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ULYSSES
(JAMES JOYCE)
,.
“Fetishizing the Bread of Everyday Life:
The Taboo Gaze in ‘Nausicaa’ ”
by Blake Hobby and Dustin Ryan,
University of North Carolina at Asheville
Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery
of the Mass and what I am trying to do? . . . To give people some
kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the
bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic
life of its own.
—Joyce, in conversation with his brother, Stanislaus
When we think of James Joyce’s Ulysses, it is easy to think of taboos,
those things that we normally do not talk about in literature: fornication,
excrement, urine, adultery, sadomasochism, racial epithets and
slurs, foul language, and “mutton kidneys that leave a faintly scented
urine taste on the tongue” (see the first line of the book’s fourth
chapter). But, for the purposes of understanding what made and often
still makes Joyce’s Ulysses seem taboo, it might be profitable to focus on
one chapter where Joyce conflates religion and sex, turning both into a
voyeuristic spectacle, the thirteenth chapter we refer to as “Nausicaa.”
During this chapter, Leopold (“Poldy” as his wife calls him) Bloom
masturbates in the beach scrubs while a disabled woman flashes
her knickers on the Sandymount Strand beach. At the same time, a
congregation at a Roman Catholic church called Mary, Star of the Sea
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