Circe

Yeah, the thujone in absinthe is psychoactive but it's not psychedelic. Today quantities in food are heavily regulated but back in the day some absinthe may have had enough to have a noticeable effect. Though I suspect that stories of seeing fairies and such are exaggerated folklore.

Still waiting for some entrepreneurial darknet vendor to start selling extracted stuff.

a few years ago it was hip and trendy to make your own absinthe

Oh yeah it's definitely possible to extract your own but getting sufficient thujone concentrations to make reliable titration a reality is beyond my skills as a chemist and likely requires some serious lab equipment.

You entirely misunderstood what is going on in that divine chapter. It's obviously not Stephen or Bloom or Zoe or anybody having their own distinct hallucination--rather they are all hallucinating a collective creative vision, as is Joyce, as is the book, and as is the reader. We must not assume any causal link between the plot of the novel Ulysses and the metamorphosis that takes place in Circe: there is, at best, correlation. Stephen getting smashed did nothing to create the situations of Circe: it is the book and language itself imploding and dying, dreaming, and being reborn for its Nostos. Finnegans Wake is the maximal expansion of this dying-and-reviving model for language independent of substantial narrative. It is language--the language used by Stephen, Bloom, the whores, the British soliders, etc., but also the language of the author and language in general--becoming its own dramatic subject. So I think Joyce was maybe slightly misleading when he said that the 'device' for Circe was hallucination, but then again there is no word in our language for what he's doing. Suffice to say, it's not Stephen and his buddy and Bloom who are hallucinating, or at least, what is going on in those characters' minds at the hour of midnight of June 16-17th 1904 is only part of what is going on in Circe. It is the destruction of realism, which is then glued back together for the last three chapters. You feel me?

Yeah, there's clearly a lot going on in the book, and everything can be viewed from several different angles.

Just like every book ever, you platitudinous fuck.

Don't listen to anyone who says Circe is "hallucinatory" or "metaphorical" or "psychological." Circe is dramatic. It's a play. We are meant to take the talking soap just as literally as we take the appearance of ghosts in Shakespeare. I would even go so far as to say Circe is a sort of "magical realism;" we must never forget that the "material" of Ulysses is not Bloomsday, but style. It is a stylistic, formal experiment first and foremost, and a wildly successful one. Circe is simply the most radical of its stylistic experiments.

>We are meant to take the talking soap

if you dropped the soap - don't take it

I don't know if a stupider reply is conceivable.

I think you're on the right track, but I disagree that Circe "destroys" realism. On the contrary I think it pushes it to a sort of schizophrenic limit, stressing the genre's mimetic capacity by making the subject of that mimesis bizarre and magical. I find Circe a very "realistic" episode, just one that does not depict "realistic" events, if this makes sense.

nope, that's a meme. absinthe is just very strong liquor.

>Don't listen to anyone who says Circe is "hallucinatory"

"Circe: The Brothel - 12am - Locomotor apparatus - Whore - Magic - Hallucination"

t. James Joyce

>Circe is magical realism

lmao

Other than that, you are correct in saying that Circe is, first and foremost, of a dramatic nature. But I don't see how that prevents it from being an hallucination, or a metaphorical or psychological drama. In fact, its very attribute as a play is what enables it to be hallucinatory.

I'm not him but I'd say it's meant to be thought of as a dramatic hallucination of the reader, or else one of Joyce's, but not that of the characters themselves.

>hallucinating on psychedelics
What are you, 12?

Delirious states can cause hallucinatory episodes. So being half awake and smashed, sure. Remember, we are in their heads as its happening at them—it's not like they're narrating at any point in the book, they aren't at this point either.

The schemas are good interpretative scaffolding, but like the construction of a building, they must be torn down when no longer required. Besides, Joyce did just this when he published Ulysses without Homeric episode titles—they only have numbers, and this is reflected in the Gabler. The titles in the table of contents of that volume are for convenience sake only. Even further, the schemas were created to give influential critics a leg-up on writing their studies, so that more people would have a "way-in" to Joyce's masterpiece, and he would sell more copies; they're closer to marketing materials than Bloomsday apocrypha, or whatever. So all told I don't think they're very useful to refute an argument, but can be used as a stepping stone towards one.

This is really pretentious but I believe you're right

I feel you.

This is actually a common problem in language though.
What do people mean by hallucinations? Fractal-like vision — tracers — warping movements? Or are they referring to full-blown delirium, where reality is indistinguishable from the imagination?
Regardless, its broad definition still fits into the use of psychedelics.

God this board is stupid

i hate the way you write

It transcends the stupid/smart dichotomy, yo.

We're beneath the good/bad dichotomy.

Just thought it worth pointing out the multifarious interpretations the novel allows.

he blazed it 420 like all great writers from shakespeare to baudelaire

He came after them though.

absinthe just makes you a crazy drunk

it's not really psychedelic but i can see why people think it gives a different drunk

yes and hes following in a great tradition, you moron

Thought he was famous for breaking from tradition.

>shakespeare
>great
top bait, would go unrecognized if not for my genius perception

Good and bad are just spooks.

what a crock of shit

You're an idiot go back to freshman year of high school english. Everyone is aware that books can be read in a seemingly infinite number of ways, go fuck yourself with your cum-stained copy of Slaughterhouse 5.

Beat me to it, Nora's farts must have been dank as fuck

Ulysses is unique however in the variety of different viewpoints one can bear upon it.

>i know nothing about modernism, james joyce, or ulysses