Nausicaa
“The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.”
Gerty MacDowell daydreams in the style of cheap romance novels while Bloom watches from a distance. Fireworks; a charged, private moment.
- Beat 01Three 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.
- Beat 02Gerty'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.
- Beat 03The 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.
- Beat 04Gerty 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.
- Beat 05Bloom 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.
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.
- Scene
- The Rocks
- Hour
- 8:00 PM
- Organ
- Eye, nose
- Art
- Painting
- Color
- Grey, blue
- Symbol
- Virgin
- Technic
- Tumescence, detumescence
- Correspondence
- Nausicaa