Pprrpffrrppffff

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As Ben Dollard nears the end of his performance, Bloom, wishing to avoid the alcohol-fueled camaraderie that will follow, says goodbye to Richie Goulding, leaves the dining room, and walks through the bar toward the outside door. Standing in the Ormond's entrance hall he hears the roar of congratulations and thinks, "Glad I avoided." But beneath the loud rumbles of Dollard's bass a smaller rumbling sound has begun: "Rrr." The congratulations continue through the next few paragraphs, but so does this new theme: "Rrrrrrrsss." The sounds coming from the bar, and thoughts about what path to take to Barney Kiernan's, compete for Bloom's attention with the question of what may be giving him gas: "'Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round inside. / Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J's one and eightpence too. Get shut of it. Dodge round by Greek street. Wish I hadn't promised to meet."

Walking up the quay, Bloom becomes lost in thoughts about actual music but suddenly finds a new tune whistling through his intestines: "then all of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind. / Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom's little wee." A few moments later, this high-pitched fluting sound gives way to a third deep rumble, "Rrrrrr," and Bloom begins to think of how to relieve the pressure building inside him: "Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had." After an interval he tries releasing just a little of the oppressive gas: "I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of custom shah of Persia." To avoid having to exchange words with a woman he recognizes, he turns and gazes through a shop window at a poster of Robert Emmett, still thinking about what has produced all this gas: "Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund." (Cider is the better bet. It is notorious for causing flatulence.)

Finally, reading the words of Emmett's speech, Bloom finds himself overcome with intestinal discomfort as the piping "p" and rumbling "r" sounds of gases moving through his intestines combine with the "f" sound of another small fart: "Prrprr. / Must be the bur. / Fff! Oo. Rrpr." Seeing that the woman has passed by and there is "No-one behind," he spies an opportunity for relief in the clanging clatter of an approaching tram: "Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two." And three! The metallic cymbal crashes of the streetcar blend with the fortissimo of consonants pouring from Bloom's rear end, the sounds PPRRFFectly combining to produce "Pprrpffrrppffff."

Joyce's pointedly anti-sublime conclusion of the music chapter weaves together several prominent threads in his literary art: the notion that music is all around us, even in sounds we are accustomed to dismiss as mere noise; the exploration of highly mimetic onomatopoeia that has begun with the vocalizations of Bloom's cat; the insistence that all parts of human bodily experience are fit objects for literary representation, even ones that censors insist on excising; and the deflation of grand heroic sentiments like the ones expressed in Emmett's supposed swan song. In addition to all these contexts for the fart, there is almost certainly a subtle echo of the poetry of Dante Alighieri. Canto 21 of the Inferno concludes with some commedia dei diavoli as the demonic Malebranche exchange signals with their leader Malacoda: "each pressed his tongue between his teeth / to blow a signal to their leader, / and he had made a trumpet of his asshole (ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta)."

Stephen has recalled these Italian words in Scylla and Charybdis, and Joyce now subtly returns to the image of an ass trumpet in Sirens by treating the squeaks, rumbles, and farts of Bloom's intestines as a kind of music. Robert Hollander says of Dante's lines, "The devils either prepare to make or have already made a farting sound with their tongues stuck through their teeth in answer to Malacoda's prior 'war-signal' of a fart. See Sarolli's appreciation of this low-mimetic scene as part of the tradition of musica diaboli, the hellish music that stands in total contrast with the heavenly music we shall hear in Paradiso." For Joyce there is no disjunction between the music of heaven and hell or of spirit and body. The man who heard delicate chamber music in the tinkling of urine also heard symphonic variations in the passing of methane.

Joyce probably was thinking only of Dante, but given his interest in medieval Latin texts it may be worth asking if he could have known of the many pictorial illustrations of human anuses being used to produce music. Ian Pittaway's Early Music Muse, the music website that displays the images reproduced here (there are many others in medieval manuscripts), observes that the large shawm called a bombard or bumbard––see the second image––got its name from Latin bombus = fart. The word flatulence, Pittaway notes, derives from Latin flatus = blowing, blast, breathing, a word which in medieval musical treatises referred to the air breathed into a wind instrument. (This sense, from flare = to blow, is preserved in words like inflate, deflate, and afflatus, and possibly also in the instrument called a flute, but only "flatulence" preserves its connection to the anus.) Pittaway also remarks that the fistula, an abnormal anatomical opening between two bodily cavities often associated with the anus, carries into English a Latin word meaning pipe or flute. There was once, it seems, an entire linguistic world of connections between wind instruments and rectal trumpets.