The Ineluctable Modality of the Audible: Exploring the sound worlds of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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.