SIRENS’ SONG:
MUSIC IN THE WRITINGS OF JAMES JOYCE
James Louis Franklin, M.D.
Read at the Chicago Literary Club
March 21st, 2005
Music in the writings of James Joyce is the subject of this paper. I came to this topic after a careful reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. It is said that Ulysses is a novel that can never be read for the first time. No one starts to read this novel without knowing that the book is about a single day in the city of Dublin, popularly known as Bloomsday, June 16th, 1904. In 1998 it was well publicized that the editorial board of the Modern Library selected Ulysses to head a list of the one-hundred greatest English-language novels. A priori, the reader knows that electing to read this novel will be no small undertaking. Joyce quipped that he had put enough riddles into this work that “it would keep scholars busy for 300 years”. Indeed it was a project that occupied its author for a decade prior to its publication in 1922. A trip to the library to survey the section of literary criticism on Joyce reveals numerous “Joyce and ....” volumes. For a start, there are surveys of his writing as it relates to history (Irish and English), philosophy (Plato and Aristotle), Catholicism (Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine), Greek mythology, literature (Shakespeare, Flaubert, symbolism and semiotics), Jews and anti-Semitism. In addition to the vast scholarly underpinnings of his writing, Joyce was ever attuned to the popular culture of his day. He loved humor, both high brow and baser types, and these along with word play of all types, are an ever increasing facet in his work. His wife Nora complained that while he worked on Finnegans Wake, a labor that occupied the last 17 years of his life, she could not sleep at night while he was writing in the next room as he was continually laughing out loud.
Joyce was a virtuoso of literary style. Almost every chapter or episode in Ulysses, corresponding to an hour of the day, employs a different stylistic technique. The fourteenth episode entitled “The Oxen of the Sun” takes place in the National Maternity Hospital at ten o’clock in the evening. Therefore, as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, so the chapter reproduces the gestation of the English language. Commencing with Roman religious chants the style evolves through Old and Middle English, through Elizabethan English and parodies the styles of great English authors of the 17th through 19th centuries. By the end of the chapter, language has exhausted itself and collapses satirically into the incoherent jargon of drunken revelers. Music and musical allusions play an ever increasing importance in his writing. While this topic may seem to have a relatively narrow focus, my reading has led me to numerous articles in journals of literary criticism, books and symposia devoted to this subject. I have identified at least three authors who would seem to have devoted the better part of their careers to the study of musical allusions in Joyce’s writing. It is the aim of the remainder of this paper to survey the role music played in Joyce’s life and to explore the function musical allusions play in Joyce’s writing. The 11th chapter of Ulysses, titled Sirens, is inspired by music and represents Joyce’s use of musical techniques in the production of a literary style. This chapter will be examined in depth to understand these devices and the literary effect they achieve.
JOYCE, IRELAND AND MUSIC
There are those who would insist that a truly universal work of art must be capable of standing on its own. If a novel that fits this description really exists, it is not Ulysses. Joyce is said to have commented that if the city of Dublin were to be completely destroyed, one could reconstruct it from his novel brick by brick. Such is the care to detail that he gave to locale and the current events in 1904 Dublin. As a callisthenic for the reading of Ulysses, I would suggest that one read his first novel, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, where much of the background that brings Stephen Dedalus to the Martello Tower on that June 16th morning can be found. Many of the characters that populate Ulysses make an appearance in his collection of short stories known as Dubliners. Richard Ellman’s James Joyce is fascinating to read and provides an understanding of the background for much of the material he used in his writing.
James Joyce was born on February 2nd, 1882 in Rathgar, a suburb south of Dublin. He was the first of ten children born to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane (May) Joyce. His father, John Joyce, who plays a major role in Joyce’s fiction, was from Cork and was brought to Dublin by his mother after his father’s death in 1875. He was an extrovert, endowed with good looks and personal charm and many talents including a flair for the stage and a fine tenor voice. However, he squandered his inheritance, selling off his properties to sustain a lifestyle beyond his means and never long held or reliably performed a job. He preferred the entertainment of his cronies, the telling and re-telling of good stories and drinking. With the exception of his relationship to his first bornson, he disgracefully ignored the needs of his other children. He was fiercely nationalistic. Charles Parnell was his uncrowned king whose tale of betrayal was always on his lips, and as his son said of him, “Irish, he was all too Irish”. Predictably he dragged his family down a path that led to a degrading poverty. The family was reduced to moving from rented house to house often leaving in the night to escape eviction using horse drawn lories to carry their furniture and bearing the Joyce family portraits as if they were coats of arms. While John Stanislaus Joyce held his wife’s family in contempt, his wife Mary Jane possessed a good education and also could play the piano well. She frequently accompanied her husband’s singing of the operatic arias that he loved. A woman devoted to the Catholic Church, she struggled to hold her family and marriage together until April of 1903 when she pitifully died of gastric cancer. Throughout the novel, the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s surrogate self) is haunted by: her deathbed agonies, how at her request he sang his setting of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Who goes with Fergus”, her disappointment over his rejection of Catholicism and the priesthood and his refusing her dying request to kneel in prayer. The sayings, songs, politics, anecdotes and personality of John Stanislaus Joyce are an ever recurring theme in his son’s writings. Joyce could forgive his father’s failings perhaps because he saw so many of them in himself. He cherished a portrait of his father painted by a family friend, Patrick Touhy, which he secured in his self imposed European exile. He posed the portrait of his father in a photograph of himself, his son Giorgio and young grandson Stephen; four generations of Joyces.
Joyce long remembered the days in Rathgar when his father would meet friends, such as Alfred Bergan and Tom Devin, who came out by the tram from Dublin. After a walk, perhaps a sail in their boat and dinner, they would spend long hours into the evening in a second floor drawing room telling jokes and singing. Quoting Richard Ellman’s biography, “May Joyce played and John Joyce sang songs of Balfe or Moore, or ‘My pretty Jane’ (looking at May Joyce) or ‘M’Appri’ from Flotow’s Martha, or any of several hundred ‘Come-all-ye’ ballads…” The art of house was vocal music of all kinds and sung with surprising skill. In 1934, James Joyce wrote to Bergan, “We used to have merry evenings in our house used we not?”
John Joyce lavished money on his son’s education. In 1888 he enrolled James in the prestigious Clongowes Wood College run by the Society of Jesus. At the age of nine, he was given piano lessons. Stanislaus Joyce in his incomplete but still fascinating memoirs My Brother’s Keeper quotes a passage from his personal diary describing his brother “as having a distinguished appearance and bearing and many graces: a musical singing and especially speaking voice (tenor), a good undeveloped talent in music”.
By 1893, declining wealth forced John Joyce to move his family back into Dublin; he also found it necessary to transfer his two eldest sons to the Jesuit-run Belvedere College. Social life during after-school hours was centered in the home of David Sheey, M.P. where James and his younger brother Stanislaus were frequent guests. Joyce was on good terms with the family’s two sons, Richard and Eugene, and their four daughters. Ellman describes the evening’s entertainment which included singing, dancing and playing various word games. We are given a picture of Joyce as a very witty, outgoing and entertaining guest. His repertoire included Irish, French and Elizabethan songs. His taste in song ran to the sentimental and humorous which he sang in a sweet if rather weak tenor voice. Notable among the Irish songs that he sang was “The Croppy Boy”, to which we will return.
During his years growing up in Dublin and later those in Trieste, Joyce would periodically consider a career as a singer. To this end there were various vocal teachers with whom he would study and all thought he had the talent to become a professional singer. Invariably, the lessons were discontinued because of a lack of funds or his disinclination to submit to the rigors of vocal exercises.
The Wandering Rocks episode or tenth chapter in Ulysses is a show piece of synchronizations illustrating the crisscrossing of panoply of Dubliners during the hour leading up to four o’clock concert in the Ormond Hotel. There are nineteen sections in this chapter through which we are given a view of Dublin as if we were a pigeon looking down on the scene below. In the sixth of these little vignettes, Stephan encounters his vocal teacher Almidano Artifoni. They briefly converse in Italian and as they part, Artifoni boards a tram, telling Stephen that he is sacrificing his voice and the practical reality of a source of income for his dreams of a literary career.
In 1903, now age 21, Joyce entered a tenor competition at the Feis Coeil (Gaelic for Festival of Music, popularly referred to as the “fish coil”). He had pawned some of his books to pay the entrance fee and became the last of twenty-two candidates. Joyce is reported to have beautifully sung two set pieces, “No Chastening” from Sullivan’s The Prodigal Son and “A Long Farwell”, an Irish air. He startled the judges, already prepared to give him a gold medal, when he refused to sing at sight an easy piece and strode from the platform. The rules of the contest prevented the judges from giving him any more than an honorable mention. When the second place winner was disqualified he was awarded a bronze medal. Later he advised his aunt Josephine to pawn the medal as it was of no use to him, but he treasured the newspaper clippings of the contest.
In 1904 Joyce was again pawning his books to take lessons from the best vocal teacher in Dublin, Benedetto Palmieri. He considered a plan that would involve travel around England singing Elizabethan songs and had contacted the famous English ancient instrument maker, Arnold Dolmetsch, about purchasing a lute. These thoughts surface in the novel’s penultimate chapter, Ithaca, during the catechism that describes the novels climactic conversation between Bloom and Stephen in the early hours of the morning.
While living in Trieste he contacted the musician, Francesco Ricardo Sinico (1869-1949), who praised his voice but told him he would need two years of vocal training. Neither Joyce nor his brother had the funds that would allow him to continue his lessons for very long, but while they lasted he had the opportunity to be taught by the heir of the leading dynasty of vocal teachers for three generations in Trieste. Joyce used his name for a major character in “A Painful Case” from the collection Dubliners.
It was characteristic of the musical life in Dublin that the lines between professional and amateur music frequently blended as when he was invited to sing in a concert at Dublin’s Antient Concert Rooms on a Saturday evening on August 27th, 1904. On this occasion he shared the stage with the famous tenor, John McCormack, receiving praise for his rendition of two Irish ballades in the newspaper accounts of the concert. As a measure of his vocal accomplishments, Joyce sang the role of the apprentice David in the famous second act quintet from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg”.
Joyce was said to have learned opera at his father’s knee which he then imparted to his own family. His wife Nora said that they attended the opera every evening when it was in season. The singing of operatic arias at home was customary entertainment. Surveys of the operas and singers heard in Dublin, Trieste, Zurich and Paris during life time testifies to the music he absorbed. His letters are rich in commentary and reference to these performances. Often opera titles or lines from a libretto were sources of humor in his correspondence with family members. In a letter to his daughter Lucia in September 1935, in Italian he writes, “I am in a hurry because the train will leave without us. Cosi` fan treni, (So trains behave, a play on Cosi` Fan Tutte). Later in life, his son Georgio, a bass, was to pursue a vocal career but with only limited success. After Joyce achieved international fame with the publication of Ulysses, he championed the career of an Irish opera tenor, John Sullivan. Joyce maintained a personal friendship with the tenor and enlisted his help with Giorgio’s singing career as he had also done with the famous tenor John McCormack who was favorably impressed by Giorgio’s voice.
MUSIC IN THE LITERATURE OF JAMES JOYCE
As music played an important part in his life, so allusions to music exist throughout his writings. There are over 1500 songs alluded to in his fiction, poetry and drama. Of the musical allusions initially identified the greatest, numbering over 1000, are in Finnegans Wake. Because many songs are referred to more than once, there are by one count at least 5,550 musical references in Joyce’s fiction. Beyond these statistics, it is notable that moving from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, through Dubliners, his play Exiles, Ulysses and finally Finnegans Wake, the richness of musical allusions increase as well as the complexity of the language. Beginning in 1907 James Joyce suffered from recurrent attacks of iritis, quite likely a manifestation of syphilis, for which he was to endure numerous ophthalmologic operations. The author was frequently photographed with thick glasses and a patch over his eye, bearing witness to his visual difficulties. During the last two decades of his life there were periods when his handicap was such that he could not read and had to rely on others to read to him. The aural quality of his prose becomes more important in his writing and is often the key to understanding much of the complex language of puns and word games that occur in Finnegans Wake. His progressive visual difficulties may account in part for the ever increasing references to music that occur in his writing.
There is an operatic parallel that cannot be overlooked. Stephen Dedalus is portrayed carrying an ash plant staff as he does during the Proteus chapter as he walks along Sandy Mount Strand and meditates on visual perception and a world without sight. The ash plant staff resonates with the tapping of the blind piano tuner’s walking stick in the Sirens episode. The parallel is to Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Wotan, the King of the Gods, who always appears on stage with a patch and a tall spear or staff. Wotan paid with the loss of an eye for the wisdom of the world which was inscribed on his spear that was cut from the world ash tree. The Wagnerian allusion continues during the brothel scene in the Circe episode when Stephen strikes out a lamp shade with his staff and cries, “Nothung” (the name of Siegfried’s sword).
Joyce had an encyclopedic knowledge of folk music, popular song and opera. For him the lyrics and the librettos were a touchstone to the themes in his prose. I have found little in his biography or correspondence referring to an interest in purely instrumental music. There are no accounts of his attending an orchestral concert or chamber music performance. A few comments are both amusing and telling. Though Die Meistersinger was his favorite among Wagner’s operas, he wrote to the composer Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer that he found Meistersinger pretentious stuff. While living in Zurich during World War I, having fled Paris to avoid the status of an enemy alien, he became good friends with Frank Budgen, an artist who was later to write an account of their friendship, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Budgen describes attending an outdoor concert in Zurich with Joyce while dining in a café and listening first to a work by Beethoven and then to Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni. Joyce commented that for him Beethoven sounded “muscle bound” in comparison to Mozart. Despite his neglect of instrumental music our examination of the Sirens episode will reveal that he had a solid knowledge of musical theory and a sound understanding of its aesthetics.
CHAMBER MUSIC
In 1907 Joyce published a slim volume of 36 poems under the title Chamber Music. He had worked on these poems over several years and had received favorable opinions from poets such as W.B. Yeats. The poems are not of the twentieth century but of the Elizabethan period. His training in poetics and translation were thoroughly honed under the tutelage of the Jesuits at Belvedere College. During this period he made many trips to the Dublin National Library to copy manuscripts of Elizabethan songs which served as models for his inspiration. The origin of the title Chamber Music is amusing. It stems from a visit he and Oliver St. John Gogarty made to Gogarty’s aunt Jenny so that Joyce might read the poems to her. (Gogarty is the model for “Stately plump Buck Mulligan”, the usurper who opens the first chapter of Ulysses.) While they sat on a couch and drank porter, Aunt Jenny withdrew behind a screen to use a chamber pot. Gogarty cried out “There’s a critic for you”. When his brother Stanislaus heard the story he suggested the title Chamber Music and remarked, “You can take that as a favorable omen”. Joyce liked the double meaning and used it in the Sirens episode of Ulysses when Bloom muses:
Chamber music. Could make a pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is.Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss…. (Ulysses 11:979).
Joyce often impresses us with Bloom’s middle brow scientific knowledge but he never lets him get it quite right.
Sampling the first poem in the collection we get a feeling for their musical quality.
Strings in the earth and air
Make music sweet;
Strings by the river where
The willows meet.
There’s music along the river
For love wanders there
Pales flowers on his mantle
Dark leaves on his hair.
All softly playing,
With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
Upon an instrument.
Within three years of the publication of Chamber Music, three composers had set some of the poems to music: W.B. Reynolds, a music critic, Herbert Hughes, a folk song collector and friend of Joyce, and Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer. Palmer’s settings of the poems were Joyce’s favorites. Palmer sent Joyce several of the songs and Joyce corresponded several times with the composer, but was unsuccessful in an effort to encourage Palmer to submit the manuscript for publication. Myra Teicher Russel who subsequently discovered the complete manuscript and thoroughly researched this topic, has published a song book of the collection. She suspects that relatives of the composer in Ireland with whom the composer resided, disapproving of Joyce and his writing, discouraged the project. Currently, there is a list of some 37 composers including Samuel Barber, Luciano Berio, Frank Bridge, David Del Tredici, and Luigi Dellapiccola who have set various poems from the collection to music.
DUBLINERS
The collection of fifteen short stories which became known as Dubliners were written while Joyce was living in Trieste. They were published in 1914 having survived a tortured gestation at the hands of a number of reluctant publishers. The last story, “The Dead”, is the most musical. Its title comes from a song from Thomas Moore’s collection of “Irish Melodies” titled “O Ye Dead!”. Joyce’s story is set during an annual Christmas party given by the Morkan sisters, Miss Julia and Miss Kate, and their niece Mary Jane. The party features music, largely singing, and table talk of opera and vocal artists of the past and present.
Mary Jane, at the urging of several of the guests is asked to play “something”. We read:
Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. He liked music but the piece she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners…. Four young men, who had come from the refreshment-room to stand in the door-way at the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in couples after a few minutes. The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the key-board or lifted from it at pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page....He knew that Mary Jane must be near the end of her piece for she was playing again the opening melody with the runs of scales after every bar….The piece ended with a trill of octaves in the treble and a final deep octave in the bass. Great applause greeted Mary Jane as, blushing and rolling up her music nervously she escaped from the room. The most vigorous clapping came from the four young men in the door-way who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning of the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped.
Finally it is Gabriel Conroy’s wife Gretta who is prompted by one of the guest’s rendition of the song, “The Lass of Augrihm”, to recollect a young man, Michael Furey, who loved her and who sang the same melody. Gabriel Conroy’s coming to terms with the realization that his wife had this secret corner in her heart leads to the real meaning of the story and the beautiful poetic prose evocation of snow gently falling over all of Ireland and on the grave of Michael Furey with which the story closes. The theme of “The Dead” was drawn from Joyce’s own life and his relationship to his wife Nora Barnacle. Joyce was obsessive in his desire to know the details of her life before he met her. Nora had told her sister that she was attracted to Joyce because he resembled Sonney Bodkin, a young man from Galway who had died of tuberculosis. Bodkin seems to have stolen out of his sick bed, despite the rainy weather, to sing to her in the manner depicted in the story. Aughrim is a little village, not far from Nora’s home, in Galway. Joyce had heard this ballad from Nora. Joyce’s use of the song, “The Lass of Aughrim” as a key that unlocks our understanding of the relationship of Gretta and her husband is emblematic of his use of a musical allusion as a literary device.
SIRENS
The eighteen episodes or chapters in Ulysses were left untitled and headed only by numbers. Joyce had produced two schemas for his novel. The first was sent to Carlo Linati in 1920 and a second version was published by Stuart Gilbert in his James Joyce’s Ulysses. In these documents each episode is given a title, a characteristic art, organ, symbol and technique. The title “Sirens” given to the 11th episode comes from the twelfth book of Homer’s Odyssey. The art of the chapter is music; the organ is the ear, the symbol is the barmaids in the Ormond Hotel and the technique Fuga per cannone. In Homer’s Odyssey, the goddess Circe warns Odysseus of two sirens who through their sweet voices, promising pleasure and merriment after the perils of war along with false promises of knowledge of the future, lure men to their deaths on the rocky shores of their island. Circe advises Odysseus that in order to hear their song, he must plug the ears of his shipmates with wax and have them lash him to the mast of the ship ordering them not to release him regardless of how violently he protests.
Joyce never formally studied Greek while he was in school and although he was an accomplished linguist, he was to bemoan this fact all of his life. He picked up some of the language from Greek speaking acquaintances he would meet in the restaurants that he frequented. While at Belvedere College, he wrote an essay “My Favorite Hero”. In it, he passed over Hector and Achilles and other burly men to choose wily Ulysses (the Latin form of Odysseus) of whom he had read in Charles Lamb’s prose paraphrase The Adventures of Ulysses.
The chapter is set in the Ormond Hotel, 8 Ormond Quay Upper. (There is still an Ormond Hotel at this address.) The bar and restaurant were popular in turn-of-the-century Dublin for amateur concerts. It is four o’clock in the afternoon, a pivotal moment on this June 16th day in 1904 in which we have followed Stephen Dedalus, now a teacher in a private boy’s school, and Leopold Bloom, a half Jewish advertisement salesman, since eight o’clock in the morning. We have briefly met his wife Marion Bloom (known as Molly) in the fourth chapter of the novel called Calypso in their home at 7 Eccles. It is in the Calypso chapter that we and Bloom first learn that Molly, a semi-professional singer, has received a letter from Blazes Boylan, the co-performer and manager of an upcoming concert tour, informing her that he is coming to their home at four o’clock ostensibly to rehearse. (As the Citizen in the chapter Cyclops sneers on hearing about the concert tour, “Hoho begod says I to myself says I…Blazes doing the tootle on the flute…” Ulysses 12:996) The letter, which Bloom brings upstairs to Molly while he servers her breakfast in bed, addressed to “Marion Bloom” (no husband in this household), leaves little doubt in Bloom’s mind as to the true nature of this assignation.
In approximate terms, Stephen Dedalus is the Joyce’s counterpart to Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, who was born in the year that Odysseus left for the city of Troy. At age twenty, his father’s palace usurped by suitors seeking the hand of his mother Penelope, Telemachus leaves his home to seek the father he hardly knows. Joyce introduces us to Stephen in the first three chapters of the novel that are equivalent to the first five books of the Odyssey, known as the Telemachiad. Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s choice as the heroic equivalent to Homer’s Odysseus. Bloom in the course of the novel will show us through the stratagems he employs to cope with the obstacles that he encounters in his wanderings through Dublin that he merits his place as Joyce’s hero and equal to the cleverest of the Greeks, Odysseus. As Odysseus was concerned about the fidelity of his Penelope, so Bloom must confront the issue of his wife Molly’s infidelity. In the Odyssey, Penelope first appears in the Telemachiad, but her voice is not really heard until the end of Homer’s epic. Joyce gives his Penelope, Molly Bloom, the last word in the novel’s final chapter through her “oceanic eight sentence sixty page monologue”.
Sirens is thirty pages and approximately 1300 lines in length weaving multiple characters both onstage and off into the fabric of the chapter. Immediately we are presented with a puzzle. Sirens begins with sixty two short sentences which make little sense to the first time reader of the novel.
Quoting the first several lines:
Bonze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing. Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
After sixty-two lines that progress in this manner, the 63rd line reads “Begin!” and one realizes that the chapter proper has begun with “Bronze by gold, miss Douce’s head by miss Kennedy’s head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel.” After reading Sirens, it is possible to look back and see that each line is is a sentence or phrase drawn from the chapter’s narrative. This beginning has been compared to an overture of the style heard in both light and grand opera, where excerpts of music from the opera that is to follow are previewed. My favorite interpretation is the one that likens it to entering a concert hall while the orchestra is tuning up. If we know the works that are about to be played we might hear the French horn play a familiar phrase or the clarinet practicing a difficult passage. Otherwise we are left with a somewhat incomprehensible din.
In the bar of the Ormond Hotel, we are introduced to the two barmaids; Bronze, Miss Lyda Douce and Gold, Miss Mina Kennedy. Joyce gives us a studied portrait of these young women as they flirt with the customers at the bar and share private jokes between themselves breaking into peals of laughter.
Mr. Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, is the first to enter the bar for the four o’clock concert. His regular attendance at the bar is signified as he greets Miss Douce – “O welcome back”. She has been on holiday laying out on the strand all day “tempting poor simple males” as Simon Dedalus (perhaps Simple Simon himself) notes. With characteristic courtliness he responds to her question as to “And what did the doctor ordered today?” with “whatever you yourself say. I think I’ll trouble you for some fresh water and a half glass of whiskey.” Mr. Dedalus fills his pipe after blowing two husky fifenotes through the flue. Miss Douce, busy polishing a tumbler, trills “O Delores, queen of the eastern seas”. This is a line from the light Opera Floradora of 1899 music by Leslie Stuart set on a South Sea Island that produces “Floradora”, being a world famous perfume.
Matt Lenehan now enters the bar. He is a well known sponger and former character from an earlier story in Dubliners, “Two Gallants”. He greets Mr. Dedalus but receives a curt nod in return. Lenehan inquires after Blazes Boylan with whom he has arranged a meeting. Blazes Boylan enters, his stride on the bar floor is signaled by a characteristic creaking of his shoes, obsequiously hailed by Lenehan with “See the conquering hero comes”. This allusion to an aria from Handel’s oratorio King Saul is full of double meaning and it earns Lenehan a glass of bitters as Boylan orders himself a sloegin.
At about the same time Bloom enters the adjoining restaurant and is seated with Richie Goulding who is Simon’s brother-in-law by marriage. Simon treats Richie Goulding with the same distain he had for all his wife’s relatives and this fact rises to Bloom’s consciousness with the strain of a song, “We never speak as we pass by.” The song however, is a minstrel ballad of 1882 by the American Frank Egerton and is sung by a cuckolded husband about his fallen “Nell”. It serves to remind Bloom of his wife’s imminent tryst.
At Lenehan’s urging and for Boylan’s pleasure Miss Douce is induced to perform “Sonnez las cloche”. This little trick consists of snapping the elastic of her garter smartly against her thigh. Bloom observes that it is almost the hour of four, and wonders if Boylan has forgotten about the time. Abruptly, Boylan gulp down his sloegin and springing toward the door is followed by Lenehan’s “Got the horn or what?” Boylan’s arrival and departure has been closely observed by Bloom and is heralded by the jingle of his jaunting cart. The acoustics remind Bloom of his bed at home which makes a similar sound on shifting ones weight. (Beds are very important! Penelope tests Odysseus’ identity by telling him that she had moved their bed in his absence. An impossibility as it was carved from a tree that was part of the foundation of the palace.) The text is punctuated by “jingles” as Bloom pictures Boylan’s approach and entrance to 7 Eccles.
As Boylan departs, he passes Ben Dollard and Father Crowley. They have just finished working on a deal to stave off a debit owed by Father Crowley. Ben seeing Simon at the piano yodels, “Come on Simon give us a ditty.” The conversation ranges to Bloom and his wife Molly referring to her as the daughter of the regiment, an illusion to Donezzetti’s Opera of that name and the fact that her father was himself a military man, Major Tweedy.
Mr. Dedalus is the first to sing. As he sits at the piano, Father Crowley calls for “M’appari tutti amour” the Italian version of a tenor aria from the German language opera, Martha, by Flotow. Simon will sing it in English. He starts to play the piano and an interesting exchange occurs with Father Crowley. “No Simon, play it in the original key one flat.” Simon has chosen a key probably a third lower in pitch to suit his voice and avoid the difficulty of hitting a high B flat. He obediently seeks to transpose the accompaniment to the desired key but falters and Father Crowley takes over the keys. Bloom in the next room hearing but not seeing, appreciates the fact that a pair of hands with a more musical touch are at the keyboard. Hidden in this short passage, we learn that Father Crowley has perfect pitch, while Simon Dedalus and Ben Dollard can play the piano; it is Father Crowley who is truly musical. Bloom cannot see the piano but recognizes that it is Crowley who is now playing as he notes that the piano has been recently tuned. Our attention is called to Bloom’s musical sensitivity throughout the novel. We learn of his discriminating tastes for vocal singers, that he can read music and often thinks philosophically about the nature of music.
As Leopold Bloom and Richie Goulding eat their dinners of steak and kidney, they are waited on by Pat, a deaf waiter, whose presence calls to mind the sailors of Odysseus. Bloom asks Pat to set the door further ajar so he can better hear the music. As Simon Dedalus sings Lionel’s aria from Flotow’s Martha, Bloom meditates on a host of subjects. Phrases from the aria are interspersed with the text to clarify the inner logic of his thoughts. As he thinks about Simon’s voice and the vocal art, he recalls the joke that “tenors get women by the score”.
The aria closes with the lines “Co-ome, thou lost one! Co-ome, thou dear one!”. Joyce gives us the following verbal picture of the singer’s vocal line as it reaches a climax on a B flat and the word “Come” bringing the aria to a close.
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained…soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…. To me!
(Ulysses 11:745)
After the aria is over, Richie Goulding effusively praises Simon’s singing and recollects his rendition of an aria from Bellini’s “La Sonnambula”, “ Tutto e’ scioloto” which translates “all is lost”. In the opera it is sung by the tenor, Elvinor, when he discovers his fiancé has innocently sleepwalked into another man’s bed. This resonates with Bloom’s sense of despair over what he knows is his wife’s eminent infidelity. Richard Ellman points out that “Tutto e’ scioloto” was a favorite phrase that both Joyce and his father would utter as various financial crises, mostly of their own doing, beset their family.
The Martha of Lionel’s aria brings Bloom back to the letter he must write to a Martha with whom he has been secretly carrying on a flirtatious correspondence using the assumed name of Henry Flowers. Bloom removes the stationery from his pocket that he had earlier purchased and asks the waiter Pat for a blotter and begins to write a response to Miss Martha Clifford. He takes the slender cat-gut thong that bound the stationery and plays a game of cat’s cradle stretching it in a basket on his fingers and plucking it as if it were an instrument. It brings to his mind an image of vocal cords and Barraclough’s (a Dublin professor of music) method of voice production. As Bloom begins to write the letter, he seeks to divert Richie Goulding from his real purpose by pretending to be composing an advertisement. He worries that the reverse image on the blotter will disclose the true nature of his correspondence.
It is now Ben Dollard’s turn to sing. He offers “Qui Sdegno”, the Italian version of Zarastro’s Bass aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The audience objects and calls for “The Croppy Boy, Our native Doric”. Then we read, “What key? Six sharps? F sharp major, Ben Dollard said. Bob Crowley’s outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords”. Joyce is again reminding us of Father Crowley’s musical abilities because F sharp major is a difficult key for the pianist and is a key played largely on the black keys of the piano rendering a rich deep sounding quality to the instrument. “The Croppy Boy” is a patriotic ballad set during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 by William B. McBurney. A “Croppy” was a Wexford or Irish rebel. The song tells the tale of a young Irish freedom fighter confessing to a false Priest who is a British Army Captain in disguise. The boy is tricked into confessing his part in the rebellion. The Captain then reveals himself and the hapless Croppy Boy is lead away to his death. Bloom starts to leave but tarries in the hallway to listen as he observes the listeners listening until the song is completed. The audience is deeply moved and Ben is roundly applauded. The song sets Bloom to meditating on the death of his only son Rudy and the fact that he like the Croppy Boy is the last of his race.
The text of the chapter is now punctuated by a crescendo of repeated and increasingly frequent designations of “Tap”. These taps represent the walking cane of the “Blind Stripling”, who is the piano tuner returning to the bar of the Ormond Hotel to retrieve the tuning fork he left on the piano earlier when he tuned it in preparation for the smoking concert.
As Bloom leaves the Ormond Hotel, he has felt a stirring in his intestines which he attributes to the glass of Burgundy temperately consumed with his meal. As he walks along the quay, he looks in the window of Lionel Mark’s antique sales shop at a picture of the Irish Patriot Robert Emmet (1778-1803) who attempted to secure the help of Napoleon for an Irish uprising. When the help did not materialize and the rebellion disintegrated Emmet was captured. He was hung and beheaded in a horribly botched public execution. As Bloom contemplates his last words, “Let no man write my epitaph…. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth then not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.” The words call to Bloom’s mind the title of Mercadante’s oratorio, The Seven Last Words of Christ, which he had earlier been thinking about and continues to confuse with Meyerbeer’s opera, Les Hugenots.. A passing tram’s “Crankcrank” provides the perfect cover for “Prrpffrrppff” which is Joyce’s transliteration of the passing of wind, and the final word of the chapter “Done”.
MUSIC, “SIRENS” AND JOYCE
Zack Bowen writing about Sirens, points out that there are 158 musical references that “crisscross in a welter of song, themes and leitmotifs” during the episode. In summarizing the chapter, I have highlighted but a few of the musical examples that appear throughout the chapter. Cataloging musical allusions in the works of Joyce seems to be a favored scholarly pursuit. In addition to Zack Bowen, pioneers in this area include Matthew J. C. Hogart and Mabel P. Worthington who published their Song in the Works of James Joyce in 1959. Recently, Ruth Baurle, has taken up the torch with a number of publications including Joyce’s Grand Operoar which discusses the role opera played in the Joyce family while they were living in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. She has completed a catalogue of musical allusions in Finnegans Wake, a project which had been started by Mathew Hodgart but left incomplete at the time of his death. This line of scholarship serves the seemingly limitless task of explicating the difficult text of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in particular. For the non-specialist, the relevant question revolves around understanding how these literary devices serve an expressive purpose and further our understanding of the themes in the novel.
We might start by trying to classify the musical allusions that occur in the text. Perhaps on the simplest level, we recognize that a variety of acoustical effects with musical implications are evoked. The peals of laughter of the barmaids Bronze and Gold summon up bells and the art of change-ringing. Simon Dedalus cleans his pipe with a fife note. Boylan’s jaunting cart jangles and the blind piano tuner’s cane taps. There are comments on the production of sound and the organ of hearing as when Miss Kennedy has a patron at the bar listen to the roar of the sea in the conch shell she has brought home from her vacation. There are numerous references to the technique of music itself such as “Numbers”, Bloom’s thinks, “That’s all music is musicmathematics”. Great prominence is given to the lyrics of vocal music either heard or remembered. The songs given particular emphasis in the chapter all touch on betrayal in love and war. “The Croppy Boy” with its tale of betrayal reflects Bloom’s dilemma during this hour of his wife’s tryst with Blazes Boylan. The topic of seduction is tied to several references to Mozart’s Don Giovanni; for example the duet “La ci darem la mano” that Boylan and Molly will sing on their upcoming tour. The minuet from the Ballroom scene in the first act of Don Giovanni which Father Crowley is heard to briefly play between songs is also summoned up by the ‘Tap, - Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, Tap, - Tap, Tap” of the blind piano tuners cane as he comes ever closer to the hotel.
There is the overall construction of the chapter which draws its structure from musical forms. We have discussed the interpretation of the opening 62 lines of text which can be taken as an overture or the tuning of the orchestra before a concert. There are those who see the overall structure as an operatic quintet not unlike the famous quintet in Die Meistersinger which Joyce had personally sung in public. As counterpoint is the art of melding independent melodic lines, so Joyce weaves the actual events occurring in the Ormond Bar and adjacent dinning room with the acoustical symbols of offstage events and Bloom’s famous interior monologue. The notion of counterpoint is reinforced by Joyce who described the technique of the chapter as a “Fuga per cannone”. In a published recollection by Geogre Borach of a conversation with Joyce while walking around the Zurichsee, Joyce is quoted:
I finished the Sirens chapter during the last few days. A big job. I wrote this chapter with the technical resources of music. It is a fugue with all the musical notations: piano, forte, rallentando, and so on. A quintet occurs in it too, as in Die Miestersinger my favorite Wagner Opera …. Since exploring the resources and artifices of music and employing them in this chapter, I haven’t cared for music anymore. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more.
Joyce did recover from this state of creative exhaustion. In November 1930, he was able to write to his friend Paul Ruggiero for Greek and French texts of a song he had composed. Commenting on a French recording he owned of the song, “My wife cried when she listened to it. What the deuce is there in music, and above all singing that moves us so deeply?”
The late Chicago neurologist, Harold Klawans, in his book, Checkov’s Lie, reflected on the power of music to drive out thought. Odysseus wants to hear the song of the Sirens and at the same time resist the lure of its charm. Bloom listens in the hallway of the Ormond Hotel to the final words of the song, “The Croppy Boy”. The listeners in the bar overcome with emotion respond with “growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all treading,….” Once outside the hotel, Bloom muses, “Freer in air. Music. Gets on your nerves.” And further, “Crowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. All ears Not lose a demisemiquaver(16th note). Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Thinking strictly prohibited….” Bloom remains as always apart, he will not allow himself to succumb to the sentimentality of the music. He is the Joyce’s contemporary counterpart of Homer’s Odysseus who must and will find the stratagems to come to terms with and overcome the adversities that he will encounter that warm summer day in Dublin, June 16th 1904.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borach, George. “Conversations with Joyce”, College English, XV (March 1954), 325-7.
Bowen, Zack. Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce. Albany New York:StateUniversity Press of New York, 1974.
Bowen, Zack. Bloom’s Old Sweet Song. Gainesville Florida: University Press of Florida, 1995.
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,1989.
Ellman, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses, New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1955.
Hogart, Mathew J.C. and Worthington, Mabel. Song in the Works of James Joyce. New York: Columbia University Press for Temple University Press, 1959.
Hogart, Matthew J.C. and Bauerle, Ruth. Joyce’s Grand Operoar. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Russel, Myra Teicher. James Joyce’s Chamber Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.