Episode 4: Calypso

Just as Book Five of The Odyssey shifts focus from Telemachus to Odysseus, the “Calypso” episode restarts the story of Ulysses in Mr. Bloom’s home (7 Eccles Street) at 8:00 am on the morning of June 16th 1904.  Leaving behind Stephen’s intensity and density of thought, you’ll likely find Mr. Bloom’s arrival on the page a relief.  As we begin the novel’s second triad of episodes in the initial style, the text continues to provide intimate access to the focalized character’s thoughts by the techniques of inner monologue and free indirect discourse, but the third person narrator now adopts Mr. Bloom’s comic sensibility and groundedness in the physical world.  We swap the erudition of Stephen’s interiority for Mr. Bloom’s reliance on external stimuli for his frames of reference and mental activity.  For example, Stephen’s musings about sight lead him to epistemological ricochets at the beginning of “Proteus,” but Mr. Bloom simply watches his cat, makes mental observations about the way she moves and her physical features, and wonders about her nature and view of the world.  He also bends down to the cat’s level and cares for her by providing milk, acts of humility and empathy that help to define Mr. Bloom as curious and kind (4.21).

“Calypso” begins with recognition of Mr. Bloom’s bodily appetites as he prepares breakfast for his wife in the kitchen of their north Dublin home.  We find an immediate contrast to Stephen, about whose preferred foods we are ignorant and, indeed, never thought to wonder about until now.  As the episode’s first page continues, you might notice other echoes of moments in the “Telemachus” episode, but they are all repeated with differences that signal the shift to the novel’s new protagonist: the “green stones” here are the cat’s eyes rather than symbols of Irish subjugation under English rule (as Stephen identifies in the green gem on Haines’s silver cigarette case); the “tower” figures into Bloom’s curiosity about his cat’s perception of his relative height, not the omphalos of an Irish intellectual movement; Bloom’s milk jug was uneventfully filled by Hanlon’s milkman, whereas the milkwoman in “Telemachus” represented Athena and the failings of Irish culture.  While Stephen seems to exhaust all knowledge in his allusion-laden inner monologue, Bloom conveys inexhaustible wonder.  His mind has a lighter air than Stephen’s, yet it is no less active.

We’ve seen Buck blaspheme and tease as he prepares breakfast in the tower, but Bloom carefully arranges the plate for his wife’s breakfast in bed.  Some readers will find Bloom’s subservience to Molly odd – perhaps even degrading – when considered in light of the revelations to come, but he conveys no resentment over what seems to be a routine conjugal favor.  Bloom hungrily but thoughtfully weighs his own breakfast options and decides on a pork kidney from Dlugacz’s butcher shop around the corner from his home.  He goes up the staircase from the kitchen (located in the basement level of 7 Eccles) and from the hallway “softly” (4.52) tells Molly (still in bed) that he’s going out and asks her if she wants something beyond buttered bread for her breakfast.  She grunts her first word of the novel, “Mn” (4.57), a muffled “no.”  As she turns over in bed, Bloom hears the jingle (4.59) of the bed’s loose brass rings – we will hear them jingle again later in the novel.  Bloom recalls that Molly’s father, Brian Tweedy, purchased the bed at an auction in Gibraltar, where he was stationed as an officer of the British Army during Molly’s childhood.  He parodies his father-in-law’s bravado but ultimately finds the good in him. 

Preparing to leave the house and still thinking about old Tweedy’s lucrative techniques in stamp collecting, Mr. Bloom takes his Plasto’s high grade ha[t] (the “t” has worn off) from the peg and checks inside the headband to make sure that the “white slip of paper” (4.70) remains hidden there.  We will learn in the next episode that this card allows Bloom to access a secret post office box; to be sure, Bloom is not as simple as he initially seems.  As he steps out the front door, he searches his pockets for the key.  He feels in his pocket his talismanic shrunken potato, but he realizes the housekey is in his other pants (he is wearing his black suit for Paddy Dignam’s funeral later this morning).  He leaves the door so slightly ajar that it “looked shut” (4.76).  Like Stephen, he is entering the day without a key to his home.  Mr. Bloom’s keylessness results from an act of generosity; he doesn’t want to disturb his wife by going back into the bedroom to retrieve it.  Stephen’s keylessness, meanwhile, is rooted in defiant self-imposed exile.

Mr. Bloom enters the streets of Dublin this sunny Thursday morning and we begin to see the city through his keenly observant eyes.  Most people fail to look closely at the things we routinely see, but Mr. Bloom notes many details as he walks through his own block of his own neighborhood, including a neighbor’s “loose cellarflap” (4.77), the sun’s orientation to the steeple of St. George’s church, and a bread van making deliveries.  Interspersed in these observations, his mind wonders about why you feel hotter in a black suit. You’ll note that he is incorrect in guessing “conducts, reflects,” and “refracts” (4.79-80); rather, black absorbs heat.  Richard Ellmann terms these sorts of mental errors “bloomisms”: “uneasy but scrupulous recollection of a factual near-miss” (Ellmann 36).  His later inclusion of Edom alongside Sodom and Gomorrah (4.222) is another such bloomism.

He notes his wife’s preference for day-old loafs, and imagines walking through a Middle Eastern market.  He quickly dismisses his reverie as overly romanticized and recognizes its origins in the illustrated title page of a travel book he owns.  He then thinks about sun imagery in Irish nationalist newspapers.  Get used to this mental liveliness – we will spend the better part of the day with Mr. Bloom, frequently accessing his inner monologue. 

As he turns the corner from Eccles Street to Dorset Street, he passes Larry O’Rourke’s pub and smells “whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush” (4.107).  He muses on Mr. O’Rourke, decides not to solicit him for an ad (Bloom is an advertising agent) and recalls Simon Dedalus’s imitation of the publican (Mr. Bloom knows Stephen’s father and will spend time with him later this morning).  Bloom greets Mr. O’Rourke and contemplates the economics of pubs.  He passes Saint Joseph’s National school and hears the ABCs (“ahbeesee …” (4.137) recited through a classroom’s open windows, distracting him from his mental math, leaving the pub problem “unsolved”; although “displeased” by this inconclusive exercise, he has the maturity to “let them fade” (4.142) and finds sensory solace in arriving at the butcher where he “breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs’ blood” (4.143-44).  Of course, it is worth noting that Bloom is Jewish, and he is about to buy pork from a Jewish butcher – not kosher.  In Dlugacz’s, Bloom is pleased to wait behind a young woman as she places an order for sausages – she works as a housekeeper next door to him.  He admires “her vigorous hips” (4.148) and hopes to hurry with his own order so that he can walk behind her “moving hams” (4.172).  Also not kosher. 

He notes the Jewish newspaper sheets Dlugacz uses to wrap up the woman’s sausages and recalls his previous employment working as a cattle trader.  He places his order and silently encourages the butcher to “make hay while the sun shines” (4.174) so he can catch up to the woman, whom he recalls seeing “cuddling” (4.178) with a burly policeman.  He receives and pays threepence for his kidney (remember that “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls (4.1-2)) and leaves the shop; he is too late to walk behind the woman. 

As he heads home, he reads on the butcher paper a prospectus for Agendath Netaim, a Zionist investment opportunity that touts the land’s fertility.  He wonders about Jewish friends of his, Citron and Mastiansky, with whom he has lost touch.  He thinks about produce.  Then, “a cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly” (4.218); this is the same cloud that covered the sun in the “Telemachus” episode (see 1.248), representing the novel’s first direct incident of parallax, the phenomenon of the same object being observed from different viewpoints.  The cloud casts a shadow on Bloom’s mind (just as it does to Stephen’s), and he thinks of Israel as “a dead land, grey and old” (4.223), starkly contrasting with the idyllic portrayal of Palestine in the Agendath Netaim ad as a land teeming with life.  This dramatic swing of thought exemplifies Bloom’s cyclical mind.  In both his mental processes and his character, Mr. Bloom embodies contradictions: he is ordinary and extraordinary, an amateur scientist with “a touch of the artist” (10.582), an Everyman and a good man, which not every man is.  He is admirable but also deeply flawed.  He is human.

Horrified by the image his mind creates of Palestine, Bloom hurries home, thinking, “Well, I am here now.  Yes, I am here now” (4.232-33), asserting his Irish identity despite his Jewish ethnicity.  He is also drawn home by Molly, his Penelope, wanting to “be near her ample bedwarmed flesh” (4.238-39).  His equilibrium restored by thoughts of home, he personifies the sunlight as running “swiftly, in slim sandals,” which suggests Hermes (who tells Calypso she must release Odysseus) and “a girl with gold hair on the wind,” which suggests Bloom’s daughter, Milly (4.240-42).   He arrives back home and collects the morning mail: a card from Milly to Molly, a letter from Milly to Bloom, and a letter addressed to “Mrs. Marion Bloom” in a “bold hand” (4.244).  Bloom recognizes “at once” (4.244) that this letter is from Blazes Boylan, the man set to manage Molly’s upcoming concert tour (she is a prominent soprano in the Dublin music scene).  Molly’s name on the envelope should by proper etiquette appear as Mrs. Leopold Bloom; Boylan has effectively removed Leopold from the marriage.  Indeed, Blazes Boylan will make good on that envelope’s clerical promise by cuckolding Mr. Bloom this very afternoon.  Molly’s correspondence to loyal Penelope is ironic.

Bloom enters the bedroom and gives Molly her mail.  While he is at the window “letting the blind up,” he watches Molly in the reflection of the window as she “tuck[s Boylan’s letter] under her pillow” (4.257) to read in private once Bloom has left the room.  He clears an armful of Molly’s dirty laundry onto the bed.  On his way back downstairs to finish making breakfast, Molly tells (commands?) Bloom to “scald the teapot” (4.270).  Molly calls him Poldy, short for Leopold, though perhaps de-lionizing him by removing the Leo from his name.  Back in the kitchen, Bloom makes the tea as commanded, puts the kidney in the pan on the coals, lets the cat lick the butcher paper, and then opens and skims Milly’s letter.  He takes the full breakfast tray up to Molly in bed.  There, he notices Molly’s ample figure and “a strip of torn envelope peep[ing] from under the dimpled pillow” (4.308), evidence that she has read Boylan’s letter while he was downstairs.  Knowing full well who it was from, he asks anyway, and Molly confirms that Boylan is going to come by the house that afternoon to review the tour programme.  We also learn that Bloom will attend Paddy Dignam’s funeral at eleven this morning.

Molly then asks Bloom to explain a word she read in a book.  The word is metempsychosis, and Bloom initially explains that it is Greek, meaning “the transmigration of souls” (4.342), but Molly dismisses this erudite definition, saying “O, rocks! [...] Tell us in plain words” (4.343).  Bloom goes on to explain reincarnation in simpler terms.  He also offers to swap out Molly’s book, Ruby: the Pride of the Ring (a cheap romance novel about a circus) for a more smutty read.  Bloom admires the picture framed over their bed, The Bath of the Nymph, and identifies the nymph in the painting with Molly, thinking “not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer” (4.371).  Beyond the similarities between the nymph and Molly, both women correspond to Calypso, the nymph in The Odyssey who holds Odysseus captive.  Bloom/Odysseus is perhaps imprisoned (by psychological forces soon to be revealed) in a state of deference to Molly: bringing her breakfast in bed, running errands for her, following her commands, and resigning himself to her impending adultery.  Questions around the causes, consequences, and sustainability of this dynamic within the Blooms’ marriage are central to Ulysses.

Molly smells something burning, and Bloom, having forgotten about his kidney on the stove, hurries back downstairs.  He salvages his breakfast and sits down to eat with a cup of tea.  He reads in full his daughter’s letter to him, thanking him for her birthday presents (she turned 15 yesterday (June 15th)) and giving a brief update on her social life down in Mullingar, County Westmeath, where she is working in a photography shop.  One detail stands out to Mr. Bloom: “there is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon” (4.406-7).  You may remember at the end of “Telemachus” Buck chatting with a guy at Forty Foot bathing area who reports that their mutual friend Bannon “found a sweet young thing down [in Westmeath].  Photo girl he calls her” (1.684-85).  So, in another instance of parallax, Bloom’s daughter Milly is involved with a young man in Buck Mulligan’s circle of friends.  Even without knowing anything about Bannon, Bloom paternally responds to this news “with troubled affection” (4.432).  Milly’s letter also references a song, “Seaside Girls,” that will return to Bloom’s mind over the course of the day.  Singing a few lines of the song to himself, Bloom’s mind recalls the “torn envelope” (4.439) of Boylan’s letter as well as its addressing of “Mrs Marion” (4.444); in this way, he conflates Milly’s blossoming sexuality with Molly’s impending sexual encounter with Boylan.  He feels these developments as “a soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen, yes. Prevent. Useless: can’t move” (4.447-48).  We might admire Bloom’s wisdom in passivity here: if Molly wants to have an affair, he is ultimately powerless to stop her.  He could intervene this afternoon, sure, but she would find a way around him tomorrow or the day after.  Same thing with Milly’s involvement with the Bannon boy.  Bloom will later think, “Woman. As easy stop the sea” (11.641).

Reflecting on Milly’s birthday, he “remember[s] the summer morning she was born, running to knock up [the midwife] Mrs Thornton” (4.416-17).  This same midwife delivered the Blooms’ second child but “knew from the first poor little Rudy wouldn’t live. […] He would be eleven now if he had lived” (4.418-20).  The Blooms’ infant son died at eleven days old, and pangs related to Rudy will arise throughout the day in the thoughts of both Mr. Bloom and Molly.  The loss of this child has profoundly impacted their marriage for years, and we will later see evidence of Mr. Bloom’s feelings of responsibility for Rudy’s death (see 6.329).  So, we might think again of the parallel to The Odyssey, how Calypso craves Odysseus for a husband.  Perhaps Bloom’s guilt over the loss of Rudy manifests itself in apologetic subservience to Molly, and Molly/Calypso desires for Bloom/Odysseus to reassert himself as the husband she married.  Perhaps the correspondence for Calypso in Ulysses is neither a person nor a picture, but rather the disconnect within the marriage, the underlying dysfunction between Leopold and Molly Bloom that imprisons each in isolation from the other.  In The Odyssey, the gods determine that Odysseus deserves to be released from his imprisonment so that he may continue his journey home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope.  The journey of Ulysses culminates in Mr. Bloom’s return home in the “Ithaca” episode, and the novel concludes with Molly’s monologue in “Penelope” – the title of the novel’s final episode suggests that enough will have changed over the course of the day that the marriage has been freed from its years of captivity.  Maybe.  Joyce’s penchant for irony prevent any such reading as certain, and your own experience of this novel will yield its own opinions and reactions.

Mr. Bloom feels “a gentle loosening of his bowels” (4.460) and grabs some reading material for a trip to the outhouse.  In stark contrast to the way the text obscures Stephen’s urination at the end of “Proteus,” the narrator in “Calypso” offers excessive details regarding Mr. Bloom’s bowel movement.  In his backyard, Bloom considers improvements to his garden but, in another example of his cyclical thinking patterns, cites his recent bee-sting to suggest that “gardens have their drawbacks” (4.483).  Then Bloom asks himself “Where is my hat, by the way?” (4.485), which will send a hyper-diligent reader back a few pages to examine Bloom’s return home in lines 243-47.  For all of the narrator’s attention to Bloom’s exit (ha[t], potato, key, leaving the door slightly ajar, etc.), the text offers no description of his entrance from the time he collects the mail until he enters the bedroom.  These sorts of “narrative skips,” as Hugh Kenner calls them,[1] compel the reader to consider what is missing and why.  In this instance, we can assume that Bloom is sufficiently distracted by the appearance of Boylan’s letter – “his quickened heart slowed at once” (4.244) – that he takes no note of where he put his hat.

Seated in the outhouse, Mr. Bloom reads a short story titled “Matcham’s Masterstroke” by Mr. Philip Beaufoy and considers his own literary prospects.  Obviously humored and intrigued by his wife, Bloom “used to try jotting down” (4.519) snippets of Molly’s dialogue out of context, similar to the idea of Joyce’s own “Epiphanies.”  Bloom remembers the night of the bazaar dance (where Molly first met Boylan?) and the morning after.  He considers the changes that occur with the time of day and discerns that Boylan has money.  Then, echoing the end of “Telemachus,” we hear the three bellchimes signaling that the time is 8:45.  Whereas Stephen’s mind translated the chimes into three lines of a Catholic prayer for the dying, recalling his mother’s deathbed, Bloom hears them as straightforward onomatopoeia:

            Heigho! Heigho!

            Heigho! Heigho!

            Heigho! Heigho!  (4.546-48)

This instance of parallax (the two men responding differently to the same hour’s bellchimes) demonstrates that, again, Bloom and Stephen’s distinctions will be highlighted by the manner in which they perceive similar events, objects, and ideas.  The contrast between the two protagonists is further emphasized in their respective last words of the opening episodes: Stephen’s last word in “Telemachus” – “Usurper” (1.743) – reveals his paranoia and self-absorption, whereas Mr. Bloom’s last words – “Poor Dignam!” (4.551) – convey a spirit of compassion.  This impulse toward empathy represents an important touchstone as Joyce begins to redefine the epic hero through Mr. Bloom.

[1] (Kenner 48).