The Review of English Studies Advance Access originally published online on November 28, 2007
The Review of English Studies 2008 59(242):740-765; doi:10.1093/res/hgm122
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
Subliminal Consciousness
University College, Oxford
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Abstract |
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As the fifteenth chapter or episode of Joyce's Ulysses, ‘Circe’ continues to challenge the reader with its hallucinatory psychodrama and its capricious recirculation of the book's textual past which both defies and demands psychological explanation. These ongoing difficulties are mainly the result of an insufficient appreciation for the way in which the psyche was understood historically and, in particular, the way in which ‘Circe’ is underwritten by a startling turn-of-the-century theory of telepathy and unconscious agency. The latter belongs to the British psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers, whose celebrated theory of the ‘subliminal consciousness’ offers up a multiply porous subjectivity through which the unconscious is seen to communicate not only intrapersonally but also interpersonally. The implications of this theory are profound, and are encoded in both ‘Circe’'s aesthetics and its genetic history. At stake is a recognition, on the one hand, of reading and writing as reciprocal activities, and on the other hand, a subversive vision of language and communication as a kind of subliminal or telepathic leakage within and between minds and texts, operating outside the authorised channels of intentional or rational discourse along multiple levels of hidden association.