In the eleventh episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Sirens,” Joyce displays a mastery of musical and memory-based narrative by composing the reader into the text’s rhetorical process. Through the structure and nonlinear prose of the episode, the reader assumes the role of a metaphysical Odysseus subjected to a perilous journey on the sea. Just as Odysseus was bound by rope to the mast of his ship in order to survive the calls of the Sirens, the reader is bound to their own mast (the episode’s prelude), secured by their own rope (Joyce’s use of repetition and linguistic harmonies), and seduced by their own Sirens (aesthetic and cyclical distractions). In essence, I am shifting the mythological progenated roles traditionally assigned to characters such as Bloom (Odysseus) and the barmaids (the Sirens) to the reader’s cognitive landscape composed of literary quagmires. By providing this structure to analyze how readers cognitively and aesthetically engage with the text, we are able to identify new rhetorical and literary relationships between the reader, music and memory.

1. Odysseus

The first distinction to make when engaging with the episode not through the characters, but through the language, is how Joyce composes the reader into the text, and establishes them as their own Odysseus. Simply, Joyce utilizes grammatical and aesthetic techniques that require cognitive engagement on the part of the reader in order to navigate the variations on streams of consciousnesses that compose the movement of the episode. This effect is achieved via parallel processing, a method of cognitive engagement that assists readers in grappling with the episode’s nonlinear prose. Patrick Colm Hogan writes extensively on this process, outlining that parallel processing “involves multiple operations occurring simultaneously to produce a single result,” and “for the most part, it is not self-conscious” (2013: 153-54). This process extends beyond purely text-centralized plot, narrative and characteristic details that are simultaneously at play; it extends to how the reader absorbs this information and in turn, which information is vocalized or subvocalized. That is, the reader and the text’s rhetoric become dialectical, since the reader must engage with linear prose that is intended to supply a singular, multifaceted effect. For example, observe when Simon Dedalus asks Miss Douce how her vacation went:

- O welcome back, Miss Douce.
He held her hand. Enjoyed her holidays?
- Tiptop.
He hoped she had nice weather in Rostrevor.
- Gorgeous, she said. (U 11.194-99)1

We first begin with a clear indication that Simon is speaking and welcoming Miss Douce back home. The next line suggests that nobody is speaking, as indicated by the missing hyphen. Yet, the second sentence in the line is a question that is directly responded to in the third line by Miss Douce. At first, the reader may believe that the question is an interior one that Simon asks himself, but then gains access to both interior and exterior rhetorical mobility when the response is manifested into a direct and “tangible” quote. The same effect is repeated in the next two lines. The narrator tells the reader that Simon hopes Miss Douce experienced nice weather on her trip, but it is left to the reader to formulate the exact phrasing of the unspoken question. As Hogan asserts, when the character’s thought is implemental, “the task usually requires only very limited cognitive processing and is mixed with exploratory simulation” (2013: 162, emphasis mine). This exploratory simulation is the precise concept that allows Joyce to compose his reader into the text; active participation is required on the part of the reader to connect internal to external.

Of course, this example is only a variation of the stream of consciousness present in the episode, one that occurs between two characters. Parallel processing is most essential when navigating Bloom’s interspersed internal monologues, since in literature, “the parallelism of stream of consciousness must be serialised, as non-subvocalised experiences are presented in the sequence of speech” (Hogan 2013: 163). Though linearity supposedly serves as an obstacle to what readers are intended to absorb simultaneously, these subvocalized and non-subvocalized thoughts and sentences are triggered explicitly by sequenced phonological occurrences independent of other fields of cognitive input.2 Thus, when the reader takes into account their own effect on what the text is rhetorically intended to tell them, they are able to surmise and interpolate the intended messages based on their preferences. For instance, let us observe how the reader may engage with one of Bloom’s internal streams of consciousness:

By Cantwell's offices roved Greaseabloom, by Ceppi's virgins, bright of their oils. Nannetti's father hawked those things about, wheedling at doors as I. Religion pays. Must see him about Keyes's par. Eat first. I want. Not yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On. Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On. For Raoul. Eat. If I net five guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The sweets of sin. (U 11.184-90)

This passage is a conglomerate of narration, self-reflection and internal storytelling. The first sentence comes from the narrator, establishing the setting and character, leading the reader into the mind of Bloom. The next two lines consist of Bloom observing the just-established setting and commenting on it. The subject then jumps from Bloom’s debate to eat or not, to his wife’s affair at four, back to where he should eat, to his success on the ads, to lingerie, and finally back to his wife’s affair. Though the information is given in a linear order, Joyce is able to present it as a singular state of thought. The bite-sized signifiers of other events, characters and feelings require the reader to sort through them and decide what Bloom is alluding to with each new sentence. The deployment of incomplete grammatical and aesthetic elements in the passage begs the reader to complete them using information garnered from earlier episodes. Consequently, this task also produces the effect of augmenting the information in other episodes, since it requires the reader’s dialectical and cognitive engagement. Although insightful to how parallel processing functions throughout the episode, these examples are only local. If the reader is made to be Odysseus through the responsibility of their participation, then what they are tied to is a state of constant parallel processing that spans the whole episode, one they are greeted with from the very first sentence of “Sirens.”

2. The Mast

The first sixty-three lines of episode eleven are distilled clips and motifs of forthcoming lines and events found all throughout “Sirens.” Although there are many interpretations as to what function the first part of the episode serves, I argue that the primary intended purpose of this prelude is to present the reader with a variety of voices that aestheticize the issue of nonlinear narrative and prose.3 Using the metaphor of Homer’s Odyssey, these lines can be considered the mast that Odysseus (the reader) is bound to. Not only does this opening section engage the reader in parallel processing, it allows the text to become a circular process of referencing that constantly contextualizes and re-contextualizes the exploratory simulation. Joyce’s style of writing in “Sirens” acts as an elastic band that pulls the reader back to previous sentences, and those sentences are tied back to the mast. The reevaluation of passages in response to these textual moments both later and prior to the chapter result in what Hugh Kenner calls the “aesthetic of delay.” Kenner describes the concept as “producing the simplest facts by parallax, one element now, one later, and leaving large orders of fact to be assembled late or another time or never” (1987: 81). This aesthetic of delay is the function that keeps us returning to the beginning sixty-three lines, and the beginning sixty-three lines returning to the text. That is, the beginning section only becomes coherent after reading the rest of the episode. Marjorie Howes expands on this concept, noting that the aesthetic of delay only requires the reader to “revisit passages and solve riddles in light of later information,” but the aesthetic of parallax formulates textual instances that are “only intelligible in relation to what has been said before… Taken together, they suggest a model of reading Ulysses that is non-linear and always in process” (2014: 129). This model of the aesthetic of delay / parallax functions in unison with the concept of parallel processing, since the former allows for time-based mobility, and the latter allows for cognitive-based understanding.

The aesthetic of delay/ parallax is not a concept that solely exists to permit readers to investigate different parts of the text in relation to one another. It is a concept that helps provide stylistic aesthetics. A primary way to observe this is by looking at how the source material from the prelude is embellished in the second part of the episode. In the sixteenth line of the prelude, Joyce writes “Coin rang. Clock clacked” (U 11.16). These two short sentences are then stylistically enriched and echoed halfway through the episode: “Miss Douce took Boylan's coin, struck boldly the cashregister. It clanged. Clock clacked. Fair one of Egypt teased and sorted in the till and hummed and handed coins in change. Look to the west. A clack. For me” (U 11.382-84). Line thirty-six, “Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss,” resonates to “Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls” (U 11.36; 983-84). In both of these examples, the original signifying sentences in the prelude are not only rearranged, but assigned new meaning and context. These rearrangements are the core function behind composing the style of literary aesthetic present in “Sirens.” The style is further established via the accompaniment of parallel processing; the reader is prompted to cognitively assign meaning between the opening lines and what they represent later on in the text (time-based mobility), or vice versa. Further, these processes give meaning as to why the prelude even exists as an aesthetic authority in the first place. If the reader is bound to the mast, then they are bound by repetition and form.

3. The Rope

In “Sirens,” the use of local and non-local textual recapitulation and musical harmonies compositionally scaffold the aesthetic of delay/ parallax and parallel processing, allowing the reader to remain as a necessary participant in the rhetorical process. More specifically, Joyce consistently employs the use of repetition in order to enhance rhetorical engagement with aesthetics, rather than linear engagement with the narrative. For instance, “Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear” (U 11.81-83). The source adjectives and verbs in the quote are established by the end of the first sentence. The subsequent sentences serve to reinterpret and re-stylize the original message. As Howes points out, “Many instances of this method are quite local, designed to highlight the principle itself rather than the content of what is being remembered” (2014: 129). Although the reader does not have to supply their own cognitive interpretation, parallel processing is still present when we consider the entire scope of details a section like this provides. That is, the details are provided once for function, and repeated again for a stylistic panorama that the reader is better able to engage with aesthetically and internally.

Local repetition does not only occur in immediate sentences, but can also manifest over the course of lines that exist in close proximity. For example, “The boots to them”; “loud boots unmannerly asked”; “bootssnout sniffed rudely” (U 11.89; 94; 100). Though the three sentences exist in separate sections, they serve to convey and develop the same idea in different phrasings. In the first line, we know who the boots are addressing. In the second two lines, we find that the boots are characterized by their abrasive behavior in two stylistic renderings. Without the full context of the words and sentences that surround them, from these clips of phrases the reader is able to identify and contextualize the boots’ purpose and meaning. Further, subtracting the surrounding details allows readers to once again engage in parallel processing in order to fill in what is both not immediately said and or implied.

Non-local repetitions establish and cement details more effectively, primarily because they remain constant on a larger scope of the episode. Further, spaced-out repetitions of details allow for more engagement with the aesthetic of delay/ parallax, since it is reliant on time-based modality. For instance, Blazes Boylan is constantly associated with the words “jingle,” “jaunt,” and “jangle”: “Jingle jingle jaunted jingling”; “Jinglejaunty blazes boy”; “Jingle a tinkle jaunted”; “Jingle jaunted down the quays” (U 11.15; 290; 456; 498). Due to the constant association with these phrases, Boylan effectively becomes interchangeable with them, as seen in the third and fourth instances when his character is signified by the word “jingle.” We also see how the initial phrase begins in the episode’s prelude and is reflected in its subsequent variations. Further, the style of the phrasing does not necessarily usurp the content-value of what is written, but rather is used in equal conjunction. Another example that places more emphasis on style than narrative content is Pat the waiter and the disembodied laughs that allude to the humor of his occupation: “Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee”; “Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait”; “Hee hee hee hee. Deaf wait while they wait” (U 11.40; 917-19; 1004). Again, the first instance of this pattern is established in the prelude and riffed on in the episode’s primary body. Although the content exists within the variations, the aesthetic rephrasing is utilized more to supply the reader with a larger palette for parallel processing. The aesthetic of delay/parallax is what ropes us to our cognitive intake and prevents us from falling into complete nonlinear confusion.

Joyce’s use of non-local repetition also works to establish larger themes in the episode. The difference between identifying character repetition and thematic repetition is that thematic repetition relies on contributions from the characters. For example, we may first draw some interpreted meaning from Simon Dedalus’ association with fingers: “He fingered shreds of hair”; “Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing an eyelid” (U 11.222; 440-41). Though an analysis of this repetition may yield a limited inference, it is not until we consider the chorus of other character’s experiences with fingers that we may decipher a more accurate interpolation of their inclusion: “Bob Cowley's twinkling fingers in the treble played again”; “his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes in the air” (U 11.958; 1152-53). With all characters and their associations to fingers included, it is certainly safer to infer that fingers are tied to musical actions, thus the body is indirectly tied to music via varied repetitions of a singular theme. This is how the reader’s metaphysical rope functions: it ties the reader to parallel processing by giving them time-based and aesthetic mobility. Another example is the repeated thematic variations of gold and bronze: “Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar?”; “Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar”; “Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking glasses all” (U 11.59; 338; 1269-70). Here, Joyce almost directly addresses the function of local and non-local repetition, utilizing space-related adjectives (anear and afar) in conjunction with the presence of bronze and gold. Again, the reader is roped to an operation of cognitive understanding that manifests through nonlinear repeated details. Another way to classify these repetitions is through the function of harmonies.

The history of debates surrounding what musical form Joyce intended to structure the episode by versus what musical form it was actually structured by is complex and has provided many different interpretations of both the rhetorical fugue and fuga per canonem.4 Despite this, what primarily concerns the making of repetition-based harmonies in “Sirens” is Joyce’s inclusion of subjects, answers to those subjects, and counter subjects. For the sake of definitional reference, I will include Lawrence L. Levin’s description of the fuga per canonem, since Joyce himself claimed that it is the form, along with all eight of its “regular parts,” that he intended to use for the episode’s structure.5 Levin writes:

The canon consists essentially of polyphonic lines of melody in which an initial voice, called the subject, is imitated, note for note, by another voice called the answer. The answer, comes, may take place at the unison, the octave, or above or below at any interval, but directly imitates the melodic phrases of the leader or dux. The complexity of the canon increases with the number of voices. (1965: 13)

Although the prose is linear, Joyce’s repetition of character-driven and thematic elements gives the plot a musical structure. On a larger scale, readers may observe the musical dynamics of the episode dictated by the frequency of musical allusions and participation of voices (parts, or characters), with one of the climaxes oc

Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said, cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley, first gent with tank and bronze Miss Douce and gold Miss Mina. (U 11.757-60)

What allows this climax to occur are the harmonies engaged and built on one another before it.

In order for these smaller harmonies to occur, the characters and their respective thematic associations must interact and overlap. For example, “Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting fingers on flat pad Pat brought” (U 11.863-64). In this sentence we simultaneously revisit Bloom’s boredom (“Nothing to do. Best value in Dub”; “Yet too much happy bores” (U 11.571-72; 810-11)), Pat’s action of bringing a pad of ink (“Pat brought pad knife took up”; “Pat brought quite flat pad ink” (U 11.30; 847)), and the thematic relationship between fingers and music (“tambourined”). Two characters that harmonize from the onset of the second part of the episode are Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy:

In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each Other, high piercing notes. (U 11.158-61)

Throughout the episode, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy seem to harmonize so frequently, that their characters operate almost in complete unison. As opposed to the blending of two separate themes as seen in the first example, this type of harmony produces two themes from its consistency. Meaning that, because gold and bronze have performed in synchronicity since the prelude (“Bronze by gold”; “By bronze, by gold”; “Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar?” (U 11.1; 49; 59)), when they act separately, there is discordance in the common theme. This allows for their own ability to create new harmonies with other voices in the episode: “Bald Pat in the doorway met tealess gold returning” (U 11.453). By introducing these groupings of harmonies in a linear fashion, the effect of a singular nonlinear cognitive interpretation is successful. As Carl Eichelberger notes, Joyce’s ability to “give significance to phonemes by echoic linkage shows how the creation of a new language in an internally referential world provides access to heterodox realities through the visual and aural properties of language" (1986: 66). These heterodox realities are the building blocks to what becomes an orthodox cognitive reality for the reader. Without these repetition-based harmonies, the reader’s referential ability becomes oppressively linear. Yet, Joyce’s use of musical functions extends beyond the role of the rope that secures the reader to the mast. It also serves as a mythological distraction.

4. The Sirens

As the reader continues to operate as their own metaphysical Odysseus, they are faced with the Sirens’ calls: musical aesthetics and memory. These devices are used to simultaneously displace the reader from their immediate narrative-driven navigation through the episode, and to shift focus to other episodes by amplifying their presence in “Sirens.” These elements summon the requirements of both parallel processing and aesthetic of delay/ parallax by retaining extended aspects of engagement beyond the immediate episode. That is, the Sirens in this episode exist to dilute the episode’s content, and shift the focus from narrative content to an aesthetic-centric nucleus.

Music exists as a distraction to the readers in two primary ways: referentially and stylistically. The first has nothing to do with musical form, but rather, its existence occurs in order to refer to, or anticipate, an event in a past or future episode. Consequently, this creates a mental displacement for readers from the immediate events of the episode. Two featured songs that demonstrate this are “Love and War” and “M’appari” from von Flotow’s opera entitled Martha. Ben Dollard’s rendition of “Love and War,” followed by Father Cowley’s piano playing, opens a thematic wound for Bloom. A sample of each part of the lyrics go as such:

Lover (tenor):
When Love absorbs my ardent soul,
I think not of the morrow;
By softest kisses, warm’d to blisses,
Lovers banish sorrow
Soldier (bass):
While war absorbs my ardent soul,
I think not of the morrow;
By cannon’s rattle, rous’d to battle,
Soldiers banish sorrow
Unison:
Since Mars lov’d Venus, Venus Mars,
Let’s blend love’s wounds with battle’s scars,
And call in Bacchus all divine,
To cure both pains with rosy wine

The song’s conflicting themes between the Lover and Soldier resonate with themes both in “Sirens” and in prior episodes. In one instance, it reflects Bloom’s debate on whether to intervene in his wife’s affair or sit idly by. In another, it makes Bloom reminisce about when he first met Molly: “Tiresome shapers scraping fiddles, eye on the bowend, sawing the 'cello, remind you of toothache. Her high long snore. Night we were in the box” (U 11.574-76). His thought is interjected by Boylan’s “Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty,” but resumes, “Only the harp. Lovely gold glowering light. Girl touched it… We are their harps. I. He. Old. Young” (U 11.579; 580-83). This internal monologue forces the reader to anticipate events that will happen in future episodes, distracting them from the immediate plot. Thematically, Bloom’s thoughts of love are interrupted by the man he is at war with over Molly, Boylan. A similar effect and message is utilized with “M’Appari” when Simon Dedalus stops singing before the end of the second stanza. “M'appari tutt amor: Il mio sguardo l’incontr…” (“You appear to me all love: My gaze meets her...”) (U 11.594-95). Jon D. Green notes that “this interruption foreshadows the reality of the situation in that Bloom's sorrow over Molly's deception will not depart” (2002: 493). To extend Green’s interpretation, this song reinforces the displacement of the reader from the immediate interaction with “Sirens,” requiring them to recall and anticipate the details that make the song’s presence so significant. This is also the point in which parallel processing occurs, since there is a cognitive product that is composed of thematic references in which the reader derives meaning from non-linear details. Referentially, music distracts the reader by allowing the details in “Sirens” to influence, and be influenced by, events and details from other episodes.

Stylistically, Joyce uses grammatical techniques to further shift the reader’s focus from the narrative content to how the content is presented. Musicality provides readers with this distracting effect through repetition: “They laughed all three. He had no wed. All trio laughed. No wedding garment” (U 11.474-75). As stated before, the re-phrasing of the last lines offers no new information, but rather serves to musically deviate the reader from the plot through aesthetics, just as one would find in a coda, trill or thematic phrasing in a composition sheet. A second example: “By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets. Of sin” (U 11.156-57). In contrast to the first example, this selection suggests new meaning in each variation. In the first phrase, Bloom refers to the sweets of sin. In the second, he assigns aesthetic value to those said sweets. The third phrase is a disjointed memento meant to echo the source phrase. Since these variations primarily operate as distractions for the reader, utilizing parallel processing is crucial in order to understand the different interpolations the variations provide.

Another technique Joyce uses to sidetrack the reader is expressive musical phrasing. One example is his use of staccato and legato: “But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the dark middle earth” (U 11.1005-6). The first three sentences are two monosyllabic words, likened to two quick notes (staccato). Following is a singular word, but one that contrasts the prior sentences with its repetition of vowels tied together by length (legato). The next sentence is one word that is then contrasted by the slightly longer phrase that follows. Each sentence can be equated to a musical phrasing, and each phrasing’s proximity to one another creates contrast, thus musical and aesthetic variation. Although these are only a few examples, other scholars have provided their own interpretations and categorizations of these musically driven grammatical techniques.6 Such techniques not only provide enhanced aesthetic value, but are again used to dilute the reader’s attention from the content to how the content is presented.

The second primary Siren in episode eleven is memory. Much like the referentiality of music in the episode, memory serves to disperse the reader’s cognitive engagement into other episodes. The difference is that this type of memory consists of noises and elements that are directly generated from text in other parts of the book.7 For example, Boylan’s association with the word jingle echoes the line in episode four: “she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled” (U 4.59). The line is contextualized in both cases by Bloom and Molly’s contentious relationship. The first is the sound of the adulterous enemy, Boylan. The second, though appearing first, is the noise the bed makes after Molly expresses displeasure in her husband with a “warm heavy sigh” (U 11.58). Consequently, each episode serves to enhance details in the others via textual echoes. Another example that captures an environmental echo is Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy’s overhearing of the cavalcade introduced at the end of episode ten: “Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze, Miss Kennedy’s head and Miss Douce’s head watched and admired,” is echoed by “bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing” (U 10.1197-98; 11.1). This callback is perhaps one of the more noticeable ones to readers, since it occurs within mere pages of each other. A final example is in episode eighteen when Molly’s monologue incorporates “Love that is singing: love's old sweet song,” into “Water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that have to be out all night” (U 11.681; 18.597-99). These are all prime examples of Kenner and Howes’ aesthetic of delay/ parallax since they are perhaps the most poignant examples of time-based connections that provide context to details in both future and past episodes. The distractions occur for readers when these connections are noticed, perpetually placing the reader on their guard and looking for references to recontextualize what they already have digested.

In order to gain access to a more complete palette for parallel processing, the reader is required to read elastically. This requirement creates another emphasis on diluting direct focus on content in “Sirens.” As Andrew Warren writes:

This attraction to particular details in the episode, the call to listen to them, rather than others, is a kind of distraction. The term, after all, denotes a violent drawing away or pulling apart, a diffusion or dispersal of attention. (2013: 657)

The content-driven aesthetic of delay/ parallax thus becomes a linearity-based aesthetic of anticipation and re-anticipation. Parallel processing then assists the reader in becoming more than just the receiver of anticipation, but part of the anticipatory process, akin to being part of the rhetorical process as previously discussed. Take the following passage for example:

Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at his feet when will we meet? My head it simply. Jingle all delighted. He can't sing for tall hats. Your head it simply swurls. Perfumed for him. What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last look at mirror always before she answers the door. The hall. There? How do you? I do well. There? What? Or? Phila of cachous, kissing comfits, in her satchel. Yes? Hands felt for the opulent. (U 11.686-92)

As Bloom anticipates Molly’s affair throughout the episode, the reader engages in a process of cognitive organizing that determines what is anticipated and how it is anticipated. First, the passage is an inner monologue narrated by Bloom. Bloom puts theoretical events and phrases into action in a linguistically disjointed manner. Although we are inside of Bloom’s head and have first-hand access to his thought process, the reader is still assigned questions to answer. For instance, after Molly takes one last look at herself before answering the door in the theoretical situation, the setting of the hall is established, and then a question is presented: “There?” It is up to the reader to decide if this means Boylan has arrived, or if the hallway is the place the affair will begin. The question is asked again after Boylan and Molly exchange their formalities. Now the reader must reconfigure the question, and begin anew with the subsequent “What?” and “Or?” both existing too without context. By the end of the passage, the reader is no-doubt derailed from any form of a linear narrative. Instead, they are left with interpretations that were required to be made in order to advance the plot, even if the reader is not sure what they have come up with is correct. The task of “filling in the blanks” is what manufactures distraction for the reader. That is, the relationship between music and memory creates a dialectical tension between the reader’s participation in the (re-)anticipatory process and Joyce’s grammatical and aesthetic quagmires that cognitively operate as the alluring calls of the Sirens.

5. Music and Memory

Music and memory are in a perpetual state of communication in “Sirens.” Joyce uses one to compose the other in both a stylistic and grammatical rhetoric. What comes from the thematic harmonies of the aesthetic of delay/ parallax and parallel processing is the literary apotheosis of nonlinear communication. The amalgamation of music, repetition, aesthetic emphasis and cognitive reliance on the reader create some of the most complex and Joycean passages in the episode:

Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle. Hiss. Now. Maybe now. Before. 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. Tap. (U 11.984-89)

In this passage, the reader is first met with phonetic musical variations of rain. At first the words are staccato, followed by an onomatopoeia interpolation of the sounds rain makes. The reader then follows Bloom’s thoughts of Boylan meeting Molly, and is presented with different clues concerning the timing of the affair (“Now. Maybe now. Before”). Joyce then spends the rest of the passage combining Boylan’s knocking at the door with the knocking of his genitals. He effectively interweaves the action of arrival with the action of the affair by blending the two together with musical variations of the words “knock” and “cock.” Here, music serves to amplify the memory, or future memory of Bloom’s anxiety and anticipation. In turn, this anticipation serves to shape exactly what notes the music takes form with.

It is important to clearly note that because “Sirens” depends on elastic reading and the aesthetic of delay/ parallax, future memory is as legitimate a function as past memory. Memory thus serves to shape the narrative as a circular operation, and as Howes argues, facilitates the reading as an ongoing process. This function is amplified when working in partnership with musical devices that serve to advance the content and plot through aesthetics. For example:

Get out before the end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where's my hat. Pass by her. Can leave that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk, walk, walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisntdall Farrell, Waaaaaaalk. (U 11.1122-25)

Here, Bloom’s internal monologue both advances the narrative and the aesthetic style of the episode by giving the reader just enough information to infer what actions are being taken, and how those actions are perceived internally by the character. The first two lines indicate Bloom is leaving the Ormond and giving thanks for the meal. Bloom then begins mixing assertions with questions; the question as to where his hat is becomes a statement, rather than a wonder. Bloom begins to repeatedly tell himself to walk. His urgency surrounding the command is emphasized by the final elongated variation. In the end, the reader is able to decipher what Bloom has done, and how he has done it, with the emphasis being on the how.

In summary, music serves to shape how memory is conveyed to the reader, and memory shapes what variations the musical elements grammatically and phonetically manifest into. Instead of explicitly advancing the narrative content of the episode, the two nurture and expound on the aesthetic rhetoric available to the reader. This relationship creates a ground for simultaneously hosting and establishing presence in other episodes. That is, memory and future memory supply music its textual echoes from which it composes, and what it composes supplies re-stylized and new context to artifacts from foreign episodes. In “Sirens,” music and memory do not and cannot exist without expressing the other.

Considering the effects of music and memory’s relationship, the reader has no choice but to assume their metaphysical role as Odysseus. They are tied to the function of parallel processing since it is the required method of interpretation and narrative advancement. Without the reader’s active participation in determining how they fill in the gaps between internal and external elements in the text, linearity will prove to be the factor that prevents any chance of full cognitive understanding. The reader is thus faced with organizing their cognitive intakes from the palette of details supplied by the aesthetic of delay/ parallax. As discussed, this palette both extends beyond the immediacy of “Sirens” and is key to gaining entire access to available context. Lastly, the reader must navigate the distractions and content dilutions presented by repetitional, musical and memory-driven aesthetics. In summary, the reader has become Odysseus, bound with the rope of aesthetic delay to the mast of cognitive parallel processing. Without proper understanding of how to navigate these obstacles, readers will no doubt be overcome by the call of Sirens, and fail to fully grasp the complexities and full array of literary treats granted in the episode.