Ulysses: what a bunch of windbags. Literally. And metaphorically.

The Aeolus episode and rhetorical devices

I’ve reached the “Aeolus” section in Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom visits the newspaper offices in order to place an advertisement for the “House of Keyes.” Or maybe it’s “keys”. Keys are key. Stephen Dedalus was already shown getting out his key. And much later in the book, Leopold Bloom will realize that his house key is in his other trousers, forcing him to break into his own house. The Aeolus section is set up as a sequence of all-caps headlines, with various gossipy and sometimes mean-spirited conversations underneath, signifying …. well, multiple things, I suppose. Basically, they’re all a bunch of wind-bags. The corresponding section in The Odyssey involves a literal bag of contradictory every-which-way winds. Odysseus is told not to open the bag. The sailors on the boat suspect their captain has hidden treasure in the bag, they’re pissed off, and so they open the bag, releasing the winds. The winds toss the boat about, blowing it far from the shore they are attempting to reach. Across the centuries, in a newspaper office, Bloom, too, is battered about by wind - the wind of speech, of text, of words, of language thrown at him to limit him/mock him, the wind of the typesetters clanking - he is sent from this office to that, blown away from his own shore.

This is how I’m putting it together, anyway. I’m not a scholar.

Additionally, just to make it fun: Joyce incorporated almost every rhetorical device known to man into the everyday language of the sequence. He kept going back to this section as he wrote the book, adding in more and more, cramming rhetoric into every nook and cranny. Here is where my lack of education derails me. Okay, I have a Master’s but it’s in acting. Ask me about Gordon Craig or Artaud or commedia dell’arte and I can speak off-the-cuff. But I don’t have an academic or literature background, beyond being a lifelong compulsive reader. I know some rhetorical devices, the ones everyone knows, but certainly not to the level and complexity of rhetoric as laid out by the Greeks. Those Greek dudes had a device for everything. In the “annotated Ulysses,” there’s an entire appendix listing each rhetorical device included in the Aeolus chapter. Check it out.

So I’m reading the chapter, and then referring to the annotations. Yes, it is cumbersome, but it pays off in terms of comprehension and experience. Keeping the index in mind, checking it occasionally, the Aeolus section gets funnier and funnier with almost every line, once you realize what Joyce is doing. What’s on the page sounds like regular dialogue, and it IS regular dialogue (maybe this is part of Joyce’s point? our language is so amazing and flexible and fluid, we’ve incorporated so much into it without even knowing: millennia is in our language). There are prosaic back-and-forths about advertisements and money and logos and gossip … but it’s really just one rhetorical device after another.

Here’s just one example:

THE CROZIER AND THE PEN

—His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely.
They watched the knees, legs, boots, vanish. Neck.

According to my annotated Ulysses, in those three lines, we have examples of: metonymy, asyndeton, and synecdoche.

There are 50 pages of this nonsense. lol It’s so fun.

James Joyce said, “With me, the thought is always simple.”

Important to keep in mind. The form is complex, the thought is simple.

That’s the fun of it. So you read about poor Bloom trying to place the advertisement, all while worrying about his wife’s potential infidelity - about to occur at any moment - and suffering under almost-constant little anti-Semitic jabs - he hasn’t even met “The Citizen” (aka Cyclops) yet - and he’s just trying to get through the day and do his work properly. You feel for the guy. You like the guy. You want him to do well. But you can’t - you mustn’t - stay on the surface. If you stay up there, you miss what Joyce is doing, AND you miss the fun. In a way, it’s the perfect format. If you go into it knowing things are simple (Bloom visits a newspaper office and tries to place an ad for one of his clients), then you’re off the hook. You don’t have to try to understand “what is happening” because NOTHING is happening.

Except for the language. What’s HAPPENING is the language.

Marilyn, by the way, is clearly reading the Penelope episode, which closes out the book. Molly Bloom’s insomniac monologue. She’d have made a hell of a Molly.

I remember coming across on Twitter some woman complaining about how Joyce was “instantly canonized” while Virginia Woolf was ignored. Because sexism. If by “instantly canonized” you mean Ulysses banned and Joyce pilloried as a pornographer, battered by accusations of obscenity, shiploads of the book confiscated at customs houses around the world, (Ulysses publisher Sylvia Beach sent a copy of the book to her sister in America, wrapped it in a sweater, hoping to elude customs), the book not allowed into the United States for over a decade after its actual publication - and even then, only through a groundbreaking court ruling - after years of appeals - and its banned status in libraries, curriculums, and Ireland for decades after that … then I guess your definition of “instant canonization” is different than mine. Using no credible rubric can you say Virginia Woolf was “ignored”. She didn’t suffer in obscurity. Yes, people often didn’t know what her books were about, they often didn’t understand what she was doing with the language, but that was true of all the Modernist writers experimenting with form. Readership for experimental literature like Woolf’s will, of course, be smaller than, say, popular fiction. Retrospect has shown Woolf’s influence on future generations (more people probably have read HER books than, say, Finnegans Wake). Joyce was more “notorious” than “canonized”. My father remembered having to travel across state lines to see Ulysses the movie (starring Milo O’Shea), because cinemas and cinema managers were too cautious to show it. Shades of Last Temptation of Christ. Groups were protesting the film, writing fiery op-eds about the dirty book, threatening boycotts if the movie was shown, and blah blah these people all say the same tiresome shit, and what do you wanna bet they never read the book? This was in 1967! Ulysses was published 45 years before! People were still pissed, people were still determined to keep the dirty book out of people’s hands.

Not every narrative loops into the same narrative. Not all stories are the same. We can discuss the very-real struggles women writers have with being taken seriously - without dragging Joyce into it (not to mention incorrectly characterizing him as instantly accepted - which is how I take “canonized”).

The Oscar-nominated film The Quiet Girl opens this week. Directed by Colm Bairéad, The Quiet Girl (aka An Cailín Ciúin), is an Irish-language film based on a famous short story (“The Foster”) by Claire Keegan. The film is told intimately from a child’s point of view. It’s been a long time since I burst into tears at a film’s final sequence. I was a MESS. The Irish-language aspect of it is a big deal. Back when I was researching my piece on Robert Flaherty for Film Comment, I did a deep dive into Irish language films (Flaherty directed the first Irish-language sound film in 1935). My research came in handy for An Cailín Ciúin. I reviewed the film for Ebert.

In final news:

R.I.P. Walter Mirisch. I agree with Elmore Leonard, whose Get Shorty dedication page reads:

One of the good guys.

— Sheila