The Cinematic Technique of Nausicaa

Our scene is set at Sandymount Shore where Leopold Bloom is attempting to rest for a moment. In what I feel is a sweet, sentimental style James Joyce writes, “Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand…” (U 13. 284). The waves of the bay splash near the weedgrown rocks. A quiet stillness washes over the bay and Bloom notices three girls sitting on the rocks enjoying the fresh air. That is the feeling that I get from reading the first few lines and my cinematically inspired rendition of the events in the first page. Thematically “Nausicaa” presents several motifs that resonate throughout the chapter and have lasting effects on the overall novel. Stuart Gilbert describes the techniques used for this chapter as tumescence and the detumescence (Gilbert 278). According to the Oxford Dictionaries, tumescence means eagerness for sexual activity while detumescence refers to sexual arousal. Gilbert’s schema refers to the chapter’s art as painting, its organ as eye and nose, and its symbol as virgin, all of which are found within the chapter and relate to the major themes of tumescence and detumescence (Gilbert 30). The resonating themes of tumescence and detumescence work with the overall cinematic technique Joyce is experimenting with in “Nausicaa.”

It’s quite fitting that the corresponding art of the chapter is painting. Like cinema, painting is also a striking form of visual art. In so many ways this chapter colors the perception of the world within the episode and paints a specific, emotional point of view. The vivid description of Sandymount Shore as well as the description of the three girls sitting on the rocks can be read like an illustration of an...

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...just as powerful. Through description, he creates an image that can never be removed from the internal visualization of the mind’s eye and the burst of the Roman candle becomes just as provocative as a woman’s bare breast flashing through a projector onto a screen. Just as there are levels of a consubstantial trinity within Ulysses, there is also a level of a consubstantial trinity within the world of filmmaking. The protean relationship in which Joyce allows the reader to transform into the character and author is not unlike the relationship between the actor, cinematographer (filmmaker), and audience. The use of this cinematic technique within the chapter acts as a commentary on the symbiosis between writer and reader and allows the reader to heuristically detach from the monocular reading of the book and adopt a more binocular vision of the concepts in the work.