The trope of water in Ulysses used as a tool in reading the city of Roskilde

Resumo

This article attempts a reading of Roskilde, a Danish provincial town with a long history as the former capital of the kingdom of Denmark. The city was founded with the aim of exploiting the unusually large number of springs – an exploitation both the church and kings and merchants benefited from. The reading of Roskilde is based on James Joyce’s Ulysses and to a particular extent on the water motif in this novel. Ulysses is used as an objective or a lens through which the importance of water for the development of the city becomes clear. Water is not simply a material element in the production of cities, but also a critical dimension to the social production of space and place and it continually interacts with political, socio-economical (in relation to gender, medicin, age, drink, power) or religious spheres, as the case of Roskilde shows. Joyce makes it clear that water is not just water. Water’s inherently ambiguous character, as well as its phenomenological dimensions, including its powerful affective and sensual features, makes this trope an effective tool in the study of the relationship between literature and place.