Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Freedman, Ariela. "Did It Flow?: Bridging Aesthetics and History in Joyce’s Ulysses." Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 1 (2006): 853–68.
Related topics:
Beginnings and Endings
Creation and Making
Ingestion and Excretion
Irish History Transformed
Medicine
Realism
Rich and Poor
Waste
Water
Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/did-it-flow-bridging-aesthetics-and-history-in-joyces-ulysses/oclc/194181124&referer=brief_results
This article explores how the depiction of the circulation of water and waste in Ulysses bridges the gap between the aesthetic world of the novel and the historical world it claims to represent. Freedman frames her argument using a passage from "Ithaca" (U 17) where, after Bloom turns on the tap, the narrator's question of "Did it flow?" is answered by a lengthy description that traces the water's entire journey through the pipes and back to its reservoir of origin (U 17.163-82). By acknowledging this process, Joyce rejects the idea of narrative autonomy, insisting that "nothing comes from nothing" and emphasizing that the text, like the water, must come from a source that is materially and historically grounded (Freedman 854).
While many critics have focused on water and waste as purely aesthetic tropes, Freedman argues that they are also tied to the historicity of the Dublin of Ulysses. At the turn of the century, Dublin stood behind other European cities in waste disposal, and it was not uncommon for a man of Bloom's status to have an outdoor privy rather than a water closet—the London standard. However, water closets often caused more problems than they solved, as defective drainage circulated waste and disease throughout the city in a way static outhouses did not. Joyce objects to water closets because they attempt to let us "deny the reality of our own shit" (864), ignoring the complex flows of the body much in the same way the miraculously arrival of water at the tap masks its journey from the source. Joyce sees language in much the same way, as a "repository of objects old and new, treasured and forgotten" (861).
The novel's single day is continually disrupted by a narrative that expands and collapses time, and even in his spectacular breaks from literary tradition, Joyce acknowledges the lineage of the canon from which he departs. Of course, the text's insistence on origin and source also highlights the impossibility of completely charting and cataloguing the world. However, rather than undermining its realism, this limitation mimics the fundamental truth of individual perception, and thus "the novel knows the world as we ourselves do" (Freedman 865).
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