Bloomsday: 'aquacities of thought'
This week, readers around the world marked June 16––the day James Joyce's Ulysses is set--with marathon readings of the novel. Here, we give you a taste of its audacious inventiveness
The story so far:
One man (Bloom) is giving tea to another man (Stephen).
Now read on…
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?
To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington’s lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.
What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.
What we love about this…
This week’s excerpt was suggested by one of our readers, Jessica Starmer, who explains its significance for her:
‘In this rapturous paean to the many manifestations of water, Joyce displays his love of words and all that they can be used to signify. He uses unusual words such as “luteofulvous” and “homothetic”; makes up his own portmanteau words: “oceanflowing rivers”, “neverchanging everchanging water”, and rejoices in the variety of terms available: “laughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons…”
‘But this passage is not just about technical exuberance: there is a music to Joyce’s language that sings through all the pages of his book; sometimes quite literally, as Ulysses is filled with the popular songs of his day, their words echoing in the characters (long before the term “earworm” was conceived). Joyce’s prose is best read aloud to allow its rhythms, falls, and rises to sing through: “pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”
‘Ulysses is known for its linguistic creativity and experimentation, but these are rarely for their own sake: they are in the service of telling the story, of drawing the characters and the world they inhabit. All the words and the famed parallels with Greek myth come back to telling the story of the three main characters: Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Bloom’s wife Molly. All the action stems from their need for human connection: Bloom and Molly’s son Rudy died as an infant 11 years earlier, and they have been sundered from one another, each on their own “Odyssey”, ever since. Stephen––a version of Joyce in his younger days––is struggling to become an artist and to free himself of institutions and people that limit him.
‘The extract is taken from the chapter of the book known as “Ithaca”, with the Greek parallel being the homecoming of Odysseus to his wife, Penelope. In Ulysses, Stephen and Bloom’s meeting allows both to become what they need to be: Stephen is saved and freed, and Bloom can become a father. The prose in this extract takes us on a dizzying journey around the world of water; but then zooms back in again on a simple domestic scene. Bloom is making tea for the hungover and tired Stephen. The verbal fireworks serve to illustrate and contrast waterloving Bloom and hydrophobe Stephen, and we start to sense one of Bloom’s defining characteristics: he is kind. He performs many acts of kindness throughout the book, though they usually go unnoticed; he is often snubbed and looked down upon by his fellow Dubliners, but tolerates their slights with patience and tolerance.
‘And this is another thing to love about this book: Joyce chose an everyday man as his hero, who is not great, achieves little––but is curious, gentle, and kind.’
About the author
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish modernist writer whose dazzlingly inventive use of language and structure in his novels Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (published in installments from 1924 under the title ‘Work in Progress’ and as a complete book in 1939) helped to revolutionize fiction. Joyce also wrote poetry, short stories (as in his early collection Dubliners), and a play called Exiles.
To read alongside…
You might enjoy reading another selection from Ulysses as featured on the Ten Minute Book Club, with a brief introduction by a Joyce expert and lots of background and further reading suggestions, plus some questions to get you thinking. Or have a look at our past LitHits newsletter on Ulysses, featuring a moment when Stephen Dedalus is walking along the beach.
You can also read the entire novel on Project Gutenberg.
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