Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in “Circe”

James Joyce’s “Circe” episode in Ulysses, by way of its closet drama form, raises questions at the center of ongoing debates on reading practice and method. Joyce uses the closet drama genre, whose name and tradition call attention to depth and concealment, to examine the relationship between surfaces and depths. Instances of free indirect discourse and interior monologue within the “Circe” episode’s stage directions renegotiate reader receptivity and accessibility. Ultimately, “Circe” is not only a consideration of surfaces and depths but also the relationship between action and contemplation. Honoring the closet drama’s historical function as pedagogical and philosophical apparatus, “Circe” is an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between theory and practice in literary studies.

An adolescent James Joyce wrote, “There is nothing so deceptive and for all that so alluring as a good surface” in his page-long composition “Trust Not Appearances” at Belvedere College between 1893–98 (3). This claim marks the beginning of Joyce’s juvenilia, but it also makes for an apt starting place for considering contemporary debates on reading practices, rife with language of surfaces, symptoms, and depths. A “good surface” most obviously lies at the center of recent calls for surface reading in literary studies, but the seductive, untrustworthy quality of surfaces is also the preoccupation of the methodologies to which this interest in surface reading responds: a distrust in the “deceptive” surface of a text, resulting in the subsequent obligation to probe beneath. Joyce’s essay culminates with the proverb “Trust not appearances” and a conclusion that, in most cases, “the real worth has to be searched for” (“Trust Not Appearances” 3).

Joyce’s early attempt to theorize aesthetics and appearances comes to fruition in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus’s Dean of Studies at University College, Dublin instigates a discussion of aesthetic theory.¹ “These questions are very profound,” warns the dean, referring to the “esthetic question” to which he demands an answer from Stephen (Portrait 202). The dean continues: “It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again” (202). The dean’s analogy is rich in pedagogical and methodological claims: aesthetic theorization is not simply surface work, nor “looking down” into the depths, nor even going “down into those depths,” but the ability to submerge oneself, look around, and return to the world. Both the early Joyce and the dean’s theories, or recommendations for theorization, demand an attention to depth but do not propose it ends there.

Joyce’s interrogation of pedagogy and theorization in Ulysses most obviously picks up with the classroom setting in the “Nestor” episode or at the National Library where Stephen surmises on Shakespeare and paternity in “Scylla and Charybdis.” “Do you believe your own theory?” (Ulysses 175) John Eglinton asks Stephen, to which he replies in the negative. Mr. Best then follows up with a subsequent question, “Are you going to write it?” and concludes, before Stephen can answer, with the recommendation, “You ought to make it a dialogue, don’t you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote” (Ulysses 175). Best refers to Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay “The Decay of Lying” wherein Wilde presents a Socratic dialogue between two characters, Vivian and Cyril. Less interested in that essay’s concluding doctrine of a “new aesthetics,” my article engages Joyce’s allusion to a dialogic discourse otherwise known as the closet drama (Wilde 1071–92).

While Stephen Dedalus never, to the reader’s knowledge, follows Best’s recommendation to compose his own dialogic theorizations in “Scylla and Charybdis” or over the course of the novel, I propose that “Circe” offers Joyce’s own “dialogue,” or theorization by way of dialogue, on reading practices in Ulysses. Whereas David Kurnick reads Joyce’s allusion to Wilde’s closet drama in “Scylla and Charybdis” as an attempt to “dra[w] attention to the queerness of the cultural tradition in which this type of intellectual debate is steeped,” I am more interested in Joyce’s nod to the Platonic dialogue—or closet drama—for its generic and formal capacities (“Joyce Unperformed” 181). After all, the Platonic dialogue is “what one could call the first closet drama” according to Martin Puchner (“Theater in Modernist Thought” 523). “Circe,” in Joyce’s case, takes up the dialogic, staged form of a closet drama to theorize on reading practices and literature.

The “Scylla and Charybdis” episode set at the National Library is unsurprisingly a site for critical accounts of reading practices in Ulysses. Michael Mayo considers Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s demand for surface reading in the context of Joyce’s oeuvre. Responding to their call to heed what is “evident,” “perceptible,” and “apprehensible” in a text, Mayo concludes that “such qualities can be functions only of apprehenders, perceivers, and seekers of evidence. This attempt at objectivity (through objectification) and externalization (inviting projection) cannot help but reflect back the products of an active reader” (Mayo 83). While Mayo examines the availability or use of “surface reading” in Joyce’s earlier work such as “The Dead,” I consider the ways in which “Circe” raises similar questions of perceptibility, externalization, and agency by way of the reading practice demanded of its closet drama form.²

Readerly expectation, practice, and decorum lie at the center of the closet drama’s generic history. John Dryden’s early theorization of the closet drama in his preface to Don Sebastian (1689) most clearly makes this point when he distinguishes “betwixt a publick entertainment on the Theatre, and a private reading in the Closet” (qtd. in Burroughs 4). Beginning her 2019 history of the closet drama with Dryden’s epigraph, Catherine Burroughs suggests that the closet drama’s origins were not a product of generic invention but instead a mode of reading. Reading a play in the closet, in other words, precedes any generic closet drama. “In the first we are confin’d to time,” Dryden surmises on staged performance, but “in the last, every Reader is judge of his own convenience; he can take up the book, and lay it down at his pleasure” (qtd. in Burroughs 4). Whereas a staged performance conjures a kind of temporal entrapment—what Dryden invokes through metaphors of “confinement”—a private reading experience yields subjective agency. The closet drama is not only a source of “pleasure,” however, but also a pedagogical tool if one considers its derivation from the Platonic dialogic tradition referenced in “Scylla and Charybdis.”

In what follows, I argue that Joyce’s “Circe” episode is a site of theorization on reading practices. More precisely, I consider how and why the episode’s generic form of the closet drama is a medium through which Joyce examines surfaces and depths. After historicizing the closet drama and Joyce’s engagement with its generic tradition, I examine how and why Joyce’s use of the closet drama negotiates reader receptivity and accessibility within his novelistic project through instances within the “Circe” episode itself. Ultimately, I arrive at a consideration of Joyce’s maneuver in the context of contemporary debates on reading practices.

To “write” but not “believe” one’s theory, as “Scylla and Charybdis” sets up, stages a formal dilemma: it is a commitment to the process of theorization—or perhaps an interest in the act of theorization—more than one’s theory per se. In juxtaposing or generating a dialectic of “believing” and “writing” via Eglinton and Best’s questions, Joyce prompts us to consider what it means to write, perform, or form—but not necessarily believe—a theory.

In heeding the latter via the staged form of the “Circe” episode within Ulysses, Joyce offers a lesson on the value of “playing out” practices of reading. The “Circe” episode becomes grounds to examine the relationship, in Martin Puchner’s words, between “theoretical meditation and theatrical spectatorship” (“Theater in Modernist Thought” 521). It is also an opportunity to consider how metaphors and practices of spectatorship engage with our discipline’s debates on method and reading. Critic Julie Orlemanski argues for the value of “treating literary texts as performative scripts, for the production of imagery, affect, and meaning” and suggests that “‘performing’ texts is necessary for discovering their design and effects.” “Circe” literalizes this performative or performance-based practice (Orlemanski 230). In staging this performative practice, the “Circe” episode stages questions of surfaces, depths, and attention in reading practice.

In taking up the form of the closet drama, which historically serves both pedagogical and philosophical functions, Joyce calls attention to the shared etymology of theater and theory from the Greek theōria: to contemplate, to speculate (“Theater in Modernist Thought” 522). The latter—theorization or contemplation—is assumed to occur in the depths of one’s mind, whereas the former is an act of spectatorship. Contemplation, or theorization, or criticism, usually arrives after the act of spectatorship or a reading practice.³ A sampling of recent twenty-first-century articles on reading practice honors the relationship between the two terms, or theorization and performance. In an attempt to define close reading, Orlemanski writes, “Close reading is the performance, as it were, of a piece of writing that is treated as a script, or notation, for sensory impressions, affects, and meanings” (224; emphasis in original).

If “Circe” is a kind of script, how do we engage with or attend to its form? A study of “Circe,” a theatrical text whose form necessarily addresses questions of attendance and temporality, is also a study of the relationship between temporality and attendance in reading practices. How does one “show up” to the spectacle of “Circe”? Can one show up to “Circe”? What tools and methods, if any, does showing up to this spectacle require? Is it a more active or passive reading process than the rest of Joyce’s novel? How does one make oneself available? How does one make oneself available to any text? I pose this series of questions not to address them all at this juncture but to suggest the generative potential of “Circe” for inquiry on reading practices.

“CIRCE,” THE CLOSET DRAMA

Upon encountering the “Circe” episode, the reader meets an almost two-hundred-page-long play-text in the middle of Joyce’s novel. Although this dramatic form is a drastic deviation from previous episodes, a brief history of the closet drama reveals that the genre of “Circe” is not unique nor new in form. In 1908, Brander Matthews wrote “The Legitimacy of the Closet-Drama” and concluded, according to critic Catherine Burroughs, that there is no need for the closet drama in the twentieth century, now that no topic is off limits (Burroughs 13). Whereas early modern women writers wrote closet dramas to “avoid public censure by insisting that her play not be staged while also issuing it in print,” as outlined in Marta Straznicky’s history of the women’s closet drama (Privacy 1), Joyce evidently enlisted the genre in his modernist novel for other purposes. Accordingly, I propose that a closet drama within Joyce’s novelistic project foremost advances his, and our, theorizations on reading practices.

A mention of the “Circe” episode’s genre—the closet drama—introduces the notion of depth or concealment, thus raising tensions between modes of reading. “Circe,” through its generic form, inevitably becomes a stage for discourse on surfaces and depths—and thus what we read for, against, and through. While I do not seek here to historicize Joyce’s entanglements with theater, notably his development of the almost completely unperformed play Exiles, as Kurnick’s work on Exiles’s “textual nonperformance” does (“Joyce Unperformed” 171), it is nevertheless valuable to consider Joyce’s conceptualization of dramatic text within his novel. Writing to Frank Budgen, Joyce describes his decision to include a snippet of dramatic dialogue in “Scylla and Charybdis,” a foreshadowing of the “Circe” episode’s form: “P.S. Last night I thought of an Entr’acte for Ulysses in middle of book after 9th episode Scylla and Charybdis. Short with absolute [sic] no relation to what precedes or follows like a pause in the action of a play” (qtd. in “Joyce Unperformed” 182). Joyce’s metaphor is curious because he does not describe his usage of theatrical form in “Scylla and Charybdis” as a dramatic interlude but the pause within the “action” of a staged performance. Joyce’s unconventional conceptualization of theater here is a reminder of the way in which his theatrical engagements in Ulysses deviate from typical functions in performance and dramatic studies.

Ulysses also subverts the form of the closet drama according to Burroughs’s definition: “rarely does a closet play contain scenes among more than three characters, since [its] focus is often an argument or a debate, the action being the working out of a physical problem or the advocacy of a moral position and, even in the internal debate, the dialogic nature of such an exchange is predominantly monologic” (Burroughs 5). While Burroughs’s volume does not examine Ulysses, the “Circe” episode’s closet drama takes on many of the closet drama’s generic requirements and liberties. If the closet drama is ultimately “a tool for learning, rehearsing, reflection, and re-reading,” as Burroughs describes its form, then “Circe” meets the genre’s formal criteria through its attention to the act and practice of reading, specifically in its usage of stage directions (Burroughs 6).

My study of “Circe” as closet drama engages similar questions as those generated in recent scholarship by Kurnick and Puchner. Like Kurnick, I understand the episode as “less Joyce’s attempt to exorcise his characters’ sexual and psychic demons than his effort to defeat the will to knowledge that has shaped his career and his reader’s expectations” (“Joyce Unperformed” 156). Joyce’s attention to knowledge and readerly expectation in the episode, as Kurnick demonstrates, offers an occasion to consider reading practices and knowledge production in the episode, rather than sexual and psychic developments in the novel. However, whereas Kurnick reads “Circe” in the context of Joyce’s theatrical writings, including Exiles and Joyce’s criticism on Henrik Ibsen, as part of his study on the ways in which “the modern novel is born from theatrical failure” (“Introduction” 1), I argue that “Circe” merits critical attention for its advancement of Joyce’s negotiations of reading and narrative practice. Although Kurnick considers the extent to which the episode transcends its “textuality,” or the extent to which “this most bookish of books aspired to a status as a play text” (“Introduction” 1), his argument ultimately arrives at a conclusion on the relationship between performance and “psychosexual significance” in the episode so as to more broadly consider “Joyce’s plumbing of the sexual depths” (“Joyce Unperformed” 191). Puchner offers a useful contextualization of “Circe” within the closet drama tradition, but he is more concerned with the episode’s relationship with theatricality and performance studies than method and narrative practice.⁴

While the closet drama produces new opportunities to “pore over” a play-text (Burroughs 6), the genre also foregrounds formal failure, inaccessibility, and closure. When W.W. Greg defined the closet drama as plays “that were never acted, and were never meant to be,” he emphasized the genre’s roots in negativity and inactivity (“Recent Studies in Closet Drama” 142). The closet drama form, then, simultaneously closes form—it is not fully “open” to perception and the public as in a traditional staged performance—yet can stage politically or sexually transgressive activity for this precise reason.⁵ By extension, in rendering “Circe” a closet drama, and thus placing the episode in the context of the closet drama’s generic history and tradition, Joyce makes “Circe” prime material for symptomatic and psychoanalytic critical engagement. Hélène Cixous underscores the political and sexual openness of “Circe” within the very title of her psychoanalytic, and characteristically poetic, reading of the episode, “At Circe’s, or the Self-Opener,” and reads the episode as “the underside of the text” (390). Cheryl Herr refers to now famous accounts of “Circe,” like those by Cixous, when she writes that “Circe” has been the novel’s “psychic testing ground for Bloom” in Joyce studies (Herr 269). In considering why “Circe” is the site of psychoanalytic readings that attempt to locate the episode’s unconsciousness or to mine the episode for clues to the broader novel’s unconsciousness, we can look to the closet drama’s own history as a site of sexual transgression or the eventual “surfacing” of what typically remains hidden. While one might merely attribute these psychoanalytic readings to Jamesonian calls for symptomatic reading in recent decades, an examination of the closet drama suggests that symptomatic readings of the episode are more immanent to its form than often acknowledged.

Most studies of “Circe” as a closet drama engage the genre’s relationship to Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and “the ways in which the closet has been used to designate . . . the actual and metaphorical space in which gay/lesbian/transgender experience has been hidden and/or revealed” (Burroughs 18). This critical maneuver derives its genesis from the episode’s setting in a brothel, its staging of sexual transgression, and the fluidity of characters’ genders, namely of Leopold Bloom himself. Given Closet Drama Studies is a “nascent field” as noted in Burroughs’s introduction, her 2019 survey of the genre and field offers an opportunity to consider this question of genre in regard to Joyce’s episode and what it ultimately teaches us about broader questions of genre, form, and reading practice (Burroughs 19).

“Circe” is not only “the twentieth century’s most astonishing closet drama,” according to Puchner (“James Joyce” 97), but also is surprising in its capacity to raise questions regarding reading practice and attention. Burroughs notes that closet dramas “are crafted to encourage a ‘poring over’ of the text in ways obviously impossible in a live theatrical performance” (Burroughs 6). The closet drama, in other words, demands or permits a process of slow reading, attentiveness, and pace unavailable to a viewer of a play. This “poring over” resembles the sort of rifling through Bloom’s belongings staged in Joyce’s episode itself. Bello, also known as the prostitute madam Bella Cohen in “Circe,” threatens Bloom, “They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills” (Ulysses 443). Yet unlike the threat of depth and “violation” suggested by Bello, depth is immanent to the closet drama form rather than a decision enacted by the reader. Engaging with the “depths” of “Circe” is less a result of a calculated decision of whether to read on the surface or below its depth—as Best and Marcus, among others, frame the current debate within the discipline—but rather a result of the closet drama form. Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse and the externalization of interior dialogue in the episode’s stage directions, as I will now demonstrate, renders “Circe” a front seat to self-reflection on our own reading practices and method.

READING INDIRECTLY

A sign of a “good surface”—according to the young Joyce’s definition of surfaces in “Trust Not Appearances”—is its “deceptive” and “alluring” quality (3). The stage directions in “Circe” allegedly operate on the text’s surface as mere directives within the dramatic genre; however, the episode’s stage directions are deceptive and alluring in their allegedly straightforward quality. While the stage directions in “Circe” function as a “good surface” in their illusion of a procedural section of the episode’s text, Joyce’s use of free indirect discourse in his stage directions ultimately provokes self-reflexive and reflective moments within a reader’s encounter with the episode. In turn, these moments within the stage directions necessarily reroute us, or plunge us into, Bloom’s interiority as well as the introspective depths of our own reading practice.

The stage directions in a closet drama are the site for the genre’s greatest incongruities and perhaps liberties. Here, within the closet drama’s stage directions or alleged directives for action, is where a reader is forced to confront the odd fact that no bodies exist to perform these externalized, physical directions. “Circe” explores techniques and methods of reading not merely by the fact that Joyce offers “unperformable” stage directions, as any closet drama necessarily does, but because Joyce takes up narrative practices from his early oeuvre and early episodes of the novel in this section. In doing so, Joyce stages reflective, theoretical events in the text for his reader rather than simple directives on the “surface” of the play-text. Joyce, in other words, forces a reader of “Circe” to contemplate the act of reading his episode during the episode’s action. He challenges surface-depth binaries beyond the closet drama genre’s typical staging of these questions. When Charles Lamb wrote his polemic against staging Shakespeare’s plays in 1811, he offered a defense of the interiority inherent in one’s reading practice of a play-text. For Lamb, as summarized by eminent closet drama studies scholar Jonas Barish, “the very meaning of a scene lies in its inwardness, the theater necessarily fixes our gaze on surfaces” (Barish 328). An instance of free indirect discourse in Joyce’s stage directions in “Circe” fixes the reader’s gaze both on the depths of Bloom’s consciousness as well as the depths of our own reading practice. I understand the “Circe” episode foremost here as an apparatus to engage with our interiority as readers and critics. Although Joyce externalizes the actions of his characters in this episode via the play-text form—thus making it seem they would be confined to the “surface” of the text—his use of free indirect discourse in stage directions draws his readers back into the introspective depths of their own readings of the novel.

Despite the “Circe” episode’s dramatic form, Joyce fails to engage the potential of the dramatic medium for direct pronouncements of speech on his characters’ behalf throughout the episode. A stage direction wherein Bloom “begins a long unintelligible speech” underscores this dilemma (Ulysses 376). Although dramatic form facilitates one of the most potentially “intelligible” or direct forms of speech—quite literally one of the few genres with a designated section for “directions”—Joyce curiously opts for unintelligibility.

A moment midway through “Circe” when Joyce thwarts receptivity through free indirect discourse during Leopold Bloom’s trial for plagiarism in the episode serves as evidence:

He was down and out but, though branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths’ child, he had been carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over a new leaf and now, when at long last in sigh to the whipping post, to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family.

(Ulysses 376–77)

This passage, as a result of its situation in the italicized stage directions of the episode, is formally a directive or procedural note in the episode. However, it evinces a failure for form to convey meaning, or raises the question of incommunicability and reception. Its formal confusion perhaps leads one to wonder, “How does the reader handle a passage like this?” as Derek Attridge asks of an exchange between Zoe, a prostitute at Bella Cohen’s brothel in the episode’s “nighttown,” and Lynch, one of Stephen Dedalus’s friends and a medical student, in the episode with resemblance to the one quoted here (120).

Here, in a form that would seem to make direct address more readily accessible than ever before in the novel, Ulysses’s readers do not hear Bloom’s speech but how Bloom’s voice would appear to the box of jurors. We are reading Bloom being read. The reflective nature of this stage direction is an exception even to the majority of the “Circe” episode. For the most part, Joyce’s stage directions—albeit “unstageable” and eccentric—exhibit more typical delineations between speech and action-driven stage directions. Contrasted with the directness of alleged stage directions is this appearance of free indirect discourse in the episode, a narrative technique that mandates reflection on narrative practice and the act of reading.

A definition of what Hugh Kenner famously called the Uncle Charles Principle, Joyce’s own iteration of free indirect discourse, is useful before analyzing “Circe” itself. Although studies of narrative practice in Joyce’s oeuvre often refer to free indirect discourse and the Uncle Charles Principle, as in Michael Mayo’s 2020 Joyce and the Jesuits, they are unsurprisingly less common in the dramatic context of the “Circe” episode. Here I outline and define these narrative techniques so as to demonstrate Joyce’s adoption of them within “Circe.” The Uncle Charles Principle is when “the narrative idiom need not be the narrator’s” (Kenner 18; emphasis in original). In other words, it is a moment when a seemingly detached narrator suddenly speaks in the language of Joyce’s characters. Mayo describes the Uncle Charles Principle as “more subtle than free indirect discourse” (58). Particularly relevant in the context of “Circe” and my argument is Kenner’s use of theatrical metaphor in his account of the Uncle Charles Principle, although without reference to Joyce’s theatrical episode in Ulysses. “Writing fiction, he played parts, and referred stylistic decisions to the taste of the person he was playing,” Kenner writes of Joyce (21). “The Uncle Charles Principle entails writing about someone much as that someone would choose to be written about. So it requires a knowledge of the character at which no one could arrive by ‘observation,’ and yet its application to the character seems as external as costume, since it does not entail recording spoken words” (Kenner 21). Kenner thus defines the Uncle Charles Principle as a theatrical technique within the Joycean novel or short story; Joyce more literally “stages” this “theatrical practice”—or mode of free indirect discourse—within the “Circe” episode, a maneuver which provokes an examination of surfaces and depths. Free indirect discourse or the Uncle Charles Principle, in its simultaneous invocation of external and interior knowledge as suggested by Kenner, already stages this relationship. Joyce’s use of this technique within stage directions heightens this tension, provoking further questions on surface-depth binaries in the novel and reading practice.

While the Uncle Charles Principle has dominated studies of free indirect discourse in Joyce studies, my case study from “Circe” can be categorized as an instance of more traditional free indirect discourse. Bloom’s language does not subtly “contaminate” the stage directions, as Kenner describes Lily in the opening of “The Dead” or Uncle Charles in A Portrait, but Joyce rather overtly refers to these interjections within speech (“if he might say so”). A broader definition of free indirect discourse is also necessary to understand why Joyce takes up the practice and how it advances his engagement with surfaces and depths in the episode.

Free indirect discourse, as suggested by the narrative technique’s name, foregrounds the indirectness of communication: one is not directly engaged with the character’s psyche or speech but occupies a distance manufactured by the narrative capacity of the novel form. Franco Moretti describes the “stern objectivity of free indirect style” (130) in a way reminiscent of the stern “prescriptive,” “objective” style of stage direction, as observed by Daniel Ferrer in his analysis of “Circe” (133). While the sociality and referentiality of stage directions typically derive their meaning from staged enactment, free indirect style in the closet drama of “Circe” enacts the narrative event or process of reading the novel. “Circe” contrasts the indirection of free indirect discourse and the capacity for direction in the closet drama medium so as to foreground readerly limitation and inaccessibility.

To take up free indirect discourse in Ulysses’s “Circe” episode is curious, given free indirect discourse is not the most characteristic mode of narration in the novel’s previous episodes. To do so in “Circe” becomes a necessarily reflective act on what it means to narrate and read character. While free indirect discourse, according to Hans Robert Jauss as summarized by Moretti, traditionally “places the novel in opposition to the dominant culture” and—in Jauss’s words—generates “uncertainty of judgment . . . turning a predecided question of public morals back into an open problem” (Moretti 98), Joyce uses free indirect discourse as a means of asserting auditory ambiguity and Bloom’s unintelligibility while on trial in “Circe.” It is a parodic version of Moretti’s characterization of free indirect discourse as “a sort of stylistic Panopticon,” where free indirect discourse is “a form of social control” (Moretti 99). When Bloom’s alleged attempt to communicate himself culminates with ellipses and the notation of “Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that they cannot hear” (Ulysses 377), readers are reminded that their interpretation of Bloom is likely unfinished, incomplete, and a result of mishearing and thus inference.

This moment of alleged unintelligibility in the episode’s stage directions, or Joyce’s foreclosure of possibilities for audition, advances the closet drama’s already generative engagement with surfaces and depths. The overt foreclosure of intelligibility in this stage direction contests the alleged capacities of the closet drama where things emerge, wherein the time to “pore over” a text would amount to reception of characters’ speech and intelligibility. This exchange evinces why “Circe” has been deemed “recalcitrant” and formally resistive, in Catherine Flynn’s words, or “resists consumption” (134). This sequence in “Circe” forces its reader to confront not merely Bloom’s unintelligibility but also how and why this passage is communicated to the reader as unintelligible speech. The episode’s readers themselves never deem Bloom unintelligible based on their own perception or assessment of his speech but are mere recipients of a value judgment. The emphasis here is on rhetoric, never letting the reader of “Circe” forget the introspection that happens alongside any engagement with a text. A reader of “Circe” experiences affective pleasure that they know “how to read” free indirect discourse, let alone the “unintelligible” discourse that Bloom speaks to the jury. Not only is the auditors’ failure staged in this instance but also Bloom’s own frustration with his failure to deliver and recover memory evidenced by “he meant to reform, to retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to nature as a purely domestic animal.” Joyce, too, cites auditors within the play-text itself who voice complaints regarding accessibility and receptivity. These “reporters” serve as a forewarning of the sorts of possible complaints of difficulty leveraged against the episode.

The conflict of this moment remains distinct to and aware of the capacities of the closet drama form. Bloom is inarticulate to the members of the text but most intelligible and in dialogue with the novel’s readers. It generates the “generous” mode of reading recommended by Timothy Bewes where “A generous reading is always, in part, a reading of ourselves reading” (“Reading with the Grain” 28). Not only do we read Bloom being read by auditors within Joyce’s novel but also now read ourselves reading. If free indirect discourse is known as a means of creating readerly proximity to a character in the nineteenth-century novel, where a reader gleans insight into a narrated character’s interior life or their idiom for a fleeting second, Joyce uses free indirect discourse in his stage directions to emphasize the indirect reception of characters’ speech and interiority in the closet drama. By including free indirect discourse within the stage directions of “Circe,” Joyce ultimately stages the event of free indirect discourse, or rather stages narrative discourse. This appropriation of free indirect discourse within the episode’s dramatic context engages the question of direction and indirection and ultimately that of surfaces and depths. Whereas Ulysses’s earlier episodes allegedly delve into the depths of Bloom’s (and Stephen’s, among other characters’) consciousness, “Circe” “stages” these depths—or what precisely diving into the depths of this text entails. A deep dive below its surface will not result in knowledge of characters’ interior states, one learns, but rather a consideration of the relationship between interiority and reading strategies within the novel.

The alleged unintelligibility of this passage does not confine the reader to mere “surface” engagement with Bloom but soon gives way to an introspective turn for Bloom and the reader alike. Following this stage direction on Bloom’s unintelligibility, which runs for a lengthy twenty-six lines, a reader arrives at a continuation of the “crossexamination,” now in a medical context. Suddenly, a reader of the episode is situated in Bloom’s diction despite the fact that italicized print would typically connote prescriptive stage directions rather than Bloom’s speech itself:

A large bucket. Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street. Gripe, yes. Quite bad. A plasterer’s bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery. Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment. He did not look in the bucket. Nobody. Rather a mess. Not completely. A Titbits back number. Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash, dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of stickingplaster across his nose, talks inaudibly.

(Ulysses 377)

Although Bloom allegedly “talks inaudibly” to his panel of auditors, he speaks in a vernacular familiar to his readers of the past several episodes. The “unintelligibility” of the preceding section, in other words, is countered with a kind of secret code between the novel’s reader and Bloom. The language of these stage directions is reminiscent of the moment in “Lestrygonians”—the eighth episode of the novel, preceding “Scylla and Charybdis”—when Bloom monologues, “Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up” (Ulysses 147). If the closet drama is a kind of clandestine affair, here readers are “in” on the joke of Bloom’s interior monologue. A reader of Ulysses over the past several episodes has become attuned to Bloom’s distinct diction and syntax utilized in his interior monologue in a way now inaccessible to the panel of jurors in “Circe.” “O, I can read your thoughts!” Zoe says to Bloom at a later juncture (Ulysses 407), invoking engagement with and legibility of Bloom’s interiority. Zoe’s line becomes a pronouncement of the process we undergo in reading the episode wherein a reader does hear Bloom’s thoughts in italics, wherein we are keenly aware of the process of reading in free indirect discourse.

The “directed” or “directable” form of the dramatic genre—even in the case of the closet drama form that “Circe” inhabits—typically foregrounds the possibility of direct communication. Then, why, one might ask, does Bloom speak in a style to his auditors that is likely unintelligible to anyone except a reader of the novel? “Circe,” for all of its appearances of indirection and “unintelligibility” within its stage directions, is the first instance in Ulysses wherein Joycean interiority is rendered directable. The novel’s third “Proteus” episode is notoriously known as one of the more difficult or opaque episodes of the novel because it does not cater to an auditor’s associative breaks but maintains Stephen’s associative delineations. A play-text, on the other hand, tacitly acknowledges a public and social environment, even in the closet drama and particularly in the context of “Circe,” which stages a public in the form of a large cast of characters and institutional setting (most specifically, the episode’s courtroom). Unlike Joyce’s attention to an individual’s attempt or failure to see through the “diaphane” in the “Proteus” episode, the staged characters in “Circe” engage with a cast of “directed” auditors and readers, both in and outside of the text. Joyce’s earlier episodes place a reader allegedly “inside,” or at least alongside, Bloom or Stephen’s interior monologue, whereas “Circe” stages this interiority in the form of an orally delivered account addressed to an auditor. Despite the fact that these stage directions refer to externalized components of the characters, their invocation of free indirect discourse, and their engagement with interior monologue, does more than mere “surface,” procedural work. Joyce’s closet drama is self-consciously grounded in the prospect of interiority and an introspective, self-mediated reading practice as opposed to the perceptual, externalized viewing experience in the theater. If Moretti defines free indirect discourse as “Emotions, plus distance,” as quoted by Bewes in Free Indirect (206), “Circe” raises the stakes of this tension and generates a form of free indirect discourse with an additional kind of distance.

Joyce’s maneuver here is a mode of theorizing surfaces: a good, deceptive surface of an allegedly prescriptive stage direction necessitates a reflection on Bloom’s and Joyce’s practices of self-narration in previous encounters in the novel. When Joyce writes, “A few moments later he emerges from under the shutter, puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom” (354), the italicized stage directions continue the episode’s directions reminiscent of Bloom’s interior monologue as depicted and made accessible in “Lestrygonians”: “A large bucket. Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street. Gripe, yes. Quite bad. A plasterer’s bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery. Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial moment” (377). Now, the Joycean interior monologue becomes the externalized, staged dialogue in “Circe,” “Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence. Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee . . .” (385). This passage from “Circe” invokes the speech patterns characteristic of Joycean interior monologue—what Liisa Dahl calls the “inner order”—wherein “the predicate complement, for instance, may have front-position in interior monologue if it contains an idea which comes first into the soliloquizer’s mind” (49), now in an explicitly externalized form of speech. If the dean in A Portrait suggested that a “trained diver” goes down into the depths only to come to the surface again, a trained reader of Ulysses emerges on the surface of the novel’s stage directions and staged dialogue to now recognize one’s training. The rewarding depths of “Circe” are not truths about Bloom’s nature or unconsciousness but instead the self-knowledge of our reading practice, and the recognition that a modulation between surface and depth is foundational to this process.

Despite the alleged depth of the closet drama form, or the depth that a pursuit of “poring over” the text in one’s own privacy allegedly produces, “Circe” provides an alternative sort of readerly quest for depth. It does not amount to a precise knowledge or intelligibility of character but an awareness of what happens when one reads Ulysses. After all, this very notion of depth is parodied in “Circe” when Bello “bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva” (Ulysses 440). Here depth, or the act of seeking depth, is made parodic to the point of literalized sexual transgression; it is physical and direct to a fault.

Stage directions in “Circe” evidence Joyce’s commitment to a kind of textual engagement derived from the possibilities of indirection. An engagement with moments when Joyce stymies the accessibility of his text—such as his use of free indirect discourse within the episode—necessitates a recalibration outside of direct engagement between subject and object, reader and text. Moreover, it teaches the novel’s reader that this confrontation with indirection is an opportunity to recognize one’s fluency in Ulysses and the fluidity with which one navigates surfaces and depths. A reader of “Circe” occupies both the surface, in the social and narrative position of free indirect discourse, as well as Bloom’s interiority and the interior cognitive reading practice of the closet drama form. “Circe” ultimately asks not how deeply one can engage with the episode and novel writ large, but instead how a reader learns to recalibrate to the modulation between surface and depth required by the closet drama form.

ACTING THEORETICALLY, READING THEATRICALLY

The state of literary studies at the present moment is its own kind of theater for debates on reading practice and methodology, or what Rita Felski termed the “method wars” in 2011 (“Introduction” v). The “Circe” episode offers anticipatory confirmation of the present attention to surfaces and depths within ongoing debates in literary studies. The dean’s image of a diver in A Portrait makes a kind of appearance in The Limits of Critique when Felski asks, “Should we be close readers or distant readers? Dive in or draw back? Burrow into a text or slide and skitter along its surface?” (52). Is a good reading practice, in other words, marked by one’s submergence in the depths of a text, as practices of symptomatic reading would encourage; or someone who, again in Felski’s words, “Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth . . . stares intently at these surfaces, seeking to render them improbable through the imperturbability of her gaze” (Limits of Critique 54)? I propose that Joyce’s “Circe” episode affirms the concerns of the so-called method wars, as well as encourages a departure from its current rigid models wherein one elects either to stand back or dive in, opt for surface or depth. In conclusion, I argue that Joyce’s closet drama productively muddles two binaries: surface and depth, along with action and contemplation.

While Joyce’s Ulysses did not emerge in response to the present “theater” of theorizations within literary studies, “Circe” reframes these debates through new, engaging approaches. Joyce’s utilization of the closet drama form is a reminder that the question of surfaces and depths is immanent to the episode’s demanded reading practice rather than solely a debate in a literary institutional context. In utilizing the closet drama genre, Joyce takes up a form that juxtaposes the typically externalized quality of a performance text, wherein one awaits its reception in staged bodies, and the “depths” of a reading practice. Joyce advances the closet drama form, as evidenced by his integration of traditional practices of the nineteenth-century and modernist novel: free indirect discourse and the interior monologue as formulated in Ulysses’s earlier episodes and Joyce’s oeuvre. The modulation between surfaces and depths is inescapable in Joyce’s text not only because of our own critical fascination with their conflict but also because of the closet drama genre’s demands and affordances.

Best and Marcus, in the conclusion to “Surface Reading,” advance two observations: “that to see more clearly does not require that we plumb hidden depths and that producing accurate accounts of surfaces is not antithetical to critique” (18). I argue that Joyce’s “Circe” episode is both a confirmation and complication of this claim. “Circe” is an endorsement through its foreclosure of these “hidden depths” of Bloom by way of the narrative practice exercised in the stage directions wherein characterization is rendered inaccessible. In arguing that “Circe” is not an endorsement of reading the episode for clues to Bloom’s or the novel’s unconscious, I instead propose that “Circe” is an endorsement of a constant engagement with the modulation between surfaces and depths, rather than an allegiance to either surfaces or depths, respectively. Regarding Best and Marcus’s second claim, I propose that an “account” of this episode’s surface emerges through the process of iterative, experiential engagement due to its dramatic form. My reading of “Circe” suggests not that it is unadvisable or fallacious to remain in the depths of Joyce’s text but that it is impossible to fully do so due to the iterative, recursive form of the “Circe” episode. “Circe” re-envisions a new mode of “searching,” to speak in the vocabulary of Felski, and Best and Marcus, by way of its iterative formal qualities.

A staging of a play, as the genre of “Circe” reminds its reader, is a recursive process: each encounter with a staging, or reading of the episode, is a reminder of a future possible staging. To watch a play again, however, is not necessarily to go deeper below the surface but rather to acknowledge the value of attendance. A “viewing”—or poring over—of “Circe” the closet drama entails recognition of its iterative process, of the fact the closet drama form encourages a repetitive, endless return to the episode’s surface. My goal in reading “Circe” in its closet drama tradition is thus to honor the recursive nature of its form: if one recalls the metaphor of the diver, he ventures into the depths only to surface again. “Circe” stages that process, through beckoning us into reflection, only to ask us to reread and restage our readings. Joyce’s “Circe” episode, in upholding the tradition of the Platonic dialogue, necessitates a pedagogical kind of reflection on reading practice, specifically through instances of free indirect discourse.

“Circe” is not a staged play, as is obvious from its situation in a novel, and in turn only engages one body: that of the reader. Timothy Bewes writes that a “generous reading is always, in part, a reading of ourselves reading,” and Joyce’s moment of free indirect discourse in the “Circe” episode’s stage directions generously offers a mode of self-reflection on reading practice and underscores readerly engagement with the episode (“Reading with the Grain” 28). Joyce’s maneuver is also a reminder that literary texts—or theater, in the case of “Circe”—can theorize. Unavoidable in the action of the “Circe” episode is an acknowledgement of the act of reading. It is a reminder that this text is not “unintelligible” to its reader, as Bloom is rendered by his auditors, but a humbler—perhaps more radical—reminder that one is immersed in an appropriate reading practice for Ulysses, simply because one is doing it. To show up to the spectacle of “Circe” is to show up to watch one’s own reading practice. To heed the episode’s textual possibilities is to concede with Best and Marcus’s claim that at least one “purpose of criticism is thus a relatively modest one: to indicate what the text says about itself ” (11). The “Circe” episode, albeit confined to the page, demands a commitment to readerly presence and attendance via its closet drama form. That might appear a tall order. It is made possible, however, by Joyce’s directive and encouragement for self-reflection.

While a taxing reading experience, “Circe” is rarely known as the most cerebral or philosophical episode of Ulysses.⁶ A typical examination of pedagogy, reading practice, and literary institutions would perhaps more easily occur in the classrooms or library of the novel. However, conflict between action and contemplation, surfaces and depths, lies at the center of “Circe.” If the closet drama is an intersection of theatrical action and critical contemplation, it stages an opportunity, in the words of Hannah Arendt at the outset of The Human Condition, “to think what we are doing” (5). Arendt’s dictum calls for a radical marriage of thought and action in the context of politics and the public sphere; her grammar renders thought and action simultaneous to and indistinct from each another. However, I invoke Arendt’s formulation here for the broader stakes of its reconfiguration of action and contemplation—or, in her terms, the vita activa and vita contemplativa—that I observe in Joyce’s use of the closet drama form within the novel. As indicated by the shared etymology of theory and theater in theōria, critical contemplation does not come after the act of engagement with “Circe” but instead occurs in simultaneity with its action and plot. That, too, teaches us something about surfaces and depths: regardless of our critical preference, regardless of our anxieties around whether to stand back or dig down—in the words of Felski—the action of “Circe” implicates us in a process of oscillation between the two. Contemplation is inescapable even in the allegedly most enacted or acted episode of Joyce’s novel. “Circe,” in other words, asks us to think what we are doing as we read due to its invocation for self-reflection.

“Circe,” by way of its closet drama form, is a site of theōria. That is to say “Circe” is quite literally a spectacle, to return to the marriage between theater and theory as outlined by Martin Puchner (“Theater in Modernist Thought” 521–22). To conclude that “Circe” is unapologetically grounds for theōria is to recall that it is simultaneously territory for contemplation, in the form of theorization, and action, in the form of a plotted, acted theatrical spectacle. In reading “Circe” through its closet drama form, I argue that “Circe” is a call to “think what we are doing” in literary studies, specifically regarding surfaces and depths.

In honoring this relationship between theory and theater, I propose the theoretical value of spectatorship. Joyce wrote “trust not appearances,” but a reader of Ulysses can indeed trust that this iterative process will produce critical value. From continued engagement with the episode’s pages, we may find that we submerge and then arrive once again at its surface in a future reading. If the closet drama blurs the line between surface and depth, it also obscures any clear delineation between readerly action and critical contemplation. “Circe” as closet drama is not merely an object for a critical search but also a spectacle to observe the action of Joyce’s novel, as well as that of our critical practice. In “Circe,” one is made a diver simply by showing up to watch. We need not fear getting lost in the depths, for we surface again with a subsequent reading.