James Joyce Quarterly

This essay looks at how narration, listening, and distraction work in “Sirens,” an episode famously littered with sonic codes and punctuation. There is so much noise and interruption that we, like Bloom, can become distracted by the music of the text. The narrative thereby threatens to turn into an abstracted puzzle of sound and reference rather than what it actually is: the story of a man in his most painful hour. I argue that “Sirens” actually represents two episodes from the Odyssey. Its overwhelming musicality distracts us from the fact that the episode is also a rendering of Books XXI and XXII, Odysseus’s confrontation with the suitors. The famous opening lines, for instance, allude not only to the episode’s “sirens,” the barmaids, but also to the storehouse where Odysseus keeps gold, bronze, and iron. Bloom and Boylan later engage in a covert archery contest. This pull between two episodes—their “dis-traction”—is expressed in the text’s narrative technique.