"How Do You Sniff?": Havelock Ellis and Olfactory representation in 'Nausicaa'
2004; University of Tulsa; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1938-6036
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoAlthough identified both eyes and nose as organs corresponding to Nausicaa episode in Ulysses,1 critics have focused almost entirely on former, apparently considering latter worthy of only a passing glance. Articles with titles such as Joyce and Feminism Encore: at Gerty MacDowell, Twilight in Dublin: Look at 'Nausicaa,' and 'Pity They Can't See Themselves': Assessing 'Subject' of Pornography in 'Nausicaa' demonstrate critical ten dency to privilege sense of vision,2 but no one has yet landed on A Fragrant Bloom. The nose has not been totally ignored, however: in A Metaphysics of Coitus in 'Nausicaa,' John Bishop devotes three pages (out of twenty-four) to the anti-idealizing function Bloom's nose exercises, as Gerty becomes object of scent rather than vision; in Joyce's Heliotrope, Margot Norris includes Nausicaa in her discussion of heliotrope as ultimate trope of desire that transforms Bloom into a kind of bee following lure of women's fragrance from flower to flower, from Gerty's cheap perfume, to Martha Clifford's 'no smell flower' pinned to her letter, and on to Molly's scent he knows 'in a thousand'; and Suzette Henke, in her Gazing at Gerty MacDowell, critiques Sigmund Freud's having puritanically expunged odors from 'civilized' sexual economy of modern man, but only as an afterthought to her main argument (123) .3 More typical (and more telling) is Patrick McGee's definition, in Joyce's Nausea: Style and Representation in 'Nausicaa,' of style as image of writing . . . an essence without essence, a scent, like a perfume (for nose is other organ of this chapter)?a parenthetical acknowledgment and dis missal of a central idea surely deserves more than two sen tences he allows it.4 Only Bernard Benstock, in James Joyce: The Olfactory Factor, roughly a third of which is devoted to Nausicaa, makes sense of smell primary in his discussion of work as a whole, but he does so exclusively in relation to Patrick Suskind's
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