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Bloom enters Calypso’s cave.  I like the movement from the long shot in the top panel to the close-ups in the bottom two.  Again, Bloom seems to carry the posture of a supplicant, holding his hat and made small in the door frame; Molly is shrouded still in the “warm yellow twilight.”  Why twilight if it’s morning?

Then, thanks to the close-up, we can have a great deal of drama generated by the eyes, all we see of Molly’s face so far.  I also like how the conversation takes place in two separate panels, in effect creating a distance between the two even in the intimate space of the bedroom.

Note two objects in the room:  the painting over the bed (about which more shortly), and the pillow at Molly’s feet, at the foot of the bed.  That’s Bloom’s, and he sleeps with his head at her feet every night.  What’s that about?

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The gentle servility of Bloom is made even more pronounced by the over-the-shoulder shots; we see Molly’s back, the curves of her body, and Bloom seems tiny and distant.  We’ve talked about how the presence of the narrator has a tendency to dominate Bloom at certain points in the text, especially when Bloom is feeling a bit tiny and dare I say unmanned, and I think that’s what’s happening here.  Take a look at the upper right-hand panel:  no text box, and the words nudge Molly out of the frame.  The arrival of Boylan’s letter makes Bloom insignificant and anxious, leaving lots of room for the narrator to step in and take over the story.  Just as Bloom is losing his grip on his marriage ever so slightly, he’s losing his grip on his own story, too.  He glimpses Molly’s hiding the letter with “his backward eye” (I love that), but we don’t quite see it:  his watching (again, the eyes have it) and the narrator’s description of it takes the place of the depiction of the actual physical movement.

The lower left-hand panel has Molly sharing Milly’s card, a thank you for birthday presents; we’ll see Bloom thinking about his maturing daughter in a few pages, reflections sparked by the events of the morning and the recent anniversary of her birth.  But as we saw earlier in Calypso, there is a little merging of “she”:  “She was reading” and “She got the things.”  The blending of young girl and mature woman, and the ambivalence Bloom feels about these stages of female life and the role he plays in them, will be important a bit later.

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The previous image and this one reveal more of the dynamic between Molly and Leopold, one hinted at in Adeline Glasheen’s points earlier, and highlighted in our commentary thus far about Bloom’s role in his own home:  he gets bossed around.  “Hurry up with that tea.”  “Scald the teapot.”  He is tiny Bloom again in the middle two panels, a diminished image to go along with the diminutive “Poldy,” until we get to the close-up in the penultimate panel:  then we see him “on the boil sure enough.”  The slow movement down the stairs is captured by the arrangement of the panels in a large white space; I think it makes Bloom seem disconnected from his own home, sort of disembodied and floating and alienated, the way we saw him earlier outside the bedroom door on page 8.

It also seems that the dominance of the white highlights the empty space where Bloom’s thoughts should be:  we have the narrator, the exchange about the teapot, and Bloom’s slightly cryptic, slightly aggravated thought balloon hovering near hunched shoulders, but not a whole lot else to indicate what he might be going through.

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Similarly to early in the chapter, when the demanding cat is sort of in dialogue with Bloom’s thinking about the demands of his wife, as he comes back into the kitchen after getting his orders from Molly, he is greeted again by the noisy feline (“Mgnknao!”) demanding a share in his breakfast.  Another quick nod to Bloom’s Judaism:  he thinks he might have a cat who keeps kosher.

I like how Bloom is framed by the black doorway as he returns to the kitchen, almost as though he is returning to his rightful place from Calypso’s cave.

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While Bloom finishes the tea he skims the letter from Milly thanking him for her birthday presents.  Two things leap out:  “young student” and “Blazes Boylan” (“Seaside Girls” refers to a song, about which more in a moment; Lough Owel is a lough just north of Mullingar, where Milly has been sent to work as a photographer’s assistant).  We’ll take a closer look when we see Milly’s entire letter in a few pages, but for now it’s worth pointing out that Milly’s possible suitor and the name of her mother’s paramour push themselves to the forefront of Bloom’s attention.  This is one of the many moments over the next pages where Milly and Molly blend into a composite female image (thanks to the comic, they blend for real, as we shall see).

Milly’s letter also sparks memories of birthdays past.  Bloom remembers the moustachecup she gave him; this is a moustachecup, and it’s just what it sounds like–a cup that lets you drink without ruining your moustache:

Rob has cleverly decorated Bloom’s with one of James Joyce’s own sketches of Bloom himself (it kind of looks like this example).  Notice that Bloom’s memory puts the remembrances of things past in a drawer; this echoes Stephen’s memories of his mother and her belongings from Telemachus.  A point for discussion might be how the visual of the drawer works both literally and figuratively throughout the comic.

This section of Calypso, beginning with Milly’s letter, also has a number of musical allusions.  Thinking of his daughter prompts Bloom to recall popular song lyrics of the time–which as a singer himself Joyce would have been very familiar with–but these allusions also tie into Molly’s career as a singer and the role Boylan plays as her manager and soon-to-be lover.  So, once more, the songs emerge from Bloom’s mind because of fond memories of his daughter, but they will also be tinged with a darker emotion when they are associated with Molly.  This particular song alludes to a piece  by Samuel Lover called “Oh Thady Brady, you are my darlin’,”, but it also echoes a Valentine the young Joyce received from a Protestant girl named Eileen Vance when he was a boy, which began, “O Jimmie Joyce, you are my darling…”.

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Molly is silhouetted here; as in the other images so far, we see her in fragments, eyes, back, shoulders, arms, hands.  Bloom is silent as the narrator has completely taken over.  She is soft, fragrant, sensuous; the image of her hand pouring the tea dominates the page, and recalls the scent of cedar and thyme in Calypso’s cave, an allusion to The Odyssey.  Tucked into the corner is the letter half-concealed under the pillow.  Our eyes can’t help but be drawn to it by the line created by the pouring tea, and even though it is the narrator directing our attention to it, I wonder if Bloom’s eyes can’t help but be drawn to it either.

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Who is Calypso?

Calypso is a nymph who captivated Odysseus on his way home from the Trojan War.  She sought to keep him on her island as her husband, but — as awesome as that might have been — Odysseus decides he can no longer stay away from his wife, Penelope.  Calypso also means “to conceal” in Ancient Greek, something Molly is doing quite a bit of this morning.

But wait, you say:  if you know anything about Ulysses, you know that Molly gets the final chapter and it’s called Penelope (something even Marilyn Monroe knew).  How can Molly be both the temptress Calypso and the faithful wife Penelope to poor Bloom?  Good question.  Feel free to jump into the comments at any point.

Both Calypso and Odysseus are wily, and the image captures this:  there’s a little bit of a standoff here, as Bloom probably knows more than he’s saying, and Molly pretends the letter from Boylan is no big deal.  Bloom takes the opportunity to get closer to the bed, and I love the “In the act of going he stayed”:  in some ways, this captures in a nutshell the problem of Bloom’s cuckoldry and how it drives the plot.  He both goes and stays.  And the way she regards him somewhat coolly, with the drapery of the bedspread showing off the contours of her body, is quite provocative.

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Molly reveals the ostensible purpose of Boylan’s visit: to bring her materials for her upcoming singing tour.  Both of these pieces, “La ci darem la mano” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” are very important for the novel, and they recur throughout the book, especially in snippets of lyrics.  “La ci darem” is a seduction song, a duet between Don Giovanni and the innocent Zerlina, the fiancee of another man; “Love’s Old Sweet Song” is a song from 1884 by J. L. Molloy, nostalgic and sentimental but quite moving.  The two songs counterpoint each other, with one telling the story of a woman caught in a seduction, and the other recalling a poignant love.  Both are necessary pieces of the Blooms’ story.

This counterpoint is captured nicely in the two upper left-hand panels:  Molly is silhouetted darkly smiling as she tells Bloom she’ll be singing “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” while his eyes grow anxious and he thinks of “foul flowerwater,” something sweet that grows stale with time.

The page ends with Bloom poking through her soiled drawers and gray garters (again, kind of echoing the “foul flowerwater,” and a contrast to the violet garters of his vision earlier) to retrieve a book…she has a question.

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As Bloom crawls around on the floor looking for Molly’s book, he thinks of the line from “La ci darem”  “Voglio e non vorrei.”  More accurately, Zerlina’s line is “Vorrei e non vorrei,” or “I would like to and I wouldn’t like to.”  Bloom thinks:  “I want to and I wouldn’t like to.”  And he repeats the “voglio”:  I want.  Given the more than a decade Joyce spent in Italy and his deep familiarity with opera, we can be sure he knew his hero was misquoting:  why change the “I would like” to “I want”?

This page is the first in a sequence that depicts a conversation between Bloom and Molly about metempsychosis:  according to Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated, “The mystical doctrine that the soul after death is reborn in another body.”  A few things to note about this.  First of all, as we saw perhaps more prevalently in Telemachus and will see again, death is very much a part of Ulysses: our main characters are all in some state of suspended or thwarted mourning.  Bloom is heading out to a funeral, but even more important is the loss of his infant son Rudy at the age of 11 days, 11 years before the action of the novel.  Second, Joyce is interested generally in things and people taking more than one form; another way of putting it might be the line from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927):  “Nothing is just one thing.”  Finally, Molly isn’t exactly a simpleton, but she doesn’t always approach things from the deepest or most intellectual place.  She kind of depends on Bloom for that, and regards him as something of a thinker.  That’s why she asks him to help her figure out this word.

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The juxtaposition between the complicated and ancient theory of metempsychosis and the trashy novel Molly has been reading is classic Joyce; he loves to play around with the contrast between highfalutin ideas and the flotsam and jetsam of popular culture.  Bloom smiling at Molly’s “mocking eye” is Joyce’s way of having his main character get that joke; it’s also a moment of affection and a prompt for another memory that doesn’t quite get filled in:  Dolphin’s Barn is an area just outside Dublin where Molly was living with her father “Major” Tweedy when she first met Bloom (and, incidentally, where Dublin’s official Jewish cemetery is located).  (Memories of Molly’s first encounter with Boylan, at a dance, show up later, too.)

Bloom takes the trashy novel, and its illustration fills the center of the page.  Ruby: The Pride of the Ring is Joyce’s reworking of an actual book title, Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl (1889); the novel was about the harsh servitude of circus life and, as Gifford points out, was meant to spark reform.  The illustration depicts an actual scene in the novel, where a circus master works the victimized Ruby to death.  In Joyce’s hands, the reform impulse is turned into something more salacious, and the image looks a little like rape (perhaps echoing the duet between Don Giovanni and Zerlina, too).  Bloom thinks about the circus as he regards the illustration, while also trying to figure out a way to define metempsychosis for Molly.

Incidentally, and probably not surprisingly, the word “metempsychosis” does not appear anywhere in the real Ruby.

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