- Icarus as an analogue for flight into exile. (Stephen doesn't make it; he will be back in Dublin in 18 months.)
- Daedalus as the mythic father/creator whom Stephen beseeches on Portrait's final page. (As Ulysses begins Stephen has written precious little.)
- Christ/Lucifer: betrayal-crucifixion is a theme implying the possibilities of psychological/spiritual death and resurrection, a continuous process throughout both novels. We can see it at work as Portrait ends.
CIRCE
Every theme introduced earlier in the novel--except the final one that must be resolved in Molly's mind--reaches climax in the Nighttown scene.[1] These climaxes, involving the personalities of Stephen and Bloom, point to a resolution of the psychological struggles of the two men in ways that have prompted some critics (since the "father" and the "son" are one at least in art) to think that here Joyce plumbs his Stephen-nature and his Bloom-nature to their depths, revealing himself to himself, growing whole.[2] Whether or not this is true, so far as Joyce's personal growth is concerned, depends on how you view his whole life. More practically: it's definitely what happens to Stephen and Bloom.
The name for this resolution[3] is redemption. Joyce makes Stephen and Bloom expose their inner selves, confess. He then accepts their confession, and grants them absolution--as a priest, psychiatrist or The Creator should. The resolution of their joint and individual problems comes in a vision--really a series of hallucinations--that is redemptive and prophetic: ultimately Bloom will stand over Stephen like a father while, delicate and alive, the angel of Rudy floats over his head. Rudy is dressed in an Eton suit:[4] the lambswool coverlet his mother had made him has become a baby lamb peeping out of his waistcoat pocket. Symbols of life and rebirth will abound before Bloom and Stephen will trudge together out of Nighttown: consubstantial son, fatherly Bloom.
In this chapter the "Apocalypse theme" and the "Shakespearean theme" merge and resolve. The Apocalypse theme announces itself by allusion in Stephen's initial two speeches. "Vidiaquam egredientem de templo a latere dextra. Allulia,"[5] words from Stephen's Catholic training, are spoken at mass in remembrance of the taking away of original sin and in prophecy of the ultimate purging of all sin from the world when the world ends. Specifically, they censure the ugly sensuality of the street of brothels while, at the same time, connecting it with salvation: Mabbot Street will become for Stephen a place of redemption, and 67 Mabbot St., Gerty MacDowell's establishment on the right side, will become a temple of salvation. Of course Stephen chants this phrase in utter irony. And of course, it's not really the Gerty MacDowell we met in Nausica who owns the place; everything is changed in this hallucinogenic atmosphere, as though the characters are on drugs. [In Oxen of the Sun the voice of Horace Walpole has foreshadowed: "Dope is my only hope."[6]]
Yet without being consciously aware, Stephen is expressing the power of the environment into which he has ventured when he drunkenly cries, "Salvi facti i sunt,"[7] and flourishes his walking stick, his ashplant, over the brothel scene. Stephen is ironic, as he so frequently is when he is with his fellows, and drunk, but Joyce will redeem him from his irony and redeem the irony itself by making it prophetic. He will even redeem the ashplant, his cane, or at least involve it in a powerful case of pralaya, psychic returning.
All day Bloom's thoughts have been running curiously akin to Stephen's. Now, as Stephen "flourishes ashplant shivering the lamp image, shattering light over the world," Bloom wonders, "What is that? A flasher? Searchlight." That Bloom's light turns out to be a fire on the South Side of Dublin is mere reality. Mythically, the light that shivers is the light of a pilgrimage in its final stages, of a long journey almost over, for it is reaching the Apocalypse, the end of the longest journey of humankind. The Apocalypse precedes the harrowing of hell[8]; the Bible reminds us that the first sign hell's inhabitants will see will be a descending bright light that will turn out to be Christ.[9] So will this flasher, a searchlight, "shattering light over the world" [425] lead to a Second Coming and a cleansing of the sins of the world, as the announcement floating all day down the Liffey has been promising.
Stephen comes into the hell of Nighttown as a derisive Christ into the Apocalypse,[10] but Bloom enters as one scourged by the devil. He has decided to follow Stephen to look after him--Bloom has drunk little in Burke's, but Stephen is quite drunk and Bloom senses he needs help. Bloom has bought a "lukewarm pig's crubeen...[and] a cold sheeps trotter" to eat, symbols that connect him with sensuality and bestiality, erotic and neurotic aspects of himself that we've already noticed and which will soon be made visible to him. They are far from safe talismans in this hallucinogenic world. Putting them in his pocket, he stumbles into Nighttown holding his side ("Why did I run?"), just misses being run over by a truck, bumps into a ragman, collides with children, stumbles again. He has lost some of his balance, but he half-realizes the power of the street: "...keep, keep, keep to the right," he mutters, "First place murderer makes for. Wash off his sins of the world.[11]"
As we follow Bloom on his adventures, we realize his feelings of guilt. He feels guilty because his father committed suicide, because his son Rudy died after 11 days, and because his relationship with Molly has been unsatisfactory ever since. Regardless, Bloom's use of murderer seems melodramatic. In fact, many of Bloom's actions during the day have been melodramatic: secreting a hidden identity in his high grade hat; dashing into the library to hide from Boylan; climaxing, as he did, in front of Nausicaa while she gushes phrases from sentimental romances. Circe will redeem Bloom from his melodrama. Appropriately, the process begins with this melodramatic word: as Bloom utters it, he is joined by an apparition of his wife and of his mother and suicide father, all drawn together by "murderer." But he cannot yet see Rudy. He has work to do.
Up till now Bloom has gently pushed upon Molly the responsibility for the lack of sexual relations between them since Rudy's death 11 years ago.[12] He may even blame her for conceiving Rudy in the first place, blaming it on her sensuous nature stimulated by the copulating dogs she saw out of their window. Certainly he feels himself less of a man than he used to be.[13] Yet common sense tells us that all the responsibility for sexual dysfunction cannot be laid upon Molly. Bloom surely must carry some, perhaps even half, the blame--perhaps more. For many chapters we have watched him continuously evade this issue, as he has tried to evade thinking about Molly's and Blazes' tryst, even though his watch stopped at the moment of consummation, as if to remind him. Leopold Bloom feels helpless, unmanned, doesn't know what to do, and doesn't want to face his situation. And, although he could have, he hasn't gone home.
It is melodramatic to phrase it this way, but Bloom, in his unwillingness to face the situation candidly, fears that, in some sense, Molly may have murdered their relations, if not their relationship. Even so, readers wonder why Bloom has acquiesced and allowed her to become an adulteress today. Beyond that, why has he lived with her without sex for eleven years? Moreover, why is he willing now to continue a relationship with an adulterous woman? Is it because he is so "humane," so "tolerant"?
Think of Bloom as a "king and father," as the successor of Rudolph and the parent of Rudy. With the death of his son, his kingdom goes awry:[14] a fisher-king scenario. But death does happen to babies--and even to fathers--as Claudius explained to Hamlet.[15] Such deaths are sad, but a true king rises to meet such adversity, a true father continues to father. But not Bloom; he has desisted for eleven years.
Just as we reason that the cause of Hamlet's unrest must precede his father's murder[16], so we may reason that the cause of the corruption in Bloom's kingdom must precede Rudy's death, for the death in itself could not explain his unnatural and prolonged reaction. Rudy's unfortunate death was pivotal, unconsciously construed by Bloom to verify some defect in himself, a defect so deep that he could not reveal it to himself, any more than Hamlet could understand his own Oedipal leanings. Bloom would rather project the blame for their lack of relations on Molly than focus on it himself and reveal parts of himself that he does not want to face. To accept that blame is essential for his growth. Hamlet cannot face his "inner evil" ("thus conscience doth make cowards of us all") and so he dies[17]. Ulysses is no tragedy: in "Circe" this blame will out.
Part of Bloom's problem also involves his father's suicide: does Bloom feel guilty because he acted the role of a son who did not save his father? Perhaps. As evidence we have not only Bloom's remorse at "Poor Papa's" death, we also know how badly he wanted to have a son as though to create a "good" king-prince, father-son situation once again (and heal the fisher -king's wound). But notice how, when we first meet Bloom, he recognizes Boylan's letter. "His quickened heart slowed at once." He knows what's in it without reading it because he fears it and because he's been expecting it--if not from Boylan, from someone else--perhaps Lenahan, who felt Molly up while they were all in a cab.
The death of his son catalyzed some deep forces in Bloom. One psychiatrist has concluded that, not able to possess a son, Bloom has "declared the mother-queen guilty," guilty of being lustful, adulterous, even of murdering part of their relationship[18]. Certainly before this book begins, Bloom has established his wrong interrelation with Molly. We see many signs of it: Bloom encourages Molly in her taste for smutty books; he encourages her to tour with Boylan; he leaves the house when Boylan is due to arrive. He permits--even encourages--his wife's adultery because it verifies his own declaration. He causes his own impotence. In the morning when the letter arrives, Bloom doesn't need to read it; he knows what's in the letter because, in a sense, he has written it himself.
Keeping this in mind, we can realize affinities between Bloom's situation and the one Stephen sees as Shakespeare's, and having done that, we will begin to understand the depth of the potential relationship between the two men. Stephen, you remember, has argued that Shakespeare, as the father-king who also lost a son, Hamnet, declared the mother-queen guilty (the "second best bed"), and established a wrong interrelation with her: living apart. These affinities become even more meaningful as Joyce links the Shakespeare and Apocalypse themes.
In the brothel, Stephen turns to see Bloom enter and, always the more intellectual, "recognizes" in drunken irony that Bloom embodies his salvation. "Il vient! C'est moi!"[19] cries the hobgoblin in Stephen's mind, while the Gramophone sings "Hosanna." Rockets rush up, stars fall. And in comes Elijah, already associated with Bloom in earlier chapters, to announce "The End of The World. The Apocalypse is at hand."
At this moment of Bloom's appearance, he is an ironic Christ: he enters as the safe arrival of the Antichrist is announced in the newspapers. He is "Reuben J. Antichrist, wandering jew." This is purposeful irony: the end of the world, according to the second epistle of Paul, "shall not come except...that the man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition."
Nor, according to the Book of Revelations, can the end of the world come until an apostasy occurs. Then all wicked men revolt against God, revealing their worst natures. In Shakespearean terms, the Iago-natures of Stephen and Bloom will step forward exactly as the Antichrist in Revelations through his tremendous pride steps forward to set himself up to be worshipped as God. So Bloom and Stephen will aggrandize their worst and opposite selves, Bloom becoming Lord Mayor of Dublin, and Stephen, Cardinal Dedalus. Through this process, each will confront an evil within him. Then, as in Revelations the Antichrist is overcome by Christ, so each will overcome his inner evils and redemption will proceed.
Psychologically and religiously, salvation will happen only after sin is revealed. The redemption here is a psychological-religious-shamanistic ritual in which all the parts of Stephen and Bloom, all the characters, participate. So Elijah the prophet, once only words on a page, then merely a vector (32'/sec/sec), now revealed, names them: "Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ..."
In the sense that when Socrates leaves his house it is himself that he meets, or that Shakespeare is "all in all," or that when Christ walked on earth, it was Christ that he met, so each of us, viewed this way, is a part of Christ: consubstantially or transubstantially or even subsubstantially.
Earlier, Stephen has described his dilemma: he is Iago trying to kill the moor, the Othello, in him. You can make this concrete by substituting some synonyms: he is the rebel would-be -agnostic trying to kill the dutiful would-be-priest in him, for example. But no one can kill just a part of themselves--short of frontal lobotomy. It is by accepting our selves that we transcend them. We understand that young Dedalus is Iago and Othello and Stephen--as a man has an Antichrist nature and a Christ nature in addition to that which is quintessentially his own. So Elijah tells Bloom and Stephen, "Be a prism. You have that something within...a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll."[20] Jesus is Christ, Gautama is a man who sought the truth, Ingersoll is an agnostic, an Antichrist. Or to merge the images: Iago/Ingersoll stands against Othello/Jesus within Stephen/Gautama who searches for a resolution to this painful standoff.
Joyce extends the analogies further. To turn back towards the Shakespeare side of the Apocalypse-Shakespeare link, Bloom is Shakespeare as Stephen defines him: as a mortal man trying to recover from the death of his own son (Hamnet Shakespeare-Rudy Bloom) and as the ghost of the king: for Bloom is now only a ghost of what he once was before his kingdom became diseased; moreover, poor Nathan walks within him, threatening him with hopelessness, especially whenever Bloom hears the opera Martha. Moreover, "the serpent.. .now wears his crown"--Boylan has usurped his place beside Molly. Bloom is the Shakespeare who played the ghost of King Hamlet in the production of the same name, written when his son died.
Bloom will also turn out to be the incarnation of Stephen's non-consubstantial (i.e. his spiritual or psychological) father, a relationship that centers around the vision of Shakespeare that Joyce grants both Bloom and Stephen when they look in the mirror, a vision impossible without their joint viewpoints.
In the ritual he enters, Bloom will come to understand that the primary implication of the word "murderer" points to his prime error, to his murder of natural relations with Molly, and, in lesser degree, to the unnecessary guilt he assumed when his father died. Later in the chapter, Bloom will expiate all this guilt, and more.
When Bloom and Stephen see themselves reflected in the mirror as Shakespeare, it strikes us as remarkable: the only instance up to this point when two characters see the same thing in the same way at the same time.[21] Just prior to envisioning the antlered bard, Bloom has assumed responsibility for Stephen's money--a characteristic way for this businessman to enter into a relationship. Just after the vision, Stephen abandons his ashplant, perhaps a symbol of his stubborn refusal to submit to any authority but himself. Bloom picks it up. And shortly thereafter, when Stephen accepts Bloom's companionship and offer of hospitality, the relationship is completed. Bloom as the father makes the overtures, Stephen as the son acquiesces.
For Bloom the vision completes his insight, his fantasy. Bella Cohen, Circe herself, performs her central part of the healing. When Zoe brings Bloom into her brothel, Bella immediately transforms herself into a man, Bello. At that, Bloom, himself, begins to change his sex:
Bello: ...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! ...He's no eunuch.
Bello, or rather his (her) fan, explores Bloom's emasculation and his resulting masochism until Bloom transforms again, turning into a swine and groveling femalely before Bello's feet. Finally Bello sits astride Bloom, rides and squeezes his testicles roughly, until Bloom finally realizes
(A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.) Woman.
And Bello exults:
No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest.
When Bloom admits having tried on Molly's lingerie, Bello envisions the scene:
...showed off coquettishly...at the mirror behind close drawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoats udders, in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! Ho! I have to laugh!
As Bloom remembers being a female impersonator in his high school play, Bello preaches:
The sins of your past are rising against you.
The symbol of Bloom's bondage to Bello is a ruby ring intertwining the masochism of Ruby, Pride of the Ring, and Bloom's son's death. So we see guilt from Bloom's exploration of women's clothes and women's roles intertwined or projected on the death of his son.
After Bello taunts Bloom with the reference to Boylan, however, Bloom's masculinity begins to revive; he turns back into a man, but an old one: into the old Rip Van Winkle whom he once portrayed in a play. But now he becomes Rip the male prostitute who, though vowing that "I will return," is nevertheless set out to be killed as a sacrifice. And then Bloom/Rip passes away. He has died.
Bloom is not all lost, however; his death ("so he's gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him.") marks the death of his emasculated, masochistic fantasy life in which cross-dressing played a part. Now a new, significant anima restores him; she is Calypso from the painting over Molly's bed. It turns out that Bloom gave the painting to Molly, put Calypso there above his "marriage couch" and that she has known what has passed (or not passed) between Bloom and Molly for these 11 years.
Bloom now becomes apologetic, then reflective. "O I have been a perfect pig," he concludes.
Finally, as Bloom's name is substituted by the whores in the little nursery sacrilege about the virgin Mary, Bloom announces "(Coldly.)You have broken the spell." He regains his masculinity, argues with Bello, gets his potato back from Zoe and begins to act paternally towards Stephen by taking his money for safe-keeping. Then Bello, the man, turns back into Bella, the woman, and comments
(Admiringly). You're such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss you.
But Bloom is not through for he has not yet faced the matter of Boylan, who drives up in a hackney car and cuckolds Bloom again while Bloom "(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself) ," identifying with his wife's sexual partner shouts "Plough her! More! Shoot!": Precisely then, as Bloom turns to the mirror, he sees himself as an antlered Shakespeare; the vision speaks to him:
Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible. Gaze.... Iagogo! How my Oldfellowchokit his Thursdaymomum. Iagogogo!
At last the vision of Bloom's Iago nature faces him fully, along with its result. It is Thursday; and although he has exulted in Mr. Purefoy's accomplishment, his own Rip Van Winkle impotence has choked his chance of making Molly a mother today. He sees his own cuckold's horns on Shakespeare's head, and hears him crow like a capon--a trumpet in this bizarre Apocalypse.
Throughout the Nighttown scene Bloom's delusions have appeared as one animal after another, as eels, crayfish, dogs, sausages (which involve animal parts), weasels, moths, pigs, turkeys, turtles, glowworms, cats. Recall that in Hamlet animal images refer to Claudius and to the emotions his sinful actions generate in Hamlet's mind, states of unhealthy passion. Similarly in Ulysses animal images represent the emotional health of Bloom. Recall your own mild distaste when we first meet Bloom, who "ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." Now, as Bloom becomes able to understand his emasculation, animal images in his mind shrink to sane proportions. The same thing happens to Hamlet: the world changes from a "rank unweeded garden" with "satyrs" and "beasts" in it to an ordered landscape where "there's special providence...in the fall of a sparrow."
Now Bloom turns to Stephen and tries to help him. "Look," he says, approaching Stephen, "I say, look." But Stephen will not yet heed him.
When Stephen sees himself as Shakespeare in the mirror, the bard speaks "in dignified ventriloquy: 'It is the loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind.'" Shortly, Stephen laughs a full apostate denial of Catholicism: "Great success of laughing. Angels muchprostitutes like and holy apostles big damn ruffians" and suddenly finds himself remembering his last night's dream of a watermelon. Bloom, we recall, associates melons with Molly, with the "plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump." Stephen remembers now that in his dream of the previous night a king, Haroun al Rashid, held a melon against his face and said "In Come. Red Carpet spread. You will see who."
Now Stephen's watermelon memory triggers a deeper understanding of the dream: "It was here! Street of harlots. In serpentine avenue beelzebub showed me her. A fubsy widow . Where's the red carpet spread?"
Now that he realizes the unknown woman ("you will see who") is a widow,[22] Stephen cries in recognition: "Break my spirit will he? ...Hola! Hillyho!" --words that Hamlet cries from the tower where the ghost of his father reveals the cause of the unrest troubling their souls: "the serpent that did sting thy father's life/ now wears his crown...." Here the street is "Serpentine Avenue." In Hamlet the ghost relates how "...lust, though to a radiant angel linked / will sate itself in a celestial bed." Here the radiant angels are "much prostitute like." And the woman whose identity has been hidden from Stephen until now[23] becomes Hamlet's mother, Shakespeare's wife, and, with any Oedipal overtones brought about by the association with Hamlet, Stephen's mother.
The development, the parallel with Hamlet, and Stephen's eventual recognition of these associations, is complicated. After meeting the ghost, Hamlet's emotions are so keyed-up that he has a spell of half-feigned, elated madness and cries the falconers' "hillo, ho, ho boy. Come, bird, come." Here in Nighttown, when Stephen cries "Hillyho!" his father's voice answers, somewhat sleepily, "Ho boy." Then Stephen, as though he identifies with the falcon, exclaims suddenly, "I flew." And then, "My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end." He sees Bloom and instantly recognizes him: "Pater," he cries, "Free." But it isn't that simple for him.
Stephen's partial revelation has followed hard upon his denial of the apostles and angels. The phrases Streets of harlots. In serpentine avenue Beelzebub showed me...I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without end suggest Christ being tempted by Satan atop the mountain while they simultaneously recall Stephen's earlier flight over the nets at the end of Portrait, implying a correspondence between his Dedalus-ness and his Christ-ness: the mix of Shakespearean-religious-mythological imagery has come to crucial focus.
Stephen now begins his transformations. He is become
"A stout fox drawn from covert, bush pointed, having buried his grandmother, run[ning] swift for the open, brighteyes, seeking badger earth under the leaves.." but "a dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past... Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins."
Having suppressed until now his guilt over his memories and emotions connected with his grand mother (sic), 'Stephen is seeking "badger earth," safety in the dark earth.[24] But revelation is upon him; he is chased by one of the horsemen of the apocalypse,[25] and suddenly hears "Hark! Our friend, noise in the street."
We know that Stephen associates a noise in the street with God--a sarcastic association, to be sure.[26] But irony becomes reality here. Hearing the approach of God, Stephen tries desperately to hide. He grasps for his former personality: "Quick! Quick! Where's my augur's rod" he asks, grabbing his ashplant cane and beating time loudly to the music that starts from the piano. He dances, first with Florry, then with Kitty, but cannot lose himself in the dance. He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, again snatches his ashplant from the table and dances with it--his last symbolic act of defense. The fox has found his badger earth, but the horseman is upon him; it is too late. "Dance of death," Stephen cries. Unable to keep from realizing what is happening to him, "He whirls giddily... [suddenly,] he stops dead." His mother is before him.
Bloom did not achieve a personal redemption until he confronted Boylan and Molly in the act of intercourse. Now Stephen will undergo a redemption after confronting his dead mother. He is at first horrorstruck. Then he is eager for salvation. "Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men," he pleads. His mother does: "Repent" she says bitterly.
Aghast, and intransigent in error, Stephen mouths one final page of oaths and rage and lifts his ashplant, his stubbornness, to smash the chandelier, the light itself direct from the Power Plant, trying to defend himself against this harrowing of his personal hell. His one final symbolic act shatters the world: "Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry." The apocalypse has come.
Stephen makes a last run, out the door. When we next see him, outside, he is breathing "deeply and slowly," dying breaths. He has realized clearly, and for the last necessary time, that, tapping his brow, it is "in here...I must kill the priest and the king...."
Carefully, and without fear, he talks himself into the receiving end of the blow that Private Carr administers. This is his symbolic death. He suffers it unresisting, and gets knocked out.
Stephen's redemption is complex. He does not need to "Repent" as he first understands the word, spoken by his mother who appears as a "corpsechewer." That is, he does not need to beg her forgiveness. He needs to, and eventually does, accept the complexity of the love/hate relationships within him. His intellect fights against this recognition until, when he is knocked unconscious, it is literally overcome.
Perhaps a series of associations can make this clearer. These revelations are based on the characters and visions Stephen sees in this chapter and revolve around Stephen's crucial realization: "in here...I must kill the priest and the king."[27]
If the king/father is Haroun al Rashid, the one who held a melon against his face, then Stephen is Hamlet who must 'kill' his 'false father', Simon, reproach in the most emotional if not Oedipal terms his mother, Mary, and affirm his relationship with his 'real father', Hamlet-pere: Bloom, Haroun al Rashid, himself, who has come to his aid. As a consequence, to find a substantial father in Leopold and a vital mother in Molly, Stephen must end the dominance of the consubstantial paternal bond and let his spirit out. This happens as the chapter ends and Bloom carries Stephen, both body and spirit, away with him.
If the king is the one to whom a Cardinal Dedalus within Stephen claims allegiance, then Stephen must 'kill' that popish king to escape entrapment. Such a king would be a priestly minotaur within Stephen's artist-breast. Against him he has already fought with his sword, intelligence. But, like Siegfried, he has suffered wounds, agenbite of inwit.
If the king he must kill is Stephen's mother, then it is the vision of her in his mind that preys on him, assumes the role of an avenging Mary, a preying priestess, a negative anima, a part of him that must be outgrown. Yet a part of him, nevertheless. He must recognize it in order to see clearly his own attitude toward his mother, and to grow beyond his juvenile resentment.
If the King is the God of the Roman Catholics, then Stephen is his son, both Christ and the Devil--a heretical view in some eyes, yet Stephen is fascinated by heresies. Both Christ AND the Antichrist who celebrates a Black Mass at the end of the world (with which this novel began) on the stomach of Stephen's hatred of his own vulnerability, on his own negative anima's navel. Has it an omphalos?
If the king is England, then the queen is Ireland, a prostituted Gertrude, and Stephen wants to be Shakespeare forging "the uncreated conscience of [his] race," yet at the same time cursing spite that he "was born to set it right" by trying to write it: "My tables, my tables..."
Returning for a moment to the morality play in the prior chapter, if the King is Stephen's own intellectual imagination, then the Queen is his non-intellectual imagination, his inspiration, and their child will be art. Inspiration is a Muse, a woman; Stephen must open himself to the positive anima within by not identifying intransigently with King Reason and neither fearing nor clinging to his emotions, even if they include hating his mother's ghost (his negative anima).
If we simply become realistic in our view, and the King is VII, then Stephen, given certain reservations, is his subject: King Edward was a king of peaceful overtures toward Ireland and its people.
If the King is Death, then the Queen is Life and Stephen is Life-in-Death, a Blakean position,[28] or phrase it death-in-life: both, at any rate, together: as when the Croppy boy spreads life's seeds at the moment of his miserable demise. This may seem an ephemeral analogy, but think of the times old events and people long dead populate this novel. To see the theme in miniature, look at those issues in "The Dead."
All of these transformations and interrelationships complete the theme of metempsychosis. Not to mention the more obvious parallels: for as Bloom is Odysseus, the roles of Telemachus and Penelope fall naturally to Stephen and Molly. Think of metempsychosis as the overall theme of the novel like the geometric area under a curve; then the slope of the curve (dy/dx) is redemption.
Like Stephen, Bloom suffers a death--when he is sentenced to be hung by the jury. Both deaths are personal apocalypses. They break the spell that Error has laid on erstwhile Mankind's head. When each awakes--Bloom from that vision, Stephen from Private Carr's blow--he is able to enter successfully into a personal relationship with the other. Bloom speaks paternally, "Come home, you'll get into trouble." Stephen acquiesces, the two leave the scene, the chapter ends.
The Shakespearean, culminating in Circe, is a metaphor for the emotions experienced by Stephen in a host of roles as artist and son. It is also a metaphorical strategy through which Joyce expresses the conflicts that have overcome Bloom in his roles as son, father, husband. It becomes a way of understanding the new relationship possible between the men.
The Apocalypse theme, which also culminates here, is a metaphor for the processes of psychological conflict: resolution and spiritual rebirth. It involves the particular concept of karma in Ulysses, the potential for the continual rebirth of man, spiritually as well as physically . At its apotheosis, it is what makes creativity possible. Metempsychosis makes it possible for us to walk through ourselves, meeting ourselves.
Nearly all the other themes in the novel are also treated inNighttown. All interrelate with Shakespeare and the Apocalypse. Of special interest is the Siegfried Saga, the Ring of the Niebelung, the apotheosis of the references to Wagner and his music.[29] But there are more. Perhaps this is the fascination of Joyce's works; nothing is unrelated or irrelevant or easy to explicate with finality. Like Shakespeare, he is "all in all," this genius who has transformed himself into everybody in Dublin on June 16, 1904.
The symbolism discussed here isn't new to the character of Stephen. Chapter 5 of Portrait of the Artist focuses three symbols:
As it is in Ulysses, in Portrait, Chapter 5, it is Thursday, (we learn this as Stephen reads a news-seller's sign on his way to school). Thursday is the also day that Portrait's Stephen has dedicated to the Most Blessed Sacrament in chapter 3. In chapter 5, on this day of the Sacrament, Stephen takes a secular, ironic communion as he
drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs
and set to chewing the crusts of fried bread that
were scattered near him, staring into the dark pool of the jar…
On this day, he undergoes a ritual cleansing. By now Stephen, who has abhorred water since elbowed into the square ditch as a child, has lice. His mother scrubs his neck and roots "into the folds of his ears and into the interstices at the wings of his nose" as in the Maundy Thursday Gospel, where a man consents to Christ's washing him, saying, "Lord, not my feet, but my hands also, and my head." (How this young man presumes upon the God he would abjure!)
On this Thursday he receives an admonition and a kind of blessing: his mother handing him a towel says "dry yourself and hurry for the love of goodness." Stephen leaves the house "smiling and kissing the tips of his fingers in adieu" only to hear the mad nun in the nearby asylum cry (to him?) "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!", the "thanksgiving of an individual madwoman for the mad sacrament of a mad service."[30]
He meets Lynch who sings a religious song from memory, prophetically beginning in the second stanza ("The mystery we now unfold"), then turns into Lower Mount Street where they meet Donovan, who tells them about his Last Supper ("curry") and Stephen asks him to bring him food the next time he goes on a botany field trip ("a few turnips and onions") . We laugh at his good humor, aware of the sinister undercurrents.
Stephen preaches his theory of aesthetics, ending with "The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, paring his fingernails." He steps aside with Cranly, Stephen's Judas (Cranly has stolen his girl, his virgin Emma). And then Stephen takes the role of God's first fallen angel Lucifer ("I will not serve"), falling, as all humans fall, must fall, leaving Ireland and our sight- -until the next novel.
In Ulysses we see Stephen emerge as an archetypal fallen figure, but by Circe he is not alone; this time he is joined by Florry Christ, Lynch Christ, Zoe Christ, Kitty Christ, et. al. It is compassion for others he has learned, or shall awaken to learn: empathy based on the complexities of the self that can lead to his being, like Shakespeare and Joyce, that "all in all." And so his potentially fatal fall in Portrait is followed by his potentially empowering redemption in Ulysses. The themes continue through both volumes.
But does Stephen actually grow, is he actually transformed? We don't know. We know that in the dreamworld of Mabbot Street, the process of redemption was revealed to him. Will he understand in the morning what he has seen and felt, or will it vanish in drunken miasma. We don't know.
We know more about Bloom. We know he has consciously acted fatherly towards Stephen. We know that he has recognized, in considerably degree, his own guilt: "Oh, I have been a perfect pig." We know that he now realizes his collusion in Molly's orgiastic affair. And Bloom is not drunk. Growth lies before him. In fact, as we will see, he will begin to imagine himself a better, if not totally new, man—even to beginning his exercise regime again, and to ordering eggs for breakfast.
Through apparently unruly and enigmatic images that rise to awareness, Circe shows that the unconscious mind can be compensatory. These often surrealist images that rise unbidden reveal the processes that can help us complete our growth, get unstuck, redeem the errors of the Ego by opening us to the larger perspectives of the Self. In Circe, the process is redemption; redemption that shapes Circe as the slope of a curve shapes the area below it. Both characters are impacted by these images, but their actual consequences await another day.
At the novel's end, exhausted by the ordeal, Stephen sleeps somewhere to dream we know not what. Bloom, who has himself journeyed so far, goes home to bed. And Molly, rather like us, remains awake to ponder what it all signifies, her thoughts turning, as every reader knows, like the great earth underneath us all.
--Ed Germain
edgermain@earthlink.net
©1975, 2003
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