As Ben Dollard nears the end of his performance, Bloom,
wishing to avoid the alcohol-fueled camaraderie that will
follow, says goodbye to Richie Goulding, leaves the dining
room, and walks through the bar toward the outside door.
Standing in the Ormond's entrance hall he hears the roar of
congratulations and thinks, "Glad I avoided." But beneath the
loud rumbles of Dollard's bass a smaller rumbling sound has
begun: "Rrr." The congratulations continue through the
next few paragraphs, but so does this new theme: "Rrrrrrrsss."
The sounds coming from the bar, and thoughts about what path
to take to Barney Kiernan's, compete for Bloom's attention
with the question of what may be giving him gas: "'Tis the
last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round
inside. / Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait.
Postoffice near Reuben J's one and eightpence too. Get shut of
it. Dodge round by Greek street. Wish I hadn't promised to
meet."
Walking up the quay, Bloom becomes lost in thoughts about
actual music but suddenly finds a new tune whistling through
his intestines: "then all of a soft sudden wee little wee
little pipy wind. / Pwee! A wee little wind piped
eeee. In Bloom's little wee." A few moments later, this
high-pitched fluting sound gives way to a third deep rumble, "Rrrrrr,"
and Bloom begins to think of how to relieve the pressure
building inside him: "Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if
I had." After an interval he tries releasing just a little of
the oppressive gas: "I must really. Fff. Now if I did
that at a banquet. Just a question of custom shah of
Persia." To avoid having to exchange words with a woman
he recognizes, he turns and gazes through a shop window at a
poster of Robert Emmett, still thinking about what has
produced all this gas: "Must be the cider or perhaps the
burgund." (Cider is the better bet. It is notorious for
causing flatulence.)
Finally, reading the words of Emmett's speech, Bloom finds
himself overcome with intestinal discomfort as the piping "p"
and rumbling "r" sounds of gases moving through his intestines
combine with the "f" sound of another small fart: "Prrprr.
/ Must be the bur. / Fff! Oo. Rrpr." Seeing
that the woman has passed by and there is "No-one behind," he
spies an opportunity for relief in the clanging clatter of
an approaching tram: "Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor.
Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm sure it's the burgund. Yes. One,
two." And three! The metallic cymbal crashes of the streetcar
blend with the fortissimo of consonants pouring from
Bloom's rear end, the sounds PPRRFFectly combining to produce
"Pprrpffrrppffff."
Joyce's pointedly anti-sublime conclusion of the music
chapter weaves together several prominent threads in his
literary art: the notion that music is all around us, even
in sounds we are accustomed to dismiss as mere noise; the
exploration of highly mimetic onomatopoeia that has begun with
the vocalizations
of Bloom's cat; the insistence that all parts of human
bodily experience are fit objects for literary representation,
even ones that censors insist on excising;
and the deflation of grand heroic sentiments like the ones
expressed in Emmett's
supposed swan song. In addition to all these contexts
for the fart, there is almost certainly a subtle echo of the
poetry of Dante Alighieri. Canto 21 of the Inferno
concludes with some commedia dei diavoli as the
demonic Malebranche exchange signals with their leader
Malacoda: "each pressed his tongue between his teeth / to blow
a signal to their leader, / and he had made a trumpet of his
asshole (ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta)."
Stephen has recalled these Italian words in Scylla and
Charybdis, and Joyce now subtly returns to the image of
an ass trumpet in Sirens by treating the squeaks,
rumbles, and farts of Bloom's intestines as a kind of music.
Robert Hollander says of Dante's lines, "The devils either
prepare to make or have already made a farting sound with
their tongues stuck through their teeth in answer to
Malacoda's prior 'war-signal' of a fart. See Sarolli's
appreciation of this low-mimetic scene as part of the
tradition of musica diaboli, the hellish music that
stands in total contrast with the heavenly music we shall hear
in Paradiso." For Joyce there is no disjunction
between the music of heaven and hell or of spirit and body.
The man who heard delicate chamber music in the
tinkling of urine also heard symphonic variations in the
passing of methane.
Joyce probably was thinking only of Dante, but given his
interest in medieval Latin texts it may be worth asking if he
could have known of the many pictorial illustrations of human
anuses being used to produce music. Ian Pittaway's Early
Music Muse, the music website that displays the images
reproduced here (there are many others in medieval
manuscripts), observes that the large shawm called a bombard
or bumbard––see the second image––got its name from Latin bombus
= fart. The word flatulence, Pittaway notes, derives from
Latin flatus = blowing, blast, breathing, a word which
in medieval musical treatises referred to the air breathed
into a wind instrument. (This sense, from flare = to
blow, is preserved in words like inflate, deflate, and
afflatus, and possibly also in the instrument called a flute,
but only "flatulence" preserves its connection to the anus.)
Pittaway also remarks that the fistula, an abnormal anatomical
opening between two bodily cavities often associated with the
anus, carries into English a Latin word meaning pipe or flute.
There was once, it seems, an entire linguistic world of
connections between wind instruments and rectal trumpets.
