МЕТАФОРИКА ВОДЕ У ЏОЈСОВОМ УЛИКСУ
WATER AS METAPHOR IN JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Summary/Abstract: Mesmerizingly ambivalent towards the symbol of water in all its potential meanings – both traditional ones and those newly acquired via philosophy, psychoanalysis, and anthropological study of ancient myth – Modernism creates its own myth of a transformational journey over stormy seas which leads to the possibility of controlling the waters. Joyce’s Ulysses can be said to be a representative text of Modernism, but it simultaneously already boasts an ironic distance from the foundational myths of the epoch. This paper strives to analyze the metaphorical meanings carried by water in Ulysses, with special attention paid to the symbolic journey over water, in which the hero is disintegrated, but then also regenerated by water. Water in Ulysses is associated with exile from the stability of home and sanity – already non-existent at the very beginning – towards all that is primitive, primal, irrational, or otherwise disturbing. As a representation of Protean prime matter, water is animalistic and feminine, and connected with sexuality, procreation, and motherhood. The womb is also the tomb, and birth connected with death, almost inevitably precisely through water as metaphor. Hades and Hell are entered through water in the novel, and both contain various watery horrors that accompany prime matter – from mere mortality and impermanence to a deeper reckoning with guilt and sin that must be washed away, frequently by way of at least symbolic death. Death by water, which might bring regeneration with it, is amply alluded to in the novel and linked with notions of baptism and, more broadly, lustral waters. Treasure yielded and represented by water includes unity, art, and the waters of life. It is also suggested in Ulysses that a middle way might be found – precisely by way of following water – between the Scylla and Charybdis of spirit and matter, asceticism and hedonism, objectivity and subjectivity.

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