"I Have Been a Perfect Pig": A Semiosis of Swine in "Circe"

Despite the popularity of Bakhtinian approaches to Joyce’s works in the 1980s and early ’90s, there has been in recent years an increasing dissatisfaction with what is often perceived as the privileging of social and political relativity within Bakhtin’s body of theory that allegedly elides questions of class, race, and history with celebratory notions of the inherently dialogized utterance and the impossibility of true monologism. The putative ahistoricism of Bakhtinian theory has led, predictably, to a criticism of its popular application in Joyce studies. As M. Keith Booker has it in his “Ulysses,” Capitalism, and Colonialism: Reading Joyce After the Cold War, many recent “political” readings of Joyce which deploy Bakhtin as a point of departure are concerned with revealing Joyce’s interest in and engagement with popular culture in an effort to dismantle the formerly dominant critical view of Joyce characterized by an “elitist and aestheticist hermeticism” (35). While the best of these “liberal” Bakhtinian readings are commendable for their recuperation of Joyce as a functioning member of his society, indeed as a political writer, Booker suggests that in focusing their analyses exclusively upon the heteroglossic nature of Joyce’s work, they may also inadvertently assume a position which is “suspiciously close to the liberal humanist notion that variety is inherently good and that good things will automatically happen when multiple voices are allowed to sound” (35). In short, some argue that Bakhtinian analyses of Joyce often come dangerously close to positing a closed system of universal (read western) aesthetics—which disregards political realities—much like the New Critical regime which they sought to displace. Peter Hitchcock warns those who invoke