Two strong shrill whistles

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In "Preparatory to Anything Else: Introduction to Joyce's Hades," Journal of Modern Literature 24 (2001): 363-499, Robert Bell offers a partial explanation of the magic: Mulligan "expects that at this time every morning he will hear the whistle of 'the mailboat clearing the harbor mouth of Kingstown'" (369). If the mailboat announced its departure from the harbor with a steam whistle, this would account very well for the "strong shrill" quality of the blasts. Mulligan knows that he can reliably predict this aural phenomenon––the mailboats were rigorously punctual––and he has practiced his summoning of the sound as a parlor trick to demonstrate his intimate communication with the divine.

But even timing the anticipated blasts in that way would be pretty tricky, and in fact there is a way for Mulligan to know that he is about to hear the whistles. As Stephen Whittaker and Francis X. Jordan explain in "The Three Whistles and the Aesthetic of Mediation: Modern Physics and Platonic Metaphysics in Joyce's Ulysses," JJQ (1995): 27-47, he can time his prediction exactly simply by looking north: "The Martello Tower upon which Buck performs his trick lies approximately one mile from the mouth of Kingstown harbor. On the gentle morning of 16 June 1904, one could have clearly seen the steam blasts from the mailboat's whistle. Albert Abraham Michelson demonstrated in 1879 that light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. The light signal would have reached Buck about five rnillionths of a second after the event, that is, simultaneously with most of the blast. Sound at sea level travels at about 1,100 feet per second, so the sound of the event would arrive at the tower about 4.7 seconds behind the light.... To anyone observing the events on the parapet, the effect is an obvious simony, a substitution of scientific trickery for spiritual power. Only to those of us whose vision is veiled by the text's temporary exclusion of any sight of the boat does Buck's power seem either real or mysterious" (30).

In a book built on symbolic parallels with Homer's Odyssey, however, the impression of divine intervention may not entirely dissipate with this knowledge. In book 2, Telemachus receives an encouraging sign that his father will return to wreak destruction on the suitors. It takes the form of "two strong shrill" apparitions:

Then Zeus, whose voice resounds around the world,
sent down two eagles from the mountain peak.
At first they hovered on the breath of wind,
close by each other, balanced on their wings.
Reaching the noisy middle of the road,
they wheeled and whirred and flapped their mighty
     wings,
swooping at each man's head with eyes like death,
Then to the right they flew, across the town.
Everyone was astonished at the sight... (147-56)
                                                (trans. Wilson)

If Joyce did mean for his readers to hear an echo of this passage, then the divine omen is not so encouraging for Mulligan.