Tashfeen Mahmud's Bookmarks

In the Caribbean there's a perfect symbiosis-well, let's say one more evident than elsewhere-between the people, daily life and the natural world. I grew up in a village hidden away among marshes and virgin forest on the Colombian north coast. The smell of the vegetation there is enough to turn your stomach.

It's a place where the sea passes through every imaginable shade of blue, where cyclones make houses fly away, where villages lie buried under dust and the air burns your lungs. For the Caribbean peoples, natural catastrophe and human tragedy are part of everyday life.

I think it all comes from nostalgia.

Nostalgia for your childhood? For your country?

Nostalgia for my country and for life itself.

It had to be mine; all books resemble their authors. In one way or another every book is autobiographical. And every fictional character is an alter ego or a collage made from this or that aspect of the author, his memories and his knowledge. It seems to me that a writer's work develops as a result of digging down inside oneself to see what is there, for the key to what one is looking for and the mystery of death. We know that the mystery of life will never be deciphered.

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)

<!--CLOSE attrib-->

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

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.

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)

<!--CLOSE attrib-->

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

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:

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.