"Might be what you like, till you hear the words": Joyce in Zurich and the contrapuntal language of Ulysses.

If you can hear, this music will make you think of a lot of weird and wonderful things. You might even become one of them.

Amiri Baraka, John Coltrane Live at Birdland

When the young American music student Otto Luening arrived in Zurich in early 1917, he had just barely avoided arrest by the German authorities. The Luenings had spent the first years of World War I in Bavaria, but now that Otto was of military age and had no passport, he had become subject to internment. Once in Zurich, he found himself in the cultural hub of Western Europe. Not only diplomats, war profiteers, spies, deserters, refugees, and political agitators had found a comparatively safe haven in neutral Switzerland: strolling down the Niederdorfstrasse after hearing C. G. Jung guest-lecture at the University, one could easily encounter Tristan Tzara in the Restaurant Tivoli, Igor Stravinsky at the Cafe Pfauen, and then Hermann Hesse at the Bar Odeon. Luening was enthralled by the city's cosmopolitan atmosphere; he enrolled at the conservatory, where he became the student of another expatriate, Philip Jarnach. Jarnach, born in Nice of Spanish and German parentage, taught composition and counterpoint, and the two men quickly became friends. Luening, in his memoir The Odyssey of an American Composer, remembers how he first heard of another fellow exile: "Apropos of nothing in particular, Jarnach said in a music composition class, 'And then, of course, there are real artists, like James Joyce'" (185). Jarnach at the time was living right next door to the Joyces, and it was not long before Luening met the author in person. Joyce recruited him for his impromptu theater company, The English Players, and soon established a close relationship with the young American. (1)

Joyce was hard at work on the middle sections of Ulysses when he met Jarnach and Luening, and these two friendships were to influence the shaping of the novel dramatically. For Joyce, the use of music as inspiration and theme was nothing new, of course. A lover of opera, sacred choral music, Irish folk tunes, and owner of a fine tenor voice himself, he had for a while toyed with the idea of becoming a professional singer, and music was never far from his mind when he was writing. Literary critics have long tried to analyze the structure of Ulysses in these terms or untangle all its musical allusions, and a substantial body of criticism exists on the subject. However, what has been overlooked so far is that it is not so much the narrative structure of the novel that is shaped by music, but rather the language itself. Through Jarnach and especially Luening, 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 began to exile himself from the English language, crafting a new language as the musical counterpoint to his native English. (2)

The section in Ulysses whose correlation with music has elicited the most scrutiny is "Sirens." Completed in June 1919, Joyce explained to several acquaintances that he had based its structure entirely on the fuga per canonem, a claim which would prove to create much confusion and dissent among the novel's interpreters (Borach 326-327; Ellmann, Joyce 459-462). (3) Starting with Stuart Gilbert, many critics have seconded Joyce's explanation of the fugal structure in one way or another (Gilbert 252). There is ample reason, however, to doubt the author's own assessment. First and foremost, it presupposes that Joyce himself understood fully the highly technical and complex processes of fugal composition. Otto Luening remembers that his friend had an extraordinary voice but had trouble reading musical scores and was not very adept with the guitar and piano, both polyphonic instruments, and these of course are limitations that would preclude a comprehensive understanding of the abstract elements of the fugue (Martin et al. 43). While admittedly no literary critic, Luening for one does not believe that the fugue serves as a governing framework in "Sirens": "I don't know where [Joyce] got [the fuga per canonem] so pat.... I never found it that clear at all" (qtd. in Martin et al. 43). (4) Also, the fugal interpretation tacitly accepts the assumption that Joyce in writing "Sirens" felt comfortable having the restrictive constraints of the fuga per canonem dictate the form of the chapter. Zack Bowen, a literary critic with musical training, comes to an acceptable but still somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion of the fugue-controversy surrounding this episode: "Just as the novel can never be tied exclusively to the rigorous formula of the Odyssey, the signs of the zodiac, or the mass, neither can the Sirens chapter be limited to one musical form exclusively" (27).

But if it is impossible to establish a clear fugal structure in "Sirens," then what exactly happens in this episode so suffused by music, written when Joyce frequently socialized with composers and musicians, and situated at the very center of Ulysses? Hugh Kenner observes correctly that the major stylistic attributes of the novel's first half are the frequent use of interior monologue and the recurrent withholding of pertinent information (Ulysses 62-63). The first ten sections are written in what Joyce called "the initial style," a style moderately innovative yet still firmly grounded in, for lack of a better term, "Standard English," a style where words are most of the time ascribable to concrete referents and processes (qtd. in Kenner, Ulysses 62). In the latter half of the book, the style dramatically changes: "Sirens" employs a new language, a language that harks back to the initial style yet is simultaneously distinctly different. Subsequent chapters use a myriad of styles as well as this new language, and Kenher attributes this linguistic-stylistic shift to the thematic necessity to unite Bloom and Stephen eventually (Ulysses 62-63, 66). However, this shift is not so much a consequence of narrative demands, as Kenner suggests. This "new language" that emerges is rather the result of Joyce's growing frustration with the English language of the initial style, a language whose possibilities he felt he had thoroughly exhausted. In search of a new approach, Ulysses in Zurich began the transformation from a virtuoso performance of English to an innovative composition of language. This transformation was largely a result of Joyce's increasing familiarity with musical notation and the compositional technique of ...