While remembering a dream he had of being on a “[s]treet of harlots”(39), and thinking of women, Stephen begins to compose a poem that, while perhaps not following the tradition of the Irish writer Bram Stoker, conjures up a vampire. “He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss” (40). Thinking of his own teeth, he wonders if he should use the money he just earned to see a dentist, and the chapter ends, as he looks over his shoulder, to see “a silent ship” (42).
Book II
4. Calypso
The fourth chapter of Ulysses, the first of Book II, begins with a name we have not encountered before: “Mr Leopold Bloom” (45). The three young men in Book I were never referred to as Mr Dedalus, or Mr Haines, so we can infer that this gentleman belongs to the category of Mr Deasy, although the first thing we learn about him is not his occupation but his appetite and taste for food, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” The narration takes us right into his gut, as it were, and this will be true in more ways than one as the chapter develops.
The setting is a kitchen, where he is preparing breakfast, which explains why he may be thinking of food and why the narration gives us a preview of his upcoming trip to the butcher store to buy a pork kidney. But first, he prepares a tray with bread and butter and tea that he takes upstairs to the bedside of a woman we infer is his wife. The theme of breakfast suggests that this chapter has moved back in time to the beginning of the first chapter and its breakfast scene in the Martello Tower.
But Mr. Bloom’s milieu is far more intensely domestic, feeding his cat milk in his kitchen, visiting the butcher shop, picking up the mail from inside his door when he returns, reading it, chatting with his wife, and after breakfast is over, going to the outhouse for his postprandial bowel movement. We are given much greater intimacy here with a literary figure than we have been given in Victorian or even other early modernist novels, suggesting that Joyce was interested in breaking ground not only in the area of style and writing, but also in representation and depiction.
In just one chapter, a rich portrait of Bloom develops. We will not learn that he is Jewish until later, although we receive a veiled hint in an awkward moment in the butcher shop when the Jewish Dlugacz appears to want to talk to Bloom about something and he balks, thinking “No: better not: another time” (49). The mail he picks up when he returns home includes a letter addressed to “Mrs Marion Bloom,” presumably his wife, since he takes it up to the woman in the bedroom. There is also a card and a letter that turns out to be from “Milly.” The Blooms have a 15-year-old daughter, we learn, who celebrated her birthday the day before, and who is living in the town of Mullingar where she is training as a photographer’s apprentice. As Bloom reads her letter thanking him for the birthday gift he sent her, his thoughts reveal an early family tragedy that will recur to haunt him all day.
Remembering the midwife who helped deliver Milly, he thinks “She knew from the first poor little Rudy wouldn’t live. “ The Blooms have lost a son shortly after his birth: “He would be eleven now if he had lived” (54). It will be some time before we figure out how this information relates to the Odyssey, where it is, after all, the son who worries that he has lost his father and not the father who has lost his son. But although the situations of Stephen and Bloom may be reversed, they are reminiscent of Homer as the novel progresses, with Stephen’s Telemachus needing a father, even if he doesn’t search for him actively, and Bloom’s Odysseus needing a son and behaving very much like a father when he finds a surrogate in Stephen that evening.
But the father-son relationship is not the only Odyssean theme introduced in this chapter. There is the letter to “Mrs Marion Bloom”—not “Mrs Leopold Bloom” we should note—that the woman in bed tucks under her pillow after she reads it and does not share with her husband. Bloom is clearly a bit disconcerted by it—“Bold hand. Marion” (52)—and asks her “Who was the letter from?” It turns out that his wife is a singer, and the letter is a note from her impresario making an appointment to bring the program for an upcoming concert tour he has arranged for her. His name is “Boylan,” and we may here be alerted that if Bloom’s wife Molly is the analog of the Homeric Penelope, then this Boylan may be the suitor threatening the husband’s place in his palace and in the life of his wife. And, so, two major themes from the Odyssey—the father and son separation and the wife’s approach by suitors or a suitor—have been introduced in this first chapter of Book II.
5. Lotus Eaters
Most of the Odyssey describes the varied and startling adventures of Odysseus during his 10-year journey home to Ithaca after the ending of the Trojan War. Leopold Bloom’s own odyssey, as it were, is compacted into a single day.
He leaves his home after breakfast and visit to the outhouse, and spends the rest of the day in Dublin, encountering his own varied adventures along the way. It begins innocuously enough in the next chapter, with a stop at the post office, where he picks up a letter addressed, curiously, to a “Henry Flower Esq” (59). He then stops at a church where Mass is being said, drops by the chemist’s to order some lotion for his wife and pick up a bar of soap, before he heads to the Turkish baths. The Homeric parallel gives the chapter the title “Lotus-Eaters” in reference to a visit Odysseus and his men make to an island where the friendly inhabitants offer them lotus-blossoms to eat, which make the men drowsy and forgetful. This chapter focuses on Leopold Bloom’s passivity, his attendance at a religious service Karl Marx might have considered an “opiate,” his visit to a chemist whose fragrant lotions might remind us of the palliative lotus-blossoms, and that mysterious letter to a man named “Flower.”
Why is Bloom getting a letter at a post office, when he has just had mail delivered to his home? The letter turns out to be from a woman named Martha who tries to mimic the pornographic chiding of a brothel Madam who calls him a “naughty boy” and tells him “I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that” (63). If his wife Molly entertains a suitor, Bloom has apparently initiated his own epistolary affair of sorts with a woman he has never met, and to whom he sends stamps and money to encourage provocative missives that appeal to his masochistic fantasies.
These initial signals of infidelity on both parts suggest that there is something wrong with the Bloom marriage, although we begin to learn what it is only in the next chapter, “Hades,” when Bloom is in a carriage with Stephen’s father and another friend to attend a funeral. Hearing Simon Dedalus talk about his son Stephen makes Bloom feel envious and think regretfully about his own lost son, “If little Rudy had lived” (73). But now we learn something quite startling. According to Bloom, little Rudy was conceived when Molly looked out the window one morning and saw two dogs copulating, a sight that sexually aroused her to want to make love with her husband—“Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins” (74). It is not until a later chapter that the final piece of the puzzle falls into place, when Bloom thinks about sex with his wife Molly and admits “Could never like it again after Rudy” (137). He appears to blame a sex act stimulated by animalistic lust for the death of little Rudy, as well as the subsequent impairment of his sex life with Molly. Unlike Odysseus and Penelope, who are separated geographically for a decade, the Blooms are separated emotionally and sexually over the past 11 years—a tragedy rendered triangular by the loss of their son. Looking ahead, this suggests that if Bloom could have a son restored, he might also be able to restore his physical relationship with his wife.
6. Hades
The death of his son is not Bloom’s only loss, as we learn in the chapter titled “Hades,” whose Odyssean analogue is the Homeric hero’s journey into the underworld, where he encounters the souls of the dead.
But before proceeding to “Hades,” we must return to a moment at the end of “Lotus Eaters” that appears utterly insignificant but will turn out to produce a disastrous consequence for Bloom later in the novel. Bloom
runs into a fellow named Bantam Lyons who wants to borrow Bloom’s newspaper so that he can check the horses that are running in the Gold Cup race on this day. Bloom hands him the paper and tells him he can keep it because “I was just going to throw it away” (70). Unbeknownst to Bloom, one of the horses running in that race is named “Throwaway,” and Lyons therefore assumes that Bloom has just given him a veiled tip to bet on a dark horse. Much later in the novel, this will get Bloom into trouble because “Throwaway” will actually win the race, and Bloom will be suspected of having won a huge amount of money and yet not offer to buy drinks for men in a pub, or otherwise share his winnings. It is all a mistake, of course, since Bloom knows nothing about the race or the horse, and never placed a bet. But the silly mistake will nonetheless get him into trouble in a later chapter.
Bloom’s encounter with the dead in “Hades” involves not only his thoughts about his dead son, but also a revelation about his father. In this chapter, Bloom rides in a carriage with two friends on their way to attend the funeral of their drunkard friend Paddy Dignam. Bloom hears his friends contemptuously discussing suicide—“They say a man who does it is a coward” (79)—a conversation that reminds him of the suicide of his father after being widowed. Bloom’s memory is vividly presented in the style of stream of consciousness that lets the narration enter into his thoughts in the same way it let us into Stephen’s in the first three chapters. Bloom remembers the “coroner’s sunlit ears, big and hairy,” and how the officials thought that his father “was asleep first. Then saw like yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed. Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure” (80).
The ride to the cemetery also triggers another uncomfortable moment for Bloom when the men doff their hats to a gentleman on the road—his wife’s concert organizer “Blazes Boylan” (76), who will be visiting Molly that afternoon. We now hear more overt jealousy in Bloom’s thoughts as he wonders: “Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst man in Dublin.” His friends clearly know about Boylan’s work with Bloom’s wife and so ask him how the concert tour is getting on, an uncomfortable subject for him.
The chapter ends with an even more uncomfortable moment when Bloom is snubbed by a man who once danced with his wife before they were married and who wonders, “what did she marry a coon like that for?” (88)—a comment thankfully not heard by Bloom.
7. Aeolus
The next chapter, “Aeolus,” opens with a startling departure not only from the book’s first six chapters, but also from the novel-writing style at that particular time. A series of capitalized titles separate the paragraphs of the chapter. Once we realize that it is set in a newspaper office, we construe these titles to function like newspaper headlines—a kind of imitative form, as we might think of it. Joyce scholar Karen Lawrence notes that “In ‘Aeolus,’ the book begins to advertise its own artifice, and in doing so, it calls attention to the processes of reading and writing” (The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ 58).
The reader’s attention is partly drawn away from the story and the characters and diverted to the style and construction of the chapter. As it happens, the narration of the paragraphs remains relatively normal, and we now see Bloom in his job as an advertising canvasser. He gets paid for getting businesses to buy ads in the newspaper called The Freeman’s Journal, a job that requires him to negotiate with clients and editors about fees and conditions. A number of men gather in the newspaper office on this day, entering and leaving, and discussing a variety of issues, including the merits of writing styles and famous speeches. In the process, they discuss and produce what might colloquially be termed “hot air”—bluster or emotionally or stylistically exaggerated speech.
There is reference here to the chapter’s Homeric title. Aeolus, the keeper of the winds in Greek legend, offers to help Odysseus with his journey by confining violent winds in a bag that Odysseus’s men open, thinking there might be treasure inside, and thereby release them. In the chapter, Bloom inadvertently unleashes something of this sort by annoying the editor Miles Crawford when he tries to negotiate a better deal for his client. “Will you tell him he can kiss my arse,” Crawford tells Bloom, who thinks to himself, “A bit nervy. Look out for squalls” (120).
Stephen Dedalus turns up at the newspaper office with the letter Mr. Deasy asked him to deliver, and himself delivers to the men a story about two middle-aged Dublin spinsters that the narrative glosses as “Dubliners” (119)—the title of Joyce’s own book of short stories. On the level of plot, we see here a curious reversal of estimations of Dubliners by Dubliners—with Stephen honored and respected, while Bloom is ignored and brushed aside. We do not yet see that the slights Bloom receives here may be sparked by anti-Semitism, but we do notice that the wise, witty, and gentle soul he exhibits in his interior monologues is not as respected by his community as we would expect.
8. Lestrygonians
We encounter a similar dynamic in the next chapter, “Lestrygonians,” named after a race of cannibals in the Odyssey. It is lunchtime, and so the chapter is focused on food and hunger, with Bloom worried about a girl he recognizes as Stephen’s skinny sister. “Underfed she looks,” Bloom thinks, speculating that she probably lives on “[p]otatoes and marge,” and may suffer from malnutrition as she gets older: “Undermines the constitution” (125). He also buys cakes to feed some hungry gulls, and listens sympathetically to his friend Josie Breen, whose chipped handbag and dowdy hat betray poverty brought on by a dysfunctional husband.
When Bloom gets his own modest lunch consisting of a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy in Davy Byrnes’s pub, he runs into Nosey Flynn, who will later disparage Bloom for presumably supplementing his income by belonging to the Masons. This chapter mirrors Stephen’s “Proteus” episode with its predominant focus on Bloom’s interior thoughts, and it is here that we get the first full revelation of his affection for and appreciation of his wife. He particularly remembers a highly romantic moment before their marriage, when he and Molly reclined on a bank on Howth Head, a hill north of Dublin overlooking the sea, and shared a kiss. “Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy” (144).
This memory describes a moment of emotional communion, when food signifying love and sharing is exchanged, producing the opposite of the hunger and need that, elsewhere in the chapter, appears to afflict Bloom’s fellow Dubliners.
9. Scylla and Charybdis
The next chapter, “Scylla and Charybdis,” turns sharply away from the previous ones to return to Stephen Dedalus, whom we last encountered in the newspaper office. Stephen is now in the National Library of Ireland, where he engages with four Irish intellectuals and writers on the subject of Shakespeare. We construe that Stephen might have come there initially to ask the writer George Russell to deliver a copy of Mr. Deasy’s letter to the editor of The Irish Homestead, but that he stays to deliver his theories in the hope of impressing the rather distinguished group of gentlemen he finds assembled there.
A startling feature of this chapter is that the names of the literary figures identify them as actual historical personages, rather than imagined characters. Such earlier figures as Mulligan and Haines also have historical prototypes: Joyce’s contemporary, the poet and politician Oliver St. John Gogarty and a fellow named Samuel Chenevix Trench, but they are given fictional names. The rather distinguished figure of George Russell, an Irish writer, editor, and poet who published under the name of AE, is presented in his own name and pseudonym, with his historical attributes intact. This is also true of John Eglinton, the pseudonym of William Kirkpatrick Magee, Richard Irvine Best and Thomas William Lyster, men who also worked as essayists, editors, and translators on the Irish literary scene in 1904.
Joyce’s evocation of these figures treats them respectfully and does not dishonor them, but their presence ad
ds a poignancy to Stephen’s disappointing failure in the most climactic moment of his day, when—by offering a brilliant lecture—he will try to establish himself as a young intellectual worthy of attention and patronage. This failure is foreshadowed by the significance of the episode’s Homeric title, which refers to two extremely dangerous hazards Odysseus must encounter and negotiate in the Odyssey: Scylla, a six-headed monster who consumes men, and Charybdis, a whirling maelstrom that sucks ships into a watery abyss.
Stephen will presumably also be caught between a rock and a hard place, as it were, in this particular social and intellectual adventure. Given that his interlocutors have interest in and commitments to the Irish Revival, a lecture on the British literary hero Shakespeare could prove to be controversial. Stephen deals with this by bringing the iconic figure—a man who named Hamlet after his own son Hamnet—down to earth, showing him walking along the river too preoccupied with his play to feed the swans. This draws an immediate objection from George Russell, who dislikes this “prying into the family life of a great man,” and objects to this “[p]eeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet’s drinking, the poet’s debts. We have King Lear: and it is immortal” (155).
Russell’s position on Shakespeare is at odds with Stephen’s approach, which is why he may decide to leave early. Before Russell goes, the men begin to discuss a soiree to be held that evening at the home of George Moore, an event to which a few bright young men, including Mulligan and Haines, have been invited. Stephen is obliged to sit there and listen to a discussion about an event in which he has clearly not been included, in spite of the erudition and sophistication of his lecture—a moment that makes him feel like Shakespeare’s Cordelia, the slighted daughter of King Lear. Nor has he been asked to submit a poem to a book of “our younger poets’ verses” (158) that George Russell is preparing to publish and for which Stephen may have penned his vampire poem earlier in the day.
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