Pararealism

I can still recall the frisson with which I first read the opening stage direction of ‘Circe’ around half a century ago. This moment was stranger than all the strange moments I’d encountered so far in the book, and had a peculiar intensity and vividness that I couldn't explain but that gripped me immediately. Thinking about it now, I can identify several sources for its peculiar power. There were the completely unexpected, verbless stage directions announcing the scene (‘The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown … Rows of grimy houses … Rare lamps with rainbow fans …). There was the enticing notion of nighttown itself, a whole town dedicated to the night and its secret doings, made even stranger by Joyce's hyphenless spelling. There was the odd sense that this was and wasn't a theatre – as if a whole street had become a stage on which mysterious actions would be played out. And there was the garish hyperreality of the descriptive method, as though a perfectly normal scene – an evening street with children buying ice creams near tram-tracks – was being relayed through an alien, and distinctly sinister, consciousness that perceived the tram-tracks as skeletons, signals as red and green will-o’-the-wisps, and ice cream as lumps of coal and copper snow. (This was in the days before Hans Walter Gabler, in his 1982 edition, corrected ‘coal’ to ‘coral’.) Although the chapter has lost some of the sheer bewildering potency it had for me then, I still find the intensity of its descriptions – often in contrast to the comic and even banal speech of the episode – unlike anything I’ve come across elsewhere in literature. This quality has something to do with the chapter's peculiar relation to realism, immediately evident in the opening sentence. I propose to call this mode pararealism, taking advantage of all the adverbial senses of the prefix para-listed by the OED, ‘to one side, aside, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper, wrong’, as well as the notions, also mentioned in the definition, of perversion and simulation.