| Sumario: | When James Joyce uses a Dantean model, Paradiso 31, for Stephen Dedalus's "Parable of the Plums" in the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, Stephen's tale marks a turning point in the character's development from earnest poet to ironic storyteller. In Dante, the Pilgrim and St. Bernard gaze up at the Rose of Heaven; in Stephen's story, two "Dublin vestals" gaze up at the statue of the "onehandled adulterer" Horatio Nelson. By structuring his profane story on an inversion of Dante's sacred one, Joyce has Stephen parody both Irish nationalism's rhetorical use of Moses' story, and the sexual repressiveness of Catholic orthodoxy. Stephen thereby accomplishes a creative breakthrough toward the mature author's Dantean polysemic aesthetics. He learns to merge imagery of contemporary Dublin with a classic narrative structure, and this makes his parable the crux of Joyce's larger Dantean pattern in the novel.
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