15. Circe

  – 性变态和Ulysses中的拉康式绕道
[Thomas, F. (2017). Unspeakable 'Circe': sexual perversion and the Lacanian detour in Ulysses. James Joyce Quarterly, 54(3), 303–313. https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2017.0004]
There has been an apparent squeamishness in the overall attitude the critical literature has regarding the Bella/Bello scene, resulting in the total de-sexualization of the scene within the majority of Joycean reviews of the chapter. Moreover this chapter precludes the presumption that its characteristic of Joyce’s style - “Joycean masochism” and that it’s not “not an anomaly, or an arbitrary obscurity”—for in a literal sense, they most certainly are. (307)
Taboos of paraphilias in “Circe” (especially in Bella/Bello scene): female domination, shoe/feet fetishism, forced feminization, erotic spanking, s&m, vorarephilia, pony play, face-farting, urophilia, coprophilia, anal intercourse, fistsex. (305)
The Bella/Bello sequence casts Bloom in the role of analysand, with his neurotic parapraxes (“Nes. Yo.”—U 15.2766) and free-associative sexual reminiscences. But the episode’s debt to Freud runs deeper than mere references. To call its style “dreamlike” is accurate but insufficient: the dreams evoked by “Circe” are far from the symbolically literal, narratively linear dream sequences of earlier literature (including “Kubla Khan,” A Christmas Carol, and even Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) but belong instead to the incoherent and sexually lawless dream-world of Freud. Similarity: dryly detailed, Dissimilarity: Freud’s dreamer wakes up whereas Circe contains no such demarcation between dream and reality. Hence Freudian system of analysis is irrelevant, leading to Lacan’s theory instead.
Lacan: The Real - the realm of human experience that has not or cannot be symbolized nor imagined nor integrated into human understanding in any way.
Lacanian theory is historically intertwined with Joyce studies. In Joyce the Symptom, he goes so far as to suggest that Joyce is capable of “touching” the Real in his writing. 
1. The Real is distinct from the true, “The true about the Real, if I may express myself thus, is that the Real, the Real of the couple here has no sense” (Symptom 147). Moreover, “masochism is the major part of the enjoyment the Real gives” (Symptom 112). Senselessness, Meaninglessness, Masochism. 
2. “The impossible is not necessarily the contrary of the possible, or, since the opposite of the possible is certainly the real, we would be led to define the real as the impossible” (Concepts 167).
“Oxen of the Sun” & “Circe”: “Circe” is the baby born from “Oxen”. For, “Oxen” is about linear time, cause and effect, the human experience as a straight line pointing in one direction, but it ends not with God but in total chaos—linguistic, physical, diegetic—and it cannot be a coincidence that, upon turning the page, the reader enters the godless, anarchic universe of “Circe.” Thus, if “Oxen” ultimately hits the limit of the symbolic order, “Circe” suggests what may lie beyond it.
The infancy: the parade of paraphilias are perhaps best seen not as specific paraphilias at all but as sexual manifestations of the episode’s overall senselessness. “Circe” unfolds not in the past tense of established history and adult memory but in the perpetual present tense of stage-play format and infant perception. Time in “Circe” is fluid and nonlinear: long, elaborate scenes seemingly occur in a single instant, with few hints (and no critical consensus) as to what is truly “happening” outside of the characters’ imaginations. In such a universe, sex can only occur as it does in the Bella/Bello scene, which breaks down every conceivable binary—fantasy and reality, male and female, pain and pleasure, disgust and delight, human and animal, penis and vulva (“He likes dialectic, the universal language”) —and in which the anal fixations of infancy (spanking, feces, the anus itself) coexist and merge with the phallic sexuality of adulthood. This tesseractic physicality belongs to the realm of the Real.
The experience of reading “Circe” is in some ways the antithesis of psychoanalysis. If the psychoanalytic process requires, in Fink’s words, “allowing an analysand to put into words that which has remained unsymbolized for him or her” (25), the process of reading “Circe” requires the opposite: taking what appear to be familiar symbols—words on a page, a man, a woman, a fan—and allowing their meaning, their underlying sense, to be snatched away before one’s eyes. both Bella and Bloom emerge from it apparently unchanged—for “the real,” says Lacan, “is that which always comes back to the same place” (Concepts 42). Confronted unexpectedly with this glimpse into the Real, the reader comes away speechless, turning her attention instead toward the accessibly symbolic parts of Ulysses and selectively forgetting Bella/Bello. The reader, in short, represses.
What “Circe” demonstrates is how much mental heavy lifting, conscious and unconscious, is required to maintain the binaries and boundaries—self and other, public and private, past and present, alive and dead—that define everyday human existence. Consciousness is an ongoing struggle not to succumb to the chaos of pure perception; we are all a blink away from a Bella/Bello scene of our own.