In Proteus Stephen notices places on the bayshore
where the downstream effects are evident: "Unwholesome
sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing
upward sewage breath. He coasted them, walking warily."
Gifford notes that "the inshore waters of Dublin Bay,
particularly just south of the mouth of the Liffey, where
Stephen is walking, were notoriously polluted" (51-52).
Shellfish were affected by the bacteria-infested waters,
causing periodic outbreaks of disease. Near the end of Nausicaa
Bloom, who is sitting near where Stephen was walking,
reflects, "Better not stick here all night like a limpet," and
soon afterward he is thinking of the human beings who eat such
mollusks: "Poor man O'Connor wife and five children
poisoned by mussels here. The sewage. Hopeless." He
has similar thoughts about oysters in Lestrygonians:
"Unsightly like a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open
them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they
feed on." He goes on to think about the
months-with-an-R rule: "June has no ar no oysters." In the
same episode, he entertains the thought of swimming in the
Liffey: "If I threw myself down? Reuben J's son must have swallowed
a good bellyful of that sewage."
One of the Liffey's tributaries, Poddle River, makes an
appearance as a bearer of sewage in Wandering Rocks. By
the time represented in the novel it had been confined to a
brick tunnel and covered over with city pavements, and it
emptied into the Liffey through a culvert. As the viceregal
cavalcade passes by this culvert, the sewage-choked stream
offers open-mouthed, scathing homage: "From its sluice
in Wood quay wall under Tom Devan's office Poddle river hung
out in fealty a tongue of liquid sewage." Gifford
notes that Joyce took fictional license to move this culvert
to the Wood Quay wall from its actual location in the
Wellington Quay wall, about 350 yards east. Why might have he
done so? One possibility is that he wanted to associate the
scorn for British rule with his father's friend Tom Devin.
The Dublin Main Drainage Scheme, discussed for decades in the
late 19th century before work finally began, devised a way of
cleaning up the Liffey. New sewer lines were built under the
quays on both banks of the river, intercepting the outflow
before it reached the Liffey and carrying it east to a
wastewater treatment plant in Ringsend.
There, the solids were settled out for disposal in the Irish
Sea, and the liquids released into the harbor near the Pigeon House for the tides
to disperse. The project was completed in 1906; in 1904 it was
still an ongoing dream of civic improvement. As Hugh Kenner
notes in his foreword to Joseph O'Brien's Dear, Dirty
Dublin (1982), this was "long after such a procedure had
been instituted in London, but turn-of-the-century Dublin was
a retarded city indeed" (viii). For more on the scheme, see
the Greater Dublin Drainage website at
www.greaterdublindrainage.com.
The novel glances at the work on this construction project in
Hades when the funeral carriage passes "open drains
and mounds of rippedup roadway before the tenement houses."
The location here is Ringsend, site of the not-yet-completed
treatment plant. Another, more comical allusion comes in Lestrygonians,
when Tom Rochford, who is working on the project, comes into
Davy Byrne's pub. "—How is the main drainage?
Nosey Flynn asked, sipping. / For answer Tom Rochford pressed
his hand to his breastbone and hiccupped. / —Would I trouble
you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said." The water
is for dissolving some "powder from a twisted paper" to treat
a problem in Rochford's main drainage: "—That cursed
dyspepsia, he said before drinking."
