Episode XIII
Nausicaa
The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.
8:00 PM, Sandymount Strand. Style: Tumescence / detumescence.
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Summary
Gerty MacDowell daydreams in the style of cheap romance novels while Bloom watches from a distance. Fireworks; a charged, private moment.
- 1
Three girls on the strand
Gerty MacDowell sits on the rocks at Sandymount with her friends Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman, who are minding small children. The prose is the sugary cadence of the cheap magazines Gerty reads.
- 2
Gerty's inner novel
Gerty narrates her own life in romance-novel English: her clothes, her hopes, her unkind suitor, her belief that the dark gentleman watching from across the rocks is a man of sorrows.
- 3
The Mirus bazaar fireworks
A charity bazaar's fireworks begin over the bay. Gerty leans back to watch a Roman candle rise. Bloom, at a distance, watches her watching it, and quietly masturbates in his pocket.
- 4
Gerty walks away
Gerty stands up and walks down the strand. Joyce lets the prose drop and shows, almost in passing, that she limps. Bloom understands, and his feeling shifts.
- 5
Bloom alone
Bloom stays on the rocks as the light fails. He thinks about Molly, about Boylan having been at Eccles Street, about Martha, about the strand. A nearby cuckoo clock strikes nine.
Gabler lines 13.1–1306
How Nausicaa unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Nausicaa is written in two halves with different voices: the first in the language of sentimental magazine fiction as Gerty MacDowell sits on Sandymount Strand, the second in Bloom's tired interior monologue. The map follows the fantasy, the fireworks, and the deflation that comes after.
Three girls mind children by the sea as the Mirus bazaar fireworks are prepared, and Gerty's consciousness is rendered in the prose of romance novelettes.
1. The novelette style
lines 1–80Evening falls in language borrowed wholesale from women's magazines, with Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman minding the twins and baby.
Why it matters:The style is the point: Gerty is shown thinking in the cliches the culture sold her.
Notice:Joyce called it a “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy” style. He is mocking the prose, not the girl.
2. Gerty's hopes and her circumstances
lines 80–300Gerty imagines a husband, a home and an eyebrowleine-perfect face, while her father's drinking and her own loneliness show through the gaps.
Why it matters:Underneath the borrowed language is an accurate account of a constrained life.
3. The gentleman in black
lines 300–480Gerty becomes aware of a dark-suited stranger watching her from the rocks and builds him into a tragic, worshipping hero.
Why it matters:Two fantasies meet: hers of romance, his of a girl who will not look away.
Compared with Homer · Nausicaa at the river
The shipwrecked Odysseus, naked and salt-crusted, is found by the princess Nausicaa at her washing, and she clothes and directs him home. Joyce keeps the meeting of a battered older man and a young woman on a shore, and removes all contact: nothing is exchanged but looks. The rescue that follows is Gerty's alone, and it restores nothing.
4. Leaning back
5. The Roman candle
6. Gerty walks away
7. “Tight boots? No. She's lame!”
8. Thinking it through
9. Cuckoo
The shape underneath
Nausicaa runs fantasy → exhibition → release → deflation, with the narration changing hands at the exact moment illusion breaks. The two styles are the episode's argument: the borrowed prose that shapes Gerty's inner life against the plain, rueful voice that follows. See the Homeric parallel below for the princess on the shore.
In modern prose
Eight in the evening. Sandymount Strand again, where Stephen walked alone this morning, but now there are people on the beach. Three young women are minding small children near the rocks. One of them, Gerty MacDowell, sits a little apart, dreaming about the kind of man she'd like to marry and noticing a tired, sad-looking stranger watching her from a distance. The first half of the chapter is written in the gushy, sentimental style of the cheap romantic magazines Gerty has actually read — soft-focus, pious, full of advertising slogans dressed up as feelings. She tilts her head, fixes her hair, and when the fireworks start at the bazaar nearby she leans back further and further so the stranger can see up her skirts. He is Bloom, and he masturbates discreetly in his pocket. Gerty gets up, and as she walks away we see she has a limp. Then the prose collapses back into Bloom's tired, kindly, post-orgasmic interior monologue as the light fades over the sea. The chapter is doing two cruel and tender things at once. It's a sharp parody of the language young women were sold to describe their own inner lives — and it's also a real act of empathy for both of them, two lonely people meeting at a distance and exchanging a small private comfort, and Bloom, for the first time today, letting himself feel something instead of dodging it.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Rocks
- Hour
- 8:00 PM
- Organ
- Eye, nose
- Art
- Painting
- Colour
- Grey, blue
- Symbol
- Virgin
- Technic
- Tumescence, detumescence
- Correspondence
- Nausicaa
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Nausicaa.
- Beginner's guide to UlyssesWhere to start, and how to keep going.
- How to read UlyssesPractical ways through the book's hardest stretches.
- All 18 episode summariesSee where this episode sits in the whole day.
- Daily Companion, Day 101: Sandymount strand at dusk, Gerty and her friendsEvening falls on the same strand where Stephen walked hours ago.
- Daily Companion, Day 106: Gerty rises and walks away, revealing her limpCissy calls Gerty to leave with the others, and as Gerty finally stands and walks off, we see what the flowery narration never mentioned: she limps.
- Daily Companion, Day 110: Evening closes with the cuckoo clockThe strand empties as darkness falls, and the episode ends on a strange, comic note: a cuckoo clock somewhere nearby chimes the hour, its call echoing oddly across the quiet scene.
- Who's who in UlyssesLeopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the cast of Dublin.
- Themes in UlyssesThe ideas that run beneath every episode.
- Dublin locations in UlyssesWhere Sandymount Strand sits on Bloom's day.