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“TWO NOTES IN ONE THERE”: COUNTERPOINT AS PARADIGM IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES by FRANCES VICTORIA LOVELACE (Under the Direction of Adam Parkes) ABSTRACT In this study of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) I discuss the limits and dangers of using analogies between musical and literary works without firmly understanding the musical model that is being brought into comparison with the novel in question. Conversely, I show that a musical paradigm such as counterpoint, if properly defined, can be a very useful method by which to read and understand Joyce, since the syntax of music is as important to (and ever- present within) the world of Ulysses as that of the English language. I demonstrate that a contrapuntal reading of the often-overlooked “Wandering Rocks” episode serves to uncover some darkly ironic questions about Anglo-Irish politics, and that while the fugal structure that Joyce claimed for “Sirens” is a deeply suspect analogy, a reading of the musical notation within the episode leads to a new understanding of Leopold Bloom in relation to his wife, Molly. INDEX WORDS: James Joyce, Music and Literature, Counterpoint “TWO NOTES IN ONE THERE”: COUNTERPOINT AS PARADIGM IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES by FRANCES VICTORIA LOVELACE BA, University of Warwick, UK, 2005 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS ATHENS, GEORGIA 2012 © 2012 Frances Victoria Lovelace All Rights Reserved “TWO NOTES IN ONE THERE”: COUNTERPOINT AS PARADIGM IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES by FRANCES VICTORIA LOVELACE Major Professor: Adam Parkes Committee: Aidan Wasley Elizabeth Kraft Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2012 DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated with grateful thanks for all the support to my family and friends, especially Layne, Rowland, Maggie, Angela, Kalpen, Jamie, Katherine, and Christine. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 MUSIC, MODERNISM, AND “WANDERING ROCKS” ..........................................4 2 JOYCE’S “SIREN[S]”.................................................................................................35 CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................................52 REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................56 v INTRODUCTION James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is encyclopedic in its scope, containing detailed references to everything from Irish history to astrology, but it is simultaneously the story of just one day in just one city: Dublin on June 16th, 1904. Although Joyce’s portrait of the city and its citizens is punctuated by the obscure and the arcane, Ulysses is a narrative that emerges from the reality of Dublin as Joyce saw it, and the language of the novel is the language of the Dubliners who inhabit it. One vital element that contributes to this language is music. Not only do Joyce’s characters allude constantly to songs, operas, performers and performances, but Joyce includes musical notation within the text itself. Gregorian chant follows Buck Mulligan from his first intonation of “Introibo ad altare Dei” – the first speech uttered in Ulysses – to an actual interpolation of an early-music stave within the text as Mulligan enters the library in “Scylla and Charybdis.” Understanding Joyce’s novel is a far more achievable task in the twenty-first century than it was in the early twentieth century, thanks to the many books of identification and explication that have emerged since the publication of Ulysses, but there remain many rich veins of allusion that have not yet fully been mined. The critical mining of such veins allows Joyce’s reader access to areas of knowledge from which he or she may otherwise have been excluded, in some cases even going so far as to translate other languages – Italian, Latin, Greek – into English. Music, too, is a language that needs to be translated so that those who do not naturally “speak” it can learn to understand it. A great deal of scholarship has gone into this task, some of 1 the best of which (Zack Bowen’s Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce, for example) seeks to annotate the text with notes on the music within, to which the reader can refer as and when it becomes necessary. Other scholarship has followed this vein of Ulysses further in order to examine the way in which music forms and shapes the narrative itself. This second area of scholarship has its dangers, however, its own wandering rocks and sirens to be avoided. The most often-encountered danger is the attempt to make music act as more than an enlightening metaphor or model for the narrative. A critic who states, for example, that he hopes “to uncover why and how there is music in the words and whether the result is music or is a novel” (Shockley 8) is sailing perilously close to such dangers, particularly in his suggestion that Ulysses could actually be music. It is important to acknowledge the limits that exist around a reading of any novel in musical terms, while simultaneously stressing the benefits of such a reading to an understanding of the narrative as a complete work of literature. This present study of musical counterpoint in Joyce’s Ulysses follows the second route outlined above, with an eye ever alert to the dangers of such a voyage. In my first chapter I address the casual use critics generally make of the term “counterpoint” in relation to the narrative and the character interactions within Joyce’s individual episodes and Ulysses as a whole, arguing that in order for counterpoint to become a truly useful paradigm it needs to be properly defined both as a musical technique and as a narrative model. I then perform a reading of the “Wandering Rocks” episode through the sharply-defined lens of musical counterpoint in order to emphasize the benefits of such an approach, showing how an awareness of the technique can lead to the emergence of certain relationships and ironies within the text that might otherwise remain hidden. In my second chapter I turn my attention to “Sirens,” showing the limitations of Joyce’s own (misleading) designation of fuga per canonem as the musical model for the episode 2 while arguing for counterpoint – the primary technique of both fugue and canon – as a more successful musical-literary paradigm. Reducing the scope of the voices in “Sirens” from that of a literary fugue to that of a contrapuntal composition allows the two most important characters within the episode, Leopold Bloom and Blazes Boylan, to emerge as counterparts, and strengthens a reading of Bloom as complicatedly complicit in the extra-marital encounter between his wife, Molly Bloom, and Boylan. Finally, in my conclusion, I discuss the ways in which the musical technique of counterpoint could be usefully employed in order to uncover further subtle connections within Ulysses, as well as the ways in which further characteristics of musical counterpoint, such as key tonalities, can also be brought into the discussion, if done carefully and with clear definition. Musical counterpoint is one of the most often-used and least-defined of all musical- literary metaphors, but in relation to Joyce’s Ulysses it is also one of the most useful. As such, I hope that this study will serve to establish the limitations but also the possibilities of counterpoint as a lens through which to read Joyce, and promote the musical technique to the position of a true paradigm rather than a weak and ill-understood model. 3 CHAPTER ONE MUSIC, MODERNISM, AND “WANDERING ROCKS” I That music was a highly important aspect of James Joyce’s life and work is a well- established critical truism. Though his technical skills have been called into question,1 the author of Ulysses was no base barreltone: his “fine tenor voice” famously gained him entry as a young singer to the “tenor competition at the Feis Ceoil, or National Festival,” which he failed to win, unfortunately, “only…because of his inability to sight-read” (Worthington 321). Despite these technical shortcomings, however, Joyce’s appreciation and appropriation of various musical forms is unwavering throughout his œuvre, with evidence to suggest that he continued to improve his understanding as he worked. While in exile in Zurich, for example, Joyce found himself living next door to Philip Jarnach, who taught composition and counterpoint at the conservatory. Through Jarnach, who clearly thought highly of the author, Joyce also became acquainted with an American-German music student named Otto Luening. Luening, who later became a composer and a pioneer of electronic music, joined Joyce’s amateur theatre group, the English Players, and held many conversations in cafes throughout the city with Joyce, talking about music.2 1 Joyce “had trouble reading musical scores and was not very adept with the guitar and piano,” according to Otto Luening (Grandt 76) 2 “Through [Philip] Jarnach and especially Luening,” asserts Jürgen E. Grandt, “Joyce became better acquainted with musical notation in general and the compositional technique of counterpoint in particular, providing him with a new approach to language. Exiled first from Dublin and then Trieste, Joyce now [from 1917 onwards] began to exile himself from the English language, crafting