In
Penelope
Molly recalls that the bed was noisy when she and Boylan were
busy: "this damned old bed too
jingling like the
dickens I suppose they could hear us away over the
other side of the park till I suggested to put the quilt on the
floor with the pillow under my bottom." The lewd jingling has
been anticipated in
Circe: after a
cuckoo clock calls Bloom a cuckold
three times in its monotonous language ("Cuckoo. / Cuckoo. /
Cuckoo"), "
The brass quoits of a bed are heard to
jingle" the words "
Jigjag. Jigajiga.
Jigjag." Those jigging sounds go back to
Sirens,
where they indicate the clap-clop trotting of a horse with
different consonants: "
Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan
shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue clocks came light to earth."
Other "j" and "g" sounds in
Sirens connect the horse
motif with the jingling of harness bells and the expression "
jaunting car": "
Jingle
jingle jaunted jingling," "
Jingle a tinkle jaunted,"
"
jinglejaunty blazes boy," "
Jiggedy
jingle jaunty jaunty." Jaunting cars were apparently
sometimes called jingles, judging by a passage in part 2 of
A
Portrait of the Artist: "They drove in a jingle across
Cork while it was still early morning." Boylan comes to the
Ormond Hotel on one of these tinkling, jingling, jaunty urban
cabs—their harness bells no doubt mandated by city authorities
to promote pedestrian safety, since rubber tires had lowered
their sound profile. He keeps the car waiting outside the
Ormond, and later in the chapter he travels to Eccles Street on
its "bounding tyres."
Even before Boylan becomes associated with horses' bells and
hooves in
Sirens,
Lestrygonians has insinuated
a suggestion that these sounds will be connected with sex. The
rich shopping mall of Grafton Street makes Bloom associate
horses with men's desire for women and the luxurious things that
they buy for them (in his case, most recently, violet garters,
which Molly will wear to her assignation with Boylan).
Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his
senses. Muslin prints, silkdames and dowagers, jingle
of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the baking
causeway.
High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All
for a woman, home and houses, silkwebs, silver,
rich fruits spicy from Jaffa.
Jingling, hoofthuds. Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All
kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled
pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along
sofas, creaking beds.
Evidently the horse bells sounding all around him make Bloom
think of his noisy bed back on Eccles Street, and of sex with
Molly.
From
Calypso to
Lestrygonians (a hop of four
chapters), from
Lestrygonians to
Sirens
(three), from
Sirens to
Circe (four), and from
Circe to
Penelope (three), the novel
periodically renews this constellation of sounds. It rings most
richly in
Sirens, where variants of "jingle" sound
again, and again, and again. A hasty word count turns up at
least 53: jingle 18, jingling 3, jingled 2, jing 2, tinkle 1,
tinkling 2, tink 2, twinkling 2, jaunting 1, jaunty 4, jaunted
6, jinglejaunty 1, jig 1, jiggedy 3, jog 1, jogged 1, joggled 2,
jogjaunty 1. Two or three of these words—tink, twinkling—have no
evident conceptual connection to Boylan's horsedrawn journeys,
but all of them grow out of the sounds that his cars import into
the chapter's musical texture.
Associating Dublin hackney car bells with New England sleigh
bells, Gifford and Seidman hear in this central, generative word
"jingle" an allusion to the hugely popular Christmas song
Jingle
Bells, which was composed in 1857 by American songwriter
James Lord Pierpont (not his father John, as they say). They
note "particularly the phrases 'Laughing all the way' in the
first verse and 'Take the girls tonight' in the third" (actually
the fourth). It seems a plausible claim given the way
Sirens
associates jingling harness bells with Boylan's insouciant
sexual hunger. The annotators neglect the best piece of
evidence, however. The second verse is by far the most
suggestive:
A day or two ago
I thought I'd take a ride,
And soon Miss Fannie Bright
Was seated by my side.
The horse was lean and lank,
Misfortune seemed his lot,
He got into a drifted bank
And we, we got upsot.
[variant form of upset]
Out riding with Miss Fanny (whose name, in Britain and Ireland,
carries an obscene suggestion), and all of a sudden pitched into
a snowbank with her. Oh jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all
the way! What fun it is to ride!
If it seems a stretch to suppose that Joyce echoed
Jingle
Bells in his text and heard sexual thrills in a supposedly
family-friendly song, then consider just how far he reaches
(Jaysus, James!) to transpose the jingle theme into the new key
of a foreign language:
— No, now, urged Lenehan. Sonnez
la cloche! O do! There's no-one.
She looked. Quick. Miss Kenn
out of earshot. Sudden bent. Two kindling faces watched her
bend.
Quavering the chords strayed
from the air, found it again, lost chord, and lost and found
it, faltering.
— Go on! Do! Sonnez!
Bending, she nipped a peak of
skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted them still, bending,
suspending, with wilful eyes.
— Sonnez!
Smack. She let free sudden in
rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her
smackable a woman's warmhosed thigh.
— La Cloche!
cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust there.
She smilesmirked supercilious
(wept! aren't men?), but, lightward gliding, mild she smiled
on Boylan.
— You're the essence of
vulgarity, she in gliding said.
To Lenehan and Miss Douce "
Sonnez la cloche" means
snapping her garter against her "woman's warmhosed thigh"—pretty
darn high up the leg for an era that thought it ravishingly sexy
to catch a glimpse of
socks.
The "
smack" sound at the center of this passage suggests
sexual activity at least as vividly as the jingling bed does,
but the sounds are remarkably different. The English here draws
on all the plosive consonants, unvoiced and voiced, of k/g, t/d,
and p/b—quick, kindling, quavering, chords, nipped, peak,
taunted, bending, suspending, rebound, nipped, garter,
smackwarm, smackable—while the French expression introduces some
softer consonants and a warm deep "o." None of them sound
remotely like jingling bells or a jogging jaunt.
But in the case of the French phrase, that is because
translation cannot carry over both sound and sense: it must
falsify one or the other. The sense of "
Sonnez la cloche,"
Senan Molony points out in a personal communication, is "Ring
the bell." "
Sonnez for the thwack of a garter" is not the
best match, he notes, but it translates the sense that Joyce
wants, and a later passage in
Sirens makes clear that
he is weaving it into the same aural web as "jingle":
Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio
onehandled Nelson, reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted,
as said before just now. Atrot, in heat, heatseated. Cloche.
Sonnez la. Cloche. Sonnez la. Slower the mare went
up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too slow for
Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the
mare.
Lydia's suggestive smacking of her thigh, performed at Lenehan's
request but for Boylan's benefit, rides in the carriage with
him, harmonizing with the jingling of Bloom's bed, the
jigjogging of the mare, and the jingling of the mare's harness.
Molony contends that Jingle Bells shows up here too,
because the beast bringing a conqueror to invade Bloom's house
is really a Trojan horse:
Oh, what fun it is to ride
In a one-horse open sleigh!
Horse. Open. Slay!
