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THE KIDNEY!!

Bloom’s precious kidney is saved from imminent ruin.  He shoves the book in his pocket so he can return it to the lending library later and get Molly something new, and he stubs his toe on the chamberpot (which you can see on the floor on page 37).  The narrator describes Bloom digging in in a most poetical fashion, while Bloom recalls something from Milly’s letter that troubles him:  “a young student.”  This is Alec Bannon, whom we hear about briefly in Telemachus (he’s a friend of Buck Mulligan’s, so of course immediately suspect); Mulligan describes getting a card from Bannon where he talks about having met a “photo girl” in Mullingar.

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The narrator takes care of Bloom’s eating while he reads Milly’s letter more closely.

The carefree and girlish style, the slangy and informal teenage-girl-speak (“we did great biz,” “getting on swimming,” “on the pop”) gives us a whole new register, a new voice.  It prompts reflection on the part of her father on how she is getting older, and remembrance of her birth.

But the letter also brings Bloom’s dead son to mind:  Rudy, dead 11 years ago at the age of 11 days.  The midwife who brought Milly into the world also knew Rudy wouldn’t live–another female figure with connections to both life and death.

Milly never appears in person in the novel, and this letter, along with Bloom’s memories of her, are pretty much all we get of her.  It always sort of bothered me that Joyce people talk about Bloom’s father issues, his quest for a son in Stephen Dedalus, etc.:  does having a daughter make a man any less of a father?

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Milly’s letter elicits pity from her father; or perhaps it’s the recollection of Rudy from the previous page–it reminds me too of Bloom thinking about how Molly has lost her Spanish; there was pity there as well.  The letter, resting on the table, brings forth a series of thoughts; Bloom’s home life, especially the female members of his family, evoke complicated emotions, “troubled affection,” as we see here.

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Bloom thinks of Milly’s vanity on the previous page (she is “quite the belle”), which provokes a series of images that begin to blend in with Molly.  He remembers taking his daughter on an excursion around Dublin Bay, possibly prompted by reading of her trip to Lough Owel, and thinking of outings she might now be taking with her beau.  These images merge with her mother’s torn envelope, and the older woman reading in bed (Gifford points out that “softly-braided nymph” is a Homeric epithet for Calypso).  It’s not easy to tell which is a younger version of the woman or an older version of the girl.  And the soundtrack is “Seaside Girls,” an 1899 song by Harry B. Norris: “Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls/All dimples smiles and curls, your head it simply whirls.”  The shimmering colored tiles seem almost like a magic lantern slide show or stained glass; Rob used this technique on page 23 to depict Bloom’s blue-tinged memories and associations emerging from his Judaism and exile, and I think something similar is at work here.  The stream of consciousness blending and merging of young and old, past and future, hold Bloom in regret and anxiety.

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The motif from the previous page continues, but with different artistic choices.  Now Bloom is caught between the girl and the woman, “girl’s sweet light lips” and “full gluey woman’s lips.”  The thought balloons tumble down, moving, spreading like the “flowing qualm” even as Bloom himself can’t move.

Yet then he thinks of moving:  traveling down to Mullingar, possibly to effect some paternal influence, maybe just to check in and keep an eye out, maybe to get away from Molly.  Bloom spends the day in motion, but this is not the only time we will see him paralyzed by his own sense of regret, loss, and ambivalence.

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This page opens the final sequence of Calypso, and two things are worthy of note right off the bat:  this is the last we see of Molly for quite a while (although the “jingle jing” will come up again and again), and Bloom is about to head over to the outhouse for the most (in)famous bowel movement in literary history.  Possibly the only one, actually.  In his 1933 decision determining that Ulysses was not obscene, thus lifting the ban on the novel in the United States, Judge John Woolsey wrote that rather than being “aphrodisiac,” the novel is “undoubtedly…somewhat emetic.”

Bloom gets a copy of Tit-Bits, another cheap penny-weekly, to serve as toilet paper, and the cat runs upstairs to spend the rest of the day in bed with Molly…at least until she is displaced by someone else.

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After a number of rather unsettling instances over the course of the morning, Bloom’s heading out into his garden to go to the outhouse is a moment of repose and reflection.  Not to sound goofy, but it’s a chance for him to commune a bit with nature in the middle of Dublin before he begins his journey.  It’s a lovely summer morning, and he’s hoping to find some satisfaction in taking care of a physical need; remember that Bloom is pretty bodily. (By the way, “the maid was in the garden,” like “the king was in his counting-house” on the next page, comes from the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence/A pocket full of rye.”)

The scarlet runner fills the bottom center of the page, and it is definitely female looking (okay, kind of vaginal); it recalls once more the work of Georgia O’Keeffe, not the desolated desert images of earlier, but the lush and erotic flowers like this one.  Bloom is in a much different place now than he was before breakfast:  his own shit makes him think of the manure that makes the garden grow, and all of the ways dirt, dung, and ash are part of the life cycle.

He does, however, have to address the practical question of where his hat might be; remember it’s got that little piece of paper in it, and he’ll need it in the next episode.

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Bloom’s vision of Milly on the previous page does two things, both of which play out here.  First, she is Hermes, the messenger; there’s an interesting little intersection here between the mythical and the mundane as the allusion to the messenger god becomes an actual delivery of some letters; whether they release Bloom from his Calypso remains to be seen.  Second–and this will be important for the next couple of pages–the idealized vision of the young daughter becomes the difficult reality of a sexually mature and vaguely dissatisfied wife.  Milly becomes a foil for Molly more explicitly in a bit, but for now, Bloom re-enters his own home and is confronted by another male presence (an Odyssean suitor, if you like) invading his doorway.

More about one of the letters and the card shortly:  our focus here is with Bloom’s on the “bold hand.”  This is our first encounter with Blazes Boylan, and you should feel free to read any dirty innuendo into Bloom’s characterization of his penmanship.  Rob’s made an interesting choice here to zoom in on Bloom’s own hand once he’s bent down to retrieve the letters from the first to the second panel:  is Bloom’s hand not bold enough?  The masculine handwriting, coupled with the address to “Mrs Marion Bloom,” immediately raise Bloom’s suspicions.  In the late 19th-early 20th century, referring to a married woman by her own name (Mrs Marion) as opposed to her husband’s (Mrs Leopold Bloom) was just not done.  (Think back to Bloom’s puttering around the kitchen, and our point about how that was a slightly off gender role reversal:  Bloom’s “womanly man” qualities.)

The absence of Bloom’s name on the envelope as master of the house is filled in by Molly’s diminutive “Poldy,” called down from the bedroom.  Is it an endearment?  Is he being summoned, servant-like, to Calypso’s cave?  For me, the arrival of Boylan’s letter, accompanied by the jingling of Molly’s quoits, really marks the beginning of the story here.  What this letter means, the sound of the bed:  these will follow Bloom the rest of the day.

A final point about letters:  we probably don’t write them anywhere near as often as people might have in 1904, but they are an important means of sharing character information and plot movement for Joyce because they were such an important part of everyday life in his time.  People would have received letters at several points throughout the day, and depended on them for communication.  Joyce is also playing with the conventional mystique of the love letter, the epistolary tryst–which I think connects well to Rob’s use of techniques drawn from romance comics here and elsewhere.

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