In Homer's Odyssey: After leaving Circe, Odysseus is shipwrecked in Book VI on the island of Skeria, where Nausicaa, a Phaiakian princess washing laundry in a stream with her maidservants, stumbles upon him asleep, naked on the beach. She dresses Odysseus in her laundry and guides him to her father, King Alcinous's, home where he is taken in and treated hospitably. Over several "books" of the poem, Odysseus recounts his adventures and tribulations from the end of the Trojan War up to the point of his arriving on Skeria. Alcinous invites Odysseus to remain on the island and offers him Nausicaa's hand in marriage, but of course Odysseus continues homeward in a fully manned ship Alcinoous provides.

Painting
[The Projected Mirage]

Grey, blue

Phaeacis—Star of the Sea

Nausicaa—Gerty

[Handmaidens, Alcinoos and Arete, Ulysses]

From Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book:

• "This episode offers respite to the 'storm-tossed heart of man'; respite to Bloom after his violent departure from Barney Kiernan's'; respite to the reader from the inflated and disorderly stylistic excesses of that interlude. Here Joyce adopts a sentimental, woman's magazinish style which, viewed as a literary burlesque, is devastating. Yet the farcical, satirical strain does not wholly determine the temper of the passage; for the vulgar idiom of the novelette, when exploited to articulate a young, uneducated girl's thoughts and dreams, becomes peculiarly touching by virtue of its sheer aptness to her adolescent self-dramatization. Joyce's linguistic virtuosity and psychological sensitivity present the two-eyed reader with a feast of blended satire ands pathos" (128).

Commentary from Fritz Senn in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, eds. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974, 277-311:

• “In the setting of all-embracing love, Bloom resorts to the most isolated form of sexual gratification, an event made more poignant by his realization that a more vital and more mutually fulfilling embrace has recently been staged at home” (278).
  
  
• "One of the potential moral effects of Ulysses is that it can condition us, more than any previous novel, to suspend or, at any rate, postpone the moralizing tendency that consists in dispensing blame and credit, in favour of a series of constant readjustments and a fluctuating awareness of the complexity of motivation" (279).
  
  
• "After Bloom's precipitate proclamation of the gospel of love [in 'Cyclops'], he does in fact embark on a tour of love in its varieties. The visit to the Dignams is an act of charity; romantic love culminates in 'Nausicaa' (which is steeped in colours of loveliness, including even the 'lovely' dog Garryowen); the depths of sexuality are charted in 'Circe'; paternal love comes into its own from 'Oxen of the Sun' to 'Ithaca'" (281).
  
  
• "With the 'Nausicaa' chapter we enter, for the first time, a predominantly female world. . . . From now on the book moves through several female phases. . . . The second, longer part of Ulysses extends between opposite poles of womanhood: young, immature Gerty, lame and incomplete (she is accorded only half a chapter), and ripe, fullblown Molly" (281-83).
  
  
• "Gerty and Molly Bloom, Nausicaa and Penelope, have some traits in common, and Molly is ubiquitous in Bloom's half of the chapter. Superstition, ignorance, and faulty grammar are common to both of them, as is a splendid inconsistency. Both begin their menstrual cycle. They set great store by their appearance and their clothes; they thrive on admiration; their thoughts circle around men" (300).
  
  
• "'Nausicaa' is technically complex, numerous discordant ruptures disrupting the basic division into two parts. . . . 'Nausicaa' is a compendium of moods and styles" (305).

In Homer's Odyssey: One of the adventures in Book XII involves Odysseus and his crew being stranded during a month of unfavorable winds on the island of the sun god Helios. Circe has warned Odysseus not to kill any of Helios's cattle, but as the men become increasingly hungry, Eurylokhos convinces them to slaughter a few cows and make offerings to the gods in hopes of avoiding any punishment for their eating well on Helios's cattle for a week. As promised, however, once the winds change and the ship is again under way, Zeus destroys the ship with a lightning bolt, killing all the sailors but Odysseus, who drifts on floating wreckage until he washes up on the island of Calypso.  

The Hospital

10:00-11:00 p.m.

Womb
[Matrix, Uterus]

Medicine
[Physic, The Eternal Flocks]

White

Mothers
[Fecundation, frauds, parthenogenesis]

Embryonic development
[Prose (Embryo—Foetus
—Birth)]

Trinacria—the hospital

Lampote and Paethusa —the nurses

Helios—Horne

Oxen—fertility

Crime—fraud

Circe—Bella

["Helios Hyperion," Jove, Ulysses]

From Harry Blamires, The Bloomsday Book:

• “More detailed correspondences between the subject of fertility outraged and the matter and form of this episode will emerge. They are numerous, complex, and perhaps too elaborately contrived. For instance, the theme of embryonic growth is reflected in a series of often brilliant parodies (or pastiches) of English prose style from Anglo-Saxon days to the twentieth century. Formally there is a division into nine parts (like the nine months of gestation), and these parts each have a special reference to earlier episodes in the book. Moreover, there is a highly technical connexion between the detailed development of the foetus and allusions in the respective sections of this episode which only those who have considerable medical knowledge will appreciate. One must add to these formal correspondences more material ones. The theme of contraception, as a crime against fertility, recurs frequently. And Joyce himself refers in his letters to an allegory in which 'Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo' (Letters, 138-39)" (139).

Commentary from J. S. Atherton in James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays, eds. Clive Hart and David Hayman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974, 313-39:

• "This chapter is an exercise in imitative form. Joyce is trying to make words reproduce objects and processes" (313).
  
  
• "[T]here are at least five processes going on in addition to the customary development of plot and portrayal of characters one expects in a novel:
  
  
  • 1) A series of imitations showing the development of English.
  • 2) A continuation of Joyce's Homeric parallels.
  • 3) A treatment of the growth of the human foetus.
  • 4) An outline of 'faunal evolution.'
  • 5) A linking with earlier parts of Ulysses" (315).
    
    
• [On Joyce's sources of different prose styles]: "There are very few things that can be done with English that Joyce does not do in 'Oxen of the Sun.'"