James Joyce and Absolute Music 9781350014220, 9781350014244, 9781350014237, 2017031930

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James Joyce and Absolute Music

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and Culture, University of Bergen, Norway Assistant Editor:  David Tucker, Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr.  Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Dr. Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/​ American avant-​garde 1900–​45 parameters, this series reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods. Series Titles Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, and Erik Tonning Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson

James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, and Susan Reid Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva Samuel Beckett’s “More Pricks Than Kicks,” John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–​1937, Mark Nixon T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry Mead Virginia Woolf ’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood Upcoming Titles Chicago and the Making of American Modernism, Michelle E. Moore Modernist Lives, Claire Battershill Politics and 1930s Literature, Natasha Peryan Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley

James Joyce and Absolute Music Michelle Witen

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Michelle Witen, 2018 Michelle Witen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-​1-​3500-​1422-​0 ePDF: 978-​1-​3500-​1424-​4 eBook: 978-​1-​3500-​1423-​7 Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Witen, Michelle L. (Michelle Lynn), author. Title: James Joyce and absolute music / Michelle Witen. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Historicizing modernism ; 28 | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017031930 | ISBN 9781350014220 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350014237 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Joyce, James, 1882–1941–Criticism, Textual. | Music and literature. Classification: LCC PR6019.O9 Z9546 2018 | DDC 823/.912–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031930 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India

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Contents List of Figures Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations and Editions Introduction: Perceiving in Registers

viii ix x xiv 1

1. Toward a Modernist Condition of Absolute Music

17

2. Joyce’s Early Use of Music

83

3. Joyce’s Fuga per Canonem: A Case of Structure

113

4. Joyce’s Fuga per Canonem: A Case of Effect

175

5. Voided Fugue in “Circe”

195

6. “It’s Pure Music”: Finnegans Wake

217

Conclusion: “Codetta or Da Capo?”

241

Appendix Works Cited Index

245 267 291

Figures 2.1 Musical notation from Early Commonplace Notebook (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​2/​A, IMG 02-​009, 7v [p.14]) 3.1 “Fuga per Canonem” list on front cover of the notebook containing a handwritten, partial draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​9, IMG 09-​002, front cover verso [inner]) 3.2 “Repeat | phrases | episodes” on first page of the notebook containing a handwritten, partial draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​9, IMG 09-​002, 1r [p.1]) 3.3 A line under “Let me there” and crossed fragments from Croppy Boy  and the Love and War duet in the earliest known draft of  “Sirens”  (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​7/​A, IMG 07-​010, 10r [p.19]) 3.4 “By Moulang’s pipes” margin note in the handwritten, partial draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​9, IMG 09-​002, 1r [p.1]) 3.5 Crossed fragment from M’appari in the earliest known draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​7/​A, IMG 07-​011, 10v [p.20]) 3.6 Crossed fragments from M’appari, Love and War, Intermezzo, and All Is Lost Now in the earliest known draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​7/​A, IMG 07-​011, 11r [p.21])

84

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127

158

161

162

Series Editors’ Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-​nineteenth to twentieth-​century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia, or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions, and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-​based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, two burgeoning subdisciplines of Modernism—​Beckett studies and Pound studies—​feature heavily as exemplars of the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of “canonical” authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly “minor” or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted toward the English-​speaking world, studies of non-​Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally based exploration shall also be included. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic “autonomy” employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-​definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers, and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept “Modernism” itself. Similarly, the very notion of “historicizing” Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

Acknowledgments The support of so many, at various stages, made this monograph possible. As such, it is my pleasure to single out the following people, though the thanks that follow are only the tip of the iceberg. First, I  would like to thank David Avital, Clara Herberg, and the staff at Bloomsbury (particularly Ian Buck, Lauren Crisp, Laura Ewen, Shereen Muhyeddeen, and Shyam Sunder) for their patience, support and hard work. I  would especially like to thank the Historicizing Modernism series editors, Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning, for including this manuscript among their titles. I am indebted to my anonymous peer reviewers for their encouragement, useful comments, and suggestions; and I am extremely thankful to Derek Gottlieb for indexing this monograph. I am grateful to the National Library of Ireland for granting permission to reproduce images in this monograph, and for the help of Sandra McDermott and James Harte particularly. This project would not have been possible without the generosity of the University of Basel, the Freiwilligen Akademischen Gesellschaft Basel, the Department of English at Basel, Exeter College at the University of Oxford, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and St John’s College, Oxford. In addition, scholarships from the English Faculty at Oxford, the James Joyce Italian Foundation, the International James Joyce Foundation, and the Zurich James Joyce Foundation during the doctorate enabled interactions with fellow Joyce scholars, which became integral to the development of my ideas. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Fritz Senn, who read and provided valuable feedback on my work, and the wonder that is the Zurich James Joyce Foundation (ZJJF). This appreciation also extends to Ruth Frehner, Frances Ilmberger, Ursula Zeller for their encouragement and helpfulness, and to inspiring members of the reading groups such as Sabrina Alonso, Ronald Ewart, Andreas Flueckiger, and Hansruedi Isler.

Acknowledgments

xi

I wish I could name the entire Joyce community, which is the most supportive and wonderfully quirky group of scholars I  have ever encountered; however, I  will limit my list to those whose time overlapped with mine at Joyce camps, colloquia, workshops, symposia, and as ZJJF scholars, and those who have offered encouragement at various points during this project. In particular, I  would like to thank Antonio Bibbo, Ruben Borg, Tim Conley, Sarah Davison, Hayat Erdogan, Hans Walter Gabler, Keel Geheber, Thomas Gurke, Cleo Hanaway, Judith Harrington, Matt Hayward, Alison Lacivita, Liam Lanigan, Geert Lernout, Norah Maki, Michael Mayo, John McCourt, Erika Mihalycsa, Ivana Milivojevic, Katie Mishler, Nick Morris, Milly Mount, Katherine O’Callaghan, Vike Plock, Teresa Prudente, Tamara Radak, John Scholar, Dirk Van Hulle, Chrissie Van Mierlo, Wim Van Mierlo . . . and, of course, the ever-​expanding “team hashtag” (#thwartchron). I  feel enriched merely by knowing you. There are also many fellow academics and musicians who have offered more concrete support in the form of extended conversations, questions and comments about my work that sent me down fruitful research paths; provided much-​needed advice about linguistic, archival, or musical conundrums; or even chased up transcriptions/​articles for me:  Derek Attridge, Valérie Bénéjam, Lucy Bledig, Peter Cavell, Rachel Cowgill, Luca Crispi, Ronan Crowley, Frances Dickey, Katherine Ebury, Paul Fagan, Anne Fogarty, James Fraser, Michael Groden, Ina Habermann, Daniela Keller, John Kelly, Tim Martin, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Federico Sabatini, Ron Schuchard, David Shackleton, Amanda Sigler, Sam Slote, Robert Spoo, Nicole Suetterlin, David Tucker, and Annalisa Volpone. I also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the readers of my doctoral dissertation, Jeri Johnson and Jean-​Michel Rabaté, whose comments were invaluable in reshaping the monograph, and who have been immensely helpful and supportive long after the doctorate. My colleagues, friends, and students at Basel have provided much mental sustenance, assistance, and blissful distraction. In particular, I would like to thank Ridvan Askin, Werner Broennimann, Philipp Dankel, Andreas Grossenbacher, Franziska Gygax, Andi Haegler, Christian Haenggi, Jens Koehrsen, Daniel Luethi, Thomas Messerli, Sixta Quassdorf, Philipp Schweighauser, Andrew Shields, Alex Van Lierde, and the Hiwis over the years (Rahel Ackermann, Daniel Allemann, Aline Bieri, Alexandra Grasso,

xii

Acknowledgments

Denise Kaufmann, Chantelle Kley-​Gomez, Jasmin Rindlisbacher, Johanna Schuepbach, Laura Waldner, Andrea Wuest). Outside of Basel, I would also like to thank the following scholars and friends for their advice and encouragement: Andrew Allen, Noel Davison, Angela Esterhammer, Marty Kreiswirth, Alan Somerset, Andrew Stirling, and Rick Trainor. I would also like to extend a special appreciation to the students from my Finnegans Wake, Modernism and Music, Ulysses, and Nineteenth-​Century Poetry seminars; the excursion groups to Dublin, Stratford, and the Lake District; and the many who have participated in the annual Bloomsday in Basel. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, I cannot thank all of you individually, but I have cherished your time, contributions, and efforts. I wish to thank my friends and relatives across numerous continents for their unfailing understanding when I could not leave home without my copy of Ulysses and for their indulgence when my language became Wakean. In Switzerland, Nicole Armstrong, Jane Berger, Helen Gilroy, Rico Pajarola, Olivia Poisson, Jennifer Wadsworth, Nicole Witen, the Bunny Brunchers, and the Mariners have my gratitude for always making me smile and successfully tempting me with treats (edible or in the form of their company). Scattered across the world, I would also like to thank Adina Arvatu, Catherine Dale, Amanda Diponio, Ruby Dhand, Jonny Johnston, Tatjana Lalic, Angela Lau, Camilla Oxley, Laura Pizzolo, Kristin Rahian, Anna Robinson, Jeanette Russell, and Katy Woolcock, who have provided years of forbearance, absolution, and sometimes even accommodation. In addition, there is a small group of people who I cannot hope to thank adequately for their feedback, advice, and encouragement over the years: Ron Bush, whose careful insights and critical acumen were instrumental in shaping this project and who read portions of this work even when he was under no obligation to supervise; John Morgenstern, who has always been willing to talk out any critical enigma, lend his discerning eye, and whose intuition has often been an unfailing compass; and my loving family, who have seen me through thick and thin, always ready with the right incentives. In particular, I  am indebted to my mother, Jennifer Witen, for inspiring me with her determination. Finally, words cannot express my gratitude to Michael Berger, whose support and love knows no bounds.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Sections of the introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 3 have appeared in an earlier version in The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts (2016), Genetic Joyce Studies 10 (Spring 2010), and Variations 31 (Spring 2012: 151–​ 72). I extend my thanks to the editors and presses for allowing me to reprint portions of these works and for their peer review suggestions at the time of their publication.

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Abbreviations and Editions James Joyce’s Works and Biographical Material CM Chamber Music in Poems and Shorter Writings, ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-​Ferguson (London: Faber and Faber, 1991) D Dubliners: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Margot Norris. Text ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006) E Exiles (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003) FW Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1975) JJA The James Joyce Archive, ed. A. Walton Litz (volumes 1–​11), Michael Groden (general editor), Hans Walter Gabler (volumes 12–​27), David Hayman, and Danis Rose (volumes 28–​63). 63 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977–​79) JL Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert. Vol. 1 (New York: Viking Press, 1957); ed. Richard Ellmann. Vols. 2 and 3 (New York: Viking Press, 1966). P Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche (London: Vintage Books, 2012) U Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986)

Other Abbreviation NLI National Library of Ireland For manuscript notation on images and figures, I have included the manuscript reference (MS), the image number, the page reference in the manuscript (recto/​ verso as r/​v), and the page reference in the NLI’s collection list (Kenny, Peter. The Joyce Papers 2002: Collection List No. 68. Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2003) in square brackets. For in-​text citation, I have included the manuscript reference (MS) and the page reference in the manuscript (r/​v).

Introduction Perceiving in Registers

I have always insisted that I know little about literature, less about music, nothing about painting and less than nothing about sculpture; but I do know something about singing, I think. —​Letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver on March 18, 1930 (JL 1: 291) Although Joyce’s epistolary insistence that he knew “little about literature [and] less about music” is intended to be a facetious way of emphasizing his knowledge of singing (and, in this case, his ability to recognize the musical talent of John Sullivan), this particular statement is only effective because his self-​assessment of knowing “little about literature,” in the wake of Ulysses, is clearly false modesty. Similarly, his claim that he knew “less about music” is also a canard, and a telling one at that, as it shows that Joyce differentiated between his knowledge of singing and his knowledge of music. That Joyce knew “something about singing” is indisputable. In fact, when critics seek to establish Joyce’s musical background, his accomplishment as a singer is the first quality mentioned. Classically trained, Joyce was known for his tenor voice, and his vocal talent could be traced as far back as a concert with his parents at the Bray Boat Club at the age of six.1 He even considered pursuing a musical career, competing in the Feis Ceoil in Dublin, and performing with one of Ireland’s most famous tenors, John McCormack.2 In almost every recollection of Joyce, some mention of his singing voice surfaces, along with contradictory accounts of his favorite performance pieces,3 his preferred singing language,4 his favored composers, and his ideal genre of music (i.e., opera, folk song, popular ballads, Elizabethan songs, etc.). Although few of these recollections reach a consensus, they do establish that Joyce’s repertoire

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was far-​reaching and diverse, and in constant flux—​a fact confirmed by the plethora of musical references encompassing the full gambit of high-​and low-​ brow (and everything in-​between) throughout all of his works. The vastness of Joyce’s repertoire has not escaped the notice of scholars of Joyce’s works, and by far, the most critical emphasis for musically minded critics has been placed on sourcing his musical allusions. Beginning with Matthew Hodgart and Mabel Worthington’s Song in the Works of James Joyce, which catalogued more than 3,000 allusions in Joyce’s works, this tendency to identify specific references is continued in Zack Bowen’s Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through Ulysses; in Matthew Hodgart and Ruth Bauerle’s Joyce’s Grand Operoar: Opera in Finnegans Wake; in Ruth Bauerle’s The James Joyce Songbook, which provided the sheet music for almost 200 songs referenced or sung by Joyce; and in a collection of essays edited by Ruth Bauerle, Picking Up Airs: Hearing Music in Joyce’s Text. More recently, Judith Harrington’s Suburban Tenor contributes to the discussion with reference to music that Joyce might have been singing. Other approaches span the musicality of Joyce’s prose (particularly in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses), which will be discussed at length in Chapter 3; to a compilation of evidence of Joyce’s musicality in Zack Bowen’s Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music and Sebastian Knowles’ edited collection, Bronze by Gold; to studies that focus on Joyce’s engagement with specific genres of music, such as opera, music hall, and traditional music.5 There are also a number of studies of influence (usually involving Wagner), such as Timothy Martin’s Joyce and Wagner,6 and an evaluation of Modernist techniques in Joyce’s works such as his incorporation of jazz techniques, noise, and atonalism.7 Fundamental and foundational though these studies may be, this study veers away from an analysis of the more observable musical allusions Joyce employs or the metaphorical qualities of musicality that literature may or may not possess, instead falling loosely under what Timothy Martin designates as the structural category of Joyce and music scholarship.8 My interest is to interrogate Joyce’s claim of having written the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses as a fuga per canonem, and his choice of the fugue as his vehicle. This book contends that the rationale informing the fugal format of “Sirens,” and Joyce’s later claim of having written Finnegans Wake as “pure music,”9 demonstrates Joyce’s integration of the growing discourse surrounding the elevation of absolute music, or pure, non-​referential instrumental music (music that does not refer to

Introduction

3

anything outside of itself), wherein the structure and the content are inseparable (i.e., the effect of the fugue is encapsulated by its form or the way in which it is conveyed). This trajectory can be seen in the emphasis on instrumentation in the early works; in his use of the fugue in “Sirens”; in his recycling of the fugal elements of “Sirens” in “Circe”; and in his emphasis on the fusion of sound and sense, the visible and the audible in Finnegans Wake. As is the case with any serious consideration of Joyce’s assertion of having incorporated fugal structure into “Sirens,” one must first establish that Joyce’s knowledge extended beyond that of encyclopedic song repertoire. Although the significance of Joyce’s singing voice has been well established,10 whether or not Joyce had any real knowledge of music theory or trends to support his claim of having achieved musical structure in his works has been the subject of some dispute. Outside of his singing, for example, composer Otto Luening reports that Joyce’s “guitar playing was weak [. . .] and he could not read full musical scores. [Nor did Luening] remember ever hearing Joyce play the piano.”11 However, many other musicians have said the opposite, and Joyce himself seemed to believe otherwise, judging from his repeated epistolary requests for scores of music as well as the presence of several musical scores in his library that would indicate a fairly advanced knowledge of music.12 According to Judge Eugene Sheehy, “When [his mother] was not present [to accompany him] he played by ear his own accompaniments”;13 Anthony Burgess writes:  “Joyce could read music and play the pianoforte”;14 and composer George Antheil remembers: Conversation with Joyce was always deeply interesting. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, this of all times and climes. Occasional conversations on music often extended far into the night and developed many new ideas. He would have special knowledge, for instance, about many a rare music manuscript secreted away in some almost unknown museum of Paris, and I often took advantage of his knowledge.15

In short, we again run into the issues of conflicting reports of Joyce’s musical abilities and comprehension. Beyond these striking anecdotal accounts, there is hard evidence that Joyce had expert knowledge of the relationship between literature and music. Composer Herbert Hughes was known to visit him and transcribe his accompaniment and singing of two Irish “come-​all-​yous” and “publish them as sung by” (JL 1: 287) Joyce himself. Furthermore, most of Joyce’s early volume of poetry,

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James Joyce and Absolute Music

Chamber Music, was set to music. During this process, Joyce was very conscientious in making sure that the musical setting reflected the content of the piece, as demonstrated by a letter to George Antheil dated September 23, 1930, where Joyce criticizes what he perceives to be a wrongly placed musical emphasis: Dear Antheil: Many thanks for your fine setting of my verses for the book. Hughes likes it very much. [. . .] There are just two small points which are not clear to me. Why have you put such a strong musical stress on the preposition in the phrase “Arches on soaring arches” this gives the idea that for the Almighty the construction of the heaven was a work of great difficulty. (JL 1: 293)

Here, his main criticism is that the musical setting does not reflect the content or meaning of the poem. There is also evidence in the James Joyce Archive (JJA) that Joyce himself produced musical settings in the form of a whimsical transcription of the Whittington Chimes (JJA 2: 626–​7); in the adaptation of James Clarence Mangan’s Dark Rosaleen (JJA 2:  620–​23) into a composition with music by James Joyce in 1899 (as recalled by Cranly); and in his setting of his poem Dooleysprudence to music (JJA 1: 310–​15; 2: 624–​5). In terms of his exposure to music, Joyce’s letters suggest that he frequently attended the opera,16 and his specific requests for sheet music from friends and relatives indicate that he was familiar with reading music and musical trends, or at least those he wanted to incorporate into his writings. Regarding his theoretical and historical background, there is no way of knowing what Joyce was or was not reading, but if the lists of books in his library are any indication, he had in his possession Gustavo Magrini’s Manuale di musica teorico-​practico as well as numerous biographies of nineteenth-​century composers such as Bizet, Verdi, Wagner, and Debussy.17 Furthermore, Joyce’s notebooks contain numerous transcriptions of lists of readings, which demonstrate an understanding of music history beyond that of a dilettante. For example, in the National Library of Ireland’s MS 36,639/​02/​A (labeled the “Early Commonplace Book” by Luca Crispi), the following titles appear: Musical Antiquarian Society Percy Society John Wilbye: Works

Introduction

5

Hawkins –​History of Music (c 104) Burney –​History of Music Rimbault –​Bibliotheca Madrigaliana (pp. 11–​28) Davey –​History of English Music (NLI MS 36,639/​02/​A, IMG 02-​007, 6r [p. 11])18

Significantly, Joyce has written down page references next to Hawkins’ History and Rimbault’s Bibliotheca Madrigaliana, which would seem to indicate that Joyce actually consulted these works. Of particular note on this list are the references to Hawkins and Burney, who were both pioneers in the field of music history, and were the first musical theoreticians to create an extended and general record of the living history of music.19 Each had distinctive approaches to music history: Sir John Hawkins’ two-​volume A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) is an exhaustive attempt to trace the pattern of music history, starting with ancient modes and ending with the then present day. Charles Burney’s four-​volume A General History of Music examines the development of music in practice. Unlike Hawkins, Burney traveled to collect his material and anecdotes; for example, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: or, the Journal of a Tour Through Those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music (1773) catalogues the distinguishing elements of the music he heard while traveling through France and Italy.20 This list is particularly relevant because it implies that Joyce was following a specific musical conversation dealing with the changing conceptions of music according to historical trends. The content of the page marked next to Hawkins’ entry (“c 104”) deals with how the “science of harmony was anciently a subject of philosophical enquiry [that] neither attended to the physical properties of sound nor concerned themselves with the practice of music, whether vocal or instrumental.”21 However, with the advent of Christianity, music was placed under the jurisdiction of the sacred, because of “the effects of music, its influence on the passions, and its power to inspire sentiments of the most devout and affecting kind.”22 This emphasis on sound and effect in addition to Hawkins’ gesture toward the dichotomy between vocal and instrumental music would seem to imply that Joyce was following a nuanced train of thought related to absolute music. Aside from this musical background, Joyce’s musical awareness is also evident in all of his writings: his first collection of poetry, Chamber Music (1907),

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James Joyce and Absolute Music

was conceived of as a “suite of songs” (JL 1:  67), and in a letter to George Molyneux Palmer, he outlines the general structuring of the collection to include a prelude and a coda:23 I hope you may set all of Chamber Music in time. This was indeed partly my idea in writing it. The book is in fact a suite of songs [. . .] The central song is XIV after which the movement is all downwards until XXXIV which is vitally the end of the book. XXXV and XXXVI are tailpieces just as I and III are preludes. (JL 1: 67)

In addition, the significance of the term “Chamber Music” is undeniable and emphasizes Joyce’s fidelity to musical forms. Given his loyalty to early music and Elizabethan song,24 there is a clear movement toward the spirit of chamber music, where the “essential attitude [. . .] is a kind of inwardness, a devotion to music for what it says to the player rather than for any effect on the audience, a devotion to the free, pure and self-​sufficient creation of a seemingly abstract beauty.”25 In keeping with the intimacy and interiority motivating chamber music, Joyce’s poetry similarly tells of the “purely personal” (JL 2: 217), inward experience of the poet, and very little of how the audience, or even the beloved, would be expected to respond to these pieces.26 Rather, they evince the poet’s or musician’s desire “to seek diversion and enjoyment through their own playing,” using “chamber music as a means of expressing what is working within them, and of satisfying and solving what seems unsatisfiable and insoluble by any other means of expression,” and therefore is intended “to be played without audience or, at most, to a very small one.”27 In addition to the musical analogy of Chamber Music, each story in Dubliners contains at least one musical reference or comparison to music, with “Clay,” “A Mother,” and “The Dead” even revolving around musical performances.28 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man similarly resonates with musical comparisons, song, and musical affect, even as early as the first page: “He sang that song. That was his song” (P 1); and Exiles arguably contains a subtext to the fairly sophisticated musicological debate presented by Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner, as articulated through the play’s two musical allusions to Bizet’s Carmen and Wagner’s Tannhäuser (see Chapter 2). Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are similarly rife with musical allusion but demonstrate a progression toward the incorporation of musical forms. Rather,

Introduction

7

Joyce’s treatment of music changes in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to reflect what A. Walton Litz categorizes as “a growing concern with the possibility of accommodating musical and literary forms.”29 In these later works, he begins to articulate an explicit musical agenda—​one that demonstrates his shifting notion of the musical and how it can be adapted to literary ends. Although allusions remain an important part of his engagement, Joyce begins to experiment with incorporating musical structure into his works, as demonstrated by his claim of having written the eleventh episode, “Sirens,” as a fuga per canonem: Dear Miss Weaver: . . . Perhaps I ought not to say any more on the subject of the Sirens but the passages you allude to were not intended by me as recitative. There is in the episode only one example of recitative on page 12 in preface to the song. They are all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels. (JL 1: 129)

Similarly, in Finnegans Wake, he demonstrates an increasing preoccupation with the disjunction between what is written and what is heard. Although he uses the 1890s American-​Irish music hall ballad “Finnegan’s Wake” as the titular starting point for Finnegans Wake, and intersperses a plethora of musical allusions and references throughout the text, he also compares the Wake to “pure music.”30 In a letter to Lucia Joyce, he writes “Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it is pleasing to the ear. And your drawings are pleasing to the eye. That is enough, it seems to me” (JL 1: 341); and in another anecdote, Joyce emphasizes the oral quality of Finnegans Wake and the transient nature of the aural experience as one that can cross over into literature: “One day a visiting English-​woman listened to him reading a passage from the book and sternly remarked, ‘That isn’t literature.’ ‘It was,’ Joyce replied, meaning that it was while she was listening to it.”31 Here, like music, the moment of reception or hearing is the point at which the text takes shape from written signs into music or literature. These concerns fit into the changing way in which Joyce approaches music in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Rather than focusing on relaying the experience of listening to music, his musical project becomes one that concentrates on “the importance of sound and rhythm, and the indivisibility of meaning

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James Joyce and Absolute Music

from form,”32 a quality specific to absolute music. In fact, I argue that the subtext of Joyce’s choice of incorporating the fugal format into “Sirens” is also rooted in the discourse surrounding absolute music. Thus, one of the purposes of this study is to situate Joyce’s musical intentions within a previously unidentified trend of absolute music, which is equally evident in the writings of other Modernist authors, such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Aldous Huxley. To understand Joyce’s application of musical structure in his works, one must first observe the development of absolute music within the nineteenth century and how these ideas filtered down to the Modernist consciousness. To this end, the first chapter is devoted to the contextualization of the technological and philosophical developments in nineteenth-​century music, leading to a change in sound that prompted a shift in the perception of the role of music within the artistic hierarchy. Moving chronologically through the writings of Diderot, Kant, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, and Hanslick, Chapter  1 examines the historical precedent that differentiates music and text, focusing principally on the nineteenth century’s elevation of “absolute music,” where “instrumental music, as pure ‘structure,’ represents itself ” and operates as a language above language (or libretto).33 That is to say, musical structures such as the fugue were elevated above all other types of music because their structure was considered inseparable from their content: the subject (fugue) is both its material and its form. In light of the technological innovations that modified the possibilities of instrumental sound, non-​referential music became associated with pure music, and structures such as the fugue and the quartet—​which had been shelved because they did not follow the early nineteenth-​century trend of instrumental music being “a ‘pleasant noise’ beneath language”34—​were reclaimed. This philosophical and musicological debate about the hierarchy of instrumental music also permeated Modernist literary thinking through stated attempts to incorporate musical structure—​specifically those associated with absolute music, like the fugue and the quartet—​into literature; and Joyce was no exception. Although the incorporation of musical elements into literature had, by the time Joyce was writing the “Sirens” episode, become an established trend—​ with forms of absolute music being deemed as particularly conducive toward literary representation—​ Joyce’s use of the fugue was considerably more

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nuanced than that of his peers. However, Joyce’s integration of musical structure into his work was not immediate, and the second chapter examines the trajectory of this shifting engagement with music and musical forms. Starting with Joyce’s essays and notebooks, the chapter traverses the spectrum of Joyce’s early interests in the subjugation of music; the separation of musical notation from versification; the musical analogy of Chamber Music; and evidence of the musico-​philosophical debate of music-​drama in Exiles, before moving into a more in-​depth examination of the deployment of music in Dubliners and Portrait, with a focus on musical affect and instrumental music or accompaniment (rather than libretto). The chapter concludes with a consideration of how music texturizes “Eveline,” “After the Race,” and “The Dead,” foreshadowing Joyce’s use of fugal structure in “Sirens.” With this trajectory and musical background in mind, the third and fourth chapters form a diptych that examines the play of structure and effect in “Sirens,” under the overarching auspice of absolute music. Chapter  3 problematizes Joyce’s claim of having written “Sirens” as an eight-​part fuga per canonem in relation to the double fugue outlined on the front cover of the National Library of Ireland’s MS 36,639/​9. Approaching “Sirens” structurally, this chapter posits that Joyce has indeed succeeded at incorporating the eight parts listed in the manuscript into a double fugue, and that earlier drafts of “Sirens” reveal this crafting. Then, the fourth chapter explores how this fugal structuring leads to the effects of a fugue. Using an interpretation of the Homeric Sirens as a springboard, this chapter explores Bloom’s experience of listening as a parallel to the double fugue. Interpreting “fugue” multifariously, this chapter traces Bloom’s psychological fugue, and his “flight of fancy,”35 as narrative progressions into the temptation toward extinction charted by the structuring of the fugue and its resulting disorientation. The way in which these “seductions of music” (JL 1: 129) are resituated in “Circe” is the subject of the fifth chapter. Joyce’s summarization of “Sirens” in “Circe” as “Music without Words” (U 15.1948) allows for a reading of the episode as absolute music. The disembodied chords and voices of “Sirens” become the language above the libretto, all telling the story of Bloom’s dissolution. Thus, when “Sirens” is repeated in “Circe,” Bloom must conquer the effects of the fugue by separating sound from situation. As such, the flights of fancy to which Bloom succumbed during “Sirens” are transposed into “Circe”

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James Joyce and Absolute Music

with the same soundtrack, but the emphasis is on the denial of sound, and the relegation of “music without words” into its opposite: words without music. Thus, Bloom succeeds at conquering the effects of the fugue and is able to return homewards. Joyce continues to draw upon material from “Sirens” throughout Finnegans Wake. However, after this final reworking of “Sirens” in “Circe,” the voided fugue makes room for the larger musical project of Finnegans Wake and further indicates Joyce’s shifting notion of the musical. Veering away from the play of structure and effect, Joyce revises his musical project into one that is “trending towards the abstraction of music” and that invites both the eye and the ear to participate in the text.36 This final chapter returns to the original Modernist attraction to absolute music as “music for the eye”37 and examines Joyce’s fusion of the visual and the aural as an attempt to make “soundsense and sensesound kin again” (FW 121.15–​16), as demonstrated by his balancing of the oral and written tradition of The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly. Many critics have commented on the aural quality of Finnegans Wake through terms such as Heath’s “optical listening” or Rabaté’s “hearing glance.”38 The final chapter aims to resituate these interpretations into the discourse of absolute music, as a way of elucidating how, to quote Beckett, “form is content [and] content is form” in a musical sense.39 “Begin!” (U 11.64)

Notes 1 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 27. 2 Timothy Martin, Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 6. As is the case with so many musical recollections of Joyce, his participation in the Feis Ceoil is the subject of some debate. Both Stanislaus Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty agree that he received the bronze medal because “his bad sight prevented him [from] scoring at sight reading” (Oliver St John Gogarty, “James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail [Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990], 25). However, in Gogarty’s account, Joyce “indignantly threw [his medal] into the Liffey” (26), whereas Stanislaus claims that “the judge, the composer Luigi Denza, added a note to his report warmly advising Joyce to study for the operatic stage” (Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce,

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trans. Ellsworth Mason [New York: James Joyce Society, 1941], 15). Another school friend, William K. Magee, recollects: “He had persuaded himself to enter as a competitor in the Irish Musical Festival, the Feis Ceoil, but when a test piece was handed to him, he looked at it, guffawed, and marched off the platform” (William K. Magee, “The Beginnings of Joyce,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail [Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990], 35), withdrawing from the competition altogether. Apparently in Joyce’s own retelling of the incident to Arthur Power, he was not only competing against John McCormack (who had participated in 1903, not 1904), but received first prize! Although, “when his name was called[,]‌he had already left the hall in disgust at his performance” (Arthur Power, “The Joyce I Knew,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail [Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990], 84). Since Joyce’s bronze medallion is rumored to be in Michael Flatley’s collection of Irish paraphernalia, one might assume that Stanislaus Joyce’s account is the most reliable in this case. 3 For example, in “The James Joyce I Knew,” James Stephens writes that Joyce loved “operatic music, the music that you can sing—​Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti [and] he also loved folk-​song. He took his hat off to English and German and Italian folk-​song, and said ‘Ah’ at them, but he adored Irish folk-​song” (James Stephens, “The James Joyce I Knew,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail [Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990], 110–​ 11). Meanwhile, Alessandro Francini Bruni claims, “Joyce had an inclination for liturgical chants” (“Recollections of Joyce,” trans. Lido Botti, in Portraits of the Artist in Exile. Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts [Seattle and Dublin: University of Washington Press, 1979], 52). 4 As with Joyce’s taste in music, his language of preference is also inconsistently catalogued in the recollections. For instance, Antonio Fonda Savio and Letitzia Fonda Savio claim that Joyce “sang only in Italian; in fact, he said our language was the only one fit for singing because the stresses fall on the next to last syllables of most words” (Savio, “James Joyce: Two Reminiscences,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail [Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990], 49–​50). And yet, the numerous reports of his preference for Irish folk songs would contradict this grandiose elevation of Italian. Along the same lines, Arthur Power recalls that Joyce “compared the English language to an organ for its sonorous wealth. But several of us protested we preferred the French language for its precision and musical quality. But he would not agree, and to support his argument he quoted passages of the English Bible and then quoted corresponding passages out of the French text” (Power, “The Joyce I Knew,” 83). It seems likely that Joyce’s preference was dependent on his audience (Italian to Italians, etc.).

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James Joyce and Absolute Music

5 See, for instance, the special double issue on Joyce and Opera, guest-​edited by Timothy Martin (James Joyce Quarterly 38.1 and 2 [Fall 2000/​Winter 2001]); Ruth Bauerle and Matthew J. C. Hodgart’s Joyce’s Grand Operoar: Opera in Finnegans Wake (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Mozart Contra Wagner: The Operatic Roots of the Mythic Method,” James Joyce Quarterly 27.3 (1990), 517–​31; and Giorgio Melchiori, “A Lightning before Death: Strauss’s ‘Eine Alpensinfonie’ and Joyce’s Ulysses,” Joyce Studies in Italy: Joyce’s Victorians 9 (2006), 17–​23. For studies on traditional music, see, for example, Martin Dowling, Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014); and Julie Henigan, “ ‘The Old Irish Tonality’: Folk Song as Emotional Catalyst in ‘The Dead,’ ” New Hibernia Review 11.4 (Winter 2007), 136–​48. For explorations of the repercussions of music hall on Joyce’s writings, see Carla Marengo Vaglio, “Futurist Music Hall and Cinema,” in Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema, ed. John McCourt (Cork: Cork University Press, 2010), 154–​7; and Ulrich Schneider, “ ‘A Rollicking Rattling Song of the Halls’: Joyce and the Music Hall,” in Picking Up Airs: Hearing the Music in Joyce’s Text, ed. Ruth Bauerle (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 67–​104. Although his monograph does not deal with Joyce, Barry J. Faulk’s Music Hall and Modernity: The Late Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004) provides an excellent background to the history and development of the music hall. 6 See also Zack Bowen, “Libretto for the Hibernian Meistersinger: Ulysses as Opera,” Papers on Joyce 10/​11 (2004–​5), 57–​70; and Susan von Rohr Scaff, “The Vitality of Music in Mann and Joyce: Wagner in ‘Fullness of Harmony’ and ‘Sirens,’ ” Orbis Litteratum 64.6 (2009), 439–​56. Harry White’s Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) also examines the development of Joyce’s musical allusions through a Wagnerian lens. 7 The studies on Joyce and noise range from onomatopoeia and portmanteau to incredibly nuanced studies of sound, voice, vibration, and artifact. Some examples include Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Methuen, 1988); Derek Attridge, “Joyce’s Noises,” Oral Tradition 24.2 (October 2009), 471–​84; Maud Ellmann, “Joyce’s Noises,” Modernism/​Modernity 16.2 (April 2009), 383–​90; Simon Evans, “A Sense of Pitch: Music and Phonetic Distortion in Finnegans Wake,” Scripsi: James Joyce 1882–​1982 2.1 (1982), 125–​33; Josh Epstein, “Joyce’s Phoneygraphs: Music, Mediation, and Noise Unleashed,” James Joyce Quarterly 48.2 (2011), 265–​90, as well as his full-​length study, Sublime Noise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Andreas Fischer, “Strange Words, Strange Music: The Verbal Music of ‘Sirens,’ ” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York and London: Garland, 1999),

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245–​62; Frank C. Manista, Voice, Boundary, and Identity in the Works of James Joyce (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2006); Peter Myers, The Sound of Finnegans Wake (London: Macmillan, 1992); Vike Plock, “Good Vibrations: ‘Sirens,’ Soundscapes, and Physiology,” James Joyce Quarterly 46.3 and 4 (Spring/​Summer 2009), 481–​96; Jack W. Weaver, Joyce’s Music and Noise—​Theme and Variation in His Writings (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998). For studies dealing with jazz and atonalism, see, for example, Alfred Appel Jr., Jazz Modernism—​ From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), who compares Joyce’s listing to jazz improvisation and claims that “the pulse of Molly’s thoughts and reveries could be called jazzlike,” and a “logaoedic swing” (Appel, Jazz Modernism, 244). More plausibly, Daniel C. Melnick’s Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1994) examines how literature can erupt out of a musical tradition. To a certain extent, Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) examines atonalism, as does David Herman, “ ‘Sirens’ after Schönberg,” James Joyce Quarterly 31.4 (Summer 1994), 473–​94. 8 Timothy Martin, “Music,” in James Joyce in Context, ed. John McCourt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 279. 9 Ellmann, James Joyce, 702. 10 See, for example, André Topia, “Musique joyciennes: le mal entendu,” in L’art dans l’art: Littérature, musique Et arts visuels (Monde Anglophone), ed. Marie-​ Christine Lemardeley, Bernard Brugière, and André Topia (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2000), 127–​46, for a nuanced review of Joyce’s musical mise-​ en-​scène via songs. 11 Timothy Martin and Ruth Bauerle, “The Voice from the Prompt Box: Otto Luening Remembers James Joyce in Zurich,” Journal of Modern Literature 17.1 (Summer 1990), 43. 12 In the appendix to The Consciousness of Joyce, “Joyce’s Library in 1920,” Richard Ellmann lists numerous scores as being part of Joyce’s library. Some examples include the score to Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, stamped J. J.; Beethoven’s symphonies 1–​3, 7–​9; Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice; Wagner’s Siegfried, Das Rheingold, Der Fliegende Höllander (Richard Ellmann, The Consciousness of Joyce [London: Faber and Faber, 1977], 97–​133). 13 Judge Eugene Sheehy, “My School Friend, James Joyce,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990), 12. 14 Anthony Burgess, This Man and Music (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1982), 134. 15 George Antheil, “James Joyce,” in James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E. H. Mikhail (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990), 123.

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16 John McCourt vividly describes the operatic offerings in Trieste to which Joyce might have been exposed in his The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904–​ 1920 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000). Also, Bauerle and Hodgart’s Joyce’s Grand Operoar: Opera in Finnegans Wake provides a full cultural history of the operatic scene in Dublin, Trieste, Zürich, and Paris in the chapter “Opera Geography” (22–​69). There are also two essays in Knowles’ Bronze by Gold (New York and London: Garland, 1999) that summarize Joyce’s exposure to opera in Dublin and Trieste, respectively: Seamus Reilly’s “James Joyce and Dublin Opera, 1888–​1904” (3–​31) and John McCourt’s “Joyce’s Trieste: Città Musicalissima” (33–​56). 17 Michael Patrick Gillespie, Inverted Volumes Improperly Arranged: James Joyce and His Trieste Library (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Research Press, 1983), 95; see also Ellmann, Consciousness, 118. 18 Luca Crispi also sources these items in “A Commentary on James Joyce’s National Library of Ireland ‘Early Commonplace Book’: 1903–​1912. (MS 36,639/​02/​ a),” Genetic Joyce Studies 9 (Spring 2009, n.p.). He writes that the Musical Antiquarian Society and Percy Society are both societies “engaged in publishing old music” (n.p.), with the third item, John Wilbye’s Works, being published by the Musical Antiquarian Society. I would add that the Percy Society was mostly concerned with the compilation of ballads. 19 Interestingly, on the same page, Joyce has drawn a diagram illustrating Aristotle’s four causes (Crispi, “Early Commonplace,” n.p.), wherein he denotes the causa efficilus, causa materialis, causa formalis, and the causa finalis. See also Fran O’Rourke, Allwisest Stagyrite: Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle, in Joyce Studies 2004, vol. 21, ed. Luca Crispi and Catherine Fahy (Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2005). Perhaps it would be too much of a leap to try to connect Aristotle’s causae with absolute music. However, the link between the page of musico-​ historical sources that trace musical trends through absolute music and a diagram where the material cause and the formal cause are placed on the same line seems almost too coincidental. 20 Hawkins and Burney were also rivals, as evidenced by Burney’s satire, The Trial of Midas the Second, wherein he critiques Hawkins’ dry and pedantic approach to music. See Wright W. Roberts, The Trial of Midas the Second: An Account of Burney’s Unpublished Satire on Hawkins’s History of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1933). 21 Sir John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) (London: T. Payne and Son, 1853), 1: 104. 22 Hawkins, General History, 1: 104. 23 This statement is not without its problems: Stanislaus Joyce claimed to have given the collection its order and its title. On the one hand, this casts Joyce’s assertions in the light of retrospective rationalization; however, in “The Woman Hidden in

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James Joyce’s Chamber Music,” Boyle offers a tantalizing comparison between the original and the published arrangement, which demonstrates the extent to which Joyce’s intentions are encapsulated in the ordering. See Robert Boyle, S. J., “The Woman Hidden in James Joyce’s Chamber Music,” in Women in Joyce, ed. Suzette A. Henke and Elaine Unkeless (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 3–​30. See also Marc C. Conner’s “Joyce’s Poetics of Knowledge,” in The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, ed. Marc C. Conner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 143–​69. 24 For an exploration of Joyce’s connections to Joyce and Elizabethan song, see Myra Russel’s “The Elizabethan Connection: The Missing Score of James Joyce’s Chamber Music,” James Joyce Quarterly 18.2 (1981), 133–​45 and “Chamber Music: Words and Music Lovingly Coupled,” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (New York: Garland, 1999), 57–​90; William Martin, Joyce and the Science of Rhythm (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Adrian Paterson, “ ‘After Music’: Chamber Music, Song, and the Blank Page,” in The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, ed. Marc C. Conner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 117–​42; and Matthew Campbell, “The Unconsortable Joyce: Chamber Music,” in The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, ed. Marc C. Conner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 51–​77. 25 Ernst H. Meyer, English Chamber Music: The History of a Great Art (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1946), 1. 26 As Robert Howarth writes: “They are not love verses because they do not really attempt to reach a woman, to speak to her, to persuade her, nor do they really attempt to reflect their writer’s experience of love or even of the fantasy of love” (“Chamber Music and Its Place in the Joyce Canon,” in James Joyce Today: Essays on the Major Works, ed. Thomas F. Staley [Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966], 11–​12). Instead, they are “essays in style,” and “in the arrangement of words to please the ear”; they are the attempts of a young man, using the “scrupulosity of introspection” to “loo[k]‌for the words to register the music of the emotions of a young man of twenty-​two” (Howarth, “Chamber Music,” 11–​14). To support this, in a letter to Stanislaus Joyce on March 1, 1907, regarding his youthful interiority in Chamber Music, Joyce writes: “Yet I have certain ideas I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions may be purely personal” (JL 2: 217). 27 Meyer, English Chamber Music, 1–​2. 28 Martin, “Music,” 275 29 Litz, Art of James Joyce, 62–​3. 30 Ellmann, James Joyce, 702.

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3 1 Ellmann, James Joyce, 702. 32 Ellmann, James Joyce, 703. 33 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7. 34 Dahlhaus, Idea, 9. 35 Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening, 8th edn., shorter version (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 183. 36 Arthur Power, Conversations with Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 106. 37 Aldous Huxley, “Busoni, Dr. Burney, and Others (The Weekly Westminster Gazette, February 25, 1922),” in Aldous Huxley—​Complete Essays, vol. 1, 1920–​ 25, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 229. 38 Stephen Heath, “Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce,” in Post-​Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 58; Jean-​Michel Rabaté, “Lapsus Ex Machina,” in Post-​Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 79. 39 Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, ed. Samuel Beckett, Stuart Gilbert, and Eugene Jolas (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 14.

1

Toward a Modernist Condition of Absolute Music She completes her book with translations of four one-​act plays by Dr Douglas Hyde, three of which have for their central figure that legendary person, who is vagabond and poet, and even saint at times, while the fourth play is called a “nativity” play. The dwarf-​drama (if one may use that term) is a form of art which is improper and ineffectual, but it is easy to understand why it finds favour with an age which has pictures that are “nocturnes,” and writers like Mallarmé and the composer of “Recapitulation.” —​James Joyce, “The Soul of Ireland,” 19031 In the above-​quoted review of Lady Gregory’s Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish (1903), Joyce’s comment that “it is easy to understand why [the dwarf-​drama] finds favour with an age which has pictures that are ‘nocturnes,’ and writers like Mallarmé and the composer of ‘Recapitulation’ ” is particularly baffling. In the endnotes, Kevin Barry asserts that the commonality of the references to Whistler, Mallarmé, and Mendès is that “the art of each aspires to the condition of music.”2 However, what is meant by the condition of music, and its relation to this pejorative term for a one-​act play, is particularly perplexing, especially given Joyce’s own avid interest in music and musical forms. His comment is a clear criticism of the audience’s penchant for the “improper and ineffectual” one-​act play, which given its ableist label of “dwarf drama” would imply a disparagement of the failure of the form, and perhaps even a slur against the abbreviation of a full-​length play.3 On the one hand, the dwarfing of drama would bring into context why a painting that aspires to be a nocturne (i.e., a nocturne that can be absorbed with a single viewing rather than with the commitment to devote an entire evening to the symphony); why a poet such as Mallarmé who was known to aspire toward poésie pure, where

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the sense of poetry is made subordinate to sound;4 and why “the composer of ‘Recapitulation,’ ”5 which would be a summary of everything that has come previously, instead of a meticulous engagement with the entire work, come under such harsh scrutiny. However, the indictment seems to pivot around the “improper and ineffectual” aspect of the one-​act play and its likeness to these other attempts by painting, poetry, and music to be reached beyond the limitations of their art, and perhaps their lack of success in doing so.6 Joyce’s statements against “an age which has pictures that are ‘nocturnes’ ” capture a particular zeitgeist at the start of the twentieth century that also provides a relevant context to his own exploration of the boundaries between music and fiction. This chapter examines these connections further, first with a historical look at the musical developments of the nineteenth century—​a period that signaled a revolution in musical thought, both in terms of performed music and ways of talking about music. Its advent marked several technological innovations that caused the tone, mood, and capabilities of performed music to change significantly. This chapter explains some of these developments and their impact on the philosophical thought of the time by moving chronologically through the theoretical writings of Diderot, Kant, Hoffmann, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Herder, Nietzsche, and Hanslick, eventually contextualizing Walter Pater’s famous statement, “all art is constantly aspiring towards a condition of music” as indicative of absolute music.7 From Pater, it moves to the literary incorporation of musical debates into contemporaneous novels, before finally examining the Modernist literary response to these conversations insofar as they are entrenched in the musical developments of the nineteenth century. Altogether, this, alongside Joyce’s use of music in his early works, provides the context for Joyce’s claim that the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses is written as a fuga per canonem. It also provides the framework for reading Finnegans Wake as pure music, all of which will be explored in the chapters to come.

A new listening experience: Technological developments in nineteenth-​century music and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 The nineteenth century saw significant changes in musical understanding. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the “means to create cheaper and more



Toward a Modernist Condition of Absolute Music

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responsive musical instruments, with technical improvements that strongly influenced the sound of Romantic music.”8 New wind instruments such as the tuba and the saxophone were developed; valves were added to brass instruments, making them more versatile, and enabling composers such as Wagner and Tchaikovsky to write melodies for them that would have been “unplayable in the time of Haydn and Mozart.”9 Improved manufacturing techniques led to the piano acquiring its now standard “cast-​iron frame and thicker strings, giving it a deeper and more brilliant tone” as well as hitherto unknown dynamic capabilities.10 These improvements caused changes in the sound of the music: the piano (soft) and forte (loud) dynamic range of eighteenth-​century music was expanded into the “heaven-​storming crescendos and the violent contrasts of loud (fff) and soft (ppp), which lend such drama to the music of the Romantics.”11 As such, a Beethoven symphony had a drastically different sound from a Haydn symphony; and a Wagner opera had completely different acoustic capabilities than one by Mozart. These acoustic capabilities were mirrored by the development of concert halls and operas that could support these changes in orchestral color. Performances moved outside of palaces and churches into public concert halls, aristocratic and upper middle-​class salons, as well as grand opera houses that could accommodate the increased sizes of orchestras and provide acoustics for their sound and dynamics. The creation of a separate concert space resulted in the development of a concert-​going public who expected to be entertained for longer. As such, even the length of musical pieces changed: “a symphony by Haydn or Mozart takes about twenty minutes to perform; one by Tchaikovsky, Brahms, or Dvořàk lasts at least twice as long.”12 An extreme of these changes could be seen in the advent of the Wagnerian opera, which can last anywhere from approximately three hours to four days (if watching Der Ring des Nibelungen as a cycle). These musico-​theatrical developments culminated in Wagner’s “theatrocracy,”13 which governed activity both on-​and off-​stage. For the audience, Wagner forbade applause between musical numbers and mandated that instead the gallery should remain silent and attentive throughout the performance. To this end, he also introduced the darkening of the seating area and relocated the orchestra into a pit beneath the stage, so that the movement of the instruments would not distract the audience. The implementation of the

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orchestra pit also overcame the problem of the instrumental music overpowering the vocals.14 Wagner even decided upon the seating arrangement of the orchestra for optimal acoustic projection, allowing him to extend the orchestra into the now-​established one-​hundred-​piece ensemble. All of these developments led to a completely different terminology for the composer and for the listener: terms such as dolce (sweetly), cantabile (songful), dolente (weeping), mesto (sad), maestoso (majestic), gioioso (joyous), and con amore (with love, tenderly) were introduced into musical scores and became standardized musical vocabulary for instruments as well as for the voice. Up until this point, the only musical instrument capable of achieving these effects would have been the human voice; thus, the critical focus had always centered on vocal music. Significantly, however, the dynamic range normally attached to the voice now became applicable to instruments. These terms demonstrated the heightened expectations for the potential of music to encapsulate a range of emotions, as well as illustrating greater versatility in the composer’s intentions (both in its realization and in the intentions themselves), which became ever more explicit in the type of music being composed and the composer’s accompanying notes (program music).15 This was also reflected in the ways of talking about music: musical reviews changed, as did the way in which music was treated in the philosophical writings of the time. A striking example of this alteration in the written treatment of music is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s field-​changing review of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 (1810). First performed in Vienna on December 22, 1808, this piece indicated a transition from Beethoven’s previous compositional style—​which, until then, had been imbued with the influences of his teachers, Mozart and Haydn, whose quartets he had spent some time copying and dissecting—​into what is generally known as his middle period.16 In his Symphony no. 5, Beethoven transformed the symphonic form,17 while making full use of the increased parameters of horns, strings, and woodwinds, the effects of which resonate in Hoffmann’s review. The unsigned review initially appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, after the Leipzig performance of Beethoven’s Fifth in June of 1810. Hoffmann’s review was extremely innovative:  for the first time a reviewer did not simply announce that a composer’s piece had been performed in “x” venue by “y” orchestra, and featured “abc” soloists. Rather than focusing on the event, Hoffmann combined the emotions evoked by the music with its



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historical relevance,18 a technique that would later be emulated by Pater in his description of La Gioconda in his essay “Leonardo Da Vinci.” As Mark Evan Bonds writes in Music as Thought, “it would not be an exaggeration to label this review as the most influential piece of music criticism ever written” and one that “established a new standard for written discourse about music by integrating emotional response and technical analysis in unprecedented detail.”19 Not only did Hoffmann’s review become a landmark in styles of reviewing music, but it also, for the first time, articulated the presence of a debate surrounding instrumental music and the hierarchies within music. In his review, Hoffmann wrote, “When music is spoken of as an independent art the term can [only] properly apply to instrumental music, which scorns all aid, all admixture of other arts, and gives pure expression to its own peculiar nature.”20 Only when combined with music are words granted the ability to “burst [their] fetters”: “Any passion—​love, hate, anger, despair, etc.—​presented to us in an opera is clothed by music in the purple shimmer of romanticism, so that even our mundane sensations take us out of the everyday into the realm of the infinite.”21 Hoffmann’s ostensible focus was to situate Beethoven’s music in the Romantic consciousness: in addition to the reference to “the purple shimmer of romanticism,” Hoffmann also decreed music to be “the most romantic of all arts—​one might almost say the only one that is purely romantic.”22 However, when Hoffmann revised and compiled this review into Kreisleriana in 1814, he shifted the focus away from its Romanticism, even going so far as to write sarcastically that only “madmen” go about classifying music as “the most romantic of all arts [. . .] through [which] they can perceive the sublime song of—​trees, flowers, animals, stones, water!”23 Instead, Hoffmann’s new focus was the purpose of music, which, in his formulation, was to distract and allow for the suspension of thought: With regard to music, however, only incorrigible despisers of this noble art would deny that a successful composition—​that is to say, one that keeps within proper bounds, and consists of one pleasant melody followed by another, without hysteria or foolish indulgence in endless contrapuntal passages and resolutions—​exercises a wonderfully soothing charm. It completely relieves one from having to think. It certainly prevents any serious thoughts from arising, and produces a gentle succession of pleasantly diverting impressions, of which one is not even individually aware.24

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Thus, in his interpretation, a truly successful composition was one that raised the listener above mundane thoughts into pleasant diversion; and a successful composer was able to use the secrets of harmony as “magical prescriptions from which he conjures forth an enchanted world” whose sole aim is to “affect the human heart.”25 That being said, repeating a statement from his initial review, the type of music that remained most fully able to achieve this effect was instrumental music because it was the most independent of the arts and the freest from external influence. Honing in on the independence of music from words, Hoffmann argued that “music could express that which lay beyond the grasp of conventional language,” thus allowing listeners access to “the realm of the infinite,” and appointing instrumental music as the highest of all art forms.26 By elevating instrumental music over other forms of music, Hoffmann both channeled and was the first to articulate an argument that had been starting to gain significance in nineteenth-​century philosophical writings—​namely, the superiority of instrumental music over vocal music.

Perceiving in registers: The changing place of music within the hierarchy of the senses and nineteenth-​century philosophical thought One of the reasons Hoffmann’s review was so impactful is because prior to 1800, music was approached philosophically, rather than through the differentiation between instrumental and vocal music. European philosophers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder saw music in terms of an artistic hierarchy, examining how music affected particular senses, which had been similarly hierarchized. Within this hierarchy, music, without the aid of poetry, was seen as depicting indeterminate sensations. However, as instrumental music developed a greater capacity of expression with the technological changes wrought by the turn of the century, as shown by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s response to Beethoven, approaches to music changed proportionately, and types of music began to be ranked by philosophers and composers alike. For example, the subsequent writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, and Walter Pater all demonstrate how musical affect and referentiality took precedence over a hierarchizing of the senses.



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Denis Diderot’s “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb” (1751) provides a salient example of how music was approached in the eighteenth century. Diderot explains his experimentation with and classification of the senses as follows: “My idea would be to analyse, as it were, a man, and to examine what he derives from each of his senses [. . .] I consider that of all the senses the eye was the most superficial, the ear the proudest, smell the most voluptuous, taste the profoundest and most philosophical.”27 In addition to laying out this sensual hierarchy, he also examines how this stratification can be determined based on the arts, questioning how a man deprived of a sense would react to an object or art specifically targeted toward this sense.28 His purpose in doing so was to show that a “decomposed” or “sensorially deprived subject” would be forced to compensate for this loss of sense by communicating through another sense’s medium, thereby demonstrating the need to “communicate metaphorically” and thus expose “the linguistic transformation of experience that fully conventional or naturalized sign systems render imperceptible.”29 As an example of this sensual deprivation, Diderot questions how a man born deaf and dumb would react to the “ocular music” of a “sonata in colour,”30 when he lacks any conception of sound or musical impressions beyond the observed reactions of people listening to music. Thinking that this man would be particularly vulnerable to and unprejudiced by such a performance, Diderot problematizes the synesthesia of being able to see music. The deaf-​mute’s only orientation to music would be his observation of its effects on fellow listeners, “the evidences of joy or grief depicted on our countenances and in our gestures as we listen to beautiful music.”31 In this way, the effects of music are equivocated to the effects of “speech” or “visible objects,” where the sensorially deprived man imagines that music is “a peculiar manner of communicating thought” with musical instruments being the “different organs of speech.”32 Diderot dismisses this notion that musical instruments might be able to communicate outside of words and concludes, “only a man who had never heard music or a musical instrument could have happened on such a theory.”33 His scorn for this understanding of music is entrenched in his belief that music is incapable of definite impressions and that, without the prior experience of listening, a deaf man cannot conceive of an art that has “no definite meaning” and “no distinct impressions.”34

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This understanding of music as an art without explicit meaning or impression is similarly evidenced in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), where he writes that music is an art that “speaks through nothing but sensations without concept,” and whose fleetingness “leaves us with nothing to meditate about.”35 As such, within his artistic hierarchy—​where his criterion is “the analogy between the arts and the way people express themselves in speech so as to communicate with one another [through] word, gesture and tone”36—​music falls under the category of “the art of the play of sensations,”37 which occupies “the lowest place among the fine arts.”38 Music ranks poorly because it is merely “a language of affects,”39 appealing only to a sense of hearing, formulaically making use of certain chords and configurations to evoke prescribed emotions. While it is an art that has a universality of sensation, this universality is indiscriminate and disorganized in its aesthetic appeal. That is to say, despite the mathematical ratios involved in evoking its language of sensation, its effect on the listener is to produce “an unspeakable wealth of thought” that cannot be organized and therefore does not draw upon “higher cognitive powers.”40 By “proceed[ing] from sensations to indeterminate ideas,” the impressions left by music are “transitory”: they are either “extinguished entirely or, if the imagination involuntarily repeats them, they are more likely to be irksome to us than agreeable.”41 Kant does not specify what type of music he is evaluating in this hierarchy.42 However, it is notable that his pupil (and, after 1780, his vehement opponent), Johann Gottfried Herder, expresses a similar argument in his dialogical essay “Does Painting or Music Have a Greater Effect? A Divine Colloquy.”43 In the debate over the greater effectiveness of painting or music, the personification of Painting censures Music for her obscurity: After all, can anyone say what tones mean to express? Do they not speak the most confused tongue of half-​sensations [. . .], which always, like sand or the ocean waves, wash around us, roar around us, and do not nearly complete their effect in us? They are gone, like the brook, like the breath of wind; and where now is their image, where their voice and language?44

As with Kant, music is again represented as a disorganized mélange of inarticulate, transient sensations. Only with words can the impressions of music be clarified: “you [Music] must admit that without my [Poetry’s] words, without



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song, dance, and other actions, the sensations you awaken in men will always be obscure.”45 This very obscurity leads to Apollo’s agreement with this assessment of music at the conclusion of the discussion: “You, Music [. . .] stir the feelings and passions, though in an obscure manner, and require a guide, an elucidator, who will at least enable you to have a more determinate effect on man’s understanding.”46 Thus, when called upon to decide between music and painting, Apollo decrees that while “it is enough that you are both my daughters,” Painting is “the draftswoman for the understanding” and Music is “the speaker of the heart,” with Poetry as “the pupil and teacher of both.”47 As such, all arts are equal, but some (poetry) are more equal than others. These writings of Diderot, Kant, and Herder provide an apt representation of how music was classified within the arts by European philosophers prior to 1800, as well as a striking contrast to the changing perception of instrumental music during Musical Classicism (1750–​1820). Until the turn of the century, instrumental music had been considered “a deficient type or mere shadow of what music actually is,” given the Platonic paradigm of harmonia, rhythmos, and logos,48 where language was as important as rhythm and tones. However, during the nineteenth century, instrumental music—​or absolute music—​ became an increasingly valid form of musical expression. Rather than seeing words as an elucidator of music, the absence of “prescribed story or text to hold the music together” indicated that “the story [became] the music itself.”49 Thus, the emphasis shifted away from the symbiosis of music and text and instead toward musical structure as reflective of musical content.50 As a result, a new musical hierarchy developed within music, juxtaposing absolute music, or “music that is purported to operate on the basis of pure configurations untainted by words, stories, or even affect,”51 against music that required text. Carl Dahlhaus, the most noted critic of absolute music and contributor to the development of the field of musicology as presently practiced, argues that absolute music was prioritized because of the “conviction that instrumental music purely and clearly expresses the true nature of music by its very lack of concept, object, and purpose.”52 He writes, “Instrumental music, as pure ‘structure,’ represents itself. Detached from the affections and feelings of the real world, it forms a ‘separate world for itself.’ ”53 As such, absolute music can be considered “an autonomous art, justified aesthetically by this very autonomy.”54 Although composers use the vocabulary of vocal music to describe

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this autonomy (i.e., the desire to “make the instruments ‘sing’ ”55), the motivating concept of absolute music was that instrumental music was freed from the stigma of “a ‘pleasant noise’ beneath language” into “a language above language.”56 By 1800, the tone of musical criticism and philosophical writings that dealt with music within the hierarchy of the arts underwent significant changes. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth was symptomatic of the growing emphasis on instrumental music as the only autonomous art. Under the auspice of absolute music, the main tenets of critics like Kant and Diderot were inverted into support for the agenda of later critics such as Hoffmann, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, and Pater. For example, Diderot’s claim regarding the obscurity of music and its inability to convey meaning without textual elucidation, and Kant’s complaint that music is merely a language of sensation that leads to indeterminate ideas without a lasting impression, become the very reasons why, for Hoffmann, music is the medium through which the infinite can be expressed beyond the grasp of conventional language; why, for Schopenhauer, music defies representation and elevates itself above the world of perception; why, for Hanslick, the tonal content of music, inseparable from its form, allows music to be the most aesthetically pure of all the arts; and why, for Pater, “all art is constantly aspiring towards a condition of music.”57 Kant and Herder’s grievance about the opacity of musical tones become the basis for Hanslick’s argument that “the tones out of which a piece of music is made, which as its parts constitute it as a whole, are the content itself.”58 Thus, nineteenth-​century aesthetic criticism witnessed a shift away from the theorization of the senses toward the effects of the arts and representation and, when it came to music, the establishment of a hierarchy within music proportionate to its referentiality. Within this framework, Hoffmann’s 1810 review set the tone by privileging instrumental music as the only independent art and prioritizing its ability to free itself from language in order to express the infinite. Independently of Hoffmann, though along the same lines, Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1818,59 directly refutes Kant’s assessment of representation in music in The World as Will and Representation. Music, he argues, is not Kant’s formulaic “language of affects,” which fails to cultivate the mind by speaking to us through sensations without concepts because it is the emotion itself. For Schopenhauer, “music does not express this or that particular and



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definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves [.  .  .] in the abstract, their essential nature.”60 In the world of Ideas,61 music is not “a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.”62 As a result, music is the most “powerful and penetrating” of the arts, “for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.”63 He deliberately rebuts Kant’s complaint regarding the contrived, formulaic nature of music by writing that “the numerical ratios into which it can be resolved are related not as the thing signified, but only as the sign.”64 Because music defies representation and replication, being the thing itself, its effects are not transient, but ineffable: a man listening to a symphony “gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony [. . .] Yet, if he reflects, he cannot assert any likeness between that piece of music and the things that passed through his mind.”65 Thus, Kant’s indictment of musical transiency, for Schopenhauer, is proof of its ineffability. Through this inability to articulate an impression after listening, Schopenhauer also connects music to the infinite: The other arts [.  .  .] objectify the will only indirectly, in other words, by means of Ideas. As our world is nothing but the phenomenon or appearance of the Ideas in plurality through entrance into the principium individuationis (the form of knowledge possible to the individual as such), music, since it passes over the Ideas, is also quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts. Thus music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things.66

Here, Schopenhauer emphasizes that music passes over the world of Ideas, and therefore exists independently of the phenomenal world. In other words, because music does not refer to anything concrete, it cannot be a copy of the world of Ideas. As such, music needs no mediator and is understood profoundly in man’s “innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself.”67 Schopenhauer’s proposition hinges upon the differentiation between music with words and music without. He examines the origins of opera as an

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attempt to “shape that invisible, yet vividly aroused spirit that speaks to us directly, to clothe it with flesh and bone, and thus to embody it in an analogous example. This,” he claims, “is the origin of the song with words and finally of the opera.”68 In this statement, one can detect an echo of Hoffmann’s claim that music endows other arts with the ability to “burst [their] fetters.”69 However, Schopenhauer’s evaluation is more extreme than that of Hoffmann: he believes that, while the combination of music with words increases the impact of the other arts (i.e., “music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and from the world at once appear in enhanced significance”),70 it does so at the expense of diluting its own power. If it “tries to stick too closely to words,”71 for example, in a pairing with poetry, it cannot speak to us in its own language. Thus, if one tries to force music to imitate concepts, it can no longer “express the inner nature of the will itself, but merely imitat[e]‌its phenomenon inadequately.”72 As such, Schopenhauer argues, the language of music must be “mere tones,”73 as therein lies its universality and objectification of the will rather than its representation of the Idea.

Absolute music: The elevation of instrumental music in the nineteenth century Schopenhauer’s account of the value of music planted the seeds for what blossomed into a controversial debate about the value of instrumental music, and subsequent philosophical writings about music demonstrated a partaking in this musical conversation. For example, Wagner, who considered himself to be a follower of Schopenhauer, viewed reading The World as Will and Representation as a formative moment in his musical and intellectual education, and believed himself to be elaborating upon Schopenhauer’s theories in his critical writings.74 Unfortunately, Schopenhauer did not return the compliment and, upon attending a production of Der fliegende Holländer, commented that Wagner “did not know what music was.”75 Despite Schopenhauer’s indictment, Wagner nevertheless plays an important role in the articulation of the changing perception of music, and, be it through support or disagreement, the writings of critics such as Hanslick, Nietzsche, and Pater reflect and contribute to the changing perception of music into its elevated status in the nineteenth century.



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Like Hoffmann, Wagner was also inspired by Beethoven’s symphonies, similarly expounding upon the independence of instrumental music and the composer’s ability to make instruments “speak” a purely musical language that suspends the listener’s self-​awareness. In fact, Wagner’s term for instrumental music, “absolute music,” was first used in his 1846 programmatic compilation for Beethoven’s Symphony no.  9, where he describes the composer’s instrumentation as “breaking the bounds of absolute music.”76 Wagner’s original use of the term was an attempt to name the “endless and imprecise expressiveness” that he ascribed to pure instrumental music, and he commended Beethoven’s ability to harness this imprecision.77 However, in his 1849 essay, “The Artwork of the Future,” Wagner’s application of the phrase became controversial. Here, it was used in reference to pure, instrumental music that had been “ ‘released’ (or ‘absolved’ [abgelöst], hence ‘absolute’) from its original motivation in dance” and, as a result, strove “to be ‘redeemed’ (erlöst) by a poem (as in the finale of the Ninth Symphony) or by a drama from the unhappy isolation where it languishes without an aesthetic raison d’être.”78 Thus, in pursuance of his agenda for the Gesamtkunstwerk and music-​drama,79 Wagner’s ideas aligned more with the earlier views of Herder and Kant, which designated the need to clarify non-​representational instrumental music with the help of words. As a result, Wagner redefined his initial classification, so that absolute music became synonymous with “the death of instrumental music,”80 and, in Wagner’s later writings, denoted “ ‘detached’ music severed from its roots in speech and dance, and thus simply abstract.”81 Wagner revised, summarized, and clarified all his previous writings in his 1860 essay “The Music of the Future.”82 Strangely still considering himself in agreement with Schopenhauer, Wagner took up his predecessor’s ideas about the pairing of music with drama or poetry as an enhancement of drama, and conversely argued that music is equally benefitted by drama, as drama takes the unintelligible aspect of music and makes it comprehensible through the words of the poet-​dramatist. He posits that music is capable of overriding the possibility of miscommunication in language because of its universal intelligibility:  its conversion of “the language of ideas into the language of feelings,” he writes, “would bring the deepest secrets of the artistic conception to general comprehension, especially if this comprehension can be made distinct through the plastic expression of dramatic representation.”83

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For Wagner, both poetry and music had reached their limits of comprehension:  just as poetry had reached “the limits of [its] branch of art, where it already seemed to touch music,”84 so too had music reached its limit of imprecise expression. In order for poetry to increase its effectiveness, it must therefore become “entirely musical,” borrowing music’s “rhythmic order” and making use of “the almost musical dressing of words in versification.”85 Thus, words could become more musical and the “inexhaustible power of expression” of music could be harnessed by words to “bring his subject into actual representation.”86 Drama then takes the power of the poet, who has combined words with music, and allows the spectator to participate in the realistic, onstage action, and thereby yield “to the guidance of those new laws through which music makes itself so strangely intelligible.”87 By combining poetry, drama and music, “the great equalizing power” of music frees the other arts from their “fetters,”88 in order to meet the demand “not for musical-​ dramatic representation alone, but for the poetic-​musical conception of a work of art.”89 Wagner’s subjugation of instrumental music into poetic music-​drama unleashed a wave of criticism, effectively dividing theoreticians into those who privileged instrumental music over vocal music, and those who did not. Nietzsche, who initially aligned himself with Wagner’s aesthetics, began to question Wagner’s understanding of Schopenhauer even during the most loyal stage of his discipleship (i.e., when he was writing The Birth of Tragedy). In the fragment “On Music and Words,”90 Nietzsche’s rereading of Schopenhauer becomes a “covert argument on behalf of ‘absolute’ music,”91 that runs counter to Wagner’s treatise on behalf of harnessing music through language. Beginning with Schopenhauer’s statement that music is a “copy of the will itself,”92 Nietzsche highlights the obscurity of such a claim:  “even Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ is nothing but the most general manifestation of something that is otherwise totally indecipherable for us.”93 Nietzsche elaborates that the origin of music “must lie in the lap of the power that in the form of the ‘will’ generates a visionary world” and therefore “the origin of music lies beyond all individuation,”94 or individual awareness of the world of Ideas, because music has no presupposition of a listener. Although this would seem to oppose Schopenhauer, particularly Nietzsche’s italicized comment, “the will is the subject of music but not its origin,”95 his train of thought strays away from a critique of Schopenhauer into one of Wagner’s



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misappropriation of Schopenhauer. Also taking Beethoven as his example, Nietzsche condemns Beethoven’s use of Schiller’s poem in Symphony no.  9, stating that music does not lend force to Schiller’s words, but rather both the music and the lyrics suffer: “the music blinds us totally to images and words and we simply do not hear anything of Schiller’s poem.”96 Thus, Beethoven does not expose “the limits of absolute music,”97 as argued by Wagner, because the listener still “confronts [the symphony’s finale] as absolute music.”98 When listening to the fourth movement of the symphony, “the content of the words drowns unheard in the general sea of sound,” and, because of this, “the text that is used is not understood by us in accordance with its conceptual meaning, but serves in the context of a musical work of art solely as material for vocal song and does not disturb our musically oriented feeling.”99 As such, it “does not prompt any rational representations in us”;100 rather, it exists as the subject of the will, whose origin lies beyond individuation or preconceived audience, existing only for itself. This worry that music has been enchained to poetry runs counter to Wagner’s claim that music has been absolved of its dance origins and clarified by poetry and drama, but is in accordance with Schopenhauer’s contention that the power of music is diluted when its language consists of words instead of tones. That being said, Nietzsche half-​heartedly tries to agree with Wagner’s contention about the limits of lyrical poetry validly encroaching on the territory of music, but he also argues that the attempt to gloss music with a “conceptual language” is counterintuitive: Imagine, after all preconditions, what an undertaking it must be to write music for a poem, that is, to wish to illustrate a poem by means of music, in order to secure a conceptual language for music in this way. What an inverted world! An undertaking that strikes one as if a son desired to beget a father! [. . .] While it is certain that a bridge leads from the mysterious castle of the musician into the free country of images—​and the lyric poet walks across it—​it is impossible to proceed in the opposite direction.101

For Nietzsche, opera is a reversal of the individuation he outlines as integral to absolute music: opera is founded on “the listener’s demand to understand the words”;102 whereas absolute music is not circumscribed by any images or words. He reasons that “to place music in the service of a series of images and

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concepts, to use it as a means to an end, for their intensification and clarification,” is nothing short of “ridiculous.”103 Nietzsche furthers this criticism of Wagner’s desire to harness music into a “conceptual language” in his later work, The Case of Wagner (1888), where he accuses Wagner of having “made music sick”: Wagner’s art is sick. The problems he presents on stage—​all of them problems of hysterics—​the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility [. . .] not least of all the choice of his heroes and heroines—​consider them as physiological types (a pathological gallery!)—​all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt [. . .] Wagner represents a great corruption in music. He has guessed that it is a means to excite weary nerves—​and with that he has made music sick.104

Although Nietzsche’s later critique of Wagner borders on the histrionic, the rational seeds of his argument in the earlier fragment, “On Music and Words,” are still detectable. Again, he emphasizes the preposterousness of reversing the process by which the lyric poet musicalizes his words by articulating Wagner’s crime as an attempt to reverse the natural order of sound, then gesture: “Wagner begins from a hallucination—​not of sounds but of gestures. Then he seeks the sign language of sounds for them.”105 In so doing, Nietzsche accuses Wagner of “abandon[ing] all lawfulness and, more precisely, all style in music in order to turn it into what he required, theatrical rhetoric, a means of expression, of underscoring gestures, of suggestion, of the psychologically picturesque.”106 Thus, Wagner tries to turn music into a language, subservient to the interpretation of words:  he is always “presupposing that one first allows that under certain circumstances music may be not music but language, instrument, ancilla dramaturgica.”107 When Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem in 1888, he was, by then, perhaps Wagner’s most vociferous critic. However, he was by no means the first of Wagner’s ex-​disciples to oppose his aesthetics. As early as 1854, Eduard Hanslick had published On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-​Schönen),108 in which he articulated the battle between program music and absolute music, effectively defining the field of musical aesthetics and establishing himself as the leading critical antagonist of Wagner. One of Hanslick’s main points of contention with Wagner was his notion that music should be made referential and representative. He problematizes



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Wagner’s claim in Opera and Drama that “the mistake of opera as an art genre lies in this[:]‌that a means (music) is made an end, but this end (drama) is made a means,” calling this a “false basis.”109 As music is both end and means, to yoke it to drama, as is the case with opera, is to subjugate it to words: This is false because an opera in which the music is always and actually used as a means for dramatic expression would be a musical monstrosity [. . .] The union of poetry with music and opera is a morganatic marriage. The more closely we look at this union, into which musical beauty enters with its specifically dictated content waiting for it, the more illusory its indissolubility seems to us.110

In other words, by dictating the content of music—​a point on which Hanslick spends an entire chapter of his treatise—​it loses its ineffability. For Hanslick, music suffers when enslaved by words, as demonstrated by the example of recitative: “in recitative, music is reduced to the status of a handmaiden and loses its autonomous significance.”111 Instead, it must “fit its own declamatory expression to the accentuation of individual words, attempting no more than to be a faithful imitation of specific, usually rapidly changing states of mind.”112 Nor does Hanslick stop with opera; his critique also extends to representational instrumental music or program music (i.e., music with “literary or pictorial associations, the nature of which is indicated by the title of the piece or the ‘program’ supplied by the composer,” including, but not limited to, incidental music, program symphonies, concert overtures, and symphonic poems113). He argues that attaching a title or image to music forms a connection so “loose and arbitrary that nobody hearing the music would have thought of its putative subject if the composer had not from the outset prompted our imagination through explicit designation of the piece.”114 Furthermore, providing a program or title to a piece designates “the representation of a specific content” and the composition becomes “unintelligible without the program.”115 As a result, music is forced to “represent some subject matter outside itself,” instead of being heard as “music and nothing else.”116 Thus, Hanslick justifies his application of musical aesthetics to non-​representational instrumental music alone: Of what instrumental music cannot do, it ought never be said that music can do it, because only instrumental music is music purely and absolutely [. . .] In a piece of vocal music, the effectiveness of tones can never be so precisely

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separated from that of words, action, and ornamentation as to allow strict sorting of the musical from the poetical. Where it is a matter of “content” of music, we must reject even pieces with specific titles or programs.117

In so doing, Hanslick clearly expresses the dichotomy between absolute music and music that requires the elucidation of words, be it vocal or program music. Hanslick rejects the idea of verbally dictated content and instead elevates instrumental music as a language above language, with musical tones as its only content. As the title of his work indicates, Hanslick’s main focus is to pinpoint the musically beautiful. From the outset, he addresses previous (mis)understandings of aesthetics: “Musical aesthetics up to now has for the most part laboured under a serious methodological error, in that it occupies itself, not so much with careful investigation of that which is beautiful in music, but rather with giving an account of the feelings which take possession of us when we hear it.”118 Resonating as a rebuttal to Kant’s disdainful critique that music is merely a language of sensation without concepts, Hanslick differentiates between feeling and sensation, with the implication that Kant’s language of sensation is, in fact, a language of feeling: “Sensation is the perception of a specific sense quality: this particular tone, that particular colour. Feeling is becoming aware of our mental state with regard to its furtherance or inhibition.”119 He concludes that an account of feelings cannot determine the beauty of music, as feelings are a purely subjective response and cannot be attributed to the content of music. Having removed the extraneous, according to Hanslick, what is left is the music itself. Taking up the previous assertions of “Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Herbart, Kahlert, etc. [regarding] the contentlessness of music,”120 Hanslick elevates this very lack of content into the principle of music. The content of music is its tones, or tonal language: “Content in its original and proper sense means what a thing holds, what it includes within itself. In this sense, the tones out of which a piece of music is made, which as its parts constitute it as a whole, are the content itself.”121 Furthermore, these tones are inseparable from the sound patterns that comprise the content of music: In music, we see content and form, material and configuration, image and idea, fused in an obscure, inseparable unity. This peculiarity of music, that it possesses form and content inseparably, opposes it absolutely to the literary



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and visual arts, which can represent the aforementioned thoughts and events in a variety of forms [. . .] In music there is no content as opposed to form, because music has no form other than the content.122

The tones that contain the language or content of music are also the musical patterns that inform the structure of music. This leads to a definition of musical aesthetics, where the form and content lead to the impression of the beautiful, which does not exist outside itself. For Hanslick, “Beauty has no purpose at all. For it is mere form, which, of course, according to its content, can be applied to the most diverse purposes, without having any purpose of its own beyond itself.”123 Since instrumental music is also dependent on form, the beauty associated with music is also “intrinsically and specifically musical.”124 The fugue, in particular, is a telling example of how the form of the music is matched by its content: the musical structure of the fugue is intended to induce flight and disorientation in its listener, and thus its form is inseparable from its effect. Fittingly, it was around this time that Bach was being rediscovered, and the fugue was being reclaimed from the Baroque by nineteenth-​century composers and philosophers, and elevated as the highest form of absolute music because of its highly structured form and content.

“All art constantly aspires towards a condition of [absolute] music”? When taken together, these philosophical ideas and technological innovations for the sound of music provide the framework and context for Pater’s often quoted statement from his 1868 Studies on the Renaissance, that “All art constantly aspires towards a condition of music.”125 However, what is meant by this condition of music? And what type of music is being referenced here? F. C. McGrath in The Sensible Spirit: Walter Pater and the Modernism Paradigm, suggests that Pater’s aesthetic theories formulated a substantial portion of the Modernist literary and aesthetic program.126 As such, an in-​depth problematization of Pater’s motivation in elevating music to such an extent is useful when situating the role of music in the works of writers such as Joyce. Within Studies on the Renaissance, Pater’s dictum appears in the chapter on “The School of Giorgione,” which, as the title would indicate, ostensibly

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focuses on the artistic secrets of Giorgione’s school of art and its attainment of the “perfect interpenetration of the subject with colour and design.”127 In reality, the school of Giorgione only makes its belated appearance in the chapter after an extensive recapitulation of previous aesthetic criticism involving a hierarchy of the arts, and culminating in an elevation of music as the “ideally consummate art” because of the inseparability of its content from its form.128 Pater’s “condition of music” acts as the conclusion to a delineation of the charms of the individual arts, after stating that “one of the functions of aesthetic criticism is to define [the] limitations” of the individual arts.129 Like Wagner, Pater envisions the various forms of art as continually encroaching upon each other’s “untranslatable sensuous charm” in order to gain greater validity: Sculpture aspires out of the hard limitation of pure form toward colour, or its equivalent; poetry also, in many ways, finding guidance from the other arts; the analogy between a Greek tragedy and a work of Greek sculpture, between a sonnet and a relief, of French poetry generally with the art of engraving, being more than mere figures of speech.130

Each art is defined by its limitations, and is only able to surpass these limits by “pass[ing] into the condition of some other art,” and, through this Anders-​ streben, or “partial alienation from its own limitations,” is lent greater force.131 Within this hierarchy, “all the arts [are] in common aspiring towards the principle of music; music being the typical, or ideally consummate art, the object of the great Anders-​streben of all art, of all that is artistic, or partakes of artistic qualities.”132 He concludes this assessment with his aforementioned declaration: “all art constantly aspires towards a condition of music.” However, despite this involved explanation of the dissolution of other arts into the “principle of music,” the exact meaning of this principle, let alone its “condition,” remains unclear. When trying to pinpoint the “condition of music,” most critics ignore the context of the aforesaid musical debates as well as changes in musical sound and trends during the time in which Pater was writing Studies on the Renaissance, treating Pater’s artistic hierarchy as revolutionary rather than a culmination.133 However, it is difficult to ignore the echoes of previous debates



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present in Pater’s language.134 For example, Pater elevates music as the highest form of art because of its “perfect identification of matter and form”: It is the art of music which most completely realizes this artistic ideal, this perfect identification of matter and form. In its consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend and aspire.135

This statement is so close to Hanslick’s argument that instrumental music represents the complete unification of “content and form,” that it almost reads as a paraphrase: In music, we see content and form, material and configuration, image and idea, fused in an obscure, inseparable unity. This peculiarity of music, that it possesses form and content inseparably, opposes it absolutely to the literary and visual arts, which can represent the aforementioned thoughts and events in a variety of forms [. . .] In music there is no content as opposed to form, because music has no form other than the content.136

As previously discussed, for Hanslick, the “content” or “matter” of music is its tonal language. Furthermore, only instrumental music is able to achieve this fusion of form and content because of its independence from words. Pater is also trying to define the quality that makes music musical by eliminating text from the equation: to locate “the element of song in the singing; to note in music the musical charm, that essential music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.”137 This attempt to locate the ineffable in music is suspiciously close to what was being said to elevate instrumental music over all other types of music, and shows Pater’s engagement with the prevailing arguments regarding absolute music, “consist[ing] of the conviction that instrumental music purely and clearly expresses the true nature of music by its very lack of concept, object, and purpose [. . .] as pure ‘structure,’ [it] represents itself. Detached from the affections and feelings of the real world, it forms a ‘separate world for itself.’ ”138 Pater even goes so far as to delineate the limits of poetry—​one can “clearly distinguish between the matter and the form”—​ which can only be superseded when it “seems to pass for a moment into an

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actual strain of music.”139 Given Pater’s pointed distinction between poetry and music, together with his description of the Anders-​streben as arts lending one another new force through combination, it follows that the “music” to which he refers in his famous pronouncement about the “condition of music” must be music without words, or absolute music, the nature of which had changed proportionate to technological innovations and risen to prominence in the nineteenth century. Given these parameters, one can understand the predominance of music within Pater’s ordering of the arts; however, it is not until he elaborates upon the listener’s aesthetic perception that he defines a condition of music. Here, again, Pater echoes Hanslick and Schopenhauer’s reappropriation of Kant’s accusation regarding the impression of music as only ever being “a transitory one,”140 whose effects “agitate the mind more diversely and intensely,” but only “temporarily.”141 Like Schopenhauer, who describes the complete loss of autonomy connected with listening to music (a man listening to a symphony “gives himself up entirely to the impression of a symphony [.  .  .] Yet, if he reflects, he cannot assert any likeness between that piece of music and the things that passed through his mind,”142 Pater also focuses on the suspension of self-​awareness that enables the listener to hear the music as a matter of “pure perception” rather than allowing the intellect to dissect the listening experience into its composite parts: Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material; the ideal examples of poetry and painting being those in which the constituent elements of the composition are so welded together, that the material of the subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the “imaginative reason,” that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-​born with its sensible analogue or symbol.143

Accordingly, the experience of music comes closest to this “pure perception” because its essence is rooted in its “present[ation of] no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.”144 Thus, for Pater, music is an art free from association: an interpretation



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of a piece of music comes from within the listener and the power of music lies in the ability of the listener to lose him or herself in the music, to be “bur[ied] under a flood of external objects [. . .] calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action,” none of which can be recalled except as a “group of impressions.”145 The union of “form and matter” (or structure and content) means that the music no longer exists as separable units, but strikes our intellect and senses simultaneously, presenting “one single effect to the ‘imaginative reason.’ ”146 Because of this inseparability, music gives our “flame-​like” existence the ability “to burn always with this hard, gem-​like flame” and “give nothing but the highest quality to [our] moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”147 Thus, the ability to succumb to the condition of music is the effect, if not the requirement, of absolute music, which defies separation because its material and composition are intrinsically “welded together” in order to “present one single effect.”148 In other words, Pater’s condition of music is, in fact, a condition of absolute music, and one that is heavily informed by the aforementioned nineteenth-​century discourses.149 As we shall see, this understanding of the inseparability of form and content becomes particularly relevant to a reading of Ulysses, as it informs the manner in which Joyce employs absolute music in the “Sirens” episode. The fugue, as the highest form of absolute music, uses its subject (fugue) as both its material and its structure. “Sirens” is structured as a fugue but the episode also incorporates the thematic material of the fugue in order to generate the condition of music of the fugue (flight, forgetting). Bloom’s susceptibility to the condition of music is demonstrated by his dissolution of self into music and the degeneration of the narrative into the swarm of Bloom’s impressions. This will be discussed in great detail in Chapters 3 and 4. Furthermore, one can see a recycling of these conversations in Samuel Beckett’s assessment of Finnegans Wake in Our Exagmination: “Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—​or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”150 The echoes of previous philosophical conversations in this statement further support Joyce’s claim of Finnegans Wake being “pure music” and a potential reading of the text as absolute music.

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Musical repertoire and reviews in Du Maurier’s Trilby: A case study These musical conversations were not limited to the philosophical writings of the time, and the exertion of their influence is evidenced in the literature that was being produced concurrently. Although examples of this can be seen in numerous works of nineteenth-​century fiction, George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) provides a particularly good paradigm for the way in which these philosophical ideas manifested in the literary representation of music, both in terms of the repertoire chosen as well as in the fictionalized response of the musical figures and reviewers of the 1850s. Elements of Trilby are also recycled in Ulysses, but this will be addressed in Chapter 5. Trilby begins as a heart-​warming story about a bohemian group of artists in 1850s Paris. However, midway through, it becomes a gothic horror story about the mesmerism of the titular heroine by the sinister Eastern European, Svengali, whose hypnosis transforms her from an incorrigible girl into the singing diva known as “La Svengali.” Most critics examine Trilby as a prototype for gothic literature, in the same vein as Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera, focusing on the pseudoscience of mesmerism; the depiction of agoraphobia (stalwart Britain versus morally questionable France and the sinister East); representations of Jewishness; Victorian femininities and masculinities; and the homosocial triangles among the friends.151 However, as a “dependable autobiographical memoir of Paris in the 1850s,” which is “as much an invention as a reality, and as much a projection of the 1890s as a recollection of the 1850s,”152 Du Maurier also portrays a nuanced cultural portrait that epitomizes fin-​de-​siècle literary engagement with the wider cultural discourse surrounding the changing attitudes toward musical form, specifically in its articulation of the debate between referential and non-​referential music. Trilby’s repertoire for the concert, in which she establishes herself in Paris as “La Svengali,” progresses from unaccompanied folk song, to art song, to absolute music, demonstrating Du Maurier’s satirical twist on the arguments surrounding absolute music. The first piece, Au Clair de la Lune is described as an “absurd old nursery rhyme” that Trilby transforms with her ability to convey emotion in her voice: “Her voice,” the narrator reports, “was so immense in its softness, richness, freshness, that it seemed to be pouring itself out from



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all round; its intonation absolutely, mathematically pure; one felt it to be not only faultless, but infallible; and the seduction, the novelty of it, the strangely sympathetic quality!”153 This is followed by Schumann’s Der Nussbaum from the song cycle Myrthen, where “the interplay between a graceful but melodically attenuated vocal line [to the poetry of Julius Mosen] and a diaphanous texture in the accompaniment produces a finely wrought dialogue” between voice and accompaniment.154 However, Du Maurier again emphasizes vocal virtuosity and the audience’s loss of identity into the condition of music that is Trilby’s voice. Neither the words nor the tune are as important as her voice: Here is about as beautiful a song as was ever written, with beautiful words to match, and the words have been made French for you by one of your smartest poets! But what do the words signify, any more than the tune, or even the language? The “Nussbaum” is neither better nor worse than “Mon ami Pierrot” when I am the singer; for I am Svengali; and you shall hear nothing, see nothing, think of nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali!155

Ironically, this statement seems to be a direct retaliation against Schumann’s articulation of his artistic intentions:  “The singing voice is hardly sufficient in itself; it cannot carry the whole task of interpretation unaided. In addition to its overall expression, the finer shadings of the poem must be represented as well—​provided that the melody does not suffer in the process.”156 Instead, following Pater and Hanslick’s articulation of the experience of art, “a matter of pure perception . . . present[ing] one single effect to the ‘imaginative reason,’ ”157 Trilby’s singing voice supersedes all as it moves beyond words, melody, and language. In the second half of her concert, Trilby only sings two pieces. The first, Malbrouck s’en-​va-​t’en guerre, like Au Clair de la Lune, is described as “just a common old French song—​a mere nursery ditty.”158 With Au Clair de la Lune, the nuances of the repeated verses are conveyed by Trilby’s “mere tone, slight, subtle changes in the quality of the sound”;159 however, with Malbrouck s’en-​va-​t’en guerre, the narrator devotes a considerable amount of narrative to describing the accompaniment. It begins quite simply “just a few obvious ordinary chords”—​“a ‘pleasant noise’ beneath language”160—​but later the accompaniment and words become equally weighted: “the accompaniment slows and elaborates itself; the march becomes a funeral march, with muted strings [. . .] Richer and richer grows the accompaniment. The

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mironton, mirontaine, becomes a dirge!”161 In this description, the accompaniment is as important as the vocalization, thus fitting into the trends of nineteenth-​century art song which privileged the technical innovations being made to instruments as complementary to vocal dexterity. Furthermore, this emphasis on instrumentation prepares the way for Trilby’s final piece, where her voice and the instrumentation will be fused into her final “song without words” in her performance of Chopin’s Impromptu in A Flat.162 Here, the reader witnesses the apotheosis of the arguments regarding absolute music. Borrowing from the language and contentions surrounding this critical debate, the narrator elevates Trilby above vocal and instrumental music into a category of her own. She “vocalizes that astounding piece of music that so few pianists can even play,” superseding the interpretation of any prior instrument or performer: “no pianist had ever played it like this; no piano has ever given out such notes as these.”163 Trilby’s technique is indisputable, but, more importantly, she is able to do the impossible:  she is able to sing a piece of absolute music and have a greater effect than any instrument. The narrative passage describing Trilby’s song emphasizes that she is singing a “song without words,”164 absolute music by definition. This very lack of verbal guidance transforms the listener into a Hanslickian “musical listener,”165 completely susceptible to the music. The music itself is non-​referential but her vocal interpretation of the piece recalls memories in the listener that corresponds with her tone quality, rather than anything she might be saying: Waves of sweet and tender laughter, the very heart and essence of innocent, high-​spirited girlhood, alive to all that is simple and joyous and elementary in nature—​the freshness of the morning, the ripple of the stream, the click of the mill, the lisp of the wind in the trees, the song of the lark in the cloudless sky—​the sun and the dew, the scent of early flowers and summer woods and meadows—​the sight of birds and bees and butterflies and frolicsome young animals at play—​all the sights and scents and sounds that are the birthright of happy children, happy savages in favoured climes—​things within the remembrance and the reach of most of us! All this, the memory and the feel of it, are in Trilby’s voice as she warbles that long, smooth, lilting, dancing laugh, that shower of linked sweetness, that wondrous song without words; and those who hear feel it all, and remember it with her.166



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The narrator draws upon common experience, the inarticulate sounds, smells, and delights of childhood, to describe the effects of the communicated expression. The listener’s response, much like Pater’s review of La Gioconda and Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5, is one of personal experience: the emotions evoked by this “wondrous song without words” is one of remembrance, evoking “all the sights and sounds that are the birthright of happy children.” In keeping with the discourse surrounding absolute music, Trilby’s song is capable of “excit[ing] such feeling as melancholy, gaiety, and the like,”167 but the specification of this response is in the jurisdiction of the listener, rather than being dictated by textual content. As a performer, Du Maurier distances Trilby the character from Trilby the singer:  Trilby herself ceases to be human when she sings. One listener, describing having heard her performance, dehumanizes her into a piano:  “Mais quand je vous dis que j’l’ai entendue, moi, La Svengali! et même qu’elle a chanté l’Impromptu de Chopin absolument comme si c’était un piano qu’on jouait!”168 However, she is even more than a pianist, more than a piano: “no pianist had ever played it like this; no piano has ever given out such notes as these.”169 Even her technique is superhuman: she “hardly seem[s]‌to breathe as the notes [come] pouring out, without words—​mere vocalizing.”170 Trilby’s voice becomes a “mere vocalizing,” an instrument for the music, invading the listener with her irresistible sound, which is expressed non-​referentially as notes without words, without pictures:  “It is irresistible; it forces itself on you; no words, no pictures, could ever do the like!”171—​echoing Hanslick’s proclamation that “With a few chords, we can be transported into a state of mind which a poem would achieve only through lengthy exposition [. . .] The effect of tones is not only more rapid but more immediate and intensive. The other arts persuade, but music invades us.”172 This move from simple folk song, to art song, to absolute music with her choice of repertoire shows the changing taste in music in terms of the valuation of instruments, as does the way in which Trilby’s vocalization of the music is described. In a folk song, the emphasis is on the vocals; the art song has equal emphasis on voice and accompaniment; and absolute music takes the voice out of the equation altogether, involving the complete consumption of Trilby the singer into Trilby the instrument. However, the reviews of Trilby’s

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performance are equally telling, and connect ever more succinctly to the contemporary, European, musicological debates. Though the reviews themselves are largely fictional, Du Maurier names actual composers and reviewers such as Théophile Gautier, Hector Berlioz, and Richard Wagner, each of whom are aesthetically important in their own right, thereby locating the fictional Trilby inside the musical consciousness of nineteenth-​century Paris. Théophile Gautier was a theater critic for La Presse (until July 1855), but is best known for his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, where he repossesses the term “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) as the aesthetic mantra of the nineteenth century. The heroine of Mademoiselle de Maupin is also an opera singer, known as La Maupin, based on the real-​life La Maupin, Julie D’Abigny, providing an intertextual link between La Svengali and La Maupin.173 The second critic, Hector Berlioz, is mostly remembered for his symphonic poems (program music) and his Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, but during his time, he was also “the leading musical feuilletonist in Paris,” producing prolific numbers of pamphlets and articles on new operas and singers, concerts of the Société des Concerts, “new instruments and musical gadgets, his own impressions of music abroad, and important musicians visiting France.”174 In Trilby, both Gautier and Berlioz write in praise of La Svengali, Gautier writing an “elaborate rhapsody, ‘Madame Svengali—​Ange ou Femme’ ” and Berlioz writing a “famous series of twelve articles entitled ‘La Svengali,’ ” for La Lyre Eolienne.175 By contrast, “Herr Blagner” or Richard Wagner is disparaging. However, given Wagner’s lack of popularity with the Parisian audience at this time, his very disapproval seems to guarantee Trilby’s commercial success. Wagner’s review of Trilby is summarized as an “intemperate diatribe” on “the tyranny of the prima donna called ‘Svengalismus’ ”: Or the intemperate diatribe by Herr Blagner (as I will christen him) on the tyranny of the prima donna called “Svengalismus”; in which he attempts to show that mere virtuosity carried to such a pitch is mere viciosity—​base acrobatismus of the vocal chords, a hysteric appeal to morbid Gallic “sentimentalismus”; and that this monstrous development of a phenomenal larynx, this degrading cultivation and practice of the abnormalismus of a mere physical peculiarity, are death and destruction to all true music; since



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they place Mozart and Beethoven, and even himself, on a level with Bellini, Donizetti, Offenbach—​any Italian tune-​tinkler, any ballad-​monger of the hated Paris pavement! and can make the highest music of all (even his own) go down with the common French herd at the very first hearing, just as if it were some idiotic refrain of the café chantant!”176

Wagner’s journalistic writings and reviews in Paris date from 1839–​42, and among them number several essays that deal with the virtuoso artist, the value of Beethoven and Mozart, and the street or plebian quality of Bellini, Donizetti, and Offenbach. Although the review of La Svengali is fictional, the language is strikingly similar to Wagner’s scathing review-​essay, Der Virtuos und der Künstler, where he describes Rubini’s portrayal of Don Ottavio as overly dependent upon the employment of the “trick” of his “famous trill from A” on the easily gulled French audience: Then slowly came a stir:  unrest, sitting-​up, shrewd glances, fan-​play, all the symptoms of a sudden straining of attention in a cultured audience. “Ottavio” was left alone on the stage; I believed he was about to make an announcement, for he came right up to the prompter’s box:  but there he stayed, and listened without moving a feature to the orchestral prelude to his B flat aria. This ritornel seemed to last longer than usual; but that was a simple illusion: the singer was merely lisping out the first ten bars of his song so utterly inaudibly that, on my discovery that he really was giving himself the look of singing, I thought the genial man was playing a joke. [. . .] I could have laughed aloud, but the whole house was still as death: a muted orchestra, an inaudible tenor; the sweat stood on my brow. Something monstrous seemed in preparation: and truly the unhearable was now to be eclipsed by the unheard-​of. The seventeenth bar arrived: here the singer has to hold an F for three bars long. What can one do with a simple F? Rubini only becomes divine on the high B flat: there must he get, if a night at the Italian Opera is to have any sense. And just as the trapezist swings his bout preliminary, so “Don Ottavio” mounts his three-​barred F, two bars of which he gives in careful but pronounced crescendo, till at the third he snatches from the violins their trill on A, shakes it himself with waxing vehemence, and at the fourth bar sits in triumph on the high B flat, as if it were nothing; then with a brilliant roulade he plunges down again, before all eyes, into the noiseless.177

As in Du Maurier’s imagined review, the opera singer is compared to a circus performer who employs cheap tricks to elicit a response from his “cultured”

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audience. The singer “lisp[s]‌” the start of the piece “inaudibly”; the orchestra is “muted”; then, like a “trapezist,” he “mounts his three-​barred F,” making the dynamics appear further contrived with his “pronounced crescendo,” before moving to the “trill on A,” which he “shakes” rather than using the voice’s natural vibrato, before sitting “triumph[antly] on the high B flat” before again returning to inaudibility. These tricks, this “brilliant roulade,” are further undermined by the wrong emphasis on the F rather than the B-​flat: “What can one do with a simple F? Rubini only becomes divine on the high B flat: there must he get, if a night at the Italian Opera is to have any sense.” The emphasis of the top note as the climax of Italian opera also contrasts against Wagner’s own doing away with grand numbers and replacing it with continuous melody, in order to move away from the contrived aspect of Italian opera, which he views with distaste.178 In the fictionalized review, Du Maurier even draws upon Wagner’s well known disdain of Italian opera179—​where “no other task has ever been set before the musician than to write a number of airs for special singers, in whom dramatic talent was entirely a secondary consideration,” and where drama is used as an excuse to exhibit “the performer’s art”180—​as a way of establishing his fictional Trilby within a non-​fictional milieu. Du Maurier’s choice of Wagner as a disapproving critic is far more nuanced than first glance would have us believe. As previously stated, Wagner’s contemptuous review biases the reader into thinking that Trilby’s performance is the opposite of Wagner’s assessment, if only because the author’s attitude toward Wagner as Herr Blagner (“blague” being the French for joke) is scathing in and of itself. This attitude is in keeping with the prevailing opinion of Wagner after the infamous premiere of Tannhäuser in Paris in 1861. Du Maurier fittingly chooses to temporally situate Trilby’s performance in the “early sixties,”181 thus squarely analogizing the controversy surrounding Trilby’s recital with that of Tannhäuser. Annegret Fauser elaborates in “Cette musique sans tradition:  Wagner’s Tannhäuser and its French Critics”:  “Few incidents in music history created such waves—​politically, culturally, aesthetically, and biographically—​as the three performances of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Académie Impériale de la Musique in Paris on 13, 18, and 24 March 1861.”182 Emperor Napoleon III’s invitation to Wagner to stage the opera had been initiated by the politically unpopular Princess Metternich; in order to demonstrate their objections, “the members of the Jockey Club disrupted



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three performances at the Opéra . . . with aristocratic baying and dog-​whistles before Wagner was allowed to withdraw the production.”183 The audience was in such an uproar that Wagner withdrew his work after only three performances, and the event pitched artists, music lovers, and critics in both Paris and Europe against each other for months to come. Thus, by the 1860s, the Parisian audience was contemptuous of Wagner and he, in turn, was equally derisive, as evidenced in his subsequent dictates to correct audience misbehavior. In this sense, Wagner’s turn against Bellini’s manipulation of the audience through “fixed forms” is as much a condemnation of the gullible audience as it is a denunciation of the artist who panders to such an audience.184 By this point, Wagner had abandoned his idealization of absolute music, and saw drama and poetry as a way of redeeming instrumental music into intelligibility. Thus, the fictional Wagner’s complaint is not merely that La Svengali’s virtuosity borders on a parlor or circus trick, made possible only by the “monstrous development of a phenomenal larynx.”185 Rather, her “song without words” (Chopin’s Impromptu), and the way in which she renders this absolute music in such a way as to make it intelligible to the “common French herd at the very first hearing” without the aid of poetry or drama,186 is an affront to the carefully cultivated theatrocracy (in opposition to abstract, instrumental music) Wagner was trying to promote. By tapping into this conflict between referential and non-​referential music, Du Maurier’s establishes his fictional Trilby within a non-​fictional milieu, channelling the culture of the music critic, from Gautier to Berlioz to Wagner, as well as the preferences of the theocratic consumer culture of the 1860s. In so doing, Du Maurier paints a nuanced portrait of late nineteenth century engagement with the changing attitudes toward musical form that problematizes and epitomizes the “tyranny of the prima donna” and the place of referential music (program and vocal) within the increasing predominance of absolute music.

From absolute music to Modernism Between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the 1920s, music traveled through several phases. Although the increased or decreased valuation of absolute music was not the catalyst for the stylistic changes that occurred

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through these decades, the defining preference for absolute over program music (and vice versa) can be detected in the types of compositions that emerged with each musical period. From Romanticism through to neo-​Classicism, the emphasis on form became increasingly pronounced until finally, in the 1920s and 1930s, the complete rejection of nineteenth-​century indulgences in favor of eighteenth-​century aesthetics (fugues, sonatas, and quartets) was complete. The following examines some of the significant characteristics of these periods before exploring the extent to which Modernist writers were aware of these changes in music. Authors such as Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ezra Pound all claimed to have incorporated forms of absolute music in their writing. Arguably, their choice of forms such as the fugue and the quartet was no accident, and, furthermore, demonstrates their engagement with the musical conversation surrounding absolute music. By the 1890s, early nineteenth-​century Romanticism had developed into the post-​Romantic operas of Puccini, Mascagni and Leoncavello. At the same time, in a parallel movement to Impressionist painters, composers such as Debussy, Satie, and Ravel tried to replicate the same freshness of first impressions in music that Impressionist painters (i.e., Monet, Manet, Dégas, Renoir, Pissarro) had attempted to capture on canvas. Just as Impressionist painters “rejected the grandiose subjects of Romanticism,” leaving the constraints of “studio lighting, perspective, and line” to focus on “ ‘unimportant material: still lifes, dancing girls, nudes; everyday scenes in middle class life, picnics, boating and café scenes,”187 so too did Impressionist composers turn away from the “large forms of the Austro-​German tradition, such as symphonies and concertos.”188 Instead, they chose to compose “short lyric forms—​preludes, nocturnes, arabesques”—​with descriptive titles, thereby emphasizing their allegiance to program music.189 Stylistically, Impressionist painters “juxtaposed brush strokes of pure colour on the canvas, leaving it to the eye of the beholder to do the mixing.”190 Satie, writing to Debussy, suggests that French composers ought to employ methods similar to French painters: “Why shouldn’t we make use of the methods employed by Claude Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-​Lautrec, etc.? Nothing simpler. Aren’t they just expressions?”191 Thus, to achieve a similar effect, they



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began to employ “whole tone scales”;192 “forbidden progressions” like the repetition of chords duplicated immediately on a higher or lower tone (also known as parallel or gliding chords); progressions using intervals of ninths to change the orchestral coloration; and “dissonance as a value in itself ” that had no need of resolution, as the listeners would then be forced to complete the fragments and progressions for themselves.193 In order to create a more dreamlike sound, they introduced the use of mutes on trumpets and horns, drum mufflers, cymbal brushes, and capitalized on the lower registers in flutes and clarinets to create a softer, more gossamer sound “in the same way that Impressionist painting moves from one colour to another in the spectrum, as from yellow to green to blue.”194 Impressionism moved into post-​ Impressionism, and Expressionism (c. 1918)  developed in response to the increasingly formulaic nature of the impressionistic chord progressions. Composers such as (early) Schönberg, Berg, and Webern returned to absolute music and reinvented the tonal system to move “beyond tonality.”195 In this way, they redefined musical language again outside of the major/​minor limitations of music: “The musical language of Expressionism,” Machlis writes, “favored a hyper-​expressive harmonic language marked by extraordinarily wide leaps in the melody and by the use of instruments in their extreme registers.”196 By the 1920s, compositions and philosophies had moved into neo-​Classicism, which completely rejected the “more extreme indulgences of the recent past,”197 epitomized by Wagner and Symphonic Beethoven. Instead, it advocated a return to eighteenth-​century musical forms (i.e., fugue, counterpoint, quartets). Composers such as Busoni, later Stravinsky, later Schönberg, Bartók, and Holst, to name some key representatives of this movement, rejected Romanticism and Expressionism, choosing instead to emulate the forms of Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Pergolesi. Machlis summarizes: they “turned away from the symphonic poem and the Romantic attempt to bring music closer to poetry and painting. They preferred absolute music to program music, and they focused attention on craftsmanship and balance, a positive affirmation of the Classical virtues of objectivity and control.”198 These trends were better recapitulated by Aldous Huxley during his tenure as a music critic for The Weekly Westminster Gazette from February 18, 1922 until June 2, 1923. In his 1922 review of the double-​piano performance

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of Ferrucio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica—​“Busoni, Dr.  Burney, and Others”—​Huxley expands upon these patterns, summarizing the musical fashions and ricochets that would have led to the appeal of Busoni’s version of “old Bach, continued and developed in a great, massive, grimly intellectual piece of counterpoint.”199 Beginning with Dr. Charles Burney, whose General History of Music outlined the prevailing musical taste of the eighteenth century,200 Huxley describes Burney’s preference for the “modern music” of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach over that of J. S. Bach’s “sacrific[e of] melody and expression” in order “to crowd into both hands all the harmony he could grasp.”201 Huxley explains the trends of music in terms of reactions: the revolt against emotionless horizontal polyphony led to a return to simpler melody:  “In Doctor Burney’s day the development of expressive melody had been the result of a reaction against the over-​elaborate pattern and surface texture of contrapuntal music.”202 Huxley even describes Wagner’s exhaustion with harmonic complications one evening after listening to a Bellini opera, when he is struck by its simplicity: “ ‘I shall never forget [. . .] the impression made upon me by the everlastingly abstract complications used in our orchestra, when a simple and noble melody was revealed anew to me.’ ”203 Huxley then resituates the latest trend in 1922 as a “revolt against the rich romantic development of perpendicular harmony, which was threatening to blot out the clear lines of melody in a welter of mere colour”; this had started with “the naiviste revolt towards folk-​song,” before developing into “the revolt of the highly sophisticated, like Debussy, who explored the possibilities of new harmony and a new melodic line,” and had now culminated in “the revolt of such contrapuntists as Van Dieren and, in this Fantasia, Busoni.”204 In each case, Huxley refers to these musical changes as a “revolt,” emphasizing the reactionary nature of each of these stages. In addition to musical intention, there were also revolutions in musical taste. Four years earlier, Ezra Pound (as his reviewing persona, William Atheling), in his review entitled “Music,” published in The New Age on March 21, 1918, had also discussed musical taste as a series of reactions, examining the vogue of Beethoven and the need to retire him until he could “regain a certain strangeness.”205 He explains that the current fashion for the ornamentation and structures of counterpoint would need to run its course before the listener could again stomach Beethoven. Although Beethoven was assuredly



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“in his day, a relief from too many trills,” his music “is now rather too much the daily (or pre-​war daily) roast beef of music” with a “beautiful appeal to the mediocre intelligence.”206 Here again, musical trends are described in terms of reaction and reversion, and, with this rejection of symphonic Beethoven, Pound advocates a return, borrowing Huxley’s wording, to “the austerity of counterpoint from which the development started.”207 The changing tastes of the music-​going public is perfectly encapsulated in George Bernard Shaw’s reviews, which range from 1876 to 1950, when he was writing as a music critic for publications such as The Hornet, The Star, The World, The Dramatic Review, The Illustrated London News, and The Musician. Honing in on his reviews from the 1880s to the turn of the century, one can see a remarkable change in tune, so to speak. In November 1885 with a piece of criticism titled “Fugue out of Fashion” for the Magazine of Music, he lambasts the fugue for being “an acute phase of a disease of dulness [sic],” whose “polyphonous development” is too advanced and untuneful for the amateur musician, indistinguishable from other fugues for the expert, and alienating for the outsider.208 He then admonishes musicians that they should follow the old adage: “Learn thoroughly how to compose a fugue, and then don’t,”209 as this “old-​fashioned deliberate form no longer seems to express anything that modern composers are moved to utter.”210 This emphasis on the agenda of the modern composer is in line with Shaw’s firm sympathies with Wagner’s precepts regarding the inability of complicated counterpoint to express subjective emotions. By 1885, Shaw praises Wagner for “finally kill[ing] the confusion between decorative pattern music and dramatic music,”211 meaning that one need no longer be “a pattern designer in sound” to aspire “to be a composer.”212 Even when the words become incoherent, as is the case with Tristan und Isolde, this is nevertheless “the expression of poetic feeling,” and as such, according to Shaw, should be categorized as “tone-​poetry.”213 In another review in 1889, four years later, “Concerts:  Wagner and Mendelssohn,” Shaw states his indictment of the fugue and all other forms of absolute music even more acerbically: Though Bach’s natural shell was the fugue, and Beethoven’s the sonata, can anybody but an academy professor be infatuated enough to suppose that musical composition consists in the imitation of these shells: a sort of exercise that is as trivial as it is tedious? The fugue form is as dead as the sonata form; and the sonata form is as dead as Beethoven himself.214

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After thoroughly burying the bodies of the fugue, the sonata, and Beethoven, five years later, Shaw suddenly finds himself exhuming the remains. In the 1894 review, “Stanford Becket,” he writes: “Something is happening to my attitude towards absolute music [. . .] I am not sure that I did not think at one time that absolute music was dead: that Mozart had been faithless to it; that Beethoven had definitely deserted it; and that Wagner had finally knocked it on the head and buried it.”215 However, after attending a concert featuring Brahms, the previously detested sound patterning has returned in full measure as absolute music and is again elevated: “The man who roused me into commonsense on this subject was no one other than our friend Brahms [. . .] when he made music purely for the sake of music, designing sound patterns without any reference to literary subjects of specific emotions, he became one of the wonders of the world.”216 Shaw, Huxley, and Pound all demonstrate an awareness of musical trends and changing sensitivities in their guises as musical reviewers. In addition, they also propound an awareness of the changes wrought to and by absolute music and the need to free music from referentiality. For example, in his review, “Literary Music,” published June 10, 1922, Aldous Huxley engages with the dispute between program and absolute music. He asks: “Ought music to be program music? Should it have an external literary theme? And does the best music, as a matter of historical fact belong to the literary or the unliterary variety?”217 In the same review, Huxley elevates the quartet and sonata—​showing his awareness of these forms of absolute music—​claiming that they are not emotional; one cannot say that they are expressions of grief, or joy, or love, or despair. They are just music, the most prodigious music that has ever been written [. . .] A large amount of the supreme music of the world is not merely written around any external literary subject; it is not even expressive of any particular emotion; it is, as we have said of Beethoven’s latest work, just music.218

Huxley’s “just music,” and his statement that Beethoven’s “last piano sonatas and his last string quartets have [. . .] no theme but themselves” are clear echoes of Hanslick’s and Pater’s assertions regarding the self-​referentiality of music. Huxley goes on to argue that while the “musico-​literary” program music of



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Mussorgsky, Strauss, and Wagner are beautiful and “dramatically expressive of emotions,” ultimately, program music is “never quite so completely satisfying as this other music, which has no literary theme and expresses no specific or easily named emotion.”219 Shaw likewise observes that the Paterian Anders-​streben and the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk are disintegrating, as music asserts itself as the end and not the means to an end: Music, in fact, is now in revolt against the union of all the arts, since it has meant to her a ruthless exploitation not only by the poet and higher dramatist, but by the sensation-​monger and pander. She is now [. . .] insisting on being once more considered as an end in herself; and so the union of all the arts falls to pieces before Wagner’s cement is dry, and his Art Work of the Future is already the art work of the past.220

This disintegration is especially clear when Shaw attends a Dolmetsch concert and recognizes that music, “completely free from all operatic and literary aims,” renders all program music “positively wizened by comparison”: “Its richness of detail especially in the beauty and interest of the harmony, made one think of modern ‘English’ music of the Bohemian Girl school as one thinks of a jerry-​built suburban square after walking through a medieval quadrangle at Oxford.”221 In his essay “Not Listening to Music,” E. M. Forster makes a more pointed assertion about the yoking of literary aims to music when he criticizes the addition of a program to Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture, which had previously been treated by Forster as an example of absolute music: I used to listen to the Coriolanus for “itself,” conscious when it passed of something important and agitating, but not defining further. Now I learn that Wagner, endorsed by Sir Donald Tovey,222 has provided it with a Programme: the opening bars indicated the hero’s decision to destroy the Volsci, then a sweet tune for female influence, then the dotted-​quaver-​ restlessness of indecision. This seems indisputable, and there is no doubt that this was, or was almost, Beethoven’s intention. All the same, I have lost my Coriolanus. Its largeness and freedom have gone. The exquisite sounds have been hardened like a road that has been tarred for traffic. One has to go somewhere down to them, and to pass through the same domestic crisis to the same military impasse, each time the overture is played.223

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This passage reveals Forster’s disinclination of the tethering of meaning in music, and his preference for pure music, or music free from association. Rather than the “hardening” of sound into an explicit interpretation, he prefers to listen to Coriolanus “for ‘itself.’ ” He later explicitly states this partiality: “music which is untrammelled and untainted by reference is obviously the best sort of music to listen to.”224 Forster’s criticism of the addition of words to a previously non-​referential piece of music also expresses a conflict between literature and music: by adding words, the sounds “harden” and their meaning becomes a bridge to intention but also the articulation of this intention in a concrete, “indisputable” form. As such, music loses its ineffability and is forced into the “specifically dictated content waiting for it.”225 The addition of a program adds tangible meaning and imposes a crisis of expression:  can the concreteness of words ever supersede the abstraction of music? When Forster describes the “exquisite sounds [being] hardened like a road that has been tarred for traffic,” he is expressing the conflict between the permanence of words and the intangibility and transience of the musical sound when it is “untainted by reference.”226 Along the same lines but from the perspective of the poet, W.  B. Yeats, referring to forms of absolute music, writes that music belongs in the “impersonal land of sound and colour” and that he “would have no one write with a sonata in his memory.”227 The sonata being a non-​referential form of absolute music, whose focus is structure, aligns with Yeats’ belief that music is “the most impersonal of things,” whereas “words [are] the most personal.”228 When musicians do incorporate words, “They masticate them for a long time, being afraid they would not be able to digest them, and when the words are so broken and softened and mixed with spittle that they are not words any longer, they swallow them.”229 Yeats even goes on to wonder “why the musician is not content to set to music some arrangement of meaningless liquid vowels, and thereby to make his song like that of the birds” if neither the music nor the words benefit from an alliance.230 Aside from an awareness of the concept of absolute music, Modernist authors such as Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and, of course, James Joyce were also aware of the forms of absolute music. What had been, until this point, an implied evaluation of the musical stylistic periods as a ricochet between program and absolute music, became articulated



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as a firm statement in favor of absolute music via the great fugues of Bach and the quartets of Beethoven—​now the highest form of absolute music and celebrated as the “cerebral in music.”231 These forms also carried the association of “intellectual and musical engineering,”232 alongside an academic, ocular quality that promoted an elitist understanding of complicated musical structure and elevated the educated listener over the average musical dilettante. This intellectual quality of the fugue is highlighted by Joseph Kerman, who quotes Charles Rosen, in a preface to a collection of Bach’s fugues: Only the performer at the keyboard is in a position to appreciate the movement of the voices, their blending and their separation, their interaction and their contrast. A fugue of Bach can be fully understood only by the one who plays it, not only heard but felt through the muscles and nerves. Part of the essential conception of the fugue is the way in which voices that the fingers can feel to be individual and distinct are heard as part of an inseparable harmony. The confusion of vertical and horizontal movement is one of the delights of fugue.233

Here, the performer’s visualization of the fugue is foremost: only the listener or performer who has the sheet music in front of him or her can fully appreciate the nuances of the counterpoint; and even then, it must be someone with a substantial understanding of harmonics.234 In Trilby, Du Maurier similarly distinguishes between the dilettantish listeners versus those who could appreciate the nuances of Bach. In his portrayal of one of the concerts in Trilby, the performance of Bach is meant to separate those who see music as a “mere emotional delight” from those who value perfection and intellect: Then there was a violin solo by young Joachim [. . .] and a solo on the pianoforte by Madame Schumann, his only peeress! and these came as a wholesome check to the levity of those for whom all music is but an agreeable pastime, a mere emotional delight, in which the intellect has no part [. . .] for these two—​man and woman—​the highest of their kind, never let you forget it was Sebastian Bach they were playing—​playing in absolute perfection, in absolute forgetfulness of themselves—​so that if you weren’t up to Bach, you didn’t have a very good time!235

Being “up to Bach,” and not having a good time listening if one is unwilling to be engaged intellectually by that which he/​she hears, gave the use and comprehension of counterpoint an elitist appeal.

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Joyce recounts a similar experience in “The Dead,” when Mary Jane plays her “academy piece” to an audience with very little interest in such complicated technique: Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages [. . .] 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 though they had begged Mary Jane to play something [. . .] The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the keyboard or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page. (D 161)

As with Trilby, the music is most enjoyable for those looking at the score, since it offers very little aural appeal for those listening, who, in Gabriel’s estimation, have simpler tastes. Although her audience begged her to play, her applause comes loudest from those who left the room at the start of the piece for refreshment and came back once the piano had stopped. This emphasis on the cerebral aspect of counterpoint is highlighted (to an opposite effect) in Wagner’s review of Bellini’s Norma, where Wagner lauds the French and Italians for composing music for the ears as opposed to the overly reflexive Germans who focus more on impressive harmonics that please only the eye:  “for in Italy and France one hears with the ears, a fact that has led to the use of such phrases as ‘ear-​tickling’ (‘Ohrenkitzel’), &c—​presumably in contradistinction to the ‘eye-​itching’ (‘Augenjucken’), which e.g., the reading of the scores of so many new German Operas gives rise to.”236 Wagner’s disdainful “eye-​itching” becomes Huxley’s “music for the eye” in the aforementioned review of Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica. Here, Huxley describes the difference between J. S. Bach’s fugues and counterpoint and his son, C. P. E. Bach’s more melodic compositions: “Emanuel was modern, a melodist, an emotional expressionist. Counterpoint, Emanuel thought, was too often mere music for the eye; he wrote for ears—​and hearts.”237 In Howards End, E. M. Forster devotes an entire chapter to the musical response to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5, echoing Hoffmann with his assessment that this symphony is “the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. All sorts and conditions are satisfied by it.”238 These “conditions” get carried into the condition of musical reception, as Forster classifies the



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different types of listener: the Mrs. Munts who “tap surreptitiously when the tunes come” and therefore enjoy the familiarity of the melodies;239 the Helens “who can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music’s flood,”240 allowing their imagination to be consumed by the music; the Margarets “who can only see the music”;241 the Tibbys who are “profoundly versed in counterpoint, and hol[d]‌ the full score open”;242 the Fraülein Mosebachs “who remembe[r] all the time that Beethoven is ‘echt Deutsch,’ ”243 thereby conforming to the Wagnerian construction of the supremacy of German music;244 and of course those who see the concert hall as a social occasion, and do not listen to the music at all. Much of the chapter is devoted to the contrast between Helen and Tibby’s form of listenership. Paraphrasing the Paterian Anders-​streben, Tibby describes Helen’s desire to “translate tunes into the language of painting, and pictures into the language of music.”245 In this passage, Tibby, the listener who best understands the structural implications of the music, criticizes Helen’s response: It’s very ingenious, and she says several pretty things in the process, but what’s gained, I’d like to know? Oh it’s all rubbish, radically false. If Monet’s really Debussy, and Debussy’s really Monet, neither gentleman is worth his salt [. . .] What is the good of the arts if they’re interchangeable? What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye?246

The inconsistency is striking: Tibby is differentiating between the ear and the eye, and yet, of all the listeners, it is he who is trying to read the ear by following along on the score. While listening to the symphony, Tibby sits with “the full score open on his knee,”247 watching what his ear should hear, and “implor[ing] the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum.”248 As such, he garners enjoyment by understanding the technical difficulty of the passages, appreciating the music with his eyes, and exemplifying Huxley’s “music for the eye.” By contrast, while Tibby is engaging with the piece in its own language, Helen is trying to attach a literary program onto the piece and shape the listener’s understanding. Helen tells her aunt, “Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing,” and relegates Tibby’s “transitional passage on the drum” into “the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back.”249 Later, Helen again shows her allegiance to program music, following the example of Smetana’s The Moldau

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by trying to turn the Oder River into a symphonic poem. Tibby relates her program: “The part by the landing stage is in B-​minor, if I remember rightly, but lower down things get extremely mixed. There is a slodgy theme in several keys at once, meaning mud-​banks, and another for the navigable canal, and the exit into the Baltic is in C sharp major, pianissimo.”250 For Tibby, however, Helen has “obliged” music into being representational, and, in so doing, has “muddled things.”251 It would be presumptuous to conflate Tibby’s response with Forster’s own taste or opinion. However, Helen’s desire to turn the river into music is labeled “an affectation.”252 In addition, in his lecture, “Not Listening to Music,” Forster repeats Tibby’s statement about the conflation of Debussy and Monet and recontextualizes it. Although he is still examining musical listening, he reformulates the argument in terms of music that has no meaning outside of itself, or absolute music. Dividing musical listening into two categories this time—​ “music that reminds [him] of something” and “music itself ”253—​Forster again draws upon the connection between Monet and Debussy: When music reminded me of something which was not music, I supposed it was getting me somewhere. “How like Monet!” I thought when listening to Debussy, and “How like Debussy!” when looking at Monet. I translated sounds into colours, saw the piccolo as apple-​green, and the trumpets as scarlet. The arts were enriched in one another’s washing.254

However, despite the initial enrichment, Forster ultimately moves away from this type of abstraction, stating his preference for “music itself ” because “music which is untrammelled and untainted by reference is obviously the best sort of music to listen to; we get nearer the centre of reality. Yet though it is untainted it is never abstract.”255 E. M.  Forster’s desire for music “untainted by reference” and Huxley’s preference for musical forms with “no themes but themselves” are only two examples of the Modernist privileging of absolute music. By the early twentieth century, forms such as quartets, fugue, sonata, and counterpoint had already been established as the pinnacle of absolute music, and Modernist authors were beginning to express their intentions of incorporating these forms into their writing. Although attempts at literary versions of absolute music would seem counterintuitive to the very concept behind these wordless



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forms, authors such as Pound, Joyce, Eliot and Huxley were experimenting with the structural component of these forms to see if its non-​referentiality could be harnessed in literature in a way that far exceeds an “implicitly elitist project.”256 That being said, the Modernist emphasis on musical structure demonstrates a specifically Modernist understanding of this condition of music. For example, Philip Quarles, the author figure in Huxley’s Point Counter Point, records his desire for musicalized fiction in a structural sense: The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound [. . .] But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. [. . .] More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different [. . .] Get this into a novel. How?257

Here, Quarles stipulates that he has no interest in “subordinating sense to sound” in the way that “Symbolist poets [. . .] tried to fuse musical and poetic effects,”258 but is instead concerned with “the construction.” The notebook entry continues with an elaboration of how to achieve this through “contrapuntal plots” and thematic “modulations and variations;”259 and, although its application is somewhat problematic, the parallel remains. Huxley even goes so far as to use the Bach’s Suite in B minor (with an emphasis on the fugue) and Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 15 as the framing device for Point Counter Point, effectively situating the novel in the discourse of absolute music. Along the same lines of musical construction, Pound makes his much disputed analogy between the structure of The Cantos and the fugue:  it is, he writes, “rather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue.”260 Virginia Woolf also, in her 1921 short story “The String Quartet,” incorporates the quartet in her title and structure, while demonstrating “the ideal of the listener’s wandering imagination,”261 especially in the face of non-​ representational music. Similarly, T. S. Eliot references the quartet form in the collective title he adopted for his last four significant poems, Four Quartets,262 while insisting in his 1942 essay “The Music of Poetry” that a “ ‘musical poem’ is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and that these two

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patterns are indissoluble and one”;263 and that the sound of the poem is inseparable from its meaning or content.264 Cautioning us not to “work too closely with musical analogies,” Eliot nevertheless encourages his reader to understand “that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image.”265 This is by no means Eliot’s first reference to the way in which musical patterning can be transposed onto forms of literature. In an earlier essay, “The Need for Poetic Drama” (1936), he similarly describes the composition process for verse plays in musical terms:  “To work out a play in verse is to be working like a musician as well as like a prose dramatist: it is to see the whole thing as a musical pattern.”266 That is to say, the “musical pattern” and the “dramatic pattern” act in tandem,267 where, “underneath the action, which should be perfectly intelligible, there should be a musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level.”268 In both of the above cases, the emphasis lies in the integrity of the “pattern” or structure to engender the musical quality of the poem, implying the inseparability of the structure of the poem from its content. Furthermore, Eliot utilizes the same juxtaposition of program and absolute music as Huxley in “The Need for Poetic Drama” (1936) as a way of understanding how musical patterning can be transposed onto literature. Here, Eliot’s distinction between “a play set to music” and the musical patterning/​structuring of poetic drama by differentiating between two forms of music, the opera and the fugue, becomes particularly significant: poetic drama “is not like opera, but some musical form like the sonata or fugue.”269 This highlighting of “form” is consistent with the above-​outlined debate, especially in terms of the prioritization of absolute music, unadulterated by reference beyond its own form (i.e., fugue, sonata), over program music (i.e., opera). Furthermore, it demonstrates Eliot’s awareness that he is working with the terminology and forms of absolute music: the poetic drama should not be “like opera,” but rather is more comparable to a “sonata or fugue,” where the form is matched by the content. In this case, Eliot’s use of the fugue to illustrate how “a musical pattern [can] intensif[y]‌our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level” is particularly apt: the fugue is musically structured to induce flight and disorientation in its listener, and thus its form reinforces its effect.270



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Elsewhere, Eliot’s writings demonstrate a related awareness that his vocabulary and understanding of musical form derives from a critical response to absolute music. For example, in his 1958 “Introduction to Valéry’s Art of Poetry,” Eliot draws attention to the necessity of understanding the structure of a piece and its relationship to its effect, taking the musical examples of “The Need for Poetic Drama,” and the emphasis on musical pattern in “The Music of Poetry” to greater specificity. He writes that, despite his lack of musical training, his enjoyment or understanding of a piece of music is “better for knowing it well, simply because [he has] at any moment during its performance a memory of the part that has preceded and a memory of the part that is still to come.”271 Here, an intellectual understanding of a piece’s structure helps to make the listener more susceptible to its effect. Eliot then transfers this understanding of music to poetry by calling attention to the importance of the inseparability of form and content. He writes that the value of exercises involving complicated rhyming stanza forms is that they demonstrate “the way in which form and content must come to terms.”272 In another passage, he describes poetic composition as “subjected to form” and being “carefully composed with a few to a final and overwhelming effect.”273 Eliot’s use of “form,” “content,” and “effect” reflects the terminology surrounding absolute music, but is here made applicable to the abstract form of the quartet used in Four Quartets.274 Arguably, the fact that all poetry consists of written content would prevent it from achieving the condition of absolute music. Eliot, however, accounts for this by applying the principles of absolute music to poetry, as outlined in “The Music of Poetry”: My purpose here is to insist that a “musical poem” is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meaning of the words which compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you object that it is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to which the adjective “musical” can be rightly applied, I can only reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much an abstraction from the poem as is the sense.275

Here, one can again detect the language usually associated with absolute music. Eliot proposes “a musical pattern of sound” that is “indissoluble” from

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the “musical pattern of words,” where “sound” and “sense” are married into one meaning. The above-​mentioned authors were partaking in a musical conversation, and were in some way refashioning the condition of music so that it would reflect the trend toward absolute music. From within this tendency, Joyce’s proclaimed desire to write the “Sirens” episode as a fuga per canonem, his summary of “Sirens” in “Circe” as “music without words” (U 15.1948), and his reported equation of Finnegans Wake with “pure music,”276 are not merely misguided similes or an elaborate trick to confound his readers, as has been argued by many musically minded critics. Rather, Joyce’s statements become part of the debate already probing the boundaries between music and literature, and demonstrate an awareness of his own partaking in the conversation.

Notes 1 James Joyce, “The Soul of Ireland,” in Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 75. 2 Joyce, “The Soul of Ireland,” 305. 3 This last is particularly convincing when taking into account that, according to Herbert Gorman and Richard Ellmann, Joyce also referred to Synge’s Riders to the Sea as a “dwarf-​drama,” when speaking about the truncated one-​act play format: “Synge protested, ‘It’s a good play, as good as any one-​act play can be.’ Joyce rejoined that Ireland needed less small talk and more irrefutable art; ‘No one-​act play, no dwarf-​drama,’ he asserted, ‘can be a knockdown argument’ ” (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982], 124). 4 Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Vintage, 2004), 384. For an extended study of the connection between Valérie’s poésie absolue, Mallarmé‘s poésie pure, and absolute music, see Carl Dahlhaus, “Absolute Music and Poésie Absolue,” in The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 141–​56. 5 Given that Joyce refers to the author of “Recapitulation” as a composer and not a poet, I am not convinced that he is referring to Mendès here; rather I think he is referencing a musical work. However, thus far, I have not been able to identify what this work might be. 6 In this way, rather than linking to Pater’s “condition of music,” it would seem to resemble the limitations of art and the failure of the Anders-​streben (Walter Pater,



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The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Phillips [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], 85–​6). 7 Pater, Renaissance, 86. 8 Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening, 8th ed., shorter version (New York and London:  W. W. Norton, 1999), 270. 9 Machlis, Enjoyment, 270. 10 Machlis, Enjoyment, 270. 11 Machlis, Enjoyment, 270. 12 Machlis, Enjoyment, 272. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 2000), 638. In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche defines “theatrocracy” as “the nonsense of a faith in the precedence of the theatre, in the right of the theatre to lord it over the arts, over art” (638, emphasis in original). Although this is intended pejoratively, the term functions aptly as a description of Wagner’s theatrical dictates, which could be bundled under an attempt to control theatrical effects by harnessing other elements that contribute to the whole of opera (lights, acoustics, orchestra, music, audience, etc.). 14 For more on Wagner’s theatrical innovations, see his essay “The Purpose of the Opera,” trans. Edward L. Burlingame, in Art, Life and Theory of Richard Wagner (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), 203–​41. 15 Program music is “instrumental music that has literary or pictorial associations, the nature of which is indicated by the title of the piece or the ‘program’ supplied by the composer” (Machlis, Enjoyment, 298). It falls under several categories: “incidental music,” which is an overture or series of pieces to be played between the acts of a play during important scenes; “the program symphony,” which is a multi-​movement work that incorporates a plot/​themes/​a written explanation of the piece contained in the program; a “concert overture,” which is the introductory piece before an opera that is based on a literary idea; and a “symphonic poem” or “tone poem,” which is a freely structured orchestral piece that “in the course of contrasting sections, develops a poetic idea, suggests a scene, or creates a mood” (298–​300). Program music, especially in contrast to absolute music, will be discussed later in this chapter. 16 Traditionally, Beethoven’s composition styles have been divided into three periods: the formative or Classical period (until 1802), most closely borrowing from Haydn and Mozart; the middle period (until 1812), when Beethoven was at his most characteristic “Beethovenian” and writing symphonies; and the later period (until 1827) of piano sonatas and string quartets (Machlis, Enjoyment, 233). These divisions have been attacked as arbitrary, since styles that characterize

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Beethoven’s compositions do not simply disappear from period to period. In more recent scholarship, these three periods have been expanded to four, with the early period being divided into two subsections, first with Beethoven’s Bonn compositions and then the experimentalism that started from 1800–​02 being classified as a composition stage in its own right. Either way, the Fifth remains stylistically part of the classification of the middle period (Joseph Kerman et al., “Beethoven, Ludwig van,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​ subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​40026). 17 From the entry on Beethoven’s Fifth in Grove Music Online (GMO):  More than any other piece of music, the Fifth Symphony has come to typify the thematic unification, or “organicism,” as the 19th century viewed it, that Beethoven developed to such a high degree in these years. The famous opening motif is to be heard in almost every bar of the first movement—​and, allowing for modifications, in the other movements. The opening theme expands into the horn-​call before the second subject, and the second subject employs the same note pattern as the horn-​call. Then, in the development section, the horn-​call is fragmented successively down to a single minim, alternating between strings and woodwind in a passage of extraordinary tension achieved primarily by harmonic means. As in many other works of the time, the last two movements are run together without a break; this device, obviously, contributes to the continuity and to a feeling of necessary sequence. But more than this: here the long transition passage between the movements, and the recurrence of a theme from the third movement in the retransition before the recapitulation of the fourth, give the sense that one movement is triumphantly resolved by the other—​a sense confirmed by the enormously emphatic last-​movement coda. (Kerman et al., “Beethoven,” GMO)

18 Dr. Charles Burney (1726–​1814) set the precedent for this new way of conceptualizing music in his General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (1776–​89), where he revolutionized this way of relating musical history through anecdote rather than event. 19 Mark Evan Bonds, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6. In The Idea of Absolute Music, Carl Dahlhaus attributes Hoffmann’s language to Ludwig Tieck, demonstrating the precedent for a review such as Hoffmann’s. He writes, “Tieck’s metaphysics of instrumental music, which was originally coined in response to the works by Johann Friedrich Reichardt, did not find an adequate object until E. T. A. Hoffmann borrowed Tieck’s language in order to do justice to Beethoven” (Dahlhaus, Idea, 90). 20 E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” trans. Martyn Clarke, in Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 236.



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2 1 Hoffmann, “Beethoven,” 237. 22 Hoffmann, “Beethoven,” 236. 23 Hoffmann, “Beethoven,” 94. 24 Hoffmann, “Beethoven,” 92 (emphasis in original). 25 Hoffmann, “Beethoven,” 102. 26 Bonds, Music as Thought, 8. 27 Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, with Appendix,” trans. Margaret Jourdain, in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, ed. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing, 1916), 164–​5. 28 Diderot outlines several ways in which he experiments with this deprivation to see how it heightens awareness in other regards. For example, he asks a blind man to describe a mirror in his “Letter on the Blind”; and in the “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” he attends an opera and plugs his ears, so as to experience the spectacle through vision alone. See Denis Diderot, “Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, with Addition to the Preceding” and “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb with Appendix,” trans. Margaret Jourdain, in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, ed. Margaret Jourdain (Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing, 1916), 68–​157, 158–​244. 29 Claudia Brodsky, “Whatever Moves You: ‘Experimental Philosophy’ and the Literature of Experience in Diderot and Kleist,” in Traditions of Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present, ed. Nancy Kaiser and David E. Wellberry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 19. 30 Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf,” 170. The sonata in color refers to Father Castel’s attempt to realize Newton’s principles of light versus sound in his creation of a color harpsichord or “clavessin pour les yeux.” Rather than emitting sounds, the color harpsichord made use of colored fans. For more about Father Castel and his sonata in color, see Wilton Mason’s article, “Father Castel and His Color Clavecin,” Journal of Aestheticism and Art Criticism 17.1 (September 1958), 103–​16. 31 Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf,” 172. 32 Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf,” 170. 33 Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf,” 171. 34 Diderot, “Letter on the Deaf,” 172. 35 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 198. 36 Kant, Judgment, 189–​90 (emphasis in original). 37 Kant, Judgment, 190. The other categories in Kant’s classification of the fine arts include “the art of speech” (oratory and poetry), “visual art” (plastic art [sculpture and architecture] and painting), and “the art of the play of sensations”—​music and the art of color (Kant, Judgment, 190–​95). Richard Eldridge notes that within this classification, Kant reserves “mixed media such

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as opera for separate treatment [and] separates music as an art of tone sharply from the arts of speech and the formative arts. He insists that music is a fine art rather than a mere presentation of the agreeable in sensation, if and only if it presents a beautiful play of sensations, which must have formal ordering” (Richard Eldridge, “Modernity and Expression: Kant on the Value of Absolute Music,” in The Persistence of Romanticism—​Essays in Philosophy and Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 64). 38 Kant, Judgment, 199. 39 Kant, Judgment, 199. 40 Kant, Judgment, 199–​200. 41 Kant, Judgment, 200. 42 The only instance where Kant addresses music without words is when he juxtaposes “free beauty” and “accessory beauty” (Kant, Judgment, 76). He categorizes “music without a topic [Thema]” and “all music not set to words” (77) as “free beauty,” which implies that the “judgment of taste is pure.” Because it is impossible to predict what will be represented in music, the imagination is free: “Here we presuppose no concept of any purpose for which the manifold is to serve the given object, and hence no concept [as to] what the object is [meant] to represent; our imagination is playing, as it were, while it contemplates the shape, and such a concept would only restrict its freedom” (77). This contradicts Kant’s later statements about music in The Critique of Judgment, but provides an interesting segue into the changes that were being made in instrumental music at the turn of the century, made possible by concurrent technological innovations. 43 This particular essay was written in 1787 and published as part of the third collection of Zerstreute Blätter (1785–​91). Considering Herder’s opposition to Kant, especially his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment, rebutted in Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1799) and Kalligone (1800), respectively, it is hard to say whether this dialogue is a genuine presentation of Herder’s ideas about music and poetry, or if it should be juxtaposed against Kant’s similar assertions (Michael Forster, “Johann Gottfried Von Herder,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Fall 2008], accessed January 31, 2017, http://​plato. stanford.edu/​archives/​fall2008/​entries/​herder/​). Given Herder’s publications on the role of music in translation theory, where he expounds upon the importance of maintaining musical structure and content, meter and rhyme, I am inclined to say that the ultimate conclusion of the colloquy, that music and poetry are equally important and interdependent, is consistent with these thoughts. Nevertheless, the role of words in the clarification of music is very relevant to an understanding of the perception of the relationship between the two and the valuation of music with words over music without at the turn of the century.



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44 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Does Painting or Music Have the Greater Effect? A Divine Colloquy,” trans. Gregory Moore, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 348. 45 Herder, “Colloquy,” 351. 46 Herder, “Colloquy,” 355. 47 Herder, “Colloquy,” 356. 48 Dahlhaus, Idea, 8. As Dahlhaus summarizes in The Idea of Absolute Music: “The older idea of music, against which the idea of absolute music had to prevail, was the concept, originating in antiquity and never doubted until the seventeenth century, that music, as Plato put it, consisted of harmonia, rhythmos, and logos. Harmonia meant regular, rationally systematized relationships among tones; rhythmos, the system of musical time, which in ancient times included dance and organized motion; and logos, language as the expression of human reason” (8). In The Mirror and the Lamp, Abrams elaborates that music was conceived by Aristotle “to be an imitation primarily of passion”: the imitation being a characteristic of flute and lyre-​ playing in Poetics, and in Politics, rhythm and melody are treated as “one medium which can present direct likeness of anger, courage, temperance, and other qualities of character” (M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953], 91). 49 Machlis, Enjoyment, 197. 50 Conversely, in vocal music, the emphasis shifted away from vocal virtuosity and instead toward the equal value of voice with piano accompaniment: for example, compare Mozart’s challenging Queen of the Night aria to the tuneful, simpler lieder of Schubert or Schumann, where the piano accompaniment carries as much weight as the vocal line. 51 Susan McClary quoting Scruton, “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’ Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’ Third Symphony,” in Musicology and Difference Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326. 52 Dahlhaus, Idea, 7. 53 Dahlhaus, Idea, 7. 54 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity—​Modernism, Avant-​Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 190. 55 Machlis, Enjoyment, 380. 56 Dahlhaus, Idea, 9. The Romantic composer, if examined through a strict musical bias, also misappropriated the term “absolute music” with the development of “Program Music,” since musical patterns became associated with literary or pictorial meanings (Machlis, Enjoyment, 298). 57 Pater, Renaissance, 86.

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58 Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), 78. 59 The World as Will and Representation was originally published in 1818, but reprinted as a second edition in 1844. 60 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1966), 1: 261. 61 For Schopenhauer, the world is juxtaposed into the world as representation or Ideas and the world as Will, or, in Kantian terms, the “distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-​in-​itself ” (1: 417). Here, music is the thing-​in-​itself rather than simply a representation. 62 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 257. 63 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 257. 64 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 256. 65 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 262. 66 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 257 (emphasis in original). 67 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 256. 68 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 261. 69 Hoffmann, “Beethoven,” 237. 70 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 263. 71 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 262. 72 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 263. 73 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 264. 74 Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), 76. For more on Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner, see Bryan Magee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2000). 75 Patrick Gardiner, Schopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 234. 76 Dahlhaus quoting Wagner, Idea, 18. 77 Dahlhaus, Idea, 18. 78 Dahlhaus, Between, 32–​3. 79 Bonds argues that Wagner furthers his agenda “by sharpening the distinction between politically engaged and disengaged instrumental music, calling the former the ‘music of the future’ (Zukunftsmusik) and the latter ‘absolute music’ (absolute Musik)” (Music as Thought, 106). He explains the nuances of the term, as at once evoking “the traditions of the idealist aesthetic, with its notions of an all-​embracing, infinite Absolute, even while implicitly disparaging a music that could also be considered isolated, remote, and disengaged from the world of the here and now” (106). Thus, music that is politically engaged implies representation in music, and this representation is linked to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.



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80 Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism, ed. Jeffrey Kalberg, Anthony Newcomb, and Ruth Solie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 224. 81 Dahlhaus, Idea, 20. 82 “The Music of the Future” was originally a letter to François Villot, published as a preface to the prose translation of Wagner’s libretti. His previously published series of art essays had excited considerable attention and opposition. As a result, Villot had requested some clarification of these ideas in order to dispel the prejudice of the critics “by a well-​considered explanation of [his] ideas” so that “many perplexed critics would feel themselves in a better situation, on the intended production of one of [Wagner’s] musical dramas in Paris, to criticise only the work of art itself, and not at the same time to give judgment on an apparently questionable theory” (Richard Wagner, “The Music of the Future,” trans. Edward L. Burlingame, in Art, Life and Theory of Richard Wagner: Selected from His Writings and Translated, 2nd edn. [New York: Henry Holt, 1909], 132). 83 Wagner, “Future,” 141. 84 Wagner, “Future,” 151. 85 Wagner, “Future,” 151. 86 Wagner, “Future,” 160. 87 Wagner, “Future,” 161. 88 Wagner, “Future,” 140–​41. 89 Wagner, “Future,” 143. 90 Within Nietzsche’s opus, this fragment “probably dates from 1871 and seems likely to have originated either as a section of The Birth of Tragedy which he decided to omit on publication or as part of a projected book on ancient Greece which he never completed” (Dahlhaus, Between, 19). Tellingly, the original title of The Birth of Tragedy was The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872). Although it was written at a time when Nietzsche’s loyalties toward Wagner were still intact, the fragment nevertheless contains the germs of his later critique of Wagner, “which culminated in his rejection of the theatre as a contemptible art form, fit only for the masses” (20)—​an idea that runs counter to Wagner’s ideas in Art and Life. 91 Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism—​Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1980), 31. 92 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 257. 93 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Music and Words,” trans. Mary Whitehall, in Between Romanticism and Modernism—​Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, ed. Carl Dahlhaus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 108. 94 Nietzsche, “On Music,” 111 (emphasis in original).

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Nietzsche, “On Music,” 110 (emphasis in original). Nietzsche, “On Music,” 113 (emphasis in original). Nietzsche, “On Music,” 114. Nietzsche, “On Music,” 115. Nietzsche, “On Music,” 113–​14. Nietzsche, “On Music,” 114. Nietzsche, “On Music,” 109. Nietzsche, “On Music,” 116. Nietzsche, “On Music,” 116. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 2000), 622. 105 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 626. 106 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 628. 107 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 629. This aspect of Nietzsche’s argument, alongside his examples of Wagner and Bizet, will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 2. 108 The Viennese music critic and academic was originally enthusiastic about Wagner’s works around the time of the Dresden premiere of Tannhäuser (1845), when he published a favorable review of the opera in the Wiener Allgemeine Musik-​Zeitung. However, his interest in the agenda of the Weimar School (featuring the creeds of composers such as Wagner and Liszt) waned, as demonstrated by his scathing review of Lohengrin (1858), his 1876 correspondence regarding The Ring, and his essays on Parsifal (1883), where he highlights the symptoms of cultural decay later expounded upon by Nietzsche. Nor was the acrimony between Hanslick and Wagner one-​sided: Wagner famously based the pedantic Meistersinger, Beckmesser (originally named Veit Hanslich), on Hanslick (a fact discovered when Josef Standhartner read a draft of Die Meistersinger in Hanslick’s presence in 1862). Furthermore, Wagner makes direct reference to Hanslick and On the Musically Beautiful in his 1869 preface to Judaism in Music, even going so far as to imply that Hanslick’s musical ideals of “autonomous musical beauty [was] a kind of ideological conspiracy to promote the ideas of a ‘Judaized’ musical culture (the legacy of Mendelssohn and Schumann)” (Thomas S. Grey, “Hanslick, Eduard,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 13, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​ music/​12341). See also Barry Millington, “Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Die,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 13, 2017, www. oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​O003512. 109 Hanslick quoting Wagner, “Beautiful,” 25.



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1 10 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 25–​6. 111 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 22. 112 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 22. 113 Machlis, Enjoyment, 298–​300. 114 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 75. 115 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 35. 116 Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948), 229. 117 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 15. 118 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 1. 119 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 3. 120 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 77. 121 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 78. 122 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 80. 123 Hanslick, “Beautiful,” 3. 124 Bonds, Music as Thought, 107. 125 Pater, Renaissance, 86 (emphasis in original). 126 F. C. McGrath, The Sensible Spirit—​Walter Pater and the Modernist Paradigm (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1986), 231. 127 Pater, Renaissance, 95. 128 Pater, Renaissance, 85. 129 Pater, Renaissance, 83. 130 Pater, Renaissance, 85. 131 Pater, Renaissance, 85. 132 Pater, Renaissance, 85. 133 An important exception to this would be Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, where he summarizes the relationship between German and British modes of romantic thought, eventually concluding: “The attempt to make literature aspire to the condition of music motivated the description by German writers of sounding forms, musical fragrance, and the harmony of colors, and furthered the general synaesthetic abandon which Irving Babbitt was to interpret as a symptom of the dissolution of all the boundaries and distinctions on which a rational civilization depends” (94). However, while Abrams takes into account the trends in philosophical thought, he nevertheless ignores the technological developments and changes in language used to express the effects of music (such as the dichotomy between absolute and program music) that might have led to these changes. 134 An inevitable question from this assertion is whether or not Pater was actually reading Hanslick. Unlike the works of Schiller, Hegel, Schelling, and Kant, Billie Andrew Inman does not list Hanslick’s treatise as being among Pater’s

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library borrowings in Walter Pater’s Readings: A Bibliography of His Library Borrowings and Literary References (1858–​73) (New York and London: Garland, 1981). Nevertheless, many other works of German philosophy are present, including Hegel’s Ästhetik, which, Inman claims, had the most long-​lasting and profound influence on Pater’s thinking (Inman, Bibliography, 49). Other examples of the German Idealist influence on Pater’s thought are present in his critique of Kant in “Coleridge’s Writings,” his allusions to Hegel, and his continuation of Schiller’s artistic hierarchy in his elevation of music as the highest art (which is counter to Hegel’s preference for poetry [50]). In The Sensible Spirit, F. C. McGrath refers to Pater as “the great intellectual synthesizer” (primarily of British empiricism and German idealism) and devotes entire chapters to tracing the presence and influence of German thought (Kant, Schelling, Schiller, Hegel) on Pater (McGrath, Sensible, 1). 135 Pater, Renaissance, 88 (my emphasis). 136 Hanslick, Beautiful, 80. 137 Pater, Renaissance, 83. 138 Dahlhaus, Idea, 7. 139 Pater, Renaissance, 87–​8. 140 Kant, Judgment, 200. 141 Kant, Judgment, 198. 142 Schopenhauer, Will, 1: 262. 143 Pater, Renaissance, 88. 144 Pater, Renaissance, 83. 145 Pater, Renaissance, 151. 146 Pater, Renaissance, 88. 147 Pater, Renaissance, 151–​3. 148 Pater, Renaissance, 88. 149 See also Patricia Herzog, “The Condition to Which All Art Aspires: Reflections on Pater and Music,” British Journal of Aesthetics 36.2 (April 1996), 122–​34, for a discussion of how Pater’s art criticism reflects the condition of absolute music. 150 Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, ed. Samuel Beckett, Stuart Gilbert, and Eugene Jolas (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 14. 151 There is a wealth of criticism available on all of these topics, though I will only give a very brief survey here. For more on Svengali’s ethnic othering through his Jewishness alongside Dracula, and how Trilby’s intrinsically benevolent Englishness overcomes French and foreign corruption, as evidenced by her victory over appetite (soul over body), see Anna Krugovoy Silver, “Vampirism and the Anorexic Paradigm,” in Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),



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116–​35. This aspect of nationality is also addressed by Sarah Gracombe in “Converting Trilby: Du Maurier on Englishness, Jewishness, and Culture,” Nineteenth-​Century Literature, 58.1 (June 2003), 75–​108 and by Jonathan Taylor, who connects Jewishness with music, in “The Music Master and ‘the Jew’ in Victorian Writing: Thomas Carlyle, Richard Wagner, George Eliot and George Du Maurier,” in The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, ed. Nicky Loseff and Sophie Fuller (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 225–​44. For issues with Victorian femininity in Trilby, see Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, The Diva’s Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1996). In terms of the development of the theater, specifically crowd psychology as exemplified by audience response, see Phyllis Weliver, “Music, Crowd Control and the Female Performer in Trilby,” in The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction, ed. Nicky Loseff and Sophie Fuller (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 57–​82. In her fascinating Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–​1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), Weliver also examines the dichotomies of angel and siren; home and abroad; and mesmerism and complacency, in addition to the erasures of class and racial distinctions through musical reception. For more on the relations between male artists, see Mary Titus, “Cather’s Creative Women and Du Maurier’s Cozy Men: ‘The Song of the Lark’ and ‘Trilby,’ ” Modern Language Studies 24.2 (Spring 1994), 27–​37. In “The Mythic Svengali: Anti-​Aestheticism in Trilby,” Studies in the Novel 28.4 (Winter 1996), 525–​42, Jonathan H. Grossman also looks at the relationship between men and art, juxtaposing Wilde’s aestheticism against Du Maurier’s anti-​aestheticism. 152 Elaine Showalter, “Introduction to Du Maurier’s Trilby,” in Trilby, ed. Elaine Showalter and Dennis Denisoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), xi. 153 George Du Maurier, Trilby, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Elaine Showalter and Dennis Denisoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 210–​11. 154 John Daverio and Eric Sams, “Schumann, Robert,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, www. oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​40704pg9. 155 Du Maurier, Trilby, 213. 156 Machlis quoting Schumann, Enjoyment, 285. 157 Pater, Renaissance, 88. 158 Du Maurier, Trilby, 217. 159 Du Maurier, Trilby, 212. 160 Dahlhaus, Idea, 9. 161 Du Maurier, Trilby, 216–​17.

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1 62 Du Maurier, Trilby, 218. 163 Du Maurier, Trilby, 217. 164 Du Maurier, Trilby, 218. This phrase, “songs without words,” occurs verbatim in the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. I will discuss the significance of this phrase, in its Joycean context, in my fifth chapter. 165 Hanslick, Beautiful, 59. 166 Du Maurier, Trilby, 218. 167 Hanslick, Beautiful, 10. 168 Du Maurier, Trilby, 162. My translation of this line: But I tell you, I myself have heard her, La Svengali! And she even sang Chopin’s Impromptu as if it were a piano playing! 169 Du Maurier, Trilby, 217. 170 Du Maurier, Trilby, 283. 171 Du Maurier, Trilby, 218. 172 Hanslick, Beautiful, 50 173 Even the descriptions of La Svengali (as Trilby) and La Maupin are quite similar: Trilby is a refreshing, tomboyish figure who bears “herself with easy, unembarrassed grace, like a person whose nerves and muscles are well in tune, whose spirits are high” (Du Maurier, Trilby, 13); La Maupin is an opera singer from the seventeenth century whose “considerable physical beauty and natural talent were said to have compensated for a lack of musical training” and whose “lively and cavalier manner and unusually strong voice offended neither decency nor verisimiltude” (Julie Anne Sadie, “Maupin,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, www. oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​18123). See also François Brunet, Théophile Gautier et La Musique (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2006) for more on Gautier’s awareness and incorporation of musical trends and traditions. 174 Hugh Macdonald, “Berlioz, Hector,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline. com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​51424pg19. 175 Du Maurier, Trilby, 220. 176 Du Maurier, Trilby, 220–​21. 177 Richard Wagner, “The Virtuoso and the Artist (1840),” trans. William Ashton Ellis, in In Paris and Dresden: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 7 (New York: Broude, 1966), 119–​20. 178 As Timothy Martin writes in Joyce and Wagner: A Study of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), “Wagner argued that the traditional opera, as a ‘bandbox’ of more or less discrete musical ‘numbers,’ [. . .] exalted the singer and his technique at the expense of dramatic illusion” (2).



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179 Although Wagner was famous for setting himself in opposition to the Bellinis, Donizettis, and Offenbachs of the music world, this was not always the case. In fact, his 1837 article on Bellini’s Norma provides evidence that, at one time, Wagner greatly admired Bellini’s work. In this article, he lauds Italian and French melody as charming and “ ‘ear-​tickling’ (‘Ohrenkitzel’), &c—​presumably in contradistinction to the ‘eye-​itching’ (‘Augenjucken’), which e.g., the reading of the scores of so many new German Operas gives rise to” (Richard Wagner, “Wagner on Bellini [Feb. 1, 1886],” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 27.516, 66). Bellini’s “pure melody, his simple, noble, and beautiful cantilena which we have found so charming” (66) are part of his “stereotyped tricks,” which include “the peculiar pattern of his musical compositions, which is usual with all Italians, the crescendos which invariably follow the theme, the tutti, cadenzas, and such” (66). However, these tricks, which for him become “fixed forms” (66), give rise to the audience’s wish for the forms when faced with the “tangled skein” (66) created by new German opera composers. Of Norma, Wagner writes: “all the phrases of passion, which are rendered in so peculiarly clear a light by his art of song, are thereby made to rest upon a majestic soil and ground, above which they do not vaguely flutter about, but resolve themselves into a grand and manifest picture, which involuntarily calls to mind the creations of Gluck and Spontini” (67). This will be discussed further in relation to Modernism later in this chapter. 180 Wagner, “Future,” 135. 181 Du Maurier, Trilby, 163. 182 Annegret Fauser, “Cette Musique Sans Tradition: Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Its French Critics,” in Music, Theatre, and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1830–​1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 229. 183 Barry Millington, “Tannhäuser,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​ article/​grove/​music/​O905051. The reasons for the riot have also been attributed to Wagner’s refusal to stage the ballet portion of the opera during the last act, when the Jockey Club normally attended performances. For more about the reception in Paris and the resulting riots, see Fauser, “Cette Musique,” 228–​55. 184 Wagner, “Bellini,” 66. 185 Du Maurier, Trilby, 220. 186 Du Maurier, Trilby, 221. 187 Machlis quoting Laforgue, Enjoyment, 366. 188 Machlis, Enjoyment, 369. 189 Machlis, Enjoyment, 369. 190 Machlis, Enjoyment, 368.

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191 Simon Shaw-​Miller, quoting Satie, “ ‘The Only Musician with Eyes’: Erik Satie and Visual Art,” in Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature, ed. Caroline Potter (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 85. 192 A scale pattern built entirely on whole-​tone intervals (i.e., getting rid of the natural semitone on the piano keyboard—​C-​D-​E-​F#-​G#-​A#-​C), resulting in “a fluid sequence of pitches that lack the pull toward a tonic, or point of rest” (Machlis, Enjoyment, 368). 193 Machlis, Enjoyment, 368. Christopher Butler also reflects on “the renunciation of thematic development, and a purely sensuous flow of harmony, which made for a new, fragmentary, and unstable language for music,” relating it to the same principles that underpin Mallarmé‘s poetry as well as Impressionist painting (Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–​1916 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994], 11). 194 Machlis, Enjoyment, 368. Simon Shaw-​Miller also provides an excellent analysis of the broad influence of Impressionist painting on music, specifically with reference to Satie’s anti-​Wagnerianism. He describes the desire to examine a musical idea from different perspectives, much like Monet painting Notre Dame at different times of the day, which is “a radical departure from Wagnerian musical priorities; a concert with nuanced variation rather than development, colour and repetition rather than continuous harmonic development” (Shaw-​ Miller, “Satie,” 92). 195 James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 308. 196 Machlis, Enjoyment, 379. 197 Arnold Whittall, “Neo-​Classicism,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 31, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline. com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​19723 198 Machlis, Enjoyment, 380. 199 Aldous Huxley, “Busoni, Dr. Burney, and Others (The Weekly Westminster Gazette, February 25, 1922),” in Aldous Huxley—​Complete Essays, vol. 1, 1920–​25, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 229. Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica was indeed a monument to J. S. Bach, and was his attempt to complete the unfinished fugue (Contrapunctus XVIII) from Bach’s collection, The Art of Fugue. Originally it was composed for one piano (1910); the second piano was added in 1922. Subtitled “ ‘Preludio al corale ‘Gloria al Signori nei Cieli’ e fuga a Quattro soggetti obbligati sopra un fragmento di Bach,’ ” Busoni adds a fourth and fifth subject (Bach had only three) to the fragment (“Fantasia Contrappuntistica,” The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press,



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accessed January 31, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​ opr/​t114/​e2415). The Fantasia was received with mixed reviews. Some hailed it as a work of genius, but others, such as Sir Donald Tovey, felt it had marred the purity of Bach. In his famous Companion to the Art of Fugue, Tovey acknowledges and dismisses Busoni in a footnote:   The reader will expect some comment on Busoni’s great Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which contains the whole extant portion of Bach’s unfinished fugue, developed not to an end of its own but to the purposes of a much larger work. It seems unusual, even with acknowledgments, to absorb 238 bars (or more than 10 minutes) of pure Bach into a modern composition; and I cannot work up any enthusiasm for compositions or cadenzas that purport to review the progress of music since classical times. Modern styles aspire to a purity of their own: introduced into other styles they are mere impurities. Bach’s own style would be a ghastly impurity if introduced into a Palestrina Mass. With contrapuntal forms there is really neither interest nor technical merit in merely taking advantage of modern possibilities as licences. A genuinely modern polyphony requires modern material [. . .] Our present task is not to produce a review of musical progress since Bach, but to follow the humbler and higher aim of carrying out what is discoverable of Bach’s actual intentions. (Donald Francis Tovey, A Companion to “The Art of Fugue” (Die Kunst Der Fuge)—​J. S. Bach [London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931], fn 47)

200 Burney’s General History of Music and Hawkins’ General History of the Science and Practice of Music were the first musical histories that moved beyond the encyclopedic: “The distinguishing mark of Burney’s history, in comparison to that of Hawkins, is his greater familiarity and interest in contemporary music and his skill in addressing the general reader” (Kerry S. Grant, “Burney, Charles,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed January 13, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​ grove/​music/​04399). While Hawkins was aiming to compile a complete and exhaustive history, Burney’s goal was to provide a subjective and anecdotal history of musical taste that would appeal to his reader. 201 Huxley quoting Burney, “Busoni,” 229. 202 Huxley, “Busoni,” 229. 203 Huxley quoting Wagner, “Busoni,” 229. As previously mentioned, Wagner was not always opposed to Bellini. It is likely that Huxley is here referencing Wagner’s 1837 article on Bellini’s Norma, which had been reprinted in the Bayreuther Blätter in 1889 and then in translation in the Musical Times on February 1, 1889. See footnote 178. 204 Huxley, “Busoni,” 229–​30. Huxley goes on to explain how Mademoiselle Suggia’s concert “was a demonstration of the history of melody and harmony” (230), which in turn reveals his own “modern” taste. He deprecatingly summarizes

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Mozart’s Haffner Symphony as “an admirable example of Doctor Burney’s ‘modern music’ ”; Saint-​Saens’ Cello Concerto as epitomizing Romanticism’s “expressive melody and romantic harmony in their feeble decay”; and Dvorãk’s Concerto as demonstrating the Romantic composer’s failure “to find salvation in folk-​song melody” (230). On the other hand, his praise of Bach contrasts sharply: “And then there was the sharp intellectual astringent of Bach’s unaccompanied Cellos Suite in C with the exquisite encore in E flat” (230). He concludes: “Listening to the program one could understand so well the reasons which made one generation turn from Dr Burney’s ‘modern music,’ which made another turn to romanticism and the next to the simplicity of folk song and the austerity of the counterpoint from which the development started” (230). 205 Ezra Pound, “Music (The New Age, March 21, 1918),” in Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. R. Murray Schafer (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 89. 206 Pound, “Music,” 88. 207 Huxley, “Busoni,” 230. 208 George Bernard Shaw, “Fugue out of Fashion (Magazine of Music, November 1885),” in How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Rubert Hart-​Davis, 1960), 102–​3. 209 Shaw, “Fugue,” 103. 210 Shaw, “Fugue,” 104. 211 George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite, in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 3, 1893–​1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Bodley Head, 1981), 3: 535. Eugene Gates also outlines Shaw’s Wagnerian leanings in “The Music Criticism and Aesthetics of George Bernard Shaw,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35.3 (Autumn 2001), 63–​71. 212 Shaw, Wagnerite, 529. 213 George Bernard Shaw, “Wagner’s Theories (The World, 17 January 1894),” in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 3, 1893–​ 1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Bodley Head, 1981), 3: 90–​91. 214 George Bernard Shaw, “Concerts: Wagner and Mendelssohn (The Star, 23 February 1889),” in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 1, 1876–​90, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Bodley Head, 1981), 565. 215 George Bernard Shaw, “Stanford Becket (The World, 11 April 1894),” in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 3, 1893–​1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Bodley Head, 1981), 3: 174–​80. 216 Shaw, “Stanford Becket,” 3: 176. This is a complete about-​face for Shaw, especially given an 1888 review of Brahms’ music: “Brahms’s music is at bottom only a prodigiously elaborated compound of incoherent reminiscences” (Shaw,



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“Parry’s Judith (The Star, 18 December 1888),” in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, vol. 1, 1876–​90, ed. Dan H. Laurence [London: Bodley Head, 1981], 1: 540). 217 Aldous Huxley, “Literary Music (The Westminster Gazette, June 10, 1922),” in Aldous Huxley—​Complete Essays, vol. 1, 1920–​25, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 255. 218 Huxley, “Literary Music,” 256. 219 Huxley, “Literary Music,” 255–​6. 220 Shaw, “Stanford Becket,” 3: 177. Shaw even picks apart Parsifal, noting that if one sets aside “that large part of the score (the best part) which is senseless apart from the poem,” it does not hold up against Beethoven’s Leonore or Ninth if considered through the lens of absolute music (3: 177). 221 Shaw, “Stanford Becket,” 3: 178–​9. The “Bohemian Girl school” will become particularly relevant in the next chapter, with reference to Joyce’s musical choices in Dubliners. 222 Wagner wrote a programmatic exposition for the Coriolan Overture “in terms of a dramatic scenario” (Curt Von Westerhagen, Wagner: A Biography, trans. Mary Whittall [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 172) as a conducting aid for his orchestra. Sir Donald Tovey translated and introduced this program in England. For more on Tovey’s role in bringing Wagner’s translations to Britain, see Catherine Dale, “Donald Francis Tovey: ‘The Grand Old Man of British Analytical History,’ ” in Music Analysis in Britain in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 223 E. M. Forster, “Not Listening to Music,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (Abinger Edition, London: Edward Arnold, 1951), 124. 224 Forster, “Not Listening,” 124. 225 Hanslick, Beautiful, 25. 226 Forster, “Not Listening,” 124. 227 W. B. Yeats, “The Musician and the Orator,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4, ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2007), 196. 228 Yeats, “Musician,” 196. 229 Yeats, “Musician,” 196. 230 W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1906—​Literature and the Living Voice,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 8, ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), 105. 231 Dahlhaus, Idea, 16. 232 Imogene Horsley, Fugue, History and Practice (New York: Free Press, 1966), 374. 233 Joseph Kerman quoting Rosen, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–​1750 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005), xvii.

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234 On a slightly more playful note, this ocular contract between the composer and the musician is also apparent in Satie’s instructions to his performers, where only the performer would have a full appreciation of ironic instructions such as “like a nightingale with a toothache (comme un rossignol qui aurait mal aux dents),” etc. See Jean-​Michel Rabaté’s study, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, for more on Satie’s 1913 composition Embryons desséchés. Shaw-​Miller also discusses Satie’s relationship to his instructions throughout his chapter, “ ‘The Only Musician with Eyes’: Erik Satie and Visual Art,” in Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature. 235 Du Maurier, Trilby, 164. 236 Wagner, “Bellini,” 66. 237 Huxley, “Busoni,” 229. As previously stated, “modern” in this sense refers to Burney’s ideas about “modern music,” which privileged sing-​ability over the endless counterpointing of J. S. Bach. 238 E. M. Forster, Howards End (Abinger Edition, London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 29. 239 Forster, Howards End, 29. 240 Forster, Howards End, 29. 241 Forster, Howards End, 29. 242 Forster, Howards End, 29. 243 Forster, Howards End, 29. 244 Dahlhaus, Idea, 119. Intriguingly, in his chapter “Classical Music, Cosmopolitanism, and War: From Authors to Audiences,” David Deutsch also distinguishes between the German and British audiences, but through the lens of war (i.e., “Britain’s ability to compete with Germany in more martial arenas”—​David Deutsch, British Literature and Classical Music [London: Bloomsbury, 2015], 188). Also examining music through its class politics, Gemma Moss looks at the way Forster’s narratives give music the capacity to be “socially inclusive” through its availability to many social groups but also exclusionary since musicianship is “the preserve of the upper classes” with the “financial freedom to buy instruments and take lessons” (Gemma Moss, “Music in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End: The Conflicting Presentation of Nineteenth Century Aesthetics,” English Literature in Transition 1880–​1920 59.4 [2016], 496–​7). 245 Forster, Howards End, 36. 246 Forster, Howards End, 36. 247 Forster, Howards End, 29. 248 Forster, Howards End, 30. 249 Forster, Howards End, 30. 250 Forster, Howards End, 72.



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2 51 Forster, Howards End, 72. 252 Forster, Howards End, 72. 253 Forster, “Not Listening,” 122. 254 Forster, “Not Listening,” 123. 255 Forster, “Not Listening,” 124. 256 Deutsch, Classical, 84. Deutsch convincingly links the writers’ aspiration toward musical forms as a demonstration of intellectualism and sophistication; proof of their associations with “the complexity and increasing social value of classical music in twentieth-​century British society”; evidence of a link to “British intellectual formalism exemplified by Walter Pater,” and a general enjoyment of music (Deutsch, Classical, 80). I have endeavored to show that the desire to incorporate musical forms goes further than this and instead shows a partaking in a conversation about musical forms that was pervading the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. For the purpose of this monograph, I am only focusing on British authors. For a detailed discussion regarding the “verbal music” of authors such as Mann, Proust, etc., see Scher’s Verbal Music in German Literature (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968). Gerry Smyth also addresses this in Music in Contemporary British Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), looking at Proust’s Swann’s Way and Mann’s Tonio Kröger in his chapter “All Art Constantly Aspires towards the Condition of Music’: The Music-​Novel in Theory and Practice” (15–​58). Albright’s Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) also comprised non-​ British-​centric examples. 257 Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Vintage, 2004), 384. 258 A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 64. 259 Huxley, Point Counter Point, 384–​5. 260 Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–​1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 210. 261 Joyce E. Kelley, “Virginia Woolf and Music,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 425. For more on Woolf and music, see also Elicia Clements, “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf ’s the Waves,” Narrative 13.2 (2005), 160–​81; Emma Sutton, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and David Deutsch, British Literature and Classical Music (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 262 Part of this work originally appeared in the Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, ed. Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

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University Press, 2016). The quoted paragraphs have been reprinted with their permission. 263 T. S. Eliot, “The Music of Poetry,” in On Poets and Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 33. 264 Eliot, “Music,” 29. 265 Eliot, “Music,” 38. 266 T. S. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” The Listener 411 (November 25, 1936), 994. 267 Eliot, “Poetic Drama,” 995 (emphasis in original). 268 Eliot, “Poetic Drama,” 994. 269 Eliot, “Poetic Drama,” 994. 270 Eliot, “Poetic Drama,” 994. 271 T. S. Eliot, “Introduction to Valéry’s Art of Poetry,” in The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, vol. 7, ed. Jackson Matthews (Bollingen Series, London: Routledge and Paul, 1958), xiv. In an earlier draft of this passage, Eliot’s reinterpretation of the condition of music as the experience of listening is much clearer. He does not convolute the text with Bergsonian duration or time, nor does he censure Pater as misleading. Rather, he illustrates that familiarity and listener experience—​the ability to anticipate and remember a piece of music and, therefore, be more susceptible to its effect—​are part of its condition. In the typescript, which cannot be quoted here, Eliot appends this susceptibility primarily to sonatas and symphonies, again drawing upon examples of absolute music to illustrate his point regarding the inextricability of structural familiarity and susceptibility to effect (T. S. Eliot, typescript of “The Art of Poetry,” Hayward Bequest, H/​1/​F, p. [10], King’s College Library, Cambridge). 272 Eliot, “Valéry,” xiii. 273 Eliot, “Valéry,” xviii. 274 For a more in-​depth application of Eliot’s musical patterning in Four Quartets, particularly with reference to East Coker, see Michelle Witen, “ ‘A Musical Pattern of Sound’: Absolute Music and Four Quartets,” in Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts, ed. Frances Dickey and John Morgenstern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 179–​88. 275 Eliot, “Music,” 33. 276 Ellmann, James Joyce, 703.

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Joyce’s Early Use of Music Jim should have stuck to singing. —​Nora Joyce1 Prior to writing the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, Joyce made no explicit statements in letters, recollections, or marginalia about his interest in absolute music, and his previous works are primarily referential. Nevertheless, one can already see the seeds of his later musical project, with a gradual progression toward philosophical and structural considerations that border on aspects of absolute music discussed in Chapter 1. This chapter explores Joyce’s early texts—​his essays, his notebooks, Chamber Music, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles—​in order to show the shifting ways in which Joyce engages with music before writing Ulysses. In Dubliners in particular, Joyce’s manifold use of it, despite the prevalence of vocal song, demonstrates a preoccupation with ways of separating music and words as well as its potential as an organizational device. Over the course of these works, Joyce’s prose demonstrates a shift from his allegiance to music as a singer to a more nuanced understanding of how music and words work separately and together. His application in his early works moves from musical analogy to the forging of a notion of musical rhythm; to participating in musicological debates; to considerations of space, mood and affect; to the application of musical terminology; and finally, to elements of musical structuring.

Shifting engagement from the essays to Exiles References to music in Joyce’s early essays are few and far between: only ten essays mention music across the fifty-​two essays collected in Joyce’s Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Aside from the perplexing quotation used in the

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epigraph of Chapter 1, and several references to Wagner,2 the focus appears to be on the way in which the power of music can be harnessed or best expressed. For example, in his 1898 essay “Subjugation,” Joyce writes of the “subjugation of a great gift,” indicating an early awareness of the need to provide even “the loveliest of melodies” with a shape: “in the ear of the rapt musician, the loveliest melodies outpour themselves, madly, without time or movement, in chaotic mazes, ‘like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh,’ ” without its “subjugation.”3 In this sense, Joyce seeks to see subjugation not as a form of oppression, but rather as “an influence,”4 or elucidation of the material to the end of making it universally understood. For music, this involves adding “time or movement” in order to give sense to the “chaotic maze” of “the loveliest of melodies.”5 Though he does not specifically refer to musical structure, this nevertheless foreshadows the way in which Joyce aims to use both time and movement in harnessing the music of “Sirens,” especially when viewing all of Joyce’s works as part of what Hans Walter Gabler and Vicki Mahaffey call the “ ‘continuous manuscript’ of Joyce’s writing career.”6 A preoccupation with the interplay of time and movement, rhythm and phrasing, can also be seen in Joyce’s Early Commonplace Notebook (1903–​ 12), where he delineates the melody of an unidentified Persian song, and then, underneath, records the different accenture of the “Rhythm of the Verse” as opposed to the “Rhythm of the Music”:

Figure  2.1  Musical notation from Early Commonplace Notebook (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​2/​A, IMG 02-​009, 7v [p.14])



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The above example of the differing accents placed on music, musical notation, and the poetry of verse shows exactly why W. B. Yeats felt that music sullied the purity of poetry, rather than the other way around. For him, “no word [should] have an intonation or accentuation it could not have in passionate speech” and since musicians felt the need to elongate vowels for it to fit the music, “modern song sung in the modern way” was distasteful.7 However, the above notes evidence no such judgment from Joyce, and certainly in Ulysses and after, he shows no compunction in elongating the vowels of words for it to fit the “music” of his prose fiction. In the notation in Figure 2.1, Joyce has presented a time signature that alternates between 3/​8 and 4/​8 (three or four beats per bar with the eighth note having the full beat), which is fairly common for some folk tunes (i.e., Bartók and Kodály’s Hungarian folk melodies). Although Joyce has not indicated a time signature, he has implied it with the stressed syllables of the text that follow the natural stressed beats of the 3/​8 and 4/​8 time. The stress of 3/​8 would normally be on the first beat, and not the second, but Joyce has matched the stress of how the word is pronounced, demonstrating an awareness of the differences between musical and spoken emphasis, somehow managing to subvert both the musical notation and the spoken word to create his own rhythmic emphasis. Related to this rhythmic stress, in Stephen Hero, Joyce writes that “Song is the simple rhythmic liberation of an emotion.”8 This relationship between music, musical rhythm, and the rhythm of the verse seems to be clearly delineated in the way Joyce has notated the music in Figure 2.1, a differentiation that prefigures how Joyce himself discriminates between the rhythm of music, musical notation, and verse when he later employs “sung” libretto in Ulysses. For example, when Molly is mentally rehearsing her performance of Love’s Old Sweet Song, she extends vowels and her accenture differs from the spoken word: Loves old sweeeetsonnnng [. . .] weeping tone once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world the mists began I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet sooooooooooong Ill let that out full when I  get in front of the footlights again [. . .] comes looooves old deep down chin back not too much make it double [. . .] yes hold them like that a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee [. . .] pianissimo eeeee one more tsong (U 18.598, 874–​908)

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Her elongation of the vowels matches the musical notation, if not the spoken word, but even that does not completely correlate with the sheet music. Furthermore, this rhythm is meant to “liberat[e]‌an emotion” or more specifically an emotional response to the rhythm and dynamics from the audience, who is watching and listening intently enough to see Molly’s double chin if she moves it too far back while singing the lower notes of “old.” In this way, even at the early stages of Joyce’s Early Commonplace Notebook, his student essay on “Subjugation,” and Stephen Hero, one can see an early preoccupation with musical rhythm, verse, and the differentiation from the spoken/​written word. This concept of “song [as] the simple liberation of an emotion” segues nicely into Joyce’s admission that he intended Chamber Music to be a “suite of songs” (JL 1: 67). His original title, A Book of Thirty Songs for Lovers,9 preserves this intention of the crossing over of his verse into song, and the changed title to Chamber Music also introduces an element of interiority as well as clear links to Elizabethan song.10 It would be a mistake to draw definitive conclusions based on the title of Chamber Music, as both its name and arrangement are attributed to Stanislaus Joyce.11 Perhaps because of its title, almost every reviewer of Chamber Music likens the poetry to music, describing them in variations of “tuneful,” “musical,” “verbal music,” and “music in verse.”12 Arthur Symons’ review for the Nation (June 22, 1907) explains them as follows: There is almost no substance at all in these songs, which hardly hint at a story; but they are like a whispering clavichord that someone plays in the evening, when it is getting dark. They are full of ghostly old tunes, that were never young and will never be old, played on an old instrument. If poetry is a thing to be overheard, these songs, certainly, will justify the definition.13

As with most reviews, the comparison to music is fuzzy at best, drawing upon the connection between lyric and song and the simile of faint music at twilight (perhaps a nod to Joyce’s favorite Love’s Old Sweet Song?). However, one interesting point from Symons’ review is the idea that “poetry is a thing to be overheard,” with an emphasis on the oral quality of the lyric voice and the implication that these “songs” are to be heard in the background, eavesdropped upon, or perhaps even earwigged(!)—​all of which connects to the oral quality



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of Finnegans Wake, H. C. Earwicker (earwigger), and the many possible interpretations of the theme of overhearing in this later text. In his Musical Allusions, Bowen only locates one song reference in Chamber Music, namely, the Song of Solomon,14 though one could argue that the lines, “My hope and all my riches” (CM XXIII 2, 5), echoes I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls’ “That I was the hope and the pride /​I had riches too great to count.” Despite the dearth of musical allusion, the poems themselves are filled with musical images: stringed instruments, pianos, harps, and bugles (CM I, II, III, XI); the music or sounds of nature, such as the river or the wind (CM I, III, VII, VIII, XIII, XIV, XV, XXIII, XXIX, XXXV); unknown, merry, or pretty airs (CM II, V, XXIV); singers, choirs, pipers, song, come-​all-​ye’s, and serenades (CM IV, V, X, XIII, XVI, XX, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XXVIII); and even to “sweet music” (CM I, III, XXXIII), which returns in full force in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when Stephen Dedalus discovers his poetic voice. Still, Chamber Music is arguably mostly musical by analogy. Joyce’s musical engagement progresses far beyond analogy by the time he writes Exiles—​likely drafted around the same time as “Sirens” and his early notebooks15—​the last of his published works prior to the serialization of Ulysses. Joyce’s commitment to music goes beyond casual interest in Exiles, demonstrating that he is aware of musicological discourse at a much higher level, when he negotiates the crux between Wagner and Bizet as presented by Nietzsche in The Case of Wagner—​a book Joyce owned while living in Trieste.16 In The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche argues that attaching prescribed or dramatic content to music forces it to become the servant of drama: “music may be not music but language, instrument, ancilla dramaturgica.”17 This is part of Nietzsche’s over all critique of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, which elevates the totalizing work of art, or music-​drama, at the expense of music. Over the course of the essay, Nietzsche attacks Wagner on the level of drama and music, and in both cases, he does so by contrasting Wagner against Bizet. In discussing orchestral music, Nietzsche focuses on Bizet’s “orchestral tone”:  “May I  say that the tone of Bizet’s orchestra is almost the only one I  can still endure? That other orchestral tone which is now the fashion, Wagner’s, brutal, artificial, and ‘innocent’ at the same time [. . .] how harmful for me is this Wagnerian orchestral tone.”18 For Nietzsche, this

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artificiality is laborious—​it “sweats”—​as opposed to Bizet’s “perfect” music, which “approaches lightly, supplely, politely,” “without counterfeit,” and contains a universal appeal or “subtlety [that] belongs to a race, not to an individual.”19 Furthermore, the organization of the melody is “rich,” “precise,” and is structured as an arc that “builds, organizes, finishes,” unlike the Wagnerian “infinite melody.”20 In short, Nietzsche remarks, Bizet’s “work makes one perfect! One becomes a ‘masterpiece’ oneself ”21 because Bizet makes his listener “fertile,”22 whereas Wagner, as “the artist of decadence” renders his listener sterile.23 In his discussion of drama, Nietzsche again confronts Wagner’s abilities: “Wagner is no dramatist; don’t be imposed upon! [. . .] he was not enough of a psychologist for drama; instinctively, he avoided psychological motivation—​ how? by always putting idiosyncrasy in its place.”24 Once again, Nietzsche demonstrates his argument by contrasting Wagner and Bizet, via Tannhäuser and Carmen. Instead of the all-​consuming, possessive reality of love demonstrated by Don José in Carmen, Wagner is preoccupied with the “problem of redemption,” present in all of Wagner’s operas:  “What rare, what profound dodges! Who if not Wagner would teach us that innocence prefers to redeem interesting sinners? (The case in Tannhäuser).”25 However, this redemption and martyrdom lacks the realism of the need to possess the loved one shown in Carmen. By separating Wagner’s music and drama, Nietzsche demonstrates how Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk has become decadent and “composite”:  “life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—​the whole is no longer a whole [. . .] The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.”26 The decomposition of the music-​drama is also articulated by Joyce: however subdued the tone of passions may be, however ordered the action or commonplace diction, if a play, or a work of music, or a picture concerns itself with the everlasting hopes, desires and hates of humanity, or deals with a symbolic presentment of our widely related nature, albeit a phase of that nature, then it is drama.27

The above quotation appears in two essays:  “Royal Hibernian Academy—​ ‘Ecce Homo’ ” (1899) and again in “Drama and Life” (1900). In the latter, Joyce



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elaborates upon the nature of drama as “the interplay of passions to portray truth,”28 and the necessity of finding a medium where it yet remains “intact”: “I shall not speak here of its many forms. In every form that was not fit for it, it made an outburst [. . .] Morality, mystery, ballet, pantomime, opera, all these it speedily ran through and discarded. Its proper form ‘the drama’ is yet intact.”29 In the case of the opera, drama has remained “intact” but at the expense of music. Like with Nietzsche, these initially pro-​Wagnerite sentiments are overturned for the same reasons that they are initially lauded. As Sam Slote writes in Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics, Joyce begins by elevating the Wagnerian aesthetic in his early essays; however, “over the course of his career as a writer, Joyce becomes more like Bizet, as Nietzsche describes him, and comes to treat his readers as if they were writers themselves.”30 Usual examinations of Exiles focus on the Ibsenian influence, psychoanalytical readings, its role within the thematic development of Joyce’s canon, and its place as a Modernist play.31 When looking at the presence of music in the play, Zack Bowen states that “musical allusions play a less significant role in Exiles than in any of Joyce’s works” and that the references to Carmen and Tannhäuser are only “tangential to the action.”32 I would like to reconsider this statement in light of the relationship between Joyce and Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner where he appears to be paraphrasing Nietzsche’s musicological argument using the same examples of Bizet and Wagner. Joyce’s reference to Bizet’s Carmen takes place in the first act of Exiles, within the context of the night Richard’s father dies: RICHARD:  I remember the night he died. [He pauses for an instant and then goes on calmly] I was a boy of fourteen. He called me to his bedside. He knew I wanted to go to the theatre to hear Carmen. He told my mother to give me a shilling. I kissed him and went. When I came home he was dead. Those were his last thoughts as far as I know. (E 15)

On the surface, Richard presents this scene as his father’s selfless desire to send him to the opera, rather than witnessing his father’s death, though Richard’s conclusion that these were likely his father’s last thoughts seems somewhat solipsistic. Bowen posits that Carmen is referenced because “it is concerned with romance and youth” as well as the theme of “self exile”; and “the opera’s love triangle” could potentially provide “the basis for Richard’s penchant for

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exile and love rivalry in his adult life.”33 It is also possible that Joyce is following Nietzsche’s analysis of love in Carmen, as opposed to the love depicted in Tannhäuser, even drawing upon the same examples. Nietzsche compares Bizet and Wagner:  “Finally, love—​love translated back into nature. Not the love of a ‘higher virgin’! No Senta-​sentimentality! But love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel.”34 For Nietzsche, the love demonstrated by Don José’s final cry—​“Yes. I have killed her /​I—​my adored Carmen!”—​demonstrates the true nature of love as possession: “They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another human being, often against one’s own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person.”35 This possessiveness is replicated in the situation with Bertha: both Robert and Richard are vying to possess her, and the aggression of Richard’s actions even mimic that of Carmen’s throwing a rose at Don José to signal her choice of lover during the Habanera when Richard “plucks one of the roses and throws it at [Bertha’s] feet” (E 64). By contrast, the appearance of Wagnerian reference in the play is through Robert playing “softly in the bass the first bars of Wolfram’s song in the last act of ‘Tannhäuser’” (E 69). Robert, expecting Bertha, is greeted instead by Richard. To make conversation, he points to the changes in their once-​ shared cottage at Ranelagh: “The piano is an addition since your time. I was just strumming out Wagner when you came. Killing time. You see I am ready for the fray” (E 70). Contextualizing this reference, Bowen writes:  “When Wolfram sings this greeting to the evening star and the departing and presumably dying Elizabeth, he sings as the responsible, God-​fearing lover-​rival of Tannhäuser, who is slave to the lust of Venus.”36 Bowen gives the wider context of Wolfram’s place in Tannhäuser: though both love Elisabeth, her affections are for Tannhäuser alone, despite discovering his faithlessness in having spent a year in the orgiastic Venusberg. In Act 2, Wolfram and Tannhäuser are set up as opposites, with Wolfram singing of courtly love during the Sängerkrieg, and Tannhäuser singing of passion, which leads to his exile and the revelation of his whereabouts for the past year. Wolfram’s song, here referenced, in the last act of Tannhäuser forms the totality of the scene, and it goes through three stages over the course of the three stanzas:  fearful foreshadowing of death in the twilight, the sudden appearance of the evening star to dispel the darkness of the night, and then



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Wolfram’s request that the evening star greet her who ascends to the heavens. This synopsis becomes relevant when considering that the stage directions of Exiles specifically state that Richard is playing the bass chords of the first bars of O du, mein holder Abendstern, falling within the tone of darkness and distress of the first stanza: the spirit is enshrouded in “Grausen bangt” (horrible fear), even as it seeks to ascend toward heaven. The evening star has not yet appeared. Like Elisabeth (and the evening star), Bertha is absent from the scene, but Elisabeth’s absence is because of death and not detainment or indecision. She never considers Wolfram to be her lover, and all of her thoughts seem to turn toward martyring herself for Tannhäuser’s redemption. According to Nietzsche, this “problem of redemption” is present in all of Wagner’s operas,37 but this redemption and martyrdom appears to be different from the love depicted in Carmen because it lacks the realism of the need to possess the loved one. Although Elisabeth is “selfless in love,” desiring Tannhäuser’s “advantage” at the expense of her own life,38 at no point does she seek to possess the other person in the way that Don José’s final move in killing his Carmen is to ensure that no one else shall ever possess her—​a reference that returns in the same context in Ulysses when Stephen is discussing his theory of Othello: “Lover of an ideal of a perversion, like José he kills the real Carmen” (U 9.1022). Similarly, Wolfram’s selfless love for Elisabeth does not show him trying to possess her, even as he realizes that she is dying. Viewing the contrasting operatic references through the lens of Nietzsche therefore highlights the different perspectives of love—​not sentimental love, but “love as fatum, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel” like in Carmen39—​which is also depicted in Richard’s sabotage of Robert’s seduction of his wife. After enabling and encouraging Bertha’s affair, he then prevents it through his presence and by disclosing his knowledge to Robert, a direct contrast to Bloom who also knows about Molly and Boylan’s assignation, but rather than prevent the infidelity, he will purposely stay away and be distracted by music. The difference in musical application from Chamber Music to Exiles is remarkable and sketches the spectrum of Joyce’s musical interest:  he moves from overt musical analogy to the subtle encapsulation of various aspects of Nietzsche’s argument in The Case of Wagner, through the like contrasts of Bizet and Wagner, eventually showing Joyce’s own allegiance to Bizet rather

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than Wagner. While both works are lacking the virtuoso aspects of his utilization of music in his prose fiction, one can nevertheless see some of the musical problems with which Joyce was grappling as well as the seeds of his desire to harness music (be it through time, rhythm, or versification) in his notebooks and essays.

Music’s “inexhaustible power of expression”: Songs without their words in Dubliners and Portrait Although Exiles and the poetry contain hints of Joyce’s musical project, the trajectory of the way in which he would later use music in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can be more readily detected in his prose fictions, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There are numerous references to songs, operas, and composers in these two works—​and there has already been much work done in unpacking the contextual insights and frameworks that these offer, as outlined in the introduction—​but the allusions are often focused on the effects of listening to a performance, the mention of a mood generated by music, or an emphasis on the instrumental accompaniments, meaning the songs without their words, functioning as their own “inexhaustible power of expression.”40 Without listing a particular song, there are many instances where an air or singing are used to capture a mood. For example, in “An Encounter,” the first-​person narrator sings “an air” to demonstrate his happiness: “The granite stone of the bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head. I was very happy” (D 14). Another example would be in “Araby,” when the narrator, feeling “liberated,” goes “from room to room singing” (D 24). Happiness is also reflected in the children dancing and singing in “Clay,” all of which is part of the general merriment of the gathering: Maria eagerly anticipates “all the children singing!” (D 83) and this is fulfilled when “Mrs Donnelly play[s]‌the piano for the children and they danced and sang” (D 87). This image of the domestic space as a place of happy music-​ making is also seen in “A Little Cloud” when Little Chandler invites Gallaher to spend an evening with him and his wife: “I hope you’ll spend an evening with us, he said, before you go back. My wife will be delighted to meet you.



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We can have a little music and . . .” (D 65). The chaste happiness of a musical evening at home is distinctly contrasted against the implied depravity of alternative musical spaces such as Gallaher having “been to the Moulin Rouge” and “all the bohemian cafés. Hot stuff!” (D 62). Similarly, in “The Boarding House,” music transforms the home from boarding to bawdy house on Sunday nights: “The musichall artistes would oblige; and Sheridan played waltzes and polkas and vamped accompaniments. Polly Mooney, the Madam’s daughter, would also sing [. . .]: I’m a . . . . naughty girl” (D 50–​1). “A Painful Case” uses the same device of delineating space with music, where music in the domestic arena is juxtaposed against the corruptibility of music when its effects are absorbed in the concert hall. At the start of the story, Mr Duffy’s evenings are dichotomized between “the landlady’s piano” and “roaming about the outskirts of the city” (D 91). Outside of these two activities, the domestic space of the piano in the home is occasionally extended to the point of a “dissipation” when his “liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert” (D 91). The specific pieces to be played at the concert are not named; however, it is at one such concert that he first encounters a mother and daughter; after a second and third chance concert meeting, he makes an appointment to walk with her. This first walk turns into many walks, before he finally visits her at home (D 92); thus, coming full circle with the extension of the piano at home to the piano abroad. The “dissipation” of the concert hall is then transferred to Mrs Sinico’s domestic arena, with her husband even “encourag[ing] his visits” since he “had dismissed his wife so sincerely from his gallery of pleasures that he did not suspect anyone else would take an interest in her” (D 92). As they spend more time together in the darkened rooms, their thoughts become increasingly “entangled” (D 92, 93) as an echo of the music that entangled them from the start: “Little by little as their thoughts entangled they spoke of subjects less remote [. . .] The dark discreet room, their isolation, the music that still vibrated in their ears united them” (D 93). Here again, no particular piece is named; however, the music appears to function as a “language above language.”41 The moment the music descends from the cerebral to the physical sensuality of entanglement—​“Mrs Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek” (D 93)—​ he ends the association and receives in return “a parcel containing his books and music” (D 94), reassigning these representatives of his domestic life to

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their proper place. Since the concert hall represents the corruption of morality through shared listening, Mr Duffy keeps “away from concerts lest he should meet her” (D 94). Instead, he remains firmly in his domestic space where “Some new pieces of music encumbered the musicstand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science” (D 94); while at the same time Mrs Sinico slowly recedes further and further to the other side of the musical dissipation, degenerating into alcoholism and possibly suicide. Here, music becomes a dichotomizing gateway, either to be enjoyed innocently within the domestic arena or to be turned into a corrupting influence when the cerebral is replaced by the physical. Music as a reflection of mood or as a space of domesticity is also seen in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, from Stephen’s earliest childhood memories of his father singing “O, the wild rose blossoms /​On the little green place” (P 3) and him singing along “O, the geen wothe botheth” (P 3); to his mother playing the “sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance” (P 3); to the merriment of the children’s party at Harold Cross with “the circling of the dancers and [. . .] the music and laughter” (P 63); to Uncle Charles’ morning routine of smoking and “hum[ing] contentedly one of his favourite songs: O, twine me a bower or Blue Eyes and Golden Hair or The Groves of Blarney” in his “arbour” (P 55). The associations with domesticity become entwined with weariness by Book IV, as can be seen when Stephen joins his siblings in singing Oft in the Stilly Night: The voice of his youngest brother from the farther side of the fireplace began to sing the air Oft in the Stilly Night. One by one the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing [. . .] He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air with them [. . .] He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children: and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurrent note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before entering upon it. (P 157)

In the above quotation, the innocent voices of children cease to be outcroppings of a happy, contented domestic life, but, for Stephen, become rather a recurring “echo” of “weariness and pain” that contrasts against the previous depictions of domestic music-​making, and demonstrates a projection of the way in which Stephen views his domestic situation. Once again, the reader is not provided with the lyrics for Oft in the Stilly Night, and there is no emphasis on the verbal significance of



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Moore’s words—​in fact the “endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations of children” is the opposite message from Moore’s message of desertion and fleeting memory—​but rather on the way in which the act of singing, devoid of words, affects Stephen. Although the passage is organized around a song reference, the description and Stephen’s response are both closer to non-​referential. In the above-​mentioned cases, the concept of music reflects a mood and/​ or delineates a particular space, but when the pieces themselves are unnamed, only their effects are recorded; when a piece is named, the focus likewise remains on the effects of the piece and, despite the specificity of the song reference, very little emphasis is placed on the (absent) libretto in Joyce’s text. In addition to the absence of libretto, the focus at times is almost completely on the accompaniment, as is the case in “Two Gallants”:  the street performer’s Silent O’Moyle imparts a sense of melancholy to the characters—​and they are only released from this mood when they reach Stephen’s Green and are exposed to “the noise of trams, the lights and the crowd” (D 43)—​but the phrases from the song are conspicuously absent from the narrative content. Several critics have noted the nationalist significance of the harpist playing Moore’s Song of Fionnuola (Silent O’Moyle), making links to the message and/​or context that could be seen as conveyed alongside the narrative. In his identification of the reference, Bowen for instance, comments: “The corruption of Ireland, its slaveys, and its harps by its mercenary gallants insures its darkness in the foreseeable future and leads to the death wish expressed so beautifully in ‘Silent, O Moyle’ and ‘The Dead.’ ”42 However, even without knowing the context or words of the music, the passage in which this takes place centers on the performance of the song as an instrumental piece, with a focus on the instrumentation rather than the text, and more particularly, on the personification of the harp: They walked along Nassau Street and then turned into Kildare street. Not far from the porch of the club a harpist stood in the roadway playing to a little ring of listeners. He plucked at the wires heedlessly, glancing quickly from time to time at the face of each newcomer and from time to time, wearily also, at the sky. His harp too, heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees, seemed weary alike of the eyes of strangers and of her master’s hands. One hand played in the bass the melody of Silent, O Moyle while the other hand careered in the treble after each group of notes. The notes of the air throbbed deep and full. (D 43)

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At no point in this description is the reader aware of the text of the piece, but only of “one hand play[ing] in the bass the melody” and the other playing the treble accompaniment. Although the melody would usually be in the treble and the accompaniment in the base, the feminization and exposure of the harp—​“heedless that her coverings had fallen about her knees”—​allows for the subtext of a story of the humiliation of a young Irish woman, which is to come at the hands of Corley in the bass melody, with his “deep energetic gallantries” (D 46, emphasis added), and his victim in the “career[ing]” treble accompaniment. Within this scenario, Lenehan, who seems to be most affected by the air—​“the air which the harpist had played began to control his movements” (D 45)—​plays a noteworthy role. On the one hand, he morphs into the performer, manipulating his bodily instrument: “His softly padded feet played the melody while his fingers swept a scale of variations idly along the railings after each group of notes” (D 45). The harpist’s accompaniment was in the treble with the melody in the base, which would explain the oddity of Lenehan playing the melody with his feet and the “variations” with his fingers. This would also create parallels to the narrative, since Lenehan is partly responsible for pressuring Corley to take advantage of his lady friend. However, at the same time, Lenehan is also sublimated into both harp and listener: the air “control[s]‌his movements” (D 45) and he imagines (and witnesses) the woman being used. Without the text to control the interpretation, the usual accompaniment ceases to be “a ‘pleasant noise’ beneath language” into “a language above language.”43 By paying attention to the instrumentation, the seeming musical interlude of Silent O’Moyle becomes a nuanced comment on the narrative action as well as musical performance. This is not the first time that one of Joyce’s characters is sublimated into a harp, with the body becoming an instrument. In “Araby,” the street singers give a nasal rendition of a “come-​all-​you about O’Donovan Rossa or a ballad about the troubles of our native land” (D 22). Here, O’Donovan Rossa is included in a list of various ballads about Irish troubles, which seem to be part of the general Irish noisescape, taking away the significance of the particular lyrics of O’Donovan Rossa;44 however, the young boy’s emotional response to the music/​noise is particularly telling: “These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me [. . .] my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires” (D 22). As with “Two Gallants,” the



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harp is corporealized, and again the male body is controlled by the harpist’s movements, or as Allan Hepburn writes: “As a harp, the boy is predisposed to be played upon, like a recipient object that expresses sounds without words when a player touches it.”45 Given the repetition of the same simile from “Two Gallants,” the use of music in this sense provides a concrete connection between the two stories, much in the same way that the repeated reference to Balfe’s operetta The Bohemian Girl in “Eveline” and “Clay” gives license to critics such as Zack Bowen to see Maria’s situation as a foreshadowing of Eveline’s fate.46 In the above examples, despite the specificity of the song reference, the emphasis is not on the libretto but rather on the effects of listening; furthermore, the focus is often listening to the accompaniment rather than the singing or the words. Another story from Dubliners that references music without libretto is “A Mother.” Here, since the focus is the inner workings and politics of putting together a concert series, the performances (rightfully?) seem secondary to the actions of organizing and negotiating. Despite the tendency to place musical talent alongside nationalist inclinations—​“People said that she was very clever at music and a very nice girl and, moreover, that she was a believer in the language movement” (D 118)—​unlike in other stories, there is little to no emphasis on the performance of the music beyond the mention of the singer’s previous performances or the audience’s recorded response to the music (or lack thereof). The only point where the performance is described is Madam Glynn’s “bodiless,” “gasping” rendition of Balfe’s Killarney, complete with “oldfashioned mannerisms of intonation and pronunciation,” “high wailing notes,” and a costume that made her appear as though “she had been resurrected from an old stage wardrobe” (D 126). This description of the Londoner is remarkable on many levels: on the one hand, it appears to be the only performance worth mentioning in any detail, even if that detail is unflattering, somehow showing the English upstaging of the Irish performance at a nationalist concert; on the other, the assessment picks apart the English performance of an Irish composer’s aria without any reference at all to the actual libretto and Madam Glynn is not described as a singer so much as an instrument. Madam Glynn aside, the narration gives no information about what pieces were performed or any details of the performance, focusing instead on the reception—​the applause for the tenor and the contralto “brought down the

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house”; Kathleen’s Irish airs were “generously applauded”; and the young lady’s “patriotic recitation” was “deservedly applauded” (D 126)—​and, as with “Two Gallants,” on the accompaniment. Significantly, even when Mr Bell is scheduled to sing, only “the piano [is] heard” (D 126). Similarly, when Kathleen is replaced as accompanist by Miss Healy, the only description is of “the first notes of the song” (D 128). In a story that is ostensibly about a concert, there is surprisingly little music; and, despite the substantial description of the singers upon their arrival, only the accompaniment is heard. This could be a reflection of Kathleen Kearney’s role as an accompanist, though she is also listed as playing “a selection of Irish airs” (D 126), so her contribution to the concert is not limited to accompaniment. While there are a number of possibilities to explain the emphasis on audience response and not the music—​from a potential reflection of the lack of information in Mr Hendrick’s report in the Freeman (which would ultimately be the only public record of the concert), since he did not witness the concert, or, perhaps a cultural comment upon the “frustration at the worn-​out formula of Gaelic League Irish nights,” designed to laud and “police the Irishness of the set lists,” sometimes at the expense of quality47—​the musical emphasis is not on the Irishness of the repertoire but rather the disembodied chords and the songs without words. The prominence of these “lost chords” (11.407) will recur in “Sirens” and “Circe,” as is discussed in Chapter 5. In pinpointing the instances where songs are mentioned without any emphasis on the libretto, I am purposely overlooking Joyce’s integration of libretto into prose, as is the case with “After the Race,” “The Boarding House,” “Clay,” and “The Dead”—​which are arguably the most obvious instances of musical incorporation in Dubliners. In “Clay,” for example, the effect of inserting the first verse of I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls as a quotation is that the song text is read alongside the rest of the text, and it is up to the reader to “hear” the music—​a feat that can only be accomplished if the reader is familiar with the music. Furthermore, the quoted music is stripped of its musicality:  it is not quoted with the sheet music, leaving the reader to read it as words without music. This leads one to wonder, when Joyce includes libretto, is it important that the reader recognize the words and figuratively hear the tune? Or are the words of the libretto simply another element of narrative text? Even without any familiarity with Polly’s “I’m a



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Naughty Girl,” the message is clear: Polly is singing about being a “naughty girl,” foreshadowing her later naughty behavior when she unwittingly reenacts the candle-​lighting scene from La Bohème and reveals similar bohemian morals.48 Likewise, in “After the Race,” knowing all of the lyrics to Cadet Roussel and their significance within the song, seems secondary to the atmosphere of drunken revelry generated by its singing. One can also see Julie Henigan’s logic in refuting Ellmann and Geckle’s mapping of the narrative of The Lass of Aughrim onto “The Dead,” by showing how both “rea[d]‌ more into the ballad itself than is actually present” in either the song or the story and that instead, one must analyse its “overall impact, both lyrically and musically.”49 To this end, Henigan argues that the strength of The Lass of Aughrim is its connection to the old Irish modality, wherein lies its “ability to move and even transfigure,” which is reflected in Gabriel’s response to the music.50 The answer to whether Joyce intended the libretto to be read as text, subtext, or music is not within the scope of this study, as my focus is on absolute music and its seeds in Joyce’s early work. In the previously mentioned Dubliners examples, the focus has been on the way in which the reader can see Joyce experimenting with musical elements beyond the referencing of song, and how this demonstrates a predilection toward thinking of music as more than the marriage of libretto and accompaniment. This can also be seen in Portrait. Although Stephen likes the sound of words (i.e., “suck” [P 7]) and demonstrates a preoccupation with the musicality of everyday noises (i.e., “the little song of the gas” [P 7, 9–​10], the “pick, pack, pock, puck” of the cricket bat [P 36–​7], or the “high whistling sound” of the pandybat [P 40]), his response to music, after a certain age, veers away from the beauty of the words to an appreciation of its rhythm and effects, eventually combining into the “rhythm of beauty” (P 199).51 In his youth, he hears the tolling bells, reminiscent of “the song that Brigid had taught him,” and he is struck by the words, incorporating the song’s libretto in his adulation: How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were where they said Bury me in the old churchyard! A tremor passed over his body. How sad and how beautiful! He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself:  for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music. The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!” (P 20)

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However, even at this stage, young Stephen already differentiates between libretto and music:  “the words, so beautiful and sad,” are only “like music,” but not music itself. In his imperfect remembrance of the song lyrics, he extricates the words from the rhythm and melody of the line—​“Bury me in the old churchyard” instead of “Bury me in the old church graveyard”; “the bell” rather than “the castle bell”—​showing an appreciation for the words that is “like [the] music” but not quite the music as written. This “tremor” felt for the beautiful words is consistent with Stephen’s appreciation of words more generally; however, the fact that he measures the value of words against the standards of musical affect is equally telling, especially when one considers that as Stephen matures, his focus on the “music and rhythm” of words becomes more explicit: “He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence” (P 214). Similarly, when he is composing his villanelle, “The verses pas[s]‌from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he fe[els] the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them” (P 210). However, when he tries to separate the words from the rhythm, they lose their enchantment: “The rhythm died out at once; the cry of his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over and over; then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and baffled; then stopped. The heart’s cry was broken” (P 210–​11). In an earlier instance where he is pondering his treasured phrase, “A day of dappled seaborne clouds,” he envisions the words as a chord: “The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord” (P 160). As he tries to unpack his sensorial associations, he hears “a confused music within him,” before it “seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence” (P 161). Stephen’s susceptibility to the effects of music seems to be more pronounced when he hears instrumental music. For example, upon hearing a waltz, he is struck by the rhythm and then the sentiments this rhythm evokes: The light spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored amid the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. A sidedoor of the theatre opened suddenly and a shaft of light flew across the grassplots. A sudden burst of music issued from the ark, the prelude of a waltz: and when the sidedoor closed again the



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listener could hear the faint rhythm of the music. The sentiment of the opening bars, their languor and supple movement, evoked the incommunicable emotion which had been the cause of all his day’s unrest and of his impatient movement of a moment before. His unrest issued from him like a wave of sound: and on the tide of flowing music the ark was journeying, trailing her cables of lanterns in her wake. Then a noise like dwarf artillery broke the movement. It was the clapping that greeted the entry of the dumbbell team on the stage. (P 69–​70)

The opening bars capture “all his day’s unrest,” which is released from him like an answering “wave of sound,” matching and freeing the image of the theater as an “ark.” Using the same image of the wave, when Stephen encounters “the first bars of sudden music” from a concertina, the “fantastic fabrics of his mind” are “dissolv[ed]” as “painlessly and noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of children” (P 154). In the dissolution of his mind’s fabric, Stephen appears to recognize music’s endless capacity for expression. He attempts to map this feeling with musical terminology, when he hears the “fitful music,” in response to his newfound freedom to attend university, as an “elfin prelude”: It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards a tone and downwards a major third, like triplebranching flames leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless: and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leap[t]‌out of time. (P 158)

While this description calls to mind the Après Midi d’un Faune, this “fitful music” is conveyed through musical intervals of “upwards a tone,” “a diminished fourth” and “a major third.” This same notational language occurs when he tries to map musical terminology onto a bird’s cry: “What birds were they? [. . .] He listened to their cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot: a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air” (P 216). Although this early concern with the relationship between the rhythm and effects of music differs significantly from the way in which Joyce portrays musical effects and performance in Ulysses, the negotiation between the songs without words in Dubliners and the music without words in Portrait

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foreshadows the very sophisticated way in which Joyce would later navigate this divide in “Sirens,” as will be shown in subsequent chapters.

Proto-​musical structure in Dubliners Although Joyce did not explicitly implement musical structure until “Sirens,” one can nevertheless see him experimenting with manners in which music crosses over into textual arrangement and musical organization as early as Dubliners. While this proto-​structuring lacks the sophistication of “Sirens,” one can already see a peculiar pattern emerging from Joyce’s placement of music in “Eveline,” “After the Race,” and “The Dead.” In “Eveline,” for example, the narrative pattern can be traced through the presence of music and musical instruments. As Eveline surveys her home, her eyes alight upon the “broken harmonium”: Home! She looked round the room reviewing all of its familiar objects which she dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided. And yet during all those years she had never found out the name of the priest whose yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. (D 27)

This “broken harmonium” or reed organ is one of the many “familiar objects” gathering dust that inform Eveline’s vision of “Home!” Moving from the broken harmonium, the next musical reference is to Frank taking Eveline to see the Bohemian Girl: “He took her to see the Bohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of the theatre with him” (D 29). In “A Painful Case,” Joyce describes the desire to see a musical concert as a sort of “dissipation” of domestic music making (D 91); Eveline’s movement from the broken harmonium of the home to the “dissipation” of the opera and sitting in an “unaccustomed part of the theatre” could therefore be seen as an extension of the growing brokenness of her home. This degeneration is cemented by Frank alerting the public to their courtship by singing to her: “People knew that they were courting and when he sang



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about the lass that loves a sailor she always felt pleasantly confused” (D 29). The final musical reference occurs at a pivotal point in Eveline’s decision-​ making process, when she hears a street organ playing the same Italian air as the night her mother died: Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mother’s illness; she was again in the close dark room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ player had been ordered to go away and given sixpence. (D 30)

The choice of “a melancholy air of Italy,” in the context of Eveline’s pending exodus, could be seen as an intrusion of the Italian immigration narrative—​ “—​Damned Italians! coming over here!” (D 30)—​into the Irish emigration narrative. Both in its initial appearance as a “promise to keep the home together” and now in its reprisal, this “street organ” seems to refract the domestic “broken harmonium” by taking the reed organ and placing it on the street, where Eveline will also become a “damned” immigrant in Argentina with potentially no promise of a functioning harmonium. Her mother’s pitiful life that went from a “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness” is similarly reflected in the broken harmonium and in her “Derevaun Seraun,” which some have speculated to mean “the end of song is madness” (D 31)—​all of which is repeated for Eveline when she descends, as Derek Attridge suggests, “not gradually like her mother, but in one instant of impossible mental and emotional conflict, into madness.”52 The progression of the (broken) harmonium, the opera, “the lass that loves a sailor,” and the street organ playing its melancholy Italian air (repeated), is not necessarily a musical structure (certainly not in the sense of absolute music), but it could be seen as a kind of musical organization within the story. Another example of musical patterning can be seen in Joyce’s equal employment of racing and musical language in “After the Race,” where Jimmy’s division of “his time curiously between musical and motoring circles” is also reflected in the divided text (D 33). The story about the aftermath of the race alternates between descriptions of the car, the race, and the evening’s revelries broken

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up by musical interludes. When describing Jimmy’s companions, Ségouin, the owner of the car, and Villona, the musician, are placed side by side: It was at Cambridge that he had met Ségouin. They were not much more than acquaintances as yet but Jimmy found great pleasure in the society of one who had seen so much of the world and was reputed to own some of the biggest hotels in France. Such a person (as his father agreed) was well worth knowing, even if he had not been the charming companion he was. Villona was entertaining also—​a brilliant pianist—​but, unfortunately, very poor. (D 33–​4)

Just as Ségouin is “charming” and well known in motor circles, so too is Villona a brilliant and entertaining pianist. Even as they sit in the car, Villona’s “deep bass hum of melody” is placed alongside the “noise of the car”:  “Besides, Villona’s humming would confuse anybody:  the noise of the car, too” (D 34). For almost every reference to music, there is also a reference to cars: “Villona, with immense respect, began to discover to the mildly surprised Englishman the beauties of the English madrigal, deploring the loss of old instruments. Rivière, not wholly ingenuously, undertook to explain to Jimmy the triumph of the French mechanicians” (D 36). Even at supper, Villona provides a musical accompaniment, demonstrating again, the equal division of time:  “There was a yacht piano in the cabin. Villona played a waltz for Farley and Rivière [.  .  .] Then an impromptu square dance, the men devising original figures. What merriment! [.  .  .] Cards! Cards! The table was cleared. Villona returned quietly to his piano and played voluntaries for them” (D 37). Again, this is not a musical structure, but it shows a predilection to play with the ways in which music can organize the text. Another musical configuration can be detected in “The Dead,” where it is possible to organize the events of the story around music,53 with the narrative alternating between musical performance and manifestations of humiliation or feelings of alienation. When Gabriel and Gretta first arrive, Miss Daly is playing a waltz: “He looked up at the pantry ceiling which was shaking with the stamping and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano and then glanced at the girl who was folding his overcoat carefully at the end of a shelf ” (D 154). Gabriel then embarrasses himself by teasing Lily about her beau and forcing her to accept money from him as



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a Christmas token. As he realizes his gaffe, he again listens to the finishing strains of the waltz: He waited outside the drawingroom door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort [.  .  .] He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they could recognise from Shakespeare or from the melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his [. . .] He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. (D 155)

His discomposure from his interaction with Lily and his worry about taking up the same “wrong tone” in his speech by making unfamiliar literary references, impresses upon him a sense of alienation and humiliation, sandwiched between the references to the waltz. The arrangement repeats when a Quadrille is played and Gabriel is sent to check on Freddy Malins’ sobriety. When he later reflects upon the evening, Gabriel thinks upon this incident as proof of him being “a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts” (D 191). Gabriel’s outsiderness is similarly reinforced during the playing of Mary Jane’s “academy piece” (D 161). Gabriel figuratively stands outside of the performance, evaluating the other listeners and finding that he “could not listen” to her playing: “Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawingroom. 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” (D 161). Instead, his mind wanders, touching upon his mother’s lack of musical talent and her wrongful indictment of Gretta as “country cute,” when he bitterly remembers “her sullen opposition to his marriage” (D 162). The same pattern of music followed by social awkwardness repeats when the “Lancers [are] arranged” and “Gabriel [finds] himself partnered with Miss Ivors” (D 162). This is one of the more embarrassing moments of the evening for him, resulting in Miss Ivors calling him a “West Briton” (jokingly and then seriously; D 163, 165). As he considers the incident shortly after it happens,

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he again realizes his mishandling and subsequent embarrassment: “Perhaps he ought not to have answered her like that. But she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbit’s eyes” (D 165). Even retrospectively, the offense is that she has humiliated him “before people” (repeated twice), thereby drawing a line between himself and the other guests. The next musical interlude is aunt Julia’s rendition of Arrayed for the Bridal, complete with grace notes and complicated embellishments (D 167–​8), after which Gabriel is forcibly reminded of his earlier misstep by Miss Ivors’ abrupt departure and returns to his role as “pennyboy” by carving the goose. At the supper, in the wake of Julia’s virtuoso performance, the dinner table conversation centres on opera and favorite performances, and Gabriel takes “no part in the conversation” (D 172), except to give his speech. Here again, he strikes the “wrong tone,” comparing his aunts to “the three Graces of the Dublin musical world,” a reference which is lost on Aunt Julia (D 178). The final performance is Bartell D’Arcy’s The Lass of Aughrim, which inspires Gabriel’s comparison of his wife’s attitude while listening to “Distant Music” (D 182). The disjuncture between Gabriel’s waves of joy and tender love looking at her as well as his “keen pang of lust” (D 184–​7), and Gretta’s melancholy thoughts about the dead Michael Furey, conjured by the music, leads to Gabriel’s final “shameful consciousness of his own person”: “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous wellmeaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror” (D 191). This ultimate humiliation ends the vacillating cycle between music and embarrassment, with the muted sounds of the “snow,” “general all over Ireland” (D 194). In “The Dead,” the narrative is segmented by the musical performance of the waltz, the quadrille, Mary Jane’s academy piece, the lancers, Julia’s Arrayed for the Bridal, and Bartell D’Arcy’s The Lass of Aughrim, allowing for music to function as a scaffolding that reflects and moves alongside Gabriel’s heightening sense of humiliation. This musical patterning, though a far cry from the sophisticated structuring of “Sirens” or his attempted “pure music” of Finnegans Wake, nevertheless arguably suggests aspects of “Sirens,” specifically with reference to the contrapuntal freefall as Bloom’s dissolution into the



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music increases with each aria that makes up the Tela Contrappuntistica, as will be discussed in the subsequent chapter. In “The Dead,” “After the Race,” and “Eveline,” a preoccupation with ways in which music can texturize the narrative is apparent. This, taken together with the shifting emphases of liberated rhythm in his notebooks, essays, and Stephen Hero; the increasing engagement with musicological discourse in Exiles; and the utilization of songs separated from their words, with a focus on instrumental accompaniment and musical affect, all prefigure Joyce’s cross over into the musical structuring associated with absolute music. Although his early works are far from pure music, one can still see that Joyce is playing with notions of referential and non-​referential music across his opus, and that his later implementation of absolute music is foregrounded by his earlier writings.

Notes 1 Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), 39. 2 In Joyce’s Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), see “Drama and Life” (23–​9), “James Clarence Mangan” (53–​60), and “Realism and Idealism in English Literature” (163–​82) for mentions of Wagner’s aesthetics and specific operas such as Parsifal, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde. See Timothy Martin’s Joyce and Wagner—​A Study of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) for an excellent, in-​depth exegesis of Joyce’s use, understanding, incorporation, and engagement with Wagner across all of his works. 3 James Joyce, “Subjugation,” in Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8. It is unclear when exactly this essay was written, but the date, September 27, 1898, and corrections point toward it being part of Joyce’s university work (Barry 290). 4 Joyce, “Subjugation,” 4. 5 Joyce, “Subjugation,” 8. 6 Vicki Mahaffey, “Joyce’s Shorter Works,” in Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176. 7 W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1906—​Literature and the Living Voice,” in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 8, ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), 105.

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8 James Joyce, Stephen Hero: A Part of the First Draft of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” ed. Theodore Spencer (New York: New Directions, 1944), 176. 9 Arthur Symons, “Arthur Symons on Joyce,” in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, 1902–​27, ed. Robert H. Deming (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 1:36. 10 The connections between Chamber Music and Elizabethan song have been well documented. See particularly Myra Russel’s “The Elizabethan Connection: The Missing Score of James Joyce’s Chamber Music,” James Joyce Quarterly 18.2 (1981), 133–​45 and “Chamber Music: Words and Music Lovingly Coupled,” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (New York: Garland, 1999), 57–​90, for a discussion of the connections to Elizabethan songs and musical culture as well as Joyce’s use of Elizabethan rhyme scheme, repetition and meter. More recently, William Martin also looks at the connection to Elizabethan song in Joyce and the Science of Rhythm (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), though his approach is to look at the “tension between the rhetorical accents and the underlying rhythms that structure the musical performance of ballads and songs” to demonstrate that Chamber Music functions as a specifically Modernist interpretation of the Elizabethan (65). Adrian Paterson in “ ‘After Music’: Chamber Music, Song, and the Blank Page” (in The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, ed. Marc C. Conner [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012], 117–​42) also looks at the nineteenth-​century sources of Elizabethan songs that Joyce may have been consulting, and how Joyce’s incorporation might deviate fruitfully from these sources. In the same collection, Matthew Campbell looks at Elizabethan intertexts in Chamber Music in “The Unconsortable Joyce: Chamber Music” (51–​77). 11 See William York Tindall, James Joyce—​Chamber Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 44. Because of Stanislaus Joyce’s involvement in the ordering, any later comments made by Joyce may have been retrospective rationalization, including his famous comments about its structure in his letter to Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer entreating him to make song settings of all of Chamber Music: “I hope you may set all of Chamber Music in time. This was indeed partly my idea in writing it. The book is in fact a suite of songs [. . .] The central song is XIV after which the movement is all downwards until XXXIV which is vitally the end of the book. XXXV and XXXVI are tailpieces just as I and III are preludes” (JL 1: 67). This being said, Boyle’s seminal “The Woman Hidden in James Joyce’s Chamber Music” offers a tantalizing comparison between the original versus the published arrangement, which calls into question the extent to which Stanislaus’ ordering represents Joyce’s original ideas. See Robert Boyle, S. J., “The Woman Hidden in James Joyce’s Chamber Music,” in Women in Joyce, ed. Suzette A. Henke and Elaine Unkeless (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 3–​30. See also



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Marc C. Conner’s “Joyce’s Poetics of Knowledge,” in The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, ed. Marc C. Conner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 143–​69. 12 Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1: 36–​57. 13 Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 1: 39. 14 Zack Bowen, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through Ulysses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 6–​8. 15 In keeping with Luca Crispi’s dating of the earlier notebooks in “A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011,” Genetic Joyce Studies 11 (Spring 2011), Joyce likely did not start writing “Sirens” until the start of 1918. This tentative dating coincides with the publication of Exiles in 1918. 16 Michael Patrick Gillespie, Inverted Volumes Improperly Arranged: James Joyce and His Trieste Library (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1983), 177. See also Mahaffey, “Shorter Works,” 187–​92. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 2000), 629. See Chapter 1 for a more sustained discussion of Nietzsche’s response to Wagner’s tainting of absolute music. 18 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 613. 19 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 613. 20 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 613. 21 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 613. 22 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 613–​14. 23 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 620 (emphasis in original). 24 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 631 (emphasis in original). 25 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 616. 26 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 626. 27 James Joyce, “Royal Hibernian Academy—​‘Ecce Homo,’ ” in Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 17. 28 James Joyce, “Drama and Life,” in Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 24. 29 Joyce, “Drama and Life,” 25. 30 Sam Slote, Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 6–​7. 31 For the relationship between Joyce and Ibsen, see classics such as Raymond Williams, “Exiles,” in James Joyce: New Perspectives, ed. Colin MacCabe (Sussex and Bloomington: Harvester Press and Indiana University Press, 1982), 105–​10; Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and B. J. Tysdahl, Joyce and Ibsen: A Study in Literary Influence (Oslo: Norwegian

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Universities Press, 1968). For psychoanalytical interpretations (and latent homosexuality), see Hans Van Stralen, “A Complementary Friendship: A Psychological Interpretation of James Joyce’s Exiles,” Orbis Litterarum 62.4 (2007), 283–​92; Jean-​Michel Rabaté, “The Modernity of Exiles,” in Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation, ed. Christine van Boheemen (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1989), 23–​36. For the place of Exiles within Joyce’s canon in terms of thematic developments (i.e., betrayal), character constellations, and dramatic archetypes, see D. J. F. Aitken, “Dramatic Archetypes in Joyce’s Exiles,” Modern Fiction Studies 4.1 (1958), 42–​52; Sheldon Brivic, “Structure and Meaning in Joyce’s Exiles,” James Joyce Quarterly 6.1 (1968), 29–​52; Vicki Mahaffey, “Joyce’s Shorter Works,” in Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 172–​95; James Alexander Fraser, Joyce and Betrayal (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). For Exiles as a piece of Modernist stage practice, see Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (Rochester, McLean, and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1978); Kirsten Shepherd-​Barr, “Reconsidering Joyce’s Exiles in Its Theatrical Context,” Theatre Research International 28.2 (2003), 169–​80; John MacNicholas, “The Stage History of Exiles,” James Joyce Quarterly 19.1 (1981), 9–​26; Elliott M. Simon, “James Joyce’s Exiles and the Tradition of the Edwardian Problem-​Play,” Modern Drama 20.1 (March 1977), 21–​35. 32 Bowen, Musical Allusions, 9. 33 Bowen, Musical Allusions, 10. 34 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 615. 35 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 615. 36 Bowen, Musical Allusions, 10. Bowen further argues that the Wagnerian reference points out the hypocrisy of character: “Robert, about to consummate a liaison with Bertha, should be singing Tannhäuser’s songs instead of the chaste and good Wolfram’s. The aria is part of the false picture he presents of himself and his own motivations” (10). My argument differs somewhat as I do not see an exact correlation between the characters. 37 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 616. 38 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 615. 39 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 615. 40 Richard Wagner, “The Music of the Future,” trans. Edward L. Burlingame, in Art, Life and Theory of Richard Wagner: Selected from His Writings and Translated, 2nd edn. (New York: Henry Holt, 1909), 160. 41 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 9. 42 Bowen, Musical Allusions, 15. Margot Norris sees the “story’s central trope of a Celtic harp and its mournful song” as a “crude allegory of Ireland’s colonial



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degradation figured as a complicitous surrender to sexual predation,” leading to a reading of the story as pornography (in the sense of its Greek etymology), where “the narration gilds the vulgar economies of the Dublin streets with the melancholy of the Celtic note” (Margot Norris, Suspicious Readings of Joyce’s Dubliners [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003], 80–​92). Frank Callanan further notes the “political colouration” of the “Irish landscape” of Sunday crowds and street music alongside the “subtle radicalism of Joyce’s feminization of the harp as an allegorical figure of Ireland,” as demonstrated in Moore’s lyrics (Frank Callanan, “The Provenance of Harp and Harper in Joyce’s ‘Two Gallants,’ ” Dublin James Joyce Journal 4 [2011], 121–​2). My focus is rather on the performance of the music. 43 Dahlhaus, Idea, 9. 44 In speaking of “Two Gallants,” Joyce writes to his brother: “And after all Two Gallants—​with the Sunday crowds and the harp in Kildare street and Lenehan—​ is an Irish landscape” (JL 2: 166). 45 Allan Hepburn, “Noise, Music, Voice, Dubliners,” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (New York: Garland, 1999), 193. 46 Of the similarities between Eveline and Maria, Bowen sees the two uses of The Bohemian Girl as paving the way for their similarities in situation: both have stayed in Dublin “to keep the home together,” and “their experience is essentially the same: the living death of the caged animal for Eveline and the imminence of literal death, foreshadowed by the lump of clay, as well as living death, for Maria” (Bowen, Musical Allusions, 12). 47 Martin Dowling, Traditional Music and Irish Society: Historical Perspectives (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 226. 48 In “Fluid Boarders and Naughty Girls: Music, Domesticity, and Nation in Joyce’s Boarding Houses,” Julieann Veronica Ulin suggests that the occluded verses of Polly’s “I’m a naughty girl” reveal “not only the outline of Joyce’s story, complete with the ‘not for long’ repentance, but the link between the fate of a certain version of the hoped-​for nation and the conduct of the ‘naughty little maid,’ ” which calls into question “domestic and female sexual purity” and “nationhood” in light of the threat of the boarding house and its “domestic openness” (Julieann Veronica Ulin, “Fluid Boarders and Naughty Girls: Music, Domesticity, and Nation in Joyce’s Boarding Houses,” James Joyce Quarterly 44.2 [2007], 275, 282). Ulin’s argument is compelling and convincing, and is certainly useful in considering the extent to which the musical allusion can provide additional insight into the text; however, the quoted song fragment is also meaningful even without this context. 49 Julie Henigan, “ ‘The Old Irish Tonality’: Folk Song as Emotional Catalyst in ‘The Dead,’ ” New Hibernia Review 11.4 (Winter 2007), 140–​1.

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5 0 Henigan, “Old Irish Tonality,” 147. 51 In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen says: “Rhythm [. . .] is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part” (P 199). 52 Derek Attridge and Anne Fogarty, “ ‘Eveline’ at Home: Reflections on Language and Context,” in Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, ed. Vicki Mahaffey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 97. 53 In “ ‘Distant Music’: Temporal Divergence and Temporality in ‘The Dead,’ ” Michael O’Brien writes: “It is possible to divide the events of the party around three pieces of music: the two piano pieces described above [Arrayed for the Bridal and Mary Jane’s academy piece] and Bartell D’Arcy’s ‘Lass of Aughrim’ ” (“ ‘Distant Music’: Temporal Divergence and Temporality in ‘The Dead,’ ” in Writer and Time, ed. Katarzyna Bazarnik and Bożena Kucala [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010], 93). Aside from the issues of classifying Arrayed for the Bridal as a piano piece and the misidentification of Mary Jane as “Mary Kate,” I agree with O’Brien’s organizing principle, though I would push it much further to include other musical performances in “The Dead.”

3

Joyce’s Fuga per Canonem A Case of Structure

Dear Miss Weaver: . . . You write that the last episode sent seems to you to show a weakening or diffusion of some sort. Since the receipt of your letter I have read this chapter again several times. It took me five months to write it and always when I have finished an episode my mind lapses into a state of blank apathy out of which it seems that neither I nor the wretched book will ever more emerge [. . .] and each successive episode, dealing with some province of artistic culture (rhetoric or music or dialectic), leaves behind it a burnt up field. Since I wrote the Sirens I find it impossible to listen to music of any kind. —​Letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, dated July 20, 1919 (JL 1: 128–​9) In his letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, dated August 6, 1919, Joyce decreed that the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses contained “all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem: and [that he] did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels” (JL 1:  129). This statement distinguishes itself from similar proclamations made by other Modernist authors, such as Aldous Huxley, who, as discussed in Chapter  1, aspired to musicalize his fiction through its “construction,”1 or Ezra Pound’s habitual application of “musical analogies to poetry, especially to the ‘fugal’ form of The Cantos.”2 Although Joyce registers a parallel desire to use musical structure as scaffolding for the construction of the episode—​as evidenced by its division into “eight regular parts” and his designation of the “technic” of the episode as a fuga per canonem in the Gilbert and Linati schemas—​his description of the fugal arrangement as an expression of “the seductions of music beyond which

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Ulysses [must] travel” also addresses its effects or its content: the nature of this fugue, or flight, encompasses “the seductions of music,” manifesting as Leopold Bloom’s desire to flee self-​awareness and to forget everything except the twining of the music. Thus, Joyce’s fugal edict supersedes the mere structural, instead exhibiting an understanding of absolute music that reveals the inseparability of its content from its form, its structure from its effect. This chapter and the one that follows explore the nuances of Joyce’s fugal claims in terms of structure and effect respectively. Drawing upon the handwritten list at the beginning of the National Library of Ireland’s Copybook MS 36,638/​9, wherein Joyce enumerates eight parts under the heading “FUGA PER CANONEM,” one sees that Joyce has outlined a double fugue, and that in his deployment of this fugue in “Sirens,” he incorporates a canon. However, in order to understand the implications of such a hypothesis, one must first understand the terminology of the list and its contexts. Thus, the first section of this chapter is devoted to a condensed history of the fugue, beginning with its medieval roots in imitative polyphony, and tracing its resurgence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the ideal form for/​of absolute music. The differentiation between the nineteenth century and late-​twentieth-​century fugue then makes it possible to revisit prior critical dismissals of Joyce’s fugue before reconsidering Joyce’s intentions in light of the eight-​part list. Moving through an extended analysis of how Joyce achieves his double fugue in “Sirens,” this chapter ends with an examination of the earlier manuscript for “Sirens,” MS 36,639/​7A + 7B, as an indication of the structural layering of this double fugue.

A brief history of the fugue as absolute music In her definitive study, Fugue: History and Practice, Imogene Horsley writes that, more so than other musical structures, the fugue has been particularly prone to “the musical ideals, styles, and techniques of each period in which it has been used, adapting elements of the new to those that were traditional in its past.”3 This very adaptability makes an examination of its historical background a worthwhile endeavor when reconstructing Joyce’s conception of the fugue, especially as most critics apply a late-​twentieth-​century interpretation of the structure rather than examining the context out of which Joyce’s

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understanding would have arisen. To clarify, a late-​twentieth-​century fugue is considered to be “a contrapuntal composition in which a theme of strongly marked character pervades the entire fabric, entering first in one voice and then in another.”4 Generally, it is organized into three sections: an Exposition, Episodes of free modulation, and the Recapitulation. During the Exposition, the subject is first introduced in one voice; then, when the answer enters, the subject becomes the countersubject (in the current usage of this term), acting as an accompaniment to the answer. This pattern repeats until all of the voices have been introduced, marking the end of the Exposition. The voices are then propelled into the Episodic section of the fugue, which, in addition to partial statements of the subject that are repeated in alternating voices until the end of the section, is characterized by contrapuntal patterns, improvisation, and modulations that lead to key changes. Finally, the fugue ends with its Recapitulation, where the main theme or subject is played fully in its original key, thus reorienting the listener. Often, critics use this understanding of the fugue when discussing Joyce’s use of it. However, this outline of the twentieth-​ century fugue is a culmination of fugal developments, varying significantly from earlier conceptions of the fugue, and, necessarily, Joyce’s notion of the musical structure. Prior to the sixteenth century, the rules that now govern the fugue had not yet been developed and both the canon and the fugue were represented by the common term fuga. At the time, the term “canon” would have signified “the Latin canon (rule) mean[ing] a short motto or sentence that indicated [. . .] the way in which a single part was to be performed or another part derived from it—​a well-​known example being the rondeau Ma fin est mon commencement, et mon commencement ma fin by Guillaume de Machaut.”5 It was not until 1558 that Gioseffo Zarlino first differentiated the fuga into the categories of fuga legata and the fuga sciolta, denoting the sustained flight of the canon and the segmented flight of the fugue respectively. With the development of tonality (the major–​minor system) in the sixteenth century, the canon, as a style of composition, was both distinguished from, and replaced by, the fugue for its capacity to incorporate harmonic trends in a way that the canon’s rigorous imitation could not. A canon involves “the strict and continuous imitation of a leading part by one or more following parts, usually at fixed intervals of time and pitch,”6 meaning that its parts are

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governed by their ability to mesh melodically through repetition. By contrast, a fugue has more freedom of movement because its foundation is not strictly imitative. Thus, although both employ the same technique of imitative counterpoint, the fugue is able to do so with greater flexibility. The fugue developed gradually from the seventeenth to mid-​eighteenth centuries, and its component parts began to be better established. This was the time when the structure of the fugue was becoming fixed for the parts that formed the Exposition in relation to tonality (i.e., the concept of dominants, tonics, and keys); as Horsley writes: “The form of the subject and the answer and the structure of the exposition became stylized according to the increasing strength of the major-​minor system.”7 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the fugue had reached its zenith in the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–​1750) and George Frideric Handel (1685–​1759), and in the texts of theoreticians such as Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (1718–​95), who produced the first monograph on the fugue, Abhandlung von der Fuge, in 1753, and Padre Giambattista Martini (1706–​84), the then leading teacher of fugues. Through these figures, terminology such as regular and irregular fugues, strict and free fugues, real and tonal answers, countersubjects, counterexpositions, and so on, arose and sought definition, leading to an attempt at the standardization of language associated with fugal compositions that later became the foundations of musical theory for nineteenth-​century composers, and later, for Joyce. In his Abhandlung von der Fuge, Marpurg was the first to differentiate between “regular” and “irregular” fugues as well as to define the countersubject of the fugue. For Marpurg, the “regular” fugue included, “in addition to the correct form of subject and answer and their proper order of exposition, good countermelodies and episodes”;8 by contrast, an “irregular” fugue would be lacking one or more of these essential elements. He went on to further subdivide the regular fugue into two categories according to content: the strict fugue and the free fugue. Here, a strict fugue “uses no thematic material except that derived from the subject and counterparts (or countersubject, if one is used).”9 Judging from Marpurg’s examples, Bach favored the form of strict fugues and Handel that of free fugues. By the late nineteenth century, the understanding of Marpurg’s strict fugue and the free fugue was that they were essentially the same in form, excepting that, unlike the strict fugue, the free fugue used “material in the episodes and coda that is not derived from the

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exposition.”10 This background justifies Joyce’s description of the “eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem” (JL 1: 129), which is a general point of contention and uneasiness for Joyce scholars, in that, with this model, Joyce’s use of the term “regular” aligns with Marpurg’s regular (or free) fugue, which could readily have eight parts. Following in the wake of Marpurg, Padre Martini’s two-​volume L’esemplare o sia saggio fondamentale pratico di contrappunto (1775) summarized the categories and findings of earlier Italian and German theorists and went on to define and set the parts of the fugue. By this time, Italian theorists had further subdivided the fuga sciolta into the fuga del tuono11 (tonal fugue) and the fuga reale (real fugue). These were extensions of Marpurg’s designations of the regular fugue into strict and free fugue—​the strict fugue corresponding with the tonal fugue, and the fuga reale with the free fugue. In his delineation of the parts, Martini preferred the fuga reale, which designated a real answer, meaning that the answer to the subject would be “an exact intervallic reproduction of the subject.”12 Martini’s outline would become the primary model for the fugue d’école, the nineteenth-​century filtering of fugal knowledge that informs our understanding of the fugue today. It can be summarized as “a tightly knit series of sections—​each a full exposition in all parts of the subject and answer—​articulated by passing cadences,” followed by a period of modulation into relative keys, “a close stretto exposition of the subject and answer in the tonic key,” and ending with “a short coda with a dominant pedal.”13 By the mid-​eighteenth century, polyphony had begun its decline and the fugue had fallen out of fashion. Instead, it was replaced by homophonic styles and forms that favored a single, accompanied melody, and avoided contrapuntal arrangements that detracted from the listening experience. Charles Burney summarizes the general view of the great fugues of Bach in his four-​volume General History of Music (1776–​89):  “for that venerable musician, though unequaled in learning and contrivance, thought it so necessary to crowd into both hands all the harmony he could grasp, that he must inevitably have sacrificed melody and expression.”14 Thus, the fugue came to represent an unnatural “self-​conscious display of contrapuntal technique” lacking in expression,15 and encompassing a calculated artificiality that was antithetical to ideas of Romantic genius and inspiration. However, with the technological developments and the subsequent ascension of absolute music in the nineteenth

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century (described in Chapter 1), the fugue rose phoenix-​like out of the ashes of its prior banishment. The appeal of the term “fugue”—​which, in its initial usage, held “the curious double meaning of texture and form or genre”16—​was revitalized during the vogue of absolute music. By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, composers had returned to the textbooks of Martini, Marpurg, and their peers, and to the compositions of Bach and Handel, in order to standardize forms and definitions, and make the analysis of fugues necessary to a composer’s training. Under the banner of absolute music, the fugue was again lauded as the highest combination of calculated structure and subjective content. In musico-​literary spheres, treatises were published by eminent theoreticians such as Sir Donald Tovey and Hugo Riemann to illuminate the formulas and techniques behind Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue; respected composers such as Ferrucio Busoni attempted continuations of Bach’s unfinished fugue (Contrapunto XIV of Die Kunst der Fuge); and handbooks detailing the art of counterpoint and fugue were compiled, including “two texts published in Paris in 1901—​Théodore Dubois’ Traité de contrepoint et de fugue and André Gédalge’s Traité de la fugue,”17 which culminated in in the standardization of the fugue d’école.18 As the discourse around absolute music developed, Modernist authors and artists were similarly afflicted with the desire to incorporate these musical formulae into their works. As Wassily Kandinsky put it in 1914:  “A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-​material of arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.”19 This “non-​material” aspect of music therefore becomes attainable by other arts when they can absorb the “methods of music,” such as musical structure, rhythm, and “mathematical, abstract construction.”20 Similarly, for early-​twentieth-​century writers, the intellectualism of the fugue—​its previously discussed “music for the eye,”21 and the elaborate construction that demonstrated a perfection of form that elevated music above “an agreeable pastime, a mere emotional delight”22—​became a condition to which literature might aspire. While the complications of its counterpoint are appreciable by the eye, the ear experiences the effects of the fugue. This play

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of “sightsense” and “soundsense” (FW 121.14–​16), the seeds of which can be found in “Sirens,” becomes particularly relevant in Finnegans Wake (and is the subject of Chapter 5), and Joyce’s much-​debated claim of having written “Sirens” as a fuga per canonem with “eight regular parts” arises out of this context. Furthermore, although many critics have been quick to dismiss the label as “either a hoax or a superficial identification,”23 the National Library of Ireland’s 2002 acquisition of Joyce’s papers sheds new light on Joyce’s intentions, the nature of his fugue, and his construction of it.

Hint or hoax? Critical (mis)interpretations of Joyce’s fugal intentions Since Joyce’s initial claims about the fuga per canonem in regard to “Sirens,” critics have been both baffled and baffling in their attempts to apply or disavow fugal elements in the episode. It might even be safe to say that musically minded critics of “Sirens” can be rather simplistically divided into two factions: those who believe in the presence of the fuga per canonem in Ulysses and those who do not.24 Those who dismiss Joyce’s attempts at fugal structure tend to acknowledge the musicality of the episode, and then liberally interpret Joyce’s use of musical terminology as both permission and springboard to apply other musical metaphors or forms to the episode. To name a few: Jack Weaver, Don Noel Smith, and Scott J.  Ordway classify it as a sonata;25 Tim Martin, A. Walton Litz, Stanley Sultan, and Alan Shockley explore it through leitmotif, its operatic components, and polyphony;26 David Herman in “ ‘Sirens’ after Schönberg” applies twelve-​tone Schönbergian atonalism;27 and Zack Bowen explores “Sirens” as a musical within the greater musical comedy of Ulysses.28 Among the more vehement disbelievers, Carl Eichelberger, in “ ‘Words? Music? No: It’s What’s Behind’: Verbal and Physical Transformations in ‘Sirens,’ ” tries to strip away the musical terminology that peppers the episode to show the “hollowness of musical forms.”29 Jeffrey Kresky similarly equates Joyce’s fugal claims with an “urban legend for music theorists,” lambasting critics for their “faulty transfer of terms that happen to be common to both arts.”30 Critics claiming to subscribe more faithfully to Joyce’s fugal aspirations tend to indulge in hydra-​headed discussions that raise more questions than

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they answer. The usual interpretation of Joyce’s fugal formula involves the sixty or so themes that form the beginning two pages of the episode (U 11.1–​63). These opening lines have been problematically labeled an “overture,”31 or more plausibly, a “prelude,”32 and most critics trace the reappearance of these lines in the rest of the episode as a way of explaining how the fugue unfolds. Even those critics who ultimately reject Joyce’s fugue still use these lines as the basis of their interpretation. For example, Andreas Fischer comments that while the episode “is neither a fuga per canonem nor any other explicit musical form,” the introduction is nonetheless the “most music-​like part” of the episode and functions as “a kind of overture that introduces ‘themes,’ that is, words and fragments of sentences that will recur in their proper context later in the episode.”33 Although these opinions are not to be dismissed, it is likely that Joyce had conceptualized “Sirens” as a fugue prior to adding the opening sequence. Examining his drafting process, with reference to Luca Crispi’s “Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscript by Episode,” one can see the first evidence of “Sirens” in a notebook that dates from late 1917 to early 1919 (which will be discussed in greater detail in the section “A closer look at MS 36,639/​7A”), and then a later draft in a notebook dating from early 1919, which corroborates Joyce’s claim of working on “Sirens” in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver from February 25, 1919 (JL 2: 436).34 This later draft, contained in the NLI manuscript MS 36,639/​9, is a version of “Sirens” that does not include the opening segments but does contain a list of eight terms under the heading “FUGA PER CANONEM” on the back of the front cover of the notebook. It also contains an instruction at the top of the manuscript, “Repeat | phrases | episode,”35 where the opening segments are inserted in later drafts (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Although we cannot say with full authority when exactly the opening segments were added, they do, as Anthony Burgess writes in This Man and Music, “la[y]‌out for our inspection the bones that litter the isle of the Sirens. He is also giving us the themes out of which his musical fabric will be woven.”36 However, given the estimated chronology of the drafting process which, likely started in 1918 with the earliest surviving draft of “Sirens” at the National Library of Ireland, followed by the letter from Joyce to Weaver on July 20, 1919, where he writes that “Sirens” had filled two copybooks (the first of which is in the NLI, from which Figures 3.1 and 3.2 have been taken), followed by its

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appearance in The Little Review in August 1919 with the opening segments,37 one can conclude that Joyce had conceived of the episode as a fugue before his incorporation of the beginning lines, and therefore its fugal evaluation should be extended to the entire episode, rather than limited to an analysis of the opening fragments.38

Figure  3.1  “Fuga per Canonem” list on front cover of the notebook containing a handwritten, partial draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​9, IMG 09-​002, front cover verso [inner])

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Figure 3.2  “Repeat | phrases | episodes” on first page of the notebook containing a handwritten, partial draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​9, IMG 09-​002, 1r [p.1])

Despite this evidence that the opening segments are not intended to be Joyce’s fugue, many critics who have engaged with the actual structural elements of the episode tend to limit themselves to these opening sentences, while taking the analogy to music as literally as possible. Heath Lees is one such critic who tries to analyse the fugue via its opening in his article, “The

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Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the ‘Fuga per Canonem.’ ” Lees begins very promisingly, tracing the historical context of the canon as the “medieval practice of providing ‘cryptic directions’ which act as precept or guide to the main unfolding” of a piece of music and therefore a guideline to the “musical (or at least rhythmic) features of the words and their groupings.”39 He then examines “the shape of Joyce’s introduction,” so that the “57 statements fall into the basic sectional outline of a fugue,”40 even identifying them as a “double fugue.”41 Alas, despite his contextualisation of the canon and the double fugue, Lees’ actual analysis accounts for neither: the fugue he describes consists of a tripartite organization—​“All fugues can be described by their three main sections: Exposition, Middle Section, and Closing Section”42—​and the argument becomes increasingly unconvincing when he maps it word by note against Bach’s (little) Fugue in G minor, whose main subject line, he claims, “fits Joyce’s word-​pattern” and “reflects a rhythmic character which is consistently used by Joyce,”43 despite the fact that Bach’s little fugue is not a double fugue. The entire argument descends into the bizarre as he proceeds to devise a rhythm out of the opening segments that align with Bach’s fugues from The Art of Fugue, but do not correspond rhythmically with Joyce’s text (i.e., “Bronze by gold” is devised into a rhythm of half, quarter, and eighth notes that only forcibly conform to Bach’s compositions).44 Lees justifies his use of Bach by the presence of the letters B-​C-​H-​A in the opening lines of the episode: “the possibilities of Joyce’s being attracted to Bach and to this collection are very likely,” Lees argues, “the more so since the first four sentences of the ‘Sirens’ introduction each begin with the letters (Bronze, Chips, Horrid and And) that form an anagram of Bach’s name.”45 In “Mining the Ore of ‘Sirens’: An Investigation of Structural Components,” Margaret Rogers also tries to impose the eight-​tone scale onto the opening lines of the episode in a method she refers to as “soggetto cavato.”46 Although Rogers painstakingly explains the system as one based on solmization, her problematic application of the system is not based on scale degree,47 but rather upon the elimination of letters out of words so that they are pared down to only those contained on the piano keyboard (abcdefg). These letters that correspond with the piano keyboard or “letter-​notes,” Rogers explains, “reveal musical keys, chordal outlines, melodic motifs, structural patterns, and musical hints.”48 For example, in Rogers’ analysis, words ending in “-​ing” indicate

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the key of G (in G) and those in “-​ine” that of E.49 Rogers provides a notation of the “letter notes” that form the first twelve lines of “Sirens,”50 but gives neither justification for the ordering of these chords, nor reason for choosing triads over any other form of chord, nor even the significance of this notation to the rest of the episode, nor how it relates to her interpretation of the episode as a fugue. To skew matters further, Rogers adds Lydian and Aeolian modes to the mix,51 thus providing a disjunctive understanding of musical theory that combines Ancient modes, Renaissance sol-​fa, the English keyboard, and triads that ostensibly follow no harmonic rules whatsoever. In less extreme cases, critics take Joyce’s label and apply aspects of the fugue to the episode. For example, in “Strange Words, Strange Music: The Verbal Music of ‘Sirens,’ ” Andreas Fischer applies the principles of counterpoint, polyphony, and onomatopoeic organization under the heading of fugue; Anthony Burgess in This Man and Music examines the “sound of words,”52 though he ultimately adheres to the idea that “literature has no power to imitate the sound of music [and that] Joyce knew all along that he could not reproduce the form of a fugue.”53 Similarly, in James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, Harry Levin acknowledges that “words and music are not simply associated [but] identified,” but rejects any notion of a musical pattern based on the lack of structural correlation between the opening fragments and the sequence in which they appear in the episode. Ultimately, Levin dismisses the notion of “polyphonic prose [as] rarely more than a loose metaphor,”54 and instead explores how sound effects are achieved through the juxtaposition of onomatopoeia and imagery, creating the literary equivalent of counterpoint.55 Another branch of fugal criticism is concerned with the thorny issue of terminological discrepancy: specifically fugue versus canon versus fuga per canonem. Some critics, like Lawrence Levin, claim that Joyce intended a canon, not a fugue. Levin writes: Joyce’s thorough musical background, his near mania for correctness of detail and accuracy of technical and factual materials, and the fact that he himself states that he based the entire chapter on the fuga per canonem, which took him five months of concentrated effort to complete, indicate that the Sirens episode is structured along the lines of the canon, not the fugue, and

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it is in accord with the canonical rules that we must attempt to analyze and to evaluate this chapter.56

After making this distinction, Levin goes on to try and identify the “eight regular parts” of Joyce’s “canon” as being character-​based, comprising “Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy (the sirens), Bloom, Simon Dedalus, Lenehan, Boylan, the piano tuner, Dollard, and Pat the waiter.”57 However, he obfuscates his argument by proceeding to apply fugal terminology, such as “free counterpoint,” rather than that of the canon, onto the parts: “with Cowley, Lidwell, Kernan, and Goulding functioning as free counterpoint, and with flight and pursuit, loneliness, Martha, Molly, and the conversations and songs serving as thematic material.”58 The canon, being a much more rigidly applied form than the fugue, despite their common roots, does not allow for “free counterpoint.” Moreover, Levin’s argument does not account for characters in “Sirens” outside of the abovementioned eight, such as Father Cowley. Similarly, David W. Cole also focuses on the aspects of the episode that conform to a canon rather than a fugue in his essay “Fugal Structure in the Sirens Episode of Ulysses”:  “If the rule by which Joyce’s fugue is to be interpreted is “Done. Begin!” the fugue has become an infinite canon, to be perpetually repeated.”59 Cole flushes out the fugue through analogies between literary and musical themes, interpreting subject and countersubject of the fugue as “feminine desire” and masculine “repressed sexual impulses.”60 Despite his emphasis on the canon, or, more specifically, the sixteenth-​century fuga per canonem, Cole’s interpretation of the fugue is specific to the late twentieth century (particularly in his understanding of the relationship between the subject and the counterexposition),61 and his grasp of musical terminology is strictly metaphorical. Thus, when Cole does apply musical terminology, the effect is disjunctive and confusing: “Ben, Simon, Bob, Tom, and George are identified as the notes in a fifth; they represent the dominant. The tuner [. . .] represents the tonic. There is a scale run of the five notes in the fifth [. . .] The tonic is repeated again and again.”62 The sudden association of characters with intervals is perplexing and unrelated to the rest of Cole’s understanding of the fugue.63 Furthermore, as I have already suggested, Joyce’s terminology is more nuanced than has been accredited, and is rooted in the fugal developments at the end of the nineteenth century/​beginning of the twentieth century.

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A genetic turning point: Joyce’s eight-​part Fuga per Canonem in MS 36,639/​9 Despite the merits and faults of these interpretations, the National Library of Ireland’s 2002 acquisition of Joyce’s papers requires that critics rethink prior dismissals and interpretations of Joyce’s claim of having written an eight-​part fuga per canonem. Prior to 2002, when most of the aforementioned critics were articulating their opinions about Joyce’s fugue, the only pre-​Rosenbach materials available for consideration were Joyce’s correspondence, spanning from February to September 1919, and a copybook in Buffalo (MS V.A.5) containing a later, partial draft of the beginning of “Sirens” on page “21” (Joyce’s handwriting) of the episode with “sang Twas Rank and Fame” (JJA 13:  32–​ 56).64 As such, they were able to absolve themselves of any real responsibility to take Joyce’s claims seriously. However, among the NLI’s 2002 holdings number two items that relate to the drafting of “Sirens,” which make it impossible to ignore Joyce’s fugal intentions in subsequent critical discussions:  an early draft of “Sirens” in a joint notebook with a partial draft of “Proteus” (NLI MS 36,639/​7/​A), and a handwritten copybook of “Sirens” (NLI MS 36,639/​9), which forms the first twenty pages of the partial manuscript in Buffalo (MS V.A.5).65 These copybooks provide insight into Joyce’s creative method and, more specifically, how he sought to achieve a fugal structure in “Sirens.” The (now) earliest surviving draft of “Sirens,” contained in MS 36,639/​7/​A, is a coverless copybook consisting of twenty-​eight pages: the first nine pages are a very early draft of “Proteus,” the next eighteen pages contain “Sirens,” and the last page, titled “Lacedemon,” outlines a series of Homeric parallels. The pages of “Sirens” are handwritten on both the recto and the verso, and are numbered by Joyce “1)” to “18).” In addition, a loose sheet, numbered “20)” in the margin, appears to be part of the same grouping. Most of the draft reads like the first 540 lines of “Sirens” minus the opening sequence of short sentences, and, more significantly, none of the narrative that occurs outside of the Ormond Hotel’s bar and saloon (i.e., Bloom’s and Boylan’s progress toward the Ormond Hotel; Bloom and Goulding in the dining room of the Ormond; and Boylan’s progress away from the Ormond toward Eccles Street) is present.66 In fact, unlike later versions of “Sirens,” Bloom does not enter the narrative until the tenth page of the manuscript, when Joyce draws a horizontal line under Father Cowley’s

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“let me there,” right before he wrests the piano away from Ben Dollard during the Love and War duet. What then follows is a series of fifty-​two narrative fragments, separated by short lines and in the margins, and crossed out in either red or blue pencil, with a few exceptions that are uncrossed altogether (see Figure 3.3).67

Figure 3.3  A line under “Let me there” and crossed fragments from Croppy Boy and the Love and War duet in the earliest known draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​7/​A, IMG 07-​010, 10r [p.19])

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For the most part, all of these fragments (except nine) reappear in later drafts of “Sirens.” These units and their significance to the drafting process will be examined in greater detail in the section “A closer look at MS 36,639/​7A”. Aside from a thought-​provoking window into Joyce’s conception of “Sirens” sans Bloom, one could argue that this earlier version of the episode illustrates how Bloom is layered into the later text, and, from a musical perspective, how this layering fits into his fugal structure. The absence of any action that takes place outside of the Ormond in this earlier version, and, what I  will argue is all of the material that fits under the purview of the countersubject of the double fugue outlined in the eight-​part list, demonstrates how Joyce manages to achieve the double fugue outlined on the front cover of the later draft of “Sirens” NLI MS 36,639/​9. In other words, this eight-​part list definitively answers the question of whether or not Joyce wrote a fugue with eight regular parts, whether he had the musical background to write a fugue, and the nature of the fugue in question. My transcription of the eight-​part list (Figure 3.1) reads: FUGA PER CANONEM 1) soggetto 2) contrasoggetto    (reale in altro    tono: in    raccorciamento) 3) sogetto + contrasoggetto   in contrapunto 4) esposizione    (proposto – codetta) 5) contra esposizione  (nuovi rapporti fra   (divertimenti)   ì detti: parecchi) 6) Tela Contrappuntistica    (episodi) 7) Stretto maestiale    (blocalis d’armonia /​    narricum antesi) 8) Pedale (NLI MS 36,639/​9, Image 09-​002, 1v)68

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Despite Susan Brown’s description of this list as “obscure, untranslatable terminology,”69 the components of this list coincide with the major developments that the fugue was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Italian, eighteenth-​century fuga was being reclaimed under the label of absolute music.70 Many elements of this list, including its order, overlap with Martini and Marpurg’s terminology, as it was filtered through the nineteenth-​ century consciousness during the fugue’s revival in the early twentieth century. With reference to the fugal terminology, Martini “designated and defined according to length three subject types”:  the andamento being the longest; the medium-​length subject being the soggetto; and the shortest subject, the attacco.71 He also named sections of the fugue like the codetta, which was the “transition between the end of the subject and the entrance of the answer.”72 Martini borrowed from Marpurg for his use of contrasoggetto and the types of answers. Countersubject in particular has become a confusing term: today, it has come to mean “a subject of secondary or subordinate character that fits in invertible counterpoint with the main subject”;73 however, in its contemporary usage, Marpurg’s contrasubjectum (or contrathema) would have indicated a type of “ ‘double fugue,’ and was the name given to the second theme in the double fugue.”74 That is to say if, “instead of accompanying the answer with a free countermelody,” which is the modern understanding of countersubject, “the first part states a definite melodic subject against it and this appears in conjunction with the subject and answer in most of their appearances throughout the fugue, this second subject is [then] called a ‘countersubject.’ ”75 This background becomes relevant in light of Joyce’s reproduction of every one of these terms in his eight-​part list, which appears to designate a double fugue. The first item, soggetto, corresponds with the subject of the fugue, and, going by Martini’s delineation of the three types of subject (above), it denotes one of medium length. The next phrase, contrasoggetto (reale in altro tono: in raccorciamento), is key to understanding the nature of this kind of fugue and translates roughly to “countersubject (with a real answer in another tone [or key]: in shortening).” In the way that fugue is understood in the late twentieth century, this would mean that the subject turns into the countersubject while playing against the answer. However, the historical context of the rest of the list indicates the countersubject, in its original sense of contrasubjectum.76 That is to say, the countersubject is the second subject of the double fugue (a fugue

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with two unrelated subjects), and the bracketed statement, reale in altro tono, signals a real answer (an exact, intervallic replica of the subject in a different key) in counterpoint with the first subject. Since “reale” is indicated as the type of answer, this fugue is a fuga reale, which we will recall is a free fugue (a form of the regular fugue). Furthermore, the presence of the contra esposizione later in the list, confirms a double fugue, which, during the time of Martini, was the norm. Martini’s prototype for the double fugue includes “a countersubject appearing first against the answer, in the continuation of the subject, [then] written in double counterpoint against it.”77 This is indicated on Joyce’s list as contrasoggetto (reale in altro tono: in raccorciamento) followed by soggetto + contra soggetto in contrapunto. Joyce’s fourth item, esposizione (proposto – codetta) specifies the exposition, from the proposition until the codetta,78 where he again incorporates the nineteenth-​century filtering of Martini’s terminology. In a fugue today, the exposition would begin when the subject is first introduced; however, in its earlier context the purpose of the exposition was to introduce all of the voices, whereas the subject and countersubject unfold the musical themes (hence the appearance of the subject and the exposition as separate items on Joyce’s list). Similarly, the term “counterexposition” is a nineteenth-​century invention that grew out of Martini’s rovesciamento, which signified “a section either directly after the exposition or following the first episodic digression after the exposition, where the voices that originally stated the subject now state the answer and those that stated the answer now state the subject,”79 ideally replicating the initial order of appearance. In his list, Joyce writes contra esposizione (nuovi rapporti fra/​divertimenti ì detti: parecchi) or “counter exposition (with several new relations between them and the divertimenti).”80 Originally, the divertimento, in its singular form, was synonymous with the codetta, but as the discourse around fugue developed in the nineteenth century, it came to be employed later in the fugue as a “modulatory section [that] introduc[ed] further material for use later in the fugue.”81 In this case, Joyce’s divertimenti is the introduction of a song pattern (hence that pluralized term?), that will be used to organize the episodi during the Tela contrappuntistica (this will be explored further in the next section, “Joyce’s fugue in eight parts”).

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The Tela contrappuntistica (episodi) is the next item on Joyce’s list:  Tela loosely translates to canvas or fabric, and contrappuntistica is a word previously encountered in Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, denoting the extremes of virtuoso counterpoint displayed in Busoni’s piece. In a later twentieth century fugue, the “episodes” (episodi) would be the word used to designate the development section of free modulation that comes after the exposition. The indication of the divertimenti and the episodi as separate articles on Joyce’s list might cause those trying to interpret some consternation, as the two terms would be synonymous, in the modern understanding of fugue. In this case, it would seem to indicate a contrapuntal fabric either separated by or consisting of episodes. Joyce’s list ends with the Stretto maestiale (blocalis d’armonia/​narricum antesi) and the pedale. Again, this follows Martini’s prototype: like his predecessors, Berardi and Bononcini, Martini placed the stretto (“the overlapping entry of two or more statements of the subject, forming a type of canon”82) at the close of the fugue and ended with a “short coda with a dominant pedal.”83 Traditionally, a stretto is the only part of the fugue that retains the properties of the canon out of which the fugue arose. It involves the “canonic treatment of the subject,”84 where the themes of the fugue are introduced so that they overlap. That is to say, before one voice has finished, another one enters, thereby “increasing excitement and intensity.”85 The pedal point also escalates the intensity while anticipating the conclusion by returning the fugue to its original key. Finally, pedal point, or pedale, is defined as “a long, held note, usually in the bass”;86 it can also be achieved through the use of rhythm.87 There are two types of pedal point:  dominant and tonic. Dominant pedal point is played toward the end of the piece, but not at the very end, and is used to build “up harmonic tension that will be resolved in [the] closing section” and features the tonic.88 The second type is a tonic pedal point, which is “part of the coda” and is intended “to establish the tonic key and to settle down to a final ending.”89 The most important aspect of pedal point is that it anticipates the conclusion of the fugue, inspiring in the listener a desire to return to the main theme in the tonic key, and that it must in some way rise organically out of the musical fabric.

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As I have already suggested, most critics tend to see Joyce’s fugue as largely metaphorical, interpreting his claim of eight parts to be “more a matter of voicing than fugal form,”90 and therefore character-​based. However, this outline of eight parts points toward the presence of the structure of a fugue rather than its voicing. In this case, the specifications of the soggetto and contrasoggetto as well as their respective esposizione and contra esposizione imply a double fugue.

Joyce’s fugue in eight parts: A structural analysis of “Sirens” as a double fugue Joyce’s outline for the double fugue becomes structurally significant in light of its implementation in “Sirens.” Using the list as a guide, one can see that the subjects and countersubjects of Joyce’s fugue have a spatial component:  the subject material occurs within the Ormond Hotel (the bar, the saloon, and the dining room), while the countersubject is all movement outside the hotel, as established by the physical movements of Leopold Bloom, Blazes Boylan, and the blind stripling as they progress down the quays into various parts of Dublin. The exposition functions as the point in which characters such as Dedalus and Lenehan are anchored into the space of the Ormond, while Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy continue to be represented as the bronze by gold barmaids. During this exposition, another element is introduced into the text: that of the loss of sense or perception. The spaces of the Ormond consist of the dining room, where one can hear music and see the barmaids without being seen; the bar as the locus of visibility; and the saloon, where one is heard without being seen. The counterexposition introduces material depicted as actively moving outside the Ormond in the form of Blazes Boylan, Leopold Bloom, Richie Goulding, Ben Dollard, and Father Cowley, into the static, paralyzing space of the Ormond. It ends when Boylan leaves the Ormond, launching into movement with a jingle, and repeating what becomes a spatial pattern for “Sirens” that works as a canon: just as the opening of “Sirens” incorporates the sound of the viceregal’s ringing steel as it passes by the Ormond, and he is “killed looking back,” so too does Boylan pause to watch Miss Douce go out of sight before withdrawing from the Ormond with a jingle. Once all the characters are “in place,” the Tela Contrappuntistica begins, and is organized by the episodi: T.

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Cooke’s Love and War, All Is Lost Now from La Somnambula, M’appari from Flotow’s opera, Martha, the Intermezzo that frames the silent roar of the shell, and William McBurney’s ballad, The Croppy Boy. The Tela Contrappuntistica comes to an end when Bloom again launches into movement as he leaves the Ormond during the singing of the last episode, The Croppy Boy, punctuated by the increasingly insistent tapping (pedal point) of the blind stripling. The narrative layering of Bloom’s progress outside the Ormond (countersubject) against the blocks of narrative in the Ormond (subject) can be seen as a literary stretto, and it follows the previously established canon—​the sound pattern as the viceregal cavalcade’s ringing and Boylan’s jingling, where Bloom’s fart acts as his, albeit less romantic, manufactured sound armor. In the following analysis, all of these elements are explored in greater detail, and are divided according to Joyce’s list.91

1)  Soggetto (U 11.64–​85) The soggetto of “Sirens” opens with both Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy as the presences anchoring the reader in the Ormond Hotel during the opening lines of the episode: “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” (U 11.64–​5). This opening sequence sketches a pattern that will be repeated throughout the episode, namely that of Miss Douce and/​or Miss Kennedy attracting the gaze of a man who is “killed looking back” (U 11.77), and whose escape is mediated by the sound he makes as he leaves—​in this case “hoofs” and “ringing steel” (U 11.65). Later, the same pattern will emerge to mark the close of the exposition when Boylan similarly “eye[s]‌” (U 11.419) Miss Douce after she snaps her garter, before his departure is conveyed through his jingling; and then again, toward the end of the episode, when Bloom gazes upon Miss Douce’s ministrations to the beerpull while listening to Ben Dollard sing The Croppy Boy, prompting Bloom’s departure, supplemented by the sound of his roiling stomach, before the “ringing steel” and jingling are ultimately parodied in Bloom’s passing of gas. From the start, the space in which the barmaids are located is set up as a place of seeing, with the barmaids as an optical spectacle of femininity: Miss Douce is described in terms of her “wet lips” (U 11.72, 76), her face, her bronzed

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skin, and her laughter; Miss Kennedy is all “twining” hair and “curving ear” (U 11.81–​4). At the end of this passage, the subject segues into the countersubject with the line “A man” (U 11.85), which doubles as the introduction of a new character as well as an emphatic end (Amen) to Miss Kennedy’s “—​It’s them has the fine times” (U 11.84).

2)  Contrasoggetto (reale in altro tono: in raccorciamento) (U 11.85–​145) In “Sirens,” the contrasoggetto is the material that occurs outside of the Ormond Hotel, emphasizing movement in contrast to the immobility of the Ormond. The parenthetical reale in altro tono: in raccorciamento signals an exact replica of the subject in a different key (a reale or real answer) in counterpoint with subject in the Ormond. The first instance of the countersubject is voiced by Bloom, who moves along the Wellington Quay: “Bloowho went by by Moulang’s pipes bearing in his breast the sweets of sin, by Wine’s antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by Carroll’s dusky battered plate, for Raoul” (U 11.85–​8). Here, the mention of three consecutive locations along the Wellington Quay indicates Bloom’s progress, the modus operandi of the countersubject. The reale, or answer, is then introduced in the form of the impertinent tea-​tray-​bearing boots boy, whose entrance into the bar returns the reader’s attention to the narrative taking place in the Ormond Hotel: “The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came” (U 11.89). The boot boy’s entrance is combined with that of the tea tray, references to the snout and his lack of manners:  “—​Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootssnout sniffed rudely” (U 11.100). Even when the boots “retreat[s]‌as she threaten[s] as he had come” (U 11.101), the tea, his snout, and his manners, remain for development in combination with the barmaids, effectively combining with the barmaids’ narrative to produce an exact intervallic reproduction of the subject in a different key. While the original statement of the soggetto (“Bronze by gold [.  .  .] heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel” [U 11.64–​65]) remains in an augmented form—​“Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel” (U 11.112–​13)—​further associations of the barmaids are repeated in altro tono, and therefore in conjunction with tea, manners, and snouts.92

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For instance, the impertinent snout of the boots develops into the “snuffy fogey” (U 11.134) in Boyd’s, combining with the barmaids into a more ladylike image with “ruffl[ed] nosewings” (U 11.142) during their imitation of his mannerisms. The image of the boots and the barmaids overlap completely in the final statement of the reale in altro tono: “Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from miss Kennedy’s throat. Miss Douce huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like a snout in quest” (U 11.143–​5). Here, the answer (the boots) has been completely mapped onto the original presentation of the barmaids during the introduction of the subject. During this time, Bloom’s countersubjective movement interjects in short segments (in raccorciamento) as “Bloom” (U 11.102) and, more persistently, “But Bloom?” (U 11.133).93 Both of these interjections cross over with the narrative of the Ormond. For example, the single word “Bloom” (U 11.102) reminds the reader of Bloom’s progress even as he evolves into the bloom pinned to Miss Douce’s dress: “On her flower frowning miss Douce said” (U 11.103).

3)  So[g]‌getto + contrasoggetto in contrapunto (U 11.146–​91) Until now, the focus has been on establishing the two narrative spaces:  the stationary aspect of the bar and movements outside the bar (in this case, by Bloom). The third item on Joyce’s list, “so[g]‌getto + contrasoggetto in contrapunto,” introduces an element of overlap between the two. A  literal understanding of counterpoint (punctus contra punctum) is “point against point,” which, in a musical sense, means two separate and equally weighted musical lines are “set against the other […] point against point or note against note.”94 At this point in “Sirens,” the two intersecting, but autonomous, plotlines consist of the duet of the barmaids’ laughter from within the Ormond and Bloom’s continued progress down the Wellington Quay, passing the jeweller, “Aaron Figatner,” “Prosper Loré[’s]” hat shop and “Bassi’s blessed virgins” (U 11.149–​51), until, by the end of this section, he has left behind “Cantwell’s offices” and “Ceppi’s virgins” (U 11.185). By contrast, the barmaids remain stationary within the bar, and the physical attributes that have been associated with them—​that is, “goldbronze” (U 11.158), “pinnacles of hair” (U 11.166),

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and mouths while “lipp[ing] her cup” (U 11.162)—​are further entwined with the tea and snouts from the answer: In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended [. . .] They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly their laughter [. . .] Miss Douce, bending over the teatray, ruffled again her nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again, Kennygiggles, stooping, her fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed, spluttered out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter. (U 11.158–​67)

During this exchange, bronze and gold are combined and made interchangeable, culminating in the duet of their laughter:  “Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more” (U 11.175–​7). The passages dealing with Bloom as countersubject also layer and expand recurring elements. For example, the “Bloowho” and “the sweets of sin” (U 11.86–​7) from his initial appearance recur in expanded (or augmented, in musical terms) form as “Bloowhose” (U 11.149) and “The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets. /​Of sin” (U 11.156–​7). Later, in the counterexposition, this is further extended to “Bloohimwhom” (U 11.309). At the same time, other elements are contracted (or diminished, in musical terms). For example, Bloom’s hesitation, introduced with “Not yet” (U 11.188, 11.190), and the notion of time also initiated with “At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning” (U 11.188) are diminished to “Not yet. At four she” (U 11.352). During the development of these two plotlines, their points of overlap or counterpoint are finite: they intersect through the words “eyes” and “greasy/​ greasea.” For example, in the passage: —​O! shrieking, miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?   Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting: —​And your other eye!   Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner’s name. Why do I always think Figather? Gathering figs, I  think. And Prosper Loré’s huguenot name. By Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white under, come to me. God they believe she is: or goddess. Those today. I could not see. [. . .]

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By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets. Of sin. (U 11.146–​57, my emphasis)

Here, the unforgettable “goggle eye” is echoed in the “your other eye” of bronze by gold’s giggling conversation. This then repeats in Bloom’s journeying narrative, as the eye of “Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner’s name,” continues in “By Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went by,” and ends the passage with, “By went his eyes,” before being taken up again by the barmaids in the next line: “In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy your other eye” (U 11.158–​9). Similarly, their giggling develops these same eyes into “O greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that!” (U 11.169), before dropping “eyes” altogether and replacing it with “greasy”:  “Married to the greasy nose!” (U 11.173). During the duet of their laughter, “eye,” “nose,” and “greasy” are combined into “Greasy I  knows” (U 11.176–​7), which incorporates homonyms for both the eye and the nose. This, in turn, is carried over into the countersubject: “Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom” (U 11.180) and “By Cantwell’s offices roved Greaseabloom” (U 11.184), demonstrating these two words are the points at which the two narratives intersect, punctus contra punctum.

4)  Esposizione (propositio –​ codetta) (U 11.192–​294) Having introduced the subject of the stationary Ormond, the Esposizione now functions as the sequence in which all of the voices or characters are anchored into this space. As such, the exposition begins when Simon Dedalus enters the bar: “Into their bar strolled Mr Dedalus. Chips, picking chips off one of his rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled” (U 11.192–​3). Dedalus is the first character from outside the Ormond to be introduced into the barmaids’ space, and his movement into the bar and then later into the saloon to tinker with the piano identifies the propositio and the codetta respectively, establishing two of the three spaces of the Ormond Hotel—​the bar and the saloon (the third being the dining room). As the exposition unfolds, the men who enter the bar interact in pairs, first with the barmaids and then with each other: Simon Dedalus converses with Miss Douce, asking after her holiday and ordering a whisky; then Lenehan asks Miss Douce if Boylan has been in; Lenehan pesters a silent, unseen Miss

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Kennedy; Lenehan baits Simon Dedalus about having seen his “famous son” (U 11.254); and finally Dedalus speaks with Miss Douce once more regarding the repositioned piano, before wandering out of sight. The exposition is punctuated by two jingles (U 11.212, 11.245) representing Boylan, halved by a quick reference to Leopold Bloom, who is slowly entering the spatial frame of the Ormond as he moves across Essex Bridge onto Ormond Quay Upper (U 11.229–​31). After his stated entrance, Simon Dedalus greets Miss Douce, and asks after her holiday, while lighting his pipe and teasing her for “Tempting poor simple males” (U 11.202) by lying out on the strand. Immediately, the visual aspect of Miss Douce is emphasized—​a “holy show” (U 11.198)—​and again, her hair is merged into her skin, “Bronze whiteness” (U 11.200) as Dedalus “presse[s]‌ her hand indulgently” (U 11.201–​2). Gradually, items that will be associated with Dedalus throughout “Sirens” are introduced: “Chips” (U 11.192), “rocky thumbnails” (U 11.193), and his pipe, which becomes synonymous with the tuning fork (“lost chord pipe” [U 11.478]) and acts as a shaping device in the episodi to come. Here, within the space of seeing, Dedalus is mostly mute:  “Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute. /​None nought said nothing. Yes” (U 11.223–​4), and his voice will not be heard singing until he has disappeared from the line of vision. Lenehan then enters the Ormond: “In came Lenehan. Round him peered Lenehan” (U 11.228). From within the Ormond, Lenehan is characterized by his roundness. First he peers out from “round” Dedalus, before trying to approach Miss Kennedy: “Lenehan round the sandwichbell wound his round body round” (U 11.240–​41). His instructions on how to read, addressed to the silent, unlooking/​unseen Miss Kennedy, involves roundness and twisting as well: “To read only the black ones: round o and crooked ess” (U 11.244). And later, when Boylan reaches the Ormond in the counterexposition, Joyce (through Boylan) puns, “I heard you were round” (U 11.344). Upon leaving the spatial quarter of the Ormond, Lenehan leaves his roundness behind to be used by those in the Ormond (as we shall see), and his parting comment at the end of the counterexposition becomes his synecdoche: “Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I’m coming” (U 11.432). Throughout the exposition, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy remain much the same as in their previous presentation: Miss Douce is positioned by the

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mirror, looking, and the focus remains on her lips. Serving “with the greatest alacrity” (U 11.213), she is both seen and heard by all of the patrons: “He smiled at bronze’s teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes” (U 11.266). By contrast, Miss Kennedy is distinguished by her refusal to listen. Still “safe from eyes” (U 11.92–​3), she is “heard, not seen” (U 11.240), and, even when asked if Mr. Boylan had been in, she is “Miss voice of Kennedy” (U 11.237). As a result of her invisibility, and refusal to glance at Lenehan, despite his “plappering” (U 11.247) and attempts to catch her attention with “—​Peep! Who’s in the corner?” (U 11.242), Miss Kennedy is not as present in the narrative of the exposition, but will compete with “sister bronze” for visibility during the counterexposition. As the exposition unfurls, the emphasis on seeing within the space of the bar becomes a central element, as demonstrated by the increased description of eyes and gazes. For example, Miss Douce’s ears are ignored completely, and she is instead described as having “listening lips and eyes” (U 11.266). Similarly, during his conversation with Lenehan, the focus is on Dedalus’ eyes and visual observation: “—​That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see. /​ He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye” (U 11.272–​4); and again, “—​I see you have moved the piano” (U 11.276). When Dedalus then moves into the saloon, his passing from sight acts as a segment of transition, or codetta, between the exposition and counterexposition. Pat enters the bar from the dining room, and his baldness, a distinctly visible feature, is emphasized, rather than his deafness: “To the door of the bar and diningroom came bald Pat” (U 11.287–​8). By contrast, Dedalus—​who has since wandered into the saloon, the locus of where one is heard without being seen—​is heard but unseen: Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys to see the thicknesses of felt advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action. (U 11.291–​4)

The parenthetical “(who?)” indicates uncertainty regarding the identity of “he,” but this “he” is acknowledged as Dedalus, “(the same who pressed indulgently her hand).” Similarly, the narrative description of the piano as a coffin prompts the parenthetical “(coffin?)” before the question is answered with “(piano!).”

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Thus, the visible Dedalus becomes a parenthetical memory of pressed hands and observed pianos, replaced by “the muffled hammerfall” of muted sound, which will blossom alongside the fatalistic footfalls of the purveyors of the countersubjective material as they make their way toward the spatial quarter of the Ormond Hotel during the counterexposition to come.

5)  Contra Esposizione (nuovi rapporti fra/​divertimenti ì detti: parecchi) (U 11.295–​458) In addition to establishing the other voices that will take part as countersubjects, musically, the counterexposition is also the point at which the exposition and the counterexposition must be brought together and all voices must be introduced for the free modulation that is to follow. That is to say, unlike the exposition, the material in the counterexposition is not exclusive to the countersubject, as the piece must now begin to function as a double fugue. In the case of “Sirens,” the counterexposition introduces material depicted as actively moving outside the Ormond in the form of Blazes Boylan, Leopold Bloom, Richie Goulding, Ben Dollard, and Father Cowley, into the static, paralyzing space of the Ormond, while also establishing the three spaces of the Ormond Hotel: the bar as a place where everything, including sound, is seen; the saloon as a place where one is heard but not seen; and the dining room as a place where one can see and hear without being seen. The counterexposition is launched by Bloom in Daly’s, buying “Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes” (U 11.295), and ends when Bloom, from within the Ormond, hears Boylan jingling away. Throughout the section, both Boylan and Bloom provide material for the countersubjective movement, and intersect in their movements. For instance, as Bloom pays at Daly’s, he sees Blazes Boylan on Essex Bridge, a locus that Bloom himself has only just passed. In his outline, Joyce specifies a divertimenti, which is the “modulatory section [used] as a means of introducing further material for use later in the fugue,”95 but could also be interpreted as “background music for a social gathering” played by a solo musical instrument.96 Joyce appears to employ it in both senses:  Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye functions as background music for an increasingly social gathering, and Simon Dedalus’ “vamping” (U 11.448)

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on the piano,97 sets a pattern for the Tela Contrappuntistica, wherein the episodi—​the individual pieces of music that organize the contrapuntal fabric to come—​are each framed by a reference to the pipe or tuning fork, an invocation to listen, a description of the accompaniment or chords, and then the music itself. During the counterexposition, this happens when the silence of the Ormond is broken by the sound of the tuning fork, representing the call that beckons toward the Ormond: “From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call” (U 11.313–​16). The chords of Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye are then played, at last releasing sound and further establishing the saloon as a place of hearing. Boylan is the first to fall prey to the call to enter as his car jingles to a halt outside the Ormond. Unlike the viceregal cavalcade during the soggetti—​ where the pattern involved looking, passing, and looking back—​Boylan enters the Ormond, causing the exposition and the counterexposition to be brought together. The optical effects on Boylan’s entrance are immediate: his jingling is reduced to “creak[ing]” and replaced by the look of his “smart tan shoes” (U 11.337); and Boylan is instantly assaulted with the visibility of the bar and the spatial placement of the barmaids—​“Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar” (U 11.338)—​as they each try to flaunt their visibility to the entering Boylan: “He touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer hair, a bosom and a rose” (U 11.346–​8). Even in telling time, Miss Douce exhibits a visual ringing with her garter hitting her thigh in “Sonnez la cloche” (U 11.404). When Bloom also decides to enter the Ormond’s dining room with Goulding, he does so to succumb to his desire to “See, not be seen” (U 11.357–​ 8), establishing the dining room as a place facilitating voyeurism. “Sonnez la cloche,” meaning ring the bell, echoes the “ringing steel” (U 11.65) from the opening of “Sirens.” And the end of that opening sequence with the viceregal cavalcade—​“—​O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots?” (U 11.79)—​echoed in the parenthetical “(wept! aren’t men?)” (U 11.416), confirms the repetition of the opening pattern. “Killed looking back” (U 11.77), Boylan is visually mesmerized by Miss Douce:  “Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice [.  .  .] His spellbound eyes went after, after her gliding

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head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze” (U 11.419–​23). When Miss Douce disappears from sight, Boylan takes his change with an impatient “—​I’m off ” (U 11.426), and leaves to the closing strains of Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye. Thus, Boylan reclaims the role of countersubject by leaving the bar, literally moving counter to, or away from, the subject. The counterexposition closes with a confirmation that all of the characters have taken their positions for the modulatory section to come: Leopold Bloom and Richie Goulding are in the dining room and, having placed their orders for Power and cider with “Bald Pat, bothered waiter” (U 11.444), they prepare to hear without seeing—​identifying the singers and players by their music alone—​as well as to observe the barmaids without being seen, heard, or hearing. Father Cowley, Simon Dedalus, and Ben Dollard have also taken their positions: forcibly “plumped [. . .] on the [piano] stool” by Father Cowley, his “gouty paws plump[ing] chords. Plumped, stopped abrupt” (U 11.451–​2), Dollard confirms the saloon as a place of hearing, with the stopping and starting of music anticipating the coming musical pattern. In the bar, bronze by gold assume their visible places as “tealess gold return[s]‌” (U 11.453) and “Bronze by the window, watched, bronze from afar” (U 11.455). Finally, outside the bar, Boylan launches into movement, his jingling with “Jingle a tinkle jaunted” (U 11.456) matching the prior fading of the hoofs and ringing steel from the opening sequence, and incorporating into Bloom’s awareness as an echo, demonstrating the fading of sound with distance: “Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He’s off [. . .] Jingling. He’s gone. Jingle. Hear” (U 11.457–​8).

6)  Tela contrappuntistica (episodi) (U 11.458–​1145) With the command, “Hear” (U 11.458), the tuning fork’s longer in dying question “You hear?” (U 11.315), from Dedalus’ first invocation to listen, is at last answered, both through affirmation and as an imperative. Immediately, the narrative is propelled into Joyce’s Tela contrappuntistica, which is organized around his episodi,98 all of which encapsulate the loss of sense associated with the locus from which they are performed:  Love and War (saloon), All Is Lost Now (dining room), M’appari (saloon), the

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voluntary/​intermezzo that frames the silent roar of the shell (saloon, dining room, and bar), and The Croppy Boy (saloon). Aside from the organizing principle of the pieces of music, the contrapuntal web incorporates elements from the subject and the countersubject: the narrative that takes place in the Ormond and the countersubject is also represented by Boylan’s progress toward Molly in the form of his moving jingle. Like a heard fugue, this point in “Sirens” becomes increasingly difficult to follow. However, despite its disorienting quality, the structure of the modulation still follows the same pattern as its divertimenti precursor: a fragmented sound, usually in the form of starting and stopping piano chords; a verbal invocation or command to listen; the performance; and an explicit finale through applause or a reference to stopped music. This pattern becomes increasingly coherent with each song sung, but as the listener becomes more attuned to the music, the non-​musical narrative of the Ormond is proportionately obscured. For example, the sequence leading up to the first of the episodi, Love and War, has the most graspable storyline, but is the least fluid in its delivery of the musical piece. Instead, the song is conveyed as a sequence of stopping and starting: Dollard “plump[s]‌ chords” (U 11.452), then “stop[s] abrupt” (U 11.452); then, after Dedalus returns from the bar “pipe in hand” (U 11.492), Dollard’s voice seems to suddenly “boo[m] over bombarding chords” (U 11.529–​30), before he is again stopped by Father Cowley for singing the wrong part of the duet. Dollard sings again, this time accompanied by Cowley, before the chords are definitively “Stopped” (U 11.561). By contrast, the last piece, The Croppy Boy, adheres the most closely to the musical piece, but the story outside of the music is more difficult to follow. Throughout Love and War, the subject is expressed in various permutations: the bar remains a site of visibility and the elements associated with the barmaids from the initial introduction of the subject are present: Miss Douce’s brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten by sunlight. Gone. Pensive (who knows?), smitten (the smiting light), she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down pensive (why did he go so quick when I?) about her bronze, over the bar where bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, eau de Nil. (U 11.460–​65)

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Similarly, the saloon mostly conveys the sound of Dollard, Dedalus and Cowley’s conversation about “Mrs Marion Bloom [leaving] off clothes of all descriptions” (U 11.496–​7)—​a conversation they likely would not have had, had they known Bloom was in the dining room (“See, not be seen”)—​and the sound of “Ben Dollard’s famous” (U 11.553) baritone. From the dining room, Bloom listens, unseen and silent, identifying Dollard’s voice and Cowley’s playing: “Wonder who’s playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical. Knows whatever note you play. Bad breath he has, poor chap. Stopped” (U 11.560–​1). The countersubject is also expressed in the form of Boylan’s extended movements outside of the Ormond:  “By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres:  sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the? Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn” (U 11.524–​7). As is the case with each episodio, the narrative intersects with the piece being sung or played. For instance, as Boylan passes the Bachelor’s walk, the orchestration of the “haw haw horn,” and his “ardentbold,” collide against Dollard’s “bassooned attack, booming over bombarding chords” (U 11.528–​ 9), rising above Boylan’s noise and his own bombarding chords, but mirroring Boylan’s preemptive ardor in the line “When love absorbs my ardent soul” (U 11.530). Boylan as lover is transposed into Dollard’s mistaken singing of the lover’s part instead of that of the warrior, and Boylan’s “bounding tyres” are subsumed into the libretto (“Beneath his sway years swiftly roll”,99 manifesting as the “Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes” (U 11.531), much to the dismay of Cowley: “—​War! War! [. . .] You’re the warrior [. . .] Half time, Ben. Amoroso ma non troppo. Let me there” (U 11.532–​41). With instructions to double the tempo (“half time”), and to sing with less love (“Amoroso ma non troppo”), Cowley wrests the piano away from Dollard’s plump, gouty fingers. The All Is Lost Now episodio is framed by the same pattern as Love and War, including Dollard’s misstarts and blunders. Simon Dedalus lays down his pipe next to the tuningfork and begins to play, but is quickly caught out by Cowley for playing it in the wrong key: “—​No, Simon, Father Cowley turned. Play it in the original. One flat” (U 11.603).100 Dedalus transposes it up a key but has forgotten how to play it in its original key: “The keys, obedient, rose higher,

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told, faltered, confessed, confused” (U 11.603). Just like with Dollard, this is one blunder too many, and Cowley banishes Dedalus from the piano and takes over the accompaniment: “Here, Simon, I’ll accompany you [. . .] Get up” (U 11.605). While this is decided, Boylan’s progress, as Bloom’s counterpart, is reported in more detail: “By Graham Lemon’s pineapple rock, by Elvery’s elephant jingly jogged” (U 11.606–​7), and Bloom and Goulding break the silence of their eating to chat about All Is Lost Now, the “Most beautiful tenor air ever written” (U 11.610) in Richie’s estimation. Bloom observes his companion, his backache, the diagnosis of Bright’s disease from his bright eyes and perceived alcoholism that has caused his kidneys and pocketbook to suffer.101 Richie Goulding in the meantime whistles the tune of All Is Lost Now for Bloom: Richie cocked his lips apout. A  low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost. (U 11.630–​36)

Here again is the pattern: the fragmented stopping and starting of the chords (from M’appari), then, the naming of the work, followed by an echo of the long in dying call, represented here by the “low incipient note sweet banshee murmured” (U 11.630), before the work is performed. In this case, the performance is conveyed through the merging of Richie into the “Rich sound” and Bloom’s thoughts as he substitutes the lyrics of the aria and the plot of La Somnambula into the piece: “All most too new call is lost in all [. . .] Fall, surrender, lost [. . .] Yes: all is lost” (U 11.635–​41). The All Is Lost Now episodio ends with a return to the scene in the saloon, where the piano has stopped because Dedalus has once again missed his cue to enter—​“Dedalus said. Me?” (U 11.645)—​much to the dismay of Dollard and Cowley, who are still “urg[ing] the lingering singer out with it” (U 11.652). The effects of All Is Lost Now are transposed over top of Bloom’s observations of Richie Goulding: “Face of the all is lost. Rollicking Richie once. Jokes old stale now” (U 11.646–​7). Here again, the piano interrupts Bloom’s thoughts and the episodio ends with “Stopped again” (U 11.651), completing the pattern.

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As the episodi progress, the words and structure of the music become indelibly incorporated into the thoughts, actions, and movements of the characters. Love and War was almost like an annotation to the actions and mood of the characters; All Is Lost Now also set the mood and provided a soundtrack to Bloom’s observations of Richie before the incorporation of its title in the transition into M’appari. However, in the M’appari episodio, significantly more of the libretto is indicated in the text, and the words as well as the subject matter are similarly subsumed into the narrative, culminating in the consumption of listener, character, and singer in “Siopold!” (U 11.752).102 As with the previous two episodi, M’appari incorporates a variation of the barmaids, bronze by gold, in the bar: “By the sandwichbell in screening shadow Lydia, her bronze and rose, a lady’s grace, gave and withheld: as in cool glaucous eau de Nil Mina to tankards two her pinnacles of gold” (U 11.660–​62). This reappearance of the sandwich bell from the counterexposition serves as a reminder of the earlier Sonnez la cloche! that will now feature in the M’appari episode along with the majority of the material from the counterexposition, including Bloom buying the notepaper for his letter to Martha and thinking about the “language of flow” (U 11.298). It will also act as a point of contrapuntal intersection between Bloom and the barmaids, as the language used to describe Lenehan’s winding of his round body around the sandwichbell—​ “Lenehan round the sandwichbell wound his round body round” (U 11.240–​ 41)—​will now be transferred to Bloom’s activities with the elastic band: “Bloom unwound slowly the elastic band of his packet. Love’s old sweet sonnez la gold. Bloom wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast” (U 11.681–​4). Once again, the sites of seeing and hearing are established. At the first sounding of Dedalus’ voice, Bloom signals to Pat to “set ajar the door of the bar” (U 11.670), so as to hear better. Then, later in the piece, Bloom is torn between seeing and hearing: “Wish I could see his face, though. Explain better [. . .] Still hear it better here than in the bar though farther” (U 11.721–​3). There is also a statement of the countersubject: “Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now [.  .  .] Slower the mare went up the hill by

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the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare” (U 11.761–​6). M’appari also follows the pattern of the musical fumbling, the call to listen, the chords that command the attention of the listener, the performance, and the explicit end of the performance. In this case the stopping and starting of the piano coincides with the ending of All Is Lost Now: “Piano again. Sounds better than last time I  heard it. Tuned probably. Stopped again” (U 11.650–​ 51). This is followed by Dedalus’ invocation to listen to his song:  “—​I have no money but if you will lend me your attention I shall endeavour to sing to you of a heart bowed down” (U 11.658–​9). The long in dying chord captures the listener, here represented by “A chord, longdrawn, expectant, drew a voice away” (U 11.663–​4), before the first line of the aria, “When first I  saw that form endearing. . .” (U 11.664), is sung. The piece then ends with applause (U 11.754–​60) and the “afterclang of Cowley’s chords” (U 11.767). The next episodio, the intermezzo, follows the established pattern. It begins with Father Cowley playing a “voluntary” (U 11.799)—​which is a “freely composed or improvised piece [. . .] generally adapted for works in two or more sections.”103 And throughout the narrative, Bloom occasionally draws attention to Cowley’s piano tinkling, and the fragmented way in which the music is reaching Bloom: “Instance he’s playing now. Improvising” (U 11.838); and then the music intrudes again in Bloom’s thoughts when it changes to a minor key: “What is he playing now? Improvising. Intermezzo [. . .] Trails off there sad in minor. Why minor sad?” (U 11.889–​93). Between the two, Dedalus issues the call to listen with his pipe: “Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying” (U 11.854–​5). Then, Bloom’s subsequent identification of “Intermezzo” (U 11.890) provides both context and structure to this musical interlude. An intermezzo is a lyrical piece, often for piano, that occurs within a larger work;104 more appropriately, it is also an entr’acte “performed in segments between the acts of a larger work,” usually involving a pantomime, and concluding with a dance piece, preferably a minuet.105 In this sequence, Bloom performs a pantomime in writing his letter to Martha, and watches another in the mimed drama that occurs when Lydia Douce commands Lidwell to listen to its silent roar. Then, fittingly, at the end of the intermezzo, Cowley begins

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to play a minuet: “Bob Cowley’s twinkling fingers in the treble played again [. . .] Lightly he played a light bright tinkling measure for tripping ladies, arch and smiling, and for their gallants, gentlemen friends. One: one, one, one, one, one: two, one, three, four [. . .] Minuet of Don Giovanni he’s playing now” (U 11.958–​66). Given that this episodi is an intermezzo, Bloom’s composition of the letter to Martha functions as a pantomime: his attempts to hide the contents of his letter from Goulding as he consciously murmurs one phrase while writing another borders on the comical. Once Pat brings him his blotting pad, pen, and ink, Bloom pretends to look for an advertisement in the Freeman, exaggeratedly finding it: “Down the edge of his Freeman baton ranged Bloom’s, your other eye, scanning for where did I see that. Callan, Coleman, Dignam Patrick. Heigho! Heigho! Fawcett. Aha! Just I was looking” (U 11.856–​8). Then, using the paper to hide his writing from sight, Bloom pens his letter. In an obvious attempt to camouflage his actions, he verbally articulates a different letter than the one he, as Henry Flower, is writing: “Bloom dipped, Bloo mur: dear sir. Dear Henry wrote: dear Mady. Got your lett and flow [. . .] It is utterly imposs. Underline imposs. To write today” (U 11.860–​62). Goulding, commenting on Bloom’s activities, asks, “—​Answering an ad?” (U 11.886). This prompts Bloom to continue in his strange pantomime of ostentatiously murmuring one thing while writing another: —​Yes, Mr Bloom said. Town traveller. Nothing doing, I expect.   Bloom mur:  best references. But Henry wrote:  it will excite me. You know how. In haste. Henry. Greek ee. Better add postscript [. . .] P. S. [. . .] How will you pun? You punish me? [.  .  .] Tell me I  want to. Know [.  .  .] Course if I didn’t I wouldn’t ask. [. . .] Sign H. [. . .] P. P. S. [. . .] I feel so sad today [. . .] So lonely [. . .]   He blotted quick on pad of Pat. Envel. Address. Just copy out of paper. Murmured: Messrs Callan, Coleman and Co, limited. Henry wrote:   Miss Martha Clifford   c/​o P. O. (U 11.887–​94, my emphasis)

Once he has finished his letter, Bloom seeks a distraction—​“Wish they’d sing more. Keep my mind off ” (U 11.914)—​and settles upon the visual

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spectacle of Lydia Douce showing off her shell. This sequence with the shell is a scene within the scene of the pantomime, following the usual pattern of Miss Douce’s invocation to “Listen!” (U 11.925) and “Hear!” (U 11.930), Cowley’s “wove[n]‌music” (U 11.926, 929). Watching, Bloom hears vicariously:  “Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar” (U 11.934–​6). Throughout the episodio, Boylan’s progress as countersubject is heard passing Dlugacz’ porkshop (U 11.883) and Larry O’Rourke’s (U 11.952), before finally “Jog jig jogged stopped” (U 11.977) outside of Eccles Street. With this “stopped,” the intermezzo concludes, after Cowley’s “twinkling fingers” (U 11.958) have played the closing minuet: “One: one, one, one, one, one: two, one, three, four” (U 11.961–​2). This minuet is identified more specifically as the “Minuet of Don Giovanni he’s playing now” (U 11.965). The final episodio is that of The Croppy Boy. Once again, the pattern is set into motion as Cowley’s chords begin to weave accordingly:  “Bob Cowley’s outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords” (U 11.998–​9). Bloom is interrupted in the act of leaving and, stilled by the narrative invocation to “But wait. But hear” (U 11.1005), falls under the enchantment of the “Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic” (U 11.1005–​6). Then, The Croppy Boy is sung, and the piece ends with the round of “bravo, fat backslapping” (U 11.1143) heard by Bloom as he leaves the Ormond. The countersubject is depicted in the tapping of the blind tuner as he makes his way toward the Ormond, replacing Boylan in the moment when his tapping merges onomoatopoeically with Boylan’s knock on the door at 7 Eccles Street: “One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock. /​Tap” (U 11.986–​9). As the stripling gets closer to the Ormond, his taps increase in number to represent the distance covered. Making his way out of the Ormond, Bloom retraces his steps. Because The Croppy Boy is the last song to be sung and is therefore building toward the end of the tela contrappuntistica, all of the previously mentioned

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episodi are referenced and concluded. For example, as in the earlier rendition of Love and War, Bloom recognizes the tones of the famous Ben Dollard, with the repetition of the word “barreltone” (U 11.559, 1011) connecting to the prior use of the same word to describe Dollard’s bass. Similarly, Bloom concludes his earlier thoughts about Richie during All Is Lost Now as the narrative focus shifts to the spatial quarter of the dining room:  “Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened” (U 11.1028–​ 9). During the Intermezzo, Bloom remembered the rat at Dignam’s funeral—​ “Ugh, that rat’s tail wriggling!” (U 11.805)—​before describing Goulding as “cute as a rat” (U 11.859). Now, during this episodi, Bloom remembers the Latin of the funeral as he listens to Dollard’s “In nomine Domini [. . .] mea culpa” (U 11.1032–​3) and “Wonder[s]‌where that rat is by now” (U 11.1036). And recalling M’appari, Bloom watches Miss Douce at the beerpull, “her breath: breath that is life” (U 11.1107), repeating the language of “he breath long life” (U 11.747) during the spinning out of Simon’s “—​Come!” (U 11.744). In addition, Bloom also enacts the narrative sequence from the start of “Sirens.” Deciding he has “Looked enough” (U 11.1073)—​concluding his original desire to “See, not be seen” (U 11.357–​8)—​Bloom determines it is “Time to be shoving” (U 11.1073). However, in one final intersection with the libretto of The Croppy Boy, in looking, he is “unblessed to go” (U 11.1076). This propels the reader back to the beginning, where echoes of the entire narrative sequence from the introduction of the subject until the end of the counterexposition can be heard chronologically and in condensed form: Bloom looked, unblessed to go. Go up to kill:  on eighteen bob a week. Fellows shell out the dibs. Want to keep your weathereye open. Those girls, those lovely. By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl’s romance. Letters read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy’s owny Mumpsypum. Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you. (U 11.1076–​80)

Here, from the soggetto we have a repetition of the viceregal procession’s “killed looking back,” in Bloom getting “up to kill,” but “looked,” and is “unblessed to go” (U 11.1076). Similarly, the “your other eye” (U 11.148) during the material of the contrasoggetto is now represented in “Want to keep your weathereye open” (U 11.1077). From the esposizione, Miss Douce’s discussion of her seaside holiday appears in “Those girls, those lovely” (U 11.1077) as does Miss Kennedy’s pensive

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reading by the sandwich bell in “By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl’s romance” (U 11.1077). Finally, from the contra esposizione, Bloom buying stationary at Daly’s and his subsequent guilty letter writing is completed in his persecution for said composition:  “Letters read out for break of promise [.  .  .] Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you” (U 11.1078–​80). Nevertheless, like Lenehan and Boylan’s spellbound eyes during Sonnez la cloche, Bloom is mesmerized by the figurative pity-​lay her hands enact on the beerpull: On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passes, reposed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring. (U 11.1112–​17)

Just as Boylan’s leave-​taking intersects textually with the viceregal cavalcade’s passing, so too does Bloom’s leaving overlap with Boylan. Echoing Boylan’s earlier “—​I’m off ” (U 11.426) at the end of Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye, Bloom also takes his leave, “Well I must be. Are you off?” (U 11.1126) after having watched his fill of the barmaids. Gradually resuming his role as the moving countersubject, his movements alternate with the stationary material of the subject, first as he makes his way out of the dining room, passing “By deaf Pat” (U 11.1130), and then circumventing the barmaids, noticed by them for the first time as he greets them on the way out:  “By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties, by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom” (U 11.1134–​6). After one final musical interjection from Dollard, Bloom encounters the bootsboy in the hallway and manages to make his escape before the bestial backslapping begins: “Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to wash it down. Glad I avoided” (U 11.1142–​5). Bloom’s “Glad I avoided” echoes his earlier “Avoid” (U 11.354) from when he first entered the Ormond, and officially propels the narrative into the stretto.

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7)  Stretto maestiale (blocalis d’armonia/​narricum antesi) (U 11.1142–​294) The purpose of the Stretto is to create intensity as the fugue builds toward the final restatement of the subject and countersubject. This is achieved by layering the subject and countersubject: that is to say, the subject enters in one voice, but before the subject has completed its thought (so to speak), the countersubject is stated. By increasing the frequency of these interrupted partial statements, the stretto tightens until its final, majestic resolution. In “Sirens,” Bloom’s progressions as reinstated countersubject are layered atop the stasis of the bar, and slowly the fog of listening is cleared from his powers of observation, culminating in his ultimate release in the form of passing gas. Once Bloom has exited the loop of “Sirens,” the clapping that had greeted the end of almost every song during the tela contrappuntistica is now transformed into bestial “growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping” (U 11.1143), and, as the singers make their way into the realm of the visual (the bar), the narrative shifts away from the quality of their musicianship, toward their physical attributes: Ben Dollard is restored to a figure who “bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes in the air” (U 11.1151–​3). Similarly, the barmaids are represented visually, and, once again, spoken words are represented through lips: “Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard” (U 11.1175). The first instance of narrative layering (blocalis d’armonia/​narricum antesi) is in the incorporation of Mina Kennedy’s love of ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer, with Bloom’s progress:  “’Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round inside” (U 11.1178–​9). When the first line of the aria—​ “’Tis the last rose of summer /​Left blooming all alone”—​encounters the word “bloom,” the narration switches to Bloom before the line can be completed, thus creating the effect of layering the first block of narrative of the stretto. The “wind wound round inside” connects to the cider that is winding round Bloom’s insides to create wind. As he moves further away from the Ormond Hotel, time resumes and Bloom thinks about the things he must do, such as go to the post office and Barney Kiernan’s Pub. He also begins to build his immunity to the music: “Freer in air. Music. Gets on your nerves” (U 11.1182). In proportion to his thoughts,

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Bloom’s progress is described as “Far. Far. Far. Far” (U 11.1185), juxtaposed and continued (FarT) in the blind piano tuner’s “Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap” (U 11.1186). Travelling up the quay he assumes all of his personas: “Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady, with sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses went Poldy on” (U 11.1187–​ 9). As he moves further away from the Ormond, he also becomes critical of Father Cowley’s piano playing, whose perfect pitch and delicate touch he had previously admired: “Cowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness [.  .  .] Instance enthusiasts. All ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty. You daren’t budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop. Fiddlefaddle about notes” (U 11.1191–​5). Bloom’s thoughts are interrupted by the physical noise of his “wee little wind piped eeee” (U 11.1203), whose “piped” intersects with and is layered atop Dedalus, “returning with fetched pipe” (U 11.1204), in the next line. Dedalus’ pipe now loses its “lost chord pipe” properties. This split occurs in the narrative as two conversations begin to separate, and Bloom is extracted out of the Ormond through an oblique conversational reference: —​Was he? Mr Dedalus said, returning with fetched pipe. I was with him this morning at poor little Paddy Dignam’s . . . [. . .] —​The wife has a fine voice. Or had. What? Lidwell asked. —​O, that must be the tuner, Lydia said to Simonlionel first I saw, forgot it when he was here. Blind he was she told George Lidwell second I saw. And played so exquisitely, treat to hear. Exquisite contrast: bronzelid, minagold. (U 11.1204–​13)

Although the conversation involves Bloom and his wife’s “fine voice,” the belated acknowledgment of Bloom’s presence in the bar seems to confirm his absence. This is further illustrated by Dedalus’ momentary transformation into “Simonlionel” minus the Leopold. In addition, Dedalus’ song is taken out of the audible and brought to the realm of the visual as the sung “When first I saw that form endearing” becomes the order in which Miss Douce saw the men who entered her bar: “Simonlionel first I saw” and “Lidwell second I saw.” The exchange ends with a repetition of the opening—​“Exquisite contrast: bronzelid, minagold”—​and Lionel’s aria becomes Martha’s ’Tis the Last

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Rose of Summer as Mina Kennedy’s sandwichbell encases “one last, one lonely, last sardine of summer. Bloom alone” (U 11.1220–​21). This “Bloom alone” again shows the layering of the blocks of narrative, and before the thoughts in the bar can be completed, Bloom enters the narrative again, still progressing, this time “by Barry’s” (U 11.1224). Once again, in this final recapitulation, all of the pieces sung in the Tela contrappuntistica return: Boylan’s “Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn” (U 11.527) from Love and War is echoed in “Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the?” (U 11.1240); All Is Lost Now reappears as “Sleep! All is lost now” (U 11.1242); The Croppy Boy is summarized as “Poor little nominedomine [. . .] Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same he must have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap” (U 11.1244–​9); the intermezzo figures in “shell of her hands” (U 11.1237); and M’appari’s “When first he saw that form endearing?” (U 11.1253–​4) is repeated as a question at the entrance of the whore of the lane. As “Sirens” draws to a close, the content becomes more and more stratified, with little to no crossover in the blocks of narrative. The threads that have made the narrative so confusing are unwound as they take turns entering in short segments:  Bloom, followed by the scene in the bar, then the tuner, then Bloom again, the bar, the tuner, and finally ending with Bloom’s purge. In each of these entrances, the parallels to the larger canonic pattern of the exposition and counterexposition are unmistakable: following in the wake of Boylan, who, killed looking back, “Jingle jaunted down the quays” (U 11.498) away from the bar (and the viceregal before him, with the sound of ringing steel), Bloom also makes his way down Ormond Quay Upper, armed with his own manner of noise: his fart. In this canon, Bloom is replaced by the blind piano tuner who has also made his tapping way toward the bar and is now retracing Bloom’s footsteps exactly, “by Daly’s window where a mermaid hair all streaming (but he couldn’t see) blew whiffs of a mermaid (blind couldn’t), mermaid, coolest whiff of all” (U 11.1235–​6), into the “Ormond hall” (U 11.1273), and finally standing at the threshold of the Ormond, hearing and unseeing, but nevertheless killed looking back as he has had to return to the bar in quest of his tuning fork. Through all of this, the scene in the bar remains static and unchanged: “Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia’s tempting last rose of summer, rose of

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Castile” (U 11.1269–​71). The men in the bar have been diminished (the contrapuntal technique of diminution) to “First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth” (U 11.1271) before being augmented again to “Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan, and big Ben Dollard” (U 11.1272). Our final view of them is as an echo of Boylan’s toast, “Fortune” (U 11.370), clinking their glasses together: —​True men like you men. —​Ay, ay, Ben. —​Will lift your glass with us.   They lifted    Tschink. Tschunk. (U 11.1276–​80)

The episode ends with the final complete statement of the subject in combination with the countersubject by the blind tuner: “Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see” (U 11.1281–​3). Although the tuner is in no danger of falling prey to the visual temptation of the bar, the final “He did not see” (U 11.1283) does not imply immunity to the sirens. Rather his ears are completely vulnerable to the laughter in the bar. This last “he did not see” transitions to the seen:  “Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words” (U 11.1284). Away from the bar, Bloom is no longer listening but seeing the last words of Robert Emmett while the tram “kran[s]‌” (U 11.1290). Then, unseen and unheard, he unstoppers himself: “Pprrpffrrppffff ” (U 11.1293).

8)  Pedale (U 11.933–​1190) Even without the aid of Joyce’s list, previous critics have noted that the blind piano tuner’s tapping is reminiscent of pedal point. For example, Burgess writes, “We have reached the final stretto, which requires a pedal-​point. The blind piano tuner has left his tuning fork at the Ormond and is coming back for it. His stick goes ‘Tap. Tap. Tap’ [. . .] a noise sounding under other noises.”106 Pedal point is defined as “a long, held note, usually in the bass”;107 it can also be achieved through the use of rhythm.108 Although Joyce does not specify whether he is using a dominant or tonic pedal point in his list, his incorporation of the tapping points toward a dominant pedal point: it appears toward

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the end of the episode, but not at the very end, and builds “harmonic tension that will be resolved in a closing section” that features the tonic.109 When the “Tap” (U 11.933) appears in the narrative for the first time, it is not necessarily identifiable as belonging to the blind tuner. Bloom has been trying to capture the attention of Pat to settle the bill—​“Pat! Doesn’t hear” (U 11.911) and again, “Pat! Doesn’t” (U 11.912)—​and, divorced from the context of the tuner, it appears as a palindromic reminder of Pat and Bloom’s attempted leave-​taking, while being positioned as a framing device for the seashell pantomime in the intermezzo episodio. Henceforward, the taps punctuate loose ends and serve as a reminder for the narrative to reestablish a pattern of movement in contrast to the stasis of the Ormond; for example, the next tap (U 11.989) concludes Boylan’s “carracarracarra cock. Cockcock” (U 11.987–​8) as he arrives at Bloom’s home and disappears from the narrative and Bloom again tries to attract Pat’s attention to pay and leave: “I’ll go. Here. Pat, return” (U 11.994). However, he is not quite fast enough and with the opening chords of The Croppy Boy, Bloom is again caught in the invocation to “hear” (U 11.1005). The taps that follow in a sense wrap up Bloom’s enchantment:  the next “Tap” (U 11.1010) falls between a mythologized version of Dollard’s voice—​ “The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth’s fatigue made grave approach and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men and true. The priest he sought. With him would he speak a word” (U 11.1007–​9)—​and the demythologization of the voice into a human identification of the singer, “Ben Dollard’s voice” (U 11.1011), thereby concluding Bloom’s receptiveness to the musicians from the saloon. Then, the subsequent tap marks the final time in which the libretto of the music is incorporated in Bloom’s thoughts, recalling the rat from the funeral that lies beneath the numbing Latin of the Catholic service: “Latin again. That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the communion corpus for those women. Chap in the mortuary, coffin or coffey, corpusnomine. Wonder where that rat is by now. Scrape. /​Tap” (U 11.1034–​7). When Bloom’s gaze is captured by the barmaids, the tapping builds in urgency to two taps (U 11.1084, 1100)  and then to three, recalling Boylan’s knock at his door, “With a cock with a carra. /​Tap. Tap. Tap” (U 11.1118–​ 19), and spurring Bloom into motion at last. The tapping then crescendos and expands to four taps, as the narrative lingers briefly on Richie Goulding, who first brought Bloom into the Ormond and is now “rift in the lute alone sat”

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waiting “Uncertainly” (U 11.1165–​6). The final appearance of the pedal point before it becomes identified as a character is in tandem with Bloom’s “Far. Far. Far. Far. /​Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.” (U 11.1185–​6). After this, it is transformed into “Tap blind walked tapping by the tap the curbstone tapping, tap by tap” (U 11.1190), at which point, having returned the narrative to its original purpose, it operates as part of the countersubject’s movement.

A closer look at MS 36,639/​7A: The genetic layering of “Sirens” While the above prolonged exegesis of the “Sirens” episode yields to an interpretation that is structurally consistent with Joyce’s eight-​part list, it is equally important to ascertain at what point he decided to superimpose this structure on the episode to determine to what extent the double fugue may or may not have been intentional. The draft contained in MS 36,639/​9 is clearly a later version of the partial draft in MS 36,639/​7A, supporting Michael Groden’s assertion that the list is Joyce’s “indication to himself of a fugue’s structure, which he apparently planned to superimpose onto an episode that was already partially drafted.”110 Furthermore, the evidence from NLI MS 36,639/​ 7A (the “Proteus”-​“Sirens” copybook) would certainly suggest that “Sirens” was indeed already partially drafted, as the episode contained therein depicts the events in the Ormond roughly up until the Love and War duet, albeit in more straightforward language. For instance, Joyce revises the line, “Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy’s heads [. . .] saw the viceregal cavalcade go by,” to “Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy’s head by Miss Douce’s head bronze over the blind of the Ormond Hotel and heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel” (MS 36,639/​ 7A, 5v). Thus, even at this early stage, the narrative focus shifts to the sound of the cavalcade as it passes, and the visual spectacle becomes the bronze by gold of Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce rather than the other way around. Similarly, the boots boy is not initially introduced as an “unmannerly” (U 11.94) character: rather than rudely banging his tray on the counter and displacing the china, “the boots came across from the hall and laid his tray on the counter” (MS 36,639/​7A, 6r). Although his “snouted lips” do later “mockingly” imitate her chastisement. There are other differences in language as well, such as a

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simpler version of “She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea” (U 11.108) that does not imitate the process with the tea in “She poured tea into a cup then back in the pot” (MS 36,639/​7A, 6r); or, during the duet of their laughter, “Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I knows. Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge” (U 11.174–​8) is instead represented as: “High, deep laughter, they urged each to peal after peal, their shaken heads they laid against the counterledge” (MS 36,639/​7A, 6v). Simplified language aside, what is absent from this early handwritten draft, but present in the later handwritten draft, are all of the passages that make up the countersubject of the double fugue, namely the movements and progressions taking place outside of the Ormond: Bloom is not passing Moulang’s pipes, Wine’s antiques, reading Aaron Figatner’s name, or buying paper in Daly’s; nor is Blazes Boylan’s characteristic jingling jaunting car heard at any Dublin landmarks or otherwise. These are not added until later in the drafting stage (see Figure 3.4). Here, one can see that Joyce has added the left-​hand marginal note, “By Moulang’s pipes, Wine’s antiques, by Carroll’s plate dusky battered” (MS 36,639/​9, 1r), effectively inserting Bloom’s movements as countersubject into the text even at this later stage in the drafting process.

Figure  3.4  “By Moulang’s pipes” margin note in the handwritten, partial draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​9, IMG 09-​002, 1r [p.1])

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Although Boylan is present in the earlier draft, he is already in the Ormond, and his concern is with the time. Notably, he believes it to be 3:30 rather than 4: “Half 3 is it? he said, looking at their gawdy reflections” (MS 36,639/​7A, 8v), and Lenehan tries to convince Miss Douce to sonnez la cloche in anticipation of four—​“—​That clock’s 4, Lenehan said. Isn’t it Miss Douce?” (MS 36,639/​7A, 9r). Perhaps because it is 3:30 and not 4:00, the dining room is not yet available for early diners, and, for that reason, Pat as waiter, Richie Goulding, Bloom, and all references to the dining room are missing. Either way, the space where one can “see [and] not be seen” (U 11.357–​8) does not yet exist. The saloon on the other hand is quite clearly described, and even situated geographically within the Ormond as being “the inner saloon” (MS 36,639/​7A, 8r). Also, when Dedalus “stray[s]‌away” (U 11.283), this early draft specifies his destination as “towards the open saloon door” (MS 36,639/​7A, 8r), connecting him more directly with the call of the tuning fork that comes from the saloon. Aside from the absence of the countersubject, almost all of the material for the Tela contrappuntistica and the Stretto appear in fragments after the tenth page of the notebook, often in blocks that proximate the episodi. Just as Dollard begins to sing Love and War, which in this rendition also contains his mistaken singing of the lover’s part, rather than the warrior’s, and Cowley’s irritated “War! War!” (U 11.532, MS 36,639/​7A, 10r), the page abruptly cuts off its continuous prose and lays out a series of fragments (see Figure  3.3). Luca Crispi posits that “it is likely that this rupture coincides with the extent of the earlier draft [and that Joyce] drew a line separating everything that came before, and only then introduced Bloom, already seated alone at the Ormond Hotel.”111 Despite this contention, the introduction of Bloom as listener does not occur in these fragments until three more fragments have been drafted, and even then, Bloom’s thoughts coincide with the singing of the as-​ yet unmentioned Croppy Boy, not Love and War, effectively challenging the hypothesis that “Joyce could have intended that the second half of the episode would take place at exactly the same time as the first half.”112 Instead, I would argue that the first half of the manuscript contains the material for the Soggetto right up until the Tela contrappuntistica, and that the subsequent draft, possibly MS 36,639/​9 (although there is likely an interim draft since the countersubject appears at other points), demonstrates the layering of the material for the countersubject for the double fugue.

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The first crossed fragment in Figure 3.3, which appears just after the line under “Let me there,”113 reads: Mr Bloom watched in silence the liquid eyeball at gaze of calm and pitiless under its narrowed lid and saw behind its of fence of lashes. At each slow leave of her bosom (her heaving embonpoint) the her red rose rose and sand with satin and all her tiny foils trembled of maidenhair. She knows I’m looking, knows without looking F114 Heat and spices of orient floated around her. On the jutting beerpull lay her hand lightly, plumply, white on the enamel, and to and fro (she knows I’m looking) over the polished knob her thumb and finger xxx passed, reposed, gently touching and then slid smoothly, slowly down, as. (MS 36,639/​7A, 10r)

In the final publication of Ulysses, this fragment corresponds with the description of Miss Douce at the beerpull while Ben Dollard is singing The Croppy Boy: A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing [.  .  .] At each slow satiny heaving bosom’s wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly sank red rose [. . .] And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair [.  .  .] On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands [. . .] over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring. (U 11.1104–​17)

In fact, all of the crossed fragments from that page (10r) coincide with The Croppy Boy episode, with the exception of two notes in the left margin which are additions to the already drafted Love and War prose: “A buxom piece,” and “Really from rock of Gibraltar” (MS 36,639/​7A, 10r). Subsequent fragments can also be grouped according to the episodi. For example, the text shown in Figure 3.5 is crossed out in red and reads as follows: Mr Bloom heard the voice of lamentation Martha, Martha, ah return, love. Her name. Strange. I am waiting here. Lovely [^Glorious] voice he has. For thee. Co-​ome, thou lost one. Cruel it is. Let people get fond of each. Thou dear one. Then tear them asunder alone. [^Way out of xxx] Can it come. For to me. Human life. That is. And she. (MS 36,639/​7A, 10v)

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Figure 3.5  Crossed fragment from M’appari in the earliest known draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​7/​A, IMG 07-​011, 10v [p.20])

This fragment is continued on the following page, and coincides with the singing of M’appari (see Figure 3.6). Similarly, the crossed fragments pictured in Figure 3.6 from the next page over (MS 36,639/​7A, 11r) can also be located in “Sirens” within the framework of the M’appari, Love and War, Intermezzo, All Is Lost Now, and again Love and War (identified from top to bottom respectively). Of the fifty or so fragments that appear in the “Sirens”-​“Proteus” copybook, seventeen of them can be grouped into The Croppy Boy; four of them in Love and War; ten of them in the Intermezzo; one into M’appari; three into All Is Lost Now; and eight (four as part of the subject and four as part of the countersubject) into the Stretto (see Appendix for full transcription and allocation). There is no material from earlier than the Love and War duet in these fragments, which would seem to be a sign of how Joyce layers Bloom into the Tela Contrappuntistica via the organizing principle of the episodi, and, later, how these are alternated into the material for the countersubject and subject in the Stretto. The material that can be located in the Stretto corresponds with the layering of the subject and the countersubject outlined in the section “Joyce’s fugue in eight parts.” Four of them present the aftermath of The Croppy Boy in the Ormond—​ that is, the lonely sardine under the sandwich bell (MS 36,639/​7A, 12r), the pouring of drinks (MS 36,639/​7A, 12v), congratulatory remarks to Ben Dollard on his singing (MS 36,639/​7A, 13v), and Dollard’s rubicund appearance (MS 36,639/​7A, 12v)—​whereas the other four fall under the purview of the countersubject, all of them occurring outside of the Ormond: Bloom’s thoughts on the fate of the donkey drum (MS 36,639/​7A, 12v), the encounter with the “frowsy whore” (MS 36,639/​7A, 13r), the public vs private passing of gas (“Custom.

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Figure  3.6  Crossed fragments from M’appari, Love and War, Intermezzo, and All Is Lost Now in the earliest known draft of “Sirens” (from NLI Joyce Papers 2002, MS 36,639/​7/​A, IMG 07-​011, 11r [p.21])

Shah of Persia [. . .] Now if I did that in company, everyone would laugh” [MS 36,639/​7A, 13r]), and thoughts of “Old Glynn [. . .] Queer up there alone in the loft with his back to the whole thing performance with his keys and stops” (MS 36,639/​7A, 16). The contrast between material happening inside and outside of the Ormond replicates the spatial component of the double fugue, and

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demonstrates the layering of the material of the subject and countersubject evident in the final version of “Sirens.” Given that the uncrossed material prior to the fragments in the early handwritten drafts (MS 36,639/​7/​A + B) is very close to that which we see in later drafts, and that missing references to Bloom are present by/​in the margins of the next handwritten draft (MS 36,639/​9), it is conceivable that Joyce purposefully layered “Sirens” as a double fugue, structuring it according to the above-​ mentioned subject and countersubject divisions. Furthermore, based on the placement and final location of the majority of the fragments in “Sirens,” one can deduce that Joyce was drafting the later part of the episode—​specifically the episodical divisions of the Tela contrappuntistica and the Stretto of his eight-​part list—​when he wrote these narrative fragments. Within this framework, the overwhelming presence of the five episodi—​Croppy Boy, Love and War, M’appari, All Is Lost Now, and the Intermezzo—​among the fragments would seem to corroborate that they were the organizing principle of the Tela contrappuntistica. Thus, taking into account this drafting process and the eight-​part list outlined in the later partial draft of “Sirens,” alongside a structural interpretation of the final version of “Sirens,” one can infer how Joyce managed to structure the “Sirens” to contain “all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem” (JL 1:  129). The effects of this will be explored in Chapter 4.

Notes 1 Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Vintage, 2004), 384. 2 Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–​1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 158. 3 Imogene Horsley, Fugue, History and Practice (New York: Free Press, 1966), 55. 4 Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening, 8th edn., shorter version (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 183. 5 Horsley, Fugue, 6. 6 Horsley, Fugue, 6. 7 Horsley, Fugue, 372. 8 Horsley, Fugue, 289. 9 Horsley, Fugue, 290.

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1 0 Horsley, Fugue, 290. 11 Although in its modern usage tuono is the Italian word for thunder, in this sense tuono incorporates the archaic form of tono, meaning tone. 12 Horsley, Fugue, 102. 13 Horsley, Fugue, 269–​70. 14 Aldous Huxley, quoting Burney, “Busoni, Dr. Burney, and Others (The Weekly Westminster Gazette, February 25, 1922),” in Aldous Huxley—​Complete Essays, vol. 1, 1920–​25, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 229. 15 Horsley, Fugue, 364. 16 Alfred Mann, The Study of Fugue (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 5. 17 Horsley, Fugue, 108. Gédalge outlines the eight essential parts of the fugue d’école as: “1˚ le sujet; /​2˚ la réponse; /​3˚ un ou plusieurs contre-​sujets; /​4˚ l’exposition; /​5˚ la contre-​exposition; /​6˚ les développements ou divertissements servant de transition aux différentes tonalités dans lesquelles on fait entendre le sujet et la réponse; /​7˚ le stretto; /​8˚ la pédale” (André Gédalge, Traité De La Fugue [Paris: Enoch, 1901], 8). A basic translation of this would be the subject; the response/​answer; one or more countersubjects; the exposition; the counterexposition; developments or divertissements (the technical term) serving as transition into different tonalities in which we hear the subject and the answer—​later designated by the term Episodes; the stretto; the pedal point. Prior to the discovery of NLI 36,639/​9, wherein Joyce enumerates a different list of eight parts, Gudrun Budde (in “Fuge als literarische Form? Zum Sirenen Kapitel aus ‘Ulysses’ von James Joyce,” in Musik Und Literatur: Komparatistiche Studien Zur Strukturverwandtschaft, ed. Albert Gier and Gerold W. Gruber [Frankfurt-​ am-​Main: Peter Lang, 1995], 195–​213) traces Joyce’s claim of an eight-​part fugue to this list. However, her article has been sadly overlooked because it is in German and remains untranslated. 18 For the most part, the fugue d’école completely replicates Martini’s prototype for the fugue, excepting that Martini’s fuga reale (free fugue) incorporates a real answer, whereas the fugue d’école favors a tonal or strict fugue. 19 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914), trans. Michael T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover, 1977), 27–​8. 20 Kandinsky, Spiritual, 28. 21 Huxley, “Busoni,” 229. 22 George Du Maurier, Trilby, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Elaine Showalter and Dennis Denisoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 164. 23 Daniel Ferrer, “What Song the Sirens Sang . . . Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture: A Preliminary Description of the New ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens’ Manuscripts,” James Joyce Quarterly 39.1 (Fall 2001), 62.

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24 There are also those who acknowledge the presence of music before moving on to examine other elements of the episode such as the mythological parallels. For example, Sebastian Knowles in “The Substructure of ‘Sirens’: Molly as Nexus Omnia Ligans” (James Joyce Quarterly 23.4 [Summer 1986], 447–​63) and in The Dublin Helix writes that “the structure of the ensuing episode may be canonic but is certainly not fugal,” and that the eight regular parts are “more a matter of voicing than fugal form” (Sebastian Knowles, The Dublin Helix: The Life of Language in Joyce’s Ulysses [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001], 86). However, aside from an appendix that outlines a possible vocal octet, Knowles ultimately dismisses both the fugue and the canon, instead focusing on the connections to the Greek myth and how “Sirens” is an incorporation of all the women whom “Bloom finds seductive during his day” (97); his interpretation, however, is curiously devoid of song, the principal attribute (along with the promise of knowledge) of the Homeric Sirens. 25 It should be noted that Weaver in Joyce’s Music and Noise (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), Ordway in “A Dominant Boylan: Music, Meaning, and Sonata Form in the ‘Sirens’ Episode of Ulysses” (James Joyce Quarterly 45.1 [2007], 85–​96), and Smith in “Musical Form and Principles in the Scheme of Ulysses” (Twentieth Century Literature 18.ii [April 1972], 79–​92) treat the form of the sonata in very different ways. Weaver’s work is an attempt to establish that all of Ulysses is a prolonged sonata (an exercise stemming from a suggestion by Pound); Ordway’s analysis is a purely musicological imposition of the sonata form on the “Sirens” episode; and Smith treats it more as an analogy. 26 Timothy Martin, Joyce and Wagner—​A Study of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Stanley Sultan, “The Sirens at the Ormond Bar: Ulysses,” University of Kansas City Review 26.ii (December 1959), 83–​92; Alan Shockley, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth Century Novel (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2009). 27 David Herman, “ ‘Sirens’ after Schönberg,” James Joyce Quarterly 31.4 (Summer 1994), 473–​94. 28 Bowen hints at this idea in “The Bronzegold Sirensong: A Musical Analysis of the Sirens Episode in Joyce’s Ulysses” (in Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music [Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995], 25–​76) and in his seminal Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through “Ulysses” (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974); however, he only explicitly states this thesis in “Music as Comedy in Ulysses,” claiming that “Sirens could rightly be termed a modernist musical comedy, untraditional only in its antisentimental conclusion [. . .] It is also a musical within a musical, a score and

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a libretto for the action and the musical setting of the rest of the novel” (Zack Bowen, “Music as Comedy in Ulysses,” in Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music [Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995], 130). For an extended discussion of the problems of Bowen’s interchanging of musical metaphor with musical terminology, see Calvin S. Brown’s review of Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce in Comparative Literature, 29.1 (Winter 1977), 87–​90. Carl Eichelberger, “ ‘Words? Music? No: It’s What’s Behind’: Verbal and Physical Transformations in ‘Sirens,’ ” in International Perspectives on James Joyce, ed. Gottlieb Gaiser (Troy, NY: Whitston, 1986), 62. Eichelberger highlights words that cross over into musical terminology such as “measure,” “transpose,” “tap,” and “bar,” to demonstrate how “musical terms descend into the mundane” (62). Jeffrey Kresky, “Urban Legends for Music Theorists,” Music Theory Spectrum 25.1 (Spring 2003), 124. Andreas Fischer, “Strange Words, Strange Music: The Verbal Music of ‘Sirens,’” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 249. Fischer is by no means the first to label it an overture: Zack Bowen in Musical Allusions and Bloom’s Old Sweet Song; A. Walton Litz in The Art of James Joyce; Jackson Cope in his essay on “Sirens” (in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974], 217–​42); Lawrence Levin in “The ‘Sirens’ Episode as Music” (James Joyce Quarterly 3.1 [Fall 1965], 12–​24); and Daniel Ferrer in “What Song the Sirens Sang Is No Longer Beyond All Conjecture”—​to name a few—​all refer to the start of the episode as its overture or orchestral tuning-​up, none of which matches the technical requirements of a fugue. Musically, theories such as these fall into the trap of applying musical metaphor too loosely: the structure of a fugue does not include an “overture” (Fischer, “Strange Words,” 249), but rather an exposition that introduces the subject, which is then played out into subjects, answers, and countersubjects. More plausibly, critics like Alan Shockley (Music in the Words, 2009), David W. Cole (“Fugal Structure in the ‘Sirens’ Episode of Ulysses,” Modern Fiction Studies 19.ii [Summer 1973], 221–​6), Heath Lees (“The Introduction to ‘Sirens’ and the ‘Fuga Per Canonem,’ ” James Joyce Quarterly 22.1 [Fall 1984], 39–​54), Werner Wolf (The Musicalization of Fiction—​A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality [Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1999]), and Brad Bucknell (Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]) refer to it as a “prelude.” Fischer, “Strange Words,” 249. Luca Crispi, “A Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscript by Episode,” Genetic Joyce Studies 13 (Spring 2013), n.p.

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35 In his “A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011,” Luca Crispi also notes the appearance of this phrase:  This manuscript also documents another transformation of the episode that is as momentous as it is problematic: the imposition of the so-​called “fugal” structure on the episode and the development of the episode’s overture. Although the conceptual note on p.  [1r]:  “Repeat | episodes | phrases” signals the origin of the overture, its first extant version is as part of the Rosenbach manuscript. (Genetic Joyce Studies 11 [Spring 2011], n.p.)

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Rather than being “problematic,” this reinforces that Joyce had conceived of the episode as a fugue outside of the opening segments. Anthony Burgess, This Man and Music (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1982), 139. Katherine O’Callaghan’s “Reading Music, Performing Text: Interpreting the Song of the Sirens,” in Bloomsday 100: Essays on Ulysses (ed. Morris Beja and Anne Fogarty [Florida: Florida University Press, 2009]) takes Burgess’ argument further and provides an excellent exegesis of how the opening lines of “Sirens” supply a key of how to read the “sound effects of the episode” through its performativity (O’Callaghan, “Reading Music,” 136). Luca Crispi, “Manuscript Timeline 1905–​1922,” Genetic Joyce Studies 4 (Spring 2004), n.p. I admit that the argument could also go in the other direction: it could be that the eight-​part list is an indication of how the fuga per canonem of the opening sequence will be organized. However, given the evidence of how Joyce layers in the text from the early notebook into the final drafts, I think this is very unlikely. Furthermore, the opening sequence is in fact a microcosm of how I am arguing the fuga per canonem is deployed in the body of the episode. Another possibility behind the opening segments is that Joyce might have been following Pound’s advice and “sign post[ing]” the episode: “I dont arsk you to erase—​But express opinion that a few sign posts. perhaps twenty words coherent in bunches of 3 to 5 wd [cross-​out: do] not only clarify but even improve the 1st. page” (Ezra Pound, Pound/​Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read [New York: New Directions, 1967], 157). If this is the case, then it would imply that the version Pound read in June 1919 did not contain the opening sequence of “Sirens,” though he does refer to the “fahrt” as the “climax of chapter” and “not really the final resolution of fugue” (158), demonstrating an awareness of the chapter as fugue prior to the opening sequence. However, since we do not have a record of the typescript Pound was consulting, this can only be conjecture. Lees, “Fuga,” 45. Lees, “Fuga,” 44.

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41 Lees, “Fuga,” 46. I also identify “Sirens” as a double fugue, but my analysis differs vastly from Lees. 42 Lees, “Fuga,” 42. 43 Lees, “Fuga,” 49. 44 Lees, “Fugua,” 47–​51. 45 Lees, “Fuga,” 47. 46 Margaret Rogers, “Mining the Ore of ‘Sirens’: An Investigation of Structural Components,” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 267. 47 In his study, Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth-​Century Novel, Alan Shockley provides a thorough critique of Rogers’ method, highlighting her lack of differentiation between scale and pitch. He writes: “Not only does she see English note names as important, but she also mentions the Latinate do, re, mi syllables, which refer to scale-​degree, not to note” (Shockley, Music in the Words, 60). Shockley explains that, although the solmization, when “used in conjunction with ‘fixed do’ can refer to pitches instead of scale degrees,” this does not seem to be Rogers’ intention (Music in the Words, 60). 48 Rogers, “Mining the Ore,” 265. 49 Rogers, “Mining the Ore,” 266. 50 Rogers, “Mining the Ore,” 275. 51 Rogers, “Mining the Ore,” 268. 52 Burgess, This Man, 135. 53 Burgess, This Man, 141. 54 Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), 74. 55 Levin, Critical, 74–​8. 56 Levin, “Polyphony,” 13. 57 Levin, “Polyphony,” 14. 58 Levin, “Polyphony,” 14. 59 Cole, “Fugal Structure, 225. 60 Cole, “Fugal Structure,” 223. In his chapter “Modernist Musicalization of Fiction I: The ‘Sirens’ Episode in Joyce’s Ulysses” (in Musicalization, 132–​3), Werner Wolf also explores the episode using desire and unfulfilled desire as the metaphorical connection to the fugue. 61 This is further demonstrated by Cole’s citation of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ definition of the fugue in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians as his primary source for his technical discussions and information (“Fugal Structure,” 222), in which the definition of the fugue is a late-​twentieth-​century understanding.

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6 2 Cole, “Fugal Structure,” 225. 63 In “Musical Form as Narrator: The Fugue of the Sirens in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Nadya Zimmerman eloquently disagrees with Levin and Cole’s preference for canonical form over fugal: “Joyce lived in modern times when the fuga per canonem had already developed into the fugue. Hence, Joyce’s characterization of the chapter as a fuga per canonem is not a sixteenth-​century description, but a twentieth-​century statement, indicating that the chapter incorporates both fugal and canonical rules” (“Musical Form as Narrator: The Fugue of the Sirens in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Journal of Modern Literature 26.i [Fall 2002], 110). Using the exact same character-​based model as Levin (above), Zimmerman compellingly argues that the eight major voices or characters of the chapter are the “eight regular parts” and “by conflating each character’s identity with that character’s formal role,” Joyce is able to replicate “the simultaneity that only music possesses” (117). 64 The Rosenbach manuscript being “the extant document representing the final-​working-​draft/​fair-​copy stage” (Michael Groden, “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: An Outline and Archive Comparisons.” Joyce Studies Annual 14 [Summer 2003], 11). A copybook indicates a notebook that contains handwritten drafts of episodes, whereas a notebook contains only notes. 65 NLI indicates a manuscript in the National Library of Ireland. For manuscript notation, I have included the manuscript reference (MS), the image number, the page reference in the manuscript (recto/​verso as r/​v), and the page reference in the NLI’s collection list (Peter Kenny, The Joyce Papers 2002: Collection List No. 68 [Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2003]) in square brackets. My labels and numbering are consistent with those compiled and circulated by the NLI’s catalogue, Luca Crispi’s “A First Foray into the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce Manuscripts: Bloomsday 2011” (Genetic Joyce Studies 11 [Spring 2011], n.p.), and Michael Groden’s revised table from his article “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: An Outline and Archive Comparisons” as it appears in Ulysses in Focus: Genetic, Textual and Personal Views (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). 66 Both Daniel Ferrer and Luca Crispi also note this absence and remark, “we are much closer to the style of Dubliners than to the ‘initial style’ of Ulysses” (Ferrer, “What Song,” 58). 67 The fragments are not numbered, so this is my own calculation of the numbers. See chart in Appendix. 68 This transcription differs slightly from Daniel Ferrer’s and Susan Brown’s transcriptions, both recorded in Brown’s article, “The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Solved.” The most significant difference is “narricum antesi,” which

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Brown terms “mystery word” and Ferrer suggests reads “rovescii antesi.” Another notable difference is the spacing. For example, Susan Brown transcribes, “5) contra esposizione (nuovi raporti fra ì detti: parecchi) (divertimenti)” (“The Mystery of the Fuga Per Canonem Solved,” Genetic Joyce Studies 7 [Spring 2007], n.p.), making it seem as though they all appear on the same line. The discrepancy becomes important as it obfuscates when the Divertimenti would take place and whether the new relations are between the divertimenti and the material of the counterexposition, or whether there are simply new relations. 69 Brown, “Mystery Solved,” n.p. 70 To date, Susan Brown is the only critic to have really engaged with these eight terms, in her article “The Mystery of the Fuga Per Canonem Solved.” Her concern, however, is sourcing the terms rather than defining them with the aim of creating a hypothesis about the type of fugue Joyce employs. Brown attributes Joyce’s use of the term fuga per canonem to an “error [committed] while skimming,” Grove’s Music Dictionary, and calls his eight-​part list a “sloppy,” “impressionistic” transcription of italicized terms from the dictionary entry on “fugue.” The foundation of Brown’s sourcing is that Joyce had no concrete knowledge of music and would therefore have been reliant on the dictionary for his understanding of the fugue. For a more complete critique of the pitfalls of Brown’s article, see Michelle Witen, “The Mystery of the Fuga per Canonem Reopened,” Genetic Joyce Studies, 10 (Spring 2010). 71 Horsley, Fugue, 136. 72 Horsley, Fugue, 165. This transition was referred to as conciliatio by eighteenth-​ century German theorists and became particularly significant in the nineteenth century, when it came to mean “a short musical phrase after the subject proper was finished” (Horsley, Fugue, 167). 73 Horsley, Fugue, 358. 74 Horsley, Fugue, 148. 75 Horsley, Fugue, 148. 76 As Horsley writes: “The term ‘countersubject’ has come to mean a subject of secondary or subordinate character that fits in invertible counterpoint with the main subject” and when it is of equal importance, it is “not just a countersubject, but a real second subject” (Horsely, Fugue, 358). However, in the nineteenth century, a double fugue would have involved two equally weighted subjects, and one of them would have been called the countersubject. 77 Horsley, Fugue, 358. 78 I have interpreted proposto as the past participle of to propose, to mean proposition or the rhetorical equivalent of the original statement. In the modern sense, the exposition is the general term used for the opening sequence of the fugue, but this is a recent label. In its nineteenth-​century usage, when it was

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first coined as a way of naming the patterns already present in earlier fugues, the terminology was informed by rhetoric: “the various sections of a musical form were called after the parts of a rhetorical discourse they seemed to parallel” (Horsley, Fugue, 155). Thus, the proposition would point toward the original statement of the subject, and the codetta would be the transition between the subject and the answer. 79 Horsley, Fugue, 174. 80 It is uncertain whether the “parecchi” (meaning several) that appears after the colon refers to the detti or the rapporti. I opt for the latter. 81 Horsley, Fugue, 167. 82 Horsley, Fugue, 142. 83 Horsley, Fugue, 270. 84 Horsley, Fugue, 179. 85 Paul M. Walker. “Stretto,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 3, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​ subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​26948 86 Horsley, Fugue, 335. 87 Gédalge, Traité, 187. 88 Horsley, Fugue, 335. 89 Horsley, Fugue, 335. 90 Knowles, Helix, 86. 91 Although I am not addressing the opening segments at all in this study, it should be noted that the prelude is roughly structured according to these eight parts. This being said, a prelude carries no obligation to give the themes in order of appearance, nor does it need to present all of the themes of a fugue. 92 Similarly, in the absence of the boots, Miss Kennedy takes up the tea and “transpose[s]‌the teatray down [. . .] safe from eyes, low” (U 11.92–​3). Then, as the narrative continues, the tea on the tea-​tray becomes the focal point, while the previous elements associated with bronze and gold are changed while waiting for the tea to draw: Miss Douce’s “laughing in the sun” (U 11.72) becomes a fear of being “sunburnt” (U 11.114), shifting the tone of bronzing from hair to skin. As the theme of the bronzed skin develops from bronzed skin to sunburn to a cure for sunburn to “that old fogey in Boyd’s” (U 11.124–​5), it does so while the tea is becoming fully drawn (U 11.108–​11, 126), milked, and sweetened (U 11.129). The tea then witnesses the return of Miss Kennedy’s ears into greater prominence: “Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears with little fingers” (U 11.129–​30), and also in “Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak [. . .] She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea” (U 11.136–​40).

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93 It should be noted that some readers interpret this “Bloom” to mean that the barmaids are actually saying that the “old fogey” in Boyd’s is named Bloom (which, as Sam Slote has pointed out, is only possible insofar as it is not impossible, since the druggist is never explicitly named). There is also another Bloom in Ulysses: the dentist Bloom who is mentioned in “Wandering Rocks” (U 10.1115), “Cyclops” (U 12.1638), and “Circe” (U 15.721). Notably, “Circe” provides a list of all the Blooms in Ulysses, of which the druggist is not a part. 94 Machlis, Enjoyment, 18. 95 Horsley, Fugue, 167. 96 Hubert Unverricht and Cliff Eisen, “Divertimento,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 3, 2017, www. oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​07864. 97 Significantly, Dedalus is not singing at this point. Although the libretto appears in the text, the narrative only ever describes the sound of the piano chords or the individual notes: “A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love’s leavetaking, life’s, love’s morn” (U 11.323–​6); “High, a high note pealed in the treble clear” (U 11.397); and “Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord, and lost and found it, faltering.” (U 11.407–​8). The voice is described as a “voiceless song sang from within, singing” (U 11.321), and when Ben Dollard and Father Cowley enter later, they only specify having heard the piano (U 11.443); furthermore, Dedalus claims “I was only vamping, man” (U 11.448), meaning that he was simply playing chords. 98 Henceforth, I use the Italian episodio and episodi (plural) to avoid confusion between the fugal terminology and the episodes/​chapters of Ulysses. 99 Bauerle, Songbook, 367. 100 These opening chords are actually played in conjunction with M’appari. However, the M’appari episodio follows its own pattern, and the chords do not necessarily need to be those of the performed piece as I am more concerned here with pattern. 101 Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses—​Revised and Expanded Edition (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), 301. 102 This will be explored more fully in Chapter 4. 103 John Caldwell, “Voluntary,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 3, 2017. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​ subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​29665. Unlike the other episodi, there is very

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little textual overlap between the account of the barmaids and the next section where Bloom writes his letter to Martha. In the absence of libretto to shape the narrative, it becomes more fragmented and difficult to follow. As a result, this is the point at which most attempts at accounting for Joyce’s fugue begin to fall apart. At this point, most critics focus on the reverberations of Martha as Bloom prepares to write to his Martha. By contrast, I argue that this segment is its own episodi, specifically an intermezzo that frames the “silent roar” from Miss Douce’s seashell. 104 Joyce was certainly aware of this definition of Intermezzo, and in a later letter to George Antheil, he reveals this same use of it: “Now as regards Cain, I agree with you with regard to Byron’s drama so far as the second act goes. This could not be sung and I think you would have to do some kind of a figured intermezzo. But the first and third acts cut a great deal seem to me to be capable of great stage effect” (JL 1:293, my emphasis) 105 Charles E. Troy and Piero Weiss, “Intermezzo (ii),” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 3, 2017, www. oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​13834 106 Burgess, This Man, 141. 107 Horsley, Fugue, 335. 108 Gédalge, Traité, 187. 109 Horsley, Fugue, 335. 110 Michael Groden, “The National Library of Ireland’s New Joyce Manuscripts: A Statement and Document Description,” James Joyce Quarterly 39.1 (Fall 2001), 43–​4. Luca Crispi dates the earlier notebook as late 1917/​early 1918 reasoning that “given all of his work on the ‘Telemachiad’ (although we do not have sufficient evidence one way or the other), it is unlikely that Joyce was also able to write a completely non-​Stephen related episode at this time [December–​ November 1917] as well. It is not known how much more time elapsed between the writing of the ‘Proteus’ fragments” (Crispi, “First Foray,” n.p.). Therefore, Crispi believes Joyce could not have started writing “Sirens” until the beginning of 1918 at the earliest. 111 Crispi, “First Foray,” n.p. 112 Crispi, “First Foray,” n.p. 113 This is likely the first fragment drafted, since the others appear as margin notes. In the Appendix, I have transcribed the fragments in order of appearance rather than order of drafting. 114 The “F” is an indication for a margin note that will appear on the next page: “F—​ Molly (. . .) a quick eye to notice if anyone is looking at her. All women” (MS 36,639/​7A, 10v).

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Joyce’s Fuga per Canonem A Case of Effect

Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind. (U 11.703) Returning to Joyce’s 1919 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, wherein he declared the eight-​part fugal structure of “Sirens,” this chapter examines the other half of his proclamation: “I did not know in what other way to describe the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels” (JL 1:  129). In presenting the fugue as his conduit for the expression of the musical temptations his Ulysses must overcome, Joyce demonstrates a stylization of the fugue that surpasses the mere structural, rather moving on to encompass the effects he wishes his fugue to produce, and, by extension, the inseparability of fugal structure and content intrinsic to absolute music. While the complications of the structure of “Sirens” are appreciable to the eye, the effect of the fugue is felt in the experience of listening, which, in this case, is represented by Bloom’s psychological disorientation during the Tela Contrappuntistica. Interpreting the term “fugue” in its multiplicity, “Sirens” exhibits all of the seductions Bloom must overcome. First, the literal translation of the Latin fuga or “flight” expresses Bloom’s desire to escape himself along with a lateral meaning of flight, as in flying. Then, the musical etymology of “flight of fancy,”1 implies the cerebral nature of this flight, in addition to the temporariness of the fugue’s disorientation: the attraction of a heard fugue is that the disorientation felt while listening is transitory, and one is guaranteed to return from it with a renewed consciousness of order. And finally, this fugue is not merely fanciful, but also psychological. In Mad Travelers, Ian Hacking defines

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the psychological fugue as a “transient mental illness” related to a dissociative personality disorder. He writes: it is “an illness that appears at a time, in a place, and later fades away,”2 manifesting in “strange and unexpected trips, often in states of obscured consciousness.”3 All of these fugue-​states are mirrored and combined in Bloom’s temptation to flee himself psychologically, to succumb to the visual and aural disorientation offered by the Ormond Hotel, and to rescind his self-​awareness into the pieces performed.

Odyssean counterparts: A flight from subjectivity into collectivity In Homer, the Sirens are not described physically; rather, all the emphasis is placed on their enchanting voices. Circe warns: You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man who was unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting his wife and little children as they stand about him in greeting, but the Sirens by the melody of their singing enchant him.4

The substance of the enchanted singing is the promise of shared knowledge—​“Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens”5—​but at the same time, the promise will only be fulfilled in exchange for forgetting one’s household responsibilities of a wife or little children. In order to pass on, so to speak, “well pleased, knowing more than ever he did,”6 the listener must relinquish his selfhood and his present tense to the song completely, and join those wrecked upon the Sirens’ Isle. Those whose ears are blocked see the “beach before [their meadow] piled with boneheaps of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel upon them,”7 but with ears unblocked, Odysseus is blind to the synonymy of the Sirens’ song with death. In “The Song of the Sirens,” Blanchot intimates that their song is one of progression, where the song heard by Odysseus was merely the hint of “a song still to come” that would guide “the sailor toward that space where singing might truly begin [. . .] a place where there was nothing left but to disappear.”8 Seen this way, Bloom’s proportionate dissolution into the performances within

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the Ormond demonstrates his gradual acquiescence to the temptation toward disappearance, and the relinquishing of his subjectivity to the music therein. In the Gilbert-​Linati schemas, Joyce assigns the barmaids as the parallel to the Sirens, even though they offer no enchanting song for the musical method of the chapter.9 Rather, they enchant through their visibility, a quality distinctly absent from Homer’s depiction. Nevertheless, when the Soggetto and Contrasoggetto first overlap in contrapunto, it is around the word “eyes”: —​O! shrieking, miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?    Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting: —​And your other eye!   Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner’s name [.  .  .] Bloom’s dark eyes went by [. . .] I could not see [. . .]    By went his eyes. (U 11.146–​56, my emphasis)

Fittingly, the word “eye” would also fool the ear into hearing the subjective “I.” Naturally, it is Bloom’s “eye” and “I” that are threatened by the Sirens: as Catherine Flynn writes, “the consumption of one person by another . . . might be taken as the underlying danger of Joyce’s ‘Sirens.’ ”10 As much as Bloom is tempted to see the barmaids without being seen himself, he is equally allured by the desire to lose himself in the music. The dissolution of subjectivity is one of the main features of the Ormond Hotel. The barmaids themselves are interchangeable and absorb the features of those that come into their midst—​that is, the snout, tea, and impertinence of the bootsboy. Even, during the initial duet of their laughter, which provides a bridge to the exposition, they become completely intertwined: “Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter” (U 11.174–​6). Similarly, examining the point at which the countersubjects join the subjects in the bar during the counterexposition, Bloom and Boylan, common victims, become curiously inseparable, with unlikely intersections in subjectivity. For example, as Bloom and Boylan both approach the Ormond, the narrative is unclear whether it is Bloom who is thinking of following Boylan or whether Boylan is the one calculating if he has a little bit of time before his appointment at four: “Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to

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Ormond quay. Follow. Risk it. Go quick. At four. Near now. Out” (U 11.304–​ 6). The interchangeability of Boylan and Bloom is again emphasized in the phrase, “Not yet. At four she. Who said four?” (U 11.352). Here, even the narrative seems to question itself with “Who said four?”—​which could be taken as a response to Boylan’s question of whether the wire has come in yet when he enters the Ormond, or as a textual echo of Bloom’s earlier thoughts about Molly’s four-​o’clock appointment. This common preoccupation with the time returns when Boylan is preparing to leave the Ormond, just as Bloom is taking his place:  “The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered tables. Aimless he chose with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near the door. Be near. At four” (U 11.390–​92). Again, their narrative merges, where Bloom’s earlier “At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning” (U 11.188) is echoed in the Sonnez la cloche sequence, though seemingly from Boylan’s perspective. Bloom’s obsession with “clockhands turning” resonates in the insistent whirring (U 11.380) and clacking of the clock (U 11.381, 383, 384), eventually culminating in the single word “O’clock” (U 11.386). The interchangeability of the two men is made more explicit in the latter half of the episode, when Bloom also leaves the Ormond and, despite the unlikelihood of having witnessed this exchange, Bloom appears to have absorbed both Boylan’s experience of Miss Douce’s Sonnez la cloche and Lenehan’s parting words to Boylan: “Molly in her shift in Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its own, don’t you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? Cloche. Sonnez la” (U 11.1238–​40).11 Even outside of their common roles as the countersubject, that Bloom and Boylan should become interchangeable makes sense, since Bloom’s desire to forget his responsibilities toward his wife is occasioned by Boylan. Furthermore, Boylan is eager for his euphemistic “homecoming,” whereas Bloom sees a reason to delay, making him susceptible to the Sirens and to the music in the Ormond in a way that Boylan, his countersubject counterpart, is not. This would explain why, from the perspective of musical structure, Bloom loses his quality of movement as countersubject: while Boylan is eager to know the time, Bloom’s time stops, as symbolized by his realization that his watch has frozen during the episode. Bloom, in entering the Ormond and granting his aural consent, is also agreeing to forget himself in the music and experience its

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fugal disorientation, as articulated by Bloom himself: “Wish they’d sing more. Keep my mind off ” (U 11.914). Within Ulysses, the “Sirens” episode takes place at four in the afternoon—​ the hour in which Molly has arranged to meet Boylan and will likely commit adultery—​and marks a turning point in the story: Bloom makes the conscious decision not to interrupt the rendezvous.12 In the ironic process of avoidance (be it of Boylan or of Father Cowley)—​“Cowley’s red lugs and bulging apple in the door of the sheriff ’s office. Avoid. Goulding a chance. What is he doing in the Ormond? Car waiting. Wait” (U 11.353–​5)—​Bloom accepts Richie Goulding’s invitation to enter the Ormond dining room, where he can “sit tight” and see without being seen (U 11.357–​8). This is the point at which Bloom is most tempted to stasis, and Boylan, eager to be off, to activity. All of this is reflected in the narrative of “Sirens,” and, more specifically, in the treatment of the double fugue through stasis within the Ormond and movement without discussed in the previous chapter. By presenting the conflict as one of arrested movement, the analogue to Homer’s Sirens becomes clearer, where the Sirens, an obstacle to Odysseus’ homecoming, are genuinely threatening to halt Bloom’s movement. Like Odysseus, Bloom (and Boylan and the viceregal cavalcade before him) moves by the Ormond and is momentarily paralyzed, but Bloom does not have a crew to make his bonds securer and ensure that he passes by the Sirens’ Isle (which Joyce lists as the bar in the Gilbert schema) without joining the wreckage of those who came before him. Thus, Bloom lingers long enough to move beyond the music for the eye (the only temptations for Boylan and the cavalcade) to music for the ear, and is therefore subjected to aural temptation in addition to the visual. As a result, Bloom’s dissolution goes beyond that of narrative parallels into him joining the ranks of those in the Ormond as a performer: the barmaids, including the Sonnez la cloche sequence, participate in a visual performance; Dedalus, Cowley, and Dollard deliver aural performances; Richie Goulding also whistles All Is Lost Now; and Bloom engages in the written performance of writing to Martha during the pantomime of the Intermezzo. As such, the Ormond becomes a site that calls to those who pass by and absorbs them in the performance contained therein, be it visual or aural.13 Those within share a common performative identity, but this identity also involves dissolution and

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relinquishing of selfhood. In other words, when Bloom decides to figuratively kill time in the Ormond, he ceases to be the countersubject that moves counter to the Sirens, and instead succumbs to the effects of the fugue, mirrored in the increasingly complex narrative of the Tela contrappuntistica described in Chapter 3.

The Tela contrappuntistica: Bloom’s manifold flight of fancy The musical pieces that are the organizing principle of the Tela contrappuntistica—​Love and War, All Is Lost Now, M’appari, the Intermezzo, and The Croppy Boy—​also chart Bloom’s psychological progression: his desire to flee, to dissociate himself from his identity, and to enter and exit his flight of fancy. Looking at the narrative line of the pieces in question, Dollard’s erroneous rendition of Love and War parallels Bloom’s defeat, as Boylan, “ardentbold” (U 11.526), usurps him as lover. This then transitions to All Is Lost Now, where Bloom concedes his defeat:  “Too late. She longed to go. That’s why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost” (U 11.640–​41). Subsequently, in empathy with M’appari’s Lionel, who has lost his Martha and can only sing his aria of loss, Bloom disintegrates into Dedalus’ “Co-​ome thou lost one” (U 11.740), before joining the ranks of those in the bar and similarly participating in the ongoing performance with a pantomime of his own—​one that will cement his loss if he is caught—​during the Intermezzo. Finally, during The Croppy Boy, he leaves the Ormond before he, too, becomes the “last of his race” (U 11.1066), thus establishing the end of his temporary disorientation and triumphantly overcoming the stasis of the Ormond, marking the return of Bloom as countersubject. Throughout the “imperfect song” rendered in Love and War14—​complete with the confusion of the parts for “Love” and “War”—​Bloom begins the first process of relinquishing the “prospect of coming home and delighting his wife.”15 From within the saloon, Cowley, Dedalus, and Dollard reminisce over the night of Goodwin’s ignominious performance on the piano, when Dollard’s lack of costume forced him to seek out the Blooms. In a perverse merging of Bloom’s anxieties, Dedalus issues his punch line:  “Mrs Marion

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Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions” (U 11.496–​7). This reference to “Mrs Marion Bloom” connects to Boylan’s disrespectful address on the letter to “Mrs Marion Bloom” (rather than Mrs. Leopold Bloom) that morning (U 4.244); however, one cannot help but wonder how Dedalus would have been in possession of this knowledge.16 This intersection hints at a collective pub identity that is privy to the private knowledge of all its inhabitants. The three then try to remember Marion’s maiden name, “Tweedy” (U 11.503), and, in its recollection, return her to her premarital state, effectively divorcing her from Bloom completely. Having divested Bloom of his current responsibilities to house and home, the music captures Bloom’s attention with “Dollard[’s] bassooned attack, booming over bombarding chords” (U 11.528–​9), while being sexualized into an amorous weapon that would “burst the tympanum of her ear” (U 11.536). This eroticization of music continues throughout the Tela contrappuntistica, sustaining itself through All Is Lost Now’s “Two notes in one” (U 11.632); Simon Dedalus’ penetrating voice in M’appari—​“Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling, full it throbbed [.  .  .] Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect” (U 11.701–​2); Molly’s chest voice begging, “Fill me. I’m warm, dark, open” (U 11.975); and finally, while listening to The Croppy Boy, Miss Douce’s sexualized ministrations on the beerpull, leading to the impotent emissions of “Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stack of empties” (U 11.1111). During the next episodio, All Is Lost Now, Bloom participates fully in Richie Goulding’s performance. First, he allows himself to be transported by the notes of Richie’s rendering: Richie cocked his lips apout. A  low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost. (U 11.630–​36)

Although Bloom is presumably recalling the blackbird imitating a motif, the double meaning of “motives” also points toward Bloom’s reasons for having entered the Ormond as being “twined and turned” beyond recognition. This results in Bloom substituting the “Order” (U 11.638) of La Somnambula into

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his experience, where the affianced Amina sleepwalks into another man’s room at an inn, and her fiancé, seeing her sleeping in another man’s bed, declares all to be lost:17 “Fall, surrender, lost.” Thus, Bloom demonstrates the progression of susceptibility to the music, beginning with the tone of Love and War, and now continuing with the ordering of La Somnambula with reference to his own situation: “Too late. She longed to go. That’s why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost” (U 11.640–​41). During the singing of M’appari, Bloom’s susceptibility to the music is more pronounced. At the first sounding of Dedalus’ voice, Bloom signals to Pat to “set ajar the door of the bar” (U 11.670), so as to better hear. When the door is closed, only the “endearing” from “When first I saw that form endearing” (U 11.664) finds its way into the narrative: “Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine” (U 11.668–​9, my emphasis). However, once the door is open, the libretto of the aria eclipses the narrative: Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear:  sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw, lost Richie Poldy, mercy of beauty. (U 11.674–​9)

The presence of the libretto, “Sorrow from me seemed to depart” (U 11.673) and the unquoted “Each graceful look /​Each word so cheering /​Charm’d my eye /​And won my heart,”18 is absorbed into a combination of effect and libretto: “Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each seemed to from both depart. When first they saw.” The same applies to the next line of libretto, “Full of hope all delighted” (U 11.685),19 where the tempo of the song changes, matching the cheerful rhythm of Boylan’s figurative theme song, “Those Lovely Seaside Girls.” This is further articulated with a narrative reference to a line from the song: “Your head it simply swurls” (U 11.688). Here, Bloom pictures Molly answering the door, her “last look at mirror always before she answers the door” (U 11.689–​90), intended for the one “Full of hope all delighted,” who is now Blazes Boylan: “Jingle all delighted” (U 11.687). As such, Bloom transposes the libretto and its theme onto his own situation.

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Bloom’s consumption as listener is also seen in the increasing confusion of the collective listener and the way in which the narrative seems to parallel the movement of the music, making it unclear whose stream of consciousness is being catalogued. As the aria unfolds, the listeners become intermingled. Once Bloom signals to Pat to open the door, Bloom and Goulding are combined in “lost Richie Poldy” (U 11.678–​9) before being subsumed into a catalogue of all the listeners from all the spaces of the Ormond: “The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to wait” (U 11.717–​19). Then, a summarization of the verse in miniature—​“How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part, how look, form, word, charmed him”—​unifies the collective listener into “Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom’s heart” (U 11.719–​20). Furthermore, Bloom’s carefully catalogued stream of consciousness, upon coming into contact with music, seems to lose its thread of coherency, instead slipping into circular introspection that is, apparently, as disorienting for Bloom as it is for his reader. His language becomes circular and microcosmically replicates the fugal format Joyce seeks to achieve: 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 feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o’er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love. (U 11.705–​9)

These thoughts are prompted by the rich and flowing sound of Dedalus’ voice: “Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling, full it throbbed. That’s the chat. Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect” (U 11.701–​2), which, for Bloom, carries undertones of sexual consummation. Here, Joyce uses alliteration and word repetition to push the narrative to and fro, even sandwiching the repeated words together in order to create the effect of anticipation and recollection. For instance, he reincorporates the “tup” in “lickitup,” three times on its own before it reappears in “tupthrob” as a final recapitulating statement of the “throbbing” of Dedalus’ voice. The metamorphosis of “tipping” through alliteration: “Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her,” again incorporates sensuality into the combination of sound with movement. The fluidity of sound and movement is also shown in the polyptoton of “dilate,” “dilating”

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and in the sandwiching of “gush” into its neologism “joygush.” The line “Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob” recapitulates most of the words that have acted as themes, showing the manner in which the excerpt plays itself out as a mini-​ fugue, or a microcosm of the entire episode, while serving as an index for the circularity of Bloom’s thoughts. Thus, the charm of music is that it supersedes all: it causes Bloom to suspend himself in the music; it provokes Bloom’s thoughts to imitate the music in content and in form; and it allows music to become language through the “escape [from] the fetters of syntactic organization and meaning [to] approach the quality of pure music.”20 This, in turn, has a syncopated effect, where the rhythmic repetition of words creates the illusion of being outside of time, of rupturing orientation and therefore approximating music as Paterian “pure perception” in the way that causes sound to strike the mind of the reader.21 This fugal quality of Joyce’s language is also reflected in the psychological fugue that causes Bloom’s narrative stasis, where Bloom appears to metaphorically voyage outside of himself in a “stat[e]‌of obscured consciousness.”22 Upon hearing the final sustained note of M’appari, Bloom’s narrative is arrested, and his thoughts spiral in conjunction, creating a sense of interiority prompted by a disassociation from himself as Bloom: It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness . . . . . . . [. . .] Siopold! Consumed. (U 11.745–​53)

At the end of this closing sequence, Bloom is completely “consumed” into “Siopold”—​a neologism that attests to the merging of Lionel (character), Simon (singer), and Leopold (listener). Once the performance has ended, the collective responds enthusiastically with their applause: “Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her, you too, me, us [. . .] clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina Kennedy, two gentleman with tankards, Cowley,

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first gent with tank and bronze miss Douce and gold miss Mina” (U 11.754–​ 60). However, Bloom (still “Siopold”) is missing from this shared exit from the song. A bird’s eye view of the bar shows that everything is as expected: “And Richie Goulding drank his Power and Leopold Bloom his cider drank, Lidwell his Guinness, second gentleman said they would partake of two more tankards if she did not mind. Miss Kennedy smirked, disserving, coral lips, at first, at second. She did not mind” (U 11.768–​71). However, in the “afterclang of Cowley’s chords” (U 11.767), as Dollard dispenses advice on voice preservation, the focus turns to the ear, where all is not well: “Lionel Simon, singer, laughed. Father Bob Cowley played. Mina Kennedy served. Second gentleman paid. Tom Kernan strutted in. Lydia admired, admired. But Bloom sang dumb” (U 11.774–​6). In the resulting noise of business as usual, Bloom has been struck silent. In the ensuing conversation between Bloom and Goulding, Bloom’s usual narrative agency is replaced by a third person recounting that separates the unified listener through the clarification of pronouns:  “He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, of the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing ’Twas rank and fame in his, Ned Lambert’s house” (U 11.786–​8). As Goulding “descants” his respect for Dedalus and talks about his family relations, the conversation is relayed in summary: “Brothers-​in-​law: relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more. The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more than all others” (U 11.789–​92). This quasi-​scientific analysis of the human voice seems to rouse Bloom out of his silence, and Bloom begins to meditate on the tricks of music: “That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It’s in the silence after you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air” (U 11.793–​4).23 However, even as Bloom attempts to demusicalize music into “Musemathematics” (U 11.834) and dissected sound, he engages in the next episodio as a performer in accompaniment to Cowley’s voluntary and intermezzo. Once again, Bloom’s agency is lost as he is schizophrenically divided, and his eyes/​I’s are figuratively separated: “Down the edge of his Freeman baton ranged Bloom’s, your other eye [.  .  .] Bloom dipped, Bloom mur:  dear sir. Dear Henry wrote:  dear Mady” (U 11.856–​61, my emphasis). Bloom speaks while Henry composes: “Bloom

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mur: best references. But Henry wrote: it will excite me” (U 11.888). Then, while watching the play of the seashell, Bloom decomposes with a hearing eye that experiences the collective “I”: “Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar” (U 11.934–​6). Here, as Jean-​Michel Rabaté writes, “The ear becomes a shell which conjures up an imaginary sound, a sound which exists without actual presence. Seeing turns into hearing just because of that imaginary nature.”24 Juxtaposing the silence of hearing with the silence of speaking, Bloom as listener is struck both deaf and dumb until he is again instructed to unstopper his ears and speech (“He seehears lipspeech” [U 11.1001–​2]) and “hear” (U 11.1005). The final episodio, The Croppy Boy, also demonstrates Bloom’s loss of narrative agency. Again, Joyce juxtaposes the tragedy of the croppy boy’s political betrayal against Bloom’s own betrayal, paralleling Bloom’s misfortunes with the events that unfold against the croppy boy in the same language as the song: “Last of his name and race. I too. Last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still? He bore no hate. Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old” (U 11.1065–​9, my emphasis on libretto). As the song advances, Dollard is transposed into the croppy boy and Bloom again cannot detach himself from the paradigm of listener-​singer-​ character: “—​Bless me, father, Dollard the croppy cried. Bless me and let me go [.  .  .] Bloom looked, unblessed to go” (U 11.1074–​6). However, in looking, Bloom’s eye once again becomes his “I.” Watching Miss Douce’s suggestive ministrations on the beerpull, he realizes that the show is not intended for just him: “Ha. Lidwell. For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her from here though. Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties” (U 11.1110–​11). This regaining of subjectivity opens Bloom’s eyes to the “boneheaps” (Homer 12: 45) on the Sirens’ Island of “empties” (U 11.1111), and Bloom decides to “Get out before the end” (U 11.1122) just as “the voice of the mournful chanter called to dolorous prayer” (U 11.1132–​3) tells of the croppy boy’s death at “Geneva barrack” (U 11.1131). As Flynn writes, “when the performance of the song leads to a rehearsal of the extinction of the individual,”25 Bloom realizes

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that his vicarious experience of the fugue must end before his disorientation is permanent. Set back into motion as countersubject, Bloom makes his way past the female sirens—​“Pass by her” (U 11.1123), urging himself to walk on, “No. Walk, walk, walk [. . .] Waaaaaaalk” (U 11.1124–​5). He passes by “deaf Pat in the doorway” (U 11.1130), and passes the barmaids who are still offering their visual promise: “By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties, by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom” (U 11.1134–​7). Although he is propelled into motion, his ears continue to strain (U 11.1130) even as he “greet[s]‌in going” with his eyes. Not until he is safe from sight and sound does Bloom feel the relief of avoiding the end of the song, observing the collective listener in the boots while also hearing the now bestialized sounds from within the Ormond: “Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway heard growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to wash it down. Glad I avoided” (U 11.1142–​5). This onomatopoeic syncopation of the applause echoes Bloom’s own sense of being out of rhythm /​out of time, followed by an appreciation of having abandoned his psychological fugue. Bloom’s desire to escape the Ormond is part of the nature of his fugue. The attraction of a musical “flight of fancy” is that the disorientation is temporary. Although Bloom has enjoyed the temporary forgetting offered in the Ormond, exiting his psychological fugue (and the reinstatement of the subject and countersubject) is also necessary. Thus, his relief at avoiding his end in The Croppy Boy demonstrates Bloom’s triumphant return to self and his gastronomic purge of the effects of stasis. Bloom’s bodily exhalation seems to expel the breath or suspended thoughts he has been holding in check throughout the episode, while also removing him from a musical sphere and returning him to an awareness of human functions through his own particular music of the body, which enacts the canon described in Chapter 3. At the same time, the percussive tapping of the blind stripling replaces Boylan’s jingling as the stripling follows Bloom’s original journey to the Hotel Ormond. The stripling’s adherence to Bloom’s original route indicates a repetition of the opening themes of visual temptation. However, the stripling is blind to the charms that lured Bloom:  “Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze.

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He saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie nor Pat [. . .] He did not see” (U 11.1281–​3). He is also at the bar to reclaim his tuning fork, which would provide closure for Simon Dedalus’ long-​in-​dying call to listen, and thus to symbolically silence the singing within the Ormond. Thus, the stripling is a stand-​in for the repetition of the original theme; however, in the style of a fugue, he has also adjusted the opening theme to reflect that which has been learned throughout the piece, and thus benefits the audience with a greater understanding of what is being recapitulated. As Bloom travels away from the Ormond, he moves away from his psychological fugue, and seems literally to become a fugueur. Although he has managed to return as the moving countersubject, purging himself of stasis, he has not purged himself of the effects of the fugue. He has extricated himself from the collective Siopold, but he is still “Henry Lionel Leopold” (U 11.1261–​2). As such, although Bloom has left behind the Sirens, his odyssey must continue for several episodes until he can conquer the effects of his fugue in “Circe” (to be explored in Chapter 5).

“The Sweet Cheat”: Bloom’s an(tia)esthetic One final component to be explored is the method in which Bloom uses the analysis of music as a form of anesthetic, which is arguably linked to how Bloom extricates himself out of the Ormond and its metaphorical bonds that prevent him from succumbing to the Sirens. In the Linati schema, Joyce lists “the Sweet Cheat” as the “Meaning/​Sense” of “Sirens.”26 Many critics have interpreted this element of the schemata as referring to Bloom’s epistolary affair with Martha. However, given the importance of music in the episode and its Homeric context, the “sweet cheat” would also seem to imply the numerous methods Bloom uses to anesthetize himself against the music and the effects of the fugue—​be it through the anti-​aesthetic of the seemingly expert listener, parallels of Odysseus’ bondage in the form of the “gyv[ing]” (U 11.684) catgut, or his attempts at following along with the music by recalling the opera. When Odysseus passes by the Isle of the Sirens, he does so chained to the ship’s mast, with wax blocking the ears of his crew and the extracted promise to “tie [him] fast with even more lashings” should he beg to be set free.27 Thus, although

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his unblocked ears and presence in the sphere of the Sirens demonstrates his complicity in their song, he never has any intention of giving music the power of destruction. As such, Odysseus cheats the Sirens by violating the hearing contract. Horkheimer and Adorno write in The Dialectic of Enlightenment: He complies with the contract of his bondage [Hörigkeit] and, bound to the mast, struggles to throw himself into the arms of the seductresses. But he has found a loophole in the agreement, through which he eludes it while fulfilling its terms. The primeval contract did not specify whether the mariner sailing past should be bound or unbound while listening to the song [. . .] By yielding to the song of pleasure he thwarts both it and death.28

Throughout the Tela contrappuntistica, Bloom consistently adopts the mien of an expert listener who is constantly, to paraphrase Joyce in his letters after having finished writing “Sirens,” trying to see through the tricks of music. Like Tibby in Howards End, it is as though Bloom is sitting with “the full score open on his knee,”29 so that his ear will not be fooled. This anti-​aesthetic emerges in the form of Bloom’s identification and critique of the musician, and in his attempt to see “what’s behind” (U 11.703) the music. In this way, Bloom as “bound listener” appears to “take the precaution not to succumb to them even while he succumbs.”30 For instance, while Dollard is singing Love and War, Bloom thinks: “Love and War someone is. Ben Dollard’s famous” (U 11.554) before armoring himself against Dollard’s voice by remembering Dollard’s too-​tight trousers and reducing his voice to the size of his “belongings”: “Well, of course, that’s what gives him the base barreltone” (U 11.559). Similarly, when Dollard begins to sing The Croppy Boy, Bloom again identifies his “Base barreltone” (U 11.1011) before fortifying himself by thinking about Dollard’s personal circumstances: “Other comedown. Big ships’ chandler’s business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships’ lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him” (U 11.1011–​15). The same applies to Simon Dedalus. As Bloom listens to Simon Dedalus sing M’appari—​before succumbing to the music itself—​he reminds himself of Dedalus’ home life and wasted talent:  “Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly man! Could have made oceans of money [. . .] Wore out his wife: now sings”

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(U 11.695–​7). Similarly, while listening to Cowley play, he concedes his musicality but remembers his halitosis. He thinks:  “Wonder who’s playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical. Knows whatever note you play” (U 11.560–​ 61) before qualifying this with “Bad breath he has, poor chap” (U 11.561). Nor is Bloom’s critical ear limited to the performer alone. He also notes that the piano has been tuned; whenever chords are “sharp” (U 11.839); and when the singer is “singing [the] wrong words” (U 11.696). On the one hand, this attention to detail would seem to be depriving music of its enchanting qualities. However, Bloom’s level of concentration while listening would equally indicate the opposite. Instead, this atomization of the listening experience demonstrates how prone Bloom is to the music even as he deconstructs it. Only when Bloom leaves the Ormond is he able to distance himself sufficiently from the music to be genuinely critical. Cowley’s unity with the instrument and perfect pitch becomes: Cowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. Better give way only half way the way of a man with a maid. Instance enthusiasts. All ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty. You daren’t budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop. Fiddlefaddle about notes. (U 11.1191–​5)

This about-​face demonstrates the “sweet cheat” of Bloom’s listening experience. Because he has left the stasis of the Ormond and reembarked upon his Odyssey, Bloom relegates the seduction of the Sirens’ song into “a concert”:31 the impediment becomes a diversion, or, as Blanchot phrases it, the “ode becomes episode.”32 Another instance when Bloom denies the aesthetic of music is when he tries to reduce it to numbers:  “Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven” (U 11.830–​32). Bloom posits that the numerical relations, the “Musemathematics” (U 11.834), are “what’s behind” (U 11.703) the music and the words. Reducing M’appari to “seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand” (U 11.11.835–​6), Bloom concedes that such an equation would “Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is” (U 11.836–​7). Once again, this fixation with the mechanics of music would seem to be an attempt to demonstrate Bloom’s resistance to the music through an anti-​ aesthetic; instead, however, it demonstrates how fully he is consumed. Like

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Kafka’s Odysseus in The Silence of the Sirens (1917), Bloom’s preoccupation with the domination of song, his metaphorical chains and wax, causes the music to “vanis[h]‌from his awareness”33—​not because he has stopped his own ears with wax (as in Kafka), but because his attempt to reduce music to atoms causes his own atomization. Bloom’s cognitive attempts to overwhelm music with numbers forces him to concede, “It’s on account of the sounds it is” (U 11.836–​7) before he himself is rendered senseless (deaf and dumb). As such, when Bloom admits that “music hath charms” (U 11.905), he is conceding that the allure of music is the disappearance of sovereignty for both himself and the music. At the same time, he is admitting surrender to the notion of the fugue. By nature, a fugue implies a “flight of fancy”—​psychologically and musically—​because it contains in itself the possibility of scattering the listener’s perception amid the disorientation of modulation and variations. Nevertheless, implicit in the fugue is the return to self and the reclaiming of sovereignty. Joyce uses fugal structure and effect in the “Sirens” episode to show Bloom’s flight of fancy through a stream of consciousness that parallels music, even as he negotiates the structure of the fugue. Thus, for Joyce, the fugue becomes the most apt device through which Bloom can overcome the seductions of music. Using the word “fugue” in the most literal sense possible, Joyce depicts Bloom’s greatest temptation of all as the desire to flee himself, his responsibilities, and his current situation. This desire is articulated through his relinquishing of himself to the collective listener/​performer. However, the fugue also promises that this surrendering is temporary, and Bloom will eventually be able to return home: “Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels after him, throws himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself.”34

Notes 1 Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening, 8th edn., shorter version (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 183. 2 Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers—​Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 1. 3 Hacking, Mad Travelers, 8. Today, the dissociative fugue appears in medical textbooks as related to a dissociative personality disorder that exhibits signs of

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“confusion about personal identity” (Hacking, quoting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn., 195), that while causing “significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning” (195) nevertheless does not impede “simple social interactions with others (such as buying petrol, asking directions, or ordering meals)” (Hacking, quoting International Classification of Diseases, 10th edn., 195). Hacking compares the American Psychiatric Association’s definition with that of the European diagnostic manual, which emphasizes the significance of amnesia in the diagnosis. For case studies and further discussion, see Hacking’s Mad Travelers—​Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998). 4 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 12: 39–​44. 5 Homer, The Odyssey, 12: 191. 6 Homer, The Odyssey, 12: 188–​9. 7 Homer, The Odyssey, 12: 45–​6. 8 Maurice Blanchot, “The Song of the Sirens,” trans. Charlotte Mendell, in The Book to Come (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. 9 In The Dublin Helix (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), Knowles posits a different identification of the Sirens. Rather, he interprets the Sirens to include: Raoul’s Mistress (in Sweets of Sin); The Virgin Mary whose “slip ‘brings those rake of fellows in’ [and whose] church is revealed in “Lotus-​Eaters” to have the same soporific effect as a siren song (89); Venus Kallipyge; The Smoking Mermaid; Daly’s Shopgirl; Cleopatra; Marion Tweedy; Martha Clifford; Lydia Douce, who, Knowles contends, is the ultimate siren because “she also acts as a connecting focus for every siren catalogued thus far” (95); Millicent Bloom; Mr. Wood’s servant; The Wealthy Silk-​Stockinged Lady from the third episode; Gerty MacDowell; Mary Driscoll; and the Frowsy Whore. Most of the “sirens” here named by Knowles are physically seductive, but they do not all necessarily connect to Molly, and, if they do connect at all, the association is more a reminder of home, wife, and children as an anchor or responsibility than of Molly being embodied in every woman. For a completely different interpretation of the barmaid seduction, one aligned with the political, cultural, and economic significance of the barmaid, see Katherine Mullin, “ ‘The Essence of Vulgarity’: The Barmaid Controversy in the ‘Sirens’ Episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Textual Practice 18.4 (2004), 475–​95. 10 Catherine Flynn, “Joyce, Kafka, and the Sirens,” in Praharfeast—​James Joyce in Prague, ed. David Vichnar, Michael Groden, and David Spurr (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2012), 114.

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11 It is also possible that the latter half of this assertion is narrative occurring outside of Bloom’s mind, and is another instance of textual consciousness on a meta level that I am arguing is part of the collective identity in “Sirens.” 12 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1934), 243. 13 For an excellent analysis of the autonomy of the aural and the visual throughout Ulysses, see Sara Danius, “The Aesthetics of Immediacy—​U lysses and the Autonomy of the Eye and Ear,” in The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 147–​88. 14 Blanchot, “Sirens,” 3. 15 Homer, The Odyssey, 12: 42–​3. 16 The narrative in “Sirens” allows for no certainties: it is possible these thoughts are Bloom’s (although I believe this to be unlikely). If this is the case, then Bloom’s later parallel recollection about Dollard’s borrowing of the “dress suit for that concert” (U 11.555) is repetitive in addition to intersecting. 17 Zack Bowen, “The Bronzegold Sirensong: A Musical Analysis of the ‘Sirens’ Episode in Joyce’s Ulysses,” in Bloom’s Old Sweet Song: Essays on Joyce and Music (Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1995), 43. 18 Ruth Bauerle, ed., The James Joyce Songbook (New York and London: Garland, 1982), 400. 19 This is the first line of the next verse: “None could feel more blessed than I /​ All on Earth I think could wish for /​Was near her to live and die” (Bauerle, Songbook, 400–​401). 20 Andreas Fischer, “Strange Words, Strange Music: The Verbal Music of ‘Sirens,’” in Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 255. 21 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 88. 22 Hacking, Mad Travelers, 8. 23 Bloom’s analysis of music will be explored further in section “The Sweet Cheat” as an attempted anaesthetic against the effects of the music. 24 Jean-​Michel Rabaté, “The Silence of the Sirens,” in James Joyce—​The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 86. 25 Flynn, “Joyce, Kafka, and the Sirens,” 116. 26 Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), appendix endpaper. Originally written in Italian, Il Dolce Inganno, this is sometimes translated as “the Sweet Deceit.”

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2 7 Homer, The Odyssey, 12: 54. 28 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment—​ Philosophical Fragment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 46. 29 E. M. Forster, Howards End (Abinger Edition, London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 29. 30 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 46. 31 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 27. 32 Blanchot, “Sirens,” 5. 33 Franz Kafka, “The Silence of the Sirens,” trans. Malcolm Pasley, in The Shorter Works of Franz Kafka (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 107. 34 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 38.

5

Voided Fugue in “Circe” Music without Words, pray for us (U 15.1948) The previous two chapters have sought to establish that Joyce demonstrated a nuanced application of absolute music in his employment of the fugal structure and Bloom’s proportionate experience of its fugitive effects in “Sirens.” That is to say, Bloom’s experience of the fugue is reflected in the structure of “Sirens,” but the structure of “Sirens” is also reflected in Bloom’s psychological fugue. This chapter contends that Joyce’s summary of “Sirens” in “Circe” as “Music without Words” (U 15.1948) reaffirms his understanding of absolute music, and that the phrase allows for the possibility of a retrospective gloss on “Sirens,” supporting an interpretation that privileges non-​referential music as a way of thinking through “Sirens.” Rather than an episode of overwhelming song, the disembodied voices and lost chords serve as a language that functions above the sung music, relating the story of Bloom’s relinquishing of his present-​day existence for a more immediate gratification that is both euphoric and silencing. Bloom’s dissolution into the music is then answered by the return of the same music in “Circe,” but as words. The identical music that charted Bloom’s progressive dissolution in the Tela contrappuntistica returns in “Circe” as hallucinations that must be confronted and vanquished in order to make Bloom’s homecoming possible. The confrontation and defeat of previous challenges is part of the hallucinatory nature of “Circe”;1 however, within the context of “Sirens” and Joyce’s use of absolute music, the reappearance of musical elements from “Sirens” in “Circe” also illustrates Joyce’s revision of the relationship between structure and effect. Rather than presenting them as inseparable, the separation of the structure and effect of “Sirens” illustrates a defeat of absolute music that mirrors Bloom’s ability to exit the Circean labyrinth.

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“Might be what you like, till you hear the words” In 1921, Joyce wrote to Valery Larbaud that he had added a litany to “Circe” that summarized all the preceding episodes: “J’ai ajouté à Circe une scène messianique avec une litanie chantée en son honneur qui acquière ces titres tirés des épisodes, c à d, des aventures” (JL 1: 169).2 The Messianic litany to which he refers appears in Ulysses as: Kidney of Bloom, pray for us Flower of the Bath, pray for us Mentor of Menton, pray for us Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us Charitable Mason, pray for us Wandering Soap, pray for us Sweets of Sin, pray for us Music without Words, pray for us Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us Friend of all Frillies, pray for us Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us. (U 15.1941–​52)

Each of these titles corresponds to the previous episodes of Ulysses involving Bloom, beginning with “Calypso” and ending with “Circe.” Within this litany, the title inspired by the “Sirens” episode is, “Music without Words, pray for us” (U 15.1948).3 Annotators have taken the idea of a title being pulled from an episode literally, and have tried to find direct, textual concurrences (i.e., Gifford connects “Sweets of Sin” to its first appearance in “Wandering Rocks”)—​although in some cases this requires ignoring that the litany is meant to parallel each episode of Ulysses chronologically. For instance, Gifford connects “Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us” to “Spud again the rheumatiz” (U 14.1480–​81) from “Oxen of the Sun,” even though the line corresponds numerically with the sixteenth episode, “Circe.” In the case of “Music without Words,” Gifford and Thornton both correlate it imperfectly to the line



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“Songs without words (U 11.1092) in “Sirens”: “Say something. Make her hear. With look to look. Songs without words. Molly, that hurdy-​gurdy boy. She knew he meant the monkey was sick” (U 11.1091–​4).4 While “songs without words” and “music without words” are not unrelated,5 Joyce’s intentions behind the “titres tirés” appear to be more synoptic than textual. With this in mind, Joyce’s synopsis of “Sirens” as “Music without Words” would belie the assertions of critics such as Werner Wolf, who have disclaimed any “explicitly metafictional statement about the musicalization of ‘Sirens.’ ”6 Rather than seeing Joyce’s fugal claims as an external mechanism gleaned only from his letters, schemas, and recollected conversations, the term “music without words” not only describes the fugue, but also the fugue as a form of absolute music, which, by definition, is music without words. In addition to summarizing “Sirens” as absolute music, Joyce’s synopsis of the episode also promotes a rereading of “Sirens” that highlights instances of music without words, a technique that had been foregrounded by his focus on speaking instrumentation in Dubliners, as outlined in Chapter 2. Throughout “Sirens,” there are many moments where instrumental music is granted its own agency proportionate to vocal music’s loss thereof—​usually with the purpose of indicating Bloom’s lapses into the fugue, the moments where he loses himself in the music. On the one hand, this enhances the amalgamation of subjectivity described in Chapter 3. On the other hand, even more than this, instances of “music without words” in “Sirens” demonstrate that, like absolute music, “the story is in the music itself ”:7 that is to say, the disembodied chords and voiceless singing record the story of Bloom’s fugue, becoming as much a part of the fugal formula as the structure and its effects. The first example of “voiceless singing” occurs during the divertimenti, Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye, when Dedalus’s “vamping” (U 11.448) on the piano is described as a “voiceless song sang from within, singing” (U 11.321). This is the first occurrence of singing instruments that nevertheless contain an element of negation: although the lyrics of Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye are printed as though they are sung, Dedalus is playing the piece on the piano, rather than singing it, unpacking the line to mean that the unsung song is in fact sung by the music itself in the absence of an external vocal accompaniment. In other words, the music seems to be sung from within. In the meantime, it seems to summon a voice, but the voice is unidentified: “Brightly

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the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording, called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love’s leavetaking, life’s, love’s morn” (U 11.322–​6, my emphasis). This summoning is prefaced by the call of the tuning fork: “From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuning fork the tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call” (U 11.313–​16). The “longer in dying call” of the turning fork is echoed in the disorientation of the instrumental music coming from the piano:  “Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord, and lost and found it, faltering” (U 11.407–​8). Thus, here, the sound of instruments—​tuning fork and piano alike—​beckon the passerby into the Ormond with the promise of being both lost and found in the combined anonymity and collectivity of “a voice.” In answer to this call, Dollard’s voice is transformed into an instrument as his “bassooned attack” is heard “booming over bombarding chords” (U 11.528–​9) during Love and War. Similarly, Richie Goulding metamorphoses into an inarticulate birdcall when he whistles All Is Lost Now, becoming the purveyor of the same type of “voiceless song s[ung] from within” (U 11.321) and leaving an unheard voice, from within, to substitute the libretto: Richie cocked his lips apout. A  low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he’s proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost. (U 11.630–​36)

In both cases, the story is told through referential music that has become non-​ referential. Although each of these arias has narrative attachments, the story is not told through the libretto but rather through the music itself. As a result, behind the storyline of Love and War, followed by defeat in All Is Lost Now, one witnesses the growing accumulation of the collective. In M’appari and The Croppy Boy too, the voice of the singer is depersonalized: “The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord, longdrawn, expectant, drew a voice away” (U 11.663–​4, my emphasis). Although Richie Goulding



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and Bloom both identify the voices of Dedalus and Dollard respectively, the singing itself is only ever conveyed in the narrative as “a voice” (U 11.664, 674) or “the voice” (U 11.693, 1006, 1020, 1031, 1040). The quality of the singing is described in detail, but the voice itself is disembodied until its reembodiment in the subsumed “Siopold” (U 11.752) or “Dollard the croppy” (U 11.1075). Like Trilby’s performance of Chopin described in Chapter  1, the singer becomes a mere instrument for the music, invading the listener with sound, but lacking agency. Within this context, the phrase “music without words” offers a new dimension to the disembodied chords that affect Bloom’s consciousness, giving one license to focus on the chords rather than on the incorporation of libretto: the “language above language.”8 For example, in the much-​discussed passage on “Siopold,” we witness the arresting of Bloom’s narrative—​his thoughts start spiraling, creating a sense of interiority prompted by a disassociation from himself: —​Come. . . ! It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence, symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness . . . . . . . —​To me! Siopold! Consumed. (U 11.745–​53)

Here, Bloom is completely consumed by the music and is swallowed by it into an amalgamation of self, Simon the singer, and Lionel the character.9 Importantly, however, this is upon hearing the sustained note of “Come” as it soars endlessly. In the description of the spinning note, the emphasis turns away from the message of the song or the incorporation of libretto, concentrating instead on the quality of the note itself—​a pure music that extends beyond the “extra-​musical impetus” of the text,10 focusing instead on the absolute, the “pure configurations untainted by words, stories, or even affect.”11

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In the same vein, John Cage, in his essay “Forerunners of Modern Music,” eliminates the role of text on music by describing sound: Sound has four characteristics: pitch, timbre, loudness, duration. The opposite and necessary coexistent of sound is silence. Of the four characteristics of sound, only duration involves both sound and silence. Therefore, a structure based on durations (rhythmic: phrase, time lengths) is correct (corresponds with the nature of the material), whereas harmonic structure is incorrect (derived from pitch, which has no being in silence).12

In this way, he describes a new music through new listening: “Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for if, something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds.”13 Bloom similarly acknowledges that the charm of music is “on account of the sounds” (U 11.837), which seem to operate in a language above language, where the “activity of sounds” is conveyed through “lost chords” (U 11.407), “Curlycues of chords” (U 11.1017), “consent[ing] chords” (U 11.1121), “deepsounding chords” (U 11.998–​9), and the “obedient keys” (U 11.601) that “confess” (U 11.603) the flaws of Dedalus’s singing instrument, long before his song is heard.14 This “activity of sounds” tells the same story as the libretto, but it functions outside of the libretto. Contrary to Bloom’s mental assertion that the music “Might be what you like, till you hear the words” (U 11.838–​9), he is still able to hear “the story” of the music during the Intermezzo—​“Trails off there sad in minor” (U 11.893) and “That’s joyful I can feel” (U 11.969)—​and this narrative line incorporates into his own performance. In his letter to Martha, Bloom writes: “P. P. S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today” (U 11.894) before conceding that his musically induced postscript was “Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms” (U 11.904). Approached chronologically, these instances of “music without words” also become part of the overarching structure of “Sirens” insofar as they each indicate the moments during the Tela contrappuntistica when Bloom is absorbed by the desire to lose himself in the fugue. As he gets further lost in the effects of the music, he no longer hears the words or the music: “Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind” (U 11.703). Rather, “the air [is] made richer” in the “afterclang” (U 11.767), and Bloom is silenced into one of the voiceless singers—​“Bloom



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sang dumb” (U 11.776)—​even as he tries to hear the message in the “Now silent air”: “It’s in the silence after you feel you hear” (U 11.793–​4). It is only during the Stretto that Bloom has enough distance to realize that he had lost himself in the language of music: “All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you never know exac” (U 11.1196–​7).

“Music without Words” | “Words without Music” If “Sirens” is “music without words,” then its demusicalizing revision in “Circe” constitutes words without music. These same points of loss and dissolution from the episodi return in “Circe” in a demusicalized form—​as words, not music—​and, because they are devoid of their musical power, Bloom is finally able to conquer the effects of the fugue from “Sirens.” Chapter 3 and 4 posited that, as countersubject, Bloom was able to leave the Ormond Hotel and in so doing exit the fugue from a structural perspective. However, despite his physical absence from the Ormond, he is not able to overcome the effects of the fugue. As such, he remains the Henry Flower from his pantomime during the Intermezzo as well as Lionel from M’appari even after leaving the Ormond:  “Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady, with sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses went Poldy on” (U 11.1187–​9). Although he succeeds at extricating himself from Simon Dedalus—​who remains “Simonlionel” (U 11.1210) sans Leopold within the Ormond after Bloom’s departure—​his inability to detach completely from the effects of the fugue is evidenced textually even as Bloom distances himself from the Ormond: “In Lionel Marks’s antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel Leopold dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged battered candlesticks melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags” (U 11.1261–​3). Since Bloom is unable to divest himself of these multiple personalities at this time, it stands to reason that Henry and Lionel, the ghosts of his fugueur past, would haunt Bloom during “Circe”—​an episode that notoriously expresses “ ‘everything’ that has been repressed.”15 Taking the reemergence of each episodio from the Tela contrappuntistica in turn, the remainder of this chapter examines how each of the nightmares and effects from the songs in question are “actualized” (insofar as hallucinations can be actualized) as drama rather

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than as music.16 Through this process, Bloom is relieved of the “sounds” (U 11.837) that enchanted him and becomes capable of confronting these projections as words. As Ellmann writes in Ulysses on the Liffey, “Words, turned to notes, take back their own again and become words once more.”17 At the same time, when agency is returned to the music in the form of words, the words become weaker and therefore conquerable. Thus, Bloom is able to overcome his loss of selfhood in “Sirens”—​his relinquishing of wife and children to song—​in order to begin his Nostos in the episodes that follow “Circe.” When Bloom first enters Nighttown, he is reflected in the concave mirror as “lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom” (U 15.146), effectively presenting the lovelorn Henry Flower, Lionel’s mourning of the long-​lost Martha, Bloom in “Bloowho” (U 11.86), and the “Lugugugubrious (U 11.1005) chords leading up to The Croppy Boy as facets that are clinging to him and that must be conquered. The pieces or effects from the Tela contrappuntistica return in “Circe,” roughly in the order in which they first appeared in “Sirens”: Love and War appears as “Mrs Marion Bloom” (U 15.306); All Is Lost Now in a recycled encounter between Richie Goulding and Bloom; M’appari and the Intermezzo in the trial sequence when Bloom is caught for his crimes as Lionel and Henry Flower; and The Croppy Boy is addressed first as the rubicund Ben Dollard accepts his praise, then in the form of Bloom’s confronting the possibility of becoming the last of his name as a result of the sexual silencing of Molly’s infidelity. Each of these causes of Bloom’s fugal behavior in “Sirens” is presented as individual obstacles to be overcome. In addition, Bloom confronts the metatext of “Sirens” during a situational recapitulation of the entire musical structure, demonstrating that his vanquishing of “the seductions of music beyond which Ulysses travels” (JL 1:  129) extends to both the structure and to the effect of the fugue. The first reminder of “Sirens” in “Circe,” is in the echo of the morning’s letter, which was addressed to “Mrs Marion Bloom” (U 4.244). Although this letter is by no means limited to any one episode, its role in “Sirens” is particularly important as a symbol of his relinquishing of his homecoming. As part of his Odyssean hearing contract, Bloom exchanges the promise of family and children for the song of the Sirens (as discussed in Chapter 4). Bloom has already symbolically surrendered his wife by the mere act of entering the Ormond, but the talk in the saloon of Mrs. Marion Bloom followed by the recollection



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of her maiden name, cements Bloom’s obstructed homecoming. This memory returns in “Circe,” when Bloom addresses Marion as “Molly!” (U 15.304), only to be corrected by her: “Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to me” (U 15.306). Acknowledging his inaction in preventing her infidelity as tacit complicity, Bloom prostrates himself before her (“Bloom stoops his back for leapfrog” [U 15.322–​3]), calling himself her “business menagerer” (U 15.325), where he not only organizes her concerts but also her trysts. This element of “menagerer” returns in the recapitulation, as Bloom “aids and abets” her encounter with Boylan later in the episode.18 The next episodio, All Is Lost Now, returns in the form of an encapsulation of the encounter between Bloom and Richie Goulding, first when they enter the Ormond dining room together—​“Best value in Dub” (U 15.505)—​and are served food and drink (U 15.509–​10) by “Bald Pat, bothered beetle [. . .] folding his napkin, waiting to wait” (U 15.506–​7). Then, Richie’s rendition of All Is Lost Now is recalled through oblique references—​not to the song itself, but rather to Richie’s “Never in all his life had Richie Goulding” (U 11.643) and Bloom’s anti-​aesthetic observations of Goulding’s symptoms for Bright’s disease after Richie’s “performance”:19 RICHIE:  Goodgod. Inev erate inall . . . . [. . .] RICHIE: (with a cry of pain, his hand to his back) Ah! Bright’s! Lights! BLOOM: (points to the navvy) A spy. Don’t attract attention. I hate stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament. (U 15.511–​19)

This reworking of the All Is Lost Now sequence emphasizes the non-​musical elements of the encounter, reducing the effects of the fugue into symptoms (literally). In the absence of the sound of music, Richie’s performance becomes an inarticulate appreciation of the aria and the food at the Ormond (“Inev erate in all”), before he is struck down by his disease. Similarly, Bloom confesses that his “motives” (U 11.633) for being in the Ormond are not a mere distraction—​ “pleasure bent”—​but “a grave predicament” that could lead to his grave. M’appari and the Intermezzo appear in “Circe” in combined form, much in the way that elements of the Intermezzo are preempted by M’appari in “Sirens.” While listening to M’appari, Bloom notes:  “Martha it is. Coincidence. Just

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going to write. Lionel’s song. Lovely name you have. Can’t write. Accep my little pres. Play on her heartstrings pursestrings too. She’s a. I called you naughty boy. Still the name: Martha. How strange! Today” (U 11.713–​16). Just as the aria parallels Bloom’s intention of writing to Martha, so too does Lionel and Henry Flower converge in “Circe,” recalling both the Martha from the letter and the Martha from the aria. In “Circe,” the recycled episodi begin with the Watch intercepting Bloom. When asked to identify himself, he divulges the transiency of his identity by introducing himself as an amalgam of all the Blooms in Ulysses (Leopold and the dentist):  “Ah, yes! (He takes off his high grade hat, saluting) Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon” (U 15.720–​21). However, the verbal and the written clash, as the “High grade. Card inside” (U 11.1128) uncovers Bloom’s epistolary identity: “FIRST WATCH: (reads) Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Unlawfully watching and besetting” (U 15.732–​4). This charge is obviously a reference to Bloom’s voyeurism in “Nausicaa,” but relates equally to Bloom’s “See, not be seen” (U 11.357–​8) of “Sirens.” The deception is further connected to Martha, who enclosed a flower in her letter, as Bloom “produces from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower” (U 15.738) and pretends that he does not know from whence it came: “It was given me by a man I don’t know his name” (U 15.739). However, in the same sequence, Bloom’s double identity is exposed as a triple identity by a reproachful Martha—​ “Henry! Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name” (U 15.754)—​who has similarly converged into an epistolary entity, an actual person named “Peggy Griffin” (U 15.765–​6), and Lionel’s lost lover from the opera. By asking Bloom in all his manifestations to “clear [her] name,” Martha forces Bloom to clarify his own identity—​be it to take responsibility as a profligate rake, an adulterous cuckhold, or abandoned lover. Distancing himself from the flirtatious Henry, Bloom pleads a case of “Mistaken identity” (U 15.760), and tries to dodge the charges of “Breach of promise” (U 15.765) that echoes his epistolary worry toward the end of “Sirens”: “Chorusgirl’s romance. Letters read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy’s owny Mumpsypum. Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you” (U 11.1078–​80). Further disassociating himself from Henry, Bloom uses his status as “respectable married man [.  .  .] liv[ing] in Eccles street” (U 15.776–​7) as proof of innocence. However, his respectability as a married man is brought into question by the Circean version of Mary



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Driscoll: “He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour, when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he interfered twict with my clothing” (U 15.885–​8). Called upon to make a “bogus statement” (U 15.897) in his own defense, Bloom protests his innocence before morphing into Lionel. Just as Simon is ordered to sing Lionel’s M’appari in “Sirens”—​“Go on, blast you! Ben Dollard growled. Get it out in bits” (U 11.586)—​so too is Bloom ordered to emit his confession: “(from the presstable, coughs and calls) Cough it up, man. Get it out in bits” (U 15.928). However, Lionel proves a flimsy defense, as, in the opera, Lyonel is also a victim of mistaken identity who is charged for indecorous conduct.20 Like Lyonel—​who, upon seeing the runaway Martha, approaches her as a peasant and is arrested for attempting to address a woman of noble birth—​ Bloom is similarly charged for making “improper overtures” (U 15.1021). Then, in the hallucinatory logic of “Circe,” Martha as noblewoman splits three ways into Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry, and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys—​all of whom want to put Bloom in his place and return him to the reality of his identity as cuckhold: “To dare address me! I’ll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I’ll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a well known cuckold” (U 15.1115–​17). Whether the cuckhold in this case is meant as a verb or a noun is ambiguous. Thus, Lionel is dispensed with, but Henry (who cuckholds) and Leopold (the cuckhold) remain. Beckoned into the brothel by the call of music—​“Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here” (U 15.1278)—​Bloom embarks on another dissociative hallucination, where he is called upon to perform: “Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs” (U 15.1720). Harkening back to his collective identity with “Sirens,” Bloom sings the song associated with Kelleher (U 5.13–​16) and tries to tell Lenehan’s joke about the “Rows of Casteele” (U 15.1731, 7.591).21 However, he is no longer in the Ormond and therefore no longer part of the collective. Lenehan condemns him as a cheater—​“Plagiarist!” (U 15.1734)—​bringing forth other forms of cheating, including adultery (which is called to mind in the comparison to Parnell [U 15.1761]). Only then does Bloom finally confess that he is both Henry and Leopold: “It was my brother Henry. He is my double” (U 15.1769–​70). The last episodio, The Croppy Boy, is relived twice in “Circe.” In its first incarnation, it operates as a summation of the Ormond that Bloom has left behind,

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incorporating the aftermath of The Croppy Boy, Love and War, and All Is Lost Now, where the performer is separated from the character as surely as Henry and Bloom are separated in this final overcoming of disestablished identity. Mirroring the function of the static subject and moving countersubject, the perspective from within the Ormond remains static even as the reader’s perspective moves away with “Exeunt severally” (U 15.2639) at the end of the first Circean Croppy Boy sequence.22 After his rendition of The Croppy Boy in “Sirens,” Ben Dollard is hailed as “Ben machree” (U 11.1160), while making his “rubicund” (U 11.1158) way toward the bar:  “Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes in the air. Big Benaben Dollard. Big Benben. Big Benben” (U 11.1151–​4). In the parallel sequence in “Circe,” this movement is echoed in stage directions: (Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops.) BEN DOLLARD: (nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels jovially in base barreltone) When love absorbs my ardent soul. [. . .] THE VIRGINS: (gushingly) Big Ben! Ben my Chree! A VOICE:  Hold that fellow with the bad breeches. BEN DOLLARD: (smites his thigh in abundant laughter) Hold him now. (U 15.2604–​10)

Like Bloom’s anesthetic when he tries to separate the performer from his song, the absence of music refocuses the narrative to physical description (even in the dramatic form of “Circe”) of Dollard. However, despite Bloom’s absence from the Ormond as rapt listener, the refrain continues as Dollard again intones in his “base barreltone” the line from Love and War:  “When love absorbs my ardent soul.” As in “Sirens,” Ben Dollard is again disembodied from his voice when “A Voice” issues the command to “Hold that fellow with the bad breeches” and Dollard repeats the command (even though one would assume that he is the “fellow with the bad breeches”).



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All Is Lost Now and M’appari are also remembered, this time in the voice of Henry, who appears singing M’appari’s “When first I saw” (U 15.2621) and exits singing “All is lost now” (U 15.2635). This is the last time Henry is presented as a speaking character (of sorts) in “Circe.” His exit symbolizes Bloom’s final extrication from his alternate personality, leaving only his mantle as cuckhold and, by extension, his extinction, one of the issues in need of resolution. Although the Ormond Hotel disappears from the “Circe” episode, Bloom is nevertheless forced to relive the humiliation of his cuckholding (which took place while he lingered there) during the Bella/​Bello hallucination.23 It is here that he encounters the “last of his name and race” (U 11.1064–​5)—​his daughter Milly—​and the threat of self-​annihilation in his home. Like Odysseus and “Rip van Winkle” (U 15.3158), Bloom returns home after having been away for twenty years, though he mistakes his daughter for Molly: “I see her! It’s she! The first night at Mat Dillon’s! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he” (U 15.3162–​3). In his physical and sexual absence, his masculine presence has been replaced from the perspective of his daughter, and, as with Odysseus, his house has become overrun with “A man and his menfriends [who] are living there in clover” (U 15.3174–​5). Thus, in relinquishing his wife and children to the song of the Sirens, Bloom has written his epitaph of extinction and agreed to his wife’s infidelity—​a fact implied by his very presence in the Ormond during “Sirens,” and one that must be reconciled in this episode if he is to return home. Focusing on the house itself, Bello relegates Molly into Bloom’s defaced property: BELLO: (cuttingly) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren’s auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art’ sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom’s. (U 15.3183–​9)

But, reversing “Sauce for the gander” (U 11.877) in “Sirens,” these are Bloom’s just deserts for deserting, but also for his own cuckholding as Henry Flower:  “Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander O” (U 15.3178–​9).

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Honing in on Bloom’s fear of returning home, Bello mocks Bloom’s stated desire to return with the fact of Molly’s infidelity because he did not return, asking if he will return “As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written” (U 15.3198–​200).24 Once again, the croppy boy’s extinction is reflected in Bloom’s status as the betrayed, and this fantasy will not be “Done. Prff!” (U 15.3390) until the final conquering of The Croppy Boy at the end of the recapitulation. Until now, this chapter has approached the recycling of “Sirens” in “Circe” by tracing how the fugal effects that hindered Bloom are recontextualized as obstacles surmounted. Having gradually separated from his alternate identities, Bloom is once again forced to confront that which made him susceptible to the temptation to fugue in the first place—​namely Molly’s adultery. In the last rehearsal of “Sirens” in “Circe,” the structure of the fugue (and Bloom’s temptation to stasis) is recapitulated as Bloom’s final obstacle to his homecoming. Opening at the split in the counterexposition, when Bloom decides to become static in the Ormond and Boylan is set into motion, the last sequence of Circean “Sirens” regurgitates the canon: (A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.) (U 15.3726–​31)

Combining a reference to Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy gazing sadly after the cavalcade with Boylan’s progress away from the Ormond in his hackneycar, the pattern of the viceregal cavalcade’s ringing steel from the opening sequence and Boylan’s jingling away from the Ormond in the counterexposition is condensed into one passage. The “answer” is also present in the form of the Circean boots boy, whose impertinence in wanting to know the subject of the barmaids’ gaze is reflected in his mockery of the barmaids from “behind on the axle”: “THE BOOTS: (jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers) Haw haw have you the horn?” (U 15.3732–​4). The Circean combination of the bootsboy with Lenehan’s “horn” motif at the end of the counterexposition—​“—​Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I’m coming” (U 11.432)—​has the effect of accelerating the recapitulation while also



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fast-​forwarding through the portion of “Sirens” that is distinctly musical (i.e., Simon Dedalus with his tuning fork and Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye). In the absence of any musical material from the episodi, the focus of the Circean version of “Sirens” is the barmaids and the completion of Boylan’s progress toward Molly. The whores Zoe and Florry are juxtaposed against Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, who are remembered through “(Bronze by gold they whisper.)” (U 15.3735). And, in the meantime, Boylan has arrived at Molly’s and sealed the deal: “(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw set sideways, red flower in his mouth. Lenehan in his yachtsman’s cap and white shoes officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan’s coat shoulder.)” (U 15.3738–​41). In this hallucinatory renaissance of “Sirens” in “Circe,” Bloom actively facilitates what he failed to hinder in “Sirens.” As Frank Budgen writes in The Making of Ulysses: Bloom’s “complaisance becomes connivance. He becomes a flunkey to Boylan, accepting from the conquering hero a tip of sixpence to buy himself a gin and splash, and is allowed to peep through the keyhole of the bedroom door at the sport of Marion and Blazes.”25 As Molly’s “business menagerer” (U 15.325), Bloom acts as pimp to Molly, still in her boudoir, while watching through the keyhole: “BOYLAN: (to Bloom, over his shoulder) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times” (U 15.3787–​9). In “Sirens,” Bloom remembers listening to Molly sing through the wall: My wife and your wife. Squealing cat. Like tearing silk. Tongue when she talks like the clapper of a bellows. They can’t manage men’s intervals. Gap in their voices too. Fill me. I’m warm, dark, open. Molly in quis est homo: Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear. Want a woman who can deliver the goods. (U 11.972–​6)

However, in “Circe,” the ear is reversed, and Bloom is not only watching Molly “deliver the goods,” but with an eye for business, he advertises it by “bring[ing] two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot” (U 15.3791–​2). The scene culminates in the juxtaposition of Molly’s orgasm against the barmaids in the Ormond, who are represented both by the laughter of the whores in the whorehouse and in their gossip about the copulating couple: “LYDIA DOUCE:  Yumyum. O, he’s carrying her round the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and New  York. Like mouthfuls of

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strawberries and cream” (U 15.3803–​5). The already sexualized duet of the barmaids’ laughter from “Sirens”—​ Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze, shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter [. . .] Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!), panting, sweating (O!), all breathless. (U 11.174–​9)

—​is now represented by a trio between Zoe, Florry, and Bella, which also includes the orgasmic “O!” and “Ah!” of Molly and Blazes: KITTY: (laughing) Hee hee hee. BOYLAN’S VOICE: (sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach) Ah! Godblazegrukbrukarchkhrasht! MARION’S VOICE: (hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat) O! Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck? BLOOM: (his eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself ) Show! Hide! Show! Plough her! More! Shoot! BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY:  Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee! (U 15.3806–​18)

The laughter no longer has its musical properties of crescendoeing voices—​ “they urged each each to peal after peal”—​but Molly and Boylan’s orgasm does double as vocal exercises. As Hugh Kenner writes in Joyce’s Voices: “The first reason ‘Sirens’ is a musical chapter is that Molly and Boylan at that time of day have what she and Bloom agree to speak of as an appointment to sing.”26 Bloom’s presence during this musical assignation as titillated voyeur, which was his position in the Ormond as he watched Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, is the fulfillment of his fear that, even if he had gone home, he would not have been able to stop them, and, rather than pretend ignorance, he would have had to watch. In acknowledging this fear of helplessness and its relationship to his presence in the Ormond, Bloom is able to overcome it, and the laughter of the whores once again becomes just that: “BLOOM: (smiles yellowly at the three whores) When will I hear the joke?” (U 15.3830–​31). Bloom conquers his silence, and regains his voice to ask after the joke rather than be laughed at, demonstrating that he has conquered the temptation to silence in the form of the fugue (flight, avoidance, escape) by overcoming its structure.



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Bloom’s fear of extinction is also relived one last time in the form of the croppy boy’s death:  “THE CROPPY BOY:  (the ropenoose round his neck, gripes in his issuing bowels with both hands) I bear no hate to a living thing, /​But I love my country beyond the king” (U 15.4531–​5). Rumbold, Demon Barber appears with paraphernalia from past hangings (for sale), and the Croppy Boy is hung. With “tongue protrud[ing] violently” (U 15.4544–​5), the Croppy Boy states “Horhot ho hray hor hrother’s hest” (U 15.4547), which Gifford translates as “Forgot to pray for [my] mother’s rest” from “Sirens” (U 11.1042–​3)27 As he “gives up the ghost” (U 15.4548), he ejaculates violently and the three Marthas from the regurgitation of M’appari (Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry, and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys) rush forward to sop it up with their handkerchiefs (U 15.4550–​52). The death of the croppy boy occurs at the same moment in both “Sirens” and in “Circe.” In “Sirens,” the song represents the end of Bloom’s fugue and the necessity of leaving the Ormond: “Bloom in the Ormond hallway heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to wash it down. Glad I avoided” (U 11.1142–​5). Similarly, in “Circe,” the gruesome hanging of the croppy boy represents Bloom’s conquering of his sexual silence, his move to escape the dream sequences of “Circe,” and his donning of the mantle of fatherly figure for Stephen Dedalus. The sterile emission of the croppy boy’s ejaculation, combining orgasm with extinction, is juxtaposed against Bloom having overcome the same annihilation in “Sirens” when he left the Ormond without joining the stacks of empties, having “G[otten] out before the end” (U 11.1122). In “Circe,” Bloom metamorphoses from a character conquered by music into a character equipped with an ability to overcome his dissolution of self and thus begin his Nostos. The disembodied chords and voices of the “music without words” in “Sirens” that told the story of Bloom’s loss of self are presented chronologically in “Circe” as Bloom’s subjectivity is reclaimed from Henry Flower and Lionel/​Lyonel. The pure sounds of “Sirens” are demusicalized and presented in conjunction with their respective performers (Richie Goulding, Ben Dollard, Lionel), who are similarly demythologized. As such, music becomes words again, and these words—​along with the insecurities of home, family, and fidelity they present—​are conquered. Amid this revision of “Sirens” in “Circe,” the absolute music of “Sirens” is also conquered. By separating the structure of “Sirens,” illustrated in its final

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recapitulation, from the effects prompted during the Tela contrappuntistica, the principle of the fugue as absolute music is mastered. The repetition of the pattern of “Sirens” allows Bloom to perceive it and thus avoid the negative value of being overwhelmed by the affective elements of the music. However, this reorientation is at the expense of absolute music (in a musical sense) as it is no longer absolute. On a metatextual level, this also demonstrates Joyce’s revision of his musical project, where he veers away from the containment of absolute music (as the inseparability of structure and content), and instead moves toward the possibility of how literature can be adapted into “music for the eye” and “music for the ear,” which will be the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 For more on the psychological, phantasmagorical, and hallucinatory aspects of “Circe,” all of which have been well documented and fittingly explored, see, for example, Daniel Ferrer, “Circe, Regret and Regression,” in Post-​ Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 124–​44; Christine Froula, “History’s Nightmare, Fiction’s Dream: Joyce and the Psychohistory of Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 28.4 (1991), 857–​72; R. G. Hampson, “ ‘Toft’s Cumbersome Whirligig’: Hallucinations, Theatricality and Mnemotechnic in V.A.19 and the First Edition Text of ‘Circe,’ ” in Reading Joyce’s “Circe,” ed. Andrew Gibson, European Joyce Studies, vol. 3 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1994), 143–​78; Hugh Kenner, “Circe,” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. Clive Hart and David Hayman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 341–​ 62; Mark Schechner, Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 2 Gilbert provides no translation of this, so I offer my own: I have added to Circe a messianic scene with a sung litany in his honor, which acquires its titles by being pulled from the episodes, c to d, of his adventures. 3 Fritz Senn describes “the messianic scene that Joyce singled out for attention in a letter [as] an exemplary case of masked license and of provection” (“ ‘Circe’ as Harking Back in Provective Arrangement,” in Reading Joyce’s “Circe,” ed. Andrew Gibson, European Joyce Studies, vol. 3 [Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1994], 68). Spring-​boarding from Groden’s “deviation” and “enlargement” described in Ulysses in Progress, Senn defines provective arrangement as “augmentation and distortion, hypertrophy and deviation: it is generally a fairly rapid development from low key inceptions through the continuous increase of



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some device to a swelling out of proportion until it changes its essence as well” (Michael Groden, Ulysses in Progress [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977], 65). Thus, the messianic scene in its entirety represents this exact distortion beyond recognition based on a small detail. That being said, I argue that Joyce’s retrospective summaries of previous chapters in this litany constitutes no small detail for enlargement. 4 “Songs without words” is normally attributed to Felix Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne worte, a numbered piano cycle of forty-​eight pieces, published from 1834–​45 (Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses—​Revised and Expanded Edition [Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988], 308). However, given the discussion in Chapter 1, the connection to Du Maurier’s Trilby is not negligible. In Trilby, the phrase appears several times: first, when Trilby is singing Chopin’s Impromptu in A flat, the narrator describes the piece as a song without words—​“All this, the memory and the feel of it, were in Trilby’s voice as she warbles that long, smooth, lilting, dancing laugh, that shower of linked sweetness, that wondrous song without words” (Du Maurier, Trilby, 218). The same phrase is used to signal Svengali’s preference for absolute music: “there can be prayers without words just as well as songs, I suppose; and Svengali used to say that songs without words are the best!” (276). Taken in connection with the next line of “Sirens”—​“Ventriloquise. My lips closed” (U 11.1095)—​and the representation of Trilby’s Svengali in “Circe” as performing “ventriloquial exorcism” (U 15.2722), it seems more likely that Trilby, rather than Mendelssohn, is intended here. 5 There is nothing further in this passage to indicate Mendelssohn (see note 4). However, given that Mendelssohn figures as one of Bloom’s noteworthy Jews in “Cyclops”—​“Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God” (U 12.1804–​5)—​the connection cannot be dismissed completely. To make an oblique association between “songs without words” and “music without words” (i.e., the history of absolute music), one should know that this group of pieces actually figured quite heavily in the debate regarding program and absolute music. At one point, a young Frenchman wrote to Mendelssohn with a proposed list of titles for the purposefully unnamed numbers of Lieder ohne worte, and Mendelssohn responded that attaching a title to the “songs” compromised the ability of the song to represent only itself:  If you ask me what I thought of when I was composing, I can only answer, “The song itself, just as it stands.” And if I did have one or more definite words in mind while composing some of these works, I will not tell them to anyone. For a word does not mean the same thing to one person that it does to another; only a piece of music can awaken the same mood—​say the same thing—​in every case: a feeling which not

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James Joyce and Absolute Music everyone would call by the same name. (Calvin S. Brown, quoting Mendelssohn, Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1948], 243–​4)

6 Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction—​A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1999), 128. 7 Joseph Machlis and Kristine Forney, The Enjoyment of Music: An Introduction to Perceptive Listening, 8th edn., shorter version (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999), 197. 8 Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 9. 9 Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulysses (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 112. 10 Dahlhaus, Idea, 8. 11 Susan McClary quoting Scruton, “Narrative Agendas in ‘Absolute’ Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms’ Third Symphony,” in Musicology and Difference Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326. 12 John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), 63. 13 John Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), 10. 14 In “And the Music Goes Round and Round: A Couple of New Approaches to Joyce’s Use of Music in Ulysses” (in Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium, ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989]), Zack Bowen explains that Dedalus has long been singing M’appari a third lower than he should have in order to avoid singing the high G that resonates so strongly in his listeners. When Father Cowley urges Simon Dedalus to “Play it in the original [F major]. One flat” (U 11.602), Dedalus cannot even remember the original accompaniment: “The keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused” (U 11.603). 15 Richard Brown, “ ‘Everything’ in ‘Circe,’” in Reading Joyce’s “Circe,” ed. Andrew Gibson, European Joyce Studies, vol. 3 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1994), 223. See also Mark Schechner, Joyce in Nighttown; and John Gordon, “ ‘Circe,’ La Gioconda, and the Opera House of the Mind,” in Bronze by Gold. The Music of Joyce, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles (New York: Garland, 1999), 277–​91. 16 The dramatic and theatrical aspects of “Circe” have also been well covered. See, for example, Zack Bowen, “ ‘Circe’ as Pantomime,” in Images of Joyce, ed. Clive Hart et al. (Princess Grace Irish Library, Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), 484–​9; Austin Briggs, “Whorehouse/​Playhouse: The Brothel as Theatre in the ‘Circe’ Chapter of ‘Ulysses,’ ” Journal of Modern Literature 26.1 (Autumn 2002),



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42–​57; Ronan Crowley, “ ‘Between Contemporaneity and Antiquity’: Katie Lawrence and the Music Hall Scaffold of ‘Circe,’ ” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 9.2 (August–​September 2008), n.p.; Catherine Flynn, “ ‘Circe’ and Surrealism: Joyce and the Avant-​Garde,” Journal of Modern Literature 34.2 (Winter 2011), 121–​38; Cheryl Herr, “ ‘One Good Turn Deserves Another’: Theatrical Cross-​Dressing in Joyce’s ‘Circe’ Episode,” Journal of Modern Literature 11.ii (July 1984), 263–​76, as well as her excellent Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 17 Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 109. Ellmann continues in a slightly different vein from mine. Although he argues the reinstatement of the value of the verbal, his focus is on the permanently shaken confidence in the narrator: “Words, turned to notes, take back their own again and become words once more. Music is like the shell, which, according to Bloom, gives back the sound of the listener’s ear. Ulysses recovers his verbal universe. But that universe is much shaken, not only because of the specialization which has made everything auditory, but also because of the shaken confidence in the narrator” (109). 18 Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1934), 243. 19 Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses—​Revised and Expanded Edition (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988), 301. 20 Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha tells the story of two noble ladies who decide to attend a country fair dressed as peasants. They are accidentally sold into service for a year, but prove to be completely useless at their work. They are eventually rescued, but not before Lyonel has fallen in love with “Martha” (Lady Harriet). Lyonel, pining for the escaped Martha, stumbles across her in the woods, but is arrested for approaching her. Only by having his ring sent to the queen is he identified as the wrongfully banished Earl of Derby’s son, and thus his name is cleared (Peter Cohen, “Martha,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 10, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​O011550). 21 In Joyce’s Voices, Hugh Kenner bemoans the lack of logic to “Circe,” where events that occur earlier in Ulysses offer no “recoverable truth” (Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices [Rochester, McLean, and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1978], 91). Drawing upon the Rose of Castille as an example, Kenner questions Joyce’s awareness of this joke. He writes:  We may think we can at least recognize in the dream-​material the earlier, “objective” events of the day, and examine how consciousness permutes the now-​familiar données. That cannot be done with any consistency either, since fantasies we want to assign to a

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James Joyce and Absolute Music character will employ elements he was not aware of when they occurred, either because he wasn’t present at the time or because they weren’t events but narrative turns of phrase. Thus Bloom didn’t see Tom Rochford’s machine, which figures in one of “his” fantasies, nor was he in the room when Lenehan told the Rose of Castille riddle which figures in another. However we try to rationalize “Circe” there are elements that escape. (Kenner, Voices, 91–​2)

22 Because this drama is intended to be read and not performed, the stage direction indicating a character’s exit means that these characters vanish from the reader’s awareness, rather than the stage. 23 As this discussion is focused on the musical parallels between “Sirens” and “Circe,” I am purposely not addressing the manifold gender issues in this analysis. However, there are a number of excellent studies that examine androgyny, theatricality, and performed gender. In addition to the review of studies examining drama and theatricality listed above, see also Suzette A. Henke, “Uncoupling Ulysses: Joyce’s New Womanly Man,” in James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 107–​25; Margot Norris, “Disenchanting Enchantment: The Theatrical Brothel of ‘Circe,’ ” in Ulysses—​ En-​Gendered Perspectives: Eighteen New Essays on the Episodes, ed. Kimberly J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 229–​41; Lisa Rado, “ ‘Hypsos’ or ‘Spadia’? Rethinking Androgyny in Ulysses with Help from Sacher-​Masoch,” Twentieth Century Literature 42.2 (Summer 1996), 193–​207; and Jennifer Wicke, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-​Enchantment: Joyce and the Cult of the Absolutely Fabulous,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 29.1 (Autumn 1995), 128–​37. 24 This entire sequence has clear textual connections to “Scylla and Charybdis,” none of which detracts from this interpretation regarding infidelity. However, as this discussion is focused on the parallels to “Sirens” and, more broadly, its musical structure, I have omitted exploration of how other episodes are similarly recycled and revised in “Circe.” 25 Budgen, Making of Ulysses, 243. 26 Kenner, Voices, 90–​91. 27 Gifford, Ulysses Annotated, 523.

6

“It’s Pure Music” Finnegans Wake

Shortly after the 1922 publication of Ulysses, Joyce began a notebook, known as Scribbledehobble, which he divided into forty-​seven sections, each titled after his previous literary works and chapters therein, “beginning with Chamber Music and ending with various parts of Ulysses.”1 Within this notebook, under the label of “Sirens,” Joyce wrote about a page of notes, with the second to last line reading “B. M. says I understand form not essense of music.”2 Although it is difficult to interpret a lot of what Joyce has written under the “Sirens” heading as explicitly linked to Finnegans Wake, for me, this particular line reads as a summary of how Joyce’s musical project changed from “Sirens” to the Wake. After completing “Sirens,” Joyce claimed that he could no longer listen to music because he could see through all of its tricks (JL 1: 129), and, in “Circe,” Bloom is able to embark upon his homecoming because he understands the “form not essense of music”3—​“essense” in this case joining essence or fundamental spirit with a relationship to the senses. However, when Joyce went on to write Finnegans Wake, he became less interested in how to make his characters experience the form and structure of absolute music, but instead turned his attention to his reader and to his reader’s experience of content and form. As A. Walton Litz writes, he “no longer tried to imitate musical forms, but created his own form through a specialized medium. Finnegans Wake is not ‘like’ music, it is a kind of music.”4 This assessment of the Wake as “a kind of music” is further supported by Joyce’s own label of the work, not as a “blending of literature and music,” but as “pure music.”5 This chapter contends that this label of “pure music” is particularly telling, especially in light of its synonymy with absolute music, and the evidence presented in previous chapters of Joyce’s awareness and utilization of the forms and principles of absolute music (namely, the fugue) in “Sirens.” However, is Joyce really claiming to have written Finnegans Wake as a piece of pure or

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absolute music? If so, to what extent is it possible for literature to approximate pure music? Perhaps the danger here is of “too great an insistence on the primacy of Joyce’s intentions” for a work that boasts of its own obscurity,6 and whose logocentricity is undeniable. However, within this obscurity there are distinct patterns that illustrate ways in which Joyce blurs the boundaries between a reading experience and a listening experience: although “no reading aloud [. . .] could possibly reproduce the graphic distribution of the text,” “the play of letters,”7 or reveal the extent of each homonym, pun, and portmanteau, one can nevertheless detect the agenda of making “soundsense and sensesound kin again” (FW 121.15–​16) and its relationship to the intertwining of “essense” and form necessary in absolute music. The nature of Joyce’s “pure music” will be discussed in the first section of this chapter, followed by an exploration of how The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly (Book 1, Chapter 2 of the Wake) demonstrates a revision of the same musical principles of absolute music that informed “Sirens” and “Circe”—​namely the effect produced in the moment of performance and the discernibility of musical structure—​through the interplay of the ballad’s oral and the written generic traditions.

Making “soundsense and sensesound kin again” Much like Forster’s Tibby, sitting with “the full score open on his knee,”8 who gains additional appreciation of the heard music by seeing it, Finnegans Wake is a work that functions visually and acoustically. Unpacking the manifold meaning of each individual, syncretic word of the Wake, has led to some accusations akin to Wagner’s “eye-​itching” (Augenjucken) complaint with reference to grim counterpoint that is only impressive on the page and not to the ear.9 However, oral recitations of the Wake are certainly “ear-​tickling” (Ohrenkitzel),10 and in fact Joyce capitalizes on the experience of listening as part of its justification. In a letter to his daughter, he writes: “Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it is pleasing to the ear [. . .] That is enough it seems to me” (JL 1: 341). The experiential element of the prose is similarly captured in Joyce’s response to an English woman’s accusation that “That isn’t literature,” to which Joyce replied, “ ‘It was’ [. . .] while she was listening to it.”11 Privileging the ear, rather than creating “mere music for the eye,”12 Joyce firmly emphasizes the aural enjoyment of Finnegans Wake, as further seen in his answer to



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Terence White Gervais’ question whether there were “levels of meaning to be explored”: “No, no,” said Joyce, “it’s meant to make you laugh.”13 In the same episode of his biography, Joyce is known to have declared that the novel was not intended to be “a blending of literature and music,” but rather “pure music.”14 This designation introduces a number of possibilities within the context of the musical conversation surrounding absolute music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the one hand, Joyce’s dismissal that his work is not a “blending” of artistic media also implies his music is in some way non-​ representational. It is not drawing upon literature or art for elucidation; the clarity comes from the text itself. Given that Finnegans Wake is written in what John Bishop calls “an incessantly allusive style,”15 this would seem to be a contradiction in terms, except that, returning to the experiential component of the text, Joyce has pinpointed that Finnegans Wake, like music, becomes music in the hearing. This oral component of music picks up on the Paterian striving toward the condition of music, the reiteration of which can be detected in Arthur Power’s recollection of a conversation with Joyce: Joyce once said to me, more or less in relation to his work: “To fault a writer because his work is not logically conceived seems to me poor criticism, for the object of a work of art is not to relate facts but to convey an emotion [. . .] Indeed, judging from modern trends it seems that all the arts are trending towards the abstraction of music; and what I am writing at present is entirely governed by that purpose.”16

That “all the arts are trending towards the abstraction of music” is a clear echo, and Joycean elucidation, of Pater’s “all art is constantly aspiring towards a condition of music.”17 Furthermore, the identification of this “condition” as “abstraction” firmly aligns his interpretation within the context of absolute music, much in the same way that Pater’s “condition of music” is also one where the form is inseparable from the content (i.e., in the sense of pure, instrumental music). To quote Pater, it is “get[ting] rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material” so that “the material of the subject no longer strikes the intellect only; nor the form, the eye or the ear only; but form and matter, in their union or identity, present one single effect to the ‘imaginative reason.’ ”18 As previously discussed in Chapter 1, this, in turn is a repetition of Hanslick’s “there is no content as opposed to form, because music has no form other than the content.”19 To do

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this in literature, Joyce similarly insisted upon “the importance of sound and rhythm, and the indivisibility of meaning from form” as a “technique” for the Wake.20 In reading Finnegans Wake, a work purportedly “entirely governed” by the “abstraction of music,” Joyce successfully employs “sound and rhythm” to produce far-​reaching effects, appealing to “the intellect,” “the eye,” and “the ear” in order to “present one single effect to the ‘imaginative reason.’ ” The inseparability of material and form is further emphasized and rephrased by Beckett in “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . Joyce”: You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other [. . .] Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—​or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.21

Inseparability of form and content, and that the text is “not written at all,” nor is it meant “only to be read” but “looked at and listened to,” is part of the discourse surrounding absolute music. Beckett’s understanding of form and content as being intrinsically musical is further clarified in his essay, “Proust,” where he reiterates this inseparability with reference to Proust, who was similarly experimenting with the musicalization of literature: “Proust does not share the superstition that form is nothing and content everything [. . .] Indeed he makes no attempt to dissociate form from content.”22 To illustrate this, Beckett draws upon examples of absolute music, such as Vinteuil’s Sonata and Septuor, linking these to Schopenhauer’s concept of music as the Idea itself, whose “essential quality” is “distorted by the listener who, being an impure subject, insists on giving a figure to that which is ideal and invisible”; for example, by corrupting “the musical phrase” with “the words of a libretto.”23 In short, the listener forces written or verbal content into something that would otherwise be non-​representational, thereby contaminating the “essense” of pure music. Unpacking this inseparability of content and form alongside Joyce’s elevation of the heard experience of his final text, the Wake encourages the reader to “lift we our ears, eyes of the darkness” (FW 14.29). As Howarth puts it: We are readers of literature, not listeners to music [. . .] We are eye-​folk on the verge of deafness. The glaucomatic Joyce was not [. . .] We go to work



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with our eyes on Finnegans Wake, as the spelling tempts us to, laboring to analyze the layers of sense into their components [. . .] Since Joyce took the risk of plying his sense closely, he obviously wanted the crisscross to play a part in the total effect: and it is doubtful whether the ear can pick up half the ambiguities that are within the comprehension of the eye.24

Despite the attempt on the part of the ear to overcome innate “eye-​folk”-​ness, seeing the text unfolds a different experience altogether. As Anthony Burgess writes: “it has to be read aloud [. . .] But it cannot be wholly freed from the page. We need the score [. . .] to perceive patterns clearer to the eye than to the ear.”25 However, the same could be said of absolute music. To draw upon the experience of the performance of a fugue described in the first chapter: Only the performer at the keyboard is in a position to appreciate the movement of the voices, their blending and their separation, their interaction and their contrast. A fugue of Bach can be fully understood only by the one who plays it, not only heard but felt through the muscles and nerves. Part of the essential conception of the fugue is the way in which voices that the fingers can feel to be individual and distinct are heard as part of an inseparable harmony. The confusion of vertical and horizontal movement is one of the delights of fugue.26

This example highlights the experience of the listener as well as the performer. On the one hand, the intricacies of the fugue are only apparent to the one who is looking at the sheet music; but on the other hand, the inseparability of the fugue’s harmony, “the confusion of vertical and horizontal movement” experienced by the listener, is also one of its “delights.” The same could be (and has been) said of Finnegans Wake,27 though, for some, the Wake elicits a response akin to Gabriel’s during Mary Jane’s academy piece in “The Dead”: “Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages [. . .] He liked music but the piece she was playing had no melody for him [. . .] The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself [. . .] and aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page” (D 161). Joyce’s proclaimed musicality has given rise to a number of interesting attempts to uncover the intrinsic music of the Wake, many of which are shrouded in notions of simultaneity or metaphors for chords and counterpoint.

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For example, David Daiches in The Novel and the Modern World, likens Joyce’s “chordal” portmanteau words as attempted simultaneity akin to “the musical chord where each note is heard with equal loudness yet at exactly the same moment, to produce a totally satisfying effect.”28 Melvin J.  Friedman makes a similar analogy in Stream of Consciousness:  A Study in Literary Method, although what he refers to as the “polyphonic language” of Finnegans Wake, is, by his account, an attempt at “counterpoint by implication,” where the response of the reader is comparable to the auditor’s emotions upon hearing the simultaneous sounding of chords: “one sentence may ambiguously refe[r]‌ to more than one meaning, so that by pronouncing it aloud the reader will have much the same effect intellectually, when the different meanings occur to him, as the auditor has emotionally when several chords are sounded simultaneously.”29 This comparison between Wakese and chords is a popular correlation. For example, in This Man and Music, Burgess writes: “It is not my aim here to analyse the work in terms of its content; I wish merely to show how a dream, permitting the fusion of real-​life referents in free fantasias, is naturally conveyed in a verbal technique which turns words into chords and discourse into counterpoint.”30 In his article, “Musical Form and Polyphony in the Wake,” Alan Shockley combines these interpretations, looking at “the novel’s circular form and the musical implications of this circularity” through the lens of “Bach’s polyphony” and the “common way of experiencing contrapuntal music.”31 In addition to the chordal, polyphonic, and contrapuntal designations, critics, such as Jennie Wang, have also emphasized the way in which “Joyce plays with sound as medium just to free the word from its spelling,” in a way that highlights “the receptivity of the ear” which “does not demand the kind of reason or rationality as the eye.”32 Similarly, Garrett Stewart, identifies the possibilities of simultaneity as seen through the “virtually instantaneous oscillation between the ascendancies of the eye and ear.”33 This is further exemplified by Jack P. Dalton’s “Music Lesson,” where he illustrates the solmization of “HCE” in musically oriented passages, such as Book 3, Chapter 4 (MAMALUJO).34 Interpretations such as these emphasize the interplay of the visual and the aural, simulating the auditory aspect of music through the interaction of reading in the sense of hearing. This has been variously labeled as the “optical listen”;35 “the hearing glance [of the] ‘eareye’ ”;36 the “collision of homophony”



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made possible through the “earsighted view”;37 or the text “heard through reading aloud, or at least in the mind’s ear; though with full awareness of the appearance of the printed page.”38 Repositioning and synthesizing these interpretations through Joyce’s stated aspirations toward “pure music,” enables a reading of Finnegans Wake that allows for the equal prevalence of the ingredients of “the eye,” “the ear,” and “the intellect” that is almost an inversion of the Duchess’ nonsensical moral in Alice in Wonderland to “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.”39 Instead, sound becomes a justification of sense, and meaning is dominated by sound; as Joyce himself writes: “here keen again and begin again to make soundsense and sensesound kin again” (FW 121.14–​16). With this synthesis mind, Joyce is able, in the words of Adorno, to negotiate a “truce” between “that of the novel today and that of literature as pure sound”: “His scrutinizing gaze spied a rift in the structure of significative language, a point where it becomes commensurable with expression, without the writer needing to stick his head in the sand and act as though language were directly equivalent to music.”40 Kristeva writes something similar when she refers to Finnegans Wake as “the rhetoric of the pure signifier, of music in letters.”41 In short, Joyce’s written text functions as “pure sound,” “pure signifier” or “pure music,” because it contains an element of orality—​which Joyce himself emphasizes, “if anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud”42—​alongside its appeal to the intellect. This is best exemplified by The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly (the only instance of sheet music in the Wake), which is the subject of the next section.

A “slip of blancovide”: The written and oral Ballad of Persse O’Reilly Finnegans Wake is a difficult text to negotiate, and any attempt to analyse it necessarily requires some preliminary interpretation of the section in question, since almost every element of the Wake lends itself to multiple interpretations.43 On a macrocosmic level, the overarching theme of Book 1, Chapter  2—​the chapter containing The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly—​is the dissemination of rumor as history and vice versa, and Joyce uses the contagiousness of a catchy

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tune to convey this. Catherine Whitley writes: “The chapter’s form combines features of the historical annal and various music hall entertainments in its depiction of gossip run wild, suggesting that history, gossip, and popular culture can be interchangeable, and are equally liable to be used for reactionary purposes.”44 The chapter begins with HCE’s encounter with the cad in Phoenix Park. This encounter and what exactly happened in the park is purposely obscure: as readers, we know that HCE encountered a “cad with a pipe” (FW 35.11) who asked him “Guinness thaw tool in jew me dinner ouzel fin?” (FW 35.15), which may or may not be drunken Gaelic for “what time is it?” Instead of responding with the time, HCE begins to stutter, proclaiming his innocent reasons for being in the park at this hour: “I am woo-​woo willing to take my stand, sir, upon the monument, that sign of our ruru redemption [. . .] that there is not one tittle of truth, allow me to tell you, in that purest of fibfib fabrications” (FW 36.23–​33), and then he gives the cad some money. Unsure of how to react to the situation, the cad discreetly withdraws home, and mutters to himself between mouthfuls of his dinner about the encounter. Unfortunately, “our cad’s bit of strife [his wife] . . . with a quick ear for spittoons” (FW 38.9–​10) deciphers his mutterings, and the following day gossips about it to the priest—​ one Mr. Browne, who subsequently goes to the races and is then “overheard [.  .  .] and underreared” by Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty “to pianissime a slightly varied version of Crookedribs confidentials [and] hushly pierce the rubiend aurellum of one Philly Thurnston” (FW 38.27–​35). The last step in this game of Operator is for the drunken Treacle Tom to sleep-​talk a truncated and incoherent version of the tale—​“resnor[e]‌alcoh alcoherently [. . .], nom num, the substance of the tale of the evangelical bussybozzy and the rusinurbean [. . .] in parts [. . .] oft in the chilly night [. . .] during uneasy slumber” (FW 40.5–​13)—​within the hearing of Peter Cloran, O’Mara, and Hosty. In the morning, after a brisk trip to the pub with Peter Cloran and O’Mara, Hosty picks up his “truly admirable false teeth” (FW 41.31) then heads to the statue of “Primewer Glasstone” (FW 41.35) where all the drunks and vagrants in town join him. The possibility and prophecy of the ballad overwhelms the story at this point: and the rhymers’ world was with reason the richer for a wouldbe ballad, to the balledder of which the world of cumannity singing owes a tribute for



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having placed on the planet’s melomap his lay of the vilest bogeyer but most attractionable avatar the world has ever had to explain for. (FW 42.12–​16)

Hosty’s potential or “wouldbe” ballad is touted as a gift to both humanity and communal singing through the term “cummanity.” Described as a “lay,” the sung poem connects to the description of Hosty as a “balledder” bringing together the ballad, ballader (French dancing), and the poetic edda into one. And yet even before Hosty sings or circulates the written version of the ballad, the term “vilest bogeyer” links the subject of Hosty’s ballad, HCE, to a mischief-​causing bogey, while also implying a boggling of both the eye and the ear: seen, “bogeyer” spells bog-​eye-​er, but heard, sounds like bog-​ear. The ballad becomes a game of “fellow—​me—​lieder” (FW 42.17)—​which unpacks to include the game follow-​the-​leader, but is nuanced toward music through the pluralized German word for song (lieder)—​and Hosty adopts the role of pied piper as he literally starts to collect his “singleminded supercrowd” (FW 42.22), assembling individuals and groups from every walk of life: “easily representative, what with masks, whet with faces, of all sections and cross sections [. . .] of our liffeyside people” (FW 42.22–​5). Once he has taken care of “fullyfilling the visional area” (FW 42.21–​2), Hosty sets about filling the aural area as the crowd ceases everyday business and eventually sings a ballad that they all know by now. And thus, the story of HCE’s scandal is disseminated to the masses though Hosty’s The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly, which leads to HCE’s eventual downfall through gossip and rumor: “Irish bards had the power to rhyme an enemy to death, and Hosty’s ballad speaks for the fold when HCE is declared dead, buried, ineligible for resurrection.”45 In comparison to the amount of criticism available on the Wake, very few critics engage with the ballad itself, perhaps because its general plot is not as obscure as other, more contested sections of the Wake. Matthew Hodgart dismisses it: “ ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ is too well known to need comment; it is obviously about Humpty Dumpty, Oscar Wilde and Cromwell.”46 Bowen and Roughley elaborate on this interpretation:  “Hosty’s ballad itself is about the fall and ostensible denial of resurrection of a series of invading conquerors including Oliver Cromwell, Lord Mountjoy, the allegedly cheating merchant/​publican HCE, the Ostman (Vikings), and, anomalously, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso.”47 Others such as Campbell and Robinson, and Rose and O’Hanlon, paraphrase it for the purposes of plot summary.

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Those critics who do engage with the ballad, generally do so through historical allusion. For example, Bauerle hones in on the stanza—​ It was during some fresh water garden pumping Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the mon                       [keys That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey Made bold a maid to woo. (FW 46.27–​31)

—​to make an overreaching connection between HCE and the tenor Caruso, who was arrested for touching a woman’s hip while outside the chimpanzee cage in the zoo. According to Bauerle, “the tenor unjustly accused of some vague sexual misconduct in the symbolic Eden of a municipal park, the evil but aptly named policeman (John Caine), the monkeys lending a jungle quality to the setting, the confusion of the witnesses, and the persistence of rumor” all provide Joyce with perfect fodder for HCE and the ballad.48 Similarly, Whitley sees the historical references to events such as the Protestant plantation of Leix and Offaly, the Drogheda massacre, the Phoenix Park murders, and Parnell’s downfall, as providing “a historical index of Ireland’s struggles with invasions, colonial forces, and the country’s loss of and inability to regain self-​governance,”49 which is then “diffused” through the ballad form, as “reactionary nationalism is transformed into a more measured patriotism through subtle changes to the songs.”50 Glasheen offers a maverick interpretation of the entire ballad and its lead up by identifying HCE’s sin in the park as homosexuality: “Convinced that the homosexuality is fact, the cad utters his imperfect recollection of HCE’s words, which pass from ear to Dublin ear, finally reaching three depraved young homosexuals, ex-​cons, wretcheds-​of-​the-​earth—​Cloran, O’Mara, and Hosty.”51 While all of these accounts enrich a reading of the text, they offer no critical position on the musical merit of the work and its interpretive possibilities—​an element that cannot be ignored, given that it is the only instance of music (composed and sheet) in Finnegans Wake. The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly contains several points of intersection with Joyce’s previous use of music. Like in some stories of Dubliners, the verses of the ballad are copied directly into the text without any narrative mediation. More importantly, as in “Sirens,” Joyce is again experimenting with the power



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of performance and the destructive power of music. Once again, we are presented with an experienced musician—​in this case, one who can compose a ballad in an hour—​whose vocal power enchants all who hear him, and, in the hearing, brings about the destruction of HCE. However, Joyce takes this musical project from “Sirens” much further: this is not a matter of a temporary flight of fancy. Rather, HCE’s reputation will be permanently destroyed. Even musically, the ballad demonstrates Joyce’s experimentation with the boundaries between the hearing reader and the listening hearer through his use of sheet music. As readers, we never hear or read about the ballad being sung, nor do we read about the effects of having listened. Instead, Joyce places the musical notation where sound/​words should be, calling into question how we read as well as the divide between literature and music by forcing those capable to “sight-​read” the music. Traditionally, a ballad is defined as a “song sung in dancing (ballando), or perhaps intermixed with dances”;52 in terms of narrative, it is “a folksong that tells a story with stress on the crucial situation, tells it by letting the action unfold itself in event and speech, and tells it objectively with little comment or intrusion of personal bias.”53 However, neither of these definitions really applies to the written version of The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly: the broadsheet does not involve dancing or even a dancing rhythm, and its story is neither objective nor is any one crucial situation stressed. In fact, there is little about this printed ballad that collates with any traditional understanding of ballads. In addition to the rupture in reading strategy, without the knowledge of how to read music, the notes as printed have no meaning. That being said, even with some musical knowledge, the notes do not become music until they are sung or played orally. And yet, when this particular ballad is heard, it is still inherently unmelodic. Bowen and Roughley have commented that “according to the traditional, theoretical musical conventions for setting lyrics to melodies, ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ is a song that cannot be sung”:54 the melodic line does not match the syllables of the lyrics provided, and the different melodic pattern has no notation to accommodate the different syllabic arrangement of the lyric.55 Although the words to the ballad match the music of the first verse, subsequent verses multiply in syllables, so that “only by repeating appropriate notes from each bar until there are enough to match the

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syllables can the singer produce a practical melodic structure to accommodate the extra syllables.”56 And so, Joyce has inserted a ballad that defies both reading and singing. Given these complications, why is the printed ballad included at all? Also, given the unsingability of the ballad,57 how could such an awkward and discordant ballad have caught on and led to the downfall of HCE? And, returning to its description in the chapter, how can such a ballad enrich the “planet’s melomap”? Arguably, the reason for the lack of musicality of the ballad is that the printed version of The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly is intended to represent the disjuncture between the written and the oral. Just as the epithet “vilest bogeyer” presents HCE as one who submerges the eye and the ear, so too does the ballad itself boggle both the eye and the ear. Insofar as this relates to “pure music,” the music of the ballad takes shape as it is heard and it is communicated orally. In The Ballad of Tradition, Gordon Hall Gerould writes: “Strictly speaking, the ballad as it exists is not a ballad save when it is in oral circulation, and certainly not until it has been in oral circulation.”58 In 1.2 we witness this oral circulation in progress: And around the lawn the rann it rann and this is the rann that Hosty made. Spoken. Boyles and Cahills, Skerretts and Pritchards, viersified and piersified may the treeth we tale of live in stoney. Here line the refrains of. Some vote him Vike, some mote him Mike, some dub him Llyn and Phin while others hail him Lug Bug Dan Lop, Lex, Lax, Gunne or Guinn. Some apt him Arth, some bapt him Barth, Coll, Noll, Soll, Will, Weel, Wall, but I parse him Persse O’Reilly else he’s called no name at all. Together. Arrah, leave it to Hosty, frosty Hosty, leave it to Hosty for he’s the mann to rhyme the rann, the rann, the rann, the king of all ranns. Have you here? (Some ha) Have we where? (Some hant) Have you hered? (Others do) Have we whered? (Others dont) It’s cumming, it’s brumming! The clip, the clop! (All cla) Glass crash. The (klikkaklakkaklaskaklopatzklatschabattacreppycrotty-​ graddaghsemmihsammihnouithappluddyappladdypkonpkot!). (44.7–​21, my emphasis)

Although other critics have classified this passage as “an elaborate introduction,” “a sort of overture to the ballad-​as-​overture-​to the book,”59 it has a greater resemblance to an oral ballad. The words “Spoken,” “Here line the refrains of,” and “Together,” seem to indicate directions, where “spoken”



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stands in for “recitative” and “Here line the refrains of ” alerts us to the refrain,60 or possibly to the cantus firmus, and “Together” being tutti—​ possibly the chorus or possibly a section sung as an ensemble. The parenthetical sentences, while a commentary on the text itself, also function as a conductor’s promptings for responsorial singing, breaking the participants in the ballads off into parts before the applause. The spoken/​sung sections follow a free-​verse rhythm dictated by the rhymes, which have a nursery-​ rhyme quality to them that makes it more melodic than the broadsheet version of the ballad. Thus, it is possible to surmise that two versions of the ballad exist: the oral and the written. Tessa Watt’s thorough study, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–​1640, explores this difference between oral ballads and printed broadsheets in greater detail. She argues that “the advent of print must have accelerated the divorce of a song form and content from any specialized social function. The broadside ballad publishers borrowed tunes and stories from court, city and country without discrimination, and distributed them to an equally varied audience.”61 In fact, though “most of the ballads went to a fitting tune, [often] one tune did duty for many ballads,”62 making the ballad familiar since the tune would have been well circulated. Furthermore, with the population being mostly illiterate, the oral form of the ballad is what would have made it accessible:  “There was theoretically no man, woman or child who could not have had access to a broadside ballad, at least in its oral form, when it was sung aloud.”63 Thus, when the ballad transitioned from its oral form into a written formula through the printed broadsheets, the purpose of the ballad changed as well from an accessible, well-​traveled, well-​used tune to a commercial and less accessible form. The role of the ballad singer changed as well, and the oral importance of the ballad singer diminished as “the printer encroached more and more on the power and privileges of the minstrel, whose profession grew ever poorer and lower.64 The idealized vision of a ballad being sung “in the huge chimney-​ nook of a farmhouse or on the bench of a village-​green, to some casual show of listeners, in such irregular and imperfect fashion as the memory and voice of some old woman or peasant youth could attain,”65 was replaced by irritation with the unreliability of transmission and transcription. William Allingham’s The Ballad Book: A Selection of the Choicest British Ballads provides a good

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description of the clash between the oral and the written, which led to the eventual downfall of the minstrel: Of the comparatively few old MS copies extant, most, if not all, were doubtless also taken down, directly or otherwise, from the oral delivery of professional minstrels, who themselves, whether as inventors or repeaters, were not accustomed to committing their verses to paper; and such MS. Copies [. . .] have really no more authority than oral versions obtained in our own day.66

Furthermore, “most of the old ballads, as taken down from the mouths of nurses, peasants, itinerant musicians, or from broadsheets and ha’penny songbooks, would be found corrupt, incoherent, incomplete.”67 As such, these broadsheets were often the “imperfectly remembered oral reconstructions of the minstrel’s repertoire,”68 which captured the unreliability of having been “copied from illiterate transcripts, or the imperfect recitation of itinerant ballad-​singers.”69 As Watt also explains, attitudes toward minstrels changed in this period as well: “the term ‘minstrel’ didn’t mean the same thing in 1570 as it had a century earlier.”70 The minstrel was demoted from “respected professional musician to the status of vagabond”—​a “taverne minstrel that would give a fit of mirth for a groat”—​as demonstrated by Queen Elizabeth’s statute of 1572, “which applied the vagrancy laws to all ‘common players in interludes and minstrels’ who were not under aristocratic or royal patronage.”71 Thus, the ballad singer or minstrel became almost obsolete except as a ballad-​monger: “The text of the ballad was sung or recited as the printed copy was being sold, and this distribution in the street, marketplace, public house, or at the fair, instead of through the usual channels for books, is a further distinguishing factor of the street ballad.”72 Even as a ballad-​monger, the profession became a figure of ridicule, like that of “the comic figure of the low-​class balladmonger in The Winter’s Tale, and to the frequently cited caricature of a drunken hack writer whose main income derived from ballads.”73 With one tune doing service for many ballads and an illiterate population, it was easy to sing the tune of one ballad while selling the broadsheet or another. This description fuses with the portrayal of the development of the printed version of The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly: and the ballad, in the felibrine trancoped metre affectioned by Taiocebo in his Casudas de Poulichinello Artahut, stump-​stampaded on to a slip of



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blancovide and headed by an excessively rough and red woodcut, privately printed at the rimepress of Delville, soon fluttered its secret on white highway and brown byway to the rose of the winds and the blew of the gaels, from archway to lattice and from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village, through the five pussyfours green of the united states of Scotia Picta. (FW 43.22–​30)

Here, the metre of the ballad is being borrowed from Taiocebo’s piece; and the method of distribution is the “fluttered secret” of white paper as it follows the “winds” and “gaels,” creating a much wider perimeter for the tale to be spread. And yet the tale itself is not conveyed through sight, but rather through sound: “from black hand to pink ear, village crying to village,” and since the only version of the ballad that we ever see performed, so to speak, is the oral version, one wonders whether the version of the ballad that was actually circulated was the oral or the written. Both Hodgart and Glasheen write about this without fully acknowledging it: in the Third Census to Finnegans Wake, Glasheen describes the ballad being “first sung to a crowd of representative Dubliners near the tollgate where William and Harold met, and in the shadow of Parnell’s monument”;74 and in his Student’s Guide, Hodgart writes, “All this gossip is elaborated into a folk song by many Dubliners in collaboration, and this is finally published as a broadside ballad, like many others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”75 However, neither Hodgart nor Glasheen seem to notice the two different versions of the ballad extant at this point. Significantly, in the first draft of Book 1, Chapter 2 in David Hayman’s A First-​Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, Peter Cloran (one of the three who listens to Treacle Tom’s sleep-​talking) is originally written in as “ballad monger,”76 and Hosty is a “streetsinger,”77 before both are crossed out and replaced with “cashdraper’s executive” (FW 40.15) and “illstarred beachbusker” (FW 40.21) respectively, nullifying the written monger as well as the oral singer. Similarly, the inception of the ballad was originally written as, “the world was the richer for a new half penny ballad first sung [. . .] under the shadow of the monument of the dead legislator”78—​which nods to the capitalist origins of the ballad as well as to the marketing of the singer at the expense of print—​ before it becomes “and the rhymers’ world was with reason the richer for a wouldbe ballad [.  .  .] first poured forth where Riau Liviau riots and col de

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Houdo humps, under the shadow of the monument of the shouldhavebeen legislator” (FW 42.13–​21). The deletion of the monetary value of the ballad and the inclusion of a combination of skepticism and prophecy in the word “wouldbe” causes the ballad to be even more nebulous. Its transmission is no longer “first sung,” but loses the agency of a singer when it is “poured forth.” Taken together, the ballad demonstrates a reworking of the musical principles of performance from “Sirens.” Hosty, as “vile bogeyer” is both ballad monger (cheating the eyes) and ballad singer (cheating the ears). In acknowledging the ballad as both an aural and a written text, The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly becomes a furthering of the musical project demonstrated in Joyce’s employment of the fugue in “Sirens” and its decomposition in “Circe.” Joyce did not abandon the fugue after “Sirens,” and, in fact, the musical structure is echoed in numerous passages throughout the Wake in the form of the “peacefugle” (FW 11.9), the “oaproariose as ten canons in skelterfugue” (FW 121.29), and the “fuguall tropicall” (FW 73.14–​15).79 He also references it in his notes:  in Buffalo notebook VI.B.40–​95, he writes, “recital/​postludium/​ fugue in H.C.E” (JJA 38.284). This particular line is not incorporated into Finnegans Wake, but almost everything else from that page of notes gets piecemealed into Book 3, Chapter 2—​a distinctive section of the Wake for those interested in Joyce and music, since he manages to incorporate hundreds of opera names, composers, singers, arias, characters, instruments, dynamics etc., much in the same way that he inserts river names into Anna Livia Plurabelle. Despite its absence from the chapter, the presence of this line referencing a “recital” (performance), “postludium” (musically—​a concluding voluntary), and “fugue” once again acknowledge and underscore Joyce’s knowledge of and engagement with musical structure. However, in Finnegans Wake, he goes much further than an imitation of the fugue and its effects, instead creating a “pure music” of his own, where the clash between the oral and the visual is the embodiment of the “music for the eye” and the ear as well as an exercise in the “intellectual and musical engineering” usually associated with structures of absolute music.80 Even at the level of reading, whenever Joyce refers to the experience of seeing, he almost always yokes it to hearing (and sometimes the absence of both); to name a few: “sound seemetary” (FW 17.35–​6); “Is now all seenheard then forgotten?” (FW 61.29); “so long as the obseen draws theirs which hear not so long till allearth’s dumbnation shall



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the blind lead the deaf ” (FW 68.34–​5); “the blink pitch” (FW 93.4); “learned to speak from hand to mouth till he could talk earish with his eyes shut” (FW 130.18–​19); “The Mookse had a sound eyes right but he could not all hear. The Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see” (FW 158.12–​13); “the doom of the balk of the deaf but that the height of his life from a bride’s eye stammpunct” (FW 309.3–​4); “His hearing is indoubting just as my seeing is onbelieving” (FW 468.15–​16); “I hereby hear by ear from by seeless socks” (FW 468.24–​5); etc. Forster’s “What is the good of the ear if it tells you the same as the eye?”81 neatly encapsulates the acoustic and visual experience of the Wake: hearing the text yields to one interpretation; seeing it, another (or many others); and an awareness of its abstraction in the sense of non-​ representational music further highlights the fluidity of language and the limits of both the written and the oral. It is “not ‘like’ music, it is a kind of music,”82 combining all elements of music that refers to nothing outside of itself, where form is inseparable from content.

Notes 1 Thomas E. Connolly, Scribbledehobble: The Ur-​Workbook for Finnegans Wake (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961), viii. Both Conolly and Hayman date this notebook from 1922/​23 based on the entries. For more on the development of “Scribbledehobble” into sketches and eventually Finnegans Wake, see David Hayman, “ ‘Scribbledehobbles’ and How They Grew: A Turning Point in the Development of a Chapter,” in Twelve and a Tilly: Essays on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of Finnegans Wake, ed. Jack P. Dalton and Clive Hart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 107–​18; and Hayman’s The “Wake” in Transit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 2 Connolly, Scribbledehobble, 108. 3 Connolly, Scribbledehobble, 108. 4 A. Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 71. 5 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 703. From its context in Ellmann’s James Joyce, one can deduce that this comment about pure music relates to Joyce’s recitation of ALP. 6 Clive Hart, “The Elephant in the Belly: Exegesis of Finnegans Wake,” A Wake Newslitter 13 (May 1963), 1.

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7 Stephen Heath, “Ambiviolences: Notes for Reading Joyce,” in Post-​Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 58. For another, non-​musical interpretation of the portmanteau as devoid of single meaning but nevertheless operating with “patterns of sonic and visual substance” (193), see Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language (London: Methuen, 1988). 8 E. M. Forster, Howards End, Abinger edn. (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 29. 9 Richard Wagner, “Wagner on Bellini (Feb. 1, 1886),” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 27.516, 66. 10 Wagner, “Bellini,” 66. 11 Ellmann, James Joyce, 702. 12 Aldous Huxley, “Busoni, Dr. Burney, and Others (The Weekly Westminster Gazette, February 25, 1922,” in Aldous Huxley—​Complete Essays, vol. 1, 1920–​ 25, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 229. 13 Ellmann, James Joyce, 703. 14 Ellmann, James Joyce, 703. 15 John Bishop, “Introduction to Finnegans Wake,” in Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1999), viii. 16 Arthur Power, Conversations with Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 106. 17 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86. 18 Pater, Renaissance, 88. 19 Hanslick, Beautiful, 80. 20 Ellmann, James Joyce, 703. 21 Samuel Beckett, “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, ed. Samuel Beckett, Stuart Gilbert, and Eugene Jolas (London: Faber and Faber, 1929), 13–​14. 22 Samuel Beckett, “Proust,” in Proust; 3 Dialogues with George Duthuit (London: Caler and Boyars, 1965), 88. 23 Beckett, “Proust,” 92. 24 Robert Howarth, “Chamber Music and Its Place in the Joyce Canon,” in James Joyce Today: Essays on the Major Works, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1966), 25. 25 Anthony Burgess, This Man and Music (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1982), 145. 26 Joseph Kerman quoting Rosen, The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715–​1750 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005), xvii. 27 In “Playing the Square Circle: Musical Form and Polyphony in the Wake” (in De-​ Familiarizing Readings, ed. Alan C. Friedman and Charles Rossman [Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 2009]), Alan Shockley writes, “This text seems to



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require that its reading be like a performance of a contrapuntal musical piece” (105), where both have a “motoric” function: “both repeat and develop simple themes in complex ways and in multiple, simultaneous layers. Both works exist in time and yet work to defeat time through the constant recurrence of thematic and subthematic material. Both works require multiple ‘readings’ if they are to disclose their significant structural workings” (106). 28 David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 111. Daiches pinpoints the simultaneity of music as follows: “For in music it is possible to present different notes in an instant of time, to have a chord each note of which is heard at precisely the same moment, or to have two melodies going together, progressing with perfect contemporaneity. But this cannot be done with the written word” (111). 29 Melvin J. Friedman, Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 131. 30 Burgess, This Man and Music, 146. Burgess clearly sees Finnegans Wake as a monstrous failure to combine music and literature: “Finnegans Wake had to be written as a horrid warning to musical literary men not to let two irreconcilable arts mate and beget a stillborn hybrid” (148). However, he does acknowledge Joyce’s musical intentions. 31 Shockley, “Playing the Square Circle,” 103, 110. In his article, Shockley compares the way F-​sharp works in the tonal language of Bach as similar to the unfolding of “painapple” in Finnegans Wake. A version of this article also appears as a chapter in his Music in the Words: Musical Form and Counterpoint in the Twentieth Century Novel (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2009). 32 Jennie Wang, “The Player’s Song of Finnegans Wake: Translating Sound Sense,” The Journal of Narrative Technique 21.2 (Spring 1991), 215. 33 Garrett Stewart, “ ‘An Earsighted View’: Joyce’s ‘Modality of the Audible,’ ” in Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 245. 34 Jack P. Dalton, “Music Lesson,” in A Wake Newslitter 16 (September 1963), 1–​5. 35 Heath, “Ambiviolences,” 58. Heath also links this to the Wakean “ ‘soundscript’ (FW 219.17),” where the “the written and the spoken are squashed together but in that very moment a distance opens between them and the reading hovers in an ‘optical listen,’ between the one and the other in a plurality outside any context” (58). 36 Jean-​Michel Rabaté, “Lapsus Ex Machina,” in Post-​Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 79. 37 Stewart, “An Earsighted View,” 256. 38 Peter Myers, The Sound of “Finnegans Wake” (London: Macmillan, 1992), xiii.

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39 Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (1897), ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 54. 40 Theodor W. Adorno, “Presuppositions—​On the Occasion of a Reading by Hans G. Helms,” trans. Sherry Weber Nicholsen, in Notes to Literature—​Volume II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 100. 41 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 23. 42 Ellmann, James Joyce, 590. 43 As with all of Joyce’s texts, there is no dearth of criticism on Finnegans Wake. Much of Finnegans Wake scholarship is devoted to trying to figure out what the book is really about. Pioneering studies such as Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2005/​1961), Clive Hart’s Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), and William York Tindall’s A Guide to Finnegans Wake (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969) have been joined by Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon’s Understanding Finnegans Wake (New York and London: Garland, 1982), John Bishop’s Joyce’s Book of the Dark (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), Finn Fordham’s Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Philip Kitcher’s Joyce’s Kaleidoscope—​An Invitation to Finnegans Wake (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Edmund Lloyd Epstein’s A Guide Through Finnegans Wake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009)—​all of which represent only a small cross-​section of criticism devoted to navigating this difficult text. In addition to these guides, there is also a growing interest in the genesis of the Wake. As Finn Fordham points out, “genetic practice of a sort was already alive in the 1929 collection of essays Exagmination, where Robert Sage analysed how a short passage from Anna Livia (I.8) grew” (Lots of Fun, 23). Since then, many works have been devoted to the development of Joyce’s text, the most relevant to this study being David Hayman’s A First-​Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), and the more recent contribution to the field, the excellent collection of essays, How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-​by-​Chapter Genetic Guide, ed. Luca Crispi and Sam Slote (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). See Luca Crispi, Sam Slote, and Dirk Van Hulle’s “Introduction” to How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake and Fordham’s Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake for excellent introductions to the perils and talismans of genetic scholarship. 44 Catherine Whitley, “The Politics of Representation in Finnegans Wake’s ‘Ballad,’ ” in Joycean Cultures/​Culturing Joyce, ed. Vincent J. Cheng, Kimberly J. Devlin, and Margot Norris (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 163.



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45 Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), xxxii. Campbell and Robinson in their Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake further this notion of rhyming to death with their explanation of a rann: “A rann is an ancient Celtic verse form. There are many stories of Irish poets who revenged themselves against ungenerous or brutal kings by composing satires against them; and frequently (or so they say) the kings literally died of the shame” (Campbell, Skeleton Key, 59). 46 Matthew J. C. Hodgart, James Joyce: A Student’s Guide (London, Henley, and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 140. 47 Zack Bowen and Alan Roughley, “Parsing Persse: The Codology of Hosty’s Song,” in Bronze by Gold, ed. Sebastian Knowles (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 297. 48 Matthew J. C. Hodgart and Ruth Bauerle, Joyce’s Grand Operoar—​Opera in Finnegans Wake (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 99. 49 Whitley, “Politics,” 165. 50 Whitley, “Politics,” 171. 51 Glasheen, Third Census, xxxi. 52 William Allingham, The Ballad Book: A Selection of the Choicest British Ballads (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1864), v. 53 Matthew J. C. Hodgart, The Ballads (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1950), 11. 54 Bowen and Roughley, “Parssing Persse,” 302. 55 See Bowen and Roughley’s “Parssing Persse” for an in-​depth look at Joyce’s composition, specifically through the lens of major/​minor key ambiguity. 56 Bowen and Roughley, “Parssing Persse,” 303. 57 Daniel J. Schiff in “Synthesizing the ‘Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’ ” notes that there are two versions of the ballad—​the 1927 version in transition 2 and the 1939 version in the publication of Finnegans Wake. Schiff claims that the 1927 version “is an easier piece of music to sing than the Finnegans Wake version” (“Synthesizing ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,’ ” in Bronze by Gold, ed. Sebastian Knowles [New York and London: Garland, 1999], 315). Admittedly, “there are still lines of verse that are jam-​packed with many syllables to trip up the tongue, and there are still lines of verse that do not match up with the tune. But Joyce thoughtfully inserted an oversized dash and a space between the end of the fourth stanza and the start of the ill-​fitting verse ‘Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye’ (JJA, 45.110). This helpful dash, while not providing the singer with the melody for the verse, at least alerts the singer of the ballad that something unusual is about to happen” (Shiff, “Synthesizing,” 315).

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58 Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 3. 59 Bowen and Roughley, “Parssing Persse,” 296–​7. 60 Musically speaking, a refrain forces “narrative to give way to melody; refrains can consist of a fifth repetitive line, a burden between stanzas, or intercalated lines within the stanza” (James Porter et al., “Ballad,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed April 17, 2017, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​01879). That is to say, in a ballad the refrain does not need to fall at the end of the verse, and it is not necessarily synonymous with the chorus. 61 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–​1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 13. 62 Allingham, The Ballad Book, xii. I am relying heavily on William Allingham for his examination of ballads because his name appears twice in the NLI MS 36,639/​02/​A (2v, 8v), and from the content of the rest of the notebook, it is clear that Joyce is following a train of thought that concerns ballads: ranging from the tradition of the ballad; to the history of the ballad; to the transcription of ballads, etc. This notebook predates Joyce’s work on Finnegans Wake; however, it shows Joyce’s definite engagement with ballads, and it is possible that Joyce returned to this notebook (as he did all his notebooks) while writing FW. In fact, the notebook seems to cover a range of years of Joyce’s thoughts and, significantly, he reiterated Allingham’s arguments about the ballad in Book 1, Chapter 2 of FW. This entire train of thought is an extension of the type of work I have already done in the Introduction and Chapter 2, when tracing Joyce’s musical background through the notebooks. It could be useful to follow Joyce’s research on ballads more closely from a genetic standpoint; however, such a task deserves its own study and does not fit the scope of this monograph. 63 Watt, Cheap Print, 13. 64 Allingham, The Ballad Book, xiii. 65 Allingham, The Ballad Book, xii–​xiii. 66 Allingham, The Ballad Book, vii–​viii. This statement concerns the legitimacy of the ballads that Allingham chooses to include in his collection, but it is equally applicable to the point at hand. 67 Allingham, The Ballad Book, xxviii. 68 David C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968), 9. 69 Allingham, The Ballad Book, xvii. 70 Watt, Cheap Print, 15. 71 Watt, Cheap Print, 15.



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72 Natasha Würzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–​1640, trans. Gayna Walls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2. 73 Würzbach, Rise, 1. 74 Glasheen, Third Census, xxxii. 75 Hodgart, Student’s Guide, 140. 76 Hayman, First Draft, 65.19. 77 Hayman, First Draft, 65.22. 78 Hayman, First Draft, 66.8–​9. 79 Nor does Joyce abandon “Sirens” after Finnegans Wake, as can be seen through its reiteration in Book 1, Chapter 3 (FW 51.33–​60.3). 80 Imogene Horsley, Fugue, History and Practice (New York: Free Press, 1966), 374. 81 Forster, Howards End, 38. 82 Litz, The Art of James Joyce, 71.

Conclusion “Codetta or Da Capo?”

Pprrpffrrppffff. Done. (U 11.1293–​4) What began as an interest in interrogating Joyce’s claim of having written the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses as a fuga per canonem—​that is, why he chose the fugue as his vehicle in this particular episode; and to what extent this choice demonstrates a trajectory in his work as well as a dialogue with other Modernists—​ developed into an exploration of his evolving use of music, from his earliest writings to Finnegans Wake, and how this discloses a sustained musical agenda that conforms with the changing perception of nineteenth-​century musical forms at the beginning of the twentieth century. After an in-​depth examination of absolute music, its philosophical and compositional precursors, and the Modernist literary elevation thereof, this study explored Joyce’s early writings—​his essays, notebooks, Chamber Music, Dubliners, A  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Exiles—​as demonstrative of an engagement with music that presages his later utilization of its structure, instrumentation, and discourse. Then, carefully retracing Joyce’s musical background and fugal intentions, as evidenced by his notebooks and drafts, I  followed his methodical construction of the fugue, its deployment in “Sirens,” and how his musical structuration exhibits an integration of the growing conversation surrounding absolute music, of which the fugue is considered to be the highest form for its attainment of inseparability of structure and effect. This same fugue is then recapitulated in “Circe” as “music without words” (U 15.1948)—​absolute music by definition—​once again showing an awareness and application of the music that functions as a language of

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its own: Bloom experiences a fugue even as the episode is structured as one, and when the episodi of the tela contrappuntistica return in “Circe,” Bloom becomes armored against them, and they become words without music, rather than the all-​consuming music without words. Now that he can see through its tricks, Bloom is able to escape the effects of the fugue and initiate his homecoming. In this way, one can see the development of Joyce’s musical project from a preoccupation with sound, rhythm and verse in his earliest works; to an untangling of song from its libretto and an emphasis on instrumentation in Portrait and Dubliners; to a full-​scale incorporation of the many facets of absolute music in Ulysses. By Finnegans Wake, however, Joyce is no longer experimenting with aspects of absolute music, and how it can be contained in literature, instead proclaiming that the work is itself “pure music.”1 On the surface, this reads as a baffling assertion within a musical discourse that purportedly refers to nothing outside of itself, considering the Wake’s endless referentiality. Importantly, non-​ referential music is not meaningless; and, like with music, the text of Finnegans Wake takes on a character of its own according to the reader’s encounter with it: for Joyce, it was literature while it was being experienced. Furthermore, if, Tibby-​like, you want to look at the score to see how the “transitional passage on the drum” plays out visually and aurally,2 then the reader is free to indulge in his “music for the eye.”3 However, if the reader wants to follow Joyce’s mandate of making “soundsense and sensesound kin again” (FW 121.15–​16), then one can gain as much, or at least a different kind of, enjoyment from listening to the text as from seeing it unfold visually. Joyce plays with this in The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly by demonstrating the rift between the eye and the ear by inserting sheet music that does not function as music and instead presenting a second ballad that takes shape and functions orally. In effect, Joyce has presented a double ballad—​one that encapsulates the historical traditions of the ballad and also demonstrates a shift from reading to aural experience. As such, interpreting Joyce’s works through the background of absolute music and his engagement with it provides greater insight into how they can be read through the change from a textual depiction of experience into the reader’s experience of content and form that pushes the project of absolute music to the limits of the literary and vice versa.

Conclusion

243

Notes 1 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 703. 2 E. M. Forster, Howards End (Abinger Edition, London: Edward Arnold, 1910), 30. 3 Aldous Huxley, “Busoni, Dr. Burney, and Others (The Weekly Westminster Gazette, February 25, 1922),” in Aldous Huxley—​Complete Essays, vol. 1, 1920–​ 15, ed. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 229.

Appendix Table of transcribed fragments from MS 36,639/​7A + 7B Below is a table of the fragments from the “Sirens” NLI MS 36,639/​7A (IMG 07-010–07-015) and MS 36,639/​7B (a loose sheet numbered as “16” in this table to correspond with its image reference [IMG 07-​016] in the NLI holdings). The first column provides the page reference (recto [r] and verso [v]) of the early draft (MS 36,639/​7A and MS 36,639/​7B) alongside Joyce’s own pagination of the MS in italics; the second is the transcription of the fragment; the third is how the fragment appears in “Sirens”; and the fourth designates how this fragment corresponds with the chapter’s structural delineation of Joyce’s deployment of the fugue, as outlined in Chapter 3. The marginal notes have been numbered alphabetically and in order of appearance (though this is not necessarily the order of drafting), from the top of the page downwards. Where the marginal notes appear to correspond with the textual fragment in the manuscript (either by Joyce’s arrow [indicated in the table by (↓), (↑), (←), or (→)], Joyce’s sign F, or by content), the marginal note has been included in the fragment entry in the second column. In cases where the marginal notes are separate from the adjacent fragment text, they have been accorded a separate entry. Text that was crossed out in red crayon by Joyce appears with the phrase, “crossed out in red”; text that was crossed out in blue crayon by Joyce appears with the phrase, “crossed out in blue.” Unless otherwise indicated, the text is uncrossed. Illegible text is indicated by “xxx” or italicized transcription.

Appendix

246 MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Crossed out in red Along Margin: a) Blank face all the same. Virgin. Write (numbered something on it. If you “10)” by don’t what becomes of Joyce) them. They want it. Got into despair d) Polite in xxx. But they don’t like too much politeness. Bully a fellow like him. Make her hear e) I could say something from here. Ventriloquize. Close my lips. Want to think it in my stomach. What? Will? You? I. Want. To. To be Admired. Keep them young. Admire themselves 10r

10r

10r

10r

Crossed out in red Margin: b) A buxom piece Crossed out in red Margin: c) Really from rock of Gibraltar Crossed out in red Margin: f) She viewed herself sideways. Mirror there. Molly always does before she answers the door a knock. Titivates herself. (arrow pointing from margin note a)

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“Blank face. Virgin Croppy should say: or fingered Boy only. Write something on it: page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young. Even admire themselves [. . .] They want it. Not too much polite. That’s why he gets them [. . .] Say something. Make her hear [. . .] Ventriloquise. My lips closed. Think in my stom. What? [. . .] Will? You? I. Want. You. To. (U 11.1086–​96)

“A buxom lassy” (U 11.502)

Love and War

“—​From the rock of Gibraltar . . . all the way” (U 11.515)

Love and War

“Bronze gazed far sideCroppy ways. Mirror there. Is that Boy the best side of her face? They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate” (U 11.1046–​7)

Appendix MS pg Reference 10r

10r

10v

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Crossed out in red Margin: g) Got up to kill. How rotten on eighteen bob a week. Fellows loan out, their cork too. Do (the I well) Crossed out in red Mr Bloom watched in silence the liquid eyeball at gaze of calm and pitiless under its narrowed lid and saw behind its of fence of lashes. At each slow leave of her bosom (her heaving embonpoint) the her red rose rose and sand with satin and all her tiny foils trembled of maidenhair. She knows I’m looking, knows without looking F Heat and spices of orient floated around her. On the jutting beerpull lay her hand lightly, plumply, white on the enamel, and to and fro (she knows I’m looking) over the polished knob her thumb and finger xxx passed, reposed, gently touching and then slid smoothly, slowly down, as Cool firm baton then while protruding out of their sliding ring. Either was given her: she pulled a full pull down, down and pulled it down. Ale gushed ^, gushed + foamed to her tankard

247

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“Got up to kill: on eighteen bob a week. Fellows shell out the dibs.” (U 11.1076–​7)

Croppy Boy

“A liquid of womb of Croppy woman eyeball gazed Boy under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing [. . .] At each slow satiny heaving bosom’s wave (her heaving embon) red rose rose slowly sank red rose. [. . .] And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair. [. . .] On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands [. . .] over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring (U 11.1104–​17) “Bronze listening by the beerpull gazed far away. Soulfully. Doesn’t half know I’m. Molly great dab at seeing anyone looking” (U 11.1044–​5)

Appendix

248 MS pg Reference 10r

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Text in “Sirens”

Crossed out in red Margin: h) F—​Molly (. . .) a quick eye to notice if anyone is looking at her. All women.

10v

—​There was an an Not in “Sirens” (located argument [^put up job] in “Cyclops” [?]‌) (numbered between them Father “11)” by Cowley said. Joyce) About ten she’d telephone down to ring up the husbandby about the [^poor] child and if Bloom had won raked in anything [^the poor begod] he was off with being in a train of shakes saying, [^the Christ was born] There was nothing at all wrong with the child. But our Mat Dillon spotted the game 10v

Episodi/​Stretto

Crossed out in blue —​To hear that fellow croaking in it, Mr Dedalus said, with a belly on him like a poisoned pup —​He’d want a stiff glass of grog to coo keep him plush up. Ben Dollard said. —​He has a fair share concealed about his person if you ask me, Mr Dedalus said

—​

“Corncrake croaker: Inter­mezzo belly like a poisoned pup” (U 11.806) (Also located in “Hades” [U 6.591–​3])

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Crossed out in red Mr Bloom heard the voice of lamentation Martha, Martha, ah return, love. Her name. Strange. I am waiting here. Lovely [^Glorious] voice he has. For thee. Co-​ome, thou lost one. Cruel it is. Let people get fond of each. Thou dear one. Then tear them asunder 11r alone. [^Way out of xxx] Can it come. For to (numbered me. Human life. That is. “12)” by And she one day with Joyce) him. And I. Ah Martha [^ return] All. Asunder. Despair. Tururu Turn tooooooo me. 10v

11r

Crossed out in red Margins: a) He had no wedding garment (↓) Ben Dollard had to see and loan if xxx coat b) They were hard up at that time wife to play the piano in the coffee palace He nods. —​Ay Father Cowley said. He used to do something in the trimming clothes line too when they lived in Holles Street. The wife used to buy up opera cloaks and dresses out of Lances in Merrion Square and sell them so much a week. Splendid things too

Text in “Sirens”

249

Episodi/​Stretto

“Glorious tone he has still” M’appari (U 11.695); “Martha it is. Coincidence. Just going to write [. . .] Still the name: Martha. How strange! Today.” (U 11.713–​16); “That voice was a lamentation” (U 11.793); “Thou lost one. All songs on that theme [. . .] Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on. Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat. Human life.” (U 11.802–​5) → libretto of M’appari throughout section

“No wedding garment. Love and —​Our friend Bloom War turned in handy that night” (U 11.474–​6) “—​I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano in the coffee palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration [. . .] We had to search all Holles street to find them” (U 11.485–​8) “—​By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there [. . .] Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses [. . .]

Appendix

250 MS pg Reference

11r

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Text in “Sirens”

—​Ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs [^Marion] Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions.

—​Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all descriptions.” (U 11.491–​7)

Crossed out in red I used to hear them as a boy in Queenstown, Mr Dedalus said, walking along in the moonlight with those earthquake hats on their ears and they used to blend their voices together. He held a plbalance of hand shielding his ringing lips and sang a nightcall and [^ with] its echo blended Crossed out in red Margin: c) Italian is the only language to sing Ben Dollard said

11r

Crossed out in red Mr Bloom observed the drawn face before him. He’s (d ↑ e) going too. Backache pills (f ↓ g). Taking matches from counter to save. Then spending half a sovereign (→ h) standing drinks. But you can’t touch them for money. Never have a cent queer people. Contradiction.

Episodi/​Stretto

“He heard them as a boy Inter­mezzo in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles [. . .] Walking, you know, Ben, in the moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices [. . .] Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a moonlight nightcall” (U 11.849–​55) “It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben.” (U 11.849)

“Tenderly Bloom over liverless bacon saw the tightened features strain. Backache he [. . .] Next item on the programme. Paying the piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile. Sings too: Down among the dead men. Appropriate [. . .] Characteristic of him.

All Is Lost Now

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Crossed out in red Margins: d) the next on the list e) Down among the dead men is his. own. appropriate. f) between drinks g) so particular about the whisky he drinks h) in dribs and drabs

11r

Her face was a blank page reading a printed (numbered page. They believe all “13)” by they in black and white. Joyce) But it was in the paper. Blank. Write on it.

Love and War

“Blank face. Virgin Croppy should say: or fingered Boy only. Write something on it: page.” (U 11.1086–​7)

Margin: a) She had a fine beard Not in “Sirens” (located of flowery hair. Taste in “Penelope” and the bar. “Cyclops” [U 12.504]) b) Down to her middle may a morning, I saw her combing it. c) Begod he was up at cockshout every market morning d) How did her love trials look? Thereby lays a tale Crossed out in blue —​The two of them were had ah it is the City Arms in Prussia Street. Cherries, the fat. But sure she’s screech the head off him.

Episodi/​Stretto

Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry water. Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign in dribs and drabs. And when he’s wanted not a farthing. Screwed refusing to pay his fare. Curious types.” (U 11.614–​22)

Crossed out in red (Lenehan) the match “Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed from his hand. whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after” (U 11.509)

11v

11v

Text in “Sirens”

251

—​

Appendix

252 MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

11v

(He thought) If she then “Too late now. Or if not? I. Would be different then. If not? If still?” But she has? Or has she? (U 11.1067)

11v

11v

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto Croppy Boy

Crossed out in red The most beautiful [^tenor] air ever written. Richie Goulding said began is that F (e) in La Somnambula. I remember Joe Maas singing that All is lost now. He set his lips [^awhistle] and from a long [^incipient sweet note] of all loss of all his breath fluted a sweet, a mournful (↓ d), a surrendered fall. White teeth he has.

“Most beautiful tenor All Is Lost Now air ever written, Richie said: Sonnambula. He heard Joe Maas sing that one night. [. . .] Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all. Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good memory. —​Which air is that? asked Leopold Bloom. —​All is lost now. Richie cocked his lips Crossed out in red apout. A low incipiMargin: ent note sweet banshee d) a thrush, a throstle murmured: all. A thrush. e) F: Coming out with A throstle. His breath, a whopper now. Shabby birdsweet, good teeth he’s liar in truth. Believes proud of, fluted with plainhim himself I believe!—​ tive woe [. . .] Mournful he Which air is that whistled. Fall, surrender, Mr Bloom asked lost.” (U 11.610–​36) Crossed out in red By Mr Bloom sore ear (↓f) sadness and betrayed in her sleep. Innocently. But What then led her in her sleep? (desire) Waking desire. Innocently? Crossed out in red Margin: f) Turning down the turned up edge of a square doyley under his bread tray)

“Bloom bent leopold ear, turning a fringe of doyley down under the vase [. . .] In sleep she went to him. Innocence in the moon [. . .] Too late. She longed to go. That’s why.” (U 11.637–​40)

All Is Lost Now

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

11v

He had an idea of starting Sunday concerts. Father Cowley said. Badly wanted you know. But the archbishop squashed it. I believe. —​He prefers with his own box office (bundle of luck) Mr Dedalus said. —​You know Crofton? Ben Dollard asked. —​What? Bill Crofton? —​Yes Bill. Tell you a good one about him. You know he [^does a] howl a bit on his own [^now and then] in his free time. But the

Text in “Sirens” Not in “Sirens” (located in “Eumeus” [U 16.1741]), but relates to M’appari

253

Episodi/​Stretto —​

Crossed out in blue wife is true blue and won’t have any music in (numbered the house on Sundays “14)” by except a queens savvy Joyce) goody about the lord and poor Bill didn’t know what to do but up lost his pluck on. Bid me to live and I will live they protestant to be. He thinks it’s a hymn, begod 12r

12r

Crossed out in red Chamber music. Cause you could make a joke about that. Still it is a kind of music. When she. [^I often thought] Tinkling. Drops.

“Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty

Intermezzo

Appendix

254 MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Like Liszt’s. Those rhapsodies. Hungarian Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle humhumhum Crossed out in red Margin: a) there’s acoustics in that. Because the resonances change according to the

12r

12r

12r

12r

12v

The headless sardine laying on thin its maturingbuttered slice. On the star base of an epoque where in lay in state on bread a xxx lone headless sardine

Text in “Sirens” 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 [. . .] Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle.” (U 11.979–​84) “Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last sardine of summer. Bloom alone.” (U 11.1220–​21)

Crossed out in red If she found out Better “If she found out [. . .] not [^Never] tell her No, not tell all [. . .] all. Sauce for the goose. Sauce for the gander.” (U 11.876–​7) Crossed out in red There’s no swindle. Still Not in “Sirens” (located it is a swindle. Well in “Cyclops” with Canada go in insurance. Work Swindle [U 12.1084–​93]) it out on probability. Cause every fellow thinks other fellow is going to lose Crossed out in blue Is he musical? ​Well, Ben Dollard. I heard he put Lead Kindly Light to music. He wanted the wife of his in Haddington Street choir.

Episodi/​Stretto

Not in “Sirens” (located in “Penelope”)

Stretto (Subject—​ Ormond: Croppy Boy aftermath in bar)

Intermezzo

—​

—​

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Crossed out in red —​Shout! Ben Dollard said, pouring (numbered —​That’ll do, Father “15)” by Cowley said. Joyce) 12v

255

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“—​Shout! Ben Dollard shouted, pouring. Sing out! —​’lldo! cried Father Cowley.” (U 11.1214–​15)

Stretto (Subject—​Ormond: Croppy Boy aftermath in bar) Croppy Boy and Stretto (Subject—​ Ormond: Croppy Boy aftermath in bar)

12v

—​Well I must say you’re looking rubicund, Ben, Mr Dedalus said cheerily. Isn’t he, Bob. You must have great feeding up in that Swagger hotel. I’m told it’s a firm place. —​What? Father Cowley said. The Iveagh House. —​Cubicle number thirty seven, Ben Dollard said smacking his lip on his drink. To such base uses are we come, Simon. Crossed out in red —​I don’t know, Mr Dedalus said. You have a good deal of corpse twine concealed about your person, Ben. —​The fat of Death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled lugubriously

“—​You’re looking rubicund, George Lidwell said [. . .] —​Ben machree, said Mr Dedalus, clapping Ben’s fat back shoulderblade. Fit as a fiddle only he has a lot of adipose tissue concealed about his person. [. . .] —​Fat of death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled” (U 11.1158–​63) “Now in the Iveagh home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him.” (U 11.1014–​15) “Lugugugubrious” (U 11.1005)

12v

Let me peruse —​Madame that document here, Bob, Mr Dedalus said. Father Cowley took from his xxxpocket a letter and handed it. Mr Dedalus scanned the envelope at his (leisurely) turning it at many angles

Not in “Sirens” (located in “Eumeus”[?]‌, though it’s Bloom perusing the letter); also in “Cyclops”?

—​

Appendix

256 MS pg Reference 12v

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Crossed out in red Chap that plays the big drum, for instance. His vocation in life (↓ b). Wonder when it first struck him. Asses’ skins they are made out of. Welt them black and blue while they live and then welt them after death Seem to be what you call backsheesh no I mean kismet. Point of view of the ass. Crossed out in red Margin: a) Pleasure him at home sitting in armchair. Pom. Pompedy. Pom. b) wallops c) 1904–​16 = 1888

Crossed out in red a frowsy whore with black straw hat askew came towards Mr Bloom. (^yes) She’s the (numbered one that night (^in the “16)” by lane). SSt! Any chance Joyce) of your washing. Knew Molly. Turn aside. Mr Bloom stood to view /​?/​ pictures in —​’s window. O. Interesting. How they know. Stout lady I saw you with in the brown costume. Put me off my town stroke. Is she passed? Robert Emmet. When my country takes her place. Softly. (↓ c) 13r

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Mickey Rooney’s band. Wonder how it first struck him. Sitting at home after pig’s cheek and cabbage nursing it in the armchair. Rehearsing his band part. Pom. Pompedy. Jolly for the wife. Asses’ skins. Welt them through life, then wallop after death. Pom. Wallop. Seems to be what you call yashmak or I mean kismet. Fate.” (U 11.1228–​33)

Stretto (Counter Subject—​outside Ormond)

“A frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the day along the quay towards Mr Bloom [. . .] Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane [. . .] Psst! Any chance of your wash. Knew Molly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be with you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke, that” (U 11.1252–​7) “She’s passing now [. . .] Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund” (U 11.1268) “Softly. When my country

Stretto (Counter Subject—​outside Ormond)

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Crossed out in red Margin c) Must be the cider of the burgun. Sway the nations of the earth. No one behind me. Then. not till then. Just coming. It must be the burgundy. Let my epitaph be written, I have. Bffffffff. Done.)

13r

13r

Crossed out in red Ben Dollard with bulky grace kechuchad some steps his gouty fingers nakkering as in the air by his ears on castagenettes.

Crossed out in red Winds sink blow from the (↓ a). Crossed out in red Margin: a) Custom. Shah of Persia (↓ b). b) Now if I did that in company, everyone would laugh. Lovely tone his voice has

13r

Text in “Sirens”

257

Episodi/​Stretto

takes her place among [. . .] Nations of the earth. No one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. [. . .] I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. [. . .] Written. I have. Pprrpffrrppffff. Done.” (U 11.1284–​94)

“Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes in the air.” (U 11.1151–​3)

Croppy Boy

“I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of custom shah of Persia.” (U 11.1247–​8) “Good voice he has still.” (U 11.1026)[?]‌

Stretto (Counter Subject—​­Outside Ormond)

Crossed out in red His voice told them “The chords consented. with consenting chords. Very sad thing. But had to be” (U 11.1121)

Croppy Boy

Appendix

258 MS pg Reference 13r

13r

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Crossed out in red Better not blot. He might read backward idea for a story. Prize tidbit. Incriminating loveletter written on blotting paper. Payment at the rate of one guinea per column.

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“Blot over the other so Intermezzo he can’t read. There. Right. Idea prize titbit. Something detective read off blottingpad. Payment at the rate of guinea per col.” (U 11.901–​3)

Crossed out in blue —​He’s witty in his own Not in “Sirens” (posway, Father Cow Ben sibly located in Dollard said. One night “Lestrygonians”) at a spread I xxx had to sing. (↓ d). Someone asked Bloom what Dan Dawson said in his speech. And says Bloom: I could hear what he said. Alderman O’Reilly was eating his soup.

—​

Crossed out in blue Margin: d) Bloom was sitting next ask Bobbob Crossed out in red Soulful eyes what do they think about? Night we were in the box at the Gaiety for tree in Trilby. I spoke to her about the 13v soul what Spinoza says in that book of papa’s. She listened. Her crocus dress (numbered low cut. ^ Full to be seen “17)” by She F listened quietly Joyce) meditative eyes. Chap in evening ^dress­circle pit staring at (^Down into) 13r

“Soulfully” (U 11.1044) Croppy Boy “What do they think when they hear music? [. . .] Night Michael Gunn gave us the box [. . .] She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on show. Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question. Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised,

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Text in “Sirens”

259

Episodi/​Stretto

her through his operaglasses from of course philosophy

13r 13v

13v

listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down into her with his operaglass Crossed out in red for all he was worth [. . .] Margin Philosophy. O rocks!” (U e) Michael Gunn 11.1049–​62) gone as (show identified as Trilby a) Clove trembling and actor as Beerbohm breath. To keep it secret? Tree in “Penelope”) b) F footlights glowering on the gilt pillars of the stage) Crossed out in red The harping chords were heard slow and penance. Ben The voice of the penitent informer sound of penance. Since Easter day thrice he ^had cursed. And (^at) masstime once he (^had gone) played. And by the churchyard in haste he went had gone and for his mother’s rest forgot to (^he had not) prayed Crossed out in red Margin: c) In nomine Dei. In God’s name penitent

13v

Crossed out in red Margin: d) he confessed the priest (↓ f) f) a false priest servant bade him welcome with traitor smile with curleques of chords

“The chords harped Croppy Boy slower. The voice of penance and of grief came slow, embellished, tremulous. Ben’s contrite beard confessed. In nomine Domini, in God’s name he knelt. He beat his hand upon his breast, confessing: mea culpa [. . .] Since Easter he had cursed three times [. . .] And once at masstime he had gone to play. Once by the churchyard he had passed and for his mother’s rest he had not prayed.” (U 11.1030–​43)

“A false priest’s servant bade him welcome. Step in. The holy father. With bows a traitor servant. Curlycues of chords.” (U 11.1016–​17)

Croppy Boy

Appendix

260 MS pg Reference 13v

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A Crossed out in blue —​It was the devil’s own time, Father Cowley said. I heard it from Little Peake who was bookkeeper then. Bloom put up a good fight. He we’s a hardworking chap, you see, attends to his business. Cuffe used to paw at him every time he met him. and Bloom at it quite coolly. Music without Words. In the end Bloom made some mistake or other and in fairness Cuffe wrote him a hell of a letter and the same night. But first, Bloom stood up to him. What did he do but tore up the letter into little bits and sent it back by in a registered envelope and from that poor day to this he was never seen in the office.

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

Not in “Sirens” (located in “Cyclops” and “Penelope”), and “Music without Words” links to “Circe”

—​

“Folly am I writing? Husbands don’t. That’s marriage does, their wives. Because I’m away from. Suppose. But how? She must.” (U 11.874–​5)

Intermezzo

Crossed out in blue Margin: e) Cuffe was fit to be tied 13v

Crossed out in red Folly it is I am writing. Husbands don’t. Is because I. Away from her. If I. But (↑ g) how? She must how? Crossed out in red Margin: g) their wives

Appendix MS pg Reference

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

13v

—​Bravo, Ben, Father Cowley cried. True men like your men are plenty here today. Eh Simon? —​I hope so, Mr Dedalus said affirmed.

13v

13v–​14r

13v

Crossed out in red With fatigue his voice called to (^bade) hear good men and true

Crossed out in red Across spine: Mr Bloom saw the delicate shell held and heard. You hear bronze. It’s waves of sea. It’s the sea of your own blood (↓i, j)

Crossed out in red Margin: h) No admittance except on business (↓ i) i) Her own ears like a pink shell. Is too. (↓ d) Only see the lobe. Hair braided over it. Shell with seaweed. Hide the way those Turkish women hide han mouth cover aphrodite?

261

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“—​True men like you men. —​Ay, ay, Ben.” (U 11.1276–​7)

Stretto (Subject—​ Ormond: Croppy Boy aftermath in bar)

“The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth’s fatigue made grave approach and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men and true.” (U 11.1007–​9)

Croppy Boy

“Bloom through the Intermezzo bardoor saw a shell held (Silent Roar) at their ears [. . .] Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there [. . .] Hair braided over: shell with seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks the mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet. Yashmak. Find the way in. A cave. No admittance except on business. The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in the ear sometimes. Well, it’s a sea. Corpuscle islands.” (U 11.934–​46)

Appendix

262 MS pg Reference

14r

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Episodi/​Stretto

j) For instance that singing sometimes in the ear. Blood is a sea. d) Martha, Yashmak. Molly in the bed, dark eyes over the sheet

Crossed out in red Give us Qui Sdegno, Ben, Father Cowley said (numbered No Ben, Mr Dedalus “18)” by said. Give us The Joyce) Croppy Boy 14r

14r

Text in “Sirens”

Crossed out in red Ben Dollard’s voice that is. Good ship’s chandler’s business he did at one time. Fine voice too, living in the Iveagh House. Number one Bass did that. Then Ruin them. Then build cubicles for them to die in. (↓a) Thinks he’s going to win a prize in that answers puzzle great writer’s puzzle. Bird sitting on their side of a nest with an egg in it. Thought it meant The Lay of the Last minstrel. Bass Number one Bass must have addled his brain a bit

—​Qui sdegno, Ben, said Croppy Boy Father Cowley. —​No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered. The Croppy Boy. Our native Doric. —​Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said.” (U 11.990–​2)

“Ben Dollard’s voice. Base barreltone. Doing his level best to say it. [. . .] Big ships’ chandler’s business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships’ lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him [. . .] Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days in. Hushaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die [. . .] Decent soul. Bit addled now. Thinks he’ll win in Crossed out in red Answers, poets’ picture Margin puzzle. We hand you a) Hushaby. Lullaby Do crisp five pound note. or die. Put in my little Bird sitting hatching in a Die Dog, little Dog, die nest. Lay of the last minb) after all the pints strel he thought it was.” picked (U 11.1011–​25)

Croppy Boy

Appendix MS pg Reference 14r

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A

Text in “Sirens”

Crossed out in blue One morning . . . not in “Sirens” (located in —​Ned Flaherty’s drake, “Circe”) Simon (^ditty), Father Cowley said. How is this that goes? (↓c)

263

Episodi/​Stretto —​

—​That was Jack Mountain’s song, Mr Dedalus said. The, I forget it now. He followed them crooning: + leading (^a plenty) —​ O the poor little fellow/​ His legs they were yellow/​He was plump, fat and heavy/​An brisk as a snake/​But some bloodysavage/​ To graize his white cabbage/​He murdered Nell Flaherty’s/​Duck loving Drake Crossed out in blue Margin: c) Bob Father Maguin he released from down the. . .? When Ann Moc Goragan again him work 14r

Crossed out in red At Geneva barracks he died. At Passage was his body laid. Calling to prayer the voice soared (^to bless you in peace, in joy). His soul should soar. Pray for him a prayer breathe a tear for the croppy boy

“At Geneva barrack that Croppy Boy young man died. At Passage was his body laid. Dolor! O, he dolores! The voice of the mournful chanter called to dolorous prayer [. . .] Pray for him, prayed the bass of Dollard. You who hear in peace. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear, good men, good people. He was the croppy boy.” (U 11.1131–​41)

Appendix

264 MS pg Reference 14r

14r

16 (loose sheet) (MS 36, 639/7B) (numbered “20)” by Joyce)

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7A+7B Crossed out in red Must be careful to write Greek ees. Dear Mady. Wonder can he see. Few lines [^Got your letter] Am in trouble. Change that ee. You know why. Accept little present enclosed. Tell me how will you punish me.

Crossed out in red They held it to an ear, each after other, hearing each for him, the plash of waves loudly, and each for other, the silent roar Ben Dollard laid it by her asked —​What are the wild waves saying?

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“Can’t see now. Intermezzo Remember write Greek ees [. . .] dear Mady. Got your lett and flow [. . .] Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accep my poor litt pres enclos.” (U 11.860–​66) “How will you pun? You punish me?” (U 11.890–​1) “a shell held at their ears. Intermezzo He heard more faintly (Silent roar) that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.” (U 11.934–​6) “—​What are the wild waves saying? he asked her, smiled” (U 11.949)

Crossed out in blue (L.B on R.G) Quite “Paint face behind on bald he is, behind. You him then he’d be two” could paint a serious (U 11.913–​14) face there for a (MS 36, 639/7B) lark. Thing he’d do himself. Then he’d be looking both ways. There is some God, Beside the back when you think of it quite as minds characteristic. I easily recognize fellow from behind. Woman, of course

Intermezzo

Appendix MS pg Reference 16

Fragment Text, MS 36, 639/7B Crossed out in red Old Glynn that instrument make it talk on his soul. Growling Queer up there alone in the loft with his back to the whole thing performance with his keys and stops. Growling surly then shrieking, cursing then wee soft wee little wind somewhere in a garden. Crossed out in red Margin: a) angry b) Want to cram cottonwool in his ear to go Deaf

16

Crossed out in blue Tuning up. Queer. Shah of Persia at the in Houridoes concert said he liked that the best. Reminded him of home sweet home, probably Dulcimers. Trousered girls sitting crosslegged. Wiped his nose in a window curtain too. Wonder what else he did. All depends on the custom. Margin: c) Anti art d) Lumteetumtoo

265

Text in “Sirens”

Episodi/​Stretto

“All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you never know exac. Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year. Queer up there in the cockloft, alone, with stops and locks and keys. Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing (want to have wadding or something in his no don’t she cried), then all of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.” (U 11.1196–​202)

Stretto (Counter subject—​outside Ormond)

“Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too. Custom his country perhaps” (U 11.1050–​2)

Croppy Boy

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Vichnar, David, Michael Groden, and David Spurr, eds. Praharfeast—​James Joyce in Prague. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia Books, 2012. Von Rohr Scaff, Susan. “The Vitality of Music in Mann and Joyce: Wagner in ‘Fullness of Harmony’ and ‘Sirens.’ ” Orbis Litteratum 64.6 (2009): 439–​56. Von Westerhagen, Curt. Wagner: A Biography. Trans. Mary Whittall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Wagner, Richard. “The Music of the Future.” Trans. Edward L. Burlingame. In Art, Life and Theory of Richard Wagner: Selected from His Writings and Translated. 2nd edn. New York: Henry Holt, 1909, 132–​89. Wagner, Richard. “The Purpose of the Opera.” Trans. Edward L. Burlingame. In Art, Life and Theory of Richard Wagner: Selected from His Writings and Translated. 2nd edn. New York: Henry Holt, 1909, 203–​41. Wagner, Richard. “The Virtuoso and the Artist (1840).” Trans. William Ashton Ellis. In Paris and Dresden: Richard Wagner’s Prose Works. Volume 7. Reprinted from 1898 Routledge and Kegan Edition. New York: Broude Brothers, 1966, 108–​22. Wagner, Richard. “Wagner on Bellini.” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 27.516 (February 1, 1886): 66–​8. Walker, Paul M. “Stretto.” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press. Accessed March 3, 2017. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/​ subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​26948 Wang, Jennie. “The Player’s Song of Finnegans Wake: Translating Sound Sense.” Journal of Narrative Technique 21.2 (Spring 1991): 212–​23. Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–​1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Weaver, Jack W. Joyce’s Music and Noise—​Theme and Variation in His Writings. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Weliver, Phyllis. “Music, Crowd Control and the Female Performer in Trilby.” In The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Ed. Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, 57–​82. Weliver, Phyllis. Women Musicians in Victorian Fiction, 1860–​1900: Representations of Music, Science and Gender in the Leisured Home. Burlington: Ashgate, 2000. White, Harry. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Whitley, Catherine. “The Politics of Representation in Finnegans Wake’s ‘Ballad.’ ” In Joycean Cultures/​Culturing Joyce. Ed. Vincent J. Cheng, Kimberly J. Devlin, and Margot Norris. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998, 163–​76. Whittall, Arnold. “Neo-​classicism.” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press. Accessed January 13, 2017. www.oxfordmusiconline. com/​subscriber/​article/​grove/​music/​19723

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Index Note: Page numbers in italics denote figures. Abhandlung von der Fuge (Marpurg) 116 Abrams, M. H. 67 n.48, 71 n.133 absolute music 2–​8, 14 n.19, 18, 25–​39, 42–4, 47–​62, 67 n.48, 68 n.79, 114–​19, 175–​6, 195, 197, 211–​12. See also instruments (musical); music; non-​referentiality (of music); pure music; “Sirens” episode Adorno, Theodor 189, 223 aesthetics (music’s place in) 17–​18, 22–​41, 59, 62, 71 n.133, 82 n.271, 87–​8, 102–​3, 188–​91, 219. See also autonomy (of art); language; music; painting; poetry; soundsense affects. See music “After the Race” (Joyce) 98–​9, 102–​4, 107 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 223 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 20 Allingham, William 229–​30, 238 n.62 All Is Lost Now 133, 142–​50, 154, 161, 162–​3, 162, 179–​81, 198, 202–​3, 206–​7 Anders-​streben 36–​8, 53, 57, 62 n.6 Antheil, George 3–​4, 173 n.104 Après Midi d’un Faune 101 “Araby” (Joyce) 92, 96–​7 Aristotle 14 n.19, 67 n.48 Arrayed for the Bridal 106, 112 n.53 The Art of Fugue (Bach) 118, 123 “The Artwork of the Future” (Wagner) 29 atonalism 2, 119 Attridge, Derek 103 Au Clair de la Lune (Debussy) ​40, ​41 aural qualities 8, 18–​28, 31–​2, 42–​7, 56–​7, 188–​91, 197–​202, 218–​33 autonomy (of art) 25–​6, 33, 35, 37–​40, 44, 66 n.42, 87. See also psychology; subjectivity Babbitt, Irving 71 n.133 Bach, Carl Philip Emanuel 50, 56 Bach, Johann Sebastian 49–​52, 54–​5, 76 n.199, 116–​18, 123, 221 The Ballad Book (Allingham) 229–​30

The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly 10, 218, 223–​33, 242 The Ballad of Tradition (Gerould) 228 Barry, Kevin 17 Bartok, Béla 49, 85 Bauerle, Ruth 2, 226 Beckett, Samuel 10, 39, 220 Beethoven, Ludwig van 18–​22, 26, 29, 31, 43–​56, 59, 63 n.16 Berlioz, Hector 44 Bibliotheca Madrigaliana (Rimbault) 5 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 30, 69 n.90 Bishop, John 219 Bizet, Georges 4, 87–​8, 90–​2 Blanchot, Maurice 176 Bloom’s Old Sweet Song (Bowen) 2 Blue Eyes and Golden Hair 94 “The Boarding House” (Joyce) 93, 98 The Bohemian Girl (Balfe) 53, 97, 102 Bowen, Zack 2, 87, 89–​90, 95, 110 n.36, 111 n.46, 119, 166 n.28, 214 n.14, 227 Brahms, Johannes 52 Bray Boat Club 1 Bronze by Gold (Knowles) 2 “The Bronzegold Sirensong” (Bowen) 166 n.28 Brown, Susan 129, 169 n.68, 170 n.70 Budde, Gudrun 164 n.17 Budgen, Frank 209 Burgess, Anthony 3, 120​, 124, 155, 221–2 Burney, Charles 5, 50, 77 n.200, 117 Busoni, Ferrucio 49–​50, 56, 76 n.199, 118, 131 Butler, Christopher 76 n.193 Cadet Roussel 99 Cage, John 200 “Calypso” episode 196 Campbell, Matthew 108 n.10, 225 canons 114–​15, 124–​5, 132–​3, 154. See also fuga per canonem; fugues

292

Index

Cantos (Pound) 59, 113–​14 Carmen (Bizet) 6–​7, 88–​92 Caruso, Enrico 225–​6 The Case of Wagner (Nietzsche) 6, 32, 87–91 Casudas de Poulichinello Artahut (Taiocebo) 230–​1 Cello Concerto (Saint-​Saens) 77 n.204 “Census of the Extant Ulysses Manuscript by Episode” (Crispi) 120 Chamber Music (Joyce) 3–​6, 9, 15 n.26, 86–​7, 91, 108 n.10, 241 Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Watt) 229 Chopin, Frédéric 42–​3, 199 “Circe” episode 3, 9–​10, 62, 98, 195–​212, 216 n.23, 232, 241–​2 Classicism (in music) 25 “Clay” (Joyce) 6, 92, 97–​8 codetta 129–30, 139, 241–​2 Cole, David W. 125, 168 n.61 collectivity 177–​88 “A Commentary on James Joyce’s National Library of Ireland ‘Early Commonplace Book’” (Crispi) 14 n.18 concert halls 19 condition of music 17–​18, 26, 35–​41, 59, 62, 71 n.133, 82 n.271, 219 content (and form) 2–​8, 34–​9, 47–​62, 117–​ 19, 175–​6, 201–​12, 219–​20, 223–​33 contra esposizione (counterexposition) 101–11, 116​, 125, 130, 132, 136, 138–42, 146, 154, 208–9​ contrasoggetto 129–​30, 132, 134–​7, 150, 177 Cooke, T. 132–​3 Coriolanus Overture (Beethoven) 53–​4 counterpoint 49–​56, 114–​19, 123–​9, 135–​7, 177, 180–​8, 218, 221–​2 countersubject 115–​16, 125, 128–​30, 132–​7, 140, 142–4, 146, 149–52, 155, 157–​64, 177–8, 180, 187–8, 201, 206 Crispi, Luca 4, 14 n.18, 109 n.15, 120, 159, 167 n.35, 169 n.66, 173 n.110 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 24, 66 nn.42–​3 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 66 n.43 The Croppy Boy (McBurney) 127, 133–​4, 143, 149–​63, 180–​1, 186–​9, 198, 202–​11 D’Abigny, Julie 44 da capo 241–​2

Dahlhaus, Carl 25, 64 n.19, 67 n.48 Daiches, David 222, 235 n.28 Dalton, Jack P. 222 D’Arcy, Bartell 106 Dark Rosaleen (Mangan) 4 “The Dead” (Joyce) 6, 56, 98–​9, 102, 104–​7, 221 deafness 22–​3 Debussy, Claude 4, 48, 50, 58 De Machaut, Guillaume 115 Denza, Luigi 10 n.2 Der fliegende Holländer (Wagner) 28–​9 Der Nussbaum (Schumann) 41 Der Ring des Nibelungen (Wagner) 19 Der Virtuos und der Künstler (Wagner) 45 Deutsch, David 80 n.244, 81 n.256 The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 189 Diderot, Denis 8, 18, 22–​3, 25–​6, 65 n.28, 65 n.30 dissipations and dissolutions 93–​107, 114, 132–​3, 148–​9, 175–​91, 195, 199–​212, 241–​2. See also fugues; psychology; subjectivity dissociative fugue 191 n.3. See also psychology divertimento, 130, 140, 143, 197 “Does Painting or Music Have a Greater Effect” (Herder) 24–​5 Dooleysprudence (Joyce) 4 double fugues 9, 114, 123, 128–​63, 170 n.76, 179. See also fugues Dracula (Stoker) 40, 72 n.151 drama 27–​36, 46–​7, 63 n.13, 88. See also music; opera; specific works “Drama and Life” (Joyce) 88–​9 The Dramatic Review 51 Dubliners (Joyce) 6, 92, 96–​7, 99, 101–​7, 197, 226, 241–​2. See also specific stories The Dublin Helix (Knowles) 192 n.9 Dubois, Théodore 118 Du Maurier, George 40–​7, 55 “Early Commonplace Book” (Joyce) 4–​5, 14 n.18, 84, 84–​6 Eichelberger, Carl 119 Eliot, T. S. 8, 48, 54, 59–​61, 82 n.271 Ellmann, Richard 62 n.3, 99, 202, 215 n.17 “An Encounter” (Joyce) 92

Index episodi 130–​3, 142–​51, 156, 159, 163, 172 n.98, 172 n.103, 181, 201–​12, 241–​2. See also specific episodes esposizione (exposition) 115–17, 123, 130–3, 137–​41, 150, 154. 177 “Eveline” (Joyce) 97, 102, 107 Exiles (Joyce) 6, 89, 91–​2, 107, 241 Expressionism 49 eyes (as fugal elements) 136–​7, 177, 185–​8 Fantasia Contrappuntistica (Busoni) 49–​50, 56, 76 n.199, 131 Fauser, Annegret 46 Feis Ceoil competition 1, 10 n.2 Ferrer, Daniel 169 n.66, 169 n.68 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 3, 6–​7, 10, 39, 87, 106, 217–​33, 236 n.43, 242 A First-​Draft Version of Finnegans Wake (Hayman) 231 Fischer, Andreas 120, 124, 166 n.31 folk songs 1, 11 nn.3–​4, 41, 43, 50, 77 n.204, 84–​5, 231. See also specific songs “Forerunners of Modern Music” (Cage) 200 form (and content) 2–​8, 34–​9, 47–​62, 117–​19, 175–​6, 201–​12, 219–​20, 223–​33. See also absolute music; fugues; Modernism; music Forster, E. M. 8, 48, 53–​4, 56–​8, 80 n.244, 218, 233 Four Quartets (Eliot) 59–​60 free fugues 116–​17, 130, 164 n.18 Friedman, Melvin J. 222 “Fugal Structures in the Sirens Episode of Ulysses” (Cole) 125 fuga per canonem “Circe” and 201–​12 in drafts of “Sirens” 120–​1, 121, 126–32, 157–​63 effects of 175–​91 “Sirens” as 2, 7, 113–​14, 123–5, 132–​57, 167 n.38, 241–​2 Fugue (Horsley) 114–​16 “Fugue out of Fashion” (Shaw) 51 fugues Bach’s forms of 51–​2, 54–​5, 76 n.199, 116–​18, 123, 221 in “Circe” 201–​12 double fugues and 9, 114, 123, 128–​63, 170 n.76, 179

293 form-​content considerations and 8, 35, 175–​6, 201–​12 free fugues and 116–​17, 130, 164 n.18 linguistic forms of 182–​5 literary form and 60–​1 Modernism and 48, 113–​14 as psychological states 9–​10, 175–​6, 180–​91, 200–​1, 241–​2 structural variation in 9, 128–​9, 164 nn.17–​18, 170 n.76, 170 n.78, 202–​3 in “The Dead” 56. See also fuga per canonem; “Sirens” episode

Gabler, Hans Walter 84 Gautier, Théophile 44 The Gay Science (Nietzsche) 94 Gédalge, André 118, 164 n.17 A General History of Music (Burney) 5, 50, 77 n.200, 117 A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (Hawkins) 5, 77 n.200 Gerould, Gordon Hall 228 Gervais, Terence White 218–​19 Gifford, Don 196, 211 Gilbert-​Linati schema 113–​14, 177, 179 Giorgione 35–​6 Glasheen, Adaline 226, 231 Gogarty, Oliver St John 10 n.2 Goodbye, Sweetheart, Goodbye 140–​2, 151, 197, 209 Gorman, Herbert 62 n.3 Gracombe, Sarah 72 n.151 greasy (as fugal element) 136–​7, 155 Groden, Michael 157 The Groves of Blarney 94 Hacking, Ian 175–​6 Handel, George Frideric 116, 118 Hanslick, Eduard 8, 18, 22, 26–​40, 42–​3, 52–​3, 70 n.108, 71 n.134, 219–​20 Harrington, Judith 2 Hawkins, John 5, 77 n.200 Hayden, Joseph 18–​20 Hayman, David 231, 233 n.1 Heath, Stephen 10, 235 n.35 Henigan, Julie 99 Hepburn, Allan 97

294

Index

Herder, Johann Gottfried 18, 22, 24–​6, 29, 66 n.43 Herman, David 119 Hodgart, Matthew 2, 225, 231 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 18–​22, 28–​9, 43, 56–​7, 64 n.19 Holst, Gustav 49 Homer 176–​80 Horkheimer, Max 189 The Hornet 51 Horsley, Imogene 114–​16, 170 n.76 Howards End (Forster) 56–​8, 189 Howarth, Robert 15 n.26, 220 Hughes, Herbert 3 Huxley, Aldous 8, 48–​50, 52–​4, 56, 59, 77 n.203, 113–​14

musical knowledge of 1–​9, 11 n.3, 17, 20, 48, 54, 60–​2, 62 n.3, 83–​4, 92, 101–​3, 114–​25, 128–​30, 169 n.63, 170 n.78, 172 n.98, 217–​33, 241 notebooks of 4, 217, 233 n.1, 241–​2, 245–​63. See also absolute music; Modernism; pure music; specific works Joyce, Lucia 7 Joyce, Stanislaus 10 n.2, 14 n.23, 15 n.26, 86 Joyce and the Science of Rhythm (Martin) 108 n.10 Joyce and Wagner (Martin) 2 Joyce’s Grand Operoar (Hodgart and Bauerle) 2 Joyce’s Music and Noise (Weaver) 165 n.25 Joyce’s Nietzschean Aesthetics (Slote) 89 Joyce’s Voices (Kenner) 210, 215 n.21

The Idea of Absolute Music (Dahlhaus) 67 n.48 I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls 87, 98 The Illustrated London News 51 Impressionism 48 Impromptu in A Flat (Chopin) 42–3, 47, 213 n.4 ineffability (of music) 27, 33, 37–​8. See also music Inman, Billie Andrew 71 n.134 instruments (musical) 2–​3, 8, 18–​22, 28–​35, 37–​9, 87–​8, 197–​9, 241 intermezzo 133, 147–​50, 154, 156, 161, 162–​3, 162, 173 n.104, 179–​80, 200–​4  “Introduction to Valéry’s Art of Poetry” (Eliot) 61

Kalligone (Herder) 66 n.43 Kandinsky, Wassily 118–​19 Kant, Immanuel 18, 22, 24–​6, 29, 34, 38, 66 n.42 Kenner, Hugh 210, 215 n.21 Kerman, Joseph 55 Killarney (Balfe) 97 Knowles, Sebastian 2, 165 n.24, 192 n.9 Kreisleriana (Hoffmann) 21 Kresky, Jeffrey 119 Kristeva, Julia 223

James Joyce (Levin) 124 James Joyce Archive 4 “The James Joyce I Knew” (Stephens) 11 n.3 The James Joyce Songbook (Bauerle) 2 jazz 2 Jewishness 40, 72 n.151 Joyce, James absolute music and 2–​3, 99–​101 formal innovations of 59, 62, 102–​7, 113–​14, 119–​25 fugue’s conception by 114–​25

La Bohème (Puccini) 99 La Gioconda (Pater’s review of) 21, 43 language aural experiences of 227–​33, 242 literary form and 2–​3, 6–​8, 34–​9, 47–​62, 117–​19, 175–​6, 201–​12, 219–​33 music and 8–​9, 11 n.4, 22–​8, 33, 37–​8, 40–​1, 52–​4, 59–​60, 62, 76 n.193, 95–​6, 124–​5, 195, 197–​212, 228–​33 orality and 227–​33 songs without words and 62, 92–​102, 197–​8, 227–​33. See also literature; music; music without words; words without music Larbaud, Valeru 196 La Somnambula 133, 144, 181–​2 The Lass of Aughrim 99, 106 Lees, Heath 122–​3

Index leitmotif 119 “Leonardo da Vinci” (Pater) 21 L’essemplare o sia saggio fondamentale pratico di contrappunto (Martini) 117 “Letter on the Blind” (Diderot) 65 n.28 “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb” (Diderot) 23, 65 n.28 Levin, Harry 124 Levin, Lawrence 124–​5 libretto 8–9, 85, 95, 97–100, 144, 146, 150, 156, 172 n.97, 172 n.103, 182, 186, 198–200, 220, 242 Lieder ohne worte (Mendelssohn) 213 nn.4–​5 Linati schema 113–​14, 177, 188 listening practices 8, 18–​28, 31–​2, 42–​7, 56–​7, 188–​91, 197–​202, 218–​33 “Literary Music” (Huxley) 52 literature form-​content issues and 56–​62, 83, 102–​7 music referenced in 40–​2, 43, 83, 86–​7, 89–​90, 92–​102 musical structure and 102–​7, 119–​32, 217–​33, 241–​2 music’s relation to 2–​4, 8, 17–​18, 24–​5, 31–​5 program music and 20, 32–​4, 44, 48–​53, 58–​60, 63 n.15. See also language; specific authors, Ulysses episodes, and works “A Little Cloud” (Joyce) 92–​3 The Little Review, 121 Litz, A. Walton 7, 119, 217 Love and War 127, 133, 142–​6, 150, 154–​60, 161, 162–​3, 162, 180, 182, 189, 198, 202, 206 Love’s Old Sweet Song (song) 85–​6 Luening, Otto 3 lyrics 31–​2, 48, 86, 94–​100, 145–​7, 197, 227. See also language; music without words; words without music; specific songs Machlis, Joseph 49 Mad Travelers (Hacking) 175–​6 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier) 44 Magazine of Music 51 Magee, William K. 10 n.2 Magrini, Gustavo 4 Mahaffey, Vicki 84 The Making of Ulysses (Budgen) 209

295

Mallarmé, Stéphane 17 Mangan, James Clarence 4 Manuale di musica teorico-​practico (Magrini) 4 M’appari (Flotow) 133, 142–​50, 154, 161, 162–​3, 162, 172 n.100, 180–​91, 198–​207, 214 n.14 Marpurg, Friederich Wilhelm 116, 118, 129 Martha (Flotow) 215 n.20 Martin, Timothy 2, 119 Martin, William 108 n.10 Martini, Giambattista 116–​18, 129–​31, 164 n.18 McBurney, William 133 McCormack, John 1, 10 n.2 McGrath, F. C. 35, 71 n.134 Mendelssohn, Felix 213 nn.4–​5 mesmerism ​40 Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Herder) 66 n.43 “Mining the Ore of ‘Sirens’” (Rogers) 123–​4 minstrels 230 The Mirror and the Lamp (Abrams) 67 n.48, 71 n.133 Modernism absolute music and 2–​3, 18, 47–​62, 241–​2 condition of music and 17–​18, 26, 35–​41, 59, 62, 71 n.133, 82 n.271, 219 drama and 88–​9 form-​content issues in 5–​6, 8, 37–​9, 47–​62, 113–​14, 118–​19, 219–​20 instrumental technology and 8, 18–​22 musical genre and technique and 2, 8, 10, 18, 49–​62 Pater’s aesthetics and 35–​9. See also form (and content); fugues; Joyce, James; language; specific authors and works The Moldau (Smetana) 57 mood 18, 59, 63, 83, 92–​5, 146, 213–​14 Mosen, Julius 40 Moss, Gemma 80 n.244 “A Mother” (Joyce) 6, 97 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 19–​20, 45, 51–​2 music absolute music and 2–​3, 8–​9, 18, 25, 28–​39, 42–3, 66 n.42, 67 n.48, 114–​19, 195, 211–​12, 221, 242

296

Index

atonalism and 2, 119 condition of 17–​18, 26, 35–​41, 43–​4, 59, 62, 62 n.6, 71 n.133, 82 n.271, 219 dissolution and 93–​103, 114, 132–​3, 148–​9, 175–​6, 180–​8, 195, 199–​201 drama and 27–​35, 46–​7, 63 n.13, 87–​9 effects of 3, 22–​8, 31–​2, 34–​5, 38–​9, 83, 92, 99–​103, 106–​7, 114, 118–​19, 175–​91, 195, 218–​23 of the eye 10, 56–​8, 118–​19, 212, 220–​33, 242 formal structures of 5–​6, 25–​8, 34–​5, 37–​9, 47–​62, 83, 102–​7, 113–​19, 217 human voice and 3, 11 n.4, 20–​6, 40–​6, 197–​9 ineffability of 27, 33, 37–​8 instrumentation and 8, 18–​22, 28–​35, 37–​9, 87–​8, 241 Joycean scholars on 2, 4–​7, 84, 87, 89, 95–​6, 119–​25 language and 8–​9, 11 n.4, 17–​18, 22, 24–​8, 31–​5, 40–​1, 52–​4, 59–​61, 66 n.42, 76 n.193, 86–​7, 95–​6, 107, 124–​5, 195, 197–​212, 228–​33 listening practices and 8, 18–​28, 31–​2, 42–​3, 46–​7, 56–​7, 188–​91, 197–​202, 218–​33 lyrics and 31–​2, 48, 86, 94–​100, 145–​7, 197, 227 non-​referentiality of 2, 8, 40–​7, 52, 54, 59, 76 n.193, 95, 107, 195 painting and 24–​5, 48–​9, 118–​19 philosophy of 22–​8 poetry and 4–​6, 17–​18, 25, 29–​30, 85, 113–​14 program 20, 32–​4, 44, 48–​53, 58–​60, 63 n.15 pure music and 2–​3, 18, 39, 217–​33, 242 rhythm and 84–​6, 99–​101, 107, 186–​7, 220 Romantic era of 18–​22 sacred 5–​6 terminology of 20, 60–​2, 83, 101, 114–​ 19, 124–​5, 129–​30, 170 n.78, 172 n.98 text and 8 visual effects and 10, 17–​18, 23, 56–​8, 118–​19, 212, 220–​3, 232, 242 “Music” (Pound) 50–​1 Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce (Bowen) 2, 87, 89–90, 95

“Musical Form and Polyphony in Wake” (Shockley) 222 The Musician 51 “Music Lesson” (Dalton) 222 “The Music of Poetry” (Eliot) 59–​61 “The Music of the Future” (Wagner) 29, 69 n.82 music without words 62, 92–​102, 195, 201–​12, 241–​2 Mussorgsky, Modesto 53 Nation 86 “The Need for Poetic Drama” (Eliot) 60–​1 neo-​Classicism 47–​9 The New Age 50–​1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 8, 18, 22, 28–​32, 63 n.13, 69 n.90, 87–​90, 94 nocturnes 17–​18 non-​referentiality (of music) 2, 8, 40–​7, 54, 59, 76 n.193, 95, 107, 195 Norma (Bellini) 56, 75 n.179 Norris, Margot 110 n.42 “Not Listening to Music” (Forster) 53–​4 The Novel and the Modern World (Daiches) 222 O, twine me a bower 94 O’Brien, Michael 112 n.53 Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings (Joyce) 83–​92 O’Donovan Rossa 96 The Odyssey (Homer) 176–​80 Oft in the Stilly Night 94–​5 O’Hanlon, John 225 opera 19–​20, 45–​6, 75 n.183, 119 Opera and Drama (Wagner) 33 Ordway, Scott J. 119 Othello (Shakespeare) 91 Our Exagmination (Beckett) 39 “Oxen of the Sun” episode 196 “A Painful Case” (Joyce) 93, 102–​3 painting 24–​5, 48–​9, 118–​19 Palmer, George Molyneux 6 Pater, Walter 21–​3, 26, 28–​9, 35–9, 43, 52–​3, 62 n.6, 82 n.271, 219 pedale 131, 155–​7 performances (in Ulysses) 101–​7, 127, 140–​51, 156, 179–​90, 197–​202, 226–​7

Index The Phantom of the Opera (Leroux) 40 Picking Up Airs (Bauerle) 2 poetry 4–​6, 17–​18, 25, 29–​30, 85, 113–​14 Poets and Dreamers (Gregory) 17 Point Counter Point (Huxley) 59 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 87, 92, 94, 99, 101–​2, 241–​2 Pound, Ezra 8, 48, 50–​2, 54, 59, 113–​14, 167 n.38 Power, Arthur 10 n.2, 11 n.4 The Present State of Music in France and Italy (Burney) 5 program music 20, 32–​4, 44, 48–​53, 58–​60, 63 n.15 “Proteus” episode 126, 157, 173 n.110 “Proust” (Beckett) 220 psychology 9–​10, 175–​6, 180–​91, 241–​2. See also fugues; music; subjectivity pure music 2–​3, 7–8, 18, 39, 54, 62, 106–​7, 184, 199, 217–​33, 242 quadrilles 105–​7 Quarles, Philip 59 Queen of the Night (Mozart) 67 n.50 Rabaté, Jean-​Michel 10, 186 Ravel, Maurice 48 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich 64 n.19 representation 26–​7, 29–​30, 32–​4, 53–​4, 56–​62. See also aesthetics (music’s place in); non-​referentiality (of music) rhythm 84–​6, 99–​101, 107, 186–​7, 220 Riders to the Sea (Joyce) 62 n.3 Riemann, Hugo 118 Robinson, Henry Morton 225 Rogers, Margaret 123–​4, 168 n.47 Romantic era (in music) 19, 21–​2, 47–​9, 71 n.133, 77 n.204. See also specific artists and composers Rose, Danis 225 Rosen, Charles 55 Roughley, Alan 227 rovesciamento 130 “Royal Hibernian Academy—‘Ecce Homo’” (Joyce) 88–​9 Savio, Antonio Fonda and Letitzia Fonda 11 n.4 Schiff, Daniel J. 237 n.57

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Schiller, Friedrich 31 Schopenhauer, Arthur 8, 18, 22, 26–​31, 38, 68 n.61, 220 Scribbledehobble (notebook) 217 “Scylla and Charybis” episode 216 n.24 Senn, Fritz 212 n.3 sense perception 22–​8, 34–​5, 40, 99–​101, 132–​3. See also aural qualities; music; visual effects (of music) sensesound 10, 218–​23, 235 n.28, 242 The Sensible Spirit (McGrath) 35, 71 n.134 Septuor (Vinteuil) 220 Shaw, George Bernard 51–​3 Shaw-​Miller, Simon 76 n.194 Sheehy, Eugene 3 Shockley, Alan 119, 166 n.32, 168 n.47, 222, 234 n.27, 235 n.31 sightsense 118–​19. See also under music; visual effects (of music) The Silence of the Sirens (Kafka) 191 Silent O’Moyle 95–​6 “‘Sirens’ after Schönberg” (Herman) 119 “Sirens” episode absolute music and 197, 226–​7 “Circe” and 201–​12, 216 n.23 drafts of 120–2, 121, 125–​32, 127, 157–​63, 158, 161, 162, 167 n.38, 173 n.110 as fuga per canonem 2, 7–​9, 62, 106, 113, 122–​5, 132–​63, 167 n.38, 175, 200, 241–​2 fugue states in 9–​10, 232 music without words in 98, 195–201 scholarship on 2–​3, 119–​25 transcriptions of 245–​63. See also absolute music; “Circe” episode; form (and content); Ulysses (Joyce) Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (Campbell and Robinson) 236 n.45 Slote, Sam 89, 172 n.93 Smith, Don Noel 119 soggetto (subject) 123, 125, 128–​43, 146, 150–​2, 155, 156–60, 163, 177, 206 Sonata (Vinteuil) 220 sonatas 23, 45, 51–​4, 58–​62, 63 n.16, 82 n.271, 119, 165 n.25 Song in the Works of James Joyce (Hodgart and Worthington) 2 Song of Fionnuola 95 Song of Solomon 87 “The Song of the Sirens” (Blanchot) 176

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Index

songs without words 62, 92–​102, 197–​8, 227–​33. See also language; music soundsense 10, 118–​19, 218–​23, 235 n.28, 242 space 83, 92–​5, 132–​40, 158, 183 The Star 51 Stephen Hero (Joyce) 86, 107 Stephens, James 11 n.3 Stewart, Garrett 222 “Strange Words, Strange Music” (Fischer) 124 Strauss, Richard 53 Stream of Consciousness (Friedman) 222 Stretto 117, 131, 133, 151–​5, 159, 161–​3, 201 “The String Quartet” (Woolf) 59 String Quartet no. 15 (Beethoven) 59 Student’s Guide (Hodgart) 231 Studies on the Renaissance (Pater) 35–​7 subjectivity 176–​91, 203–​7, 241–​2. See also dissipations and dissolutions; psychology “Subjugation” (Joyce) 84, 86 Suburban Tenor (Harrington) 2 Suite in B Minor (Bach) 59 Sultan, Stanley 119 “sweet cheat” device 188–​91 Symons, Arthur 86 Symphony no. 5 (Beethoven) 20–​2, 26, 43, 56, 64 n.17 Symphony no. 9 (Beethoven) 29 synesthesia 23 Tannhäuser (Wagner) 6–​7, 46, 70 n.108, 88, 90–​1 Taylor, Jonathan 72 n.151 Tchaikovsky, P. I. 19 technology (in musical instrumentation) 8, 18–​22 Tela Contrappuntistica 107, 130–​3, 141–​55, 159–​63, 162, 180–​9, 195, 200–​2, 212, 241–​2 terminology (musical) 20, 60–​2, 83, 87, 101–​7, 114–​19, 124–​30, 170 n.78, 172 n.98 Third Census to Finnegans Wake (Glasheen) 231 This Man and Music (Burgess) 120, 124, 222 Thornton, Weldon 196

Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 94 Tieck, Ludwig 64 n.19 ’Tis the Last Rose of Summer 152–​4 Tovey, Donald 53, 76 n.199, 79 n.222, 118 Traité de contrepoint et de fugue (Dubois) 118 Traité de la fugue (Gédalge) 118 Trilby (Du Maurier) 40–​7, 55–​6, 74 n.173, 199, 213 n.4 “Two Gallants” (Joyce) 95–​8 Ulin, Julieann Veronica 111 n.48 Ulysses (Joyce) intertextuality in 91 musical allusions in 6–​9, 85, 242 performances in 101–​2, 127, 140–​51, 156, 179–​90, 197–​9, 202–12 publication of 217 rhythm in 85–​6 scholarship on 119–​25, 157, 169 n.63, 196–​7, 209–​10 Trilby and 4​ 0, 213 n.4. See also specific episodes Ulyssses on the Liffey (Ellmann) 202 visual effects (of music) 10, 56–​8, 118–​19, 212, 220–​3, 232, 242 voice (as instrument) 3, 11 n.4, 20–​2, 25–​6, 40, 43–​6, 197–​9 Wagner, Richard 8, 22, 28–​36, 218 instrumentation of 19, 49, 52–​3, 56, 68 n.79, 75 n.179 Joyce and 2, 4, 8, 18, 83–​4, 89–​91 literary references to 44–​6 Nietzsche on 6–​7, 28–​32, 63 n.13, 87–​92 operas of 19–​20 Schopenhauer and 28–​9. See also specific works waltzes 106 “Wandering Rocks” episode 172 n.93, 196 Wang, Jennie 222 Watt, Tessa 229–​30 Weaver, Harriet Shaw 1, 113, 120, 165 n.25, 175 Weaver, Jack 119 The Weekly Westminster Gazette 49–​50 Well Tempered Clavier (Bach) 118

Index Whitley, Catherine 224, 226 Whittington Chimes 4 Wiener Allgemeine Musik-​Zeitung 70 n.108 Wilbye, John 14 n.18 will, the 26–​7, 30, 68 n.61 Williams, Ralph Vaughan 168 n.61 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) 230 Wolf, Werner 197 “The Woman Hidden in James Joyce’s Chamber Music” (Boyle) 14 n.23 Woolf, Virginia 8, 48, 54, 59 “‘Words? Music? No: It’s What’s Behind’” (Eichelberger) 119

words without music 201–​12, 227–​33, 241–​2. See also language; music Works (Wilbye) 14 n.18 The World 51 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) 26, 28–​9 Worthington, Mabel 2 Yeats, W. B. 54, 85 Zarlino, Gioseffo 115 Zimmerman, Nadya 169 n.63

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