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Attridge, Derek. "Joyce’s Noises." Oral Tradition 24, no. 2 (2009).

Related topics:

Animals
Creation and Making
Ingestion and Excretion
Language and Linguistics
Realism
Thought and Action

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/joyces-noises/oclc/4638110036&referer=brief_results

Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/oral_tradition/v024/24.2.attridge.html

Derek Attridge examines James Joyce's use of (mostly) non-lexical onomatopoeia, a term defined in Attridge's earlier work, Peculiar Language, as the grouping of phonemes to create a sound effect without forming a recognizable word of the language. Though Attridge locates seeds of this device in a "Pok!" from Dubliners' "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," and the sounds of cricket batting practice in Portrait—"pick, pack, pock, puck: like drops of water in a fountain slowly falling in the brimming bowl"—most of his analysis concerns the onomatopoeia of Joyce's Ulysses.

Beyond a catalogue-like recollection of bell sounds, animals sounds, etc in the novel, Attridge draws our attention to three moments that suggest "the main characters in Ulysses [Molly, Bloom, and Stephen] all have an interest in onomatopoeia." Molly's moment comes in the representation of train whistle/fart as "frseeeeeeeefronnnng" (U 18.596), a spelling Attridge views as "connected in some way with Molly's own perception of the sound," which is linguistically intertwined with thoughts about her musical career and affair with Boylan. Likewise, the whispering "ee: cree" of Rutledge's door in "Aeolus" (U 7.50) is rendered as heard by Bloom, and becomes integral to his reflections on noise versus music later in the novel: "There's music everywhere. Ruttledge's door: ee creaking. No, that's noise" (U 11.964-5). Conversely, Attridge sees Stephen's engagement with onomatopoeia as active and authorial; he is poet-speaker rather than interpreting listener, crafting sound-words without heard impetus: "His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayaway" (U 3.401-04).

In each case, Attridge reads Joyce's language as blurring or testing the lexical/non-lexical boundary, proposing three functional patterns of this semi-lexical onomatopoeia in the novel. First, unconventional phonetic forms serve as a networking tool, extending "beyond local pleasure" in their repetition and variation to suggest links between disparate sections of the book. (Both the Molly train whistle/fart example and Bloom's cree-king door example achieve this type of effect.) Second, Attridge identifies a deformation strategy in which Joyce modifies real words to increase their "aural effectiveness," making them more aggressively resemble the things they represent, as with "lugugugubrious" (U 11.1005). Third, Joyce sometimes divorces regular words from their typical lexical content, instead employing them for "purely onomatopoeic purposes." This strategy is at play in the description of moths repeatedly flapping against "Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats" (U 15.2477), where the drawn-out sequence of unvoiced plosive consonants imitates the hushed, repetitive impact of the moth's wings, rather than literally emphasizing visual attractiveness of the garments.

Attridge entertains the possibility of a cultural origin for Joyce's aural language, but concludes that the historical context of 20th century technological development is insufficient to explain the sounds of Ulysses. Reversing cause and effect, Attridge argues that Joyce's linguistic forms construct, rather than reflect, their cultural context: "instead of letting the world break into the text, nonlexical onomatopoeia, in Joyce's hands at least, reminds us, with comic brilliance, that the text produces a world."

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