a repetitive sequence of the sights and sounds of the dead as I have argued in the first chapter. The premises of this fantastic Ireland lie in the fact that Irish writing is seriously under the threat of a “loss of a natural relationship to
language” (Boheemen-Saaf, 2). It is through this paradoxical
“overpotentialized”-lack20 of textual instability in Ulysses that I would term Joyce’s “Circe” a re-imagination of a castrated past. Since there is the feigned core of both hollow and tumid which were constructed to disguise his own insufficiency, I would contend that Joyce uses a deliberate textual repetition of the fantastic scenes in “Circe” as the infrastructure to elaborate and emphasize the returning streams of his protagonists’ conscious and unconscious thoughts.
The fluid inter-spatial connotations of a play as the amalgam of symbolic spheres that Baudrillard and Hélène Cixous have explored are also part of my argument. Employing the Freudian Uncanny and the Phantasy to read “Circe”
in the later section of this chapter, I intend to investigate the seemingly ad hoc Circean narrative.
20 Benstock, Bernard, James Joyce, The Augmented Ninth (New York: Syracuse UP, 1988), 48. In “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear say yes in Joyce,” Derrida points out that the danger of reading or commenting on Ulysses lies in both the terror and beauty of its inclusiveness that nothing is outside the net of this “circle of enyclopedia,” “the archive of Western culture,” as the “overpotentialized text” constantly reminds its readers that they are being captured within a network of language, writing, and knowledge.
To reflect the image of the “eloquent”21 Irishmen, Joyce creates a situation where every character acts and speaks. Although there exist innate difficulties to follow the human unconscious and put the unconscious into prolonging narrative praxis, Joyce has managed to write in the pandemonium likelihood in simulating how human mind works. Moreover, expanding the device of
“play-with-in-a-play” to a “play-within-a play-within-a-fiction,” Joyce weaves an-OTHER space, a serial space of phantasies in which “characters and objects alike orate, exhort and mimetic” (Lawrence, 147). These dream-like
mnemonic incidences are by nature impossible to be fully recreated however strenuously the word attempts to retrieve. Thus, Joyce’s well-designed authorial omnipotence, in Derrida’s interpretation, “opens and even defines the dimensions of fantasy” (“Ulysses Gramophone,” 58). Joyce successfully reconstructs Dublin in intricate dramatic genre by re-organizing pieces of hallowed, uncannily familiar as well as foreign scenes to build his aesthetics in
“Circe.” Constantly, both characters and readers commute from external
present to internal memories, from the conscious remembrances to unconscious or preconscious distorted imagery projections, and boomerang in between these two spheres. Terming these distortions “Hallucination,” Joyce’s writing
technique in “Circe” does not refer to what his characters have experienced.
Instead of using the term “Hallucination”, which contains connotations of mental and physical disorder that I do not recognize in Bloom or Stephen’s experiences and mental status in “Circe,” I propose that each scene represents
21 In “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” Joyce raises Oscar Wilde’s comments on Irish people: “We Irishmen are the greatest talkers since the time of the Greeks” (CW, 174) to invite a more active attitude toward a national revolution.
the protagonists’ phantasies. In coping with the Circean incantation of repetitive narrative navigation, Joyce presents his fantastic scenes in ways tantamount to Freud’s daydreaming. This narrative technique is uninhibitedly exposed through realist delineation and mimetic playwriting to perform
randomly the reminiscences of daytime incidences.
In his letter to Fliess on May 2, 1897, Freud wrote: “Phantasies22 are psychical façades constructed in order to bar the way to these memories [of primal scenes].” This phenomenon of phantasy, which causes hysterical behavior, refers to the function of the Phantasy as decorative or illusionary appearances of its deeper memorial constructions (S.E. V, 491). For Freud, the Phantasy is rather complicated, which he understands in analogy to
“day-dreaming” (S.E. V, 491). In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
elaborates on the essence of the Phantasy based on the model of daydreaming.
Identifying the characteristics of daydreaming that are in resemblance to those
22 According to the annotations of Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Phantasie, in German, means ‘imagination” in the sense of the “world of imagination” ( Jean
Laplanche, & J. B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1974.) Read also Freud’s note for S.E. V.
491. In other words, by using the term “Phantasy” instead of “fantasy,” I intend to emphasize more on the activity and the sphere of the Phantasy rather than the
philosophical connotation of its French equivalent “fantasme” carries. In the survey of Laplanche, “fantasme” refers to a specific imaginary production which tends to carry implications of “whimsy, eccentricity, triviality, etc.” (314). Furthermore, by using the Phantasy instead of fantasy, I intend not to limit its meaning to a certain topographical position so as to avoid the restrictions in its functions— either as an
“imaginary expression designed to conceal the reality of the instinctual dynamic,” or
“a distorted derivative of the memory of actual fortuitous events” (Laplanche, 315).
of nocturnal dreams, Freud postulates that daydreaming and the Phantasy provide secondary revisions23, which construct in our mind an unconscious blocking:
Like dreams, they [day-dreaming] are wish-fulfillments; like dreams they are based to a great extent on impressions of infantile experiences; like dreams, they benefit by a certain degree of relaxation of censorship. If we examine their structure, we shall perceive the way in which the wishful purpose that is at work in their production has mixed up the material of which they are built, has rearranged it and has formed it into a new whole. They stand in much the same relation to the childhood memories from which they are derived as do some of the Baroque palaces of Rome to the ancient ruins whose pavements and
columns have provided the material for the more recent structures. (492) Erected on the basis of memories, phantasies are also a type of wish-fulfilment based on infantile experiences, daytime suppression, unsatisfied daytime wishes or residues from the day. As a type of wish-fulfillment based on memories, phantasies are greatly “rearranged” or “mixed up” to form new types of psychical acts of various sorts— “judgments, inferences, denials, expectations, intentions” and even “worries” (S.E.V, 550-51). Despite these rearrangements, Freud suggests that these psychical acts tend to remain in the unconscious:
23 Cf. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis (New York: Norton, 1974.), 412. Secondary revision is “an effect of the censorship which is responsible for additions or rearrangement of a dream (the Phantasy) so that it can be present in the form of a “relatively consistent and comprehensible scenario” (412).
The frequent occurrence of conscious day-time phantasies brings these structures [memories] to our knowledge; but just as there are phantasies of this kind which are conscious, so, too, there are unconscious ones in great numbers, which have to remain unconscious on account of their content and of their origin from repressed material. (S.E. V, 491-92) This repressed material imposes upon Joyce’s characters the grotesque yet unbearable reality of their lives. Joyce indulges himself in a play with physical and psychical reflections of his selected Dubliners to reopen the potentiality of delineating the real in fiction in “a basic, originary speech native to the subconscious, not the conscious, mind” (Deane “Joyce the Irishman,”
50-51). His tone cruelly affirms “the underpinnings of life” (Tymoczko, 336), and he subjects his characters to the torment of life. Since Ireland has lost her original language, as Deane rationalizes, Joyce seems to have made unusual and unlikely traditional shifts between the real Dublin and the hidden stories within the city. These fantastic scenes reinforce the Irish national and cultural dilemma that Joyce concerned. Furthermore, they reveal the immeasurable depth/lack of a satisfactory content within each Dubliners. Intentionally, Joyce invites his readers in and out of reality to encrypt the dimensions of his narrative in the discontinuing scenes and the unclaimed psychical activi ties in his characters’ mind.
Joyce recycles materials in the real world to create fantastic uncanniness that brings out two peculiar effects on his readers and characters. Firstly, for characters in “Circe,” the uncanniness brings to them residues of memories, words that they have said or heard, scenes they have encountered during the daytime. When the audience recognize a step further and faster what certain terms, such as “sweets of sin,” “house of keys,” or “Nes, Yo,” would cause
chemical effects upon Bloom and Stephen, the two protagonists are perhaps already deeply trapped inside the bizarre circumstances that keep attacking them repetitively. Secondly, readers and critics are awed by the intimidating
“Uncanny” in “Circe” that is closely related to “What is frightening” as well as
“what arouses dread and horror”(368). Such a “dead and horror effect” has been constructed in earlier episodes, as Derrida’s suggests: “nothing can be invented on the subject of Joyce” (Ulysses Gramophone, 48). Exploring the realm of aesthetics, Freud claims that plain novelty would not induce
“Uncanny” since there is less fear than curiosity, excitement, and expectation, etc. Therefore, pure “Uncanny” arises from that which we have known but not known enough, from what we thought impossible but possible, and from that which we have believed in but always tried to deny. Freud’s
investigations have led him to the conclusion that “ the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”
(“The Uncanny,” 369). Into the category of the “Uncanny,” Freud introduces several elements: uncertainty, anxieties caused by infantile weariness,
omnipotence of thoughts, sexual insecurity about the female genital organs, and the unintended recurrence of the same thing. Freud uses Jentsche’s example of the wax-work figures of dolls and automata to explain that the “Uncanny”
“excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental”(“The Uncanny,” 375). As a spectator, one starts to manifest the mental activities of lively wax dolls;
meanwhile, this “a doll which appears to be alive” (382), undoubtedly,
establishes the growing atmosphere of the “Uncanny”; the sensational scare lies in the obscure domain of the real and the fictional or whimsical. Thus,
Joyce’s ability to invent an incident and constantly recycle the familiar but
distorted scenes in “Circe” create an “intolerable violence” (Ulysses Gramophone, 48). In other wo rds, objects that cause our perturbed
experiences do not have to be bloodily sick-and-twisted, nor do they have to be absolutely new. Instead, they are elements or experiences that have already branded in the audiences’ minds. Through gazing at the paper-stage
performance, the audiences are able to probe into the internal world of
characters. The effect of uncanniness heightens as the recurrence of daytime thoughts and events take place more and more frequently. The fantastic sights and scenes rotate wi th the real fictional time-space, which has become so engrossing that the verisimilitude of Bloom and Stephen’s psychical world actually vivisect themselves open for their audiences. The non-stop presence and presentations of what has taken place in Bloom’s and Stephen’s minds allow their readers to become the co-witnesses of the protagonists’
self-exposure. In consequence, readers inhale the scent of uncanniness and estrangement in their reading process.
“Circe” is a dramatic mental space that process the characteristics of Rosemary Jackson’s definition of fantasy— an invented “non-human world,”
which Jackson borrowed from Cixous: “ it [“Circe”] is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar and apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and different” (8). Instead of having an objective and omnipotent narrator to reinvent the whole story, Joyce betrays the conventional topology of fiction in “Circe”. Joyce not only aims for “a demonstration and a celebration not just of Bloom’s virtues, fantasies, and sexual ‘crime,’” but also for a display of the “author’s power in representing them” (Shechner, 103). This power of representing the real as well as the
fantastic fortifies the impervious position of the author and his aesthetics. The author has be both subjective and the objective in order to provide the flowing visions and focalized coincidences that echo his audience’s mind. The text of
“Circe,” therefore, becomes what Boheemen-Saaf terms a “symptomatic body”
which “provides a utopian place where the breach in existence, the fractures in being, whether of race, gender, or class, are placed in non-collapsing
juxtaposition” (25). This symptomatic textual body has no lengthy plot in
“Circe”; instead, the episode embarks upon oscillation between “calls and answer” (U 15. 9), which dwindles the progress of the episode, both in the reading and performing, into an exceptionally sluggish pace. The sluggish
pace, therefore, forms a sense of space that allows for performances of all kinds.
Rather than staying still in the internal stream of consciousness, Joyce has both ends meet, the external and internal24. In the fictional midnight Dublin on June 16 and 17, 1904, characters search for themselves and each other at the specific factual as well as fictional moment within their apparitional past and agonizing present. The narrative of “Circe” does not prevent the interior life from surfacing; instead, it exposes the inner thoughts as pompously as possible.
The SD offers detailed descriptions of each characters’ movements, while their dialogues rehearse the mind-work, action, sounds, voices, and responses of
24 Hugh Kenner has also mentioned that the aim of Ulysses is not story-telling but to
“examine its story in immediate human enactment.” He suggests that Joyce’s
“Circe” caters to Modernity rather than antiquity in that it shows as whatever we, as readers perceive, hear, and feel both the internal and external worlds of the
protagonists, which he argues are hallucinatory effects that “Circe” imposes on its audience-readers rather than its protagonists. James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays.
eds. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 344.
either objects or characters that have been anticipated, and thereby construct the depths of the impossibility to fulfill an expectation— the inner monologue offers a source of consolation toward the defeats from the external world (Kiberd, 142). The effect of reincarnating a representation of everyday scenario makes Joyce’s “Circe” appealing and truthful. The configuration of the dramatic narrative stretches and dwindles the possibilities of direct verbal and physical communications between characters. That is to say that Joyce creates blocks of Other spheres— the spheres that contrast to those in the traditional English novel with its linear, descriptive narratology. It is an
“embodied location” where inarticulate experience, conscious or unconscious, excluded by history, is preserved as broken “unclaimed memory”
(Boheemen-Saaf, 25). Since psychoanalysis regards everything mental as unconscious in the first place (SE. XX, 31), these other spheres, wreathed with symbolic subliminal nexus, lend absurdity to the hidden plots and memories.
Among these other spheres of the fantastic, we audience-readers see through Bloom’s and Stephen’s minds in detailed obscenity that we witness the panorama “of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-the-visible”
(Baudrillard, 131), which I presume shapes Joyce’s alter-realistic fluid Dublin.
Akin to Baudrillard’s communication model where media and
info-transformation have meticulously dissolved the time-honored division of private and public spheres through TV, “Circe” is a realm of hyperreality as it intrudes in our lives through intense broadcasting of the protagonists’ thoughts, providing the audience “scenes” that are without “secret” (131) but slightly secretive. Baudrillard’s words justify the importance of this sphere:
Certainly, this private universe was alienating to the extent that it
separated you from others— or from the world, where it was invested as a protective enclosure, an imaginary protector, a defense system. But it also reaped the symbolic benefits of alienation, which is that the Other exists, and that otherness can fool you for the better or the worse (130).
In “Circe,” “scenes” that are inundated with a sense of otherness and graphic fantastic realism are wrapped within the network not only between readers and characters, or readers and Joyce, but also between Joyce and his fellow writers.
In short, as the above -mentioned dialogical spaces are magnified, readers are able to induce in their minds25 the imagery-unimaginable and
cacophony-silence in “Circe” and simultaneously remain as equal objects as the Other subjects within the norm of our reading experiences.
If myths were the various fancies anonymous writers depicted for human embodiments, the prototypes of the imaginative characters would be writers’
undercurrent ways of thinking that bring their thoughts into beings. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye introduces two poles of literature—
mimetic and mythical. He reminds us that while he tends to desire the
“accuracy of description,” it is the “plausible or credible story” that forms the nature of fiction (51). As a writer in exile reinventing his motherland and fellow Dubliners, Joyce’s intention in Ulysses is apparent: He uses The Odyssey
25 The dialogical space contains various levels of mind, including the mind of Joyce, those of the characters, those of the readers, what Hugh Kenner calls the mind of the text (Ulysses,112), and the mind of the language. Sheldon Brivic, “Joycean
Psychology,” Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, eds, Richard F. Peterson, Alan M. Cohn, Edmund L. Epstein ( Carbondale : Southern Illinois UP, 1983),108.
as the shadowy blueprint for the geographical Dublin to twist the wandering Odysseus into the uxorious Bloom, the venturous Telemachus into the distrait Stephen, and the chaste Penelope into the capricious Molly. This plausibility is based on an invasion of human privacy26 as audience-readers witness the sanguinary excesses of a private “dailiest of days” (Kiberd, “Bloom the Liberator,” 4), for instances, shaving, urinating, masturbating, enrapturing, musing, embryonic developing, sauntering into abysmal psychological comatose state, and daydreaming27. The repetition of these familiar human behaviors, then, emphasizes the “Uncanny” tendency of Joycean narrative.
The novel, as a mixture of mimetic and mythical elements, will be capable of forming reticulated verisimilitude with subliminal dimensions. Even if the fantastic scenes are invented, each of them preoccupies the unfathomable of
26 Cf. Ellmann’s words in the preface of the Gabler Edition Ulysses, ix. Except Ellmann’s comments, Chester G. Anderson in “Leopold Bloom as Dr. Sigmund Freud” has also discussed the “excrescences of the body.” Chester G. Anderson, James Joyce (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 27.
27 See Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-analysis. trans.
Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974.), 95. The term daydream here is Freud’s name for “scenarios imagined during the waking state” which he deliberately used the term as to bring out the analogy between its common meaning as “ reverie, a visionary fancy indulged in while awake”( New York: Random House, 1991), 347.
Aladár Sarbu has used the term in the Freudian sense of day-dream,“waking reality.”
Sarbu, Aladár, “The Fantastic in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Representational Strategies in
‘Circe’ and ‘Penelope’,” More Real Than Reality: the Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts, eds, Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha ( New York: Greenwood P, 1991),
‘Circe’ and ‘Penelope’,” More Real Than Reality: the Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts, eds, Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha ( New York: Greenwood P, 1991),