Episode VII
Aeolus
In the heart of the Hibernian metropolis.
12:00 PM, Freeman's Journal offices. Style: Newspaper headlines.
Summary
A chapter told in newspaper headlines. Bloom tries to place an ad while editors, lawyers, and Stephen swap rhetoric, gossip, and jokes.
- 1
Headlines start
The episode is broken every few paragraphs by mock newspaper headlines that grow more lurid and modern as the chapter goes on.
- 2
Bloom at the ad desk
Bloom is at the Freeman's Journal trying to renew an advertisement for the tea merchant Alexander Keyes. He shuttles between the printing floor and the editor's office.
- 3
The editor's room
Myles Crawford and a cast of Dublin talkers — Professor MacHugh, J. J. O'Molloy, Lenehan, Ned Lambert — perform set-piece speeches and remember famous trials and orations.
- 4
Stephen arrives
Stephen drops in to deliver Deasy's foot-and-mouth letter. The editors are charmed; they offer him drinks and a chance to write for them. He tells them a short, sour parable about two Dublin women on Nelson's Pillar.
- 5
Bloom rebuffed
Bloom comes back for confirmation on his ad. Crawford, half-drunk, half-grand, brushes him off ('he can kiss my arse'). Bloom pockets the insult and keeps walking.
Gabler lines 7.1–1075
How Aeolus unfolds, scene by scene
This is a map, not a recap. Aeolus is the first episode with headlines cutting across it, and the movement to track is not plot but air: trams, presses, gusts of talk, and a story that finally deflates. The map follows Bloom's failed advertisement and Stephen's arrival into the same room.
Trams converge at Nelson's pillar, the presses thump, and Bloom moves through the newspaper offices trying to place an ad.
1. Trams, mailcars, and the headlines begin
lines 1–20A newsreel-style opening sets trams starting and stopping at the centre of Dublin under the first headline.
Why it matters:The episode announces its new technique before any character speaks: the page itself is now a newspaper.
Notice:Everything here circulates and returns — trams, mail, rumour. Nothing in Aeolus arrives anywhere.
2. Bloom in the machine room
lines 21–200Bloom watches the presses and typesetters, thinks of his father reading Hebrew backwards, and chases the Keyes advertisement.
Why it matters:Bloom is the only man in the building doing actual work, and the only one whose work will come to nothing.
Notice:“Sllt.” The machinery gets its own voice; human talk will soon sound just as mechanical.
3. The crossed keys design
lines 200–390Bloom explains the House of Keys design he wants and is sent off to secure a three-month renewal.
Why it matters:The small commercial errand is the episode's actual plot, and it will be blown off course at every turn.
4. Professor MacHugh and the dead languages
5. Dan Dawson and Taylor's speech
6. Bloom telephones and is brushed off
7. Stephen delivers the letter
8. A Pisgah Sight of Palestine
9. Out into the street
The shape underneath
Aeolus runs circulation → inflation → deflation. Headlines chop the page into rhetorical units, and the classical figures of speech Joyce works through are the real subject. The one man with a concrete task leaves empty-handed, the young man with nothing to do is invited to write, and neither knows the other was there. See the Homeric parallel below for how Crawford plays Aeolus.
In modern prose
Midday. Bloom is in the offices of the Freeman's Journal newspaper, trying to chase up a small advert for a client. The chapter is chopped into short scenes, each one slapped with a mock newspaper headline that gets sillier and more inflated as the day goes on — a parody of how journalism flattens and dramatises everything. Editors, journalists, lawyers and hangers-on wander in and out, telling jokes, swapping gossip, performing speeches about Irish patriotism and the great orators of the past. The dominant note is hot air: men who like the sound of their own voices congratulating each other on how well they speak. Bloom moves through this male performance trying to do an honest, small piece of business and is brushed off and slightly patronised. Stephen arrives separately to drop off Deasy's letter about cattle, gets pulled into the bluster, holds his own with a strange little story he invents on the spot. Bloom and Stephen are in the same building, brush past each other, and don't connect. The chapter is essentially about media — the way public language is mostly noise — and about Bloom as a quiet working person trying to get a job done in a room full of people who'd rather be performing.
Context and parallels
The Linati and Gilbert schemas
- Scene
- The Newspaper
- Hour
- 12:00 PM
- Organ
- Lungs
- Art
- Rhetoric
- Colour
- Red
- Symbol
- Editor
- Technic
- Enthymemic
- Correspondence
- Aeolus
Themes: Modernity, Nationalism, Identity.
Project Gutenberg, public domain.
Further reading
Guides, essays and Daily Companion days that go further into Aeolus.
- Beginner's guide to UlyssesWhere to start, and how to keep going.
- How to read UlyssesPractical ways through the book's hardest stretches.
- All 18 episode summariesSee where this episode sits in the whole day.
- Daily Companion, Day 37: Inside the newspaper offices, amid trams and typesettersThe scene shifts to the offices of the Freeman's Journal, busy with trams, typesetters, and errand boys.
- Daily Companion, Day 42: Famous speeches recalled: Dan Dawson and John F. TaylorThe men in the office recite and admire remembered oratory — a florid speech by Dan Dawson gets mocked for its purple prose, while a speech by the real-life lawyer John F.
- Daily Companion, Day 46: Looking back over Aeolus as a wholeAs the chapter closes, its restless energy of headlines, speeches, and puns settles, leaving an impression less of any single event than of a mood: Dublin talking, always talking, wind moving through everything from newsprint to politics to jokes at a bar..
- Who's who in UlyssesLeopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and the cast of Dublin.
- Themes in UlyssesThe ideas that run beneath every episode.
- Dublin locations in UlyssesWhere Freeman's Journal offices sits on Bloom's day.