PARAREALISM IN “CIRCE”

TL;DRAbstract

I can still recall the frisson with which I first read the opening stage direction of Circe forty years ago. This moment was stranger than all the strange moments I'd encountered so far in the book, and had a peculiar intensity and vividness that I couldn't explain but that gripped me immediately. Thinking about it now, I can identify several sources for its peculiar power. There were the completely unexpected, verbless stage directions, announcing the scene (The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown ... Rows of grimy houses ... Rare lamps with rainbow fans. U 15.1-4).1 There was the enticing notion of nighttown itself, a whole town dedicated the night and its secret doings, made even stranger by Joyce's hyphenless spelling. There was the odd sense that this was and wasn't a theatre - as if a whole street had become a stage. And there was the garish hyperreality of the descriptive method, as though a perfectly normal scene - an evening street with children buying ice-creams near tram-tra

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