Concentric circles

In Brief

Just before the end of Ithaca, as Molly and Bloom lie beside one another in bed, she interrogating, he responding, comes the question, "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." The image recalls a scene just before the end of the Divine Comedy in which the pilgrim and his guide gaze up at the divine Trinity in the form of three interpenetrating circles. Rather than the perfection of God, the Blooms have been contemplating their imperfect marriage. But Bloom too has been on a long pilgrimage, and the last thing he sees on this day suggests that he has returned to his heaven. Like Dante's God, it is something that he and his wife must struggle to understand and to find their place in.

Various scenes in the Paradiso feature concentric circles, both angels and human souls coming together to form this shape. In the Appendix to Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination, Mary Reynolds offers two possible analogues to the scene in Ithaca. Canto 14 shows Dante in conversation with Thomas Aquinas, who appears as one starlike light in two bright rings circling one another: "the holy circles showed new joy in wheeling / As well as in their wondrous song" (23-24). Reynolds does not cite it, but the canto opens with a similar image: Dante's thoughts, when he has heard what Thomas has to say, move like water 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). There are more concentric circles in canto 28, when Dante sees God as an infinitesimal point of intensely bright light surrounded by nine fiery rings of angels, revolving at different speeds.

Reynolds' appendix merely quotes lines from Joyce's works followed by similar ones from Dante's, without commenting, so readers can only infer the thought processes behind her choices, but it is hard to see what precise relevance the soul-rings or the angel-rings could have to the rings of light on the Blooms' bedroom ceiling. The concentric circles at the end of Paradiso 33 offer more promising grist for the allusive mill. (Reynolds does not cite them in her appendix, though she does mention them earlier when she discusses Dantean circles in Finnegans Wake.) The canto shows two people––Dante and his final guide, St. Bernard of Clairvaux––gazing up toward God. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary that "by lifting up his eyes, / he may rise higher toward his ultimate salvation" (26-27). Dante looks "upward" (50) to where Bernard and Mary are gazing, and his sight, "becoming pure, / rose higher and higher through the ray of the exalted light" (52-54). In a way that he cannot communicate or even remember, his sight penetrates to the infinite source of all being.

The experience culminates in a vision of three "circlings" (giri) 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. (115-20)

Amid this mystery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is inscribed the other central mystery of Christian doctrine, the unity of God and Man in the incarnate Christ. After some gazing, the "circling" 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," with "varying gradations of light and shadow"––a commonly experienced effect of lampshades. Perhaps Joyce meant to contrast these imperfect circles with the transcendently significant ones of Paradiso 33, or perhaps he intended to evoke Dante's impression of colored lights mysteriously shimmering into one another while remaining separate. Similar questions of correspondence or non-correspondence are raised by the images' referents. As he looks at the lights Dante struggles to understand the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Blooms, by contrast, are thinking about what Bloom has been doing all day (such questions about Molly's day remain unasked), about Molly's inquisitorial interest in such matters ever since Milly's first period, and about the sad state of their sexual relationship since the death of Rudy.

Every Joycean allusion invites readers to ask how far the correspondence may extend. Does the Ithaca passage offer an analogue to Dante's effort to see how the human image is inscribed in the divine one? It probably does, since both Leopold and Marion are asking themselves whether they still have a place in this marriage, and are struggling to see how they fit in it. Does some Trinitarian relationship figure in their thoughts? This seems less certain, but possible. Just before the long paragraph devoted to Bloom's day, Molly's interrogation, Milly's menstruation, Rudy's death, and sex, a short one has asked what is the "salient point" of Bloom's narration. Answer: "Stephen Dedalus." Husband and wife may well be wondering how Stephen could fit into their marital circle. In Eumaeus and Ithaca Bloom thinks that bringing the young man into his house might solve certain problems, and in Penelope Molly entertains similar thoughts. Stephen shows no sign of wanting any part in a triangle, sexual or otherwise, but for both Blooms it seems to hold out some hope of marital rejuvenation.

Or, to consider a different Trinity, could Milly be contained in the circles? The narrative has just described how her pubescence has altered behavioral patterns in the marriage, and earlier in Ithaca Bloom has recalled a time when a drop of his daughter's spit made "concentric circles of waterrings," precisely like the image at the beginning of canto 14. A Bloom-Molly-Milly trinity on the ceiling would constitute an emblem of the current family unit. A Bloom-Molly-Stephen trinity would convey the potential union of the novel's three protagonists: Father, Mother, and surrogate Son.

Such human mysteries may prove as impossible to parse out as Dante's theological questions, but in both works the overall promise of the circles seems clear enough. Dante's offer him insight into the Love that moves the stars. Joyce's, if they are cut from the same cloth, suggest that the Blooms still see something worth saving in their marriage. Dante's vision requires that he demonstrate his understanding of faith (canto 24), hope (25), and love (26). With enough of these three virtues, the Blooms too may find their way through a rough patch to a secular approximation of heaven.

Ithaca begins with Bloom and Stephen visualized from far above charting squiggly "parallel courses" from the Customhouse to Eccles Street. It ends with Bloom and Molly tracing lines through unbounded space on squiggly parallel courses described by the earth's rotation, revolution, and inclination "at an angle of 45° to the terrestrial equator" and positioned 180° to one another in the bed. The scientific worldview implicit in the chapter's mathematics and astronomy provides a kind of framing context for Joyce's appropriation of Dante's image, whose parallel circles embody the perfection of changeless being. In the world of change nothing is perfect, but even in shadows playing on a ceiling life holds out provisional promises of fulfillment.

John Hunt and Russell Raphael 2024

Concentric circles

In Brief

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