Joe: What if every single one of your private anxieties—your deepest insecurities about your job, your relationship, your place in the world—suddenly came to life and started screaming at you in a crowded room? Lewis: That sounds like a nightmare. A very specific, very public nightmare. Joe: It is a nightmare. And it’s the heart of what James Joyce does in his notoriously difficult masterpiece, Ulysses. He takes us on a journey, not just through the streets of Dublin on a single day in 1904, but through the unfiltered, untamed chaos of the human mind. Lewis: And that’s a place most of us try to keep locked up for a reason. Joyce, apparently, decided to pick the lock and invite everyone in for a tour. It’s a book with a legendary reputation for being, let's be honest, incomprehensible. People joke that they deserve a medal just for finishing it. Joe: Absolutely. It’s the literary Mount Everest. But the thing is, you don't have to climb the whole mountain to see the most incredible view. There's a section in the middle of this book that is so wild, so psychologically daring, that it contains the key to the whole thing. Lewis: And today, we’re going to be your guides through that beautiful, terrifying chaos. We’re tackling Ulysses from two angles. First, we'll plunge into the psychological deep end: the famous 'Nighttown' scene, where reality completely shatters and the subconscious takes over. Joe: Then, we’ll uncover the ghosts that are driving this madness—from the very personal guilt of the characters to the collective trauma of an entire nation. We promise, by the end of this, the incomprehensible will start to make a strange, and deeply human, kind of sense.

Joe: Alright, so let's go straight to the heart of the storm. It’s late at night on June 16th, 1904. Our two main characters, the young, brooding artist Stephen Dedalus and the older, gentle advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom, find themselves in Dublin’s red-light district, which Joyce calls 'Nighttown'. Lewis: A place that's already on the fringes of polite society. The perfect setting for the rules of reality to bend a little. Joe: Or in this case, to shatter completely. This chapter, known as 'Circe,' is unlike anything else in literature. Joyce writes it as a phantasmagoric play script. You have character names and dialogue, but the stage directions are where the madness lives. They describe hallucinations, surreal transformations, and bizarre, dreamlike events as if they are actually happening. Lewis: So it’s not just what the characters are thinking. It’s as if their thoughts have physically manifested on stage next to them. The internal becomes external. Joe: Exactly. It's the literary equivalent of a fever dream. And the perfect example of this is what happens to Stephen Dedalus. Throughout the book, we know he's haunted by the death of his mother. He refused to kneel and pray at her deathbed, and the guilt is eating him alive. Lewis: It's his great unresolved trauma. The wound he keeps poking. Joe: And in the brothel, drunk and exhausted, that wound doesn't just ache—it rips open. The stage directions tell us his mother's ghost, emaciated and ghastly in her decaying grave clothes, rises up through the floorboards. She's not just a memory; she's a character in the scene. Lewis: And what does she say? Is it a comforting, motherly ghost? I'm guessing not. Joe: Not even close. She looks at him with hollow eyes and whispers these chilling words: "All must go through it, Stephen... You too. Time will come." She's not offering forgiveness; she's offering him a vision of his own mortality, his own eventual decay, wrapped in his guilt. She begs him to repent. Lewis: It’s a projection of his deepest fear—that his defiance, his artistic pride, has damned him and that he's destined to end up just like her, consumed by regret. So how does he react? Does he break down? Joe: You’d think so, but Stephen is a rebel to his core. He looks at this horrifying manifestation of his own guilt and, instead of cowering, he lifts his walking stick—his ashplant—and screams the motto of Lucifer: "Non serviam!" which means "I will not serve!" Lewis: He won't serve God, he won't serve the Church, and he won't serve this guilt his mother's memory represents. Joe: And with that scream, he smashes the brothel's chandelier. The room is plunged into darkness and chaos. It's one of the most powerful moments in the book. He is literally trying to shatter the light of the world that is showing him this unbearable vision of himself. Lewis: That is an incredible image. It’s not just stream-of-consciousness, where we hear a jumble of thoughts. This is what you might call 'enacted-consciousness'. Joyce isn't just telling us Stephen feels guilty; he's building a stage and having Guilt itself walk onto it and deliver its lines. Joe: It’s a raw data dump from the human soul. It's messy, it's contradictory, it's often nonsensical. You get these bizarre, cryptic lines from Stephen like, "Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon." It sounds like nonsense, and it is, but it's the nonsense of dreams. It’s the logic of the subconscious, which doesn't operate in neat, complete sentences. Lewis: It’s the mind with all its filters turned off. We spend our whole lives curating the thoughts we express, presenting a coherent, logical version of ourselves to the world. Joyce is showing us the raw, uncurated feed. And it's terrifying, but it's also more true, in a way. Joe: It's the ultimate act of psychological realism. He’s not just describing a character; he’s dropping you directly into the character's nervous system. And once you're there, you realize Stephen isn't the only one being haunted.

Lewis: Exactly. And that's the perfect pivot. Stephen's mother isn't the only ghost in the room. This entire chapter is a haunted house, and every character is carrying their own specter. Let's talk about our other protagonist, the everyman, Leopold Bloom. Joe: Bloom is a much more grounded character than Stephen. He's kind, empathetic, and observant. But he has his own private hell. All day long, he's been tormented by one fact: he knows that at 4 PM, his wife, Molly, is having an affair with her flashy music manager, Blazes Boylan. Lewis: And unlike Stephen's guilt, which is about a past action, Bloom's anxiety is about a present powerlessness. He's a cuckold, and he feels utterly inadequate and humiliated. Joe: So when Bloom enters Nighttown, his subconscious doesn't conjure up a decaying ghost. It conjures up elaborate fantasies of his own humiliation and bizarre transformations. At one moment, he's put on trial for his sexual peccadilloes. At another, he magically transforms into a woman. His deepest insecurities about his masculinity and his role as a husband are played out in this surreal theater. Lewis: He's grappling with his own sense of inadequacy. And this is where Joyce does something truly brilliant. He shows how these deeply personal anxieties are tangled up with much larger, public ones. The personal nightmare and the national nightmare become one and the same. Joe: You see this perfectly after Stephen smashes the chandelier and runs out into the street. He gets into an argument with two British soldiers, Private Carr and Private Compton. Lewis: And this isn't just a random drunken brawl. This is a collision of worlds. Stephen, the hyper-intellectual, sensitive Irish artist, versus these two representatives of the British Empire, the occupying force in Ireland. The soldiers are with a prostitute, and they think Stephen has insulted her. Joe: Stephen, in his typical fashion, doesn't just apologize. He launches into a philosophical, sarcastic tirade. The soldiers are talking about fighting for their country, and Stephen retorts with this incredible line: "You die for your country. Suppose... But I say: Let my country die for me." Lewis: It's the ultimate rejection of patriotic sacrifice. It's the artist's declaration of independence from the state, from nationalism, from everything. And of course, to a soldier, this is the most offensive thing you could possibly say. Joe: Private Carr completely loses it. He screams, "I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!" And then he punches Stephen in the face, knocking him out cold. Lewis: And in that moment, it's not just a fight. It's a microcosm of Irish history. It's the sensitive, rebellious spirit of Ireland being crushed by the brute, unthinking force of its colonial master. Stephen's intellectual rebellion is met with physical violence. Joe: And Bloom, the ever-present father figure, rushes in to protect Stephen. He tries to de-escalate, to reason with them, but he's powerless against the mob mentality. Lewis: Let's connect the dots here, because this is the core of it. Bloom's personal feeling of being emasculated and controlled by Boylan in his own home is a mirror of how many Irish people felt about being controlled by England in their own country. His private humiliation reflects a public one. Joe: And Stephen's rebellion is two sides of the same coin. He rebels against the ghost of his mother and the Catholic faith she represents, screaming "I will not serve." And moments later, he rebels against the authority of the British soldiers with his sarcastic, anti-patriotic rhetoric. It's the same defiant spirit fighting against different forms of control—religious, familial, and political. Lewis: This is why Stephen says earlier in the book one of its most famous lines: "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." For Joyce, the past isn't just a collection of stories. It's an active, oppressive force. It's a ghost that haunts the present, both for individuals and for nations. The fight on Beaver Street is the nightmare of Irish history erupting into the present moment. Joe: And the beauty of the Nighttown chapter is that it puts all these nightmares on the same stage. Stephen's dead mother, Bloom's sexual anxieties, and the violent history of British rule in Ireland are all swirling together in this psychological vortex.

Joe: So, Ulysses, or at least this insane, brilliant part of it, is like a psychological pressure cooker. Joyce throws in the most potent ingredients he can find: personal guilt, like Stephen's over his mother, and profound insecurity, like Bloom's over his marriage. Lewis: And then he cranks up the heat with the suffocating pressures of religion, culture, and national history. The result is this explosion of surreal, hallucinatory chaos we see in Nighttown. It's a creative Big Bang. Joe: He's showing that you can't possibly understand a person by looking only at their conscious, rational self. You have to dive into the messy, irrational subconscious. And you can't understand that subconscious without understanding both their private demons and the public ghosts that haunt their world. Lewis: It's why the joke from that old podcast—that this is a book about nothing—is so wrong. It's a book about everything. It's maximalist, as they say. It’s an attempt to capture the totality of human experience—from the mundane, like Bloom buying a pork kidney for breakfast, to the profound, like Stephen battling the ghost of his mother—all within the span of a single day. Joe: It is a difficult read, there is absolutely no question. It demands a lot from you. But it leaves you with this powerful, and frankly, unsettling idea: our minds are much wilder, messier, and more crowded places than we ever care to admit. Lewis: We walk around presenting this polished, coherent narrative of who we are. But underneath, there's a Nighttown in all of us, a place where our fears and desires run rampant. Joyce had the courage to write it all down. Joe: It’s an edifice to the complexity of being human. He’s not trying to give you a neat story with a clear moral. He's just trying to give you the thing itself, in all its chaotic glory. Lewis: So the question to leave you with is this: if your own 'Nighttown' scene were written down, what ghosts would show up? What repressed fears, secret desires, or unresolved anxieties would take center stage? It's a terrifying thought, but as Joyce shows us, it's also a profoundly human one.