Little pills
Little pills
In Brief
Demonstrating his familiarity with all parts of the globe,
"skipper Murphy" reveals a solemn mystery of the Far East: "—
I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that
had little pills like putty and he put them in the water
and they opened and every pill was something different.
One was a ship, another was a house, another was a flower."
Not only could these toys have been found in Europe in 1904—no
travels needed—but they were most likely Japanese in origin.
Joyce may have encountered them in Marcel Proust's monumental
novel In Search of Lost Time. If so, then the
seemingly inconsequential little recollection resonates with
implications about the survival of the past in the present, in
a chapter preoccupied with that theme.
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Only once in Eumaeus is Murphy called the "narrator," and it comes just before this possible echo of the Proust's long first-person novel, which was still being sequentially published in France when Joyce was living in Paris and writing Eumaeus. In a famous passage at the end of the first chapter of Swann's Way (1913), the narrator tells how the little village of his youth which he calls "Combray" became miraculously present once again when he tasted a bit of cake dipped in tea. In this marvellous passage the narrator recalls how the visual details of the village "rose up like a stage set" in his memory. Then, in an extended simile featuring one of the novel's many bits of japonerie, he heightens the magic by describing how the same thing can happen when little pieces of folded paper are dropped into a bowl of water.
Here is the passage, in Scott Moncrieff's translation: "And
as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of
madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my
aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must
long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so
happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where
her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the
little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built
out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until
that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house
the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the
Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along
which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it
was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse
themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping
in it little pieces of paper which until then are without
character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch
and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become
flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in
that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's
park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of
the village and their little dwellings and the parish church
and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape
and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from
my cup of tea."
I have never seen "little pieces of paper" precisely like the
ones Proust describes, but as the accompanying video by artist
Étienne Cliquet demonstrates, such origami is still
being practiced in France. All folded paper tends to unfold in
water, perhaps because folding stretches the wood fibers and
loads them with potential energy, while wetting the fibers
(which happens slowly, through capillary action) gives them a
way to return to a lower energy state. Today, one can buy many
other toys that expand in water, including some containing
small sponges that have been cut into recognizable shapes and
packed inside pill capsules. When one of these capsules
dissolves in water, the sponge inside opens and swells to
become an animal or a vehicle or an action figure. Joyce's "little
pills like putty" may perhaps be a precursor to these,
since gelatin capsules for delivering medications were
invented in 1833. But even if this is the case, his account of
all the things packed inside the pills ("One was a ship,
another was a house, another was a flower") seems
clearly to owe its inspiration to Proust.
Stephen too revisits vivid memories from his past, as does Molly. To list them all would be tedious, but a copious account of the three characters' recollections would show how right John S. Rickard was to speak of Joyce's Book of Memory. Not only does Joyce clearly believe what Stephen says in Scylla and Charybdis—"I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory"—but he appears to hold a Proustian view that the past never really goes away. When we re-collect or re-member, we simply allow the shapes to assemble again, like little pieces of paper on water. As another modernist writer, William Faulkner, famously wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." From this insight hinted at in Eumaeus, it is only a small step to Finnegans Wake.
