This job
This job
In Brief
Stephen's distance from his own body is evident when he
performs an act of excretion: "Better get this job over quick.
Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos.
Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses,
rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in
barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling,
widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling." The
flowing of his own water into the swirling waters of Cock Lake becomes so
thoroughly transformed into poetic sounds and images that one
can barely tell it is happening. But Joyce carefully shaped
his language to make this conclusion unavoidable.
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The paragraph provides a hint that Stephen is thinking of peeing into the ocean waters: "I shall wait. No, they will pass on." And after the flow is "spent" his thoughts keep circling around the topic. As the foam floats away he imagines the weeds under the water's surface as women lifting up their skirts: "Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds." The "hising up" of petticoats recalls Mary Ann's urination in Telemachus, and "writhing weeds" and "coy fronds" make these female entities sexual beings. Soon they are "Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious men." Penises too are playing in Stephen's consciousness. Two paragraphs later he thinks of the drowned man's corpse, "A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly."
Stephen's thoughts about his urine mingling with the waters
of the ocean anticipate similar thoughts at the end of Lotus
Eaters when Bloom imagines his penis floating in a warm
bath. Bloom has considered masturbating in the bath, and the
thought of seminal fluid mingling with the bathwater
sexualizes the image: "He foresaw his pale body reclined in it
at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting
soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over
and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel,
bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush
floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp
father of thousands, a languid floating flower." Joyce
clearly intends a connection to the "floating foampool, flower
unfurling" in Proteus.
