dc.description.abstract | This project proposes to investigate James Joyce‘s Ulysses, in particular
chapter 13 “Nausicaa,” in the light of Jacques Derrida’s work on “postcards” with
the aim of corroborating that, less than the art of painting as Joyce himself maps
out in his scheme for this chapter, “Nausicaa” bears hallmarks of a postcard with
its message or signification left open and floating for instant as well as mass
consumption.
The casting of Gerty MacDowell in “Nausicaa” is biographically established to
be based on Marthe Fleischmann whom Joyce met in Zurich and whom he sent in
1918, among other letters, a postcard addressed to “Nausikaa,” signed “Odysseus”
(Letters II 426-36). Joyce‘s desire for Fleischmann is arguably reinscribed but then
volatilized onto the narrator’s desire for Gerty in “Nausicaa.” Bloom‘s clandestine
letter correspondence to Martha Clifford in the false name of Henry Flower already
bears witness to Joyce’s keen interest in exploring the disguise/disclosure;
elsewhere/here; or absence/presence dialectics in the novel Ulysses. Denis Breen‘s
receiving a putative libelous postcard bearing the words of “U.P.: up” readily
circulating among Dubliners on July 16, 1904 and the sailor D. B. Murphy in the
cabmen’s shelter bluffing about South American cannibals on the proof of a
postcard from Bolivia are other distinguished examples in Ulysses of the
prominence of letters and postcards circulating and thereby disseminating occult
desires as well as messages in modern cities like Dublin. The unpredictable and
wayward paths these letters and especially postcards take suggest the fate of the
logocentric/patriarchal writing pen of Joyce’s (or of his various writer‘s personae
in the novel); namely, the supposedly-known and -established center is inevitably
always already dislocated.
Similarly, “Nausicaa,” if read as a postcard, exposes and circulates the
Victorian- and patriarchal-underwritten desire eager to typecast the lower-middle
class Gerty onto the dual roles of the angel in the house and the aristocratic femme
fatale. While enframed by the male gaze of the Joycean narrator’s desire,
“Nausicaa” nonetheless reflects back (after all, voyeurism works both on Gerty,
Bloom, and by inference, the readers), implicates, and finally subverts the
authoring stance and authority--thus de-“singular”-izing the name of the author. By
drawing on Derrida‘s The Postcard (1987), I’d like to argue that the messages of
“Nausicaa,” like those of a postcard, are both exposed to the eyes of the beholders
as well as encoded for deciphering by their recipients. In other words, they are
located both inside and outside--or rather “entre,” in-between--the dominant
discourses seeking to inscribe the text of “Nausicaa.” Such slippery and protean
stylistic display and performance, I would continue to argue, are Joyce‘s feat of derestricting
and thus de-colonizing the discursive hegemony of the sort already evinced in that (i.e. the nationalistic-political brand) of “Cyclops.” Consequently,
“Cyclops” and “Nausicaa” can be pair chapters exploring from different angles the
volatile textual force and performativity embodying no less strength than that of
politics. I’d like to confirm that these two chapters are Joyce‘s way to enact
verbal/textual maneuvers pertaining to decolonization in politics. | en |