Music, Memory and Metaphysical Odyssey: How Joyce Composes Readers and Text in “Sirens”

Abstract

In the eleventh episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Sirens,” Joyce displays a mastery of musical and memory-based narrative by breaking the rhetorical wall and composing the reader into the text. Through the structure and style of the episode, the reader assumes the role of Odysseus; they are bound to the ship’s mast (parallel processing), secured by the rope (aesthetic of delay/parallax), and seduced by the Sirens (music and memory). Analyzing the reader as a character integrated into the text helps us identify new cognitive and literary relationships between the reader and musically driven writing techniques. These uncoverings are apparent through an examination of how the episode’s first sixty-three lines work in relation to the rest of the episode, and how “Sirens” works in relation to the rest of the book. It becomes imperative for the reader to engage elastically with the text in order to gain the full context of provided references and meaning. Additionally, I explore how Joyce’s use of local and nonlocal repetitions of details work in relation to linear and nonlinear cognitive interpretation.Utilizing Hugh Kenner’s concept of the “aesthetic of delay” and Patrick Colm Hogan’s studies of parallel processings, I will explicate the indivisible relationship between the role of music and memory within the episode, consequently displaying how rhetorical interplay is thus produced between reader and text. Through Joyce’s use of textual echoes set to melodic architecture, the reader befits a metaphysical parody of Odysseus and sails through a sea of Sirens on their own hero’s journey home.