Fireworks on the Beach

This episode is named for Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess who, while playing ball with her maids-in-waiting, discovers the naked Odysseus washed up on the shore of their island. Though she desires to marry our hero, she and her parents help facilitate Odysseus's safe return to Ithaca.

As with the previous episode, we again find the chapter narrated from a specific perspective, this time that of a young woman, Gertie MacDowell. Unlike the pessimistic narrator of "Cyclops," who has a tendency to deflate and reduce, Gertie's voice is that of a sentimentalist, one who tends to soften and romanticize reality. The contrast between the language and style of Gertie and that of Bloom - whose consciousness we reenter halfway through the episode (p. 367) - is stark indeed. The episode makes great use of a series of other ironic contrasts: Gertie's love vs. Bloom's lust, the Virgin Mary vs. the temptress Gertie, the spirituality of the religious ceremony vs. the materialism and fireworks of the Mirus bazaar, to name but a few.

Note also a few other interesting aspects of this chapter. The beach on which Bloom is walking is the same stretch of beach Stephen walked on that morning during "Proteus"; Bloom may find Stephen's poem on p. 381. Also, note that it is now 8:00 at night. For the first time in the book, a significant stretch of time has elapsed: we're missing two or three hours in between "Cyclops" and "Nausicaa," which apparently involved a visit of Bloom to the Dignam house. Another curious point involving time is that Bloom's watch has stopped at 4:30 ... likely the time Blazes Boylan and Molly got it on. Another point of interest involves Bloom's masturbation; not only is this yet another taboo bodily function (along with defecation, urination, menstruation, and copulation) not often presented in so-called realistic novels, but it is also proof positive that there is nothing wrong with Bloom "down there." Bloom can indeed "get it up." Finally, here we are over 300 pages into the novel and Joyce continues to provide the reader with expository information, including finally (on p. 357) a physical description of the novel's protagonist! Of course, nailing down Bloom (or, for that matter, any human being, Joyce seems to suggest) is as difficult as completing the cryptic message Bloom leaves for Gerty in the sand: "I. AM. A."

The Cyclops

Not only is the "Cyclops" episode one of the most memorable of Homer's epic, but this chapter is, for my money, one of the best and funniest in the novel. In Homer, Odysseus finds himself in the land of the brutal, lawless, one-eyed Cyclopes, imprisoned in a cave by Polyphemus, who is swallowing Odysseus's men two at a time. Telling Polyphemus that his name is "No Man," Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk on wine, pokes out his one eye with a pointed, flaming spear, and escapes the cave by hiding under Polyphemus's sheep as they exit the cave. As he sails away in triumph, Odysseus commits a fatal error by revealing his true name, an action that allows Polyphemus to enlist the help of his father Poseidon (the sea god) to make the rest of Odysseus's journey miserable.

The Joycean counterpart to the raging Polyphemus is "The Citizen," a physically powerful yet small-minded and xenophobic Irish nationalist whose myopia causes him to see things in a distorted and narrow-minded way. Here the narrative structure is essential to an understanding of the section, for the chapter contains two narrators. The primary narrator is the nameless first-person ("I"/"eye") misanthrope who narrates the goings on on Barney Kiernan's pub from the perspective of deflation and reduction, treating Bloom and others with a great deal of scorn and ridicule. This narrator's tale, however, is interrupted some 33 times by parodies embodying "various pompous, sensational, or sentimental literary styles" (Gifford 314). Thus, the second "narrator," often referred to as the parodist, serves to inflate and exaggerate the importance of the actions of the chapter by relating them according to any number of writing styles, the most prominent being the overinflated style of the Irish Revivalists (recall the Library chapter) attempting to translate/rewrite ancient Irish epics.

Perhaps most notable in this chapter is Bloom's near-heroic response to the anti-Semitism expressed by The Citizen, who, ironically, bemoans Irish oppression. Bloom stands up to The Citizen, not by resorting to physical violence (perhaps Joyce's comment on the post-WWI view that heroism no longer can be equated with military triumphs?), but rather by hurling a series of rejoinders aimed at deflating the Citizen's prejudices -- "The Savior was a jew and his father was a jew ...Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me" (342) -- just as The Citizen hurls a cracker box at Bloom, mirroring the Cyclops's hurling a boulder at Odysseus's ship. However, one of Bloom's finest moments in the novel comes in his confronting the hatred of The Citizen with his doctrine of justice, tolerance, and ... Love. That's right, it takes the Jewish Leopold Bloom to best express and embody the central doctrine of Christ's teachings.