Episode 13 — Nausicaa

Eight p.m., Sandymount Strand at dusk — the same beach Stephen walked along nine hours earlier. Three young Dublin women are on the rocks at the far end watching the fireworks for the Mirus charity bazaar over Howth Head: Edy Boardman with her infant brother in a pram, Cissy Caffrey with her two younger brothers running on the sand, and Gerty MacDowell. Gerty is twenty-two, slightly lame, the daughter of a drunk; she has been thinking about love and marriage in the prose style of the magazines she has read all her life.

The first half is given to her in that style. Joyce parodies and inhabits the late-Victorian magazine voice with extraordinary precision. "The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual in its ivorylike purity." Gerty becomes aware of the dark-suited gentleman sitting alone at the other end of the strand. She decides, half-consciously, that he is a man with a great sorrow; she dramatizes herself for him. As Cissy and Edy run off with the children, Gerty stays. She leans back and arches as the Roman candle bursts overhead. Bloom masturbates silently in his pocket. When Gerty stands to leave, we learn what the prose has been hiding. She has a limp.

The second half cuts to Bloom's own interior monologue. Tired. A little ashamed. A little tender. He thinks about Gerty, about Molly, about menstruation, about magnetic attraction, about advertising, about the bat flickering past his head, about whether the lighthouse on Howth is signalling, about how much time has passed since four p.m. He decides to write a brief message in the sand with a stick — "I AM A." — and rubs it out before finishing. The chapter ends with him asleep, briefly, on the rock, the cuckoo clock at the priest's house behind him crowing nine.