In Circe Bloom remembers a high school class trip to Poulaphouca, a spectacular waterfall on the River Liffey in County Wicklow, 20-30 miles southwest of Dublin. Rather than inspiring a sense of romantic sublimity, the majestic scene drove him to masturbate in the nearby woods. His impulsive act is one of many Joycean examples of sex in the countryside, but the verdant surroundings probably played only a small part in his excitement. Bloom became aroused mainly because the rushing water made him think of urination. In the 1920s Havelock Ellis gave the name undinism to a class of fetishes ("paraphilia") centered on urine, and it is tempting to apply this term to Joyce's particular imaginative constellation of female bodies, male sexual arousal, flowing water, and nature spirits—all the more so as Joyce is on record as being an undinist himself.

Poulaphouca (Irish Poll an Phúca, the Hole of the Pooka) gets its name from a race of mischievous and sometimes malevolent Irish spirits. A pooka lived in the Wicklow waterfall, which used to plunge some 150 vertical feet through a rock chasm about 40 feet wide. 18th and 19th century guidebooks recognized the site's appeal as a tourist destination and roads were built to it, as well as a bridge crossing the chasm. In May 1895 the Dublin and Blessington Steam Tramway opened a new line to the site called the Blessington and Poulaphouca Steam Tramway, which Bloom thinks of in Eumaeus: "Poulaphouca to which there was a steam tram." But construction of a hydroelectric dam in the 1930s and 40s reduced the waterfall almost to nothing.

During his hallucinatory conversation with the Nymph who hangs over his bed, Bloom mentions the commode and chamberpot in the bedroom: "That antiquated commode. It wasn't her weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle." Immediately after these recollections of Molly making water, "The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade," speaking the word, "Poulaphouca Poulaphouca / Poulaphouca Poulaphouca." The waterfall is imaginatively fused, then, with a cascade of urine, and immediately afterward thoughts of sexual excitement are introduced by a stand of distinctly female yew trees that "grew by the Poulaphouca waterfall."

Coyly mingling their boughs, the Yews whisperingly ask, "Who came to Poulaphouca with the high school excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?" It was Bloom, and as he starts to reluctantly confess his sin the waterfall sounds again, its refrain now slightly altered: "Poulaphouca Poulaphouca / Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca." The subset of readers who may have heard the word "fuck" in the initial mention of the waterfall may now find their dirty minds vindicated by the relentless repetition of that syllable. The Nymph exclaims, "O, infamy!" Rousing himself to self-justification, Bloom pleads immaturity: "I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette through ill-closed curtains, with poor papa's operaglasses."

This is one of those torrents of flimsy excuses that define Bloom's reactions to public shaming throughout Circe. He blames his erection on teenage hormones interacting with natural surroundings: countryside, springtime, trees and flowers, birds and bees. His amateur mania for scientific "phenomena" produces a particularly absurd claim: that fluid rose in his penis by "Capillary attraction," either on its own or in sympathy with the sap rising in the nearby plants. Only his final excuse, that his excitement had something to do with spying on a neighborhood girl as she urinated, has the ring of confessional truth. The Poulaphouca scene thus closes as it began, with the waterfall provoking lust by calling up memories of a woman peeing.

In writing Circe Joyce drew on several contemporary and near-contemporary "sexologists"—writers whose investigations of human sexuality delved forthrightly into phenomena customarily regarded as perverse. One was Havelock Ellis, an English physician who produced nonjudgmentally probing accounts of homosexuality (he preferred the term "inversion"), autoeroticism (a much more complex phenomenon than just masturbation), transvestism (which he called "eonism"), and other peculiar forms of sexual preference. Ellis discovered one such psychosexual complex from personal experience when, at age 60, he found himself aroused by the sight of a woman urinating. He called this proclivity "undinism."

The term came from undines: female water spirits dwelling in forest pools and waterfalls, first hypothesized by Paracelsus in the 16th century. By the time Ellis wrote in the early 20th, the mythology had become firmly fixed in the popular imagination. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's fairy-tale novella Undine (1811) had given rise to dozens of stories, novels, plays, paintings, sculptures, and musical compositions in the 19th century. (The mythology has continued to inspire artistic works down to the present day. The 21st century has seen production of two films film called Ondine and Undine.) Most of these works represent undines as female water-spirits who chance to take a sexual interest in human males. The more one learns about the mythology, the more relevant it seems to the elements that Joyce combined in his Poulaphouca passage: a naked goddess found in or near water ("The Bath of the Nymph"), a waterfall named for a resident spirit, female tree spirits, heterosexual attraction, and urination.

Did Ellis influence the writing of this passage? Joyce admired his works greatly and had only begun to write Circe when Ellis experienced his strange attraction in 1919. But as far as I can determine Ellis did not publish his theory of undinism until volume 7 of Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which came out in 1928. Until it can be shown that Joyce somehow learned of it by 1920, when he finished the Nighttown chapter, any suggestion of influence must remain speculative. If Joyce did not know of the psychological term, perhaps he conceived of something very similar independently. His Trieste library contained a copy of de la Motte Fouqué's Undine.

Joyce scholars do not seem to have recognized the Ellis-like connection between urine and sexual excitement in Circe, but at least one has come close. In James Joyce and Sexuality (1985), Richard Brown writes, "Ellis connected his interest in eroticism and urination with more general sexual fondness for water and bathing for which he coined the term 'Undinism'. There might seem to be plenty of this in Joyce's work from Stephen's bed-wetting and the wading girl in A Portrait, and Bloom's bath in Lotus-Eaters, to 'St Kevin Hydrophilos' in Book IV of Finnegans Wake" (84). Brown goes on to talk about Ellis's interest in voyeurism and Bloom's watching Lotty Clarke "through illclosed curtains," but he does not remark on the link between chamberpots and waterfalls.

Many pages of Circe are devoted to Bloom's scandalous and uproariously embarrassing sexual peculiarities. In some passages the analysis seems almost clinical, as when the doctors from the hospital common room subject him to rigorous examination. But the Poulaphouca passage is built on more literary and mythological materials. Richard Brown aptly observes that both Joyce and Ellis "were prepared to look at sexual anomaly not just as matter for clinical examination but, to some extent, as an aspect of human creativity and imagination" (85). The word "undinism" seems perfectly, and perhaps even uniquely, suited to what Joyce makes prose do in this scene.

In keeping with that observation, it should also be noted that the fixations that Bloom displays in the Poulaphouca episode are relatively inoffensive. Ellis coined another term for his proclivity, "urolagnia" (urine-lust), that has been more widely embraced in our coarser culture. (Perversities such as "golden showers" were perhaps no less commonly practiced behind closed doors a century ago, but they were much less commonly discussed.) But Bloom does not fantasize about peeing on someone, or being peed on, or drinking urine. He seems to be turned on by the mere sound of urination, by the mere association of a woman's body with moving water, and by a mere fancy of female spirits inhabiting the woods and waters. His attractions to this watery dimension of female physicality are mercifully notional in comparison to the anal fixations that Ellis termed "coprolagnia." There, his confessions enter darker terrain: "I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant..." 

The thoughts explored in this note were kicked off by a personal communication from Vincent Van Wyk, who urged me to consider the possibility that Bloom masturbates in the woods because he connects the sound of the nearby waterfall to Molly's urination and is sexually aroused by it. While no one else seems to have explicitly commented on the connection between the two kinds of rushing water, some have probably intuited it. Vladimir Nabokov (as recorded in Alfred Appel, Jr.'s annotations to Lolita) remarked that "Havelock Ellis was an 'undinist', or 'fountainist', and so was Leopold Bloom" (425). And so too was James Joyce. Ellmann's biography records the fact that, in a letter he wrote to Gertrude Kaempffer in Zurich, Joyce described his first sexual experience, at age 14. He was walking through rural fields with the family nanny when she excused herself and asked him to look away. "As he did so he heard the sound of liquid splashing on the ground.... The sound aroused him: 'I jiggled furiously', he wrote" (418).

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John Hunt 2025