Proteus conveys Stephen's wryly skeptical detachment from the world around him by representing his peripatetic extremities (legs, feet, shoes) as independent entities, distinct not only from his mind but from the larger body that the mind is usually thought to control. But something more than character-study must be going on in these passages, because Joyce uses similar locutions in contexts that have nothing to do with Stephen. When a more corporeally integrated character appears in the next chapter, his "hand" is twice shown performing actions that would normally be attributed to a person. Independent body parts and actions surface from time to time throughout the novel, and in Sirens they flood the foreground. Much of the music of this chapter is contributed by speaking, laughing, cooing, blowing, lisping, trilling, murmuring, and humming "lips."

In Calypso Bloom prepares to exit his front door: "His hand took his hat from the peg." In Dlugacz's shop he tells the butcher what he wants and receives a pork kidney: "His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket." The syntax of these sentences is anomalous. Writers of more conventional prose would say that "he" did these things, and if there were reason to mention a hand it would be a direct or indirect object ("He extended his hand for the kidney," "He took the hat with his hand"). The subject-object inversion in these sentences is probably subtle enough to escape notice, but when Bloom reads the throwaway at the beginning of Lestrygonians it becomes quite arresting. Now body parts exert agency as a grammatical subject and make Bloom the direct object: "His slow feet walked him riverward, reading." Feet here do for Bloom what they do for Stephen in Proteus: "I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there? Seems not." The strange prose validates human experience. Feet have a mind of their own, and when consciousness is focused intently on something else, walking—an action normally viewed as voluntary—shows itself to have an involuntary, unconscious element.

In "Joyce's Lipspeech: Syntax and the Subject in Sirens," an essay published in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja et al (1990): 59-65, Derek Attridge focuses on such moments, noting that "The English language allows very little independence to the organs of the body: most verbs of conscious behavior require a grammatical subject implying an undivided, masterful, efficient self of which the organ is mere slave or satellite" (59). Joyce's English, however, casts organs as agents. In Wandering Rocks Patsy Dignam recalls his father's speech: "I couldn't hear the other things he said but I saw his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better." In Aeolus Myles Crawford's facial muscles sneer contemptuously, an act that initially seems a mere involuntary physical "twitch" but then is shown to involve agency and intention: "His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain." Reading backwards, one realizes that the novel has been exploring these locutions from the beginning. Telemachus mentions Mulligan's "wellfed voice" and shows the old milkwoman bowing her head to "a voice that speaks to her loudly."

The opening sentences of Sirens feature a particularly conspicuous subject-object inversion when Lydia Douce speaks: "— In the second carriage, Miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the sun." Just as Stephen's feet in Proteus may be seen as indexes to his states of mind, Attridge allows that the focus on Miss Douce's lips may be "An indication of the barmaid's mindlessness as she produces mechanical chatter" (60). But this kind of reading cannot survive the numerous reiterations of the trope in Sirens: "Her wet lips tittered"; "Lenehan's lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy"; "Miss Douce's lips that all but hummed, not shut, the oceansong her lips had trilled"; "Lips laughing"; "Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying"; "Play on her. Lip blow"; "Miss Mina Kennedy brought near her lips to ear of tankard one. / — Mr Dollard, they murmured low"; "Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard." Lips, no less than their human owners, figure in this chapter's symphonic effects, as occasionally do other body parts: "Hoarsely the apple of his throat hoarsed softly"; "His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he's proud of, fluted with plaintive woe."

Readers may rebel against these suggestions of dispersed agency, looking for explanations that might reassert the control of the unitary self. Attridge observes that the strange body-expressions could be discounted as synecdoche, a rhetorical figure that Stephen ponders in Circe: "Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their shirts. Shirt is synecdoche. Part for the whole." Invoking this figure of speech is reassuring, he reasons, because it implies reversibility: readers can jump from the part back to the whole, regarding the lips of Sirens as mere linguistic stand-ins for people. But by the same logic one might "regard the naming of the whole individual when only a part of the body is active as itself a figure of speech; in fact, the substitution of whole for part is included in the classical definition of synecdoche" (60).

This is true—synecdoche can be either part for whole or whole for part—and it opens an epistemological chasm. We tend to think of unitary selves acting through bodily instruments, but perhaps that impression is a delusion enforced by linguistic habit. As rational minds inhabiting big brains, we often take credit for things that are actually effected lower down. By this logic, Joyce's syntactic innovations represent a kind of truth-telling—"a stratagem that liberates the body from a dictatorial and englobing will" (60). Attridge goes on to argue that the loosening of this hegemony reveals the power of sexual energy, a force that pulses everywhere in Sirens. "[O]rganic liberation is erotic power: sexuality thrives on the separation of the body into independent parts, while a sexually repressive morality insists on the wholeness and singleness of body and mind (or soul)" (62).

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