‘Sirens’ has more one-word paragraphs than most episodes. ‘Admiring’ (11:777) might summarise the general amount of admiration that’s been going on after Dedalus’s song (Joyce’s rendition of public admiration is an example of how acute he can be at such collective experiences, just as he generally is at bar-room scenes), or the specific act of admiration from Leopold Bloom, last seen singing dumb – in which case he could conceivably be admiring Lydia Douce (but can he see her?), but more likely, like everyone else, is admiring Simon Dedalus’s voice.
Richie Goulding, ‘admiring’ (11:778), certainly is. He spends three paragraphs now telling Bloom of his admiration, and specifically of his appreciation not just of the song they’ve just heard but of a time, ‘one night long ago’, that Dedalus sang ‘Twas rank and fame that tempted thee’, from Michael Balfe’s opera The Rose of Castille (1857), at Ned Lambert’s house. In general this seems another case of Joyce’s practice of building in the back-story of a generation, similar to the personal histories whose insertion into Ulysses has been genetically traced by Luca Crispi in Joyce’s Creative Process and the Construction of Character in ‘Ulysses’: Becoming the Blooms (2015). We didn’t, though, pause to look into the genetic history of Goulding’s anecdote, focusing rather on the verb ‘to descant’. It means to talk at length, often with connotations of tedium; it’s also musical, signifying a high treble line above the rest of a composition. The main sense here, then, is that Goulding is being a loquacious bore; but his talk of music is described with a strongly musical verb.
‘That man’s glorious voice’ (11:778) is rendered outside direct speech, but looks like a version of Goulding’s actual words. ‘Si’ is an unusual contraction but seems to be what Goulding, specifically, calls him (see 11:667), as an in-law. (Hugh Kenner, who definitely wasn’t an in-law, sometimes called the character ‘Si’, in an inappropriate access of familiarity.) The ‘twas’ in ‘in Ned Lambert’s ‘twas’ looks like a deliberate echo of ‘‘Twas rank and fame’ (11:780): but could Goulding actually be saying it, too? Members of the group thought so, even if we don’t remember ‘‘twas’ being a common locution in Joyce. The line ‘Good God he never heard in all his life a note like that he never did’ is a recognisable mode of exaggerated praise about music: Goulding has done it already in this very episode (11:610, 623), but it also feels like Freddy Malins’ praise of opera singers in ‘The Dead’. The sense is mostly plain enough, of ‘so clear so God he never heard […] a clinking voice […] ask Lambert he can tell you too’ – except, what’s a clinking voice? Clinking doesn’t seem quite enough like ‘chiming’ or ‘ringing’ to fit here. The other puzzle is whether Goulding voices the words in italics: ‘then false one we had better part […] since love lives not […] lives not’ (11: 781-2). It seems likelier that he does than doesn’t: the alternative is to say that the narrative voice encyclopaedically knows the song (which it does) and inserts it, but that insertion doesn’t quite seem motivated by the context. In other words, we perhaps wouldn’t expect the narration to insert words out of nowhere that weren’t being uttered at some point.
The next paragraph (11:784-5) is a sentence in a very odd order. Its meaning is: ‘Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale face, told Mr Bloom of the night Si Dedalus sang ‘Twas rank and fame in Ned Lambert’s house’. The information all comes through, and some of it in the right order, but some not: ‘face’ moves to after ‘Mr Bloom’, ‘Dedalus’ moves to after ‘in Ned Lambert’s’. The last clause is OK where it is but might be clearer if moved back as in the paraphrase just given. So this sentence suffers from a very strange, rather arbitrary distortion. It also almost entirely recapitulates information from the previous paragraph, except the ‘flush struggling’ in Goulding’s pale face.
The next paragraph consists of another sentence recapitulating the same information yet again.
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 (11:786-8).
We have here a Joycean strategy that, while not used that extensively across the whole book, still feels deeply characteristic: a readiness to repeat material, varying order, testing permutations, demonstrating the different ways that something can be represented or processed. A pretty good example is the ‘dullthudding barrels’ chiasmus at the start of ‘Aeolus’ (7:21-4). But ‘Sirens’ is more the heartland for such techniques; the beautiful lines on Mina Kennedy ‘sauntering sadly’ early in the episode (11:81-3) at least come close to the same principle. Now the repetition is perhaps connected to the sense of Goulding as long-winded: his speech is cited three times to indicate how it feels to be subjected to it. Joyce’s readiness to work with wilful pedantry is in full action here: do we need every ‘he’ and ‘him’ to be spelled out? If we do, why not leave out the pronouns and just include the proper names? It’s like a gross overcompensation for the uncertain reference of male pronouns in ‘Penelope’. The experimental pedantry is also reminiscent of Gertrude Stein (there are passages in Three Lives rather like this), despite the tendency for Stein and Joyce to appear as Parisian poles apart.
At last, the next paragraph is interior monologue. ‘Brothers-in-law: relations’ is Bloom’s summary of Goulding’s relationship with Dedalus, while ‘relations’ could also mean good or bad relations. ‘We never speak as we pass by’ is, Don Gifford notes, a song from 1882, whose lyrics happen to talk of adultery. Its main sense here is surely that Goulding and Dedalus are very close together yet, despite the former’s admiration for the latter, they won’t actually meet. ‘Rift in the lute’ is a further song reference: Tennyson’s poem of 1859 talks of how a tiny flaw can grow to create an insuperable problem. ‘Lute’ is yet another musical instrument for the episode’s catalogue, and one that Joyce once wanted to play on a tour of England. The logical implication here is that a small difference between Dedalus and Goulding has led to an unbridgeable gulf. The relationship, such as it is, is very one-way: Dedalus ‘Treats him with scorn. See. He [Goulding] admires him all the more’, with ‘See’ a gesture pointing at the outcome. ‘The night Si sang’ is Bloom’s version of what Goulding is saying, and an example of the one-sided admiration he’s thinking of. The next sentence is a little odder: ‘The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more than all others’ (11:791-2). We might think that this is Goulding’s sort of excitable rhetoric, but we think it’s Bloom himself reflecting sincerely on the voice. A genetic investigation suggests that the parts of the sentence were moved around, not necessarily to improving effect; we also wondered why vocal ‘cords’ are rendered as the technically incorrect ‘chords’. To be sure, that’s a musical term, but a look at drafts during the seminar suggested that Joyce originally wrote ‘cords’ and it was mangled into ‘chords’ at some point, by the author or another hand.
‘That voice was a lamentation’ (11:793) is Bloom’s reflection on Dedalus: a factual classification, a lot more detached than what we’ve been hearing. It may not be intended to have the connotation of ‘That voice was lamentable’. ‘Calmer now’ is the bar’s atmosphere. ‘It’s in the silence after you feel you hear’ suggests: ‘In the silence after music you feel that you can still hear it resonating’ (not much change from Efterklang, then), or possibly: ‘In the silence after music, you are more attuned to sound and hear whatever there is to hear more attentively’. The seminar observed Joyce’s brisk anticipation of a 20th-century ‘aesthetics of silence’, which might culminate in John Cage. ‘Vibrations’ are either what Bloom thinks he still feels, or what he thinks he was hearing before but does no longer, as it’s ‘Now silent air’. ‘Air’ can mean a song so there’s a faint, though hardly needed, pun in the last word also.
‘Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hands and with slack fingers plucked the slender catgut thong’ (11: 795-6) calls back to 11:683-4 where Bloom first wound an ‘elastic band’ round his fingers and ‘gyved them fast’. They can be ‘ungyved’ (unfettered, untied) after the song: the elastic band round his fingers has been equivalent to a rope tying Odysseus to the mast while the sirens were singing. So, it was extrapolated, the elastic band might have helped distract Bloom from the sentiment of Simon Dedalus’s performance. The sentence drew admiration as a Joycean performance with vowels, or with rhythm. We’re unsure if the band is ‘catgut’, but note that Bloom is treating it as a further kind of instrument, to be ‘plucked’. ‘It buzz, it twanged’ (like a jew’s harp?) sounds like a distortion: should that be ‘It buzzed’, or has Joyce written ‘It buzz’ to mess with syntax and perhaps be mimetic about buzzing? A genetic examination suggested that ‘buzz’ might simply be an error.
Goulding talks of a Dublin vocal tutor, Arthur Barraclough. Kernan meanwhile has already made his way to the piano and is talking to Bob Cowley who plays ‘a voluntary’: that is, a piece of his choosing, presumably quite casually. That Cowley is ‘listening’, as well as nodding, is another piece of pedantry, in lines that again repeat the recent gesture of cataloguing a series of characters’ simultaneous actions (the episode has moved closer to an interest in group dynamics, as the group has been formed by Dedalus’s performance). Kernan is well known to overuse the phrase ‘retrospective arrangement’ (6:149-50), but does that mean he’s using it here? More likely Kernan is ‘harking back’ – that is, reminiscing about something – to Cowley, and the narrative voice of ‘Sirens’ is mischievously picking up on others’ quotation from him and reusing it as a sufficiently factual description of his speech now. Meanwhile Dollard talks ‘with’ (not just to) Dedalus: ‘lighting, who nodded as he smoked, who smoked’ (11:800-1). It’s surely Dedalus who is lighting his pipe and nodding as he smokes it (he nods because Dollard talks); the one ambiguity is ‘who smoked’. Is this saying that Dollard also smokes? No, it seems to be a terrifically redundant repetition of the fact that Simon Dedalus, nodding as he smokes, is indeed … smoking.
We will resume on 11th December 2020 at line 11:802: ‘Thou lost one’.
[Blog by Joe]
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