The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses by Blamires Harry

Author:Blamires, Harry [Blamires, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2012-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Nausicaa

In the Odyssey Nausicaa, daughter of Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, comes to the beach, accompanied by her maids, to wash her linen. The girls play ball, laughing and shrieking, and wake up Ulysses who is lying there, worn-out, storm-tossed, naked, cast up by the waves. The girls are frightened and embarrassed, but Nausicaa takes charge, cleans Ulysses and clothes him, then leads him home.

This episode offers respite to the ‘storm-tossed heart of man’; respite to Bloom after his violent departure from Barney Kiernan’s; respite to the reader from the inflated and disorderly stylistic excesses of that interlude. Here Joyce adopts a sentimental, woman’s magazinish style which, viewed as literary burlesque, is devastating. Yet the farcical, satirical strain does not wholly determine the temper of the passage; for the vulgar idiom of the novelette, when exploited to articulate a young, uneducated girl’s thoughts and dreams, becomes peculiarly touching by virtue of its sheer aptness to her adolescent self-dramatization. Joyce’s linguistic virtuosity and psychological sensitivity together present the two-eyed reader with a feast of blended satire and pathos.

Gerty MacDowell (Nausicaa), Cissy Caffrey, and Edy Boardman are sitting on the rocks on Sandymount shore, where Stephen Dedalus walked and mused this morning. They are looking after Cissy’s two brothers, Tommy and Jacky, twins of four years old, and little Baby Boardman. In the background is Howth Hill (for Leopold and Molly Bloom the place of youthful love realized) and, near by, the parish church dedicated to Our Lady as Star of the Sea. Gradually, in this episode, an important parallel is unmistakably established between Gerty MacDowell and the Virgin Mary. Each of them is ‘in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the stormtossed heart of man’.

Tommy and Jacky dabble in the sand: Cissy plays with baby eleven months old, trying to get him to talk. Tommy and Jacky begin to quarrel over their sand-castle: Cissy has to reprove Jacky and to comfort Tommy.

Gerty MacDowell, meanwhile, sits lost in thought. She is beautiful, slight in build, graceful, pale in complexion. The description of her, voiced in the sentimental idiom of her own thinking and dreaming, is as much a piece of self-revelation as of objective picturing. (The use of words and phrases like ‘graceful’, ‘almost spiritual in its ivory-like purity’, ‘veined alabaster’, ‘queenly’, and ‘glory’ reinforces the implicit correspondence with the Virgin Mary.) The reader moves in Gerty’s mind, richly aware of its absurdities, its naivetes, and its pathos, piquantly stirred simultaneously to laughter at her and sympathy for her. Her eyes, beautiful and yearning, have a seductive power that owes something to the advice on makeup given in the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess novelette. Her dark-brown hair waves naturally. Her ready blush adds to her loveliness. It is due to Edy Boardman’s playful remark to little Tommy. ‘I know who is Tommy’s sweetheart, Gerty is Tommy’s sweetheart.’

Or is it wholly playful? Gerty sees more to it. We hear of Reggy Wylie, whose father is now keeping him in of the evenings to study (We heard of his brother in the bicycle race on p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.