Abstract
Taking wing from Joyce’s reading of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, in which the Irish writer found an account of cross-species sexual contact, this essay explores Leopold Bloom’s animal metamorphosis in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses. It argues that this encounter with the nonhuman animal is subordinated to the cause of working through barriers of human difference. In the process, the animal that enables this reconciliation disappears. Unable to represent animal interiority, “Circe” settles for merely probing their interiors.
Highlights
Hands down, the violation of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses (1922) ranks among the novel’s greatest outrages
Bloom may stool and masturbate in the earlier episodes, but it is his violation at the hands of Bello that, ninety-five years after the first publication of Ulysses, still retains most viscerally its power to shock
One reason for this evergreen offence is that the antebrachial rummage marks a breach of another order
Summary
The violation of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses (1922) ranks among the novel’s greatest outrages. Bloom may stool and masturbate in the earlier episodes, but it is his violation at the hands of Bello that, ninety-five years after the first publication of Ulysses, still retains most viscerally its power to shock. Bloom becomes not solely female but, by turns, an intersexual dog, horse (or pony), cow, and chicken.3 This veritable farmyard of fanciful metamorphoses enjoys a Homeric precedent or correspondence—the sorceress Circe, who makes swine of Odysseus’s crewmen—but, for all its zoological inflection, obscures the very nonhuman animals it purports to represent. The clergyman describes how, as a twenty-year-old, he had spied on his neighbour, the daughter of a Church of Ireland archdeacon, as she fisted her father’s mare This instance of peeping Tommery and brachiovaginal invasion was Joyce’s immediate source for the elbow-deep violation of Bloom, as a commonplace-notebook for Ulysses that is at the National Library of Ireland reveals
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