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Sailing the Choppy Sea of Meaning:
Charting the Reader’s Experience of Joyce’s Motifs in Chapter 11 of Ulysses
Jake Wilder-Smith
Response Paper #4
October 22, 2012
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The word motif exhales music, emanating a smoothness of line alive with the movement, the motivus of its
etymologic root—and the soft pulse of a heartbeat, the iamb. In its application in music, it functions with similar breath
and vitality, integral to how we, the listeners, hear and understand music in realtime. The (in)famous four-note ‘fate motif’
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for example—G-G-G-Eb, F-F-F-D—is a dynamic musical cell, which encapsulates
rhythm, pitch, and mood (all while, it should be said, avoiding the tonic note of C minor, its key center) and acts as a lens
through which we understand the first movement. In his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven excelled in condensing his musical
material—in forging a malleable solid through which he sculpted the body of the movement. One of the reasons
Beethoven is so successful—and why so many of us recognize this motif regardless of our comfortability with classical
music—is because he deals with one theme, or motif. Yet, what if a composer—or, in turn, a writer—experiments with an
abundance of motifs rather than one? How does this alter the ‘listener’s’ experience?
In Chapter 11 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Joyce’s role changes course: he shifts from writer to composer. While his
writing embodies stylistic qualities and forms from a wide range of musical traditions—most notably that of the fugue,
following multiple ‘voices’ or storylines that cross, melt into each other, meld, and separate—he markedly departs from
the concepts of musical development of a theme inherent in the music of many composers and works cited within Ulysses
(namely Mozart). It opens with an avalanche of episodic, disjointed motifs—all, in one way or another, dealing with
sounds—and it’s difficult to avoid feeling buried, strangled by these cells of musical language.
This opening, physically separated from the bulk of the chapter that follows, is often likened to an overture—a
collection of themes that gain meaning in their realization within the music that follows. This assertion, in my experience
of the chapter, is misleading. If we attend a production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, we listen to strains of songs
flowing into each other in the orchestral overture—“You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Easy to Love”—with an
understanding that they will come back into the mix, and in juxtaposition, Porter crafts melodies that are irresistibly
catchy, and memorable. Joyce, in contrast, crafts a series of compartmentalized, detached phrases. “Bronze by gold heard
the hoofirons, steelyringing,” sounds the first; “Imperthnthn thnthnthn,” the second (Joyce 210). These melodic motifs are
rich with sonic color—both in the sounds they ask us to imagine (“steelyringing”), and the sounds they phonetically
express (imperthnthn thnthnthn)—but they jump out of a polyphonic texture not for their expressivity or promise of future
development, but for their absurdity. Joyce provides no harmonic structure—no scaffolding for our understanding of a
motif like “imperthnthn thnthnthn”—and thus leaves us lost.
As we read on, though, we discover the true root of the phrase: loud boots’ mocking treatment of Miss Douce’s
verbally rich rebuke, who criticizes his “impertinent insolence” (212). Reaching this exchange, we remember the motif as
a ghost—and are (hopefully) able now to contextualize this fragment of melody with which Joyce opens. Of course, the
sheer number of motifs introduced in the opening (fifty to sixty) leaves us with no more than a vague shadow of the
various themes, segmented into compact capsules. We are left with the same experience as hearing the sounds of a movie
soundtrack echoed in the concert hall—say the Einleitung from R. Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, from 2001: A Space
Odyssey to the Berlin Philharmonic. The characterizations of these motifs as more silhouettes than actual rhetorically
musical structures solidifies mid-chapter through the contrast of the apocopation present in Bloom’s thought as he writes
to Martha: “Got your lett and flow. Hell did I put? Some pock or oth. It is utterl imposs. Underline imposs. To write today”
(229). As we read these sentences—the ends of words chopped off—we fill in the gaps, finish the words ourselves. “Got
your letter and flowers,” we sound out, “It is utterly impossible […] [t]o write today.” Joyce prepares the dominant chord
and we, feeling its gravity—where it leads—are able to resolve it to the tonic ourselves. We cannot perform this kind of
resolution in the opening section. No—rather, Joyce’s motifs feel weightless, and drift past us, and we are unable to grasp
them in our hands. “Blew. Blue bloom is on the,” one sentence reads (210): what the “blue bloom” is on we cannot yet
guess, though it is later revealed as “rye” (215). “Peep! Who’s in the …. peepofgold?” (210). Good question: who is in the
peepofgold? And what is the peep of gold?
Joyce composed Chapter 11 in parallel with the episode of The Odyssey depicting sirens. The parallels range from
more literal allusion—the flirtatious, voluptuous barmaids who seduce and attract the attention of many men, to the
figurative—Bloom mentally chained to the ship, like Odysseus, resisting action in response to Boylan’s impending
rendezvous with his wife, the siren song, despite experiencing it in full, heartwrenching awareness. Hidden within the
chapter, however, is a structural allusion to the sirens; the function of Joyce’s motifs, of an opening full of fragmented
motivic bursts later contextualized and expanded. Our experience of the chapter modulates from vague absorption of sonic
images, coupled with confusion, to recognition of the echoes of the motifs in the second section of the chapter, which beg
for—perhaps even require—a recursive reading of the text. We are drawn back irresistibly to the mystery of the opening
—the strange snippets of sound that bewilder us at first, urging us back as we read on. We are forced to revisit it. This
allows Joyce to further narrate—or compose—with a form invisible to the reader, innate to the text: that of the da capo
aria, briefly mentioned in the climax of Bloom’s awareness of the sounds in his environment (“A blade of grass, shell of
her hands, then blow. Even comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of”) and in his mind (Molly, love, Dignam,
Death). “It is music, I mean of course it's all pom pom pom very much what they call da capo. Still you can hear,” Bloom
ruminates. The circular nature of our reading of the chapter implicitly generates an ABA form, much like that of a da capo
aria, with the sections related in substance, but differing in color and texture. And like the long, winding arias of Händel,
we find ourselves arriving at the second A section with renewed energy and transmuted perspective.
!Or are we, perhaps, under the control of the siren song of Joyce’s writing and highly structured, layered work—bound to
death-by-overanalysis, lured from the sea of meaning, shipwrecked.
!Maybe Joyce leaves a clue within the chapter when he writes, “Words? Music? No: it’s what’s behind.” (226). Once we
hear the chapter, come to terms with its sounds and language, can we safely chart its seas. We, the reader, transform into
Odysseus: we hear the siren’s song, but avoid the inevitable doom that grimly accompanies it.
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