"Hengler's Royal Circus," mentioned in Eumaeus
as well as Calypso, staged its acts in large
permanent structures—often round, hence the name. Frederick
"Charles" Hengler (1820-87), one of the great circus managers
of the 19th century, directed the construction of such
buildings (sometimes called "hippodromes," to reflect his
emphasis on equestrian acts) in various Scottish and English
cities. When his circus came to Dublin, it apparently
performed in the Rotunda, a large round performance space on
Rutland Square. By the end of the century circuses were a
staple of middle-class entertainment.
Victorian circuses featured acts of human acrobatic
brilliance in the form of bareback riding tricks and
performances on the "Trapeze," horizontal
bars suspended from ropes high above the ground. The French
name trapèze came from the trapezoidal shape formed
by the bar and its ropes, and its adoption in Britain
reflected the fact that much of the art had been developed by
Frenchman Jules Léotard, namesake of the eponymous garment and
inventor of the "flying" tricks in which performers jumped off
platforms, swung through the air, released their hold on the
bar, and were caught by other performers swinging by their
knees.
Gifford infers that "Bloom has apparently witnessed a trapeze
accident at the circus," but it is possible that he has merely
been disturbed by the business of risking fatal accidents to
sell tickets. Human beings will gape not only at actual falls
but at feats that might result in a fall, their pleasure at
the athleticism heightened by their awareness of the potential
for bodily injury. It seems somehow characteristic of Bloom's
timidity and pacifism to suppose that he "Had to look
the other way" merely because some death-defying
trick was whipping the crowd into a frenzy.
He goes on to think, "Families of them," because many
trapeze artists were trained in the art from a very early age
by their parents, in a tradition of family troupes which the
Wallendas and others have continued to the present day.
Training young children in such a dangerous sport counts as
another form of "Cruelty" for Bloom, and it leads him to the
strangest thought of this passage, "Bone them young so
they metempsychosis." Several readings of this
sentence seem possible, none of them entirely satisfying.
To "bone up" on something can mean to study it intensively,
and metempsychosis means being incarnated in a new body, so
perhaps Bloom is thinking of trapeze artistry as a kind of
exotic life form: early training helps children metamorphose
into the spectacular butterflies that eventually flit from bar
to bar. (Explaining metempsychosis to Molly, Bloom briefly confuses it with metamorphosis,
so he may be thinking along those lines here.) To "bone"
something can also mean to remove its bones, so a variation of
this reading might be to suppose that the children's early
training, and their youthful resilience, renders them so
flexible as to seem essentially boneless. But neither
possibility extends the theme of cruelty that Bloom has been
meditating on, and neither makes literal sense of
metempsychosis. So perhaps "bone them" means something like
"break their bones" (he has already thought, "Break your
neck"), in which case the souls of the young circus performers
may be liberated to seek out a less perilous line of work in
the next life.
This last reading, suggested to me by Nariman Tavakoli, may
be the best one, but the sentence remains obscure. Its oddness
is only increased by grammatical irregularity (Bloom's awkward
use of a noun as a verb) and by textual uncertainty: the first
edition of Ulysses had "metamspychosis" instead of
"metempsychosis." This oddity was corrected in the Odyssey
Press editions of the 1930s, but Gabler's edition in the 1980s
recorrected it, restoring the original reading.
