The Jingle and the Tap

A bell on a jaunting car, a blind boy's cane, and an iron knocker on a front door: three sounds in James Joyce's Ulysses, and the man they are aimed at is eating liver in a hotel dining room. Sirens, the eleventh episode, is the chapter written as music, and Philip Kitcher has a theory about what that music is for. It concerns the one man in the Ormond trying hardest not to listen. Kitcher follows Blazes Boylan's jingle from a half-glass of whisky to the door of seven Eccles Street, scans the knock there like a line of verse, and then turns to the smaller sound that answers it.