Strangers in My House, Bad Manners to Them!

Like ‘Wandering Rocks’, but unlike all the other later chapters in Ulysses, ‘Circe’ does not chiefly rework English (or Anglo-Irish) discourses that are traceable to printed texts. Fragments of a variety of the kind of discourses I’ve described appear in the chapter. But it is not primarily a treatment of them. For ‘Circe’ is a chapter of voices. In ‘Circe’, people speak, and the effects of colonial power are heard in what they say, and how they say it. If the chapter cannot principally be read off against a set of discourses, it nonetheless exposes the pervasiveness and complexity of the effects of colonization as much as any other chapter in Ulysses. It tells us a lot more than we have so far learnt about how the British have left their mark. ‘Circe’ turns Dublin-and the account of Dublin that has preceded it —inside out.

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