Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

Ulysses
a sequence of 
e
s stands not only for a
release of wind, as in ‘A wee little wind piped eeee,’ but for a stick trailing along 
a path (‘Steeeeeeeeeeeephen!’ [1.629]), a creaking door (‘ee: cree’ [7.50] and 
‘ee’ [11.965]), a turning doorhandle ([‘Theeee!’ [15. 2694]), and a distant trainwhistle
(‘Frseeeeeeeefronnnng’ [18.595], ‘Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong’ [18.874], ‘sweeeee 
. . . eeeee’ [18.908]). In the last example the context does not allow us to distinguish
that trainwhistle from Molly’s own anal release.
(6) For onomatopoeia to work at all, however, it is not enough to know from the
context what sound is supposed to be represented; it is also necessary to have some
prior familiarity with that sound. [. . .] Bloom produces a sound with which we are
all familiar, but we are less likely to know what a 1904 Dublin tram sounded like
and so are less likely to be impressed by the imitative appropriateness of Joyce’s
phonetic formulae. To take a more extreme example, readers who do not know the
sound of a badly adjusted gaslight (among whom I number myself) will not be able
to find out what it is from the letters given to represent the noise in the ‘Circe’
episode: ‘Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!’ (15.2280). (We might suspect, from the much more
helpful lexical description ‘
the gasjet wails whistling
,’ that there is a Circean extrava-
gance about this utterance as about so many utterances in that chapter, but even if
the representation were as accurate as letters could make it, we would still be little
the wiser.) Onomatopoeia is not a means of gaining knowledge about the world; after
all, we can praise a literary text for the precision of its descriptions only if we are
already fully acquainted with what the text purports to be describing.
(7) Even when these two conditions, an unambiguous situating context and prior
familiarity with the sound, are met, the imitative effects of onomatopoeia – even of
this very direct type – remain extremely imprecise. What, for instance, are we to
make of ‘Oo’? Is this a voiced (or thought) exclamation of Bloom’s? An accompanying
burp? A noisy passage in the anal performance? (As every actor knows, the letter ‘O’
can represent a wide variety of speech sounds.) Are the ‘rrr’ sequences here and earlier
to be taken as stomach rumbles, or as premonitory activity in the bowels? And what
aspects of the tram’s sound are represented? The other noises made by trams in the
novel provide no help: earlier they are to be heard ‘honking’ (5.131) and ‘clanging
ringing’ (7. 10), and in ‘Circe’ a sandstrewer bears down on Bloom, ‘its trolley 
hissing
on the wire,’ while the motorman ‘
bangs
his footgong’ and the brake ‘
cracks
violently’ (15.186, 187, 190). One reader, at least, does not even hear a tram at the
end of ‘Sirens,’ but something more euphonious: David Hayman, in a plot summary
of 
Ulysses
, refers to Bloom’s ‘carefully releasing a final fizzle of fart to the sound of
band-music.’ (Hayman 1981: 142; cf. 112–14, where Hayman takes Bloom’s thoughts
about a drummer in a military band as evidence that there is a real band on 
the Liffey quay). Most readers would no doubt regard this as a highly idiosyncratic
interpretation, but it does testify to the lack of a wholly obvious sonic referent.
Only a few nonvocal sounds, in fact, can be imitated with any degree of closeness
by the speech organs, and the significance (and pleasure) to be drawn from Bloom’s
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
173

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fart lies partly in its exceptional character: it is unusually amenable to vocal imita-
tion in being a sound produced by an orifice of the human body. This fact enables
the sequence ‘fff ’ to be appropriate in both the ways open to onomatopoeic imita-
tion, in its articulatory processes and in its acoustic properties – it is both produced
like and sounds like a fart. (Even then, we take little pleasure in accuracy of imita-
tion for its own sake: a more precise rendition of a fart than ‘Pprrpffrrppffff ’ would
be ‘Ffffffffffffff.’) Few of the sounds that we hear, and that writers attempt to convey,
are as well qualified as this one is for imitative representation. We might even say
that the only fully successful onomatopoeia occurs when the human voice is imitated,
which is what written language, in a sense, does all the time – except, that is, when
it is attempting nonlexical onomatopoeia.
(8) A further complication is most obvious in the case of nonlexical onomatopoeia,
though it remains a possibility in all onomatopoeic devices. The reader who responds
to these strings of letters as attempts at direct representation of familiar sounds is
likely to go beyond the normal phonological rules of English in essaying an imita-
tion (in the imagination if not in actual utterance) more accurate than language
normally permits. Doing so amounts to treating the sequences as instructions to the
reader: [