Calypso Essay

James Joyce’s Calypso

Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they go through an ordinary day. Written by James Joyce, the modernist novel is broken down into eighteen episodes. Joyce wrote to a friend about his project, saying that it was “based on the wanderings of Ulysses. The Odyssey serves me as a ground plan. Only my time is recent and all my hero’s wanders take no more than eighteen hours” (Levitt, 1972, p.133). In this essay I will focus on the fourth episode, Calypso, where Leopold Bloom begins his day and prepares the reader for what the day will hold, the episodes connection to Homer’s Odyssey and the episode as a piece of modern writing.

A hero, Leopold Bloom, ventures froth from the world on a common day and

The Odyssey is the very web of Ulysses and the key to understanding the characterization and plot of the novel (Levitt, 1972, p.137). Joyce was interested in the character of Odysseus or Ulysses, in Roman, from adolescence (Levitt, 1972, p.133). “The characterization of Leopold Bloom is a legitimate development of the Homeric Odysseus”(Standford, 1953,p.125). Other characters have their parallel beings in the Odyssey as well, like Molly Bloom being based on Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Joyce’s episode Calypso is influenced by the fifth book in the Odyssey where Kalypso is told that she must let Odysseus leaver her island, though when he leaves, he is stuck in a storm made by Poseidon which forces him to swim ashore. When Bloom was looking at Molly lounging in bed, he compared her to a goddess, like the painting above the bed. This could be a connection to Kalypso and her beauty. Kalypso was actually a nymph and could have been featured in the painting above their bed. Also, Bloom is in an emotional storm dealing with his wife having an affair. Like the storm Poseidon troubled Odysseus with, Bloom can not escape or do anything about this storm. Bloom is half Jewish and this characteristic is emphasized in the episode as he thinks about the struggles of his people. By making him half Jewish, Joyce has made a connection to the wandering figure

Joyce is known as the “father of high modernism” because of his bewildering, experimental, obscure writing (Shiach, 2007, p.99). Ulysses is considered to be such an amazing novel because “it was soulless, because its disjunction of character, incident, and form”(Williams, 1992, p.132). In Ulysses, the quest is more important than the goal, and Joyce described the quest with a vast array of styles that the reader has to focus on the techniques he uses and not just the plot. The first challenge the reader is faced with Calypso is the opening, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls (Joyce, 2000, p.65). A simple sentence, though a introduction to a new and central character four episodes into the novel. “The first three chapters traced Stephen’s day from eight until noon, while with the fourth chapter, abruptly leaps back four hours to being the day of the novel’s over central protagonist” (Shiach, 2007,p.105). Joyce’s writing changes in this episode because it is filtered through or focused on a new character, different from Stephen. Calypso offers a new character with a new consciousness. Ulysses is know to offer unique and generous access to its protagonists, whether it be in the outhouse or through their stream of consciousness. “Such intimacies are balanced in a narrative style which moves fluidly between the more conventional omniscient