28 October 2003

Sing and Spell: Language Expanded in Joyce’s Ulysses

By Jason Preu

    Throughout his masterpiece, Ulysses, James Joyce presents his readers with numerous challenges. One such challenge arises in Chapter Eleven, ‘Sirens,’ wherein Joyce forces a reader to consider music and language in tandem; how the two structures relate, and where they diverge. Joyce wrote this chapter with music on his mind. ‘Sirens’ displays a tension between language and music. Within that tension Joyce seems to critique the efficacy and primacy of language that refuses to acknowledge the influence and importance of the aural. What does it mean to read this chapter successfully? It means that, while reading, the reader must keep music on his or mind. Joyce populates the chapter with characters that can be seen to represent both language and music, and often refers to a music-soaked world. By chapter’s end the reader might be surprised that Joyce is critical of language, his chosen medium. This paper will explore the chapter in an attempt to highlight the techniques Joyce employs and specific characters he uses to express this critique.

    The first 63 lines of the chapter start the reader off in an extremely disjointed fashion.  These lines create a confusing and foul noise for any reader who assumes from the text any type of standard narrative set-up or progression. If, however, a reader looks upon these lines as structured musically (as an overture or symphonic tuning), he or she might make two contradictory realizations:

1) there is some musical sense to this section but,

2) there is no music in this section.

    Joyce knows that words can only approximate music and, while it may be possible to structure a prose piece in a musical fashion, how can a writer make his writing as musical as possible? Joyce teases out this problem throughout Chapter 11 and ups the ante for future writers who attempt to amalgamate language and music. Joyce blends words (“Siopold”), repeats words, shifts repeating words, and cuts letters from words, often in the process rendering them brilliantly ambiguous in sound and meaning (“Bloo smi qui go.”). Each of these liberties, by acting as choruses, reprises, and other musical structures, plays with reader expectations of how sentences work to create meaning and mental coherence. Joyce wants to make music from words. The problem, however, is that as musical as some of this chapter’s passages are, the prose comes out so foreign as to be off putting and distancing to a reader. Can a reader make meaning from a sentence wherein Joyce foregoes syntactical coherence to achieve a more musical phrasing? Further, is it important that a synthesis between the two forms is rarely, if ever, achieved? In order to present a more coherent picture of the different ways this chapter looks at music and language, I will forego until the conclusion my answers to these questions and instead shift focus to some of the chapter’s characters.  

    The character Pat is an interesting and integral part of this chapter. A key point to keep in mind concerning Pat is that the text often describes him as deaf. Is Pat really deaf? His profession, a waiter in a bar, would indicate otherwise, but Pat’s deafness may be more symbolic in nature, representing the need he has to consistently focus his auditory attention upon the bar’s patrons. Pat works in a bar full of sirens – male, female, and otherwise - yet his job is to hear and respond to people as they relate their wants and needs. He doesn’t pay mind to their banter, their music, or their creative expression.

So Pat is deaf, Pat is bald, and Pat waits. Pat brings to Bloom materials with which to write. Pat seems to represent the harbinger of the word, which is fitting as the sounds, infectious as they may be to the other characters, elude him. Pat is not concerned with the music around him and (as the passage below shows) in action, dialogue, and description, the music is not concerned with Pat:

Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went. (847-48)

     Joyce uses no indefinite articles to relate Pat’s actions and the only adjectives he offers are, in conjunction, “quite” and “flat”. The combined effect is the creation of a monotone, simplistic rendering of this character’s action. Joyce’s word choice is precise here and, of course, appropriate to a chapter so concerned with music. Pat himself may be seen as a quite flat character; only waiting, never initiating.

What is also intriguing about that descriptive passage is that Joyce uses those adjectives to describe an ink pad, one tool with which a writer reifies his or her words. On the surface, Joyce describes the pad as quite flat because by its nature a pad is flat. Might Joyce be subtly suggesting here that, without any music, any animus, language itself is quite flat? Finally, if Pat is the harbinger of the word, a reader might associate the waiter with language itself. Is writing a quite flat exercise compared with the life, the activity, and the sensual pleasures associated with the music in the bar?

    The blind man’s presence marks another character of interest in this chapter. Joyce makes the reader aware of this person by inserting into the text, in true comic-book, onomatopoeic fashion, the blind man’s cane taps. Joyce allows a reader to hear the blind man as a blind person hears, detached from any corporeal form. What does a reader do with this tapping? He or she starts by first comparing this sensually impaired character with the chapter’s other sensually impaired character, Pat. Contrast the blind man’s willfulness with Pat, who throughout remains rather passive and subservient. Joyce’s description of the stripling’s “taptaptapping” gives the character a rhythmic existence that Pat lacks. Additionally, the stripling’s tapping leads the reader into Bloom’s meditations that music is in all things (with the implication being that language needs to recognize this) (1240). The stripling sees no one, no thing. “Hee hee hee hee. He did not see” (1283). With these words coming as they do towards chapter’s end, Joyce plays with his readers as if to say, “You’ve been seeing, reading this chapter, when all the while you should have been listening.” What a grand jest to have in the middle of a novel and a poke in the ribs at writers who treat language as though it has nothing whatsoever to explore in the musical field.

     Bloom is the next character to look at when comparing music and language. Bloom is seemingly unable to write with any coherence while he is in the bar. He does write, but under distracted, dissonant, and disinterested circumstances, swayed as he is by the vivacity of the bar environment. Bloom writes to Martha, “It is utterl imposs. Underline imposs. To write today” (883). The music is too much; Bloom cannot concentrate on the task at hand: “Better add postscript. What is he playing now? Improvising. Intermezzo. P.S. The rum tum tum” (889-90).

“Folly am I writing?” (874) Bloom asks himself as he tries to compose a new letter to Martha and sees the resultant gibberish. Folly does anyone write whilst the world moves on about/without them? Again, in Joyce’s comparison, the auditory prevails over the literary. Bloom haphazardly composes language but his attention is almost consistently elsewhere, never on the task at hand, and his letters suffer.

    Bloom here could be taken as representative of the need a writer has for isolation. Bloom might be successful were he not trying to compose a piece of writing amidst the entire bar’s hustle and bustle. One important experience that interrupts Bloom’s hectic mental composition is Simon Dedalus’s singing, which enraptures Bloom in an auditory, erotic embrace:

Tenderness is welled: slow, swelling, full it throbbed. That’s the chat. Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.

Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind.

Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the fee the warm the. Tup. To pour o’er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love. (701-09)

    The language in this passage is sexually charged and is used as one of many ways for Joyce to highlight the connection between music and the basics of life – in this case sexual activity. Bloom’s mind is on the music. Bloom’s mind is on the sensuality of it all. Bloom’s mind is on his relationship with Martha and the taboo eroticism of their correspondence.

    Bloom’s mind then decides Bloom is going to write. But Bloom can’t write (713-14). Why not? What does Bloom’s distraction signify? He wants to write a letter; an adulterous letter. And if he somehow let go of that desire, and surrendered to the music, that letter would never get written and he would not be an adulterer himself. The irony is that the sirens in this chapter turn out to be, at least for Bloom, a preventive measure rather than a danger to him.

    More importantly, Bloom seems to get no pleasure from his half-hearted attempts at writing. Is Joyce asking whether pleasure is even a possibility for the writer? Is there a chance for unmitigated feeling to exist alongside such a pre-meditated action as writing? Music is all about feeling and a loss of control. There is no processing going on that a listener is aware of. When one writes, or reads, one is constantly aware of what the body is doing. Additionally, linguistic activities always require some, however slight, motor activity. A reader may have the luxury of reading a page in a fugue state but when he or she gets to the end of that page, if they’re still awake, they must move an arm, a hand, or a finger to progress. Obviously, in writing, the effort exerted is much more pronounced and over the head of any wordsmith distraction always looms.

    Music affects in a different manner. As opposed to reading and writing, where the reader or writer must move the narrative along, music often sweeps its listeners along without a second thought. One might be able to ignore music on some level, but more so than language, music can be an immediate, physically debilitating weapon, should one choose to wield it so. Bloom says with regard to the music, “That’s joyful I can feel. Never have written it” (969). This quote gives some insight as to why Joyce might consider music a more visceral, immediate, pure, and ultimately more important mode of experience and expression that consistently usurps any attempts by language to exact the same amount of feeling. Therefore, language needs to pay more heed to the more aural aspects of the world.

    Bloom eventually asserts that both arts, language and music, are joys but he adds an important coda when he says, “Mere fact of music shows you are” (970-71). The body is not literal, but it is musical (as Bloom sounds off about at chapter’s end) and, while language can be made to resemble music, it will always fail to have music's immediate, involuntary response upon a subject. Now this is not to say that language cannot move a person or harm, it just takes a greater effort and is therefore further removed than music in elucidating aesthetic or disgusted responses.

    It is apparent that Joyce loves the written word. Joyce seems attracted by the written word’s almost utter malleability. The whole of Ulysses is testament to that attraction and Chapter 11 is one of many experiments with writing that Joyce conducts to satisfy his own curiosity about the possibilities of language. As Joyce is writing to an audience, he must also want to test reader response and reaction to his experiment.

    Joyce succeeds in using language to make his readers fully aware of the music that is constantly going on in and around them. The experiment is not a complete success, though. If an initial experience with a piece of music is so unsettling or so foreign to a listener’s expectations, should that person stick with the piece or leave the music behind? In Joyce’s case, should a reader alienated by Joyce’s experiment with an aurally-centered language stick with the piece or let the writing be? This question is especially important when, having successfully completed Chapter 11, the reader finds that Joyce might be arguing against the primacy and efficacy of language that does not consider the aural aspect of existence. With this knowledge, how should a reader continue on with the novel if the rest of the chapters do not incorporate this new standard of literary awareness?

    Finally, is this the stroke of genius brushed into the chapter – a controlled reminder to the reader that he or she is involved in a text, a text that, in this particular section, strives always to include music in the composition? To read this chapter successfully, a reader must sacrifice traditional expectations of narrative structure and meaningful syntax. This sacrifice must be made in order to make room for Chapter 11’s experiment, expanding language to make it as musical as possible.