A Rare Recording of James Joyce Reading From Ulysses

In this rare 1924 recording, James Joyce reads from the Aeolus episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses. The recording was arranged and financed by the author’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The first session didn’t go well. Joyce was nervous and suffering from his recurring eye troubles. He and Beach returned another day to finish the recording. In her memoir, Shakespeare & Company, Beach writes: "Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–"he lifted his voice above it boldly"–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory. The passage parallels the episode in Homer’s Odyssey featuring Aeolus, god of the winds. As a pun, Joyce sets it in a newspaper office where his hero Leopold Bloom stops by to place an ad, only to be stymied by the blustery noise of the printing presses and of the various "windbags" in the office. One character tries to entertain a couple of his friends with a mocking recital of a politician’s speech printed in the day’s newspaper.