The Nighttown Hallucination — Ulysses

Bloom follows Stephen into Nighttown: Dublin's red-light district: and the novel transforms. Circe is written as a play script, with stage directions, but the drama is hallucinatory: the unconscious material of both men surfaces in theatrical form, wildly distorted, mixing memory, desire, guilt, and fantasy without warning.

Bloom undergoes the most extreme sequence. He is put on trial by women he has encountered during the day. He briefly becomes a messianic figure, a tyrant, a woman, a masochist, a martyr. His dead mother appears. He relives humiliations and transforms them into fantasies of power. Bella Cohen, the brothel madam, becomes Bello: a dominating male figure who degrades Bloom and whom Bloom serves. Then she becomes Bella again.

Throughout all of this, Bloom retains something: a stubborn, practical, kind center that the hallucinations cannot fully dissolve. He is tried, humiliated, transformed: and he remains himself. That persistence is the chapter's most important discovery about him.

Stephen, drunk and increasingly unmoored, eventually smashes a brothel chandelier with his ashplant and rushes into the street. Bloom pays for the damage and follows him out. In the street, two British soldiers accost Stephen over an imagined insult to their king. Stephen argues back. One of them knocks him down.

Bloom stands over the unconscious Stephen. The ghost of the dead child Rudy appears: eleven years old, dressed in an Eton suit, reading from a book. Bloom gazes at him. The chapter ends.

The most extraordinary sequence in the novel has done what dreams do: shown both men what they are afraid of and what they most need. What survives the hallucinations in Bloom is care. What survives in Stephen is a capacity for destruction that has not yet found its creative form.