Concentric circles

In Brief

Just before the end of Ithaca, as Molly and Bloom lie beside one another in bed, she interrogating, he responding, the question is asked, "What moved visibly above the listener's and the narrator's invisible thoughts?" Answer: "The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow." Many readers have detected in this scene an echo of Dante's Paradiso, where on several different occasions the pilgrim beholds concentric circles consisting of hierarchically ranked angels, sanctified human souls, or Persons of the divine Trinity. The last of these, where Dante sees God in the form of three interpenetrating circles, occurs just before the end of the poem's final canto, and on that and other grounds it seems the most likely analogue for Joyce's scene. But the Blooms are not contemplating the nature of the Trinity and humanity's involvement in it. If an analogy to Paradiso 33 is implied, they are contemplating the nature of marriage and their involvement in it.

In the Appendix to Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination, Mary Reynolds suggests two possible analogues in the Paradiso. Canto 14 shows Dante in conversation with Thomas Aquinas, who makes up a starlike light in two bright rings of 24 lights each. The canto opens with a simile: Dante's thoughts, when he has heard what Thomas has to say, move like the ripples in a round container, "From center to rim, as from rim to center," when it is "struck from without or from within" (1-3). A little later, in the lines that Reynolds quotes, the souls in their "holy circles showed new joy in wheeling / As well as in their wondrous song (14.23-24). In canto 28 Dante sees God as an infinitesimal "point" of intensely bright light surrounded by nine fiery circles of angels, the smallest circle revolving at unimaginable speed and each succeeding ring revolving more slowly.

Reynolds' Appendix consists merely of quotations from Joyce's works followed by allegedly analogous quotations from Dante's, without any commentary, so her readers can only imagine what thought processes may have driven her choices. But it is hard to see what precise relevance these two cantos, or most other ones where circles play a prominent role, could have to the depiction of the Blooms gazing up at rings of light on their bedroom ceiling. And if readers can be certain of anything by this point in the novel, it is that when Joyce alludes to a literary work he usually has precise passages in mind, its details establishing precise and multifarious dialogue with details in his own scenes.

The last representation of circles in the Paradiso, which Reynolds does not cite, does offer such intertextual correspondences. It comes just before the end of the Commedia's final canto, much as the concentric circles in Ithaca come just before the end of the novel's linear action. Thanks to Russell Raphael for pointing out in a personal communication that at the end of Ithaca Bloom has arrived at his heaven, the marriage bed, and that Molly's chapter can be seen as a kind of "coda" to the male structure of the first seventeen chapters.

As in Joyce's scene, canto 33 involves two people––Dante and his final guide, St. Bernard of Clairvaux––gazing up at circles of light. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary that "by lifting up his eyes, / he may rise higher toward his ultimate salvation" (26-27). Dante directs his gaze "upward" (50) to where Bernard and Mary are looking, and his sight, "becoming pure, / rose higher and higher through the ray of the exalted light" (52-54). His sight penetrates, in some way that he cannot communicate or remember, to the infinite source of all being.

The experience culminates in an vision of three circles somehow contained in one another:

In the deep, transparent essence of the lofty Light
there appeared to me three circles
having three colors but the same extent,

and each one seemed reflected by the other
as rainbow is by rainbow, while the third seemed fire,
equally breathed forth by one and by the other.

Amid this mystery of the Trinity is inscribed the other central mystery of Christian doctrine, the Incarnation. After Dante gazes on the "circling" for a while, it seems, "within itself and in its very color, to be painted with our likeness, / so that my sight was all absorbed in it" (127, 130-32). Like a geometer attempting to square the circle, the pilgrim struggles "to see how the image fit the circle / and how it found its where in it" (137-38). He fails intellectually, but a divinely granted flash of insight gives him what he seeks, obliterating his sense of self and subsuming his will and desire, "like wheels revolving" (143), in the Love that turns the stars.

In Joyce's scene, Bloom and Molly gaze upward into rings of light that are "inconstant," "varying," with "gradations of light and shadow"––a commonly experienced photonic effect that replicates some of Dante's sense of differently colored circles that inhere in one another, reflect one another, proceed from one another. Nothing in the text surrounding this vision suggests, as everything in the text surrounding Dante's vision suggests, that they are seeking to understand the nature of God. What they have been thinking about, immediately prior to this, is their marriage: where Bloom has been all day and what he has been doing (no such questions are asked about Molly's day, for obvious reasons), how their sexual relationship has been affected for the last ten and a half years by the death of their son, how their personal relationship has been affected by the initial menstruation of their daughter. And, before those thoughts, their discussion has focused on "Stephen Dedalus, professor and author."

The context suggests that, if there is an allusion to Dante's vision in canto 33, the Blooms are contemplating the mystery of how the two of them fit together in one circle of marriage. And, if Joyce is working as precisely as he typically does with such allusions, they may also be contemplating how Stephen may fit into their circle of marriage. Bloom has already been shown asking himself such questions in Eumaeus and Ithaca, and Molly will be shown doing so in Penelope. It would seem that Stephen wants no part in a ménage-a-trois, sexual or otherwise, with a couple nearly old enough to be his parents, but for both Bloom and Molly this particular triangulation seems to hold out some hope of marital rejuvenation. And if they are indeed seeing some kind of Trinity, carnal or otherwise, in the dancing rings of light, then this allusion to Dante, stripped of its Christian theological references, may represent a kind of culminating symbol for Ulysses: Stephen, Bloom, and Molly united in an effigy of Trinitarian mystery.

In more general terms, the allusion to Dante would seem to hold out some hope that the problems in the Blooms' marriage are not insoluble. For Dante, the circles open a window into what he seeks: perfect understanding of the divine plan and his place in it. No mystical vision at the end of Bloom's day or Molly's puts a satisfying end to their intellectual and appetitive quests, but if they do see themselves united in the light that hangs over their bed then the book is suggesting that divorce is not the inevitable consequence of their alienation. Just as Dante's vision of God is predicated on his perfect understanding of Faith, Hope, and Love (three different saints interrogate him on those subjects, and he passes his orals with distinction), with enough faith, hope, and love the marriage of the Blooms may yet endure.

JH 2024

Concentric circles

In Brief

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