His
hand
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).