Bloom's lewd censuring of Zoe's smoking and Zoe's injunction that Bloom should make an impromptu oration on the subject elicit a fantasy that lasts over 20 pages. Zoe finally has enough: "Talk away till you're black in the face," she says, after which Bloom accompanies her into the music room of the whorchouse. He is a rather pathetic man here — truly tripping as he enters the establishment. But enter he does, to join Lynch and Stephen, and the "antlered rack" is a reminder of his being cuckolded by Boylan.
The second part of "Circe" climaxes in the most important moment of the entire novel: Stephen smashes his ashplant against the whorehouse chandelier in defiance of his mother's attempts to foist upon him an increased sense of guilt in order to lead him back to the Church. As he smashes the symbolic "light," he screams "Nothung!" "Nothung," significantly and again symbolically, is the sword of Siegfried, the hero of Wagner's magnificent operatic rendering of myth — The Ring of the Niebelung. Clearly, Joyce was more deeply influenced by Wagner than most critics have guessed. In his play, Exiles, for example, Joyce uses as the name of his protagonist "Richard"; he calls him "Richard Rowan," and "Richard" was Wagner's first name, and the "rowan" is, in fact, an ash tree, the substance from which Stephen's walking stick is made, and it is also the tree in which Siegfried's heroic sword was buried for many years before it was finally wrenched free. The language that Joyce uses in describing the (literally) minor damage to the chandelier indicates that Joyce wants us to focus not on it, but on Stephen's rebellion against his mother's apparition; this is the high point of the novel (at least as far as Stephen is concerned): "Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry."
Many factors, carefully delineated by Joyce in "Circe," account for Stephen's hallucinations and for his act of rebellion. His blurred vision, for example, is caused by his earlier breaking of his eyeglasses, and his hand lacks power because it was injured during his fight with Mulligan. Stephen has waltzed feverishly with the whores on a stomach which is empty of food, but which is full of alcohol. These are the physical claims on him; the metaphysical and spiritual claims are embodied in his mother — and she makes many claims on him: Stephen holds the first-born status in his family; there are memories of his mother's reassuring him when he was lonely and away from his friends; there is her insistence that he kneel down and pray for her suffering soul, despite his non serviam delivered to God; and, finally, there is Stephen's recollection of his singing to his mother as she lay dying. Stephen is also reminded of Mulligan's recurring statement that it was he, Stephen, who killed his mother (who is now "beastly dead") because he refused to pray at her bedside.
