In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the artist was backed into a corner. Scientific determinism raised doubts as to the artist’s ability to freely create. Meanwhile, rapid dissemination of scientific theories raised another doubt, expressed by William James as follows: “the enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these later days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than another . . . the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned on us.”(1) Readers of the time also found this fear expressed in the work of Nietzsche, where they read that even the concept of truth is no more than a construction founded upon humanity forgetting that all words are metaphors, or the equation of two unequal things.(2) Consequently, the ability of the artist to creatively express experience on the level of immediate and construct-free perception assumed a central place in aesthetic and philosophical discourse leading up to and during Joyce’s time.

Remy de Gourmont argued the following on the merit of the artist’s engagement with the visual versus aural realm:

The ear is the favorite entryway: the Holy Spirit always enters through the ear; but in the form of words and sentences that are engraved in the brain just as they are pronounced, just as they have been heard; and they will emerge from it one day, identical in sound and perhaps bereft of signification. That which enters through the eye, on the contrary, can only emerge from the lips after an original effort of transposition; to tell what one has seen is to analyze an image, a complex and laborious operation; to tell what one has heard is to repeat sounds, perhaps like an echoing wall.(3)

The extra effort required to express what one perceives visually ties creative expression to immediate perception. For de Gourmont, the combination rendered the expression of the visual in words the favored means by which to forge new metaphors.(4) The forging of new metaphors was a task levied at artists by Nietzsche’s distinction between new and worn metaphors.(5) As a result of his own studies in the development of the French language, de Gourmont, too, took seriously the argument that words are only taken to have a “true” signification after use over time wears away the word’s originally metaphorical quality.(6) De Gourmont assigned primacy to what he termed the “visual mind” for its heightened efficacy in the act of forging “new metaphors in order to make language express its immediate sensations.”(7) His influence on the poets of the time was testified to by Pound’s statement in 1915 that “every young man in London whose work is worth considering at all, has felt that in Paris existed this gracious presence. . . .”(8) T. S. Eliot considered de Gourmont “the perfect critic,” with whom only Aristotle could compare.(9) Pound’s interest in ideograms alone testifies to the influence of de Gourmont’s argument for the primacy of the visual faculty in creative endeavors.

In an argument reminiscent of de Gourmont’s emphasis on the importance of an “effort of transposition,” Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argue that the temporal unfolding of film provides the audience at best a distraction, as there is no means by which one can stop and contemplate what one encounters.(10) Sound, as noted by Saussure, also unfolds temporally.(11) Horkheimer and Adorno’s objection to film thus also holds for aural stimuli. How, then, can we understand Joyce’s predilection for sound?

Another influential writer of Joyce’s time directly addressed the significance of sound for the artist: Stephane Mallarmé argued that the poet must yield to the agency of the ear so that the sounds of words are allowed their own initiative in the creative process. We see such privileging of the ear’s agency in Stephen Hero: “He read Blake and Rimbaud on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions.”(12) The attribution of the infinitive “to construct” is here ambiguous. The natural assumption is that he, by combining the five vowels, constructed cries for primitive emotions. But the placement of “to construct” immediately after “five vowels” opens the text up to another possible reading: that he combined the five vowels and they constructed cries for primitive emotions—as “to live” functions in the sentence “He created Adam to live in Eden.” It would be very easy to avoid this ambiguity; the infinitive could simply be moved to the beginning of the sentence as an introductory clause. Assuming then, that this ambiguity is not incidental, what we have here is the personification of the linguistic tools used in the creative process so that they have agency . . . so that they act. Mallarmé did the same thing when he argued that “the ear, set free from an artificial counter, discovers delight in discerning on its own all the possible combinations that timbres can make amongst themselves.”(13) Of note here is the personification of the ear: it “discovers delight,” and should anyone remain in doubt as to the independence of the ear and the primacy of sound in the process, he insists that the ear discerns “on its own” not concepts or ideas but “timbres.” I would point to the following as some possible ramifications of this idea for readers of Mallarmé who were concerned with the avoidance of conceptual constructs: when the sounds of words are allowed their own agency, the author’s helpless subjection to conceptual constructs need not factor into the composition of the line. In addition, for those concerned with restoring a metaphorical quality to words, the yielding to sound as generative calls attention to the act of signing alone through the prioritization of signifier over signified—a reversal that unconflates the signifier and signified and thus restores the metaphorical quality to words.

Hugh Bredin provides an example of sound’s dissolution of this conflation in his article “Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle,” where he distinguishes between “verbal sound” that is “transparent” versus “opaque”:

Verbal sound in ordinary usage is transparent: that is, we can grasp the meaning of a word or phrase without consciously adverting to, or subsequently remembering, its sound. In onomatopoeia . . . the sound of words and phrases becomes opaque.(14)

Bredin argues that a word loses its transparency and becomes opaque when it denotes a sound, in which case “we are then predisposed to become aware of any acoustical properties of the word which resembles the sound [denoted], however minimal the resemblance might be.”(15) He provides “whisper” and “sister” as examples: the word “whisper” is very close in sound to “sister,” and yet “whisper” “sounds” like a whisper because the meaning of the referent, a sound, calls attention to the sound of the word itself.(16) Here, we have an example of how calling attention to the sound of the signifier can be exploited to call attention to the relationship between signifier and signified as a relationship and not, after all, a conflation.

The Sirens episode of Ulysses contains a line that Mallarmé could have used as an example had the timing of the texts proven different: “By Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went by.”(17) The first “by” renders the last superfluous to say the least. “By Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went” suffices so far as the grammar of the sentence is concerned: we have a complete sentence with “eyes went,” with a prepositional phrase and some adjectives tacked on. The same goes for “Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went by.”

The repetition of the word “by” has a threefold function. First, it functions to remove linear directionality: “By Bassi’s blessed virgins” is an adverbial “where” clause; with it, we have “where what did.” By contrast, “where what did where” is circular, without any clear directionality. Second, the alliteration at play in “By Bassi’s blessed virgins Bloom’s dark eyes went by” lends the final “by” a closure function: the sounds of the B’s continue until they seem to suggest their own continuation such that the last “by” sounds to fit and it is perhaps only upon a second glance that one realizes its grammatical and semantic superfluity. Finally, the sentence is written in iambic pentameter with its stressed/unstressed syllable alternation. This device functions such that the rhythm of the words dictates a need for a final stressed syllable. The final word “by” has thus been suggested by literary devices based in sound (alliteration and rhythm) so that the semantic circularity introduced by the second “by” appears appropriate by virtue of perceptual overdetermination. Joyce, through just this one line of Ulysses, demonstrates that an emphasis on sound over meaning becomes no less than an exposure of the groundlessness on which rest the arbitrary linguistic rules through which “meaning” emerges.

Generations of readers have wondered why A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man only provides one example of Stephen’s creative writing. Can a distinction between visual engagement with the written word and aural engagement with the spoken elucidate this issue?

In Portrait, Stephen argues that visual apprehension by definition involves fencing an object off from its surroundings:

In order to see that basket . . . your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of
the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a
bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended.(18)

To perceive a basket, one must effect a bounding line, a division between it and its surroundings (including the observer); then, one “sees” it as materially related to oneself. Visual apprehension is thus conceived as a relation between two bounded, material forms: yourself and the object. Is the sound of speech also experienced as a relation between two bounded, material objects? The only material, formed objects with which the sound of speech is associated are the internal vocal mechanism of the person who speaks and the internal hearing mechanism of the person who listens, neither of which the listener (or speaker) has sensory access to because we do not have sensory access to our insides. And although sounds waves themselves are material, here I am concerned with sensory perception of the material mechanisms involved in sensory perception, and we do not sensorily perceive the actual movement or instance of a sound wave.

In the 1950s, the Group de recherches de musique concrète appropriated the French adjective “acousmatique” to mean a sound whose source one cannot see. The term derives from the Greek acousma and Pythagoras’ practice of hiding his music disciples behind a curtain so as to avoid his distraction by the visual realm.(19) Maud Ellman, in her essay “The Music of Joyce’s Vernacular Voices,” argues that God is the ultimate acousmatic voice and cites the moment in Ulysses when Stephen refers to “a shout in the street” as God.(20) Of interest is that the term “acousmatic voice” refers to a voice whose source one cannot see—as though the mechanistic “source” of any voice can be seen. When a hand touches your skin and you are asked to identify the “source” of the touch, you can see and point to the hand. You do not need to resort to pointing to the person “in general” to identify the source of the touch. Whereas with the voice, one literally cannot see the material mechanisms at work in its production. All voices are acousmatic.

Ellman argues that the material mechanisms through which speech is produced even distance us from our own speech: “The voice hollows out a gap between speaker and speech, severing the latter from its source. Speech and speaker never fully coincide: there is always an element of ventriloquism in the voice that we hear ourselves uttering.”(21) We cannot flesh out the nature of our engagement with our own voice, and so it seems to be inside us and outside us(22) and neither all at once. Our experience of sound as unbounded suggests the possibility that our experience of ourselves as bounded arises from vision to the exclusion of sound. With a sense of ourselves as forms, as bounded entities, all that we experience is relational. The phenomenon of voice problematizes this notion: how can we experience ourselves as relational to something that we do not conclusively experience as outside of ourselves?

Nietzsche states that “like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us.”(23) The experience of the voice as unformed, immaterial, and thus unrelational represents this inaccessible “X” of nature that is by definition outside of the conceptual realm. As unrelational and without form, the sound of the voice is inequatable. Thus, if Nietzsche is correct and all concepts indeed arise from the equation of two unequal things, then the sound of the voice is perhaps an excellent tool for resisting the organization of experience in accordance with conceptual frameworks.

By contrast, the visual faculty’s association with form problematizes its potential to function as a means to break out of conceptual constructs. In fact, in an increasingly materialistic society, vision’s indissoluble tie with materiality raises questions about the effect of the rise of the prose novel on the evolution of the word “literature.” Raymond Williams delineates the evolution of the word “literature” such that the process of its conflation with material texts coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie.(24) As “literature” came to be associated with a consensual class-based judgment of “taste” and “sensibility,” it came to denote a class of material objects. Did “literature” come to refer to material texts with the rise of the bourgeoisie because of the rise of the prose novel and its association with visual engagement? Something about the audience’s engagement with material texts at the time made Mallarmé feel the need to strongly advocate that prose, the dominant mode of the time, be approached as verse, traditionally affiliated with sound.(25)Given that the mode by which one experiences prose novels is typically visual engagement with a material object, is it possible that the conflation of the term “literature” with materiality indicates a society losing the sense of literature being associated with sound? On the flip side of the coin, could the timing of Saussure’s observation that sound could not be considered to have a productive or necessary relationship with meaning(26) be related to his place in a material text–centric society in which prose, historically the relegate of speech, was now tied to material objects through visual engagement with which one experienced “realist” novels that made a claim on reality?

In the conversation between Stephen and the dean in Chapter V of Portrait, visual metaphors figure heavily in association with language-related hierarchical frameworks from which Stephen seeks to break. Stephen enters a classroom and sees the dean kneeling to light a fire. Stephen politely asks if he can help, and the dean states that “there is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.” Stephen states that he will “try to learn it.” Moments later, Stephen states, “I am sure that I could not light a fire.”(27) The ability to light a fire is thus posited as a skill of a figure of authority in the school, who also happens to be an Englishman.

A few lines later, the dean directly associates fire with vision. In response to the dean’s question regarding the definition of the beautiful, Stephen quotes Aquinas, which translates to “We call that beautiful which pleases the sight.”(28) No sooner has “sight” been mentioned than the dean brings up fire: “This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will it therefore be beautiful?” Stephen, with the phrase “We call that beautiful which pleases the sight,” had already equated “beautiful” with the act of the signification of a thing as such. But he responds to the dean’s question as follows: “in so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful.”(29) Here, Stephen claims that with visual perception necessarily comes conceptualization—that apprehension “by the sight” “means” “intellection.” He then contrasts the conceptualization necessarily involved in the visual-linguistic process with “the natural animal craving for warmth”(30)—a contrast in line with Nietzsche’s own of language/concepts/societal constructs versus nature/unnamable “X.” Stephen posits that visual perception is inseparable from language and conceptualization. And just as vision is deemed by fire the purview of the dean, Stephen also laments that “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine.”(31)

The dean and Stephen continue the visual metaphor–dominated conversation with a scuffle over their different uses of the word “lamp.” For Stephen, its use is purely metaphorical: “For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas . . . I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. . . .” The dean responds with a story about a thief stealing a lamp in which the use of the word is meant literally, as though the word conflates with the object. Stephen’s retort to the story is a short “I meant a different kind of lamp, sir”(32)—the artist using the word as a metaphor. The discrepancy parallels that drawn by Nietzsche with regard to “worn”(33) versus “new”(34) metaphors: whereas the authority figure uses the word as though it conflates with an object, the “artist” puts the term to use in a new way. And in response, the authority figure asserts thievery. For Stephen had no sooner, with “I shall try to trim it,” spoken of crafting his own light than the dean asserted thievery of the right to do so with his story about the thief stealing the lamp.(35)

The subsequent confusion over the word “detain” associates sound with resistance of such linguistic ownership. Stephen engages in a play on sound with his explication of two different meanings of the same word, detain:

One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.(36)

The dean mistakes “I hope I am not detaining you” for an expression of sentiment and assures Stephen that he is not detaining him “in the least.”

Stephen’s use of the word “esthetic” here associates vision with perceptual, semantic, and interpretive fixity: “esthetic discussion” does not lend itself to the ability to perceive or differentiate between multiple referents of one sign. The source of the alternative meaning of the word “detain” is an antiphon used in mass or vespers. As Jessica Berman notes, in the mass, the antiphon is a sung chant.(37) Joyce thus chooses a word sourced in sound as the means by which Stephen, in his befuddlement of the dean, achieves a temporary resistance against the dean’s visual-linguistic realm of fixed meanings. The dean, in his embarrassment at having been confused, insists upon returning to the realm of the visual: “To return to the lamp, he said . . .”(38) The dean embodies the rigid fixity of the established structures of authority as enacted and founded in the fixed, proper meanings of words—or, as phrased by Nietzsche:

. . . something becomes possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved in the realm of those sensuous first impressions, namely the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions of borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative.(39)

The presence of the phrase “definitions of borders” here as what come to represent something “regulatory and imperative” ties to the thread that runs throughout the conversation between the dean and Stephen: that the indissoluble tie between vision and material forms effects an association of the visual faculty with “something regulatory and imperative.”

In the context of the height of the prose novel, through which the predominant mode of engagement with literature shifted from aural to visual, and the subsequent application of materiality to the concept of literature itself, James Joyce chose to compose works that exposed and forced readers to attend to the sound of speech as the sound of speech—to restore to the sign its opaqueness. Perhaps we do not often see Stephen create written text because he is an artist.

Works Cited

Baron, Scarlett. “Flaubert, Joyce: Vision, Photography, Cinema. Modern Fiction Studies 54 (2008): 689–714.

Berman, Jessica. “Comparative Colonialisms: Joyce, Anand, and the Question of Engagement.” Modernism/modernity 13 (2006): 465–485.

Bredin, Hugh. “Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle.” New Literary History 27.3(1996) 555–569.

Ellman, Maud. “The Music of Joyce’s Vernacular Voices.” Modernism/modernity 16 (2009): 383–390.

Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor W. “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 1223–1240.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Seamus Deane. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crisis in Poetry.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 845–851.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 874–884.

Peignot, Jerome. “De la musique concrète à l’acousmatique.” Esprit 28 (1960): 111–120.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 960–977.

Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, & Early 20th-Century Thought. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Williams, Raymond. “From Marxism and Literature.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 1567–1575.