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."
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.
Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of
wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like the way it curves
there.
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.
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.
