In Homer's Odyssey: In Book V, the nymph Calypso has kept Odysseus on the island of Ogygia for seven years.  Upon the goddess Athena's persuasion, Zeus sends word by Hermes to Calypso, that she is to free Odysseus so that he might return home to Ithaca.  When Odysseus sets sail, however, his enemy, Poseidon the sea-god, wrecks his ship. The goddess Ino saves Odysseus by giving him a veil which carries him to the island of Phaeacia.

Economics
[Mythology,
The departing traveler]

Nymph
[Vagina,
Exile,
Family,
Israel in bondage]

Calypso—print of The Bath of the Nymph over bed of Blooms

The Recall—Dlugacz

Ithaca—Zion

Images, motifs linking with the "Telemachiad" (episodes 1-3):

• Breakfast, keys, tea, hat, cow, urine, Milly-Bannon-"photo-girl"

Major themes:

• Exile, infertility, the human body.

The Body

Bloom's earthiness, the emphasis on the body, the unpoetic and utilitarian kidney, his practicality and "commonness," pedestrian concerns like breakfast, bathroom, Tit-bits, advertising, monetary reckonings--these all counter to Stephen's "higher" concerns--poetry, learning, etc.

Bloom as body vs. Stephen as spiritual (intellectual?): Bloom as practical, experience-oriented vs. abstract of Stephen. 

Bloom more contented, his world, with its problems, mature, generous (Poor Dignam) where Stephen is bitter to his roommates, restless, in search of (abroad, now at home) (Usurper).

Exile

Exile from Molly: 11 years since normal sexual relations, emptiness inside (despite kidneys); lost son; a sort of psychological exile from himself/also by Molly and her lovers (here as Calypso)

Daniel Schwarz notes that Bloom's thralldom, to parallel that of Odysseus, in Calypso, is based on three perpetual concerns: his personal and racial past, his mortality, and his wife's and daughter's sexuality.

Exile too as wandering Jew, called home in a sense to the East (Zion). 

Fertility

Advertisement serves this theme in its image of growing things in the soil. Garden is dry and scabby in appearance, in need of manure and water. Of vague plans for garden, but garden such trouble . . . irony of making own manure, and making water.  Irony of rubbing dung over prize story, one of Joyce's own earlier unpublished stories.

Obvious with fertility in sexual sense, though not a physical impotence.

We get sympathy for Bloom from his view, seemingly Molly is at fault (Calypso) in her infidelity, but it may be Bloom's own fault, his enslavement to the nymph above her bed, the nymph from Photo Bits, advertising, his own perversion

Exile from Molly-Penelope is exile from fertile sex properly done.

Sin of pork symbolizes sin of not being fruitful and multiplying: "the crime against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition."  Wastes seed on ground, and on Molly's warm bottom, fantasy and perversity.

In symbol of kidney, chooses dead "bad" flesh over healthy live flesh of wife.

In Homer's Odyssey: In Book IX, Odysseus, being entertained and offered a ship by the Phaeacian king, Alcinous, begins to recount his wanderings since leaving Troy, including a visit to the land of the Lotus-Eaters. Driven by storm to this land, Odysseus tells of going ashore for fresh water. Some of his men become friendly with the natives and join them in eating the Lotos, which makes them pleasantly lethargic and unwilling to continue their journey. Odysseus forces them back to the ships and sails on to the country of the Cyclopes..

Botany, Chemistry
[The Seduction of the Faith]

Brown

Eucharist
[Host,
Penis in bath,
Foam, Flower,
Drugs,
Castration,
Oats]

Narcissism
[Dialogue, Soliloquy,
Prayer]

Lotos-Eaters—cabhorses, communicants, soldiers, eunuchs, bather, watchers of cricket

Images, motifs:

• Tea, ha[t], pot, horse, water, Chalice-cup, lemon soap, father-son, flowers, drugs, the East

Major themes:

• Lethargy/paralysis, sexual fantasy/frustration/infertility, the body.

Lethargy/paralysis

The lotus is everywhere in this chapter, in the forms of flowers and narcotics either literal or metaphorical.  Nearly every paragraph depicts the listlessness, apathy, heaviness, drowsiness, paralysis of Dublin--in a sense, all Dubliners are lotus eaters. 

Gelded cabhorses, soldiers in poster "half-baked, hypnotic like," eunuchs, churchgoers, little boy smoking, cricket watchers, Bloom himself.

Eucharist, symbol, most powerful lotos drug here.

Body

From Eucharist, emphasis on body - corpus become corpse in Hades

Bloom much with body - Narcissism - more than usually self-centered interior monologue - distracted levels of thought with McCoy and Lyons - wanting to be alone - wants to avoid McCoy and Lyons - in pool, masturbation possible

Bloom as lotus/body in name Flower (fulfillment of bloom - virag) and in chalice/tub/potted meat / affected by lotus too, in own indolence in killing time, floating on waters of bath, sexual fantasy

Sexual fantasy/frustration/infertility

Letter to Bloom/Flower (pretend) fantasy of soft-core porn with safe stranger/ fantasy with lady in carriage interrupted by McCoy and tram

sexual incapacity: Images of geldings, eunuchs, penis limp as floating flower in bath/ potted meat ad

looks forward to masturbation in bath (mix business with pleasure)

Herring notes that these sexual fantasies, perversions (flagellation in letter), and frustrations resonate throughout much of the text - sense of plot as quest for fertile sex with Molly

These fantasies, perversions, frustrations are mirrored and completed in Nausicaa and Circe, which closes Part II.  In one sense, frustration is relieved in Nausicaa through successful masturbation, though masturbation in itself is a frustration of fertile sexual relations with Molly-Nymph as Calypso (Martha, too)

Close of chapter ties many of the images together for neat closure.

In Homer's Odyssey: Still recounting his adventures to Alcinous, in Book XI Odysseus tells of his descent into Hades, the world of the dead.  Odysseus meets and talks with many "shades," including those of his mother, Elpenor, one of his men who died on Circe's island, and Tiresias, who tells Odysseus of Poseidon's enmity, and of many suitors to Penelope that Odysseus is likely to find upon his return home.  At Elpenor's request, Odysseus leaves Hades for Circe's island to give Elpenor's corpse a proper burial.

Religion
[Descent to Nothing]

White, Black

Caretaker
[Cemetery, Sacred Heart, The Past,
The Unknown Man,
The Unconscious,
Heart trouble, Relics, Heartbreak]

Incubism
[Narration,
Dialogues]

Four Rivers of Hades—the Dodder, the Brand Canal, the Royal Canal, the Liffey

Sisyphus—Martin Cunningham

Cerberus—father Coffey

Hercules, Elpenor—Dignam

Agamemnon, Ajax—Parnell

[ Ulysses, Eriphyle, Orion, Lartes, etc., Prometheus, Tiresias, Proserpina, Telemachus, Antinous]

Daniel Schwarz, in Reading Joyce's Ulysses (New York: St. Martin's, 1987):

• "this chapter explores the bankruptcy of the elegiac and nostalgic mode that dominates Irish life and literature; we shall see much more of this in the next chapter's windy comparisons of Ireland with the lost tribes of Israel.  Among other things, Ulysses is an implicit response to the kind of hyperbolic claims that Irishmen make for the past.  In particular, Joyce had in mind the elegiac poetry that Yeats sometimes wrote--such as "September, 1913" with its refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone/ It's with O'Leary in the grave" (115).

Images, Motifs:

• The East, sleep, hat, body [from corpus to corpse], dog, brown and gray colors, mysterious stranger in the macintosh, the thirteenth man, potted meat, death, decay.

Major themes:

• Living with ghosts, descent and return, exile

Living with Ghosts

Obvious with graveyard; for Ireland in statues; Simon Dedalus, his wife; for Bloom his son, Rudy, and his father

Exile

Incubism - incubus as a sort of evil spirit that lies upon sleeping persons, frequently to rape women by night, or more generally, a person or thing that oppresses or burdens like a nightmare.

As interior monologue, has moved from Narcissistic fascination with self, to oppression/obsession.  We seem to plunge deeper into Bloom than before, plumbing the depths of his emptiness - this chapter adds more serious depth to Bloom than elsewhere, as he struggles to come to terms with death.

Still with loneliness of wandering Jew, an outsider (with McCoy and Kernan, and macintosh) - story of Reuben J. Dodd taken from his mouth by Cunningham, absorbed matter-of-fact claim that quick death best way to go met with shock, Hynes who owes him money doesn't know his first name, snubbed by Menton--not "one of the boys."

More than previously, he is in company of other people, but spiritually he is more alone, especially in his removed perspective in witnessing a Catholic burial ceremony--has not comfort of religion to help face death.

Descent and Return

R. M. Adams notes that this chapter is hardly significant to plot, but rather in its thematic connections with the rest of the novel--its fuller development of Bloom.

Whereas in The Odyssey, descent is kind of a penultimate scene, with emotional intensity and great import to the plot.

For Bloom, this incubus, death, serves as a sort of moral/psychic test he passes.  Taking place within, the gruesomeness of his pondering of corpses crawling with maggots, Bloom's language of interior monologue is key to his incubus.

There is a notable progress of connotation of the word-symbol "heart" in this chapter.