‘Circe’ and the Uncanny, or Joyce from Freud to Marx

Abstract

As Leopold Bloom half staggers through the more than merely hallucinatory milieu of ‘Circe’, his imaginatively prosaic sensibility is confounded by the sheer variety — and garish spectacle — of the apparitions rising to confront him. Joyce, not content merely to render a milieu emblematic of unconscious forces, limns a Nighttown that — fraught with overdetermination — is rather a place in the psyche, the constitutive nexus, determinant centre, of a true host of unheimlich spectres. These uncanny spectres comprise, in swirling aggregate, a necessary counterweight to the psychically-vitiated Dublin portrayed so poignantly throughout Joyce’s work, the everyday Dublin demonstrably sapped by a certain ‘haemiplegia of the will’.¹