Jay Michael Dickson - Defining the Sentimentalist in Ulysses - James Joyce Quarterly 44:1

This parallactic nature of the sentimental is most fully explored in Bloom's literally climactic encounter with Gerty MacDowell in the "Nausicaa" episode. In Homer's Odyssey, the Princess Nausicaa offers Odysseus a respite from his weary travels; just so, Joyce's "Nausicaa" has been understood to offer relief not only for Bloom but also for the reader in that the episode fundamentally disrupts the stylistic progression of the episodes in Ulysses.³⁰

While many readers have observed that the episodes become progressively more difficult for the reader from "Scylla and Charybdis" to the novel's climax in "Circe," Joyce describes the style of "Nausicaa" in a letter to Frank Budgen as "a namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là!) style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter's palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc etc" (SL 246). Karen Lawrence notes that "[t]o begin 'Nausicaa' is to feel that one   [End Page 28]

has stumbled into a bad Victorian novel,"³¹ and indeed the text's stylistic sources have been traced to works that stand quite apart from the more canonical archive of literary styles chronologically parodied in the novel's subsequent "Oxen of the Sun" episode. The sources for "Nausicaa" extend to a decidedly more middlebrow archive (which would include such novels as Maria S. Cummins's The Lamplighter and Mabel Vaughn and popular magazines such as The Princess Novelette³² ) that the episode's heroine Gerty MacDowell would favor.³³

Gerty, indeed, has been critically identified as the wellspring of the episode's excessive sentimentality, in that she allows Bloom to gain emotional relief from the violent reactions of the patrons of Barney Kiernan's bar. Indeed, her expressions of emotion make the charges leveled against Bloom's sentimentality seem relatively trivial. Throughout the previous episodes of Ulysses, Bloom has behaved with increasing tearfulness. In "Sirens," he cried into his beer over Simon Dedalus's rendition of the maudlin "M'appari" aria and the emotions it evoked within him regarding Molly's infidelity. In "Cyclops," Bloom gave his earnest defense of love, "the opposite

of hatred," which some critical readers have found suspiciously mawkish, as does the Citizen.³⁴ In "Nausicaa," for once, the burden of sentimentalism is removed from Bloom's shoulders and placed upon those of Gerty, who, by dint of her class, age, and gender, adheres to the twentieth-century remnants of an eighteenth-century cult of sensibility.

Gerty is thus often treated as a foil for Bloom: while she luxuriates in her "borrowed" language of emotional excess, Bloom seems, in comparison, to be pointedly unsentimental.³⁵ Many critics, as Philip Weinstein points out, indeed see "Nausicaa" as Joyce's "comic exposure . . . [of] Gerty's foolishness."³⁶ To see Gerty in this way, as merely a figure of fun to bring into relief Bloom's superiority misses the very point of the episode and, in particular, its complex treatment of modern sentimentality. For Joyce, Gerty and Bloom are not alternates or foils but rather complements to, or even mirrors of one another: one observes the other observing the other, as if in a kind of sentimental mise-en-abyme. What "Nausicaa" demonstrates decisively is that when sentimentality in Ulysses is understood in terms of its intrinsically parallactic nature it becomes not an excuse for further isolation (as it is for Bloom earlier in the novel) but rather the basis for community between outsiders.

Alone among the episodes in Ulysses, "Nausicaa" presents a narrating character's thoughts not directly through unmediated discourse but rather indirectly through the third person. Whereas Molly, Bloom, Stephen, and even the unnamed narrator of "Cyclops" speak as "I," Gerty is always presented as "she": indeed, when she first appears in the text, the narrator asks, "But who was Gerty?" (U 13.78). The question reverberates throughout the entire episode, as [End Page 29] the reader attempts to comprehend her character. The narrative itself may answer this question by describing the young woman's external features, but its language suggests that the reader look not simply at Gerty but rather also through her and her pretensions. So too are we encouraged to see through her sentimental rhetoric, which can be recognized (and hence seen through) all too readily. She is at once forever distanced from us as an object of our gaze, even as we are privy to her inmost thoughts.

This distancing is just the sort of thing Gerty, the teasing exhibitionist, would enjoy. Just as Joyce listed the eye in his Linati schema as one of the principal organs identified with this episode (30), so Gerty sees the eye as the body's most important feature:

That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup feelings though not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said.

(U 13.188-92)

Although initially giving credence to the cliché that the eyes are the gateway to the soul, she immediately reverses herself when considering the implications of that statement. Before the mirror, Gerty wants to show herself not as she is but as she would like to be: that is, as crying "nicely" rather than giving way to her true feelings. For Gerty, sentimentality is a mode of excess but one that remains always a carefully regulated and performed excess calibrated exactly for effect.³⁷

On the other hand, to position Gerty simply as a hypocrite is to miss Joyce's point. Gerty's feelings are real to her insofar as they conform to her ideas of what emotions should be. Although she speaks in the clichés of sentimental fiction, these are powerful words to her because they express what she believes she should feel. Fritz Senn notes that when reading "Nausicaa" we cannot ourselves condemn Gerty for falling victim to sentimental platitudes especially since "clichés could not have been popular but for some inherent charm, however cheap."³⁸ What we read as excessive in Gerty's displays of feeling—that is, as sentimental—she instead reads as genuine, as the mark of true sentiment.

Gerty sees her willingness to salve "wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm" as the mark of her acquiescence to a prescribed gender role: "She was a womanly woman not like other flighty girls unfeminine" (U 13.435, 435-36). Such emotional expressiveness, however, would not be, in her opinion, inappropriate for a man. Indeed, her own "beau ideal" of "a manly man" would be one "who would understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all the [End Page 30] strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long long kiss" (U 13.209, 210, 212-14). Naturally, then, she sees Bloom, the figure in mourning opposite her on Sandymount strand, in a very different way than we have become accustomed to others viewing him throughout the novel. He becomes the embodiment of her "beau ideal," the figure of sorrow and sympathy for whom she has waited. Bloom's melancholia renders him not effeminate to Gerty's eyes but rather indicates his masculine eroticism.

Just as Gerty has previously cried before a mirror for pleasure, so too does Bloom's affected melancholia afford her great pleasure. "He was in deep mourning, she could see that," the narrator notes, "and the story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what it was" (U 13.421-23). Of course, Gerty does not really need to ask him about the story behind his sorrow (and indeed she does not do so, preferring instead to remain in a distant, observing silence), because to some extent she already knows. The pleasure Bloom gives Gerty is largely defined by how he reflects her image of herself as a creature of feeling.

Gerty thus creates a Bloom of her own sentimental imagining by constructing an especially novelistic history for the figure before her: "she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind" (U 13.656-59). Her favorite poem is Louis J. Walsh's "Art thou real, my ideal?" (U 13.645-46), and she never allows the question Walsh's title poses to be fully answered. Paradoxically, Bloom can only be "real" to her so long as he remains an ideal. He becomes the "dreamhusband" of her fantasies (U 13.431), and Gerty can reciprocate by allowing him the stimulus of his own fantasies of her. Bloom, of course, has been participating in the same process of imaginative projection (as we are to learn in "his" portion of the episode, which mirrors her own), remaking the woman before him as the "[h]ot little devil" of his masturbatory fantasies (U 13.776). As Weinstein has argued (117), Gerty is not wholly exploited or objectified by Bloom here, given that she actively participates in the scene's consummation by herself manipulating Bloom's gaze for her own pleasures. In this way, the literal climaxes of his erotic reverie and her sentimental dreaming occur simultaneously:

She would fain have cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of   [End Page 31]  rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

(U 13.733-40)

The reiteration of the word "cry" signals that this is not merely a physical orgasm but an emotional one as well, shared by two sorrowful souls who achieve climax in their mutual sentimentalized creations of one another. This reciprocal evocation is itself marked by the repetitions of the word "O," the signifier both of sexual pleasure as well as a vocative summation of the Other. Sedgwick comments upon the "dangerously similar overlap" of masturbation and sentimentality in the twentieth-century public

imagination: both have been viewed with some suspicion because of their perceived unproductive and solipsistic pleasures.³⁹ Gerty's and Bloom's climaxes, however, are depicted as clearly and pointedly interpersonal, despite the fact that they never speak to one another during the episode: "Still it was a kind of language between us," Bloom realizes later on the strand after parting from her (U 13.944). Although Gerty and Bloom perform emotionally before the mirror of each other's eyes—just as Gerty often likes to cry "nicely before the mirror"—they nevertheless recognize within one another a mutuality of feeling (excessive or otherwise). Thus their momentary sentimental union parallels that praised by the male worshippers in the Our Lady Star of the Sea parish church (as the "Nausicaa" episode begins) as they celebrate their communion with their idealized heavenly intercessor. Sentimentality thus becomes neither isolating (as in the novel's previous two episodes) nor purely masturbatory, but cohesive: a sympathetic expressive understanding of separate outsiders who would otherwise be strangers to one another.

The third-person narrative of Gerty's section also implicates the narrator in this mutual commingling of sensibilities. So too does it involve the reader in its moment of communion, in that we also become privy to Gerty from within; yet our ultimate separation from her becomes underscored, as it does for Bloom, when her lameness is revealed (at which moment her monologue significantly ends). The keynote becomes a suspension between sympathy and judgment, the tension upon which Robert Langbaum famously argues the dramatic monologue (the closest poetic equivalent to Gerty's long soliloquy) is built.⁴⁰ The tension of sentimentality in the modern world, Joyce shows us, is that it allows both for such sympathetic commingling and for the alienating and vicarious judging of sentimentalism, so that the idealized moment of communion ("O!") can only be fleeting.

Jay Michael Dickson - Defining the Sentimentalist in Ulysses - James Joyce Qua... - The Diigo Meta page

Would you like to comment?

Top Tags

Check out another URL