Seminar, 28 July – ‘Sirens’, 735-753

Our last seminar before we take a break for the summer took place on the 28th of July. We made it to the end of ‘M’Appari’. This feels like an achievement.

Another line from ‘M’Appari’, with the “Ah” we noted last time, and then: “Quitting all languor” – Simon is building up to the big finish, though it is Lionel who “cried in grief”. Although “dominant” is a musical term, it relates to the two emotions here – passion dominating over grief – deepening on the one hand, rising on the other, with “love” here meaning Martha; the difference between what the voice and the piano are doing also feed into this doubling. There is an anagram to be seen in “lionel” and “loneli” (this is not just about hearing, it remains visual as well), and know and feel are distinguished from each other, just as they were with Bloom and Goulding previously, the phrases made to mirror each other. That “lionel” and “martha” appear without capitalisation transforms them from people into principles.

“Where?” We noted some time back how the questions contained within lines 690 to 692 anticipate this moment: those lines concerned Molly and Boylan – but where is Martha? The following sentence we took to be conveying the imagined effect on listeners, caught up in the music, that they must immediately rush out looking for her, in a flurry of questing conveyed by this sequence of monosyllables, though with rhythm and even chiasmus on display. (In the Little Review this line reads, simply: “Where? Somewhere.” We agreed that the effect is rather different.)

“Co-ome“: this is the only time a word from the song is altered to indicate how it should be sung. A line and a half from ‘M’Appari’ – right before the final three words, which are given – are not reproduced in the text (‘Thou alone can’st comfort me/Ah, Martha return!’), certain words from which appear in the ensuing paragraph. Martha it is who is the “One love. One hope.” A “chestnote” would be produced by the chest-voice: there is a sense here of practical advice being given, as though from a singing coach with a cultivated ear and some concern for the quality of the performance. Then “Come …!“: the first of the last three words.

“It” – the voice, the song – becomes a bird, which made us think of Daedalus, though a “swift” is a kind of bird; so begins this paragraph searching for ways of describing the indescribable (music) as Lionel’s “cry” returns. The soaring “silver orb” we found immediately odd. It is a metal to go along with the gold and bronze (and, earlier on, steel too); we noted too the royal connotations and then thought about drops of mercury. A breakthrough, however, led us to thinking about the musical score itself and the notation there, of minims especially, which, joined together, might resemble a bird as well (one of Sam Slote’s annotations suggested we were on the right track). The word “leaped” poses a problem of pronunciation, since the rhyme with “serene” – can leaping ever really be serene? – demands ‘leeped’ rather than ‘lept’. This flight is “sustained” (“held its flight”) – “to come” is a reminder of the song – so time moves forward and is yet static: we considered that this makes sense musically (pitch is sustained) and is only a paradox when rendered in words. The broader point in microcosm, then. 

There is more coaching, or more anxiety on the singer’s behalf (whether we want to think of this as Bloom’s anxiety, or the narrator’s), in “don’t spin it out too long”. Breaths are also marked in musical notation, but we moved on to the life of the breath itself (as it is sustained) and noted the masculine emphasis in “he breath”. More “soaring” was related to Aquinas and integritas, consonantia and claritas, as expounded by Stephen in A Portrait: a verbal attempt at the praxis of this, in relation to that theory of the aesthetic.

The sense of height now brings the quality of light, and heavenly light in particular: “resplendent, aflame” (and “effulgence”, “etherial”, and “irradiation” all coming up). The word “crowned” links to “orb” as a symbol of royalty, but we were also informed here of the musical symbol for fermata (pauses) which resembles a dot crowned (see the accompanying illustration for four of these). We thought about the musical score as itself an exercise in looking for adequate ways of referring to music.

 The OED has Milton as its first instance of “effulgence”, the quality of radiant light (we talked a little about Icarus here and only in retrospect does it seem odd to me that we didn’t talk about Lucifer, instead or as well as). That word did not detain us as long as “symbolistic”, which is a puzzler, explicitly referring, not to symbolism in general, but to Symbolism as artistic movement and practice: there were some interesting ideas put forward here about Rimbaud and synaesthesia as those relate to what is going on in this passage (so too the notion of pure sound in the avant-garde).

Another “high” and then the “etherial bosom” and heaven. Bosoms and music have already and recently been linked, of course – Bloom turning Molly’s sheet music at Matt Dillon’s – and we discussed warbling, and Swedish nightingales. The idea of this writing as in some way parodic was raised here (of a kind of symbolistic writing), but we eventually decided that it’s just not that good that it might be taken as parody: the main thrust remains the sense of exhaustion, an inadequacy to what is being described, the words running out of ideas, struggling in the face of the sublime.

Another word traditionally entirely to do with magnificently radiant light in “irradiation”, though we weren’t sure that its subsequent scientific sense – becoming dominant as Joyce was writing ‘Sirens’, certainly – was wholly absent, and the sun might be taken to combine the two as a figure. The “all around about the all” might be a nod back at the game of musical chairs, and we noted – again thinking about how this can’t really be taken as parody – the presence of words belonging to different registers (‘Nausicaa’ was instanced as a point of comparison).

We actually revisited “long life” and “don’t spin it out” here as a result of these reflections: Simon is not, after all, as young as he was; so is he overdoing it? Is this not actually the triumph we are assuming? (The others are going to applaud regardless.) We were reminded of Aunt Julia’s performance of ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’ in ‘The Dead’ (a post-seminar look yields: “To follow the voice, without looking at the singer’s face, was to feel and share the excitement of swift and secure flight”).

The “endlessnessnessness” seems to gesture towards or even stand in lieu of a genuinely endless word, in which the ‘ness’ can be reiterated for as long as is required. The seven dots likewise might be indefinitely extended (there are only three in the 1922 Ulysses, but seven in the Little Review, so the Gabler is presumably right): then again, seven is a prime, the perfect number indeed. And, with “To me!“, the song ends, as all things must.

“Siopold” brings Simon and Leopold together – we tangled with the pronunciation, but ‘sigh-opold’ seemed best – but can you tell whether Lionel is there also? This only matters, perhaps, if some play on the Trinity is going to be made. Subjectivity is dissolved in music in the way it has been at points throughout this performance, but is there something else here, given it is these two characters that are joined? “Consumed” led some of us (all right, me) to the idea of consubstantiality, that Simon and Bloom are here of the same substance (which, on one level, they literally are, but then so is everybody else) – is there some relation here to Stephen’s theory of paternity in ‘Scylla’? We also – perhaps belatedly – considered Bloom’s own Martha at this point (there will be time to come back to this). The word ‘consumed’ also conveys the sense of being spent, done, finished, as this relates to Christ’s last words on the cross: consummatum est. And … has Bloom finished consuming at this precise moment: the last forkful of mash, the last swig of cider?

We will return in due course – a date will be announced here, for some time in September – and we will then resume with: “Come. Well sung.” Thank you to all those who have kept us going through this crisis of presence and I hope you all find time for some downtime in the weeks ahead.

 

Seminar, 14 July – ‘Sirens’, 717-734

On Bastille Day, we met online once again to consider lines 717 to 734 of ‘Sirens’.

“The voice of Lionel” is simultaneously the voice of Simon, and the weakening (if “unwearied”) is a dramatic effect on the singer’s part. “It” then renders the voice impersonal, and there is a dissolving of identity in the list of names that follows. The “also” separates Pat off from the rest, who is “waiting to wait”, but, being hard of hearing, straining to hear as he sees the others so caught up? We wondered what has happened to Mina Kennedy here: has she wandered off to wait on the two gentlemen, perhaps, absent as she is from this list?

Words from the opening of ‘M’Appari’, repeated as they are in the song, are woven through the next sentence, but with a degree of reworking and some distortion: “how sorrow seemed to part” is a Bloomian adaptation of the original ‘sorrow from me seem’d to depart’ (see 673 and the first reworking of this line at 677-78). “Gould Lidwell” and “Pat Bloom”, substituting for ‘my eye’ and ‘my’ respectively, seem like separate characters as well as random pairings. 

The next paragraph returns to Bloom’s interior monologue, and the wish to be able to see Simon’s face. “Explain” suddenly puts the rational engagement with the words, even with the argument of the song, up against all the prior emotional engagement. Adolphe Drago’s, Hair Dressers and Perfumers, is listed at 36, Henry Street, in Thom’s Directory. Does Bloom assume he will “hear it better here” because the bar is noisier – a reasonable, though, as we know, inaccurate assumption – or is there some other acoustic effect of the layout of the Ormond that is being alluded to?

“First night”: what follows is really rather significant for the history of the Blooms and our knowledge of it. Although the night when the Blooms first met has been referred to before – though not, perhaps, as the night when first they met – by John Henry Menton in ‘Hades’ (6.696-97), dating it to the year 1887, this gives us a Bloom’s-eye-view. A yellow dress with “black lace” trimming seems rather more a choice for a garden party than for an evening event.

“Musical chairs” is an intriguing way of making characters coincide, and it is no surprise that Bloom attributes their meeting to “Fate” (at least twice). “After her” gives the sense of a chase – as fate might chase – though in the game, it is everyone chasing everyone else, the piano making them go, now slower – “Round and round slow” – now faster: “Quick round”. “We two” are the last left (just the one chair, then), the onlookers (“All looked”) all “ousted”, including, eventually, Bloom himself. “Halt”: the piano stops. We assume Bloom does not attempt to sit on Molly: hers are the lips, as are the “Yellow knees”, covered by the material of her dress.

“Charmed my eye” we’ve already had, at line 720, making that retrospectively anticipatory on Bloom’s part, an overture of sorts. “Singing” is a double singing then: here and now in the Ormond, but also then at Mat Dillon’s. ‘Waiting’ is a song about a woman waiting for her lover to come, and Bloom turning the pages of Molly’s sheet music suggests a sudden intimacy. “Full voice” is pretty full on for a recital of this kind. A phrase from Martha’s letter then weaves in to Molly’s scent (note was taken here of A Rebours and perfume in relation to music: scents too have their ‘notes’); “lilactrees” may be a perfume, but these are, or at least were present in Mat Dillon’s garden (6.1013; it is described as a “lilacgarden” in ‘Ithaca’, 17.467, where we also learn that this same occasion was the first time Bloom met a five-year-old Stephen Dedalus).

Following on from the lips and the knees, we noted the Victorian fashion in which Bloom acquaints himself with bits of Molly, “Bosom” and “throat”: does “both full” refer to both breasts, or to breasts and voice? Given the interrelatedness of chest and throat in the act of singing, we weren’t sure this was decidable. “First I saw” calls back, then, but also refers to the first Bloom saw of this body close up. “She thanked me”: politeness is not the first quality associated with the Molly Bloom of ‘Penelope’ and elsewhere, so this is a welcome corrective. “Why did she me?” ‘Choose’ is only one of the many missing verbs that might be inserted into this incomplete sentence.

Which omission seems significant because “Fate” seems to remove all agency from Molly. “Spanishy eyes” would be dark, like Bloom’s own, but what makes them specifically Spanish (and is that why they are Spanishy instead)? ‘Alongside the song ‘In Old Madrid’ the next sentence made us think of Mulvey and had us asking whether Molly has ever been to Madrid? (We couldn’t see why she would have done and seems here to be becoming less the Molly of Bloom’s knowledge and more a series of cultural images from songs). “Dolores shedolores” sends us back to an earlier moment in the episode, but, we noted, a point when Bloom wasn’t there. “At me” is certainly Bloom, though: a response to any and all insecurity triggered by thought of Mulvey and others, Bloom insisting it is him that she chose. There is a significant ethical slippage between “Luring” and “alluring”, what it is sirens do and what men find women to be regardless – or is this just Bloom searching for the right word? Either way, the “Ah” is looking ahead to the next line, which is also the next line of the song.

Which is where we began again, with “Martha! Ah, Martha!“, on the 28th of July.

Seminar, 30 June – ‘Sirens’, 705-716

On the 30th of June, the online seminar met to discuss the following. I had to leave a little early, so the blog below is from me up to a point and thereafter from Joe:

“Bloom”: another paragraph in this episode – and it won’t be the last – which begins with a single word, in this case this most resonant of names. What follows links back to Bloom’s reflections on tenors and the increase of flow (l.686), but that seems in tension here with the viscosity of “warm jamjam”: we thought here of Bloom’s mashed potato and the Jenny Lind soup and the hypersexual charging of food (Tom Jones, of course). Alongside this, the “secretness” (secretness lends this a further abstraction) touches on feelings around sex and infidelity, and we thought there was a kind of synaesthesia at work in that respect. Then again, secret relates to secrete, and the sense here that what is most immediately being alluded to is sexual fluids, and, in “lickitup” and “dark to lick”, cunnilingus. Stepping back from it slightly, we wondered if this is about as close as we ever get to an actual stream of consciousness in this book.

Bloom is thinking (if that is the right word here, since he is clearly feeling primarily) about what is going on around him and also, via imagination, back at 7 Eccles Street; but also this opera (Martha), and also Othello, which makes this a heady and complex mix. So, the pattern of “in”, “out”, “in” is clearly sexual on the one hand, but also might relate to the pouring of drinks (the treacly nature of the language made us think of Boylan’s sloe gin), as well as the pulling of pints, and the act of breathing too, since everything links back to the song. It is the music which is “invading” then, but also Boylan, and other things besides.

Tip, tep, tap, top, tup: all these words, on one particular level, are the same word, in that they all relate to the breeding of animals and to the act of copulation more generally. In this particular sense, “Tup” might be the most familiar, from its appearance in Othello: “an old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe,” and in that sense the fifth sound, ‘tup’, set apart from the rest, is the one that places all the others, repeated as it is three times (the various words have other meanings too, of course, and we noted that ‘tap’ will become a key motif in the later parts of the chapter). We thought then of Molly relating how Boylan treats her like a horse (18.122-23), and found Boylan exclaiming “Topping!” at a significant moment in ‘Circe’ (15.3773). 

We discussed pores “dilating”, whether with heat or as a result of excitement, and of secretion again. We wondered if pores stand here in lieu of other orifices; pupils – not orifices exactly, but still – it is which are normally associated with dilation. Another ‘tup’ and then a sentence containing “joy” and ending with a “the”, which no one felt we could pass over too quickly. As opposed to the water over the sluices: “pour o’er” made us think of Shakespeare, but thereafter of the antiquated English that features in libretti of the time (including the one for Martha). A sluice is meant to control the flow of water, so to have it “pouring” over the top is evidence of a loss of control. “Flood, gush, flow”: music, sex, emotion; and then some notably sticky compounds, in “joygush, tupthrob”, both of which we considered in relation to ejaculation and orgasm. And then we did the same for “Now!” for good measure. Before relating that word back to a key moment in ‘Lestrygonians: “Me. And me now” (8.917).

The paragraph ends “Language of love” (11:709). The words appear to reflect back on the preceding lines, which have been a vivid combination of music, liquid and unmistakable sensuality. But whence do the closing words come? Is this Leopold Bloom’s interior monologue, reflecting that such words are a ‘language of love’? This could bring a certain bathos, as the high-flown language is classified and boxed away. It would be somewhat consistent with Bloom’s tendency to talk elsewhere of the language of flowers or perfume. But has Bloom actually heard, or thought, these preceding words? It doesn’t seem correct to suppose that he has. In that case, what would he be thinking ‘language of love’ about? The alternative is that the phrase arises from outside him, and is a case of ‘the “Sirens” narrator’ commenting on its own work.

A “ray of hope“, in the song sung by Simon Dedalus, is “Beaming” (11:711). Perhaps Lydia is also beaming, as a good professional in a service industry, as she serves George Lidwell a drink. “Lydia” and “Lidwell” rhyme; “squeak scarcely” alliterates. The overall sense of the sentence is that Lydia is unpopping a cork to serve a drink: it’s a cork that is “unsqueaked”, as earlier drafts (including the Little Review) confirm. She’s doing it quietly so as not to be disrespectful to the song: “scarcely hear so ladylike”. “[T]he muse” sounds a bit like ‘the music’ – the reason she’s being so careful – but also posits Lydia as a ‘muse’. The real uncertainty in this sentence comes at the end, where it is no longer a cork that is unsqueaked but “a ray of hopk” (11:712). It’s not that clear why a ray of hope can be substituted for a cork: perhaps the hope is Lidwell’s, looking forward to a drink? (The hope can hardly be Bloom’s; his cider is more than enough for him.) ‘hopk’ makes things still less clear. It seems to be a blend of ‘hope’ and ‘cork’, but some members of the seminar thought it poor judgment on Joyce’s part. It’s not evident even how to pronounce this neologism; it doesn’t look enough like ‘cork’ to suggest that object beneath the ‘hope’. Perhaps the most productive suggestion was that this discordant, nigh-unpronounceable word is equivalent to a wrong note played in music.

The next paragraph is fully internal monologue. Leopold Bloom notes that the song being sung is from Martha; it’s a “Coincidence” (11:713) because one of his intentions in coming to the Ormond is to reply to Martha Clifford’s letter: “Just going to write”. “Lionel’s song” is what Bloom is hearing; “Lovely name you have” is a vague recollection of what Martha wrote, “I often think of the beautiful name you have” (5:240). Martha means ‘Henry Flower’, but it’s conceivable that Bloom’s connection is from Lionel (fictional character singing in the opera) to Leopold, another leonine name. (The names are also connected by Alan Hollinghurst in his 2004 novel The Line of Beauty.) “Can’t write. Accept my little pres” is a version of what Bloom intends to say to Martha (I can’t write to you properly at the moment; please accept my little present of a postal order). “Play on her heartstrings” is plain enough – win her sympathy with sob stories (and playing on strings is a ‘Sirens’ musical motif) – “pursestrings too” is mainly a natural evolution from one phrase (that is, one kind of ‘strings’) to another, though it doesn’t entirely add up as Bloom is apparently to be the one giving away the money; you could say that Martha’s playing on his pursestrings more than the reverse. Martha actually chided Bloom for sending stamps (5:243), so why would she want him to send money? Perhaps her ‘anger’ was never meant to be taken seriously. “She’s a” – what? A tease, a flirt, a woman with whom such games of chastisement can be developed? “I called you naughty boy”, echoing her letter, suggests something of the kind. “Still the name: Martha. How strange! Today” seems to say: ‘Still, it’s an odd coincidence, again, about her name coming up in the song when I was about to write to her’, and possibly also: ‘Today’ has seen a number of coincidences – like the ones Bloom remarked on in his lunchtime wandering (8: 502-3, 525).

We resumed on the quatorze juillet 2020, at line 717: ‘The voice of Lionel’.

Seminar, 9 June – ‘Sirens’, 690-704

We met online again on the 9th of June – a week ahead of our Bloomsday celebration – and discussed the following:

“There?” We took this to be following an invisible ‘are you …’ But it led to a series of questions. Is Boylan there? (Reading on, he hasn’t arrived at Eccles Street yet.) Is Molly there? Is this Bloom imagining the scene? Or Molly rehearsing it, or Bloom imagining her doing so? It is another form of performance, clearly, no matter where it is being staged, at the actual door of 7 Eccles Street or merely in Bloom’s mind: the latter eventually seemed the more likely location. The repetition of ‘there’ also prefigures the play on whereabouts at line 739 and the sense of being unsure. Cachous are a breath sweetener, as are “kissing comfits” of the sort sold by Graham Lemon, “comfit manufacturer” (8.3): these really are the sweets of sin, though they reminded us of Armstrong’s figrolls and his “sweetened boy’s breath” (2.24) in ‘Nestor’. Which episode is the more likely venue for a satchel too: is this actually a kind of handbag? “Yes?” In response to ‘are you there’, perhaps. “Hands felt for the opulent” is from Sweets of Sin (10.611-12).

“Alas” is not lamenting anything about the voice but is merely quoting from the song, the line about to appear. With all the questions in the previous paragraph, the word “rose” ties in with the idea of rising intonation. There is “sighing” and then a change: the voice shifts to become “loud, full, shining, proud” – this is the distance travelled from “low” at the start of the previous seminar Simon’s performance, the singer moving up through the vocal register.

Bloom reflects on Simon’s singing voice, in a paragraph of unusually usual (for this point in the chapter) interior monologue. “Cork air” carries a double meaning, referring to literal air, but also to air as a tune; is the “brogue”, the Cork accent, really also “softer”? The word “oceans” nods at sirens and we spoke a little here of the real John Joyce and his son (who once described having ‘a future as a singer behind me’). “Singing wrong words” – as Molly does too – but we wondered whether Bloom is right here. If he is, is Simon covering for gaps in his memory of the words and making up bits as he goes? With the song not reproduced in full, it is a little hard to tell.

The next sentence we took to be volunteering a sequence of events rather than suggesting any causality – a transfer of energy can certainly be seen, from Simon wearing out his wife to focussing on the singing instead. “Only the two themselves” suggests the impossibility of judging from outside (something which Simon does all the time, of course), but it might also gesture towards the singer and accompanist. Bloom is alert to Simon’s vulnerability – he did, after all, break down in ‘Hades’ (6.647-48) – expressing a form of anxiety on his behalf. “Keep a trot” we took to mean something like keeping a bit in reserve for the end, so as to produce the big finish. The extension of singing through the body we took to be rather easier to detect in the singer’s hands than in their feet.

Excessive drinking would be bad for the nerves, but we liked the musicality of “overstrung”. There is some distance between “abstemious” here and getting “women by the score” earlier. The key ingredient of Jenny Lind soup is sago rather than sage; though sage can feature, so this isn’t necessarily a mistake, since not all the ingredients are present in the list. Having tracked down a recipe, we couldn’t tally it with Gifford’s description of the soup as “bland” (it features a fair amount of gruyere, for all that this isn’t named here). “For creamy dreamy” (see “dreamy creamy” at 8.778) indeed: something of Bloom the ad man there is in this.

We spent a bit of time with the etymology (Frisian) of “welled” which is then taken to “swelled” and rendered unusual thereby: this, after all, relates to a line from the song we don’t get, other than through this highly charged evocation of its effects (expertly rendered in the performance by this seminar’s nominated reader, Finn: a memorable moment this was). For all that the throb might be that of the music – vibrato, tremolo – and for all that “That’s the chat” (meaning something like ‘that’s the real thing’) is a moment undercutting the rest and recoiling from the excess, there was no getting away from the phallic nature of this passage. We noted that “Ha” might be the start of ‘hath’ (which word appears in the missing line) and the effects of giving and withholding. We reflected again on the difficulty in looking for interior monologue as a template here: this can instead be taken to relate to Bloom’s visceral response, at a remove from mere ‘thought’.

“Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind.” Is there an actual debate in aesthetics to be had here? We talked a little about Herder, and Pater also, but Bloom’s common or garden fashion in rendering this idea, that “what’s behind” is presumably the emotional response of the listener transferred to an implied quality at a remove from the music and the words, led us to wonder how much weight to put on this, this romantic idea of art which is not, surely, Joyce’s, running counter to his own theories, stated or implied. It is, after all, rather trivial noodling, when set against the thrust of the previous paragraph.

It was then with a flash of recollection (we had been going a while) that we realised that what is being “looped” and “unlooped” is that same elastic band from earlier, though the sense of this line also capturing the actions of Bloom’s mind in relation to the music was clearly there. We tracked down ‘node’ as a musical term to a Dictionary of Music and Musicians published in 1900, confirming our suspicions. Vocal cords can also be afflicted with nodes.

On Bloomsday itself, we met to read from each of the eighteen episodes and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves; the seminar then reconvened on the 30th with “Bloom”.

Seminar, 26 May – ‘Sirens’, 673-690

On the 26th of May, the seminar convened online and covered the following:

The second line of ‘M’Appari’ is followed by a paragraph in which third-person narrative and Bloomian interior monologue coalesce, in a manner which will become increasingly familiar, and in which Bloom will sometimes get quite lost (read on for more). The “hush of air” suggests rapt attention, while “low” carries more than one meaning (the suggestion being that Simon has started in a low register, but also that the distance between him and his attentive audience requires them to be so hushed). There follows a catalogue of the things this voice is not, although the sense is also that it is very like these things – “rain”, “leaves in murmur” (an exterior setting carried into this interior), “voice of strings or reeds” – though these last are both perfectly musical, there is a Yeatsian touch here. In ‘Calypso’, Bloom thinks of a “girl playing one of those instruments what do you call them: dulcimers” (4.), so “whatdoyoucallthem” is Bloomian in origin, but also another call back to an earlier textual moment on the part of the narrator. We talked about the link between Dulcimer and Douce, and a little of Arnold Dolmetsch and the dulcimer in ‘Kubla Khan’ as well.

The double “still” – silent, unmoving – adds to the hush, and we thought there was something magical in the idea of being physically touched by words. The image of “still hearts” is slightly troubling on one level, but the principal sense is of rest, waiting, anticipating. The “his” made us conscious of the absence of Douce and Kennedy from this conglomeration of listeners; this is now just Bloom and Goulding, “their each his” capturing their simultaneous oneness and twoness. “Good, good to hear” might or might not be a bit of unmediated Bloom. We noted that “sorrow” departing does not equate to happiness. The clogging up of words here suggests the two men combining somehow, “heard” and “saw” becoming similarly exchangeable at this point.

But not entirely so, as the familiar forms of their names are given, each becoming lost in the music, alongside the more obvious sense of what “lost” might mean for each. And what is the “first … word”, given that it is not actually sung here? Yes? The non-Bloomian “mercy of beauty” then gives way to rather more common speech, in which the person from whom you “wouldn’t expect it in the least” is presumably Simon, but might also be Lionel (given the mirroring oneness of those two at this point). We admired the chiasmus of “lovesoft oftloved”.

Love personified is what is singing, in line with “love’s old sweet song”, one of the songs Molly will be singing with Boylan shortly (see 4.314). Bloom has reason to be fiddling nervously with his packet of stationery, winding distractedly with the elastic band (patented in London in 1845 by Stephen Perry, invented for the very purpose of holding papers together). The “sonnez la” which intrudes into the title of the song also relates to elastic, but we noted that Bloom was not present for Miss Douce’s performance. And surely “gold” should be “bronze” on this account? But then, bronze does not rhyme with “old”.

Bloom’s fingers become like tines in “four forkfingers”, but we considered that they might also be holding a fork. This sentence captures very evocatively the stretching and relaxing going on in playing with a rubber band, the doubling suggesting it is twice wound round, though Bloom it is who is “troubled”: for all the surrender to the music, he is also nervy and ends up, like his own fingers, “gyved” –  much like Odysseus, then, tied to the mast.

Another line from ‘M’Appari’ is followed by a somewhat blokeish reflection on tenors. A “score” is two tenners, of course, and also another of those casual musical references, so tenors do indeed get women “by the score” as in via the seductive power of the music. Does sex make a tenor better? Is the “flow” (in which we detected both Flotow and flower) that of the voice, or something more carnal, whether in the tenor or the women? The thrown flower is a reminder (for Bloom) of the flower sent by Martha, and a phrase from her letter ensues (5.249), wherein “meet” rhymes with “feet”.

“My head it simply” points both to Martha’s headache (5.255) and to Boylan’s song about the seaside girls (“Your head it simply swurls”, see 4.438), while “Jingle all delighted” places Boylan within the libretto of ‘M’Appari’ – so who it is who “can’t sing for tall hats” is not clear. “Perfumed for him” made us think of Sweets of Sin – though it does not appear in the relevant section of ‘Wandering Rocks’ – Molly is perfumed for Boylan, and so Martha’s “I want to know” takes on other resonances if transferred to Bloom. “Jing. Stop. Knock”: Boylan’s arrival. Is Bloom here thinking of what Molly habitually does before answering the door, checking herself in the mirror, or more specifically of what she will do when opening the door to this particular visitor?

Time ran out mid-paragraph and we resumed with “The hall. There?” on the 9th of June.

 

Seminar, 12 May – ‘Sirens’, 642-672

At the May seminar – or, rather, the first May seminar, details of the next at the bottom – we made good progress and had at least one first for the seminar (I think it’s a first), something that would not have been possible in a room in Senate House.

Bloom’s (“lost Leopold” in some ways but not in others) words respond to Goulding’s (l.829) as if the two paragraphs in between (or all the business of the previous seminar, in other words) were mere interlude. “Never in all his life” equally returns us to Goulding’s insistence on the superlative nature of Maas’s performance, and Bloom opposes his own “know” to Goulding’s “feels”. If Goulding has been “harping on his daughter” (paraphrasing Polonius; “harping” recurs at l.663), in the Ormond at least, we have not been privy to it; initially this seemed to have come out of the blue, but there are two earlier moments feeding into it, textually via  ‘Proteus’, where she is named as “Crissie” (3.87) – “Papa’s little bedpal. Lump of love” (3.88) – and, for Bloom personally on top, the point in ‘Hades’ where “Dedalus said” these words in the first place (alongside “papa’s little lump of dung”, 6.52-53). We talked about this proverbial wise child – as we must have done when we read ‘Hades’, considering there too, no doubt, whether “knows” might be made to take on its Biblical sense – and noted how it now points back to Stephen’s subject in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. “Me?” might be taken in any number of ways, Bloom reflecting back on himself – does he also harp on about his daughter? – but also the question of what Milly knows of him.

I think we’d all assumed that Goulding and Bloom were sitting facing each other, but “askance” suggests otherwise. The word “liverless” is repeated from l.614 (and the OED suggests it existed before Joyce used it): we noted the oddness of the way this sentence ends with “saw”, left hanging in mid-air. The “Face” (again a part of the body) is presumably what is seen, but is also what is seeing, in that sense that it might be Bloom’s or Goulding’s; in this way the sentence is an anticipation of “Siopold” (l.752), the singer performing a role in which the listener also gets caught up and all three become wrapped together in this moment of union. Bloom, privately, remains rather less pleasant to whilom “Rollicking Richie” Goulding with his “old stale” jokes than Goulding, publicly, is to Bloom, who is again rehashing earlier thoughts here (see 6.57-59). The ear wagging might be a party trick; “Napkinring in his eye” suggests Goulding imitating someone with a monocle.

And that someone might well be Simon Dedalus, we thought, from whom much of this knowledge and view of Goulding must derive, right up to the improbability of Walter bringing these “begging letters” to Eccles Street, rather than importuning his uncle (“Crosseyed” here, he “squints” in ‘Proteus’, 3.93). Goulding is a costdrawer, someone who draws up solicitors’ bills of costs, which we thought would be a decent job: is he not very good at it, or does he squander that much? “Wouldn’t trouble …” and “Apologise” are phrases from a begging letter, though the latter made us think of the opening of A Portrait.

We learn that Bloom has heard this piano before and remembers it well enough to recognise that is has since been tuned (if the blind stripling and the piano tuner are one and the same then Bloom met him in ‘Lestrygonians’). Dollard and Cowley are still urging Simon to sing (we noted the rhyming in “lingering singer”), their “out with it” turning it into a kind of power play (as though they were urging him to confess, rather than perform). The subsequently shortened “With it” and “It” seemed a kind of orchestration of language of a sort we had come across before in ‘Sirens’, but here making use of actual speech, ‘real’ voices, where previously the narrative seemed solely responsible for such play. However much of the protesting was previously genuine reluctance to sing on Simon’s part, it is now clearly mock reluctance, as he turns to music hall patter (Sergeant Pepper’s was mentioned) and a performance of mock poverty (though Simon actually is poor, of course): this reads as though it were a response to a begging letter, craving attention while delivering something other than money instead.

The “sandwichbell” returns us to the bar and the strange quality of the light in there with the blinds drawn, discussed previously (by us) more than once. A “lady’s grace” is here Miss Douce’s hair and the flower she wears – colour and body respectively – and this is immediately what is given and withheld, teasingly, to those in the bar (the two gentlemen and their “tankards two”), with the two verbs then transferring to Miss Kennedy and her own colour, “glaucous, eau de Nil” and hair. But “gave and withheld” also responds to Simon’s call for attention: there is a very pleasing doubleness to this, the audience taking their places.

But even now, not quite yet, still “expectant”, as a “longdrawn” chord “drew a voice away” – it is the piano waiting for the voice to start, of course. Harping is a manner of playing in which the chords are broken up. To illustrate this point and to everyone’s delight, Finn played the opening of ‘M’Appari’, not in the sense is which much music has often been played at the seminar over the years – via a recording – but live on an actual piano. (You wouldn’t get that in Senate House 243: how would you get it up the stairs?)

Simon delivers the opening line of the song, Richie turns and delivers “Si Dedalus’ voice”, stressing the family connexion with this unfamiliar bit of familiarity – who else calls him Si? – and presumably telling Bloom something he hardly needs to be told, Goulding presenting himself as the connoisseur of tenor voices once again. “Braintipped” gives us an organ and body part to go with those to come and those that have come before (including those on the plates): we took this to be descriptive of a tingling scalp, the hair standing up, which goes with “cheek touched with flame”, the effect of drink and the effect of the music on the drinkers. And non-drinkers, since having discussed whether Bloom and Goulding or Douce and Kennedy are the flushers here, we decided it was impossible to tell (we thought also of Stephen blushing in ‘Aeolus’,  “his blood wooed”, 7.776). Flow (noun, verb) substitutes for form and we considered the form of the list that follows, in the absence of commas.

Pat, “bald Pat” – an actual moniker used of Pat, presumably – is a waiter hard of hearing that we have met before and already knew was hard of hearing, but the reminder sets this up nicely, as Bloom attempts to communicate without words. The repetition of “the door of the bar” is songlike, a refrain as it were, but also indicative of Pat not getting what Bloom is after the first time. Bloom also doesn’t want to talk over the music, of course: the door being set ajar answers a lot of questions from earlier on about what was audible from the saloon in the dining room. Rather more now, basically. We ended thinking about Odysseus tied to the mast – though his hands were tied and his mouth was not stopped, we realised.

We will reconvene on Tuesday the 26th of May, at 6pm BST. The link to join the session will be the same again: https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/c49cbc86f6f84ac390f91ad0252aa9d3. Starting from line 673: “—… Sorrow from me seemed to depart.”

 

Seminar, 28 April – ‘Sirens’, 630-641

At our second April seminar, we began by heading backwards, albeit not very far, to “All is lost now” or ‘Tutto e sciolto‘ in the original (the performance in that link has French subtitles; the auto-translated English version beneath it has rendered the first line, unhelpfully, as ‘Everything is dissolved’). Knowledge both of the air in question, in which Elvino casts off the innocent Amina, and of the opera La Sonnambula from which it comes informed a lot of what we went on to discuss.

Having named the air, Goulding now proceeds to whistle it: “cocked” might be a bird reference (given what is coming up); “apout” is not Joyce’s coinage, and is very obviously there for the rhythm. We wondered if “low” referred to pitch or to volume (possibly both) and “incipient”, just so, made us think of “Incipient jigs” in ‘Aeolus’ (7.366), Ned Lambert’s comment on Myles Crawford, another drinker. The Irish “banshee” is not usually connected with “sweet”, but alongside “murmured” we figured this suggests something mournful as opposed to the stereotypical shriek that seems to have affixed itself to banshees. Then: “all” – the first word; we discussed the sense of time slowing down in this paragraph.

“A thrush. A throstle” (same bird, the song thrush, although the OED suggests throstle can refer to a blackbird) is repeated from ‘Hades’; there Bloom was thinking of Molly’s voice. We took an illuminating detour into the Buile Suibhne and Sweeney’s acquisition of bird-like qualities in that narrative which then seemed to be running through this paragraph from this point on: “His breath, birdsweet.” Birds do not have teeth, and we wondered how Goulding’s pride in them might be expressed (he is making them visible in whistling?); a contrast was drawn between these “good teeth” and those of their owner’s nephew. We considered a double meaning to “fluted” (the teeth themselves and the sound), but assumed it couldn’t be Bloom’s own play on the word, before recognising that this isn’t really Bloom anyway: in contrast to the passage of fairly conventional interior monologue above it, this is something else, with the music the transforming agent, whether on the text or directly on Bloom.  The etymology of “plaintive” relates it to complaint.

“Is lost” follows “all” – again the sense of time slowing (not the first time we’ve considered this, nor the first chapter of the book in which we’ve done so). “Rich sound” is also a Richie sound, in that Goulding is producing it and “Two notes in one” is a token of this richness. We spent a fair old time with the blackbird, not least because Bloom has never mentioned it before and never mentions it again. The “hawthorn valley” seems to be better known as Furry Glen, in Phoenix Park, a location of considerable significance to HCE and Finnegans Wake, the hawthorn bringing a mythological Irish quality to it too (Sweeney again). The idea seems to be that the bird has taken Bloom’s “motives” – or motifs, this being a variant spelling of the musical term – and “twined and turned them”, repeating back to Bloom his own tune, presumably whistled by him, sung by the bird in an act of mimicry. Some doubt was expressed that blackbirds actually do this – it is, after all, a nature anecdote from Leopold Bloom, the man once bitten by a bluebottle – though some birds undoubtedly can. Might he be imagining that a blackbird (once heard in the hawthorn valley) might do this?

The monosyllables in the next sentence seem themselves to perform this act of twining and turning. We noted Joyce’s use of the word elsewhere, the “trysting and the twining star” in ‘Bahnhofstrasse’, “twinstreams twinestraines” in the Wake (528.17), those later uses twining and turning with this precise point in Ulysses, perhaps. The next two sentences then twine with Thomas Moore’s ‘Echo’, its title and its opening line: “How sweet the answer Echo makes”. “How is that done?” might be the scientific side of Bloom enquiring into the phenomenon of the echo, but here is where we sensed his thoughts turning to Molly in full: “Mournful he whistled” refers to Goulding, but “Fall, surrender, lost” points elsewhere.

The ear is another body part, here bent to hear, though we also picked up the connotations of bending someone’s ear; again quite characteristically, Bloom seeks distraction. We picked up on the domestic note to his sorting out the fringe of the doyley, though it reminded us also of the act of sweeping something under the carpet. Order restored, Bloom here remembers the song and La Sonnambula more broadly, in which the innocent Amina sleepwalks into the room of Rodolfo and is discovered there asleep by her fiancé Elvino: he is mistaken, she is “Brave”. Again, typically, Bloom turns to sleepwalking more generally: we were familiar with some of the received wisdom about what not to do when confronted by a sleepwalker and the “danger” of waking them – that you would hold them back if there were no other option, that you might gently call their name – but “Touch water” foxed us a little. Gifford suggests this was also popular superstition, whereby the sleepwalker made to touch water would return to bed for fear of drowning, but his word for it was all we had to go on.

“Jingle jaunty” from the narrator almost acts as a prompt to Bloom here, and his thoughts can still be attached to the opera, but Molly clearly looms large in those thoughts: “Too late.” “She longed to go” (on tour with Boylan?) seems easier to associate with Molly than it does with Amina, and the more general thoughts about “Woman” that follow suggest a synthesis of the two, “As easy stop the sea” calling back to the touched water. “Yes: all is lost” thus operates on any number of different levels; agonising when related to Molly, but also leading, on the most prosaic of those levels, straightforwardly to the next line. It’s simply the title of a song that Bloom knows.

We met again on the 12th of May: blog for that coming shortly.

Seminar, 14 April – ‘Sirens’, 602-629

Thank you to everyone who attended the second of our online seminars on the 14th of April. Some passing sound problems and the albeit muted presence of the theme tune to The Archers at bang on 7.03 aside, it all went off without a hitch.

Cowley is having none of Simon’s attempt to play in a lower key, insisting on “the original. One flat.” This would be (and here I am grateful for some post-seminar explanation from the less musically-challenged) F, meaning the tenor voice would have to hit a top A at the end of the song, so cementing that sense of Simon attempting to make it easier on his voice, no longer that of his youth. We admired the movements of sounds here and the ambiguity between what is verb and what is adjective, ending with the double ‘conf’ of “confessed, confused”. Is Simon deliberately stumbling as he searches for that higher key, expecting Cowley to step in, or (more likely) does he not know the original arrangement? Cowley does step in, the “Up stage” calling back to the “Down stage” at l.588, with “strode” being an appropriately dramatic form. The “accompany” of the next line got us thinking about Virgil and Dante.

We are then back with Boylan and the telltale “jingly jogged” as he heads north up O’Connell/Sackville Street and passes Graham Lemon’s and Elvery’s, both of which have been mentioned previously, in ‘Lestrygonians’ (8.6) and ‘Hades’ (6.253) respectively. Elvery’s sold waterproofs and was known as the elephant house because of the elephant positioned in front of the first floor window above the door: “Elvery’s elephant” is very exact here. The next paragraph repeats and performs various bits from earlier – mashed together indeed – with “at meat” carrying the archaic sense of all food, and meat (as in ‘it is meet’) nicely lining up with “fit”. Bloom and Goulding now are princes, those for whom this meal is fit. They “raised”: this might be cutlery as well as drink, alongisde the sense that they are proposing formal toasts. “Power and cider” reverses the order of “Bloom and Goulding”.

“Most beautiful tenor air ever written”: does Goulding’s remark come out of thin air, or is it the continuation of a conversation to which we have thus far not been privy, or is it even prompted by the sound of the piano? “Richie said” leaves no room for ambiguity, but there is no em dash, and this sets the pattern for the following mixture of interior monologue and Goulding’s speech (seeming thereby both actual, ‘live’, and reported). Maas was English, M’Guckin Irish; both were choirboys and tenors: we thought here of the discussion of tenors in ‘The Dead’, which shares the same dynamic, favourites being advanced. Maas is Goulding’s choice where M’Guckin is Bloom’s, and the former’s qualified response to Bloom’s choice is a prelude to the insistence on the preeminence of his own: “Yes. In his way.”

Bloom has finished the liver ahead of the bacon (we know the inner organs are the ones he eats with relish). We know also that Goulding is unwell from ‘Proteus’ and there is a typical flash of empathy from Bloom at the visible signs of discomfort. Bright’s disease, now understood as collecting together different forms of nephritis under that label, was named for Richard Bright, the physician who first described it: we did find some evidence to suggest that redness and soreness of the eyes can be a consequence of the condition, but these do not seem to have much to do with brightness, exactly. “Next item” has Bloom thinking about consequences and further decline, but there are some nice musical red herrings here, from “programme” to “piper” all the way to “Stave”.

Of course, Bloom has already thought about Goulding, his health, the underlying causes, and the kind of quack remedies nodded at in “pounded bread” before, in ‘Hades’: “Out on the rampage all night. Beginning to tell on him now: that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing his back. Thinks he’ll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are. About six hundred per cent profit” (6.59-62). On the other hand, “worth a guinea a box” turns out to be the advertising slogan for Beecham’s famous laxative pills, which the advertising canvasser in Bloom might well admire. “Stave it off awhile” does not suggest that Goulding’s pills will be as efficacious as were Beecham’s, nor that his is a condition liable to an easy fix.

“Down among the dead men” is the title of a bawdy drinking song, possibly older than its first publication in 1728, with a tune possibly written by Purcell, and lyrics possibly written by John Dyer, but definitely made use of as a theme by Charles Villiers Stanford in 1898. Bloom does not sing, of course – the outsider, the observer – and his “Appropriate” is a rather sharp joke, as is the “Kidney pie” being “Sweets to the” which follows. It was Goulding who chose the place – “Best value in” – and “Characteristic” marks an even harsher turn, Bloom being himself uncharacteristically hard in his judgments.

“Particular” seems to tally with ‘characteristic’, but Power presumably used “fresh Vartry water” in the making of their whiskey, just as all of Dublin made use of it. “Flaw in the glass” – something Bloom is observing about Goulding’s glass of Power – we thought might also be an oblique reference to Goulding’s eyes again. We noted that Bloom’s tone here is not unlike that of the narrator of ‘Cyclops’, in its disdain for Goulding’s fecklessness (“Fecking” meaning pilfering here) and the squandering of money “in dribs and drabs” perhaps has an echo in ‘Counterparts’, though we also noted that – assuming much of this information has come from Simon – Goulding is no more a squanderer than is Simon, or Dignam, or many others lacking Bloom’s prudence. We spent quite a long time on “wanted” (in the absence of a comma, there is some ambiguity here), but ultimately settled on Goulding being wanted (at the bar, by his family), rather than his never having gone without. “Screwed” does mean drunk (it is used of Freddy Malins in ‘The Dead’ on three separate occasions): that Goulding would be caught out in this way does seem curious, for a lawyer, but the plural “types” supports the sense that Bloom is thinking about other such men as well.

Goulding’s insistence returns and is reworked as he recalls a performance in the “old Royal” (a theatre destroyed by fire in 1880), which Goulding attended with “little Peake”, previously noted by Bloom as a name in the paper in ‘Hades’ – “is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne’s?” – and in ‘Counterparts’ before that, as indeed the very chap, hounded out by Mr Alleyne. Stopping mid-sentence, “Speech paused”: another moment, typical of this chapter, where human agency recedes and is replaced by something more mysterious, the characters themselves as instruments with and on which the narrative plays.

Bloom expects some kind of hyperbole to follow, “a whopper” and “lies” to boot (if he “Believes his own lies” are they really lies at all?); “damn all” is strong for Bloom, captured in this cynical mood, convinced he can see all the tricks and devices. “Rhapsodies” is another one of those casual musical references posing beneath a metaphor. We assumed it was also the lawyer in Goulding, as well as the teller of tall tales, that needs “a good memory” in order to stitch it all together without losing track. The whole name of “Leopold Bloom” emphasises the fact that the narrative has now parted company from his interior monologue. No whopper results: the air is named.

We met again on the 28th – that blog will follow shortly.

Online Seminar, 12 May, 6-8pm (GMT+1)

The next seminar will take place online tomorrow, 12 May at 6pm. The link to join the session remains the same:
https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/c49cbc86f6f84ac390f91ad0252aa9d3

We will continue with ‘Sirens’, Gabler page 224, line 642: ‘- A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.’

Online Seminar, 28 April, 6-8pm (GMT+1) [Tomorrow!]

Having run out of time to combine this post with the next blog, we will reconvene online tomorrow at 6pm, at line 630 of ‘Sirens’: “Richie cocked his lips apout.”