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2 ”Mkgnao! Mrkgnao! Mrkgrnao!” The Pussens Perplex John Gordon A reviewer, if I remember correctly, once wrote that for me Joyce was literally a sensational writer. This writer was right. I have always been interested in how the senses work in Joyce’s writings—in how they register and reverberate, how they progress from stimulus to sensation, from sensation to perception, from perception to conviction or hallucination or dream. The process of sensation, in short, and what follows from it in the embodied brains, or brainy bodies, of Joyce’s characters. To give one example, which I have cited before: when in “Proteus” Stephen, walking on the beach, “closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells” (U 3.10–11), the distinctively Joycean note is not the onomatopoeia of the last five words but rather the fact that it kicks in at the moment Stephen closes his eyes and starts to listen. We are tracking here not so much reality as attention to it, not impressions but the dynamics of impression formation, neither sound nor sense nor sense’s virtual source but the interplay of all three, the way they work out in the sensorium and the mind managing the sensorium. You can perhaps find approximations of such effects in a few other places, among the symbolists, for instance, but for writers of fiction no one I know of—not Pater or Proust, Chekhov or James, Woolf, Nabokov, Updike, or anyone later—comes close to the way Joyce threads the course of his fictions through the glimmerings and awakenings of his characters , through the percepts, made and in making, of his resident perceptors. These observations of mine are not original. Over forty years ago Frank O’Connor remarked of the phrase “The high cold empty gloomy rooms,” from “Araby,” pretty much what I just said about Stephen’s crackling shells in “Proteus ,” that their order follows, as he put it, “almost experimentally,” the young 32 John Gordon protagonist’s stages of apprehension: “Because he is so small, the first thing the boy notices is that the rooms are high; then he perceives the cold and associates it with the rooms themselves; then he realizes that they are cold because they are empty, and finally comes the emotive adjective ‘gloomy’ that describes their total impression” (O’Connor 19–20). Earlier, in The Classical Temper, S. L. Goldberg had described Joyce’s streams of consciousness as rendering not “passive registrations of external reality” but “the very process in which meaning is apprehended in life” (92). More recently, similar comments have been made by Christy Burns and by Fritz Senn, who in his reading of the “Lestrygonians” sentence, “Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls, gulls,” observes that the odd syntactic postponing of “gulls” there may be explained by the fact that, “Empirically, we may well notice something moving”—flapping and wheeling, for instance—“before the thing moving is determined—motion before identification” (Senn 102). What I would like to do is call attention to one critical phase of these perceptual dynamics as they are realized in Joyce’s work. It is the phase that Finnegans Wake describes as passing from the “impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform” (FW 18.24–25). It begins with the involuntary operation colloquially known as “pricking up your ears” or, for sight, “peeling your eyes,” and its essential unit is what the experimental psychology current in Joyce’s youth called the “just noticeable difference,” or “j.n.d.” The j.n.d. is the minimal increment necessary to distinguish one phase from another of what Herman Helmholtz called the “modality” of a class of sensations—for instance, the notes of a scale (Boring 10). For a musical neophyte, the interval between C and C-sharp might, for instance, be such a j.n.d. But as Bloom remarks in “Sirens,” it would be different for musical “enthusiasts,” the ones who are “all ears,” who never “lose a demisemiquaver” (U 11.1192–93) and who would surely be able to distinguish other gradations falling between any two adjacent keys on the keyboard. As the experimenters of the time were demonstrating, j.n.d.’s are modifiable (Boring 480–81), and the first step in modifying them is to apply the kind of attention exemplified by Bloom’s musical enthusiasts, the ones who are “all ears.” Again, by pricking up your ears. I am walking through a strange town...

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