Notes on "Aeolus"

Homeric parallel:

-- Winds blowing against Bloom

-- Empty verbiage

In the Odyssey, King Aeolus's bag of winds, once opened, keeps
Odysseus from making it home seven or eight years earlier. Likewise,
Bloom almost meets Stephen, and he is meanwhile thwarted in his
efforts to sell an ad.

E.g., see Bloom's difficulties with Crawford (who would be King
Aeolos) -- pp. 120-121.


Art: Rhetoric

Rhetoric = wind, i.e., ineffectual talk, hot air. (Is Stephen an
exception?)

Three rhetorical set piece sin the chapter:

1. Dan Dawson (102-104)

2. Seymour Bushe (114-115)

3. John F. Taylor (116-118)

Plus: Stephen's "Parable of the Plums, or, A Pisgah Sight of
Palestine" (119-123)

Relevant themes:

Nelson = Imperial Britain

The Church

Phallic imagery

Moses and the Promised Land (Charles Stuart Parnell)

Seeds (ambiguous)

Note that MacHugh understands the parable as being self-embittered, an
assessment similar to Deasy's assessment of Stephen as unhappy.


Technic: enthymemic

The style of the chapter:

Newspaper Headlines

Tame, detached ------> Increasingly strange, and editorializing


The hand of what Kenner calls "the Arranger" is first evident here,
and it will be recongnizable later in outburst of journalistic
bombast.