Ulysses Pianola

Abstract

Now that phonography is established as the cardinal regime of audio recording, storage, and playback in studies of sonic modernity, a coeval sound-reproduction technology merits attention—the pianola, or player piano. The instrument is a pneumatic reading machine: it scans binary machine code from perforated paper rolls and translates it into acoustic events while prompting song with its scrolling lyrics. Revisiting Derrida's “Ulysses Gramophone” (1984) thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida's piece has helped underwrite in sound studies. The essay then turns to an extended reading of Joyce's novel, one of several modernist works that feature the pianola in their self-conceptualization. Ulysses's pianola at once incarnates the novel's virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.