ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an account of a similar occurrence in "Circe", a sequence in which one passage from an opera conjures up a real-life reenactment of the larger narrative from which that passage comes, by virtue of the fact that the musically knowledgeable listeners can instantly recognize and situate the setting. "Circe" is Ulysses's "hallucinatory", compounded of hallucinations facilitated by drug- and alcohol-induced delirium and by mental derangement, hallucinations that to an extent still not widely recognized tend overwhelmingly to arise from the working of discernible external facts on those states. The fundamentally happening in this sequence is that Stephen has got the La Gioconda narrative running in his head and now finds the visible occasion for this gruesome phase of it primarily in the image of his own face, reflected in that mirror. The "hallucinatory" susceptibility in "Circe", Stephen's La Gioconda-governed encounter with his mother is an exceptionally vigorous-from a clinical view, virulent-instance of the condition.
