I’d like to let Josh have the opening comment here: “This one’s a bit of an oddball. We’re going for a Rorschach test look.” This strikes me as particularly apt for a couple of reasons (click here if you need a quick refresher on the Rorschach). We haven’t really seen a mosaic of panels like this before, although a similar effect was used in Telemachus here. The purpose in both cases is to show the connections among objects and memory, and I think in Calypso especially it’s used to great effect to capture Bloom’s free association from memory to memory and object to object: his stream of consciousness. Memory is deeply connected to objects, and they are sensuous, haunted and haunting — mournful, a feeling emphasized I think by the use of the black silhouettes against the gray clouds. And, each memory sparks another memory, conjuring another object and recollected sense experience: all five senses are represented in this series of panels and Bloom’s thoughts. So the objects themselves are not necessarily the focus of Joyce’s text, but Rob’s drawing out of something solid from Bloom’s melting into air is a very evocative choice.

This is where we get some explicit evidence of Bloom’s Jewish background, too, which plays a significant role in his sense of exile and nostalgia here.  The Hebrew letter, the last tile alluding to the holiday of Sukkoth:  these are part of Bloom’s heritage and his deep memory even though he has left it behind.

The haunted and haunting quality of the page gets at Bloom’s nostalgia, a feeling that comes up again and again in his experience of his marriage and family life. Here he is nostalgic for the early days of his life with Molly, when he lived in the Jewish neighborhood of Dublin; he was part of a community that connected him to those origins that are now making him feel so bereft, so much like an exile. With blue as the dominant color scheme, we have moved out of the warm Dublin summer morning and into the chilled darkness of Bloom’s oncoming emotional desolation. Going back to Telemachus again, this is the moment where that solitary cloud floated across the sky, creating an instant of overcast. Same time of day, same cloud, same sky, seen from two different parts of the city and two different perspectives (check out Mike Barsanti on this idea, known as parallax, here).

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The previous page, with its tiles of objects silhouetted against the blue and gray sky and its mournful note of nostalgia, serves as a transition to this page. The cloud that shadowed Stephen in Telemachus (“A cloud began to cover the sun slowly”) is coming to darken Bloom’s world, and his psyche. The familiar Dublin street scene is now overlooking a desert as our hero’s inner landscape becomes more desolate.

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Bloom is alone: gone are his familiar city and the exotic beauty of the East from earlier imaginings. The gray sky has been transformed into a night landscape littered with falling stars, brimstone descending to the empty plain, “a dead land.” The abundant sensuality and teasing possibility of the female has been replaced by the stark skull and flower reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings.  Like O’Keeffe’s work, this image explores the interplay between death and life and how each is embedded within the other:  it’s a vision of a memento mori and of the natural life cycle.  Bloom’s pretty deep understanding of this comes up again and again (in Calypso, it’s a big part of some later pages set in Bloom’s garden).

The Sea of Galilee, imagined by the Zionists of Agendath Netaim as a place of fruition and homecoming, has become a dead sea, vulcanic lake, poisonous waters. Both woman and home, for Bloom on this page, are as desiccated and doomed as Lot’s wife.  In this episode, Bloom’s return will not necessarily resolve these feelings:  there is still more wandering to be done.

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“Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.”

The grey horror engendered by the vision of the stumbling drunk hag — echoing the milkwoman from Telemachus (in fact wearing the same clothes) — seems to be at odds with the searing orange sun in the hot blue sky here, but grey evokes Bloom’s feeling of death and desiccation. (Look at the language of these pages as well as the images, and note the number of times words associated with death, decay, greyness appear.) Grey takes us back to the “gray sweet mother” of Telemachus, but here the mother is an old woman, not a vision of fertility but an empty, dead cunt, an origin we are terrified to return to.

This feels like a shocking, obscene image, but I’d like to recall what D. H. Lawrence believed about using strong, Anglo-Saxon language: there is no substitute for letting language be powerful and grounded in the sensual, the real. The really radical vision of modernist literature, and Joyce in particular, demands that we stop pussyfooting around. Especially about sex and death: this is the culmination of a sequence of images that make a visceral connection between sex, birth, death, and the female, between desire and decay. The flesh of woman bears “the oldest, the first race,” another echo of Bloom’s origins, as is the reference to wandering and captivity, but this makes him feel horror in his own flesh.

Stephen nudges towards this in Telemachus in thinking about his mother and the milkwoman, but he doesn’t have the grounding in the sensual and the earthy — nor does he have the life experience of being a husband and a father — to really grapple with these feelings.

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