Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Ulysses 257
his masturbation. Of course, as we later learn in the novel, Bloom
does indeed engage in debased sadomasochistic fantasies, delighting
in a woman of the night who treats him as an insolent pig, riding
him and putting out a cigarette in his ear. These fantasies, a Joycean
parody of Freud’s ideas about repression and sexuality, are also the
focus of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Joyce
indicts Irish religion and culture.
Repression is a fitting topic for Joyce to discuss and especially
to think about in terms of “Nausicaa’s” taboo subject matter. For,
while the chapter presents repressions and repressive mechanisms in
a comic light, “Nausicaa,” originally published in The Little Review
( July-August 1920 issue), was seized by the U.S. Postal Service, one
of the many times Joyce’s works fell victim to a censor who deemed
them immoral. While the U.S. Postal Service had a definite sense
of moral turpitude in mind, such grandiose moralizing is just the
sort of thing that Joyce satirizes in the chapter. “Nausicaa” is both
a representation of our humanity and also a jarring text, one where
the religious and sexual collide—both presenting fetishized taboos.
While such a collision gives us a humanistic chapter, this weaving
of the sacred and the illicit was, and still is, too jarring for many.
Joyce will not allow the reader to accept a comforting view of the
world. Rather, Joyce presents the ideals we believe in and juxtaposes
them with flaws that mar our utopian ideals, making our moralizing
polemical hypocrisy at best. In doing so he reminds us that imagining
the world to be one way does not change what it actually is.
Rather than a debased portrait of what is illicit, Joyce presents our
desires and our fantasies, the stuff of the taboo, as sacramental. In
that sense, Joyce ruins the sacred truths, leaving us with a portrait
of our humanity with all of our foibles intact, presenting our taboos
for the fetishes we make them to be.
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
Devlin, Kimberly. “The Romance Heroine Exposed: ‘Nausicaa’ and The
Lamplighter.” James Joyce Quarterly Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer 1985):
383–96.
Foucault, Michel. “The History of Sexuality, Volume One.” The Norton
Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B Leitch. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1648–59.