Notes on Chapter 13, "Nausicaa"

Time:  8 p.m.

Technic:  "Tumescence, Detumesence" -- Almost totally unhelpful!

     Just as pertinently, the style is that of a woman's 
     magazine, very sentimental, somewhat limited in its 
     concerns (mainly domesticity, child-raising, and romance).  
     Gerty MacDowell is an adolescent girl completely and 
     adequately defined by this kind of hackneyed prose.  
     Chicken or egg?  Compare also "Dubliners," especially 
     "Eveline," but also "An Encounter."

     The base style (woman's magazine) is meanwhile interrupted 
     not by the real world, but by Gerty's bad-tempered (but 
     normal) exclamations of irritation, examples of the failure 
     of stereotype to describe even HER adequately.



Homeric parallel: Odysseus (naked) wakes up on the beach in Phaeicia
and being examined by the princess Nausicaa, who conducts him to the
court.

Pastiche in the chapter.--  

There are at least four voices: 

      1. The woman's magazine narrator (though subverted increasingly) (294)  

      2. The "neutral" narration of the Benediction service in the
      adjacent Church of St. Mary Star of the Sea (284, 286, 289, 292-293, 295)

      3. Bloom's (detumescent) narrative at the end (301ff) 

      4. Arranger in last passage about the Mirus bazaar fireworks ("A
         last lonely candle...") (310)

Juncture: fireworks (orgasm) (300)

Bloom's self-assessment (308)

Bloom's scientific inquiry into seasickness in fish (310)

Outrageously "novelistic" touch appropriate in this chapter: the 
watch stopping at 4:30 (303)