Circe Is Not a Hallucination

Philip Kitcher opens on the strangeness of "Circe": the longest episode in Ulysses, set out like a play script with stage directions in the manner of Ibsen and Shaw, in which inanimate objects speak and the ordinary laws of physics break. The action underneath is simple, and he lays it out. Stephen Dedalus, very drunk, goes to Bella Cohen's brothel in Nighttown. Leopold Bloom follows to look after him. Stephen sees his dead mother, smashes a lamp, and is knocked down by two British soldiers, and Bloom is left tending to him.

The popular reading is that the wild material is hallucination. Kitcher thinks that is wrong-headed, since it is never clear whose hallucination it would be. He takes a different tack. By episode 15 the reader knows the world of the book, what he calls Ulysses world. James Joyce treats that world the way he treated the real June 16, 1904, and fictionalizes it from every angle he can imagine, so that we see what is haunting Stephen and Bloom in ways their actual thoughts never could. Kitcher reads the episode as Joyce's first experiment toward Finnegans Wake.