I enjoy this chapter very very much and think it is a demonstration of limitless skill in developing, creatively, the book's preoccupations. But I could easily understand another reader's frustration with "Circe". Besides being very demanding on a reader (making demands on time, memory of the book, & sense of location within the book: like "Oxen of the Sun" the chapter jars the reader (more like "Circe" basically assualts the reader)), there is no true resolution, which I think is probably the fundamental or at least first learned joy of reading. I think it's a little bit of an acid test for the reader, who must really work at this chapter, and the interpretations drawn are going to really depend on the reading of the preceeding thirteen chapters.
Because in one way, "Circe" interrogates the reader and his or her interpretations of the novel to this point. Especially, to make of Bloom. The mirror we see his reflection in in the beginning of the episode, from four points of view, is a symbol of that. He begins the chapter literally having shit his pants, and then he is put on trial, forced to confess his fetishes, turned into a woman, raped, and sacrificed. Simulatenously he is praised as a reformer, a religious figure, and a god. The different views of Bloom do seem to follow more than a dialectic or two sided course; it really seems more like four sided, with participants entering the stage from many dimensions (like Virag, Bloom's ancient progenitor and keeper of the Bloom manhood).
Critics seem to have reached a consensus, that the really weird parts of the chapter are Bloom's hallucinations. I disagree. Clearly they are from his point of view, as they feature things from his consciousness: the soap, the potato. But they seem more like a gestalt of the novel. I would argue that Ulysses' is a closed universe, with a limited numbers of objects (literally it has a vocabularly of about 30,000 different words). "Circe" then seems like encyclopaedic encapsulation of the book, of its themes, characters, motifs, and previous action, in conjugation. (You could also say "Circe" is a written as a dialetic disguised as a synecdoche of the novel; both words appear within pages of each other at the end of the chapter.)
Conjugation describes the chapter well because 1) the characters' defining attributes, their tehnics, are shown in various progressions, as a conjugation of a verb 2) the theme of conjugates, i.e. opposing pairs or doubles features heavily 3) conjugal relationships, especially Bloom and Molly 4) sex & the brothel.
1 comment:
I think you're right to say that Bloom's hallucinations are not that strange. I would say that those scenes are the most realist moments of the book. Rather than being realism of the external self, it is realism of the internal one. When one thinks, they are writing a play. If we recall a memory or think of something to come, the images of thought are like characters or actors. I think this view is supported in how almost every motif and character is revisited in the hallucinations. What Bloom has seen throughout the day stays with him, and now comes together dramatically in his stream of thoughts.
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