The Long and Winding Road" / "For You Blue by The Beatles

About

NAUSICAA TIME: 8.00 pm. SCENE: The rocks on Sandymount Strand where Stephen had walked in PROTEUS. ORGAN: Eye, nose ART: Painting COLOURS: Gray, blue SYMBOL: Virgin TECHNIQUE: Tumescence, detumescence CORRESPONDENCES: Phaeacia-Star of the Sea; Nausicaa-Gerty. (Handmaidens, Alcinoos and Arete, Ulysses. Sense: The Projected Mirage). HOMERIC PARALLELS: In book 5 of The Odyssey Odysseus leaves Calypso’s isle, is harassed by Poseidon and is washed up on a Phaeacian beach near the mouth of a river. He hides, and in book 6 he is awakened by Princess Nausicaa and her maids who have come to the river to do their laundry. He emerges from hiding, returning a ball that the women had been playing with, praises Nausicaa’s beauty and begs her to help him, which she does. SUMMARY: Cissy Caffrey, her twin brothers, and her friends Edy Boardman and Gerty MacDowell (who sits a little apart), are on the Sandymount Strand. Gerty is impatient with the boys and their noise and mess, and her friends, who are a little common, and she daydreams at length about herself and both her romantic aspirations (her suitor, Reggy Wylie, has neglected her), and her spiritual strivings (her thoughts often turn to religious themes) . The twins kick their ball to Bloom, who is also on the beach, and Gerty weaves him into her thoughts (she notices that he is in mourning and constructs a tragic but romantic tale around him). Cissy cockily goes to ask Bloom the time, but his watch has stopped. A fireworks display begins. Her friends run along the beach, but Gerty stays near Bloom and leans back to watch the fireworks (she knows that men can be excited by immodest women, and she is allowing Bloom to see up her skirt). When she leaves, Bloom notices that she has a limp, and we learn that he has masturbated while she “was on display”. Bloom’s thoughts run along the lines of women, marriage and smells (which join sight, taste and sound in the novel’s sensory compendium). He thinks of writing a story about himself—The Mystery Man on the Beach. He thinks of his children, and of Gerty. Notes on James Joyce’s Ulysses