Episode 11, "Sirens," takes place between 4 and 5 PM, most of the action happening in the bar, restaurant, and "saloon" (a small concert space) of a hotel on the northern quays where Bloom sees Blazes Boylan depart for his assignation with Molly. From passages in book 12 of the Odyssey, Joyce conceived some key narrative elements: two beautiful and seductive young women, some emotionally compelling songs, a man listening from afar, threats of destruction. He made this a chapter about music, just as Hades is about death, Aeolus about rhetoric, and Lestrygonians about eating. In addition to representing the performance of several actual songs (nearly every word of one appears in the text), Sirens is composed of words that aspire to the condition of music. Through repetition, onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, fragmentation, rhythmic organization, and other devices, words are freed from rigidly sematic contexts and converted into quasi-musical motifs. Joyce was deluded in his pretentious claim to have created the equivalent of a baroque fugue, but he beautifully succeeded in blurring the boundary between literature and music.

In one passage of book 12, Circe tells Odysseus how to listen to the seductive song of some sea nymphs without being destroyed. In another part of the same book, the hero follows her advice. The Greek mythological figures called Sirens do not appear in any existing classical literature before the Odyssey, and Homer does not describe, number, or name them. Only three things are certain: they are female, they inhabit a coastal plain, and they lure sailors to destruction by singing "piercing songs. Around about them lie / great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones, / their skin all shriveled up" (12.45-47, trans. Wilson). Circe tells Odysseus that when his ship passes by this coast he should plug his men's ears with wax and have them bind him tightly to the ship's mast so that he can hear the beautiful music without succumbing to its seductive lure. The hero exactly follows her advice, gaining a rich experience while bypassing a mortal peril.

As in many other chapters in Ulysses, a short but imaginatively rich incident generates a wealth of imagistic details. Two attractive young women work behind a bar described as a "reef of counter," in "cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow." One of them has just returned from a seaside vacation, "Lying out on the strand all day.... Tempting poor simple males," and she has brought back a lovely seashell, a "spiked and winding seahorn" (probably a conch) that makes haunting sounds when held to the ear. Darting to the window to see a young man in the viceregal cavalcade who is turning to look at her, she laughs through "wet lips" and tells her companion that "He's killed looking back.... Aren't men frightful idiots?" Other men enter the bar and flirt with the women, and eventually three of them perform well-known songs to piano accompaniment, in front of "a dusty seascape" depicting "A headland, a ship, a sail upon the billows.... A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the wind upon the headland, wind around her." From his perch in the dining room next to the bar, Leopold Bloom listens to the songs, watches the women listening to them and to the seashell, and thinks of "lovely seaside girls." Unwinding an "elastic band," he weaves it around his fingers in some kind of cat's cradle, leaving them "gyved...fast" like Odysseus to his mast.

Aeolus, fabricated from imagistic reminders of Homer's story about the winds and the rhetorical devices that are their everyday equivalent, quotes from three actual speeches exemplifying Aristotle's three kinds of rhetoric. In Sirens the imagery suggestive of Homer's seductive nymphs is complemented by three actual songs of "Love and War." As Bloom listens to them, emotion wells up in him—understandably, since Molly has told him that Boylan will be coming to see her "at four" (the hour when the chapter begins) and Boylan makes an appearance at the Ormond Hotel bar on his way to Eccles Street. Bloom becomes an Odysseus figure both by being susceptible to these rushes of strong emotion and by distancing himself from them. He thinks about music with critical detachment, musing in his wry layman's way on its calculating devices and mysterious powers.

Joyce too was thinking abstractly about music as he wrote the chapter, and more ambitiously, though it seems likely that his knowledge of musical theory was little better than Bloom's. Ellmann records remarks that he made to Georges Borach on 18 June 1919: “I finished the Sirens chapter during the last few days. A big job. I wrote this chapter with the technical resources of music. It is a fugue with all musical notations: piano, forte, rallentando, and so on. A quintet occurs in it, too, as in Die Meistersinger, my favorite Wagnerian opera…. Since exploring the resources and artifices of music and employing them in this chapter, I haven’t cared for music any more. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more” (459). The disenchantment was probably temporary, but the grandiose affectation was only too enduring. Ellmann goes on to remark that Joyce later went with Ottocaro Weiss to see Wagner's Die Walküre, and at the intermission he asked his friend, "Don't you find the musical effects of my Sirens better than Wagner's?" When Weiss said no, "Joyce turned on his heel and did not show up for the rest of the opera, as if he could not bear not being preferred" (460).

Sirens displays many impressive quasi-musical effects, but Joyce's efforts to treat it as a genuine musical masterpiece seem pretentious and defensive. Whatever he may mean by a "quintet"—probably the moment when "Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard," "true men" all, lift glasses—it can hardly be equivalent to what Wagner does. Effects like piano (quiet), forte (loud), and rallentando (gently slowing down) are so laughably basic as to demean anyone who prides himself on using such "technical resources." Most pretentious of all is the claim to have written a fugue. In both schemas Joyce identified the Technic as "Fuga per canonem," and in a letter he told Harriet Shaw Weaver that the chapter had "all the eight regular parts of a fuga per canonem" (Letters 1.129). Notwithstanding the fact that this is not a commonly recognized term in musical theory ("fugue" is, but per canonem?), literary critics have been all to willing to hear in this authorial boast an indication that Sirens possesses some dauntingly intricate structure. Many have labored to explain how the prose exemplifies it, prompting many others to mindlessly repeat the critical mantra: fuga per canonem....

This whole critical endeavor has the feel of a snark hunt. Literary texts, which move forward one word at a time, simply cannot reproduce the contrapuntal effects of a fugue, in which multiple melodic lines sound simultaneously, pursuing separate horizontal paths but coinciding vertically in harmonious intervals. Poetry and prose fiction can certainly accomplish a complex interweaving of themes, and they can be contrapuntal in the loose sense of having different voices answer one another successively, but they cannot do so simultaneously. To achieve true contrapuntal polyphony in the medium of language, speakers would have to perform separate texts at the same time—a kind of supra-literary vocal performance art which Sirens does not attempt.

One might argue that Joyce's per canonem implies something simpler. A "canon," or "round," is a more basic contrapuntal form in which a melody is repeated unchanged over and over again. Such songs (Three Blind Mice, "Row, row, row your boat," Frère Jacques) are far less complicated than the fugues written by Bach and other Baroque composers, but they too are impossible to replicate in a literary medium. And Joyce's strange reference to the "eight regular parts" of a fugue suggests that he was thinking of something decidedly un-simple. 

Susan Brown has offered to dispel the air of grandiosity in Joyce's self-advertisements, and to undermine the critical hunt for intricate contrapuntal structure in Sirens, in an article titled "The Mystery of the Fuga Per Canonem Solved," published first in Genetic Joyce Studies 7 (2007) and then in European Joyce Studies 22 (2013): 173-93. As a result of scrutinizing one page in a long-lost trove of Joyce's manuscripts and notes, Brown reports that Joyce's notion of a fugue in eight "regular parts"—a theoretical entity that no musician has ever heard of—came from superficial impressionistic reading of an article by Ralph Vaughan Williams in the second edition of Grove's Encyclopedia of Music, published from 1904 to 1910. On the inside cover of a copybook Joyce listed, in Italian, eight elements of a "Fuga per canonem"—terms like "subject," "answer," and "countersubject"—that he apparently intended to graft onto the chapter that he had begun working on.

Joyce was a magpie and a skimmer of texts, but when dealing with things like literature and philosophy he had an uncanny facility for pulling out details that would establish a rich intertextual dialogue with his own writing. Brown argues that his engagement with the Grove encyclopedia entry, by contrast, represents "pure cribbing." "Fuga per canonem" reflects his misunderstanding of Vaughan Williams's observations early in the article (on the first page reproduced here) that "a form which has inspired the most magnificent music of the greatest composers" (i.e., works by Bach and others) began much more simply: "In the 16th century the word meant a movement in canonic form; indeed the name 'canon' is merely short for 'fuga per canonem', a fugue according to rule." Some people in that era practiced the "limited fugue" or "strict canon"—simple rounds of the Frère Jacques variety. Others played with freer forms that ultimately led to the splendid complexity of the Baroque era. Joyce got it exactly backwards, then: canonem refers to the simple precursors from which fugues later evolved, not to a hyper-complicated structure.

Brown attempts to puzzle out what Joyce wrote down about the eight elements of a complicated fugue and what he meant by them. Her specific findings do not bear repeating here, but her assessment of their overall significance does. Vaughan Williams, she notes, was describing possible elements that a fugue might feature, not "regular parts," and Joyce grasped very little of their complex musical significance. His purported mastery of fugue theory was "bogus to none," and he used the terms he cribbed from Grove's as "an inspiration—not a template" to start playing with language in new ways in Sirens. Even his reference to a quintet in Die Meistersinger appears to come from the same essay in the encyclopedia. None of this means that he was not thinking of his eight terms as he introduced different characters and themes into his chapter—probably he was—but it does mean that readers need not search for some fiendishly intricate theory to make sense of the verbal patternings in Sirens.

Probably only one structure in Sirens could not have been conceived without the example of a musical structure. The chapter begins with a list of verbal motifs divorced from any narrative framework. After nearly five dozen fragmentary non-paragraphs, ending with "Done," someone says, "Begin!" and a recognizable narrative commences. All of these clusters of words eventually appear in the narrative, and much of the pleasure of reading it consists in retrospectively learning what events they reference. This structure may well be unprecedented in literature, but every operagoer will recognize what is happening. Operas often begin with an instrumental overture in which musical themes that will appear later in the work's arias, duets, and choruses sound before anything happens on stage. People who already know the work can take pleasure in being reminded of what is to come. People who are new to it can be introduced to themes that they will soon hear developed more fully.

Mozart, Rossini, Bizet, and Verdi all practiced this kind of musical foreshadowing, but the composer through whose writing it gained a technical name (though he did not himself use the term) was Wagner—the artist of whom Joyce spoke to Borach and Weiss. The Wagnerian leitmotif is a melodic theme that, instead of belonging to one musical number, becomes recurrently associated with a character, situation, object, or idea. Some even recur throughout the Ring cycle. Sirens develops very comparable aural motifs associated with characters, objects, and states of mind. Every careful reader learns to recognize and enjoy the "tap tap tap" of the blind piano tuner's cane, the "jingle" of Boylan's carriage bells, the "blue" notes of Bloom's sadness, the "chips" of Simon's fingernails, the "black deepsounding chords" of The Croppy Boy, the distinctive rumblings of Bloom's intestines. These are real aesthetic accomplishments of the chapter, not mere pretensions to parity with great musicians. A few ingenious critics may affect to hear the play of fugal subjects and countersubjects in various sentences, but every attentive reader will quickly learn to recognize these simple aural themes and appreciate the lovely music that Joyce makes from them.

Both schemas list the Art of Sirens, unsurprisingly, as Music, and its bodily Organ as the Ear. The Gilbert schema lists the Symbol as Barmaids, and the Linati schema lists the Sense (Meaning) as The Sweet Deception.

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John Hunt 2025