Tuesday 22 September 2015

Tuesday, 22 September 2015, Pages 464 - 474, Nausicaa, episode 13

We stopped mid-paragraph at "From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled." (Penguin 474.28), (Gabler 13.661)

Last week, we had left how the howling of Baby Boardman was calmed down with the help of a suckingbottle. Gerty, immersed in her thoughts, is disturbed by this noise caused by not only the baby but also the twins, and wishes that they would go. Noticing that the gentleman sitting on the rocks was looking at her, her heart goes pitapat. In no time does she give up her dreams of the bicycle-riding boy, Reggy Wylie, and transfer her matrimonial wishes to this gentleman, who was in deep mourning (the first hint that the person is none other than our Mr. Bloom), who she could see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner.

The following are the main distinguishing features of the pages we read today:

(Source: http://www.sfmission.com/sfbirthplace/ladyofsorrows2.GIF)
First of all, passages such as those above alternate with passages describing the service in the church nearby. As Fritz Senn explained, we move, within a single sentence, from the scene in the church (recitation of the litany to Virgin Mary, Father Conroy assisting Canon O'Hanlon at the altar) to the scene on the beach (Gerty, Cissy, Edy, Jacky, Tommy, the baby and the gentleman), and get into the mind of Gerty (her wishes/dreams about how here was that of which she had so often dreamed.)

Secondly, though we read at the beginning of the episode that three girl friends were seated on the rocks, we realize soon that there is not much friendship amongst the three girls. In fact there is quite a bit of jealousy, even bitchiness. Gerty, for example, thinks quite meanly about Cissy's hair (which had a good enough color if there had been more of it), where as she complements herself about her own hair thinking, 'a prettier, a daintier head of nut brown tresses was never seen on a girl's shoulders'.

Thirdly, at this stage it is quite difficult to distinguish between wishful thinking and reality regarding Bloom and Gerty. Gerty imagines Bloom looking at her and that there was meaning in his look. She thinks how, if she could make him fall in love with her, (she would) make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him... This quick transfer of affection from Reggy Wylie to Bloom (though Bloom is still a complete stranger to Gerty) makes one wonder whether it is all in Gerty's imagination. But then one thinks of what happened early that morning when Bloom went to Dlugacz. There he saw his nextdoor girl, who was served first. Bloom got impatient to buy what he had come for, so that he could catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams (Penguin 71.21). Thus there could be a grain of truth in how Gerty perceives Bloom's attention on her (she thinks that he was eyeing her as a snake eyes its prey).

Finally, there is another hint here of how much of Bloom's efforts of the day are thwarted. In the morning he could not catch up with the nextdoor girl. Later in the day, he did not succeed in his attempt to inspect the Greek goddesses in the library museum. At the end of the day, he is still trying to secure the order for an advertisement from Keyes. Now on the beach, when Cissy goes to him to ask what time it was, he cannot give an exact answer, as his watch was stopped, saying it must be after eight because the sun was set. 

In the twilight of the sunset, however, which must be around 8.30 p.m. in mid June Dublin, we know the day is moving towards its end. So, Bloom's day has moved to Bloom's night. While the girls carry on taking care of the children and clean up the baby, Gerty pursues her dreams the no-one knew of. She thinks poetry, which she'd be able to write if she could only express herself like that poem that had appealed to her so much and copied out for herself, and of the lamplighter who will soon be doing his rounds in the streets, like she has read in the book The Lamplighter by Miss Cummins. (Incidentally, the heroine in The Lamplighter is called Gerty, too.)


The book is accessible through Google Books:
https://books.google.ch/books?id=ygkRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+lamplighter+cummings&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMInqOGk7CNyAIVgdUUCh0XuAYQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Gerty is acutely aware of time going by (the years were slipping by for her) and of that one shortcoming, of an accident coming down Dalkey hill, always trying to conceal it. (At this point, the reader does not know what she is referring to.) Her fantasies about Bloom, what kind of man he might be, whether he is suffering and afflicted by some tragedy (he is wearing mourning clothes, after all), a widower perhaps, or a man who has had to put his wife into a madhouse, a nobleman with a foreign name.

We will pick up from her musings and her picturing on the beach next week.