Calypso
“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”
Leopold Bloom arrives. He cooks a kidney for breakfast, feeds the cat, brings Molly her post — including a letter from Blazes Boylan — and quietly senses what's coming.
- Beat 01Bloom in the kitchen
We meet Leopold Bloom — 38, advertising canvasser, husband of Molly — making breakfast and talking to the cat with surprising tenderness.
- Beat 02Out for a kidney
He walks to Dlugacz's butcher shop for a pork kidney, daydreaming about an oriental land in the morning sun and noticing a neighbour's daughter ahead of him on the pavement.
- Beat 03The morning post
Back home, he brings Molly her letters in bed. One is from their daughter Milly in Mullingar; one is from Blazes Boylan, the man who will visit Molly that afternoon. Bloom sees the handwriting and says nothing.
- Beat 04Word for the day
Molly asks him what 'metempsychosis' means; he answers as best he can. The kidney burns on the stove. He rescues it, eats, reads Milly's letter again.
- Beat 05Outhouse and bell
He takes a magazine to the privy in the garden, reads a prize story, and hears the bell of nearby George's Church toll for Dignam's funeral, which he must attend at eleven.
Back to eight in the morning, but in a different house and a different head. This is where we meet Leopold Bloom: thirty-eight, Jewish by background, baptised Protestant and then Catholic for love, working as an ad salesman, living at 7 Eccles Street with his wife Molly. He's in the kitchen making her breakfast. He likes the inner organs of animals; he fries a pork kidney, feeds the cat in a small considered conversation, walks round the corner to the butcher's, daydreams about the swing of a servant girl's hips, walks home. Upstairs Molly is still in bed. He brings up her tea and her post, and among the letters is one from Blazes Boylan — her concert manager, and the man Bloom already quietly knows is going to come round at four o'clock that afternoon and sleep with her. He doesn't confront it. He goes back downstairs, reads a chatty letter from their teenage daughter Milly who's working away from home, eats his kidney (slightly burnt), and takes the newspaper to the outhouse to empty his bowels. The chapter is doing something quietly radical: after three chapters inside the head of a brooding young intellectual, it drops us into a middle-aged man who is decent, curious, a bit lonely, attentive to small kindnesses, and carrying a private hurt he refuses to make anyone else carry. We are meant to like him immediately, and we do.
- Scene
- The House
- Hour
- 8:00 AM
- Organ
- Kidney
- Art
- Economics
- Color
- Orange
- Symbol
- Nymph
- Technic
- Narrative (mature)
- Correspondence
- Calypso