Aeolus

The Rhetorics of Fiction and Politics in the Aeolus Episode of Ulysses

"They had heard, or had heard said, or had heard said written" Finnegans Wake 369:16

As everyone has remarked, the business of this episode is rhetoric. But in a fairly obvious sense the business of all the episodes is rhetoric: how to find a style that best communicates the thoughts of a half-educated man as he goes about his business in a provincial capital of the British Empire in 1904; the thoughts of his uneducated wife mulling over her past and present without melancholy in the middle of the night; the musings of an overeducated young man walking alone with his thoughts on a beach; the conversation of a group of intellectuals discussing literary history; the talk of another group of educated men discussing and practicing rhetoric as here in this episode. 1

How do you convey the rather chaotic reality of a group conversation in a place of business with its many interruptions without at the same time presenting the reader with chaos? How do you make the report an artistic daedalian construct that displays the individual parts without seeming like a collection of disjecta membra? It is the question that Stephen Dedalus tried to grapple with on the beach in "Proteus": how to turn the protean flux of life into an artistic "thing".

1

In James Joyce's Ulysses (194-8) Stuart Gilbert has four pages of rhetorical forms used in this episode. An appendix doing much the same can be found in Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated (2nd ed., Berkeley: U of California Press, 1988), p.635 ff.

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Thomond Gate