In the “Aeolus” chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus attempts to express to Professor MacHugh that he has “a lot, much to learn” about Dublin, but that he also has a “vision” (Joyce 119). Whether his vision relates to the city or his artistic aspirations is unclear and also unimportant. Rather, the interruptions caused by the garish newsboys and the distracting errands that Stephen's group goes on are central in their significance to Joyce's conception of the epic form, his fascination with mass media, and the influence of factors external comments on an artist's product. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayJoyce struggles to forge a new role for Odysseus in the literary pantheon of great epics and novels while trying to overtake and confuse historical standards of greatness. In “Aeolus,” Joyce encounters problems defining his work in the context of an epic legacy. Furthermore, it plays with the scope of its ambition and attempts to straddle the multiple meanings of “novel” and “epic.” Joyce's decision to construct "Aeolus" to resemble an assortment of newspaper clippings, with titles followed by concise blurbs, allows the author to examine the position of Ulysses within a canon of evolving epics and the role of the novel as a reader-created medium narrative. The evidence for Joyce's historical homage, his acknowledgment of Ulysses' past and future stimuli, is less pervasive in this chapter – his reliance on intertextuality is limited to primarily Irish sources. However, the predecessors of Joyce's modern epic are still present in the work, although mostly as distorted reincarnations. The characters in "Aeolus" - especially William Brayden, the Christ look-alike, Myles Crawford, "Mr. Editor", and even Bloom, the exponent of the "gentle art of advertising" - are still paragons of the humanity, but they represent the very embodiment of imperfect art. human rather than the divine superman (Joyce 111). Patrick McGee identifies an even more subtle distinction between the figure of the ambassador of the Homeric epics and the simple examples of Joyce: "the social stability of the patriarchal subject in Homer is undermined by the incommensurability of the modern, decentered subject, who has no no connection with the whole. " (McGee 194). None of these characters is assured of a triumphant ending; Bloom's ad for Keyes is rejected, Brayden runs up the stairs and disappears, Crawford is flippant, bombastic, and thrifty. Perhaps the he failure of traditional heroism is due to the fact that, Michael Gillespie points out, most of the characters cannot naturally direct the narrative and are swallowed up by the city, arguably the true epic force of Ulysses Stephen, telling his Parable. plums to the distracted Crawford, Lenehan and Burke, "must struggle to make his ideas heard and gain some recognition of their value from others. He spends much of the rest of the day striving to gain the respect of his peers." fellow citizens of Dublin, and he must also make the rest of the novel compete for the reader's attention” (Gillespie 161), Joyce wants the reader to sift through the myriad perspectives presented in “Aeolus,”. none of which “reaches a position that allows coherent and logical meaning to be derived from the various elements of the discourse and that no discrete creative model proves sufficient to encompass all the vagaries of the work” (Gillespie 155). This is not an epic with a social agendaother than that of identifying the larger-than-life but mundane details of normal people's lives or the slight absurdity of such a colloquial expression as "the bard befriending the bull" under the title "the greatness that 'was Rome.' (Joyce 108-9). The relatively unexciting vignettes of “Aeolus” are thought-provoking only because of their placement within a self-described “epic” and because Joyce allows readers freedom of interpretation. We do with Ulysses what we want; the lack of a driving force leaves the chapter “drawing the reader into a deeper engagement with the creative process involved in producing a text” (Gillespie 154). Unlike traditional epics, which feature distinct, inaccessible heroes of the Gilgamesh or Beowulf variety. , Joyce avoids spotting a central vortex in Ulysses, eschewing strange events or flamboyant characters in favor of a more accessible and applicable text: each person's self-constructed epic. “In striving toward the universal,” writes Gillespie, “Joyce felt the attraction of a narrative strategy that would transcend the limits of individual consciousness while retaining the personal point of view...No reader can ignore the range of smells and hope to form a coherent text” (Gillespie 172) This is not to say that Joyce’s characters do not aim for the same greatness as Ulysses – MacHugh is obsessed with Kyrie Eleison and the “inspiration of genius” d). 'Ignatius Gallaher is a favorite topic of conversation (Joyce 110) But for Michael Seidel, Ulysses is remarkable as an epic on a more human level: "Joyce may reposition the Odyssey in Dublin, but its hero is not." a king, does not have the help of a goddess and is not mythically endowed in Odysseus is more a hope than a promise” (Seidel 84). to go beyond predefined historical criteria of literary superiority, completeness, and peer-judged value and efforts to completely break free from history and create something entirely new. The comparison, rooted in journalism, suggests Aeolus's interest in everyday reinvention and Joyce's desire to write the common man's bible. Bold titles, Gillespie argues, circumvent a sense of lineage common in most epics and instead force each reader to consider the chapter differently from the next reader: "This very process of reading affirms an implicit contract between the artist, the audience and the artifact, recognizing an intellectual engagement with the work and a stated belief in the possibility of forming a text encompassing the vagaries of the evolving paradigm” (Gillespie 179). The mixed journalistic and literary styles of “Aeolus” also promote Joyce’s hybrid notion of the “epic.” The simultaneous appeal of journalistic writing—Ulysses as tireless reporter of objective humanity and history—and the creative license of journalism results in an amalgamation of styles evident in “Aeolus.” Although the actions of several characters are meticulously traced in the journalist's brusque prose, the presence of censorship, editing and literary consciousness is also visible through the metaphor ("a smile of light"), the parable (the 11 brothers of Jacob), the intention, etc. (Joyce 110, 101). At one point, an unidentified editor/narrator comments on John F. Taylor's speech, visualizing it, anticipating it: "His listeners held their cigarettes ready to hear, their fumes rising in frail stems that flowered with his speech ...Noble words to come. Attention. Could you try it yourself? » (Joyce 117). But Joyce's justifications for conceiving an epic in the first place remain mysterious: did he strive, 1976.