Fifenote
Fifenote
In Brief
In keeping with Bloom's observation that "There's
music everywhere," the Sirens overture follows
its echo of "hoofirons, steelyringing" with music made by a
pipe: "A husky fifenote blew." The motif anticipates a passage
in which Simon Dedalus cleans out his pipe preparatory to
filling the bowl with fresh tobacco.
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After ordering a glass of whiskey from Miss Douce, "Forth
from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus brought pouch and pipe.
Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two husky
fifenotes." Dedalus blows through the pipestem for a
practical purpose: to dislodge any remaining bits of ash and
charred tobacco shreds from his last smoke and ready the bowl
for a sweet new draught. But the stem holds a cylindrical
chamber, like a fife (a small high-pitched flute), and air
rushing through that chamber produces a musical sound. Joyce's
sentence enforces the sense of musicality with insistent
rhymes (blew, through, flue, two), and it seems to contrast
the high note that such a "fife" would be expected to produce
with the low, "husky" sound that actually emerges.
Also of musical interest: the overture ends its echo of this
sentence with the word "blew" and then starts the next line
with the same word before replacing it with a homophone:
"Blew. Blue bloom is on the." A single sound is prolonged
through blew, blue, and Bloom, but underneath the tonal
uniformity the semantic reference changes from Simon's
pipe-filling to Bloom's peripatetic progress toward the
Ormond. The effect is something like that of a symphony where
one movement moves into another with no break, or a medley in
which the closing chord of one song provides the starting
point for a new melody.
William Faulkner and his pipe. Source: www.artofmanliness.com.
