In Sirens Bloom thinks, "Chamber music. Could make a
kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought
when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most
noise." "It" is the sound of bodily fluids "Tinkling" in a
chamber pot, and the pun was implicit in the title of Joyce's
first book-length publication, a collection of 36 short lyric
poems written from 1901 to 1906.
Chamber music is simply classical music with a small number
of parts and one performer to a part. The term usually refers
to instrumental genres like the string quartet, but it might
as justly be applied to the Elizabethan lute songs that Joyce
was enamored of in his early 20s. These delicate compositions
bear more than a passing resemblance to Joyce's early lyric
poems—resonant mood pieces that, although far removed from the
rhythms of speech, require attention to each word, much as
lute songs highlight each syllable in the voice and each
quaver in the responsive instrument.
Joyce's brother Stanislaus noticed the resemblance between his
poems and chamber music, and suggested the metaphorical title.
A chance incident suggested the additional scatological pun.
Ellmann relates the event: "Gogarty, who was then in Dublin,
had brought Joyce to visit Jenny, an easy-going widow, and
while they all drank porter Joyce read out his poems, which he
carried with him in a large packet, each written in his best
hand in the middle of a large piece of parchment. The widow
was pleased enough by this entertainment, but had to interrupt
to withdraw behind a screen to a chamber pot. As the two young
men listened, Gogarty cried out, 'There's a critic for you!'
Joyce had already accepted the title of Chamber Music
which Stanislaus had suggested; and when Stanislaus heard the
story from him, he remarked, 'You can take it as a favorable
omen'" (154). Joyce did.
Few people would associate a countertenor plaining to his
lute with a woman peeing into a ceramic pot, but in Joyce's
imagination the connection became almost inevitable. Even in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where
spirituality and physicality are not fused so dramatically as
in Ulysses, Stephen's thoughts run the ethereal-carnal
gamut: "His mind, when wearied of its search for the essence
of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas,
turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the
Elizabethans. His mind, in the vesture of a doubting monk,
stood often in shadow under the windows of that age, to hear
the grave and mocking music of the lutenists or the frank
laughter of waistcoateers [prostitutes] until a laugh too low,
a phrase, tarnished by time, of chambering [fornication] and
false honour, stung his monkish pride and drove him on from
his lurkingplace."
Some readers may recall that the best-known of these delicate
songs, "Greensleeves," concerns "chambering" in this sexual
sense of frequenting women's bedrooms and their vaginas: it
makes its complaint to a woman who accepted all the singer's
rich gifts in return for sexual favors, and then left him. The
John Dowland song attached here effects a similar linkage
between Petrarchan adoration and carnal knowledge: the
repeated words "come" and "die" both contain strong sexual
meanings.
Joyce was not content simply to have Bloom state the
connection between dainty music and women's genitals. In Penelope
he staged a performance on the chamber pot and insinuated a
reference to the musical effects of poetry, bringing the
scatalogical implications of his poetic title to life.
When Molly's period comes on her and she sits on the pot that the Blooms
keep beside their bed, the sounds make her think of a lyric poem that rings with
countless rhymes.
