The Aeolus Episode in Ulysses and the Freeman’s Journal: Chief Baron Palles and the law of defamation
Bloomsday 2022 is a good day to note the imminent publication the following (from the introduction and conclusion; footnotes mostly omitted):
…The Aeolus Episode in Ulysses and the Freeman’s Journal: Chief Baron Palles and the law of defamation
Christopher Palles is one of the many real Dubliners in Joyce’s Ulysses. The title refers to the Roman name of a Greek hero, Odysseus; and the novel roughly corresponds to various episodes in Homer’s Odyssey, telling the story of Dublin through the wanderings of Leopold Bloom (Homer’s Odysseus) on 16 June 1904. In the Odyssey, Aeolus, the warden of the winds, seeks to help Odysseus. In the Aeolus episode in Ulysses, Bloom visits his workplace, the Freeman’s Journal, and almost crosses paths with Stephen Dedalus (Homer’s Telemachus, the other great protagonist in Ulysses).
In the Aeolus episode, many of the novel’s characters discuss the issues of the day in the Journal’s offices. J.J. O’Molloy (a once-promising lawyer now fallen on hard times) interrupts Professor MacHugh’s discourse on the grandeur that was Rome, to ask ‘Do you know that story about chief baron Palles? … It was at the royal university dinner. Everything was going swimmingly …’.