Nice piece of wood
Nice piece of wood
In Brief
As Bloom sips his burgundy in Davy Byrne's pub, the narrative offers a fine rendering of the consciousness of incipient inebriation: "Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there."
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Unlike his creator, Leopold Bloom drinks very little, but on
this solitary occasion Joyce allows him a glass of wine and
observes him experiencing the first, and probably best, stage
of alcoholic intoxication: that moment when the cares of the
world subside and things glow with a quiet beauty. The
observation comes at the end of a glimpse of Bloom's lunch:
Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off.Calypso begins by remarking on Bloom's "relish" for mildly disgusting flavors like urinous kidneys but it does not describe his responses to the kidney that he cooks. Lestrygonians rectifies this omission. It shows the "relish of disgust" with which Bloom savors sharp mustard and moldy gorgonzola cheese and then moves to the flavors of the wine, opening up in the early summer air, as it gently counteracts the pungent flavors of the food. Finally the narrative leaves food and drink behind, evoking the pleasant alcoholic fumes in Bloom's brain as he contemplates his surroundings in a newfound spirit of contentment. Nice bar, nice wood, nice planing, nice curve: the hedonic repetition evokes the relief of briefly letting go of thought and rediscovering the pleasure principle.
Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves there.
This is, of course, not the only passage in which Joyce subtly records the effects of alcohol on the human brain. There are many in Dubliners and Ulysses, but the few brief sentences in Lestrygonians are perhaps the only ones that paint these effects in an entirely benign light. Bloom has found a way to experience the virtues of the drug without succumbing to its dismal excesses. Most others in his world struggle to get the dose right.
The interior of Davy Byrne's, probably much changed from what it looked like in 1904, in a ca. 1930-1950 photograph held in the Valentine Photographic Collection of the National Library of Ireland. Source: mappingdubliners.org.
A nicely epoxied piece of wood in a Resin Cast Ocean Style Bar Counter by Tables and Resin Works. Source: www.designertables.co.za.