From “Wandering Rocks” to “Sirens”
Works of psychological realism—particularly those, such as Ulysses, that rely on mentalistic narration1—commonly set out to engage readers through an exploration of the inner complexities of a character’s thought and motivation. This exploration is, of course, just what we have been considering in discussing simulation, personality, and related topics. Insofar as an author is successful in developing psychological realism, he or she has, by definition, captured something in the nature of human psychological processes. As such, the literary representation of particular minds should be illuminated by empirical findings on the structures and processes of human cognition and affection. More significantly, if a psychological realist novel has in fact captured something about mental processes, it should have its own independent validity. Specifically, the power of such fiction, its ability to produce strong responses in readers, suggests that it fits readers’ experience and therefore manifests insights into some aspects of the human mind. Of course, we cannot simply assume it has “depictive accuracy,” a strict, literal validity. But readers, with their human minds, would presumably not relate so intensely to certain works of psychological realism if there were no connection whatsoever with their own processes of thought and feeling.2 In this respect, then, psychological realist fiction should contribute to our understanding of those processes.
In short, the relation between neuroscience and psychological realist fiction should be, in some degree, mutual. Neuroscience should contribute to our understanding of particular novels. But at the same time particular novels should contribute to our understanding of the human mind and thus (however indirectly) to neuroscience. As Wallace Chafe contended, “Authors of fiction have discovered various ways to involve their readers in a fictional consciousness, and studying such devices can lead to understandings of consciousness that might otherwise be difficult to achieve” (369).
We cannot know beforehand just what aspects of a novel are psychologically valid and what are invalid. But that hardly counts against the place of psychological fiction in the study of the human mind. After all, the same point holds for current accounts in neuroscience. It seems clear that contemporary neuroscience will not continue unchanged indefinitely. Some aspects of current theory will be rejected—indeed, given the pace of research in neuroscience, undoubtedly are being rejected even as I write. In each case, literary and neuroscientific, conclusions and implications must be tentative. One might also object to this reciprocity of literature and science by noting that our understanding of a literary work is contingent on interpretation. But interpretation enters no less in the understanding of experimental data. One may expand on the point and say that the conclusions drawn from a literary work cannot be definitive because they require empirical study. That is true. But this also applies to experimental work. However well designed, no single study is definitive. Each study suggests further avenues for research— and further ways of reinterpreting earlier data, whether from experiments or from novels.
Indeed, the preceding claims were rather understated in asserting that psychological novels may have a place in our understanding of the human mind. They do have such a place, since our reading shapes the ways in which we perceive and understand our own psychological operations and those of others. Putting the point somewhat polemically, we might say that the only question is whether we will subject the representations of psychological novels to scrutiny or will simply let them guide our understanding and imagination unreflectively.
More exactly, in order to give a neuroscientific account of the human mind, we need to have some representation of the human mind. The brain is a material thing—a complex material thing, but a material thing nonetheless. It is observable. It has visible parts. But the mind is, in the first place, pure subjective experience. We need to be able to depict the mind in some way in order to connect it with the brain. Even if we say that there is nothing underlying the mind other than the brain, that the mind is wholly contingent on the brain, we cannot simply observe the brain and identify it with the mind. Even to reduce the mind to the brain, we need to have some sense of what constitutes the mind. To some extent, our sense of what constitutes the mind appears to be innate or close to innate. We appear to be predisposed to understand minds in terms of beliefs and goals, to posit emotions, and so on. But some aspects of our self-reflective understanding of mind appear to be influenced by cultural factors. These include psychological theories. For example, psychoanalysis has pervaded the way in which many people think about the human mind, even if they self-consciously repudiate Freud. For our purposes, one crucial source for our cultural understanding of the human mind—perhaps the most crucial source for most of human history—is verbal art. Psychological fiction is in some ways the most obvious case of this.
Consider interior monologue. As a literary technique, this is generally traced to Edouard Dujardin (see Bal). However, it was used most rigorously by Joyce, then Woolf, Faulkner, and others. It seems very likely that literary depictions of interior monologue have affected our ordinary understanding of the way human thought operates—and “our” here includes neuroscientists, who are not insulated from culture. Initially, this may seem perfectly fine. If the preceding comments are correct, then Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and others must have been onto something in representing interior monologue as they did. So we should be perfectly happy that this affects our understanding of the human mind. Unfortunately, however, things are not that simple.
Again, to say that successful authors have gotten hold of something about the human mind is not to say that we know precisely what they have gotten hold of. Perhaps they have most accurately represented not how we ourselves think. Perhaps their depictions capture how our “Theory of Mind” operations (our means of understanding other people’s thought) depict the minds of others. Moreover, even if they capture something about our own interior thought, that may be only one part, which we then overgeneralize. Worse still, there may be systematic distortions—through, for example, idealization, as in many depictions of romantic love. On the other hand, even these distortions may be revealing if properly understood. For example, certain aspects of successful romantic narratives will not tell us about how romantic love really operates, but they will tell us about what we aspire to in romantic love and the precise ways in which we idealize it.
Perhaps most significantly, works such as Ulysses are notoriously complex and difficult. People are, no less notoriously, quite poor at abstracting general principles from even simple practices. For example, when asked about basic grammatical principles—such as how to form regular plurals for ordinary spoken words—people invariably get them wrong. (For plural formation, people generally say “add ‘s,’” when the rule is to add “ǝz” after sibilants, “z” after voiced non-sibilants, and “s” elsewhere. Note that “add ‘s’” is not even right as an orthographical rule.) There is, therefore, no reason to believe our untutored inferences about interior monologue are accurate with regard to the complexities of the literary works in question, not to mention the mental processes those works depict. In brief, we may very well abstract the wrong general principles from Ulysses even when the novel itself is successful in its realism.
One key area in which we might expect simplification or misrepresentation—in the literature and in interpretations of the literature—is that of serial versus parallel processing. The brain engages in parallel processing.3 But our own immediate experience of thought at least seems to be serial. We are therefore likely to be biased toward interpreting our thought and experience, as well as the thought and experience depicted in literature, serially. That almost certainly involves misunderstanding the mind. It may also involve misunderstanding the literature. Indeed, the treatment of parallel processing is one of the most remarkable features of Joyce’s novel, though it seems to have been largely ignored.
Serial and parallel processing are just what they sound like. Serial processing involves operations on one item at a time such that the mind completes a single step treating a single target before taking up a second step treating the same or a different target. Most instructions are of this sort—for example, “First, separate the wedges from the planks. Then take plank A and attach it to wedge B with bolt C,” and so on. Parallel processing involves multiple operations occurring simultaneously to produce a single result. An example may be found in piano performance. In effect, the score gives instructions along the following lines: “Play this melody with the right hand while simultaneously playing this sequence of chords with the left hand and operating the sustain pedal at these points.”
To further clarify parallel processing, we might invoke another distinction, that between social and psychological cognition. Social cognition—or, more fully, socially distributed cognition—is thought that occurs across a number of individuals, whereas psychological cognition is the thought of those individuals as such. To use a simplified example from Hutchins, when operating a boat, one person may be holding and adjusting the rudder while two others are dealing with different aspects of the sails. All three processes may have to be done more or less simultaneously, though with constant adjustments guided by what is happening with the other people and processes. The result is not the product of any individual person’s cognition alone. It is, rather, the result of work by all three individuals. As this simple example illustrates, socially distributed cognition involves parallelism across individuals. Psychological parallelism is similar in involving the interaction of different mental processes that occur simultaneously.
The boat and piano examples may be somewhat misleading in seeming to suggest that parallel processing is a self-conscious operation. In fact, it is usually not self-conscious. On the other hand, the examples do suggest two things that are perhaps not widely recognized—first, that self-conscious processes may be in some degree parallel; second, that parallelism is a feature of human cognitive behavior that recurs in widely different contexts. It seems that these points, particularly the second, are not fully appreciated, at least not in literary study and arguably even in some areas of cognitive science.
Specifically, anyone familiar with the brain knows that most operations of the brain involve complex parallel operations across many neurons in different regions. However, most of us probably begin with an unreflective view that parallelism in the mind is more constrained. To take a modified version of the piano example, the act of tapping out a melody on a keyboard clearly involves parallelism at the level of the brain. There are, for example, postural and respiratory signals that operate along with the motor operations governing one’s fingers and arm—motor operations that involve parallelism themselves. However, we would generally consider tapping out a melody to be a series of single actions at the level of the mind, however massively parallel the act may be at the level of the brain. In other words, we are likely to view mental operations as serial even when we recognize the underlying parallelism of brain processes. Our ordinary understanding of interior monologue only reinforces this view. Specifically, our ordinary understanding of interior monologue is as an entirely serial sequence of words, proceeding step by step, with little or no parallelism.
However, a careful reading of the “Sirens” episode shows that Joyce does not present the thought processes of Leopold Bloom as entirely serial. Rather, Bloom’s thought incorporates parallel elements. Joyce seems to have come to develop Bloom’s psychological parallelism in part due to the social parallelism presented in the preceding “Wandering Rocks” episode, along with the model of music that dominates the “Sirens” episode itself. We will examine textual details in a moment. But before going on to this, we should outline the theoretical implications of the parallelism in Bloom’s thought, implications that converge with cognitive research, though (as far as I can tell) they have not been systematically articulated in cognitive science. (I was led to the following account of cognitive parallelism largely by Joyce’s novel. However, for clarity of exposition, I will present the forms and limits of such parallelism first and the analysis of Joyce’s text after.)
To recapitulate, as a first intuition, it may seem that much of the operation of our minds is serial. Certainly, when I introspect and follow my thoughts, they seem to proceed from one thing to another. Even if the connections appear random, the sequence seems serial. Given an awareness of the parallel operations of the brain, we might assume that seriality is a property of consciousness, with unconscious processes being typically parallel. Alternatively, we might restrict seriality more, imagining the serial quality of thought as confined to working memory only, thus the part of consciousness that is actively processing information, integrating, anticipating, and so on. More narrowly still, we might conceive of seriality as a function of language. In fact, contrary to these intuitions, it may be that pure seriality is still more limited—specifically to syntactically organized subvocalized speech, with parallelism entering at every other level.
Parallelism in consciousness is fairly straightforward. If I play the piano, I am conscious that my left hand is striking chords, while my right hand is picking out the melody. Thus, I am conscious of parallel operations. The complication is that I may be focusing my attention, thus engaging working memory, in a solely serial process. For example, I might be thinking about the dynamics of the performance, while letting the fingering proceed more or less automatically.
Though such a restriction is possible, it still seems clear that sometimes I do turn attention to simultaneous processes, incorporating parallelism into working memory. First and most obviously there is modal parallelism in working memory. The fact that, right now, I hear the wind does not in any way prevent me from seeing leaves moving outside my window or from linking these perceptions, all while I simultaneously type and subvocalize what I am typing. Indeed, if there were no such parallelism, one would never be able to describe what one is seeing while one is seeing it. Of course, it is well established that the capacity of working memory is limited. Moreover, attentional orientation limits the degree to which non-focal information enters working memory. For example, sitting here, typing this chapter, I am keenly aware of what I am writing, less aware of the visible events outside my window, and so inattentive to the sound of typing on my keyboard that I failed even to record it when enumerating the elements of my modal parallel processing a moment ago. In that sense, working memory appears more narrowly oriented (closer to serial) than consciousness generally, which is itself presumably more narrowly oriented (closer to serial) than unconscious processing.
Here one may be inclined to conjecture that linguistic or verbal processing must be serial (even if that seriality is embedded in modal parallelism). But, in fact, there is evidence that there is at least some degree of semantic parallelism. For example, research on left and right hemisphere language processing indicates that, although there may be fairly consistent seriality in left hemisphere processing, a degree of parallelism enters into right hemisphere processing. For example, consider a joke that relies on a pun. Roughly speaking, the left hemisphere is limited to contextually relevant meanings of a word. In contrast, the right hemisphere generates a broad range of meanings (see Chiarello 145). As a result, apparently irrelevant meanings will be available when it is necessary to understand the pun. Suppose Jones has the habit of torturing his wife with bad jokes when they are in an airport. “Oh, no!” he exclaims. “Look at our connecting gate. It’s not H-9, but K-9—and you know that gate is for the dogs!” The left hemisphere processes “K-9” solely as “K-9,” whereas the right hemisphere might also activate “canine.” That, in turn, enables Mrs. Jones to comprehend her husband’s attempt at a witticism through working memory linguistic processes that involve parallelism. (One consequence of this situation is that people with right hemisphere damage in the relevant areas are impaired in their appreciation of jokes; see Beeman 272).
This is not to say that there is no area of mental processing where parallelism does not enter. One apparently purely serial process is in the actual subvocalization of syntactically encoded sequences. (Subvocalization is silent or internal speech.) Put simply, it seems that we cannot process two sentences simultaneously, even in different modes (e.g., aural and visual). Of course, even here, there is parallelism of underlying processes, parallelism of perceptual modes, and parallelism of right hemisphere semantic activation.
Before going on, it is worth noting that parallelism may be affected also by what we might call “processing orientation.” As noted in chapter three, Faude-Koivisto, Wuerz, and Gollwitzer distinguish an exploratory from an “implemental” mind-set (74). In the former, one is rather freely imaging scenarios—for example, what it might be like to live in another country. In the implemental or pragmatic orientation, in contrast, one has a specific goal one is trying to reach via the imagination—for example, when would be the best time to leave for the airport in order to arrive early enough, but not too early (see Baumeister and Masicampo 955). It is possible to draw further divisions along these lines, constraining the processing task more fully—as when one wishes to argue that it is best to leave for the airport at a specific time (say, 9 a.m.) and is considering reasons to support this argument. In each case of further constraint, it seems likely that serial processing becomes more prominent. Thus we might expect parallel processing to be particularly evident in thought that is both exploratory and non-subvocalized; in contrast, we might expect serial processing to be more prominent in argument-based, subvocalized thought (though, again, in both cases, there would be massive, underlying parallelism).
The psychological novel arguably culminates in the techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Though these two phrases are sometimes used interchangeably, it is useful to distinguish between them. Specifically, narration may represent a character’s speech or thought, and it may do so directly or indirectly and with marking or free of marking (see Chatman). The difference between speech and thought is straightforward. “Jones said to Doe, ‘Mrs. Smith was supposed to meet me here’” is a representation of speech. “Jones thought, ‘Where is Smith?’” is a representation of thought. Moreover, both of these are direct and marked. They are direct because they give the precise content of, respectively, the speech and thought. They are marked because we are told explicitly that they are speech and thought respectively. A nice example of indirect speech may be found in the “Wandering Rocks” episode. Mrs. Sheehy asks Father Conmee how he is. The next line is “Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed.” This presumably reflects Father Conmee’s actual statement, “I am wonderfully well indeed.” But that statement is not presented directly. This is also an instance of unmarked—or “free”—indirect speech. A marked, indirect version would read, “Father Conmee said that he was wonderfully well indeed.”
As Semino and Short note, free direct thought “tends to be used to present thoughts which give the impression of having been mentally verbalized at particularly intense and dramatic moments” (120). If a literary work presents direct thought—usually, free direct thought—in an extended form, we have interior monologue. Interior monologue, then, is subvocalized speech. More exactly, it is partially idealized subvocalization, just as literary speech is partially idealized utterance. This idealization limits the disfluencies and distractions of thought to those that are relevant to the aesthetic and thematic purposes of the work.
Of course, in literary works, the presentation of thought is necessarily verbal. To make the point clear, we might contrast literature with film. Through the soundtrack, a film can, to some extent, present directly what a character hears. Though the camera never presents an image that is identical with visual perception, it can, through point-of-view shots, approximate what a character sees. Thus the direct presentation of thought in film is not confined to words, unlike that in literature. This is not to say that literature cannot present sensory perception, emotional experience, memory, or nonsubvocalized aspects of thought. It can. But it must do so indirectly. When an author seeks to give a more inclusive presentation of a character’s thought, not merely the subvocalized part (thus not merely interior monologue), we may refer to this as stream of consciousness. In this usage, then, stream of consciousness includes interior monologue as one component. However, it is not confined to subvocalization.
Interior monologue, constrained by subvocalization, is necessarily serial. Stream of consciousness includes a serial element—whatever is subvocalized. At the same time, it necessarily extends to parallel processes of perception (including internal perception, thus memory and emotion) as well as semantic association. There is a problem, however. Again, literature is constrained by its means of representation and communication. It must render parallelism in speech. That not only means that non-subvocalized thought must be presented indirectly.4 Such thought must also be serialized.5 One result of this is what might be called “canonical stream of consciousness,” the paradigmatic form of representing thought in stream of consciousness. Canonical stream of consciousness represents the interior processes of characters as verbal and serial. In consequence, it readily leads one to assume implicitly that these processes are entirely verbal and serial. This may contribute to a broad if also tacit tendency to view thought in real life as verbal and serial. Again, this is not the case with Joyce.6
As noted in chapter four, it is useful to distinguish three types of constraint on non-personified narrators. (Personified narrators, such as Molly, have all the usual constraints of human minds and are therefore not our concern here.) Narrators may be spatially, temporally, and/or psychologically constrained. Thus a given narrator may be confined to one place and time and to one or more character’s minds. Most often, Joyce constrains his narrator’s psychological access to the minds of Stephen and Bloom. In the early episodes, this psychological access is in general spatially and temporally confined as well. In other words, the narrator is in one place. If the focal character moves, the narrator usually goes along. If the narrator does not go along, then his or her knowledge is confined to the place where he or she stays. For example, in “Lestrygonians,” the narrator has internal access to Bloom’s thoughts. However, when Bloom steps into the men’s room, the narrator remains in the space that Bloom left and does not convey anything outside that space. Moreover, the narrator does not shift back and forth in time. For example, he or she does not present what went on in the bar, then shift to what happened in the men’s room when Bloom was there. Rather, the narrator is confined in the single stream of time.
As indicated earlier, there is in the course of Ulysses a general loosening of narrational constraints. One may think of it in terms of principles and parameters. Joyce follows implicit principles in developing both narration and style in any given episode. Those principles involve some fixed procedures and some variables. As the novel progresses, the principles undergo a sort of parameterization. In other words, procedures that were formerly fixed now become variable. Again, Joyce generally prepares us for the innovations in one episode by the procedures in a preceding episode.
In “Wandering Rocks,” Joyce removes a previously fixed constraint on the spatial extent of the narrator’s knowledge and allows variation. The result is that the narrator can recount simultaneous events at various places in Dublin.7 Joyce also allows variability in what might be called the temporal indexing of the narrator—what counts as “now” for the narrator. The result of this is that in “Wandering Rocks,” we have a series of overlapping vignettes that are partially simultaneous but that are recounted with a shifting temporal index. Thus one vignette might run from, say, 3:00 to 3:15, ending with the narrator’s “now” at 3:15. The next vignette may begin at 3:05, making the narrator’s “now” earlier than it was at the end of the preceding vignette. Of course, this is not entirely new in the novel. In keeping with Joyce’s general practices, this dense use of spatial and temporal shifting is itself prepared for by the earlier shift from Stephen to Bloom in “Calypso” (episode four). That single shift is preparatory, but also very different from the multiple, brief parallelisms of “Wandering Rocks.”
One way of thinking about this change to intense and multiple spatial and temporal variation is that it communicates continuous, complex social parallelism. However, it does so by presenting that parallelism in serialized form. Moreover, it does so through narration that requires the development of signals marking simultaneity. In short, it does in the social sphere precisely what stream of consciousness requires in the psychological sphere—the serialization of continuous, complex, multiple, and relatively short-term parallelisms with signals as to when the parallelisms occur. In this way, “Wandering Rocks” not only introduces a narrational innovation (relative to the default narrational style of the novel), it does so in such a way as to prepare us for the innovation in “Sirens.” Indeed, the opening of “Sirens” itself makes very striking use of spatial parallelism as the narrator moves back and forth between the pub and Bloom wending his way through the streets. It even draws particular attention to the spatial parallelism, in part through the use of what we might call “false matches.” For example, at one point, Boylan asks Lenehan, “Wire in yet?” and the immediately following line is Bloom’s interior monologue, “Not yet.” It initially seems as if Bloom is responding to Boylan. In fact, he is thinking that it is not yet time for Boylan to meet Molly. When the reader realizes that Bloom, who has not entered the premises, cannot be answering Boylan, he or she is likely to become particularly aware of the spatial variance in the narration. This foregrounding of the spatial parallelism might help prepare the reader for the psychological parallelism that follows.
In the case of “Sirens,” the reader’s sensitivity to parallelism may also be enhanced by the overarching model for the episode—music. Much of the criticism on “Sirens” has concerned large organizational issues or uses of sound patterning and the like.8 These discussions are valuable. However, O’Callaghan notes that a wide range of musical properties bear on the episode; she mentions “performance, interpretation, meaning” (135). For our purposes, the main relevance of the musical model lies in the fact that harmony and counterpoint are key components of Western music. As such, the music that Joyce drew on as a model was highly parallel.
Of course, the difficulty of introducing parallelism into stream of consciousness lies in the details, the precise implementation of the goal, not in the mere isolation of the goal itself. To see how Joyce has accomplished this implementation, we need to consider a passage in detail. The following is one of the many that we could examine: “Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a lovely. Gravy’s rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their harps. I. He. Old. Young.” It may seem at first that this is simply serial, subvocalized, interior monologue. Indeed, it may seem to be “stream of consciousness” only in being chaotic—in keeping with some common views of stream of consciousness (cf. Steinberg 253). But, on reflection, that seems unlikely. Much of it is ambiguous between subvocalization and perceptions, emotions, or memories. “Only the harp” could in principle represent Bloom thinking the words, imagining a harp, or both. It is fairly clear that he is indeed imagining a harp, whether he is subvocalizing the words or not. It seems rather unlikely that he is subvocalizing the word “lovely” rather than having a feeling, experiencing the image of the harp as lovely. The following phrases then explain the feeling. “Gold … light” suggests the image of the harp rather than words he would be likely to think.
“Glowering” is peculiar here. It seems a singularly inappropriate word for what Bloom is thinking. As such, it appears at first to suggest subvocalization, since the narrator, filling in words for Bloom’s experiences, would be unlikely to make mistakes about the meaning of words. On the other hand, it is not evident why Bloom would think this. Evidently, he is thinking about glowing light and has in effect made a pun on the word “glowering.” That idea of a pun may indicate what is going on here. A pun would appear to suggest right hemisphere activation, thus semantic parallelism more than subvocalization proper. Of course, Joyce would not have conceived of the passage in these terms. The point is that he would be seeking to represent human thought as he experienced and tacitly understood it. Critics may then explain the resulting representation in terms not available to Joyce, including reference to right hemisphere semantic activations.9 Thus “glowering” would represent Bloom’s simulative, perceptual experience of a glowing harp being lowered to a girl’s shoulder (as we will see in a moment), along with some right hemisphere verbal associations linking “glowing” and “lowering”—but probably not full syntactic subvocalization.
“Girl touched it” is also ambiguous, but it seems more likely to be imagery than words—a visual scene of a young woman specifically pulling the harp back to play. From what follows, it is clear that this is precisely the gesture at issue. The next phrase, “Poop of a lovely,” assimilates the upper part of the harp to a ship. The suggestion is a matter of the image, not the words. The image is one of the crown of the harp rising into the air, like the poop of a ship rising on the waves, as the girl pulls the harp to rest (“head” first) on her shoulder.
But we are not yet told that this is a ship. Rather, there is an apparent interruption—“Gravy’s rather good fit for a.” This line is almost certainly subvocalized. First, the contraction and the modifier “rather” seem more characteristic of Bloom’s speech than of the narrator translating his (nonsubvocalized) experience. Second, and more definitively, Bloom had earlier thought that he would have a “Dinner fit for a prince.” Here, he is partially repeating this phrase. Most significantly for our purposes, this subvocalization appears between “Poop of a lovely” and “Golden ship.” The second phrase clearly completes the first phrase. In other words, the full thought is “Poop of a lovely golden ship.” If we take this all to be subvocalization, then we have the odd situation that Bloom subvocalizes “Poop of a lovely,” clearly intending to subvocalize “Poop of a lovely golden ship,” but then interrupts himself with “Gravy’s rather good fit for a,” only to return and complete the previous sentence. But that would be very strange. In fact, something else seems to be going on. Joyce is representing two parallel thoughts. One is the image of the rising crown of the harp, along with Bloom’s feeling about that image (“lovely”) and his association to that image (the poop of a golden ship). This image/feeling/association complex occurs simultaneously with a subvocalized observation on what he is eating. Since speech (thus the text we are reading) does not itself allow simultaneity, the parallelism is serialized as an obtrusive interruption—so obtrusive as to draw our attention to its implausibility. This sort of parallelism—verbal and imagistic, concerning food and music—is what one would expect since Bloom is eating while at the same time thinking about music. Moreover, the ellipsis in the subvocalization, the fact that he does not complete the phrase “fit for a prince,” is consistent with the fact that his working memory would be limited. Indeed, the fragmentary quality of both the images and the subvocalizations makes sense in relation to constraints on working memory capacity.
In his usual manner, Joyce anticipated this development. As we saw in chapter three, he begins “Lotus Eaters” (episode five) with the narrator describing Bloom’s walk. The narrator’s sentence is “By lorries along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office, and past the sailors’ home.” However, Joyce interrupts this sentence to give us Bloom’s parallel reflection, “Could have given that address too.” This yields the actual text, “By lorries along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office. Could have given that address too. And past the sailors’ home.”
Returning to our passage in “Sirens,” we find that the next thought, “Erin,” could be either a subvocalization proper or an image of the harp as a symbol of Ireland. In either case, there is presumably an activation of the word, “Erin,” whether associative or fully subvocalized. This verbal connection is important for the following line, “The harp that once or twice.” As Gifford and Seidman note (see 11.581–582), this alludes to a song. Thus it is clearly subvocalized. Interestingly, in keeping with the preceding subvocalization, this one too is elliptical. Moreover, it does not follow the song precisely but substitutes an idiom, “once or twice,” for the song’s “once.” Both the ellipsis and the substitution of an inappropriate idiom appear to result in part from the limits on Bloom’s working memory. Those limits inhibit the development of his subvocalization and substitute automatic for more effortful processes—the automatic process in this case being the use of an idiom.
The next line, “Cool hands,” apparently returns us to “Girl touched it.” Or, rather, this is probably not a return at all. Rather, the image has been continuous and parallel with the subvocalizations. Again, the subvocalizations, and semantic associations, simply appear to have interrupted the image due to the necessary serialization of parallel processes. The phrase “Cool hands” presumably reflects Bloom’s sense of being touched by the girl. Indeed, it seems likely that he would imagine the feeling of the girl’s hands as cool against his skin, rather than making a somewhat abstracted (and musically irrelevant) verbal statement about their temperature. Such an imagination would almost invariably be linked with memories. This is particularly the case as the image suggests that the young woman is pulling the harp to rest against her body. If indeed this is the image Bloom is simulating, the touch of the cool hands would result from the same motion—pulling Bloom down to her just as she pulls the harp—and the associated memories would be linked with this motion.
Bloom has one particularly salient and emotionally powerful memory of just this sort. That concerns the day he proposed to Molly. At the end of the book, we learn what Molly engaged in just this gesture before she agreed to marry Bloom. She “drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” In effect confirming this analysis, this is precisely the scene that Bloom now remembers, the scene on “Ben Howth” among “the rhododendrons” (on the rhododendrons, see 18.1571–18.1573). Here, too, it seems unlikely that Bloom names the memory and the flowers. It seems far more likely that he is experiencing the memory simultaneously with the imagination of the girl’s cool hands and her gesture with the harp.
At this point, the images and the subvocalizations finally converge, as Bloom thinks, “We are their harps.” In part, this is merely a sexual image: men are drawn down to rest on women, against their shoulders and breasts, and between their open legs—a part of the image suggested, though unverbalized. But it is more than just these images of Bloom and Molly and the harp and girl. There is abstraction—a generalization of the relationship from Bloom and Molly to men and women generally—thus presumably subvocalization, in parallel with the (more concrete) image. In part, the verbal comment suggests the dominating role women play in Bloom’s sexual fantasy, thus his desire. In part, it recalls that Molly is the musician in the family. Most importantly, however, Bloom produces the generalization (“We”) in connection with the single concern that has haunted him the entire day— that this afternoon Blazes Boylan is taking Bloom’s place in Molly’s arms. Like most of Bloom’s other thoughts about Molly on June 16, 1904, this one combines desire (for Molly as a woman) with admiration (for Molly as a musician) and grief (for the loss of his place in Molly’s affections).
In keeping with these last points, Bloom goes on to think about Boylan— “I. He. Old. Young.” This is more likely to be a matter of images and feelings than words—images of himself and his younger, more attractive rival, images of each as the harp in Molly’s arms. Indeed, this returns us to the song Bloom had partially quoted, indicating that it was not a wholly separate sequence of thought. In keeping with the usual operation of the human mind, the parallel processes did interact with one another. The point of that song was that a particular harp was once the “soul of music,” but “Now hangs … mute” (qtd. in Gifford and Seidman for 8.606–7). It has been set aside, like Bloom himself. In retrospect, then, we see that the feeling of personal grief was already there, guiding Bloom’s thoughts, even through this apparently distinct subvocalization. Indeed, feelings of loss and alienation were already there in the semantic association that transformed the positive “glowing” and neutral “lower” into the unhappy “glowering.” This perhaps also suggests how Bloom imagines the harpist and Molly look at him.
Passages of this sort occur throughout “Sirens” (see, for example, 11.676–11.692, 11.705–11.709, 11.725–11.735, 11.802–11.809, and 11.824–11.827, among others). It is worth noting that in most such passages Bloom is engaging in exploratory rather than implemental thinking. In other words, he is not figuring out how to get something done, how to achieve some goal or make some argument. Moreover, when his thought is implemental, the task usually requires only very limited cognitive processing and is mixed with exploratory simulation (as in his decision to leave the restaurant [11.1120–11.1129]). In keeping with the preceding discussion, this may be part of the reason why parallelism appears unusually prominent in these passages.