The story of the siren

The text reveals what Bloom sees: "Plasto's high grade ha." The intrepid reader can take it a step further; the sentence, like the whole of the mock epic Ulysses, provides a high-grade laugh. The breaking up and reformation of the very syllables that produce Joyce's words exemplify a tendency that had been there all along in his fiction from the very carefully selected keywords-paralysis, gnomon, simony-of his first story in Dubliners, to the young artist's fascination with the sound of the word «suck» in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to the description of a widow's unkempt hair in the Sirens episode of Ulysses-wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:'d." Joyce commodifies language, turns it into a value package where meaning derives from many sources-the accumulation of sounds, puns, metamorphic words, the arrangement of sentences and phrases. Early in Finnegans Wake we are simply told that "every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings." The means by which words participate in the formation of action and ideas has absorbed the attention of Joyce's finest critics in recent years ...»