One sentence of Sirens featured in Gabler's edition,
"Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the black
deepsounding chords," appears to contain a nonsensical verb,
and indeed most editions from the 1930s onward substituted the
word "gripped." But "griped" appeared in all of Joyce's early
texts, and close reading reveals that he knew what he was
doing. As a transitive verb, "gripe" can mean "to grasp,
seize."
The 1922
text reads, "Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the
black deepsounding chords." So too does the version of
the chapter's second half that Joyce published in The
Little Review in September 1919. The fact that he
oversaw both productions confers some authority on this
spelling, though of course he missed hundreds, even thousands,
of clear mistakes in the first edition. Still stronger support
comes from the so-called Rosenbach manuscript that Joyce wrote
out by hand and sold shortly before the first edition came
out. It is much harder to imagine him mis-writing a common
word than to imagine a compositor (especially a French one who
spoke no English) mis-setting the type.
Several new editions of Ulysses were published in the
1930s, and these Odyssey Press texts are generally of high
quality. But Joyce was too preoccupied with other things at
this time (including Finnegans Wake) to devote himself
to the work of editing, and even the editor he appointed,
Stuart Gilbert, admitted that he was only lightly involved.
Probably someone else involved in the work, then, saw fit to
change "griped" to "gripped," presumably correcting what
seemed to be a type-setting error. As has happened all too
often in the annals of editing Ulysses, this effort
to correct an error resulted in the introduction of a new one.
The most common intransitive sense of "gripe" today––making
petty and nagging complaints––seems utterly inapplicable in
the context of the Sirens sentence. But the verb
derives from the same roots as "grip," and when used
transitively it can have similar meanings. The OED
lists senses such as "to make a grasp"; "to grapple with, come
to close quarters with"; "to lay hold of, seize, catch,
grasp"; and, most pertinently, "to clutch. seize firmly, or
grasp tightly with hand, paw, claw, or the like." Such
meanings are a little stronger, more savage and predatory,
than the usual connotations of "grip." In the context of
Father Cowley's piano playing, they convey a sense that he is
attacking the keys.
Ben Dollard wants to sing The Croppy Boy in "F
sharp major," which is "Six sharps." Quite apart
from the challenge of transposing the song from the key in
which it was published (A major, according to a source cited
by Slote), this is far out of the common run of familiar keys.
Thinking on the fly about which notes to strike and reaching
far back into the keyboard to play all those black keys,
Cowley looks like a savage raptor, impaling his prey with
"outstretched talons."
