James Joyce, as a clinician of his nation, employs symptomatology to expose the problems of the Irish people, thereby attempting to cure the Irish national malady which he calls ¡°spiritual paralysis.¡± All his works can be regarded as such a remedy for this malady by way of enhancing the virtual power of an impersonal and nonorganic life, a life replacing the world of stagnancy and closure with a chaosmos of difference and becoming, and thus more possibility and vitality. In ¡°Circe,¡± this is achieved first through the becoming-woman of Bloom, which singularizes Bloom out of the Irish majority. With it, all of ¡°Circe¡± is involved in a block of becoming, disrupting all established logics and values so that Stephen Dedalus¡¯s denial to his mother becomes a denial to all authoritarian control. The affirmative power endowing on Bloom¡¯s becoming-woman then reconstructs ¡°Circe¡± as a chaosmos where all possibilities of life occur, in which a true liberation of the Irish people can be imagined. |