Immaculate Erection - Literature Essay Samples

With all the irregular movements in Nausicaa  ­ Gertys limping walk, Blooms masturbation, the jerky flight of a hovering bat , the abrupt and erratic changes of scene and perspective, and finally the seasick movement of the sea (1189; 1162, Do fish ever get seasick?) one cant help but accumulate a sensation of nausea (1187) over the chapters course. But if we can swing with the off-kilter events (and morals) in this chapter, we may begin to intuit that they are a portal to epiphany; Joyces espoused errata as portal has become erratic erotica as portal. At the outset of Nausicaa, we get many signals that the pending scene is of a special, radiant, and (self-consciously) religiously marked quality. Its events take place at a mysterious (1) hour, and will be presided over by the pure radiance [of] a beacon Mary, star of the sea(7-8). Chants and incantations to Mary fill the beach; the narrative flashes quickly to evening incantations to her or related ecclesiastic ritual just befo re (289) and throughout the Bloom-Gerty encounter scene. We are given the slight impression that Gerty is the acting Mary in situ, the special avatar and representative of the famous virgin. A child of Mary badge (639) is inside her small drawer of most prized possessions as an object that associates her directly with the virgin; she might wear it on her chest and press it to her flesh, thus metonymically linking her to this goddess. (It seems more appropriate to call the Mary in Nausicaa goddess rather than Mother of God/Jesus; not once is Mary mentioned along with the latter description, and the Mary presented seems to be loosely linked only with other divine/saintly feminine entities, such as Our Lady of Loreto (288). She is a blessed virgin figure to whom prayers are sent in isolation; she is the prime and deity of the chapter, who presides over all virgins [and hence the three girl friends on the beach, two of which are virgin-mothers of sorts]. The mention of Erin further emphasizes the goddess valences  ­ i.e. as a principal and independent divinity not needing to be linked to a male deity  ­ that mark the chapter. Erin, the mythical female-name for the Irish Nation, is a higher power secondarily invoked by the figure and presentation of Gerty: Gods fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal (121-122). She, like Erin, metaphorically reigns over all of Ireland. The entourage on the beach catch the last glimpse of Erin (625), passing out as day turns to night. She, like Mary, is a temporal (moving) dusk goddess, who picks this moving gathering twilight (624) time to manifest herself and be seen.) The Virgins epithet, Mystical Rose(374), is played out over Gertys body, further linking her viscerally to this goddess. She blushes several times, crimsoning up to the roots of her hair ( 454), once (she recalls) in front of a priest and also under the gaze of Bloom. Her cheeks were stained rose-color, and color rose to her face. Indeed her face (and hence person) performed a chameleon-transition to actually transmute into a potentially-mystic rose: a burning scarlet swept from throat to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose (519-520), and flushing a deep rosy red (266). Indeed, Gerty, just post-climax, is described as having a flowerlike face (764). She rose(759), Joyce writes, just as she is getting up to leave the lingering Bloom and her flowerlike face looks as if it possesses a strange shining (763). This shining is both reminiscent of the halo of a saint, and an aura of sexual excitement. For, The multi-petaled rose could allude also to the female pubis. ( A perhaps complementary  ­albeit more subtle genitalia-reference to that of Bloom and his stick(895); My fireworks. Up like a rocket, down like a stick. Bloom, incidentally, later throws the stick into the sand (1270); it stuck; indicating a successful and achieved action of metaphorical copulation he undertakes with the virgin). Bloo m also notices that Gertys menstruation is coming on and ruminates on menstruation thoroughly, connecting it sexual excitement; this string of physiological musings can similarly be connected to an image of a blood-red rose, the (sweet) but pungent smell of the rose, and passion for which the rose is a common symbol. As avatar of the mystic rose, Gerty would not deny Blooms attentions or wants: the most pious Virgins intercessory power that it was not recorded in any age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned by her (378-380). Gerty asserts in her mind that she will accept and love him despite his sins (see passage beginning 431). She does not deny Bloom as petitioner because she possesses the the com-passion of the virgin: she is womanly (on the cusp of menstruating and in flux with the lunar -cosmic- forces) and acts on her natural sexual/passionate drives with feeling (com-passion). She is an impartial agent of sexual feelings, feelings of sadn ess, guilt, and all others and more combined. Thus, the Bloom-Gerty tryst is linked to the pantheon of Catholic imagery and symbology. When Bloom at last ejaculates, it is to the bursting of a phallic-shaped Roman candle- a firework of a nomenclature alluding to the Roman Catholic Church, and recalls the candles in any Catholic church (or, specifically the flower-threatening candle in Father Conroys service (552-555)). We are left with the odd and scandalous suspicion that Bloom and Gerty are performing an illicit (but sacred) sacrament, juxtaposed to the eroticized, but real sacraments to Mary are taking place just over the beach and inside the building from whence arousing wafts of incense flow and fill the beach (371).But what is the nature and/or the spiritual fruits of this unsupervised sacrament? Upon the central rose epithet and allusion-set, Joyce fills this chapter with the greatest density of flower references in the book thus far. Reading this chapter is like walking through a field of scented and exotic vegetation; we read of violets(230), a bunch of flowers(336), whiterose scent (641), violet ink (642), violet garters (800), heliotrope hyacinth jessamine, (1009-1010), sunflowers (1089), rhododendrons (1098), as well as the flowers described in the various images of church ritual (flowers and the blue banners of the blessed virgins sodality: 448). And indeed, Henry Flowers/Bloom, seems to be experiencing some sort of intensified flowerly blooming: even when he opens his coat to attempt to smell a mansmell he is accosted with a flowerly scent (1041). The feminine has invaded every part of his being and has inundated even his most personal physicality. Blooms earliest and most timely envoy (in terms of the course of his epic-length day) of feminine-erotica/erotic epiphany, Martha, presaged this moment in her effusive but oblique letter. Henry, in this chapter, truly hits a timely stroke in which he may Flower and Bloom (ejaculate?); he is da mn glad (786) that he didnt do it in the bath that morning over Marthas letter and conserved his juices for this rare moment offered up by a convergence of circumstance. First, there are the distracting fireworks that give Bloom and Gerty privacy from on-lookers (they are also at first mistaken for sheet lightning- something that would indicate the sympathy of the cosmos; a pathetic fallacy that Joyce side-steps by replacing it with a man-made cosmic event, but still alludes to). There are secondly the lines of force that radiate from Gertys person (see 949, in relation to the ball, related perhaps more generally her lunar pre-menstral pull), and the specific influence of evening that causes women to Open like flowers (1089). It is an uncanny Chance(1271) meeting over the long trajectory of for ever(1254), in which Bloom must grapple with the paradox of erotic return; couples in the rhododendrons and the fleeting uniqueness of one specific moment of encounter.. It never comes the same(1277)). It is an encounter spun up in and moving through the convergence of different worlds (those of Mary, Erin, the Church, Ireland, and the old man and young girl of Gerty) that Martha (via her erotically-nested errata) introduced; an ecstatic potential, previously only evinced through clues in torn space is coming to fruition. Martha planted the masturbatory seed, as did his earlier gazing at his lotus-flower in the bath-tub. Bloom was primed with distant, removed, and apparently randomly induced fore-play of an oblique nature from ungraspable women Indeed, a second presaging and mildly titillating incident that frames the events in Nausicaa; it is the compressed narrative in museum when he attempts to look up the skirts of the stony goddesses, to see if they in Ch. 8. Bloom himself mentions this incident as one of the high points in his Long day: museum with those goddesses (1215). The scene with Gerty, where he steals a look up her skirt, is parallel (or an expanded ) version of earlier inspection of the marble goddess-statues in the library. Statuesque imagery is applied to Gerty, Greekly perfect veined alabaster (88-89), and moving from pagan to Christian, one can well imagine a white effigy of the blessed virgin too. In both incidents, Bloom is, from a distance, looking up the skirt of an indifferent (or quite welcoming, in the case of Gerty) goddess/woman. Even though Gerty is now a living woman of flesh (contrary to the only-imagining Martha, and the stone-women of the library), there is still the distinctive phenomenon of distance between the two lovers (as there is between Bloom and his wife and daughter, the central women in his profane existence). Joyce spends much narrative (tongue-in-cheek) time developing Gerty as an embodied ideal of Irish beauty and of young-womanhood generally, with all the allusions to her reading of fashion magazines, grace and goodness, etc. Thus, Bloom is connected directly to this ideal via eyes only, yet, paradoxically it is a highly sexualized encounter based on look but dont touch: it is an immaculate erection.We might begin to think that Bloom truly is of the Catholic faith (despite being merely a convert): he embraces the invisible Mary perhaps more than an average Catholic. And, when he notices that she is lame; the universe/happenstance has engineered a perfect sacrament for him. The perfect ideal of woman (all the passages spent building up how ideal in every way Gerty is) is embodied in the host (Gertys and Blooms bodies) is brought down to the material and embodied in the imperfect (sin-infected) human flesh. Blooms sinning errata (which she swears to accept) is merged with her secret and hidden (like Blooms masturbation) physical errata. We see that they are matched and mutually attracted not unlike Blooms realization that he and Molly, like most husbands and wives, are quite a pair: As God made them he matched them(976). Both Bloom and Molly (and Gerty) are seeking ecs tasy (and enlightenment?) in the orgasm of illicit sexual union. Blooms sexual climax, whose splendor we can only deduce from synchronized, euphemistic fireworks (and Blooms many O!s), marks a door through which Bloom passes beyond which he reawakens (see 1110: the Rip Van Winkle episode and thoughts). Blooms epiphanic portal allows him to rethink/rediscovers his link to Molly; two of a pair, both orgasming in their own ways. And linked still linked strongly- Bloom thinks that his watch, carried on his own person, must have stopped when Molly orgasmed with her lover.Thus Joyce leaves us with a picture of Bloom who, although wryly conscious of his aging, is still incanting the life-affirming, sex-flowers-(blooming)- food yumyum: Lovers: yum yum (1100). The bat is the joining symbolic carrier of the illicit Gerty-Bloom union. Just as their sacrament is a hybrid Catholic-sexual rite, the bat is a weird cross between a rodent and bird. It flies from the church bell and hovers over the lovers. Like Bloom the mysterious man on the beach the bat is a mysterious/ weirdthing and the mediating body between the religious discipline and propriety of the church and the sexual licence (and tandem religious ecstasy) that occurs outside of the church. Inside the church‹the candles threaten the flowers his bloom might be destroyed. Thus, their weird yet life-affirming sexual encounter must be hidden behind a protective no (Should a girl tell? No a thousand times no. (750)), a word first heard from a child, little Master Tommy: Nao (70). Tommy as child and twin, is the recent fruit of sexual union, and the embodiment of Blooms theory of twin souls (i.e. husbands and wives) finding each other. Further, he recalls Blooms dead boy; all there of the young boys could be stand-ins for Blooms dead son, himself conceived from an unconventionally-tinged sexual union. But despite all valences of grief, loss, and sadness (somewhat assuaged by Mary mistress of tears: Gertys parting smile that verged on tears (765)), we end with Blooms practical down-to-earth (lewd, man-based) commentary of sexual phenomena: Tip. Have to let Fly (994-995); and then, more humanely, It never comes the same no harm in it (1277).