Rhetoric and the Enthymeme in Aeolus

“All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot cake that stuff.”

To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here.

If you’ve ever picked up a reading guide or annotation for Ulysses, you’re likely familiar with the lists of correspondences arranged tidily at the opening of each chapter. That’s right - Ulysses is so complicated that James Joyce created two tables of correspondences, known as schemata, during the book's early years to explain each episode’s interwoven system of symbolism. The Gilbert schema was introduced to the public in 1930 with the publication of Stuart Gilbert’s Ulysses: A Study, the first Ulysses reading guide, in which Joyce was heavily involved.

Let’s take a look at some of the correspondences Joyce (via Gilbert) lists for Ulysses’ seventh episode, “Aeolus”. Focusing on a group of men shooting the breeze in the office of the Evening Telegraph newspaper, this episode corresponds with the color red (I’m assuming because a newspaper is black and white and read all over), and the lungs (as the men in question are a bunch of windbags talking over one another). “Aeolus” also has a correspondent art and technique, rhetoric and enthymemic respectively.

Colloquially, rhetoric is often thought of as empty, opinionated speech, but it is actually a classical art form, revered by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Jesuits and one James Joyce, an admirer of both the ancients and the Jesuits. “Aeolus” is deliberately constructed in the style of a classical rhetorical treatise, both in structure and in the themes and techniques employed throughout the episode. I’ll give a brief overview in this blog post, but if you’re interested in a much more thorough treatment of this topic, I recommend reading this article by Logan Wiedenfeld or M.J.C. Hodgart’s analysis of “Aeolus” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays.

Joyce’s Jesuit education would have included training in rhetoric, as it is one of the three arts studied as part of the trivium. The rhetoric of “Aeolus” is often interpreted as the empty pontification of men past their prime, lavishing in their bygone glories while accomplishing nothing in their present. This is part of the atmosphere of “Aeolus” for sure, but it’s an incomplete analysis. “Aeolus” is packed to the gills with dozens of rhetorical devices, which can be found listed in their entirety in appendices in Gilbert’s Ulysses: A Study (it’s likely that this list was supplied by Joyce himself), as well as Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated. Joyce was so fascinated with these rhetorical Easter eggs that he added even more to “Aeolus” after its initial debut in The Little Review (this is also when he added “Aeolus’” signature headlines). As we’ll see, while his list was comprehensive (all the rhetorical devices found in Quintillian’s twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria and more!), they weren’t always interpreted precisely in Gilbert’s book and subsequent commentaries.

Wiedenfeld describes “Aeolus” as “an interpolated rhetorical treatise very much in the tradition of its Greco-Roman predecessors,” showing direct influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Aristotle lists three rhetorical styles - deliberative, forensic, and epideictic - all three of which are illustrated in the three speeches quoted in “Aeolus.” Aristotle used specific subject matter as examples of each of these styles, which is also reflected in “Aeolus”. A deliberative oration was illustrated with a political speech like John F. Taylor’s speech comparing the plight of the Irish to that of the ancient Israelites in Egypt. Forensic speech was illustrated with legal topics, like Seymour Bushe’s elegant defense in the Childs murder trial. Epideictic speeches focused on praise and celebration, just like Dan Dawson’s overstuffed speech about the serried peaks and bosky groves of Erin, Green Gem in the Silver Sea.

Cesare Maccari, *Cicero Denounces Catiline*, 1889

As part of discussions of these rhetorical styles, classical rhetoricians like Cicero and Longinus would critique speeches from the past. In “Aeolus”, J.J. O’Molloy’s wistful memory of Bushe’s legal oratory or Myles Crawford’s nostalgic admiration for the exploits of Ignatius Gallagher are often dismissed as empty nostalgia. Again, it’s not so much that this interpretation is incorrect; it’s just incomplete. Wiedenfeld sees these men’s nostalgic appraisal of past rhetoric not only in line with the works of a master like Cicero, but also “an essential gesture of the rhetorical treatises of antiquity.” Such examples in ancient texts were used to illustrate both technical prowess and failure, a quality shared with the three speeches in “Aeolus.” Attacking the poor rhetoric of a rival allowed a rhetorician to denigrate not only the rival’s ability as an orator, but also the weakness of any political or intellectual agenda within the rival’s speech.

In classical texts, these appraisals of rhetoric were often structured as dialogues among a group of men. Wiedenfeld points out that works such as Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus, and Cicero’s De Oratore use this format (Wiedenfeld, for his part, believes “Aeolus” to be most closely modeled on Phaedrus). The typical set-up of these dialogues is a group of older men from different walks of life in discussion with a younger, intellectually curious man. In “Aeolus”, a scholar (MacHugh), a lawyer (O’Molloy), a journalist (Crawford), Stephen (teacher-student-artist), and others fill these roles. Joyce further hangs a lampshade on this trope, as the characters discuss the diversity of experience in their group under the headline “OMNIUM GATHERUM,” itself a nod to the classics with its faux Latin:

“—All the talents, Myles Crawford said. Law, the classics...
—The turf, Lenehan put in.
—Literature, the press.
—If Bloom were here, the professor said. The gentle art of advertisement.
—And Madam Bloom, Mr O’Madden Burke added. The vocal muse. Dublin’s prime favourite.
Lenehan gave a loud cough.”

It’s ironic that rhetoric is the art that Joyce corresponds to the palace of the written word: the newspaper. Though the men in the newsroom in “Aeolus” clearly admire a gifted orator, the written word is still their bread and butter. The one exception could be O’Molloy, as a lawyer’s gift ought to be the spoken word, but we learn his once promising career is on the wane. Wiedenfeld points to Socrates’ critique of the written word compared to the spoken word towards the end of Phaedrus, in which the great philosopher argued that writing lacks the ability to create new knowledge; it can only dredge up memories of old knowledge already possessed.

Part of Socrates’ critique hinges on the fact that writing is divorced from its context. As Wiedenfeld puts it, “...written texts are shorn from their author’s illuminating intelligence, orphaned….” It’s shoved out into the world for readers to encounter at random, unable to court its audience the way a speaker might. This interaction between speaker and audience is a key part of rhetoric as an art form. Spoken word creates the opportunity for dialogue, for questioning, for the listener to expand their knowledge beyond their starting point, and for the speaker to weave their words in a way that speaks directly to their audience. A reader may encounter the writing without the requisite knowledge or appropriate context to integrate it in the way the speaker intends.

In this spirit, Bloom reflects on how the Evening Telegraph, needing to cater to a fractured audience, tries to please everyone at once with its brief, targeted sections, often fluffy non-news, sometimes to the point of absurdity:

“It’s the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the official gazette….To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to statute showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina. Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake’s weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle Toby’s page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin’s queries. Dear Mr Editor, what is a good cure for flatulence? ...M. A. P. Mainly all pictures. Shapely bathers on golden strand. World’s biggest balloon. Double marriage of sisters celebrated.”

Not only is this the state of one of Dublin’s great daily organs, the agora of the modern era, but this scattered collection of fluff and nonsense is how it sustains life. People couldn’t care less about the news, but they love the human interest stories, the pictures, and, most germane to Mr. Bloom, the ads.

It would seem to prove Socrates’ point - there is no deeper knowledge to be gained from these base stories. The printed word can suggest sentience, but it’s only an incomplete facsimile. Writing is to speech as a painting of the beach is to a real trip to the beach. Unlike the painting however, we begin to believe that the written and spoken word are one and the same, as we are so inundated in writing in the modern era. Joyce reproduces the speech of objects as well as people in Ulysses through his use of onomatopoeia. Objects gain the power of speech early on in “Aeolus”, as Bloom observes the print shop. Through the mastery of speech, they also appear to gain a form of intelligence, of desire, of volition. Behold the dialectic of printers and doors:

“Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.”

In “Aeolus”, though rhetoric is king, there is also a sense that some human speech is as empty as “sllt” and Uncle Toby’s page for tiny tots. As Bloom enters the inner sanctum of the Telegraph, he walks in on Simon Dedalus and Ned Lambert uproariously mocking a printed speech by Dublin bakery maven Dan Dawson. The work, entitled Our Lovely Land, sings the praises of the natural wonders of Ireland with overly florid descriptions, no adjective left behind:

“—As ’twere, in the peerless panorama of Ireland’s portfolio, unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize regions, for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight… that mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of the moon shine forth to irradiate her silver effulgence…”

Dedalus and Lambert slap their knees and roar with mocking laughter. Dedalus says, “Agonising Christ, wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse?” Bloom silently appraises Dawson’s speech as, “High falutin stuff. Bladderbags.” This scene might seem like merely two friends taking part in the time-honored tradition of luxuriating in the glow of unintentionally subpar media, but it is also in the even-more-time-honored tradition of the classical rhetorical treatise. As mentioned above, a common feature of Greco-Roman rhetorical critique was demonstrating the weakness of poor rhetoric as well as the strengths of the greats.

“Aeolus”, one of two episodes centered on an intellectual dialogue among peers, corresponds with the lungs while the other, “Scylla and Charybdis”, corresponds with the brain. Whatever wisdom is stumbled upon in the course of the newsroom musings is subordinate to their hot air and idle chatter. The rhetoric of “Aeolus” leans on showmanship and eloquence as much as substance. In other words, no matter how clever Æ is, he is unlikely to come up with a line as good as “wouldn’t it give you a heartburn on your arse”.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, *Helen of Troy*, 1863

Dawson’s rhetoric serves as an example of one of Aristotle’s three styles - the epideictic speech. Gilbert inaccurately classifies Dawson’s speech as expository, though this is not one of Aristotle’s three styles nor is there much exposition in Dawson’s drivel. Epideictic speech intends to praise a subject, the clear intent of Our Lovely Land from the title onward. Bombastic, flowery description is not necessarily a characteristic of exposition, but it works well in an encomium. Epideictic speeches were a common style for a rhetorician’s show piece in ancient Greece, what Wiedenfeld describes as “rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake.” Antisthenes, Gorgias, and Isocrates all composed pieces entitled “Encomium for Helen” to flaunt their skills in “high falutin stuff”. Gorgias admitted that he wrote his “Encomium for Helen” in order to praise Helen and also to amuse himself, hinting at the masturbatory quality of such a speech. In a certain regard, Dawson's overblown praise for Ireland is really about himself. Including this example of epideictic rhetoric demonstrates just how hollow this showy style of speech can become when divorced from its context.

Let’s move on to this episode’s enthymemic technic. The major problem here is that no one quite agrees on what an enthymeme actually is, including Aristotle, il maestro di color che sanno. Hodgart wrote that this confusion over enthymemes “...thus [produces] one of the most irritating minor problems in the interpretation of Ulysses. For neither Joyce nor anyone else seems to know exactly what an enthymeme really is.” The experts are lost, so that leaves it for us amateurs to get to the bottom of this mess.

In order to understand the enthymeme, we must first understand the syllogism, a basic form of reasoning in which a conclusion is drawn from two premises, one major, one minor. Probably the most famous syllogism is, “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” To be sure I understood the syllogism, I came up with my own:

“All people living in Portland are weird. Kelly lives in Portland. Therefore, Kelly is weird.”

The major premise supplies us with a necessary quality of Portlanders - that they are weird. The minor premise, that Kelly lives in Portland, is minor because it focuses on one example in this set. Since Kelly is a member of the larger set, she shares its necessary quality - being a weirdo. Got it?

Aristotle, who originated the concept of the enthymeme in his Rhetoric, wrote that the “enthymeme must consist of few propositions, fewer often than those which make up normal syllogisms.” That would alter my syllogism to read something like, “Kelly lives in Portland. Therefore, Kelly is weird.” I’ve dropped the major premise, but if you have any background knowledge on Portland, you can likely fill in the blank. Dropping more obvious premises makes sense, since it would be very tedious to listen to a speaker who laid out every one of their arguments in a strict, syllogistic fashion.

Gilbert, the first to write of “Aeolus’” enthymemic technic, defines an enthymeme as “a syllogism with one premise suppressed.” Enthymeme is also sometimes described as a “truncated syllogism.” This is where the trouble begins. Scholar Phillip Tompkins argued that an enthymeme is not limited to a hidden premise, but it can also have a hidden conclusion.

This tactic is often employed by enterprising politicians trying to drum up votes. An example would be the claims that former U.S. president Barack Obama was a secret Muslim. The claim that Obama is a Muslim has a suppressed major premise and a suppressed conclusion. The major premise would be, “Muslims shouldn’t be president,” leading to the conclusion, “Barack Obama is a Muslim and therefore shouldn’t be president.” Stating the minor premise is enough to get the whole message across. The major premise and conclusion don’t need to be overtly stated because they manipulate a strong anti-Muslim bias in American culture. Obama’s supporters argued the factual inaccuracy of the claim, but the discourse at the time didn’t question that original hidden major premise that adherence to Islam should necessarily disqualify someone from the U.S. presidency. Countering that Obama is a Christian may be factually correct, but this argument doesn’t question the hidden premise that a Muslim shouldn’t be president.

This anecdote demonstrates the power of the enthymeme. It allows the audience to supply their own premises and conclusions, thus making them an integral part of the rhetoric. The listener takes ownership of the premise, which ultimately makes it more believable to them. We like a conclusion or idea if we think it’s our own, and the enthymeme allows the audience to hear the speaker’s words spoken in their own voices. It’s similar to a rhetorical question in which the audience supplies their own answer to a speaker’s open-ended question. Additionally with a hidden premise, there are potentially great weaknesses to an argument that aren’t being critiqued publicly at all since no one noticed their absence. While we argue about a factual inaccuracy, no one is questioning why a Muslim leader in a multicultural society seems so implausible.

Given this persuasive power, the stronger the audience’s belief in the parts of the enthymeme that they supply themselves, the stronger they will find the speaker’s argument. Because syllogism is built on a necessary truth (“All men are mortal”), the conclusion is more likely to be necessarily true. Enthymeme, on the other hand, results in a tentative conclusion based on probable premises, leaving enthymeme more prone to fallacies.

Aristotle, however, saw tremendous persuasive power in enthymeme, considering it the strongest of rhetorical proofs. The use of enthymeme allows a speaker to introduce far more proofs into their argument since the premises don’t need to be explicitly stated while at the same time making no pretense at producing apodeictic truth - truth that is beyond dispute. A skillfully deployed enthymeme can result in a probability strong enough to move one to certainty.

Scholar Robert Spoo argued that regarding an enthymeme as nothing more than a “truncated syllogism” denies its importance in the history of rhetoric and downplays its rhetorical heft. Spoo writes:

“Enthymeme is ‘incomplete’ only in the sense that, as a form of probable reasoning, it requires the active mental participation of the audience in constructing the proofs by which that audience is persuaded; the successful enthymeme is one that arouses expectations which are satisfied in part by the listeners themselves.”

Spoo was concerned that Gilbert’s mischaracterization of enthymeme, with its “suppressed” premise, creates the impression that rhetoric is nothing more than trickery “masquerading as truth but in fact perverting it.” Many subsequent commentators have repeated and even magnified Gilbert’s “suppressed premise” definition of enthymeme, which has muddled many readers’ impression of what an enthymemic technic might be and how Joyce used it in “Aeolus.”

Joyce’s personal definition of enthymeme is unknown, which makes our next task difficult as well. If the technic of “Aeolus” is enthymemic, where is the enthymeme in its text? As mentioned above, enthymeme is one of dozens of rhetorical tropes that Joyce crammed into the scant 34 pages of “Aeolus”. In fact, Joyce even crammed additional rhetorical devices into “Aeolus” after its initial publishing in The Little Review.

So where is the enthymeme in “Aeolus”? One guess might be the headlines introducing the many microchapters throughout the episode, as they require the reader to supply background information in order to understand them in many instances. However, plenty of them are quite explicit in their meanings. The headlines were also added after “Aeolus’” initial publishing in The Little Review, so if Joyce intended them as a major representation of his enthymemic technic, they would have come on the scene quite late. In Gilbert’s rhetorical appendix, he supplies Bloom’s encounter with Joe Hynes as an example of enthymeme. Hynes has owed Bloom three shillings for three weeks, and Bloom wants to remind him to pay up since it’s payday at the newspaper. Bloom comments somewhat obliquely:

“—If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said, pointing backward with his thumb.
—Did you? Hynes asked.
—Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you’ll catch him.
—Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I’ll tap him too.”

Bloom’s premise is suppressed (“You owe me money, Hynes.”), but so is his conclusion (“Therefore, you should collect your salary and pay me back.”) Hynes seems to miss the point entirely, leaving Bloom’s comment hanging in the air, ineffectually passive aggressive, and not particularly persuasive. It’s such a small encounter that does much to subtly inform the reader of Bloom’s social position but does little to communicate the overarching themes of the episode. It’s not a central moment, and it just doesn’t seem like enough to elevate it to the level of representing the “technic” of the entire episode.

Tompkins rejects the headlines and the Hynes encounter as effective examples of enthymeme, offering instead a third suggestion: John F. Taylor’s speech as recounted by the newspapermen. Taylor’s speech is the third bit of rhetoric considered by our esteemed scholars in “Aeolus”, in which the speaker compares the Irish people to the Israelites held in bondage in Egypt and the British to the Egyptians holding them captive.

Tompkins points to the audience-supplied major premise that people who are held in “religious, literary and cultural” bondage should seek to free themselves. Taylor’s minor premise is that the Irish in 1904 are held in such a state of religious, literary and cultural bondage. Still speaking of the Israelites,Taylor states it thus:

“Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.”

Notice Taylor’s use of the second-person “you”; this subtle pronoun usage allows the audience to slip into the role of the Israelites listening to the pompous Egyptians. The conclusion a listener or reader might reach based on these premises is that, “The Irish are a people who should move to free themselves.”

Since Taylor’s speech is quoted at length as a rhetorical example, the reader of Ulysses, even many years beyond the political climate of 1904 Dublin, must be able to supply these premises and conclusions in order for this enthymemic approach to be effective. Positioning the Irish as metaphorical Israelites strengthens this conclusion since both Taylor’s audience and Ulysses’ readers are likely to be familiar with the Exodus story, in which the Israelites, God’s chosen people, do ultimately escape the house bondage. Could this also be the fate of the Irish people? Perhaps the Irish are a chosen people as well?

A reader with knowledge of Joyce’s biography can expand this proof one step further. Joyce felt that he was held in bondage by the culture and religion of Ireland and the Catholic Church and that in order to flourish as a writer, he too would need to flee the house of bondage for exile. The themes of bondage and the struggle for freedom in Taylor’s speech resonate throughout the text of “Aeolus” and Joyce’s works as a whole. Tompkins goes one step further, allowing his search for enthymeme to bleed over far beyond the bounds of “Aeolus,” interpreting the entirety of Ulysses as an extended enthymeme:

“Would it be so obvious that Ulysses is the tale of a father in search of a son, a son in search of a father, if the Homeric example were unknown to us?”

Rhetoric and the Enthymeme in Aeolus

Further Reading:

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