A Day With James Joyce's Ulysses - The Infamous Circe Episode

A Day With James Joyce's Ulysses - The Infamous Circe Episode

Image: Bertram Mackennal, Circe, 1893, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Presented by
Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass (Ph.D., ANU),
Artistic Director of Bloomsday in Melbourne
and Dr Steve Carey Ph.D.

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This event is a fundraiser for Bloomsday in Melbourne, enabling us to pay our Director, actors and staff for our Bloomsday theatrical productions. Every cent is going straight to them! 

And the Circe episode of Ulysses is the subject of Bloomsday in Melbourne's 2025 theatrical production, Circe's Carnival of Vice, at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne, opening on Thursday 12th june.

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For this day together we're focusing on the most infamous and, frankly, astonishing episode of Ulysses, Circe (episode 15). 

Why all the ruckus?  This chapter, twice as long as some novels, is Joyce’s most sustained treatment of the nature of sexuality itself. He takes on the new discipline of sexology - but don’t be alarmed, as he’s in a playful mode. So, there’s cross-dressing, flagellation, kinky boots, and because Joyce (and his characters) may be drinking too much (absinthe?), it’s trippy and isn’t afraid of taking the reader on a ride that feels positively trans, and not unlike the carnival rollercoaster. Because Leopold Bloom is magically transformed by an oversized Madame into a woman (she becomes a bloke), he takes one into the subaltern world of cruel beauty regimes and the drudgery of female domesticity. And the episode is full of soulful intimacy, too. We get to experience grief at close quarters: Stephen’s desperate need to unburden his guilt for his mother’s death; and Bloom’s more mature longing for a dead son who would be making his barmitzvah had he lived; Molly’s anger with her husband who is not sexually upstanding is also palpable. And there’s a cast of lightly but deftly sketched (sex-)working women. There’s even more: the community’s ambivalence about Bloom has him riding the wild and unpredictable beast of public opinion, and getting summarily CANCELLED! He has more enemies than friends... but you may regard yourself as among the exceptions!  

This daylong workshop will be interactive, a mix of presentation and discussion of text. But always remember the Bloomsday promise: you'll never be put on the spot! If you prefer to sit quietly and absorb, that's absolutely fine. We assume absolutely no prior knowledge of Ulysses - although if you do already have some experience of Ulysses, and have even read Episode 15, Circe, that'd certainly enrich your experience, of course. 

Our intention for the day is to confront directly the obstacles to reading this most challenging and also most rewarding of subversive chapters, to put Joyce in a rich literary and historical context, and to make clearer his innovations as a writer and thinker.

And then afterwards, we'll head to Hotel Railway for a chat and a drink of whatever takes your fancy.

Presenters
The course is delivered by Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass (Ph.D., ANU), founder of Bloomsday in 1994 and its Artistic Director. Frances has taught Joyce at tertiary and other levels since 1980. She is a member of the College of Distinguished Deakin Educators. She's assisted by Dr Steve Carey, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the comedy of Ulysses at Oxford University supervised by Joyce's biographer Prof. Richard Ellmann.