Bloomsday — Seattle 2025
The Wild Geese Players of Seattle will present a staged reading of Episode 15, “Circe” (part 2), adapted from the 1922 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
For our 28th annual reading,
we’ll present Episode 15, “Circe” (part 2),
at 2:00pm on Saturday, June 14, 2025 at the
Ballard Branch
of the Seattle Public Library,
5614 22nd Ave NW,
Seattle, WA 98107
Bloomsday (Bloom’s day, named for Ulysses’ main character, Leopold Bloom) refers to the 24-hour period on June 16, 1904 in which Ulysses is set. Joyce’s ground-breaking novel follows the wanderings of Bloom, a Jewish everyman, and Stephen Dedalus, a young writer and Joyce’s alter ego, as they wander the streets of Dublin.
In Episode 15, it is around midnight, and Stephen Dedalus and his friend Lynch, both very drunk, have entered Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district, in search of female companionship. Leopold Bloom, who has some paternal feelings for Stephen, has followed them. This chapter is full of hallucinations and nightmares, where Bloom confronts many of his unspoken desires and emerges strengthened.
The Circe episode is enormously long. We are reading the second half this year, having read the first half last year.
Note: this chapter is intended for an adult audience. Bloom will be excoriated and sexually humiliated by the brothel’s madam.
The meaning of Circe
The structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses is loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, in which the hero Odysseus wandered around the ancient Mediterranean for decades longing to get home to his wife Penelope. Joyce’s Odysseus/Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, a slightly pathetic jewish Everyman wandering around his native Dublin on June 16th 1904. He feels bad because his wife Molly is being unfaithful and their marriage has been sexless for many years, since their baby son Rudy died. At the end of the previous episode, Oxen of the Sun, Bloom felt protective and fatherly towards Stephen Dedalus, the son of a friend.
In Homer’s Circe episode, Odysseus maintains his wits and uses the herb moly, as advised by the god Hermes, to avoid being unmanned during his seduction by the goddess Circe who has enticed his men with song and feasting before transforming them into pigs. She falls in love with Odysseus, reverses the spell on his men and they feast for a year before she helps them on their way home.
The Circe story above inspires Joyce’s schema for his chapter, which includes magic, whore, hallucination, man-hating ogress, and personification. A major theme is that sexuality degrades men to the level of dumb unconscious swine… note the multiple references to pigs. The Homeric transformation to pigs may actually refer to anticholinergic intoxication, producing amnesia, hallucinations, and delusions, and counteracted by the snowdrop flower, fitting the description of moly. There are some references to Bloom being womanly, hinting at the overt gender transformations in the second half of the chapter. Joyce’s usual multitude of voices are relatively easy to discern because the text is written like a play, though depiction of the many hallucinatory sequences and extreme transformations would require ultramodern animation techniques.
Commentary on Circe
- Text of Chapter 15
- James Joyce Digital Archive
- U22 Podcast: Circe
- The Joyce Project: Circe
- Ulysses Guide
- Kennesaw Guide
- Cliff Notes
- Sparknotes
- The Joyce Portal
- The Sheila Variations
- Joyce Images
- Paul Debraski
- Shmoop Summary and Analysis
- Groden Notes
- Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook: Suzette Henke — “Circe”: Ulysses in Nighttown
- The Modern Word
- James Joyce’s Ulysses: Where It’s Always June 16, 1904, Circe II, and Circe III
- 1982 RTÉ Recording
