I got a lot of this chapter. I understood Joyce’s early allusion to the limitations of discourse, although I didn’t have the background in Medieval history to pick up on his parody.
A factor that inhibited my comprehension-- throughout the novel, as well as in this chapter-- was the character development; descriptions are sparse and rare. Many new characters are introduced without any description of their personalities and brought up suddenly. I’m learning to understand these characters by paying attention to the way that they speak-- their habits of speech, gestures... It’s more difficult, though, than it is with a narrator who gives us a lot of back story and detail.
Joyce’s characterizations are realistic; we don’t understand the subtext without the gesture or the speech of a character. We’re all sort of blank until we begin talking and gesturing, we begin to act, and our characters are revealed.
When I was reading the chapter, I thought a lot about the speech in dreams-- thwarted amalgams of sentences that are comprehensible to the dreamer but do not make logical sense upon waking.
Some of us dismiss these phrases we remember from our dreams. We try to quickly forget them, and make a cup of coffee before completing the set of tasks that begin the day. They don’t seem to coalesce with our sense of reality.
Nabokov suggested that dreams are mere amalgams of diurnal reality, but he also suggested that a dream sometimes will strike some chord with the dreamer in his waking life, as well as that it’s when “one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits.”
This is a chapter about a birth, and in it there are many drunken misinterpretations of language-- This makes me think of the birth of Bloom’s consciousness in the novel. He seems in many ways to be an actor, stepping into and our of character throughout the book, as though society doesn’t coalesce with his sense of reality; he struggles to keep up with the conversation, but falls into deep reveries during his long walks, in which he has thoughts that he can’t share. He is unable to notice things; he doesn’t notice Blazes when he passes in Hades, but stares at his hands instead. The mistaking of language suggests an inability to accept the constraints of society that are presented-- a literary technique that expertly conveys the waxing and waning of Bloom’s consciousness.
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I take it this is not about the chapter after Nausicaa, but about Circe - the most dreamlike chapter in the book. It is specifically a dream, as shown, for instance, in the moment when Zoe's complaint about Bloom's wordiness - "Make a stump speech out of it" - leads to an imagined stump speech. It has the associative quality of a dream. I think Nabokov's comment about dreams was in some ways an expression of his annoyance with Freud's unpoetic (and somewhat limited) interpretation of dreams as wish-fulfillment. But Joyce is closer to Freud's side here, as Bloom's and Stephen's repressed guilt plays out in the red light district. It is really, for them, another "Hades" - a transformative journey into their psyche and ultimate victory.
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