Tuesday, 2 December 2014, read to Page 186, Aeolus, Episode 7

We read to "he strode on jerkily", next heading is: "RAISING THE WIND" 
(Gabler 7.994) (Penguin 186)

We pick up the conversation among the characters at the newspaper office. They talk about a speech given by Taylor on the issue of whether the Irish language should be revived or not. Presumably, Taylor's speech was elaborate but spoken without the help of a script and, since there seem to have been no shorthand-typists present when he delivered it, it was never recorded either. For the reader, this raises the question of whether it is likely that McHugh should be able to quote Taylor's speech himself verbatim and on the spot. In Aeolus, a chapter on windy speech and oratory skills, we are made to believe so, at any rate. Incidentally, there is a recording of Joyce reading the Taylor-speech passage (scratchy but intelligible)  made in 1924 and available on Youtube. To listen go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhW0TrzWGmI

Note that, here too, the various characters' speech is intermingled with Stephen's thoughts, often triggered by a word they say. Here's an example ("revealed to me" reminds Stephen of "It was revealed to me" in saint Augustine):

His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?

– And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest
raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their
meaning was revealed to me.

FROM THE FATHERS

It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were
good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine.

- Why will you  jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? (…) (7.834 ff.)

In contrast to the highflying orations and rhetorical tricks he has been listening to, Stephen takes the floor and produces a story of his own, totally unembellished, which he makes up out of the two women he saw earlier on the beach. The "midwives" are now portrayed as two women who've come from the fringes of the city to visit Nelson's Pillar (a high rising monument and symbolic of the British empire) and he gives them names too (Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe). Note that Stephen's paragraph starts with "Dubliners" (right after the heading "DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN" at 7.921). The way he tells his story is indeed not unlike the way Joyce himself wrote Dubliners (seemingly on side issues and out of raw and rough materials he encountered). The language is at its barest, very detailed and with no embellishments.

With "RETURN OF BLOOM" re-enters a character at an unfavourable moment: Bloom tries to catch the editor to talk about his advertisement when the men are already heading out of the office. In other words, he picks the worst possible moment to talk (i.e. an Irishman on his way to the pub) and, besides, he is not a good speaker himself, he is totally flustered, is making little sense and the editor doesn't really care about the ad anyway. Fritz Senn points out the irony here of Joyce making his Ulysses (a figure traditionally associated with great skill and agility in action and in speech) a bad speaker and a fumbler.