James Joyce by Platt Len;

Author:Platt, Len;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

RUDOLPH

Second half crown waste money today. I told you not go with the drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.

BLOOM

(hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen, feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi.

RUDOLPH

What you making in this place? Have you no soul? (with feeble vulture talons feels the silent face of Bloom) Are you not my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and Jacob?

(U 15.252–62)

With its elaborate representations of self loathing and narcissism and its wild inflations of Bloom’s interests in voyeurism and masochism, ‘Circe’ represents a intellectual culture that by the1920s had come to terms with Freud. To the extent that the psychoanalytic paradigm could be culturally exploited and laughed at, Freud had become assimilated. As strange as ‘Circe’ seems, it is familiarizing in this respect. It reduces the power of the Freudian to shock – part of the effect of its carnivalesque atmosphere is to normalize guilt and, most tellingly, the desires that Freud considered to be indicative of sexual pathology. At the same time, however, ‘Circe’ does shock, as a powerful challenge to conservative forces, but also in the dramatic reconfiguration where church, state and nation appear in familial terms to reshape Freud’s conception of the crucial psychic drama. In the extended climax that forms the end of ‘Circe’, Stephen’s mother, far from being an object of sexual desire, becomes an objectification of the Church ghoulishly demanding her son’s repentance. The authoritative father figure is represented both by a bumbling Edward the Seventh – ‘robed as a grand elect perfect and sublime mason with trowel and apron, marked made in Germany’ (U 15.4454–5) – and the henchman apparently responsible for discipline and order, Private Carr (‘I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king – U 15.4644–5). And, as Stephen says in the very beginning of things, ‘a third there is’ (U 1.641). Ill-defined in ‘Telemachus’, this third master appears precisely in ‘Circe’ as ‘Old Gummy Granny’, the crone who is both Ireland and ‘Ireland’s sweetheart...Strangers in my house...Silk of the kine!’ (U 15.4584–6). This figure urges Stephen to die for his country – ‘you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free (she prays) O good God, take him!’ (U 15.4738–9) – and is crucial to Stephen’s realization that his rebellion must first take place in his head. ‘Break my spirit, all of you’,he declares, ‘if you can! I’ll bring you all to heel!’ (U 15.4235–6), before tapping ‘his brow’ and facing the psychodynamic fact that, whatever else, ‘in here it is I must kill the priest and the king’ (U 15.4436–7). This redrawing of the psychological landscape, part assimilation, part appropriation, is as characteristic a Joycean turn as anything in Ulysses, one which confronts conservative Ireland with a scientific perspective both European and modern, but which at the same time confronts Europe with the modern world as represented by the colonized state.

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