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“OMNIUM GATHERUM”
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nostalgia and regret, however, “seems all the more
inappropriate in that it takes place in a newspaper office, a
locale ostensibly dedicated to the present moment” (2010: 83,
102). Osteen has it that newspaper offices process events and
turn them into news, but the occupants of the
Telegraph
office
exchange little news; rather they circulate borrowed rhetoric
and money (1995: 204). Throughout the episode, undisputedly,
these “talents” indulge in borrowed rhetoric. Rhetoric, Killeen
argues, is meant “to be kinetic, to move the listeners to do
something”; in “Aeolus,” nevertheless, rhetoric “is entirely
static, existing in a void remote from any action” (2004: 72).
The only action these “talents” take is when Stephen proposes
a drink at a bar after MacHugh’s sentimental and forceful
recitation of Taylor’s speech on Moses and the Promised Land,
a speech supposed to inspire them to patriotism. The
“OMNIUM GATHERUM,” in other words, is replete with
flatulent yet empty words, lacking in practical and
consequential actions; these Dubliners’ speeches are ineffectual,
their “action,” heading toward a bar, escapist. Ironically, these
personages of empty rhetoric act as the backbone of
turn-of-the-century Ireland, liable to inspire and direct the
people during times of turmoil, to utilize their expertise in the
production of truth. And yet instead of being the conscience of
the people, they corrupt the national spirit: their idleness,
flatulence, alcoholism, and nostalgia not only result in failure
and unfulfillment, but, more gravely, signify the degeneration
of the intelligentsia. Retrospective rather than innovative,
dedicated to the borrowed rather than the self-created, these
Dubliners fail to be the “talents” worthy of their professions.
Joyce’s representations of the journalists, lawyer, and
professor in the “Aeolus” episode implicitly evoke the
intellectuals who dominated nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century Irish history. In his portrayals of the “talents” in the
Telegraph
office, Joyce critiques these Dubliners on the one