In the "Aeolus" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus tries to express to Professor MacHugh that he has "much, much to learn" about Dublin, but who also has a “vision” (Joyce 119). Whether his vision concerns the city or his artistic aspirations is not clear but not important either. Rather, the interruptions caused by the screaming newsboys and the distracting errands Stephen's group is running are central in their significance to Joyce's conception of the epic form, his fascination with mass media, and the influence of external factors on the product of an artist. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Joyce struggles to forge a new role for Odysseus in the literary pantheon of great epics and romances as he seeks to surpass and confound historical standards of greatness. In “Aeolus,” Joyce encounters problems in defining his work in the context of the epic legacy. Furthermore, it plays with the expansion of its ambitions and tries to overcome the multiple meanings of "novel" and "epic". Joyce's decision to construct "Aeolus" to resemble an assortment of newspaper clippings, with headlines followed by short blurbs, allows the author to examine Odysseus's position in an ever-changing canon of epic poems and the role of the novel as a story created by average readers. The evidence of Joyce's historical homage, his recognition of Ulysses's previous and future stimuli, is less pervasive in this chapter: his recourse to intertextuality is limited mostly to Irish sources. However, the predecessors of Joyce's modern epic are still present in the work, albeit mostly in the form of distorted reincarnations. The characters of "Aeolus" - especially William Brayden, the Christ impersonator, Myles Crawford "Mr. Editor" and even Bloom, the representative of the "gentle art of advertising" - are still examples of humanity, but they represent the epitome of 'imperfect 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 epic and Joyce's simple examples: "the social stability of the patriarchal subject in Homer is undermined by the incommensurability of the modern, decentred subject, which has no relation to the whole” (McGee 194). None of these figures are guaranteed a triumphant ending; Bloom's ad for Keyes is rejected, Brayden goes up the stairs and disappears, Crawford is irreverent, bombastic and stingy. Perhaps the failure to perform traditional heroism occurs because, Michael Gillespie points out, most characters cannot naturally dominate the focus of the narrative and are swallowed up by the city, arguably the true epic force of Ulysses. Stephen, telling his Parable of the Plums to the distracted Crawford, Lenehan and Burke, "must struggle to make his ideas heard and to obtain from others some recognition of their value. He spends much of the rest of the day trying to earn their esteem." . of his fellow Dubliners, and must also spend the rest of the novel competing for the reader's attention" (Gillespie 161). Meanwhile, Joyce intends for the reader to examine the myriad of perspectives presented in "Aeolus," none of which " reaches a position that allows coherent and logical meaning to be derived from the different 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 an agenda social other than that of identifying the larger-than-life but mundane details of normal people's lives or the slight absurdity of a sentencecolloquial as "bard who befriends oxen" under the title "the Grandeur that was Rome" (Joyce 108-9). The relatively unexciting vignettes of "Aeolus" are thought-provoking only because they are placed in a self-proclaimed "epic" and because Joyce offers readers freedom of interpretation. Let us do with Ulysses what we want; the absence 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, unattainable heroes of the Gilgamesh or Beowulf variety. , Joyce avoids identifying a central vortex in Ulysses, eschewing whimsical events or whimsical characters in favor of a more accessible and applicable text: the common man. self-made epic. “In striving for the universal,” writes Gillespie, “Joyce felt the attraction of a narrative strategy that transcended the limits of individual consciousness while maintaining the personal vision… 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 strive for the same greatness as Odysseus: MacHugh is obsessed with the kyrie eleison, and Ignatius Gallaher's "inspiration of genius" is a favorite topic of conversation (Joyce 110). But for Michael Seidel, Ulysses is notable as an epic on a more human level: "Joyce may relocate the Odyssey to Dublin, but his hero is not a king, has no assistance from a goddess, and is not mythically gifted . Epic resolution in Ulysses is more a hope than a promise" (Seidel 84). So the text seems to oscillate between attempts to overcome history's preset criteria of literary superiority, completeness, and peer-judged value and efforts to free itself from history altogether and create something entirely new. The rooted journalistic comparison suggests "Aeolus'" interest in everyday reinvention and Joyce's desire to write the common man's bible. Bold titles, Gillespie argues, bypass a sense of lineage common in most epics and instead require each reader to consider the chapter differently than the next reader: "This very process of reading affirms an implicit contract between artist, public and artifact, recognizing an intellectual engagement with the work and affirming faith in the possibility of forming a text that understands 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 attraction of journalistic writing – Ulysses as a tireless recorder of humanity and objective history – and the creative license of journalism result in the amalgam of styles evident in “Aeolus.” Although the actions of several characters are meticulously traced in the reporter's blunt prose, the presence of censorship, editing, and literary awareness are also visible through metaphor ("a smile of light"), parable (Jacob's 11 brothers), l intent, etc. (Joyce 110, 101). At one point, an unidentified editor/narrator comments on John F. Taylor's speech, visualizes it, anticipates it: "His listeners held their cigarettes ready to listen, their smoke ascending in fragile stems that bloomed with his speech ... Noble words coming .Careful. Could you try it yourself?” (Joyce 117). But Joyce's justifications for conceiving an epic in the first place remain mysterious: does he strive to reserve a place in the overwhelming mass of the great literature of the past, "skilfully sliding his words into the pauses of clangor" (Joyce 99) )? Or does he want to abandon the example and “paralyze Europe” with a shock of originality (Joyce 111)? It turns out that Joyce wants them, 1976.