The opening sentences of Calypso describe a man
who is much more at home in his body than Stephen Dedalus, and
much less brilliant with language. The first sentence contains
an apparently unintended pun, "ate with relish," and then, as
if to confirm that something is not quite right, the second
paragraph begins with a supremely awkward literalism: "Kidneys
were in his mind." These locutions can be read as instances of
free indirect style, pulling the prose into the mental orbit
of Bloom, much as the narration on the first page of the novel
swung into the orbits first of Mulligan and then of Stephen.
§ The
clownish ineptitude of these stylistic features
notwithstanding, the chapter's opening moves the novel quite
decisively, and skillfully, from Stephen's rarified
intellectual meanderings to Bloom's intestinal hankerings. The
effect of hearing Bloom's list of organ meats is similar to
the transition that Joyce makes at the beginning of part 3 in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "The swift
December dusk had come clownishly after its dull day and, as
he stared through the dull square of the window of the
schoolroom, he felt his belly crave for its food. He hoped
there would be stew for dinner, turnips and carrots and
bruised potatoes and fat mutton pieces to be ladeled out in
thick peppered flourfattened sauce. Stuff it into
you, his belly counseled him."
These sentences derive much of their impact from their
contrast with the ending of part 2. As Stephen kisses a
prostitute for the first time, bodies dissolve into
abstractions: "With a sudden movement she bowed his head and
joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her
movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him.
He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and
mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure
of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as
upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague
speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid
pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or
odour." Amorous lips press upon the brain with an unknown
language, and a wet tongue becomes transmogrified into
something even more vague than "the swoon of sin."
Bloom's narrative takes over from Stephen's in Ulysses
with a catalogue of bodily organs—"thick giblet soup,
nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried
with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes," "grilled
mutton kidneys"—not as a humiliating reminder of
the spirit's enslavement to carnal sin (Stephen's condition in
A Portrait), but as a lusty hymn to carnal appetite.
Joyce's schemas do not assign
an organ to any of the first three chapters, because Stephen
barely resides in his body. Calypso is associated
with an organ: the "kidney."
