Nighttown as Heterotopia― A Foucauldian Reading of "Circe"

The object of this essay is to bring Foucault's theory and practice of heterotopias to bear on James Joyce's "Circe" episode of Ulysses. Reflecting on the meaning of social spaces, Foucault convincingly suggests a refreshing notion of heterotopias. Heterotopias, socially marginalized, heterogeneous, and unnoticed, are the 'other spaces' that are absolutely different from all everyday spaces. Heterotopias are the other spaces against which the society defines its familiar scenes and the values they represent. Foucault singles out among others the following heterotopias: cemeteries, museums, libraries, bedrooms, brothels, and colonies. A point of interest is that these heterotopias are Joyce's chosen settings in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The object of this essay is to examine the relevance of different spaces in "Circe" to Joyce's thinking on the multi-dimensionality of everyday colonial life in Dublin. To bend Foucault's notion of heterotopias to my purpose, Nighttown is not merely a physical heterotopia, insofar as it is a socially partitioned place. Accordingly, social spatialization is closely associated with the question of representation of the world and its relatedness to our habitual spatial practices. Social space is embedded in our symbolic and conceptual practices that bring about the third definition of space in terms of the psychological space of human subject. The opening scene of "Circe" is invested and tainted with the dark and bestial images of deformity and abnormality. It casts an illuminating light on the theatricality of social division in Dublin. Joyce's choice of the threshold of Nighttown as the setting for the opening scene is far from fortuitous, since the space of threshold is a disrupting point of the division of indoors and outdoor. The gendered notion of publicity in a socially differentiated space is at issue, inasmuch as the existence of prostitution dismantles the dividing line between the private and the public. The modern form of bourgeois nuclear family is rooted in the unquestioned assumption that establishes an unbridgeable borderline between the public and the private. The presence of prostitution in Nighttown transgresses this borderline, even if a prostitute is figured as the public woman who supplements woman's regulated role as the private woman in domesticity.