I think I may have lost my companions on the voyage through Ulysses, a loss I am feeling most keenly after reading this and the previous sections… I would love to know what they make of them.
Episode 15 is loooong, by far the longest of the book. And it reads, to me, as one long Freudian meander in the minds of Leopold and Stephen. The episode is a long, intermingled series of drunken hallucinations by Bloom, Stephen and an fictional other whose presence allows each to reflect on scenes and words they couldn’t have seen. The impossibility of the perspective– from a logical perspective– is mirrored in the impossibility of the play itself as one that could be staged, being rife with stage directions that couldn’t be implemented and descriptions that the staging and dialogue could never convey to the audience… when they aren’t novelistic rather than dramatic.
A few examples:
(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)
(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)
ZOE: Silent means consent. (With little parted talons she captures his hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor, luring him to doom.) Hot hands cold gizzard.
(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)
THE MALE BRUTES: (Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro) Good!
Parallels with the Circe section of The Odyssey aren’t particularly clear to me beyond the hallucinations being like the enchantment of Circe. The hallucinations and dream-episodes are heavily Freudian– Bloom’s hallucinatory episodes are largely full of sexual guilt, the most significant of which finds him transformed into a female pig, dominated by “Bello”– a male version of Bella, mistress of a brothel; Stephen’s work darkly around his torment regarding God. At first the division between Bloom and Stephen’s hallucinations is clear, but it becomes more difficult to tell the two apart, each having in their own dreams ideas and thoughts of the other as well as scenes and images they weren’t privy to. This points to, I think, that these may in part be a kind of hallucinatory dream of Ulysses the novel itself, as an attempt to represent as wholly as possible an entity.
It’s a bit hard to tell what “really” happens in this episode. Bloom follows Stephen and Lynch, temporarily loses them when he steps off at the wrong stop, and stops to buy a snack (pork, which he feels guilty about purchasing at all, much less eating) that he feeds to a dog before wandering to the brothel, where Stephen’s presence is confirmed by a prostitute named Zoe. Stephen, who is already there, is drunk and gives Bello more money than is needed even for he and Bloom, before dancing drunkenly and finally smashing the chandelier with his walking stick in an attempt to fend off his mother’s ghost. Bello calls the police and tries to charge Stephen too much, at which Bloom intervenes. When the police arrive Stephen is physically accosted at which point Bloom again tries to help him, getting knocked unconscious.
The point of recapitulating the material plot is to show how it reinforces a central theme: Bloom becoming closer and closer to Stephen, seeing in him his lost son, and trying to protect him while Stephen is only partially aware of the gravity of Bloom’s feelings, being too consumed with thoughts of his mother and his spiritual difficulties. Bloom saves Stephen twice, more or less, only to end up on the floor, his wits knocked out of him, dreaming of his lost infant son.
I cannot help you here, and not anywhere with Ulysses, though I do have to credit your Ulysses Updates in my feeds with getting me back to it. Am currently far behind, with the Lotus-Eaters. Am reading Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses as I go, along with a well-thumbed and very old copy of Gifford/Seidman’s Notes For Joyce. There are times when I just want to run with the text, but I invariably end up reaching for the notes. I wish I was up to where you are, but I am nearly “stogged,” and so far behind.