Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Derek Attridge
(reprinted from: Derek Attridge, 
Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference
from the Renaissance to James Joyce
London: Methuen. 1988, p.136–47)
Joyce’s dexterity in handling the sounds and patterns of English is evident on every
page of his published work, but one episode of 
Ulysses
is explicitly concerned with
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Derek
Attridge

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music and imitative sound, the chapter known from the Odyssean scheme as ‘Sirens’.
We can expect to find here not only Joyce’s customary linguistic agility and inge-
nuity but also some consideration – if only by example – of the whole question of
language’s capacity to imitate directly the world of the senses. In the well-known
closing passage of the chapter, we find a very rudimentary type of onomatopoeia:
the use of the phonetic characteristics of the language to imitate a sound without
attempting to produce recognisable verbal structures, even those of traditional
‘onomatopoeic’ words. I shall call this type 
nonlexical onomatopoeia
. Indeed, the
device is perhaps too simple to be called ‘onomatopoeia,’ which means in Greek
‘word-making’ and usually implies reliance on the imitative potential of the accepted
lexicon. In its naked ambition to mimic the sounds of the real world, however,
nonlexical onomatopoeia exposes sharply some important but easily overlooked
features of more sophisticated imitative figures.
Leopold Bloom, having imbibed a glass of burgundy at lunch and a bottle of cider
at four o’clock, is walking along the Liffey quay uncomfortably aware that the after-
effects of this indulgence will be embarrassing for him should they be heard by any
passer-by. In particular, he wants to avoid being noticed by an approaching prosti-
tute, and he therefore gazes strategically into a shop window that happens to contain
a print of Robert Emmet together with Emmet’s famous last words on Irish nation-
hood. Just at that moment a tram passes, providing an acoustic cover under which
he can achieve the desired release without fear of detection:
Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. 
When my country takes her place
among.
Prrprr.
Must be the bur.
Fff! Oo. Rrpr.
Nations of the earth.
No-one behind. She’s passed. 
Then and not till then.
Tram kran
kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One,
two. 
Let my epitaph be.
Kraaaaaa. 
Written. I have.
Pprrpffrrppffff.
Done.
(11.1284 [Numbers refer to the corrected text, ed. Hans Walter
Gabler 
et al
., and indicate episode and line nos])
Several nonlexical onomatopoeic sequences occur here, proffering with a vivid and
comic directness the sounds and sensations of tram and fart and contributing to the
undoubted memorability of the writing:
Prrprr.
Fff! Oo. Rrpr
. . . kran kran kran.
Krandlkrankran.
Kraaaaaa.
Pprrpffrrppffff.
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But how simple, obvious, or direct 
is
the onomatopoeic imitation of sound here?
Several factors complicate the picture, and I shall isolate eight of them. The first four
are concerned with the assumption that onomatopoeia involves an unusually 
direct
or 
unmediated
link between language and its referent, the next four with the comple-
mentary assumption that onomatopoeia involves an unusually 
precise
representation
in language of the physical world.
(1) The most elementary question to be asked is how these black marks on the
page represent sound at all, and the answer is, of course, that they rely as much on
the reader’s knowledge of the phonological system of spoken English and the grapho-
logical system of written English as does lexical onomatopoeia or, for that matter,
any English text. Onomatopoeia does not lead us into a realm of direct and concrete
significance, where many writers have dreamed of going; we remain firmly held
within an already existing system of rules and conventions, and whatever mimetic
capability the sequences have they owe entirely to this fact. Putting it another way,
although these are not words and sentences, they mimic words and sentences – and
it is this mimicry that permits us to pronounce them at all. In reading ‘Fff! Oo. 
Rrpr,’ for instance, we give a specific phonetic interpretation to the sequence excla-
mation mark (or full stop)/space/capital letter and treat it quite differently from the
rhythmic repetitions of ‘Tram kran kran kran,’ with its absence of punctuation and
its lower case, or the continuous ‘Krandlkrankran,’ which has the graphic form of a
single word. Even if the normal phonological restrictions are breached, as in the
climactic string of letters (‘Pprrpffrrppffff ’), the resulting articulatory awkwardness
helps draw attention to the sounds themselves, an effect that is equally dependent
on the reader’s prior familiarity with rules of graphology and phonology. Else-
where in 
Ulysses
Joyce goes even further in the direction of unpronounceability 
within the conventions of English: the Blooms’ cat goes ‘Mkgnao!’ ‘Mrkgnao!’, and
‘Mrkrgnao!’ (4.16, 25, 32), and in ‘Circe’ the ‘dummymummy’ produces the sound
‘Bbbbblllllblblblblobschb!’ as it falls into Dublin Bay (15.3381). The difficulty of
pronunciation is obviously part of the comic point (when Bloom imitates the cat in
reply he goes, conventionally, ‘Miaow!’ [4.462]).
(2) The sequences we are looking at do not constitute lexical items, but they do
not function purely as phonetic chains either, without reference to the morpholog-
ical system of the language and its semantic accompaniment. (It would be difficult
to find a string of letters that had no semantic colouring, given a specific fictional
setting and the eagerness of readers to find meanings in what they read.) The letter
‘f ’ hints at the word ‘fart,’ and ‘kran’ is not very far from ‘tram.’ There are also links
with words accepted in the lexicon as representations of sound: ‘Prr-’ suggests ‘purr’
(another long-drawn-out sound made by the expulsion of air through a restricted
passage), and ‘kran’ has elements of two of the words used elsewhere in the novel to
represent the sound of trams, ‘clang’ (7.10) and ‘crack’ (15. 190). ‘Krandl-’ evokes
phonetically related verbs of movement and noise such as ‘trundle,’ ‘rumble,’
‘grumble,’ ‘shamble,’ ‘scramble’ – what has been called a ‘phonesthetic constellation’’
(Bolinger 1965: 191–239; see also Graham 1981 for further discussion of the ‘phon-
estheme’). Mechanical associations, moreover, are evoked by its closeness to ‘handle’
and by the presence of ‘-krank-’ later in the string. We might also note that the most
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salient word in the quotation from Emmet is ‘epitaph’; its [p] and [f] echo the
onomatopoeic fart, deflating the heroic gesture as it is made. This link is all the
stronger because Joyce has implanted it in the reader’s mind in the chapter’s prelude,
where it occurs in the initially uninterpretable ‘My eppripfftaph’ (11.6 1). The reader
might also be induced to make a connection with another sign system, that of musical
dynamics, where ‘ppffff ’ would signal ‘very soft’ and ‘very loud indeed.’ (When Molly
breaks wind in ‘Penelope,’ and also does her best to be quiet about it, she addresses
the words ‘piano’ and ‘pianissimo’ to herself at the critical moment [18.907, 908].)
The onomatopoeic effect also relies on an