Nausicaa

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.

Schema · Linati / Gilbert

Scene

The Rocks

Hour

8:00 PM

Organ

Eye, nose

Art

Painting

Color

Grey, blue

Symbol

Virgin

Technic

Tumescence, detumescence

Correspondence

Nausicaa