The Silence of Sense: on Pieces from James Joyce’s Chamber Music
The Silence of Sense: on Pieces from James Joyce’s Chamber Music

Summary/Abstract: Poems are essentially songs. In order to be able to hear the music of diction, to become involved in the melody and in the rhythm of words, one also has to hear the silence of the works of poetry: one has to hark to the silence that is the silence of the structure moulded and devised in and as jointures of the texture. Reading pieces from James Joyce’s collection of poems entitled Chamber Music make the hearing acute for perceiving where the jointures of silence open up and demand interpretation as locations of the silence of sense. The modes of articulation pertaining to the length and to the position of the particular lines of the poems, the role of punctuation, the sequences of words and the currents of prosody all manifest themselves as threads along which the textual jointures – of sense and of silence – surface.

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