Clearly, there is a father-son feeling toward Stephen in Bloom's mind.

There is a good deal of really raw sexual language in this episode, but the essence of the writing is easier to grasp than the previous episode, which was nearly impossible for a layman to figure out, without the help of on-line guides.

The classical allusion "Circe" is to the pigs which Odysseus' men were changed into by Circe. I must say, the men in this episode - no, in the entire book - do act like pigs, and this episode is the zenith or the nadir of that behavior. Circe is said to correspond to the madam of the brothel - Bella, who figures prominently in Bloom's hallucinations.

There are only three episodes left, totalling 173 pages. The end is in sight! I know that Molly's final speech - the last words in the book - are wonderful, so I am looking forward to that, but it's been a long and difficult haul to get to them.

I haven't really heard any comments from readers for weeks, and for my next project, I'll need to figure out a better way to blog on classic books, which reaches more people. I seem to be fairly invisible in the blogosphere, but the blog has kept me reading this massive and difficult work for the first time in my life, so I count that as a success.