Concealing Dalkey Hill: Evasion and Parallax in Nausicaa Essay

Concealing Dalkey Hill: Evasion and Parallax in Nausicaa T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses was a masterpiece because it demonstrated the futility of all prior literary styles. Indeed, the episodes of "Oxen of the Sun" and "Aeolus" could be taken as challenging primers on English style and rhetoric. This kaleidoscopic potential is seemingly reduced to a stark black-and-white vision in "Nausicaa." As many critics have pointed out, Joyce stylizes Gerty MacDowell's half of the narrative with a saccharine veneer which euphemizes her sexual encounter (itself a distanced and euphemized rendezvous) with Bloom. The first-time reader and seasoned critics alike are led into sneering at Gerty behind the safety of the author's overt critique of her superficiality; only when Joyce reveals the psychological origin of her constant evasion - her lame leg, a condition which is only hinted at until Bloom notices it post-climax - are the first seeds of pity sown in the reader's mind. The audience's appreciation of Gerty's "defect" grows "ten times worse" (301) in light of Bloom's uncharacteristically cavalier and scurrilous attitude towards a fellow outsider in which he, too, is guilty of his own brand of sexual evasion. As the reader implicitly identifies Bloom's rather heartless outlook with his own, he compensates for his initial condemnation of Gerty's character by sentimentalizing her with a Dickensian gloss - and thus is held as culpable of evasion as the episode's heroine and hero. Joyce's manipulation of his audience's expectations is never deployed through explicit moralizing but through his parallactic style (a concept distinct from the stylistic cornucopia present elsewhere in the novel), a shifting mode through which he questions t... ...ernan's, he reminds himself of the necessity for perspectival inclusion: "Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant. Three cheers for Israel." (311) Bloom's mollification of the Citizen's undoubtedly hostile remark may spring from either cowardice or his underlying sense of humanity, depending on how one takes it. And that parallactic means of interpretation is what "Nausicaa" requires - not only for interpreting the text, but for interpreting our interpretation. We, after all, are the ultimate voyeurs in an episode of purely visual interaction. To commit our literary resources to uncovering the work alone, and not ourselves, is yet another instrument of evasion.