Joyce's Noises

Molly Bloom is lying restlessly in bed, her head next to her husband's feet, counting the days until she will next be with her lover, Blazes Boylan: "Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday" (Joyce, U 18.594-95).1 The next item we see on the page--one can hardly call it a word--is a bizarre string of letters: "frsfronnnng" (U 18.596). All in lower case, it begins the fourth of the so-called sentences of the final episode of Ulysses. Its challenge to our reading of the episode is multiple: it is unpronounceable, at least according to the norms of the English language; it is meaningless; and it is hardly conceivable as part of Molly's thought processes in the way that everything in the chapter up to this point has been. Joyce does not leave us mystified for long, however: the verbalized thoughts that follow this strange irruption explain what it is doing here: "train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants" (U 18.596-97). Distant train whistles may more usually evoke associations of travel, separation, nostalgia, or longing, but Molly's response is clearly colored by her active desire for the man she has just called, with obvious relish, a "savage brute" (U 18.594).