Blown Off Course

Philip Kitcher admits that "Aeolus" took him a while to warm to. The first couple of times through Ulysses he found it thin next to the other episodes. He has since come round, and this film is his case for the chapter. It is one of those places where the Homeric parallel really works: in The Odyssey, Odysseus's crew open the bag of winds when they are quite close to home and are blown years off course, and Joyce's chapter is permeated by squall, windfall, blow, and breath.

The setting is a newspaper office, one of the rare places a novel shows people at work. Kitcher follows Leopold Bloom in to place an advertisement, treated courteously by the printers and rudely by the newsroom and its editor, Myles Crawford. Stephen Dedalus arrives after his father has left, is hailed by the journalists, and leads them off to a pub instead of keeping his appointment with Haines and Mulligan. Kitcher ends with the capitalized headlines that preface each section, reading the last few aloud, and argues that the winds have scattered them into chaotic forms.