In Sirens Simon Dedalus says to Ben Dollard, "Sure, you'd burst the tympanum of her ear, man...with an organ like yours," and Father Cowley chimes in, "Not to mention another membrane." Every element of this lewd joke—the effect of music on parts of the human body, the libidinal interchangeability of those parts (throat and phallus, ear drum and hymen), their transformation into musical instruments (organ, tympanum)—draws on threads that run throughout the prose tapestry of the eleventh chapter. Joyce's schemas identify the Organ of the episode as the ear, but this is far too limiting. Ears, eyes, lips, cheeks, hands, fingers, throat, chest, spine, skin, hair, nose, heart, brain, not to mention penis and vagina—all make up a corporeal symphony pulsing with sexual energy. Musical instruments play on people just as people play on them, and just as variously.

Doctors use tympanum, a Latin word for drum, to name the membrane stretched across the ear canal whose drumlike vibration makes human hearing possible. That medical usage provides a chance connection with an instrument in the symphony orchestra ("The tympanum," evoked in the chapter's overture), and the anatomical similarity of the eardrum to the female hymen brings sexuality into the metaphorical mix. Music enters human consciousness when air pounds against the eardrum, just as sexual intercourse begins with a penis pounding against the hymen. Joyce exploits all of these connections in the joke between Dedalus, Dollard, and Cowley: Ben's powerful singing constitutes a quasi-sexual assault on "her" eardrum. Several paragraphs later in Sirens Bloom recalls the concert in which Dollard was forced to perform in a pair of borrowed trousers:

Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers. Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed, screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O saints above, I'm drenched! O, the women in the front row! O, I never laughed so many! Well, of course that's what gives him the base barreltone. For instance eunuchs.

Basses get their tympanic voices from their male "belongings" just as eunuchs get their countertenor voices from the mutilation of these organs, and Molly's wetness in response to Ben's hilariously revealing trousers suggests a certain female receptivity. Circe maps the association between hearing and sexuality onto the Christian story of the Virgin being impregnated not by semen in her vagina but by words in her ear. Combining Gabriel's Annunciation with skeptical stories of Mary having actually been inseminated by a Roman soldier, the Jewish Virag squawks, "Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum."

In a perceptive short essay titled "Joyce's Lipspeech," Derek Attridge looks at how body parts are isolated in Sirens, how they seem to act independently, how they substitute for one another, how they fuel sexual energy, and how they make music. He observes that the chapter describes singing voices in terms that suggest sexuality both male ("Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling. Full it throbbed...Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect") and female ("Gap in their voices too. Fill me, I'm warm, dark, open") (63). The "lips" of his title (labia in Latin) "may be a synecdochic substitute for the whole individual of which they are a part, but they may also be a metaphoric substitute for another organ which they resemble. Miss Douce's lips are twice given the adjective 'wet', and she complains after her laughing spree, with undecidable reference, 'I feel all wet'. (Compare this with Molly's 'I'm drenched'...)" (62).

Vaginal and seminal wetness also enter the chapter in variants of the morpheme "flow." Bloom thinks about the language of flowers suggested by Martha's letter, but this word flows into thoughts of sexual lubricity: "Means something, language of flow." The language of romantic and sexual flow-ers has an intrinsic connection to music: "Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at his feet when will we meet?" In one of the ecstatic prose responses to Simon's singing of the aria from Martha, this coincidence of meanings becomes at once fully sexual and fully musical: "Flood of warm jimjam lickitup sweetness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading.... To pour o'er slucies pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love."

Many other parts of the body play parts in this symphony of sexual receptivity. Skin tingles: "Pores to dilate dilating." Breasts heave: "Full voice of perfume of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat warbling." Hands stroke: "Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their harps." Eyes gaze and conceive: "A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly, hearing." The entire body responds to powerful music as to sexual excitement: "Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine." Attridge observes that any part of the body can channel sexual energy: "the sexual innuendos by means of which the two barmaids urge one another into orgasmic laughter are all achieved by displacement: 'And your other eye!'; 'With his bit of beard!'; 'Married to the greasy nose!' (Lenehan uses the same technique in his advances to Miss Kennedy: 'Will you put your bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?')" (64).

By the same principle of displacement, objects that are not part of the human body also become metaphorically transmuted into sexual agents. Simon Dedalus fills his pipe as Miss Douce pours him a drink: "He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the bowl." Although Simon does not flirt with Lydia so explicitly and aggressively as Lenehan, the prose conveys his desire. As he pokes shreds of tobacco into his pipe bowl, he (or it) imagines another kind of fingering, another kind of bowl, other feathery shreds. When Boylan raps on the front door of Eccles Street, confidently, insistently, Joyce's spectacularly rhythmic prose turns the knocker into a phallus: "One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock." As Miss Douce listens to The Croppy Boy, her hand lewdly strokes the "smooth jutting" tap handle: "Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, repassed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring."

To call this virtual masturbation would only reduce the pulsating sexual reverie to dry clinical observation. Sirens sometimes does speak of sexuality in clinically abstract terms, as when Bloom gazes on one of the barmaids: "Blank face. Virgin should say: or fingered only. Write something on it: page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young. Even admire themselves. See." But the language quickly slips back into lubricity, corporeality, musicality: Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman, a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes, all women." Freud memorably characterized sexual desire as "polymorphous perversity"—not just a spur to heterosexual genital copulation but a promiscuously open-ended energy directed to oral, anal, and genital gratifications, other parts of the body, other things. For Bloom, a woman's body is something to play on, an instrument of different holes and registers to which he might gently apply his lips.

Sirens is far and away the most consistently sexual chapter in Ulysses. Exploration of such feelings is the central organizing element in its imitation of musical effects. Joyce may have fooled himself and his readers into believing that his words reproduce the intricately mathematical structure of a baroque "fuga per canonem," but there is nothing pretentious about the way he makes language evoke the fusion of musical sound and corporeal feeling. Music consists of two kinds of vibrations: those imparted to the air by instruments, and those introduced via the tympanic membrane into the bodies of listeners. Just as a lover can play sexually on a beloved's body, or a musician on an instrument, musical performances play on every part of the listener's body and mind: "We are their harps."

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John Hunt 2025