Ulysses

Bloom visits the Freeman's Journal newspaper office to place an advertisement, and the chapter becomes a satirical examination of rhetoric, journalism, and the hot air of public life. Joyce structures it like a newspaper: each section is headed by a bold-type headline that often contradicts or ironizes the prose beneath it. The headlines interrupt the flow, editorializing, reducing, and sensationalizing events in real time. The newspaper office is all motion and noise: editors, journalists, compositors, delivery boys, the machinery of the press. Bloom navigates it trying to close his ad deal while various Dublin literary and political figures hold forth with oratorical set pieces. The chapter is named Aeolus — god of winds — because most of what gets said here is wind: eloquent, impressive, empty. Professor MacHugh delivers a celebrated speech about the Greeks versus the Romans, arguing that the Romans built roads and aqueducts while the Greeks gave the world its mind — and Ireland has been sentenced to Roman servitude. It is a beautiful speech. It changes nothing. Stephen arrives with Mr. Deasy's letter about foot-and-mouth disease. He is asked to tell a story and tells a parable — the two Dublin women who climbed Nelson's Pillar to look at the view, ate their plums, and spat the stones out over Dublin. It means something and nothing simultaneously, which is precisely Stephen's artistic condition at this point in his life. Bloom gets his ad placed, but only partially. He is talked over, shuffled around, ultimately unsuccessful. The chapter ends with the group walking out into the ordinary street, and the gap between the grandeur of the rhetoric inside and the city outside is the joke Joyce has been building to all along.