Three chapters of Stephen. Three chapters of Bloom. In chapter seven, "Aeolus," the two finally intersect (albeit briefly) in a newspaper office located at the epicenter of Dublin proper. However, this much-anticipated meeting is anything but climactic, with each protagonist barely acknowledging the presence of the other. The chapter is titled for the God the Winds who had bagged up and given to Odysseus all of the winds save the one that would return Odysseus home to Ithaca. However, as their captain slept, Odysseus's curious men opened the bag of winds, thus preventing a safe and timely return home. Throughout this episode, note the "wind" being blown around the newspaper office, both in terms of the bloviating (thank you Bill O'Reilly) on the part of the newsmen as well as in the 63 newspaper headlines that punctuate the chapter. It might be worth noting at this point that in addition to parallels to Homer, each chapter also contains a correspondence to a particular body part: "Calypso" is the kidney, "Lotus-Eaters" is genitals, "Hades" is the heart, and "Aeolus," of course, is the lungs. (Significantly, as he is so out of touch with his body, Stephen's three chapters have no bodily correspondences.) Finally, recall that Joyce once famously said that a writer "should never write about the extraordinary. That is for the journalist." Thus, the novel as a whole becomes a campaign against writing that distorts the ability to accurately perceive the world. Hence, "factual" newspaper reporting proves less than ideal in portraying the truths about life, since (1) fact-based newspaper accounts fail to accurately capture human experience (which we'll witness first-hand when we read the woefully inaccurate and incomplete newspaper account of Dignam's funeral near the end of the book) and (2) the news deals with the extraordinary, not the ordinary.
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