Love's Old Sweet Songs: How Music Scores Memory in the "Sirens" and "Penelope" Episodes in Ulysses

If you want your work to reach fruition what you need's a link with your tradition … the art of making art.

—Stephen Sondheim

PRELUDE

Familiarity with popular music is central to understanding the art of James Joyce in all his texts—A. Walton Litz, Anthony Burgess, and others have said as much—but in none more so than Ulysses.¹ The song fragments that Joyce weaves into snippets of dialogue illuminate the larger text, often comprising what the Lithuanian semiotician Yuri Lotman would term a "text within the text," wherein we encounter "the presentation of one text as an uninterrupted account while a second is introduced into it in fragments, such as citations, references, epigraphs, and the like [song fragments, for instance]. Presumably, the reader unites the fragments into whole texts."²

The juxtaposition of the fragmentary text within the text to the text of the uninterrupted account enlarges the emotional substance of the literary experience. The relationship between the two texts is associational. In The Art of James Joyce, Walton Litz notes that Joyce employs the associational technique in two significant ways: first, to order the impressions and memories of his characters, and second, to organize the novel's heterogeneous raw material.³ These effects are especially apparent in the "Sirens" and "Penelope" episodes, where Joyce incorporates snatches of popular music—in particular, from the songs "Waiting" and "In Old Madrid," two of Molly Bloom's greatest hits—both to highlight, on a June night in 1904, her reverie of lost loves and past times in Old Gibraltar nearly twenty years earlier, and to score a memory almost as old in Bloom's mind as he resists seduction by the sirens of the Ormond Bar earlier that day.⁴ Joyce achieves a simultaneity of effect, in that the heterogeneous elements comprising the narrative in the text within the text of the "Penelope" and "Sirens" episodes occur in the same narrative moment as the larger text, in what Walton Litz views as the result of an accumulative process. This sense of simultaneity can only be attained after we are familiar with all the components in the texts and their relationship with each other and to the larger text (Litz 54–55).⁵

In Lotman's terms, then, the heterogeneous elements that initially do not appear to fit into the homogeneous whole actually contribute to and enhance the total narrative design once we have cracked the code of the texts within the text—fragments of songs quoted, or misquoted, in the text; allusions to refrains outside the text. By applying Walton Litz's associational principle to the seemingly heterogeneous texts, and with the aid of what Denis Donoghue calls the "auditory imagination,"⁶ the close reader will be able to discern how music scores Molly's memories in "Penelope" and Bloom's in "Sirens." In both instances, the narrative enlightenment is lodged ultimately in the effect of simultaneity. This requires reading and rereading of Joyce's densely allusive text in order to assemble all the illuminating heterogeneous components and evaluate their interrelationships.

Sound more readily than sight, however, is what transports the reader fully into the experience of Molly's nostalgia in the novel's final episode and Bloom's sentimental recollection in the Ormond Bar. A songstress as well as a siren, Molly alludes to popular music fragments throughout her late-night ruminations. This music also plays beyond the text for the reader acquainted with it, but whether literally on the page or allusively off it, the song lyrics are meant not only to be read and recalled but also to be heard. Thus, Donoghue emphasizes Joyce's auditory potency, recalling Stuart Gilbert's early observation that within the Ulysses schema the ear is the "organ" of "Sirens"⁷ and Joyce's own insistence in Finnegans Wake that it is the "Ear Ear not Eye Eye" that must be enlisted to make sense of his narratives.⁸

TEXTS

Indeed, the ear more than the eye often lends sense to Molly's fragmentary stream...