When Calypso has received her
orders from Hermes and told Odysseus that he may leave,
she cannot let go of the feeling that she must be more
attractive than Penelope. And Odysseus, ever the tactful
tactician, agrees:
"And anyway, I know my body is
better than hers is. I am taller too.
Mortals can never rival the immortals
in beauty."
So Odysseus, with tact,
said "Do not be enraged at me, great goddess.
You are quite right. I know my modest wife
Penelope could never match your beauty.
She is a human; you are deathless, ageless.
But even so, I want to go back home,
and every day I hope that day will come."
All of this exchange is implicit, though mostly unvoiced, in
Bloom's single thought that the nymph on his bedroom wall is "slimmer"
than Molly. The objective picture he gets of a woman
approaching middle age (as opposed to his many ardent memories
of her when she was younger) do not inspire lustful worship:
"He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft
bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder."
He thinks in Circe that "She put on nine
pounds after weaning." In Penelope Molly
too thinks that she has gotten a bit heavy: "my belly is a bit
too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner." And she
too thinks that the nymph may outdo her a little: "would
I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only
shes younger."
Representations of beautiful Greek goddesses are, of course,
efforts to stop time, arresting the physical blossoming of
female loveliness at its young-adult peak before bellies and
haunches swell and breasts sag. But Bloom thinks of them also
as aspiring to transcend the limitations of the body
altogether. In Lestrygonians he balances his gloomy
thoughts about food with a fantasy of eating incorporeally:
"Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world
admires. . . . Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden
dishes, all ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled
mutton, carrots and turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar
imagine it drinking electricity: gods' food. Lovely forms of
woman sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we
stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood,
dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an
engine."
In Circe this longing for "Immortal lovely" bodies
is answered when "Out of her oakframe a nymph with
hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown artcolours, descends" and speaks to Bloom. The
Nymph acknowledges his adoration: "You bore me away, framed me
in oak and tinsel, set me above your marriage couch. Unseen,
one summer eve, you kissed me in four places. And with loving
pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame." Bloom
reaffirms his longing: "Your classic curves, beautiful
immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of
beauty, almost to pray." But she soon makes clear that human
sexuality is abhorrent to her, even while she invites his
gaze: "(Loftily.) We immortals, as you saw
today, have not such a place
and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We
eat electric light. (She arches her body in
lascivious crispation, placing her forefinger in her mouth.)"
In reply, Bloom rejects her purported purity as simply
pre-sexual posturing: "If there were only ethereal where would
you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an
ass pissing."
Joyce's novel thus completes a circuit from physical desire
to spiritual aspiration and back to physical desire. The
effect is similar to that achieved in Shakespeare's famous
sonnet 130, which plays on Petrarchan literary similes rather
than Hellenic visual arts. The temporal element in Joyce's
investigation of sexual desire also evokes Homer's poem, since
nearly two decades have passed since Odysseus last saw his
wife. When he says that Penelope's beauty would pale before
Calypso's, he surely must be wondering how much it has
declined in his absence.
