Aeolus

Odysseus visits Aeolus and is given a remarkable gift to speed him homeward: a bag in which all the unfavorable winds are trapped. There are a few windbags in the corresponding episode in Ulysses as well.

Wind is everywhere in Joyce's Aeolus: doors blow open, newspaper floats in the air, the characters smoke cigarette after cigarette, and there is even a kite and a modest belch. Wind as a metaphor for communication is ubiquitous, and discussed in the episode are newspapermen, lawyers, oratory and diplomacy.

This is also the episode that delineates one of the key metaphors within the book, the parallel drawn between Greece–Rome and Ireland–England. In each case—from Joyce's point of view—a smaller and more beautiful culture was swallowed up by a larger, vulgar one. Of the Romans:

—What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow, but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehova. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.

Of the British:

I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality?

Note, by the way, that the title of the book is not Odysseus but Ulysses, for Joyce speaks the tongue of the conqueror, the English, and the Roman conqueror's name for the Greek hero was "Ulysses."

Later on the character who voiced those thoughts, Professor MacHugh, declares himself to be loyal to "the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar." In other words, he regrets the fact that Napoleon lost. I had never fully taken in the force of that sentiment before, nor did I really absorb the fact that the monument that is mentioned later in the episode is that of the admiral who won that battle. It was in the heart of Dublin, a statue of a British war hero, and the characters must pass beneath it at the end of the episode. As they walk in its shadow, Stephen relates a cryptic parable in which two elderly and virtuous Irish women save up their pennies and bring a picnic of head cheese, fancy bread and plums to the top of the pillar. Exhausted by the climb, however, they have no strength to look up at Nelson or down at Dublin, and so they just eat their plums and spit the pits over the railing.

In my previous readings I had never quite realized just how bitter and pervasive the anti-British sentiment is in Ulysses.

The monument was blown up by the IRA in 1966.