Episode 7 — Aeolus

Noon. Both narrative lines converge for the first time at the offices of the Freeman's Journal on Prince's Street North, near the General Post Office. Bloom is there on advertising business — a tea merchant named Alexander Keyes wants to renew his ad with a particular crossed-keys design, which Bloom has to confirm with the editor. Stephen is there to drop off Mr. Deasy's letter on foot-and-mouth disease, hoping the paper will print it. They are in the same building for nearly an hour. They do not meet.

What the reader experiences is the form coming apart for the first time. The chapter is interrupted by parodic newspaper headlines — printed in capitals across the page — that mock the events of the prose beneath them. "IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS." "A DAYFATHER." "SHORT BUT TO THE POINT." The headlines start as nineteenth-century broadsheet style and drift into modernist parody as the chapter progresses. Joyce is showing what kind of consciousness produces a newspaper.

In the editor's room a group of journalists and hangers-on declaim. The lawyer J.J. O'Molloy, broke and decaying, recites a famous courtroom speech of Seymour Bushe's, and for a moment is the man he used to be. Professor MacHugh follows with John F. Taylor's 1901 speech comparing Ireland to Israel. Stephen tells his own small parable: two elderly Dublin spinsters climb to the top of Nelson's Pillar with a paper bag of plums, look out at Dublin, and spit the plumstones over the railing. He calls it "A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, or the Parable of the Plums." The journalists laugh, not quite sure why. Bloom, downstairs, has been brushed off. The chapter's correspondence is to Aeolus — the god of winds.