Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:45:07.167Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ulysses Pianola

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Paul K. Saint-Amour
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 15 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Armstrong, Tim. “Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic Modernity.” Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (2007): 1–19. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baum, Erica. “The Melody Indicator.” Triplecanopy 16 (2012): n. pag. Web. 2 July 2013.Google Scholar
Bowers, Q. David. Put Another Nickel In: A History of Coin-Operated Pianos and Orchestrions. New York: Bonanza, 1966. Print.Google Scholar
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1960. Print.Google Scholar
Carter, William C. The Proustian Quest. New York: New York UP, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Danius, Sara. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Ulysse gramophone: Ouï-dire de Joyce.” Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Galilée, 1987. 57–143. Print.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce.” Trans. Tina Kendall. Trans. rev. Shari Benstock and Derek Attridge. Acts of Literature. Ed. Attridge, . London: Routledge, 1992. 253–309. Print.Google Scholar
Dolan, Brian. Inventing Entertainment: The Player Piano and the Origins of an American Music Industry. Lanham: Rowman, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Ellmann, Maud. “Ulysses: Changing into an Animal.” Field Day Review 2 (2006): 74–93. Print.Google Scholar
exponential63. “Remembering Tchaikovsky on the Anniversary of His Birth.” En Passant. N.p., 13 May 2013. Web. 4 July 2013.Google Scholar
Forster, E. M. Maurice. New York: Norton, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Gitelman, Lisa. “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls.” Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture. Ed. Rabinovitz, Lauren and Geil, Abraham. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 199–217. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Goble, Mark. Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hampson, R. G. “‘Toft's Cumbersome Whirligig’: Hallucinations, Theatricality and Mnemotechnic in V.A.19 and the First Edition Text of ‘Circe.‘” Reading Joyce's “Circe.” Ed. Andrew Gibson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 143–78. Print. European Joyce Studies 3.Google Scholar
Joyce, James. Letter to Frank Budgen. 10 Dec. 1920. Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Gilbert, Stuart. Vol. 1. New York: Viking, 1957. 151–52. Print.Google Scholar
Joyce, James. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Ed. Gabler, Hans Walter et al. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Kallberg, Jeffrey. Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Metteer, Michael, with Cullens, Chris. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey and Wutz, Michael. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Knowles, Sebastian D. G. “Death by Gramophone.” Journal of Modern Literature 27.1-2 (2003): 1–13. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kreilkamp, Ivan. “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness.” Victorian Studies 40.2 (1997): 211–44. Print.Google Scholar
Magome, Kiyoko. “The Player Piano and Musico-Cybernetic Science Fiction between the 1950s and the 1980s: Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick.” Extrapolation 45.4 (2004): 370-88. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Paul. “‘Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops’: Joyce and Antheil's Unfinished Opéra mécanique.” Bronze by Gold: The Music of Joyce. Ed. Knowles, Sebastian D. G. New York: Garland, 1999. 91–105. Print.Google Scholar
Moore, Stephen. “The Secret History of Agapē Agape.” Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System. Ed. Tabbi, Joseph and Shavers, Rone. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007. 256–66. Print.Google Scholar
Picker, John M. Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proust, Marcel. The Captive. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. Moncrieff, C. K. Scott and Kilmartin, Terence. Vol. 3. New York: Vintage, 1982. 1–422. Print.Google Scholar
Rice, Thomas J. “His Master's Voice and Joyce.” Cultural Studies of James Joyce. Ed. Kershner, R. Brandon. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 149–66. Print. European Joyce Studies 15.Google Scholar
Roehl, Harvey N. Player Piano Treasury: The Scrapbook History of the Mechanical Piano in America As Told in Story, Pictures, Trade-Journal Articles, and Advertising. New York: Vestal, 1961. Print.Google Scholar
Scott, Bonnie Kime. “The Subversive Mechanics of Woolf's Gramophone in Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Ed. Caughie, Pamela L. New York: Garland, 2000. 97–113. Print.Google Scholar
Sousa, John Philip. “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” Appleton's Magazine Sept. 1906: 278-84. Print.Google Scholar
St. Clair, Justin. Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suárez, Juan A. “T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the Gramophone, and the Modernist Discourse Network.” New Literary History 32.3 (2001): 747–68. Print.Google Scholar
Suisman, David. “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure.‘” Social Text 102 28.1 (2010): 13–34. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanderham, Paul. James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses. New York: New York UP, 1998. Print. Wells, H. G. Tono-Bungay. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations. New York: Harper, 1965. Print.Google Scholar
“A Wonderful Invention—Speech Capable of Infinite Repetitions from Automatic Records.” Scientific American 17 Nov. 1877: 304. Print.Google Scholar