A Ulysses Centenary Saponiad

Ulysses is a hundred years old today!

We celebrated the centenary on Sunday night with David Collard's online Glue Factory event, where there were readings, films, songs and talks. 

Follow David on Twitter @DavidCollard1

Lisa and I contributed a short performance of the Saponiad (soap epic), a lovely word that Stuart Gilbert came up with in 1930:

'Through the greater Odyssey of Bloomsday there runs a ‘Little Odyssey’, a Saponiad, the wandering of the soap – a comic counterpart of the heroic tale.'

The Saponiad begins around 10.30 in Sweny the Chemist's and ends 13 hours later in the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street.





We began like this

Me:Tonight we are lucky to have the hero of that Saponiad – Let me introduce you to Soap
SOAP: Hello
You all look very clean....apart from you!
ME: What kind of soap are you?
SOAP: I’m lemon soap, made in Dublin by Sir John Barrington...


 

We only briefly covered the events of the soap's day, so here are its actual wanderings through Ulysses:

We first meet the soap on the counter of Sweny the chemist's:

'Nice smell these soaps have. Pure curd soap. Time to get a bath round the corner....
I’ll take one of these soaps. How much are they?
—Fourpence, sir.
Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.
—I’ll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.
—Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you come back.
—Good, Mr Bloom said.
He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the coolwrappered soap in his left hand'


Mr Sweny in Sweny's

Fourpence was the price of two pints of stout.

In the street Bloom meets Bantam Lyons, who borrows the Freeman's Journal to look at the racing page. When Bloom gets the newspaper back he wraps the soap up in it. At this point I wrapped Lisa up in my facsimile copy of the paper:





'Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap in it, smiling.'




Although the scene for this chapter in the Gilbert-Gorman schema is 'the Bath', we don't actually visit the baths.

SOAP: But that's the most important bit!

The chapter ends with Bloom imagining the bath:

'Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow...'

We next meet the soap shortly after 11 am in the carriage, heading north to Glasnevin for Paddy Dignam's funeral.

'I am sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap: in my hip pocket. Better shift it out of that. Wait for an opportunity....'

Getting out of the carriage, he moves the soap to his inner handkerchief pocket.

'Change that soap now. Mr Bloom’s hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket.'

I think it's now 'paperstuck' because it got wet in the bath.

In the newspaper chapter, after midday, 'Aeolus', the soap gets its own headline:

'ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP

He took out his handkerchief to dab his nose. Citronlemon? Ah, the soap I put there. Lose it out of that pocket. Putting back his handkerchief he took out the soap and stowed it away, buttoned, into the hip pocket of his trousers'

It stays in his hip pocket for the rest of the day. Although the headline says 'only once more' there are seven more soap appearances.

At the end of the lunch chapter, around 2 pm, the soap helps Bloom out of a difficult situation, when he's trying to avoid a chance street encounter with Blazes Boylan:

'I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I ? Ah, yes. Trousers. Purse. Potato. Where did I ?

Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.

His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck, Ah, soap there! Yes. Gate.

Safe!'

The soap's tepid now, and by the time of the Sirens episode, around 4.40pm, it's sticky:

'Ow. Bloom stood up. Soap feeling rather sticky behind. Must have sweated: music. That lotion, remember.'

In the evening, around 9.30, on Sandymount Strand, Bloom smells the soap and again remembers he's forgotten to go back and pay Mr Sweny for the lotion.

'Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his waistcoat. Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that’s the soap.

O by the by that lotion. I knew there was something on my mind. Never went back and the soap not paid.'

In the late evening after 11.10pm, in Nighttown, Bloom worries that he's had his pockets picked:

BLOOM O!

(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there. Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch, fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepocket, sweets of sin, potato soap.)

BLOOM Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves' dodge. Collide. Then snatch your purse.

But the climax of the epic is the apotheosis of the soap, when it's transformed into a sunrise and gains the power of speech:

'BLOOM: I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning. (He pats divers pockets.) This moving kidney. Ah!

(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)

THE SOAP:

We’re a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.

(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the soapsun.)

SWENY: Three and a penny, please.

BLOOM: Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.'





At this point Lisa as the soap rose up from beneath the table with a sun on her head, and Sweny's face on the sun.




I based Sweny's face on the photo of him in the chemist's today, with added freckles.




I wonder if the sunrise was inspired by the Freeman's Journal, which wrapped the soap earlier in the day. The editorial page had an image of the sun rising above the Bank of Ireland, formerly Parliament House. In Calypso, Bloom remembers Arthur Griffith's witty description of this as 'a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank of Ireland.'

Finnegans Wake also has a soap sunrise.

The soap then features in the Litany of the Daughters of Erin

'THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN:

Kidney of Bloom, pray for us
Flower of the Bath, pray for us
Mentor of Menton, pray for us
Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us
Charitable Mason, pray for us
Wandering Soap, pray for us...'

The Saponiad ends after two in the morning in the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street:

'Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?

To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington’s lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.'

ME: And that's when the Saponiad ends.
SOAP: And that's when the book should have ended! 

You can still buy lemon soap from Sweny's Pharmacy and, at 5 euros, it's better value than it was when Mr Bloom bought his bar.

'Let me know exactly what you are doing and how you are getting on, if you have sold anything or are travelling for soap. Oh my prophetic soul when I put soap in Ulysses' pocket.'

Joyce to Frank Budgen, 28 February 1921