Marian Encryptions in "Nausicaa"

Joyce’s legendary love of wordplay and embedded games is still yielding fresh critical discoveries. We can only speculate how many word-secrets remain in Ulysses. Have we uncovered all the correspondences between the Telemachia and ‘‘Calypso’’?1 Is there a finite list of peristaltic metaphors in ‘‘Lestrygonians’’? Is ‘‘U.P: up’’ family code derived from Nora’s sexual need?2 This note focuses on the Gerty MacDowell/Virgin Mary pairings in the ‘‘Nausicaa’’ episode of Ulysses. I examine seventy-six encryptions (there may be more), primarily in Gerty’s narrative, that semantically echo words spoken by the Virgin Mary in Luke’s gospel. Joyce’s first noted his use of ‘‘Mariolatry’’ in ‘‘Nausicaa’’ in a letter to Frank Budgen,3 and he makes specific reference to the Virgin symbol in the Gilbert schema.4 Thereafter, virtually every major non-genetic study of Ulysses—Gilbert, Tindall, Budgen, Sultan, Goldberg, Ellmann, Schwaber, and Kieberd,5 to cite just a handful—has touched on one or more of the approximately 200 Virgin allusions in the episode’s 16,765 words. Scholars have typically identified prominent Marian parallels, ranging from Gerty’s ‘‘ivory’’ countenance to the several blue shades in the colors of her clothing.6 The root of Joyce’s more elusive and deeply encoded pairing is found in the King James Bible at Luke 1:34.7 At the moment of the Annunciation, Mary asks (emphasis added): ‘‘How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?’’ The sentence uses forms of three verbs—to be, to see, to know—plus a negation. Joyce uses these identical verbs and the negation in briefly introducing Gerty in ‘‘Wandering Rocks’’(U 10.1206): ‘‘Gerty MacDowell, carrying the Catesby’s cork lino letters for her father who was laid up, knew by the style it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn’t see . . .’’ (emphasis added). Fritz Senn, whose work on word patterns in ‘‘Nausicaa’’ pioneers this note, describes Joyce’s introduction of Gerty as ‘‘a perverse twist’’ on the words of the Virgin Mary at the