Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

avoidance
of certain morphological asso-
ciations where these would be irrelevant or distracting: this is one reason – we shall
look at others in a moment – why the spelling 
cran
with a 
c
, though it would indi-
cate exactly the same pronunciation as 
kran
with a 
k
, would seem less appropriate,
as it would produce associations with cranberries or craniums or Stephen’s erstwhile
companion Cranly. And what if the tram went ‘bramble’ or ‘gran, gran, gran . . .’ ?
(3) The passage relies on our knowledge not only of the conventions of graphology,
phonology, and morphology, however, but also of those of the rhetorical device of
onomatopoeia itself. To take one example, the convention that a repeated letter auto-
matically represents a lengthened sound is not to be found among the rules of the
English language; the spelling of 
gaffer
, for instance, does not imply that the medial
consonant is pronounced at greater length than that of 
loafer
. The rules cannot handle
a succession of 
more
than two repeated letters at all. But we have no difficulty with
Joyce’s triple 
Fff
, which we interpret as an indication of marked duration, and such
breaches of the graphological rules function, in fact, as strong indicators that we are
in the presence of an onomatopoeic device.
The conventions of onomatopoeia relate not just to spelling, however, but also 
to the associations evoked by sounds and letters. Within the tradition of English 
poetry, the onomatopoeic associations of /s/ and /
∫
/ are more appealing than those
of /f/, though there is nothing intrinsically beautiful about the former or ugly about
the latter. [ . . . ]
More generally, to respond to onomatopoeia of any kind it is necessary to have
learned how to do so, because it means overriding the normal procedures of language
comprehension whereby the sound functions, in Saussure’s vocabulary, entirely as a
differential entity and not as a positive term. [. . .] In sum, onomatopoeia requires
interpretation
as much as any other system of signs does; it is a convention among
conventions. [. . .]
(4) Although we have been discussing onomatopoeia as if it were a purely aural
device, it is evident that the effect of these sequences is partly visual. [. . .] A mere
glance at the passage, in fact, signals to the eye the presence of sequences of letters
which go beyond the normal configurations of written English, and the visual patterns
contribute to the mimetic impressions received by the reader – the short, visually
contrasted segments of ‘Fff! Oo. Rrpr’; the identical repetitions of ‘kran kran kran’;
the undifferentiated extension of ‘Kraaaaaa,’ with a run of letters all the same height;
and the more varied continuities (and presumably sonorities) of ‘Pprrpffrrppffff,’
where the graphic shapes not only differ from one another but protrude above 
and below the line. (The reader familiar with musical scores might even respond
11
111
11
111
S O U N D , S T Y L E A N D O N O M A T O P O E I A
171

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subliminally to this up-and-down movement as a representation of pitch changes.)
The unpronounceable examples mentioned earlier rely even more on apprehension
by means of the eye: they remain resolutely visual, rendering any attempt to convert
them into sound arbitrary and inadequate. One does not have to go to 
Finnegans
Wake
to find a text in which neither eye nor ear is sufficient on its own; indeed, one
does not even have to go to Joyce or to ‘experimental’ writing.
(5) Turning now to the common notion that onomatopoeia constitutes an unusu-
ally precise representation of the physical qualities of the external world, we may ask
how successful we would be in identifying the sounds referred to by these strings of
letters outside the specific context of this passage from 
Ulysses
. Joyce in fact poses
this question at the beginning of the chapter, as if to underline the point in advance.
Among the brief fragments that open ‘Sirens’ are the following, without any accom-
panying explanation:
Fff! Oo! (11.58)
Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl. (11.60)
These enigmatic scraps, like all the items in the list, convey very little in terms of the
fictional setting and can be interpreted only retrospectively. Appearing where they
do, they highlight the dependence of linguistic formations – onomatopoeic and other-
wise – on their immediate context. Thus our ‘hearing’ of the tram in the final passage
of ‘Sirens’ depends entirely on a clue not given in the prelude, the word ‘tram’ itself,
without which we could make no sense of the onomatopoeic sequence. And the fart
has already been carefully prepared for earlier in the chapter, without, it is true,
anything so gross as the word ‘fart’ crossing Bloom’s mind or the text’s surface.
(Molly, in a similar predicament at the end of the book, is not so squeamish.) Several
intimations of flatulence have appeared at intervals on the preceding pages:
Rrr. (11.1155)
Rrrrrrrsss. (11.1162)
. . . bloom felt wind wound round inside.
Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. (11.1178)
. . . then all of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.
Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom’s little wee. (11.1201)
Rrrrrr.
I feel I want . . . (11.1216)
Wish I could. Wait. (11.1224)
I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. (11. 1247)
Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund. (11. 1268)
The final release is therefore the culmination of a little private drama, a kind of inte-
rior dialogue, and we are left in no doubt as to the sound represented by the letters
on the page before us. (Though some readers of refined sensibilities may have taken
the problem to be the less embarrassing one of an urge to belch: the text seems to
offer this possibility in its references to the gassiness of the cider and to the Persian
172
E X T E N S I O N

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custom of burping at banquets, and in the apparent, if deceptive, hint in ‘Must be
the bur.’ Such an uncertainty as to oral and anal alternatives would be entirely in
keeping with the rest of the episode [. . .].) The same letters can in fact perform 
very different onomatopoeic tasks: in