Following Mrs. Breen’s anticipation of Molly’s monologue, Bloom and the whining dog walk towards hellgates. Bloom encounters a woman in the archway “bent forward, her feet apart [pissing] cowily”, a group of loiterers listening to a “brokensnouted gaffer” tell a comic story outside a pub, and a pair of armless people “wrestling, growling, in maimed sodden play fight”. Thus, amidst symbols of absence of decency and decay, our expectation of hearing about a shameful moment in Bloom’s life is finally fulfilled (Blamires, 2008).
It turns out that the gaffer’s tale is actually about a time when Bloom evacuated into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the shavings for Derwan's plasterer”. That is, Bloom’s sudden bowel trouble let him to relieve himself publicly in a man’s porter which he thought was actually a plasterer’s bucket. The loiterers definitely “think it funny” that this happened in “broad daylight” and they “frisk limblessly around him” while Bloom is grateful that were no women around to see this.
During his trial, Bloom is once again remembered of this extremely embarrassing episode while all his hidden guilts are exposed. Thus, the bucket serves as an object of shame stemming from his internalized notions of public decency and privacy. This contrasts sharply with contrast with the image of the woman who he sees peeing publicly without a hint of shame, potentially pointing to the shaming of natural, animal needs in bourgeois society. Here, the mundane can be both liberating and repressing. Furthermore, Bloom felt extremely vulnerable and overpowered by forces outside of his control. For example, his consideration of how lucky he was no women saw him is an admission to the lack of agency he felt, since nothing in his power could have prevented that from happening.
Circe can be seen as the episode in which exactly this happens at a deeper level. Bloom is completely exposed, vulnerable, and overpowered by outside forces that completely dominate and remove his agency. His deepest darkest secrets are evacuated in a seemingly public trial which defames his humanity. Thus, it is natural that the goal of Bloom’s journey in nighttown is completed when he finds Stephen beneath the scaffolding on Beaver Street, the exact same spot this occurred.
—Manu Alcalá
Works Cited
Blamires, Harry. “Circe.” The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses, Routledge, 2008, p. 132.
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