1 The Ineluctable Modality of the Audible: Exploring the sound worlds of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Roger Alsop School of Production, Victorian College of the Arts email: r.alsop@vca.unimelb.edu.au Abstract: James Joyce’s Ulysses takes us into the world of Leopold Bloom; we see through his eyes, hear through his ears and think through his thoughts. We develop an intimate relationship with the interior and exterior world of the man. Through the work Joyce puts the question “Where do we live?” and answers it through making concrete the interdependence of our experiences, inner and outer, which provide our total ecology. This paper explores how Joyce uses word sound to define physical and psychological place, offering the reader a subtle, yet potent, path through Bloom’s day. Joyce does this through an acoustic means, namely speech. This is the sound to which humans are most attuned and through which we communicate most clearly. It fills our world inside and out, describing ourselves to ourself and to others. Joyce uses the facets of speech, its sound, its meaning, its understanding, to develop an environment for the reader to inhabit. 1 Introduction Sound is considered fundamental in most people’s lives. The fundamental, and vital, use of sound in our current environment is speech. Speech, and its notation, is the medium through which humans communicate on all levels of experience: we formally transfer information, we express and generate emotional states, and we use it as a method of filtering and organizing our thoughts. James Joyce’s style uses many facets of speech. Reading his works, especially aloud, is to take a tour through many possible uses of speech. Joyce uses language’s sounds to imbue a sense of rhythm, place, object and motion in the reader (or more accurately) the listener, giving words many more values than those ascribed to them in dictionaries. In this way Joyce celebrates the prime acoustic world of humans, speech. In this paper I discuss the development of speech/language, the deriving of meaning from language‘s sound, and using the sound of language in a variety of contexts. This is done with references to the early pages of “Ulysses” and to other works of Joyce where appropriate. 2 Language as the prime human aural experience It is commonly accepted knowledge that speech sounds, and therefore language, are a primary force in a child’s development after birth. There is an innate desire to learn language and an evolutionary genetic predisposition in the human brain to the learning of language (Lenneberg 1964; in Kies 1991). This is essential in the development of the fully functioning human as we know it. 1 Daniel Kies (1991) gives an outline, shown below, of language development from ages 0 to 12 months for normal hearing children. These developments show an avid and increasingly active interest by the infant in acquiring language skills. This interest, at such an early, presumably pre- conscious, age, strongly suggests a predisposition to the sound of the human voice, and a further predisposition to deciphering the structures and meanings of the sounds made by that voice. Age Vocalization and Communication Birth Crying; body movements; facial expressions 12 weeks Diminished crying; smiles and makes vowel-like, pitch modulated gurgling sound (cooing) when spoken to 16 weeks Responds to human sounds more definitely; turns head; eyes search for speaker; some occasional chuckling sound 20 weeks Vowel-like cooing is interspersed with consonant sounds 1 This does not presume that heard and spoken languages are the only valid type of language. Deaf people use a very highly evolved language that is similar in most ways to spoken/heard language. Art forms such as dance and theatre also have highly evolved languages that are unique to themselves.