In a 1903 essay, Bertrand Russell deems several tenets of modern science “so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand,” including the dispiriting probability that humankind is “destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins” (107). Russell’s grim outlook partakes of a strain of cosmic pessimism seemingly necessitated by the second law of thermodynamics, that watershed of nineteenth-century physics which insisted that both time and heat-flow were irreversible and that, in any closed thermodynamic system, usable energy would invariably dissipate. Applied on a grand scale, the so-called law of entropy posited a mortal world tending irrevocably “toward a final state of thermal equilibrium, or ‘heat death’”—a prospect that “struck at deep-rooted apocalyptic fears in the popular imagination,” and which physicists continued for several decades to endorse as the universe’s only realistic fate (Prigogine and Stengers 116; Whitworth 60). Indeed, a 1930 essay finds Russell as confident as ever of the theory’s unassailability: “The second law of thermodynamics makes it scarcely possible to doubt that the universe is running down, and that ultimately nothing of the slightest importance will be possible anywhere” (32).
Early twentieth-century writers, then, had to contend not only with the new uncertainties of their epoch but also with a portentous and widely-accepted law of physics, one that can only have contributed forcefully to modernity’s crisis of meaning—as Russell’s fatalistic tone suggests. It seems plausible, even likely, that some literary modernists must have felt the same “need to mitigate the theory’s consequences,” through sublimation if not outright elision, that Michael Whitworth has found more explicitly in popular science texts from the period (61). I hope to commence this line of inquiry by locating a mitigation of this kind in the works of James Joyce; in particular I want to suggest that the evolving representations of time and reality occasioned by Joyce’s radical stylistic progression in Ulysses—which is a movement, among other things, from objectivity to subjective uncertainty—increasingly mask and finally disavow the second law’s implications of irreversibility, entropy, and heat death.
“All that is Solid . . .”: Turner, Joyce, and the Thermodynamic Real
Against Wyndham Lewis’s charge of “time-fanaticism” (83), Frank Budgen defends Joyce’s temporal fastidiousness in Ulysses as pertinent to the changing nature of time in the modern era: “James Watt invented the steam engine, and the steam engine begat the locomotive, and the locomotive begat the timetable, forcing people to grapple with its complexities and think in minutes where their grandfathers thought in hours” (129). Yet the relationship Budgen limns between Watt’s steam engine and modernity’s evolving relationship to time is more significant than he likely intended, for the steam engine stands as icon and origin not only of the industrial revolution and its regimented timetable, but also of thermodynamics and its impact on modern time. It was, after all, the steam engine that begat Sadi Carnot’s work on efficiency and heat loss in the 1820s, which begat William Thomson’s initial formulation of the second law (1852), which begat the concept of heat death, a “dizzy leap from engine technology to cosmology” that Clausius’s entropy principle (1865) later affirmed (Prigogine and Stengers 111-20). The steam engine, then, is intimately bound up in the prosaic regulation and dissection of modern time as well as its unidirectionality, its irreversible “tendency toward homogeneity and death” (116).
Joyce’s preoccupation throughout much of Ulysses with “the temporal equivalent of ‘local colour,’” to borrow Lewis’s phrase (82), befits this thermodynamic perspective as well as the author’s own determinedly protean efforts to convey the modern real, efforts for which an important predecessor in the visual arts—J. M. W. Turner—can serve as an illuminating comparison. Turner not only anticipated modernist formal experiments but also evinced a fascination for steam engines and was, according to Michel Serres, “the first true genius in thermodynamics” (Hermes 57). Indeed, his later paintings presciently evoke the new uncertainties and indeterminacies that would come to characterize industrial modernity. Like Joyce’s later works, Turner’s “landscape[s] of both apparent and submerged complexity [and] energy” depart from received notions of mimesis, attaining a transcendent fidelity to a world newly overturned by “industry’s transforming fires” (Rodner 3). Serres notes that where Turner’s contemporaries still found mechanics and geometry in nature, as befitted a pre-industrial Newtonian worldview, Turner alone recognized the boundlessness of his steam-powered milieu: “Geometry disintegrates, lines are erased; matter, ablaze, explodes . . . . The perception of the stochastic replaces the art of drawing the form” (Hermes 56-8).
Analogously, Joyce’s novels turn from deterministic naturalism to the seemingly stochastic textuality of Finnegans Wake and the latter episodes of Ulysses. If Turner’s unique “brand of realism was different than ours,” as John Gordon argues of Joyce, “[t]hat is because his idea of reality was different”—an idea of reality hardly invalidated by Joyce’s refusal to conform to outmoded realist conventions (xii). Serres argues that Turner “enters into the boiler” of the steam engines and steam-powered machines that pervade his paintings, and that Watt’s invention consequently becomes the model for Turner’s universe: “The cosmos is a steam engine, and inversely” (Hermes 56, 59). Turner didn’t live long enough to know of the second law—Thomson’s formulation post-dates the artist’s death by a year—and perhaps only for this reason can his paintings freely celebrate “cosmic copulations . . . of fire and water” without acknowledging the world’s ticking clock, that seeming certitude with which later artists and writers would have to cope (62). With Ulysses, I want to suggest, Joyce also “enters into the boiler” of the thermodynamic modern world, and his modes of representation likewise adapt to convey that world authentically—but with an important omission, for those formal evolutions ultimately work to suppress the boiler’s more “startling implication” of an entropic universe, one that Turner could not have suspected but which later “inspired dread and animosity” in Joyce’s contemporaries (Lightman 81, 96).
Displacement: The Clocks on Boylan’s Socks
Leopold Bloom muses frequently on time’s passage (“Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On”), its relentlessness (“As easy stop the sea”), its irreversibility (“Never again. My youth. Only once it comes”), and its dissipative effects (“Me. And me now”) (11.188, .641, 13.1102, 8.917). He also demonstrates more than a passing familiarity with its inevitable end: “Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing. . . . Gas: then solid: then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock . . .” (8.581-3). This, in a nutshell, is the tragic grand narrative the law of entropy has granted the cosmos; Bloom evidently knows his physics. Oddly, though, he has a difficult time determining how solar heat reacts to his dark suit: “Be a warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat” (4.78-80). The answer he seeks is “absorbs,” an answer that, unlike the three possibilities he considers, implies the irreversibility of heat-flow and the dissipation of thermal energy. It may seem a stretch to argue that Bloom’s inability to arrive at the correct answer implies a psychological denial of the second law, but this is merely a first example—occurring only eighty lines into Bloom’s odyssey—and Joyce offers sufficient reason throughout the rest of Ulysses to see this as integral to a larger framework of suppression.
The first indication of heat-death anxiety soon follows, when a cloud “cover[s] the sun slowly, wholly,” prompting in Bloom’s mind the image of a “barren land, bare waste. . . . A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old” (4.218-23). Abandoned by solar energy, the earth has become exhausted, cold, infertile: “Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation” (4.226-9). Fortunately for Bloom, unlike the end portended by modern science, this dismal scene does not endure. The clouds soon part, and the sun comes “running down Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath” (4.240-1). Note that the sun appears here as Hermes, assuring us of its own godlike immortality and rushing to foreclose any further musings on a future devoid of its vitalizing force, as well as foreshadowing in miniature the project of containment and denial that operates throughout the novel—a project whose triumph will be the Eternal Return of Finnegans Wake.
In Ulysses this project operates initially through a displacement of the second law onto a figure who plays a crucial role at the story’s outset but, appropriately, becomes less and less important (to Bloom, to Molly, to the narrative, and to the reader) as the novel progresses: Blazes Boylan, a character that operates for Joyce in much the same way as do the steamers and locomotives that populate Turner’s canvases, essentially powering the primary conflict of the first half of Ulysses—Bloom’s anxiety over Molly’s four-o’clock appointment—the way a heat source powers a thermodynamic system. (That he does not continue to do so in the novel’s second half is an essential component of Joyce’s final containment of entropy.) Boylan’s conspicuously thermodynamic name, on which Joyce plays throughout the text—e.g., “hot as blazes,” “Boylan with impatience” (18.951, 10.486)—reinforces this steam engine quality; moreover, the comparison between Boylan and the steam engine works on more than just the nominal level. Hot-tempered, inflamed with lust, an athletic lover (replete even with an “energetic piston and cylinder movement” [17.2158-59]), and dissipative in more ways than one, this “jaunty” gent is by far the most thermodynamic character in the novel. In “Circe,” Bello evokes a conflagrative image of Boylan mid-coitus that is, like the steam engine, literally ablaze at its center: “A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush!” (15.3141-42). And like a boiler, Boylan blazes within, as Joyce reminds us by continually referring to the heated seats he leaves behind him (11.342, .524-26, .764). He also cuts an incandescent figure against the dull backdrop of urban Dublin and quiescent men in mourning, often to cartoonish effect: “By the provost’s wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes and socks with skyblue clocks,” offering “to the ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and the red flower between his lips” (10.1240-6).
Those “socks with skyblue clocks” on them deserve more attention, given the clocks’ conspicuous alternate signification, for Boylan in fact embodies not only thermodynamic power but also thermodynamic time, and he worries Bloom in ways inseparable from his anxiety over time’s irreversibility. Boylan’s raison d’être is, of course, to serve as a threat to our protagonist, a threat in itself bound up with temporal matters; the hour of four o’clock and the character of Blazes Boylan perform complementary and inseverable functions in the narrative. The two of them certainly hold equal significance for Bloom, whose thoughts of one invariably precipitate thoughts of the other. After narrowly avoiding an encounter with his challenger, he thinks, “Didn’t see me. After two” (8.1178). Earlier, when Nosey Flynn mentions Boylan, Bloom immediately “raised his eyes and looked at the bilious clock. Two. Pub clock five minutes fast” (8.790-91). Without skipping a beat, his thought stream moves directly from Boylan to the clock hands’ unrelenting movement: “Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet” (8.791). Time’s onrushing flow is as unstemmable as Blazes is unstoppable: “Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can’t move”; “Useless to go back. Had to be” (4.447-8, 8.633). Bloom acquiesces to the inevitability that is four o’clock, making no attempt to stand in the other man’s way even when a clear opportunity presents itself in “Sirens.” And when he ponders what time it will be safe to return home he decides, “Six. Time will be gone then,” meaning, of course, that Boylan will be gone then (8.853). Time and Boylan, in Bloom’s mind, are evidently synonymous.
This character, then, who evokes the steam engine by name, sight, action, and narrative purpose, also embodies time—or, more precisely, the portentously irreversible and dissipative time of the second law. Just as the steam locomotive and its timetable emblemize modern thermodynamics and entropy, so Boylan and four o’clock serve as odious reminders of the dissipation of Bloom’s marriage; it should hardly surprise us that when Boylan descends, inevitably and horribly like time itself, onto Molly, her husband’s watch dies: “Funny my watch stopped at half past four. . . . Was that just when he, she? O, he did. Into her. She did. Done” (13.846-9). Time, as it must, has run out. “As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost” (11.641). Joyce is not content, however, to leave it at that. Through modes of representation that obscure time’s passage and elide its irreversibility, modes that become especially emphatic after Bloom’s watch stops, Ulysses sets out to suppress entropy and, in a roundabout way, to recoup what our hero has lost.
Erasure via Representation: Escalating Relativity in Ulysses
The winding-down timepiece—an apt if conventional metaphor for the universe in the wake of the second law—is the dark underside of the steam engine-begotten modern “timetable” to which Budgen refers. In Ulysses representations of time adapt as the narrative’s formal complexity escalates, allowing Joyce to recant Boylan’s impact on the novel and thus mitigate the anxiety over entropy that he has displaced onto this character. The novel’s latter episodes foreground time as emphatically as do their predecessors but in very different ways; just as Turner’s art moves from the geometric exactness of the eighteenth century to the turbulent flux of his later canvases, Joyce’s depictions of objective time (i.e., timetable time) dissolve into an emphasis on the subject’s (i.e., the characters’ and the reader’s) relativistic relationship to it. While Joyce continues, as Thomas Jackson Rice puts it, to “affirm a real that, although unreachable or unrealizable through representation, nonetheless exists,” his attention tends away from the real and ever more toward its variegated potential representations (8). Accompanying this move is what amounts to a suppression of the arrow of time, first through obfuscation and later through the promise of renewal offered by the conclusion of Ulysses and the temporal circularity of Finnegans Wake.
In keeping with Hugh Kenner’s definition of “Objectivity” as “the outer world perceived as a sequence of reports . . . occurring in irreversible time,” Joyce’s increasing eschewal of objective prose, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, accompanies a gradual turning away from irreversibility (Joyce’s 4; my italics). Throughout much of Ulysses, Joyce so carefully plots the day’s temporal progress that “it is possible to account for the entire day, 8 a.m. to midnight, of a secondary character, Buck Mulligan, whose onstage appearances are only four in number and widely separated” (Kenner, Ulysses 15). Yet time becomes much less clear and exact as the novel wears on, due to “the advent of engulfing stylistic idiosyncrasies” in “Sirens,” the episode in which Joyce begins to privilege style and representation over narrative exposition (51). Appropriately, this stylistic foregrounding coincides with the climax of what has hitherto been the text’s central conflict. Boylan cuckolds Bloom, Bloom’s watch stops ticking, and one expects, perhaps, some sort of denouement. Instead, Joyce offers the rest of Ulysses, which style and muddling representations of time come to dominate all the more—at the expense of entropic time and its embodiment, Blazes Boylan. As Gifford’s Annotations point out, “after midnight . . . clock time becomes less and less certain” (3). The majority of the action in “Circe” transcends clock time; whether we take its phantasmagoric flights as dramatically inflated depictions of characters’ fleeting thoughts, or as the Arranger’s spuriously contrived diversions, or as anything else, they certainly do not abide by the hours of the clock. In fact, “an extraordinarily active two hundred pages” pass between midnight’s chiming and the end of “Eumaeus,” when one o’clock approaches (3; U 15.1362, 16.1603).
Thanks to these internal indications—the chiming of midnight, the “getting on for one,” the two-o’clock church bell (18.1232)—Ulysses never quite lets us forget that objective time exists, and that it is running down; nevertheless, the text struggles more and more against this objectivity, especially in the final episode’s “blurring of the time element” (Nabokov 363). “I never know the time,” Molly Bloom admits; “even that watch he gave me never seems to go properly” (18.344-5). Later she assumes it must be “4 in the morning . . . if not more” long before “Georges church bells” announce that two o’clock has arrived (18.927, .1231-2). Joyce’s failure to provide Stuart Gilbert with an exact hour for this final episode, and also his listing under “Time” in the Linati schema of the infinity symbol (Gifford 610), highlight the author’s suppression of objectivity; he provides us with a time, two o’clock, toward the episode’s end, but the atemporality implied by the schemata and by Molly’s multidirectional monologue indicates we are no longer to concern ourselves with the objective real so much as with Molly’s subjective response to it. Her mnemonic navigation of time elides its irreversibility; she summons the distant past as readily as the recent past and the near future, seamlessly moving from one to the other and demonstrating that time is endlessly navigable, that every event of the past is revivable, that future events are foreseeable—if only in one’s mind. The two-o’clock church bell intrudes to remind us that time, independent of the subject, keeps winding down, that the past is irrecoverable and the only certain future a tragic one, but this is a mere blip in what is otherwise a forty-page celebration of time’s subjective reversibility. Richard Ellmann’s assertion that “the ruins of time and space and the mansions of eternity here coexist” points up the hierarchical relationship in “Penelope” between ontological (irreversible) time and its phenomenological (reversible, or “etern[al]”) counterpart: Joyce clearly erects the “mansions” of the latter atop the “ruins” of the former (Liffey 163).
It is telling of Joyce’s escalating containment of time in the latter part of Ulysses that Molly recognizes the coloring but not the conspicuous ornamental flourishes of Boylan’s “socks with the skyblue things on them” (18.421; emphasis added). Molly—and, at this point, the novel—fails to recognize the inscriptions of Boylan’s temporal embodiment, and so the text repudiates a significance that it earlier worked so hard to establish. Boylan, once a vehicle for displacement, now becomes an empty sign whose referents—entropy and irreversibility—are consequently effaced. Compounding this effacement, “Penelope” also nullifies the sign itself by finally submerging Molly’s thoughts of Boylan (which, given the events of her day, might be expected to take center stage throughout) under the overwhelming contemplation of other topics, especially her husband, to whom her thoughts continually return and at whom she directs the book’s concluding affirmation of “yes I said yes I will Yes” (18.1608-9). In addition to suppressing the once indefatigable presence of Boylan (Boylawho?), Molly’s final words further exacerbate the episode’s time-blurring quality by leaving the reader in a triune temporal space: on Howth Hill at the occasion of Molly’s long-ago consent to Bloom (“yes I said”), as well as in the immediate present of Molly’s thoughts, the real object of which appears to be an affirmation for the future (“yes I will”). Ulysses ends by placing its reader simultaneously in multiple places along the objective arrow of time; this is an impossible feat in the physical world but a pleasant fantasy enabled by Joyce’s narrative technique, and one that erases the inevitability of heat death as surely as Molly’s imperfect recall has erased the clocks from Boylan’s socks.
“He Can Swim of Course”: The Discourse of “Hydrokinetic Turgidity”
In an observation that accords neatly with my own regarding Blazes Boylan’s steam-engineness throughout the novel, Kenner notes that Boylan takes the form of a locomotive in the following passage from “Penelope”: “frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng” (Ulysses 148; 18.596-8). That Molly frames her thought of the train with snippets from her duet with Boylan clinches the connection between the man and the machine; indeed, the train seems to whistle his part. But what I find particularly interesting are the oddly watery locomotives Molly imagines, with “water rolling all over and out of them all sides.” In this reduction of the thermodynamic train engine to what is essentially a hydrodynamic image, we once again see in microcosm a project of containment that accretes throughout the book, one that increasingly foregrounds a hydrodynamic discourse—with its attendant figurations of flux and unpredictability, but also of cyclical renewal and vortices of local stability—that overwhelms the thermodynamic and entropic character of Joyce’s modern “chaosmos” (FW 118.21). This foregrounding effects a movement in focalization from the cosmic to a more local level, that of the earth’s water cycle; in other words, Joyce focuses our attention on a dynamic system that, for all its stochastic turbulence, nevertheless replenishes and renews itself perpetually—as long as the sun continues to shine, or, in Joyce’s fictional landscape, as long as the reader can be deluded that it will. Whereas other modernists frequently use water as a trope for the frightening instabilities and chaos of modern life (Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves come readily to mind), Joyce celebrates this chaos, these instabilities, as characteristics of a system that at least remains unchecked by entropy—assuming one can ignore, as Joyce’s fiction increasingly enables and encourages us to do, the encompassing thermodynamic system that powers the water cycle and to which its fate is ultimately tethered.
Robert Adams Day describes Joyce’s treatment of water as “beginning in tentative dribbles and expanding to infinity throughout the chronological sequence of Joyce’s works” (7). This expansion from the otherwise arid Dubliners stories’ “tentative dribbles” to the all-embracing waters of Finnegans Wake accompanies Joyce’s concomitant evolution away from objectivity and irreversible time, and both movements contribute to an increasingly emphatic repression of the law of entropy—as well, it might be said, as a repression or proscription of Stephen Dedalus and the hydro-phobia he represents. As Day points out, even in the famous “bird-girl” scene in A Portrait of the Artist that so clearly articulates the thematic linkage between water and art, Stephen chooses to wade only in a seaweed-filled rivulet—“and he soon begins striding over the strand and then turns landward. . . . When he is not flinching with revulsion from real or figurative water, he is merely getting his feet wet” (10). In Ulysses Stephen has not changed much; he describes himself as a “hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in October of the preceding year) . . .” (17.237-9). The sea, Mulligan’s “great sweet mother,” is for Stephen “a bowl of bitter waters”—an image prompted by the same “cloud [that] began to cover the sun slowly, wholly” that catalyzes Bloom’s first intimation of heat death (1.248, 4.218)—that recalls memories of his own dying mother (1.80, .249).
His hydrophobia clearly holds figurative as well as literal implications, representing a fear not only of water but of the protean flux of life. Notably, “Proteus,” in which Stephen ponders these very qualities in life and in language, calls attention to the sea’s deadly and destructive powers by re-inscribing “our great sweet mother” as a vast watery grave for human corpses both literary and real: those of Milton’s Lycidas (“Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor”) and the recent drowning victim, now a “[b]ag of corpse gas sopping in foul brine” (3.474, .476). At the water’s edge lies another carcass, a dog’s, which further disturbs “poor dogsbody” Stephen (3.351-2), and the episode’s final crucifixion image, of “a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees,” even suggests a sea-death for Christ, perhaps also foreboding a like fate for Stephen the pseudo-Christ figure (504). Drowning may be the “mildest of all deaths known to man,” but it is also his greatest fear: “She is drowning. . . . She will drown me with her . . .” (3.482-3, 10.875-76). Stephen’s aversion to fluidity and flux leave him a stagnant character with, in Joyce’s words, “a shape that can’t be changed” (Budgen 105). Thus, immediately after his hydrophobia crescendos to a fevered pitch in “Proteus,” Joyce jettisons him from the novel’s center stage, attending henceforth to a very different sort of character, a confirmed “waterlover” who proves remarkably adept at navigating the flux of life—the sort of fellow who can endure his wife’s infidelity and later crawl calmly into the bed that bears “the imprint of a human form, male, not his,” pausing only to brush away “some flakes of potted meat, recooked” (17.183, .2124-6). While Molly’s tryst with Boylan has caused Bloom some obvious strain, he nevertheless recognizes its inevitability (“more than inevitable, irreparable”) and negotiates the perturbation with alacrity (17.2194).
This acceptance of turbulence and ability to “go with the flow,” so to speak, manifest themselves in Bloom’s positive relationship with water. Recognizing the maternal and nourishing properties of water that Mulligan posits and Stephen rejects, Bloom’s imagined bath at the end of “Lotus-Eaters” is “a womb of warmth,” one that will “sustain” him (5.567-9). Yet its maternal qualities are not all that Bloom likes about water; on the contrary, he seems to appreciate everything about it, embracing the element’s many seemingly contradictory characteristics. When the questioner in “Ithaca” asks, “What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, . . . admire?” (17.183-4), the response is remarkable for its insistence on paradox: Bloom admires water’s “flow” as well as its “solidity”; its “variability” and “variety” as well as its “stability” and “imperturbability”; its “docility” as well as its “hegemony” and “strength”; its “restlessness” and its “constancy”; its fecundity and its “sterility”; its “hydrokinetic turgidity” as well as its “hydrostatic quiescence” (184-221). In “Nausicaa,” too, Bloom ponders the sea’s capacity for chaos as well as calm: “Big brutes of oceangoing steamers floundering along in the dark, . . . pitched about like snuff at a wake . . . . Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid, crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones’ locker, moon looking down so peaceful” (13.1148-65).
While Bloom recognizes the ocean’s dangers, he never shies away from them: much to Molly’s chagrin, he once volunteered to take the helm on a boating trip that soon “came on to get rough the old thing crookeding about . . . and the tide all swamping in floods in through the bottom . . . it’s a mercy we werent all drowned he can swim of course” (18.955-60). Bloom managed to maintain control and, if Molly remembers correctly, rose authoritatively to the challenge, saying, “pull the right reins now pull the left . . . theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm” (18.958-61). Bloom also cites, more than once and with evident paternal pride, an excursion on the Erin’s King into “some remarkably choppy, not to say stormy, weather,” on which Milly got “[n]ot a bit funky” (4.434-6, 16.651-2, 13.187-8). Ulysses celebrates the Bloomian capacity for riding out life’s turbulent waters as the proper antithesis to Stephen’s hydrophobia, finally sidelining Stephen because his “shape,” having been molded unalterably in A Portrait, simply could not be made to fit comfortably within the structure of a novel that valorizes hydrodynamic flux while masking the world’s fatally thermodynamic underpinnings.
Joyce’s “Whirlworlds”: The Vortices of Time
It is significant that Joyce’s ode to water in “Ithaca” cites “eddies” and “whirlpools” as among the element’s admirable manifestations, because the whirlpool encapsulates and signifies water’s turbulent self-contradictions (17.206-7). Serres writes, “The vortex is unstable and stable, fluctuating and in equilibrium, is order and disorder at once, it destroys ships at sea, it is the formation of things” (Birth 30). Amid a turbulent flow of water, a whirlpool represents an island of order and stability; someone trapped in it, however, will find it a uniquely destructive force. Stephen is aware of both potentialities. On the one hand, he sees his family, his city, and the nightmare of history as vortices that pull at him and, like his sister Dilly, will drown him (10.875-7). On the other hand, in “Scylla and Charybdis” Stephen sees the present as a stabilizing eddy to which he can cling against the destructive flow of time: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past” (9.89). When his precocious lecture fails to impress the literati in the library, however, the swirling waters of Charybdis pull him under, and he spends the remainder of the day drowning—in copious amounts of Irish whiskey as well as under the onrushing tides of Joyce’s obscuring styles.
This image of the future plunging to the past through the whirlpool of the present is commensurate with the growing alignment in Ulysses of water and time. Even in the early portions of the novel, Bloom often reflects on time’s irreversibility as a hydrodynamic concept (“Always passing, the stream of life”), which helps to vitiate the thermodynamic character of time’s arrow: “Can’t bring back time. Like holding water in your hand” (5.563, 8.610). But later episodes cast life’s “stream” in more and more turbulent ways, with ever-shifting styles and modes of representation constantly stirring up the once-calm waters of the novel’s “initial style.” All this turbulence serves to make the stream of life erratic and unpredictable; moreover, it increasingly tends to circulate that stream, to vorticize it, so that in “Penelope” Molly’s thoughts constantly circle back upon themselves and return to subjectively re-inhabitable points in time.
“Penelope,” then, not only obscures time’s arrow but bends it, makes a spiral or whirlpool of it; and given the linkage between water, time, and representation in Ulysses, it is appropriate that the novel’s least time-bound and most overwhelmingly subjective episode is also its wateriest. Joyce calls attention to Molly’s bodily flow and to its enormity (“its pouring out of me like the sea”) just as he renders her thoughts as an uninterrupted and unpunctuated stream, one that often re-circulates to the subjects of hydrodynamic flux, of “the sea and the waves rushing” and “O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea” (18.1122-3, .1559, .1597). As Day has it, Molly “is full of liquid and of life. She urinates and menstruates; more, her discourse, with no beginning or end, is verbal water, in which shapeless thoughts flow, eddy, and are transformed” (16-7; emphasis added). The end of Ulysses compels us to see eddies in the stream of time, to focus not on its entropic unidirectionality but on its mnemonic reversibility. “Penelope” completes the novel’s containment and repression of thermodynamic time, drowning any notions of entropy or heat death beneath the deluge of Molly’s whirling soliloquy.
Finnegans Wake reflects this successful sublimation of dissipative time. The title alone alerts us to Joyce’s continued hydrodynamic focus, one of wake’s definitions being “the movement of waters in the aftermath of a ship or vessel,” as Gary Banham points out (184). The waters of the book’s “riverrun” recycle rather than deplete, the once-irreversible stream of life having become a “commodius vicus of recirculation” (3.1-2). And the Wake just gets more hydrodynamic from there: into this great whirlpool of a book Joyce weaves somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand river names (Bishop 336), producing a “lappish language” of “affluvial flowandflow” and “hitherandthithering waters” (FW 66.18-9, 404.1, 216.4) that reflects “an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water”—as Joyce himself said of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (JJII 564). Moreover, the Wake promises “the regeneration of all man by affusion of water,” the renewing powers of water on which “Saint Kevin, Hydrophilos,” meditates (FW 606.11-12, .4-5). Just as “Hydrophilos” both Latinizes and sanctifies Bloom the “waterlover,” the Wake as a whole extends Joyce’s appropriation in “Penelope” of water imagery’s potential for diversion and erasure.
Of Time and the “Riverrun”: Anticipating Nonlinear Thermodynamics
The Wake’s implications of reversibility and cyclical renewal receive support from its overall structure, for if “riverrun” is the beginning, it is also just a word from the middle of the book’s “last” sentence. The Wake is a fully cyclical celebration of the spiral and the whirlpool, of “whirled[s]” and “whirlworlds” (582.20, 17.29). It succeeds not only in bending the arrow of time back upon itself, but in continuing to do so through a hydrodynamic discourse that abnegates the universe’s thermodynamic mortality. Anthony Burgess, treating literary time in a general way, writes, “Time is the great enemy, and books like Ulysses and Finnegans Wake triumphantly trounce it” (178). More precisely, these works trounce a certain kind of time—the time of modern physics, of Blazes Boylan, of entropy and heat death—and offer in its place an immortal temporality, one that enables an optimistic cosmic vision that by 1922 had long seemed, and would long continue to seem, unattainable outside the realm of fiction.
Yet Joyce’s textual denial of the second law’s cosmological implications may actually achieve some scientific validity when considered in the retrospective light of nonlinear thermodynamics, according to which thermodynamic systems that are far from equilibrium “may still evolve to some steady state, but... the stability of the stationary state, or its independence from fluctuations, can no longer be taken for granted” (Prigogine and Stengers 140). This means that the inevitable thermodynamic equilibrium promised by the second law, or the similar stationary state reached by near-equilibrium systems, cannot be predicted for a nonlinear, nonequilibrium system; in fact, the latter may tend toward an unstable state wherein “certain fluctuations, instead of regressing, may be amplified and invade the entire system, compelling it to evolve toward a new regime…” (140-1). Wheareas equilibrium thermodynamics held entropy to be the ultimate force in nature, these newer discoveries suggest that chance may be the more commanding cosmic player.
This revelation necessitates a reevaluation of the seeming incongruity between the second law of thermodynamics and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for entropy’s dominion seemed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to preclude any conception of nature as progressively self-organizing (that is, evolutionary) at the cosmic level. In The Nature of the Physical World (1928) Arthur Eddington writes, “The law that entropy always increases . . . holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature” (74). Chance might account for some natural phenomena, but only so long as the universe sustained them, and the universe was doomed: “With universes as with mortals,” Sir James Jeans asserted in 1929, “the only possible life is progress to the grave” (309). While wandering the streets of Dublin, Leopold Bloom ruminates on this same morbid fate: “world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock . . .” (U 8.582-3). But in 1882, a younger and evidently more optimistic Bloom “had advocated during nocturnal perambulations . . . the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, expounded in The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species” (17.1641-5), theories of “ever-increasing circles of complexity” arising from the success of random chance variations (Darwin 124). Two decades later, Bloom has apparently grown wise to the inevitable. However, the second law does not necessarily encroach on biological evolution in the way that grown-up Bloom and his real-world contemporaries would have assumed, since we now know that some nonequilibrium systems–for example, “the world[, which] is not the ideal, closed system of thermodynamic theory” (Rice 169)–can destabilize, give rise to fluctuations, and evolve.
Compellingly, Joyce’s increasingly watery discourse anticipates Ilya Prigogine’s appropriation of hydrodynamic models for understanding self-organizing thermodynamic systems: “Phenomena of this kind are well known in the field of hydrodynamics and fluid flow. For instance, it has long been known that once a certain flow rate of flux has been reached, turbulence may occur in a fluid.” This onset of turbulence represents not entropy but rather self-organization, for “while turbulent motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale” (141). The flux and turbulence to be found in hydrodynamic systems, then, is symptomatic of those systems’ capacity fro increasing order and complexity, which means that Joyce’s foregrounding of hydrodynamic turbulence precociously highlights nature’s negentropic potential. Ironically, his textual erasure of the second law achieves an unexpected validity for 21st-century readers familiar with nonlinear thermodynamics—the very readers for whom this erasure is no longer necessary.
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