Joyce’s Ulysses: The Music of Chapter 11

Abstract

This paper considers in what ways chapter eleven of Joyce’s Ulysses can be read as essentially musical. Joyce himself said of his eleventh chapter that it is technically like a fuga per canonem. Yet, the traditional fugue is by no means the sole model possibly guiding Joyce’s composition of the text. The descriptions of musical performances, allusions to and mentions of a variety of musical pieces such as songs, operas, operettas, nursery rhymes, religious pieces and symphonic music as well as the repeated employment of musical terminology, the competent variations of tempo through verbal means and the exploration of phonological devices, significantly connected and interwoven with Bloom’s inner monologues produce a sort of symbiosis of language and music and render the text its peculiar rhythm and the chapter its musical essentiality.