By Grant Wei
THE GRAMOPHONE:
Jerusalem!
Open your gates and sing
Hosanna…
Gramophones, representative of the prevalence of religion, continue to hold their authority throughout Ulysses. The first mention of the gramophone in Ulysses occurred in Hades in the interior monologue of Bloom: “Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday” (Joyce 95). Even in the context of death, Bloom’s monologue reveals the cultural importance of keeping the presence of a gramophone close, as “it takes place in ‘Hades’, in the cemetery, at about 11 o’clock in the morning, the time reserved for the heart (that is, as Heidegger would put it again, the place reserved for memory that is retained for truth” (Derrida 87). The placement of the gramophone during Sunday dinner, the day of the Sabbath in Judaism indicates that the gramophone represents more than a “subject of translation or transfer” (Derrida 79). Although Joyce, along with other modernist authors like James, Kafka, and Proust, did not have religious affiliations, he shared a “concern with religious experience” (Lewis 4). Within a countermovement against secularization, Joyce continues to to stress the importance of religion in society through his association of gramophones with religion.
Referencing the “second coming of Elijah,” the gramophone, through continuing to blare religious messages in “Circe,” symbolizes the revitalization of religion in society despite trends towards secularization. In the face of the “end of the world,” the gramophone continues to blare The Holy City over the sounds of “coughs and feetshuffling,” describing the placating powers of religion in the face of fear and uncertainty (Joyce 397). As an overwhelming sound that creates solace in questions revolving around mortality, religion continually serves as a placating force in society even given secularization through “thinkers like Nietzsche help[ing] to sustain his opposition to religious and philosophical frameworks…[his] mind reject[ing] the whole present social order and Christianity” (Butler 68). Although the church no longer holds the same political power it once had, Joyce continues to equate religion in terms of “spiritual beauty and emotional power” (Lewis 5). The prophet Elijah, concurrent with the gramophone, “[act] as a kind of telephone exchange or marshalling yard” or as a sort of arbiter of communication (Derrida 87). Thus, the function of gramophones act in conjunction with religion.
Given the modern transition from authority invested in religious to capitalist institutions and ideologies, "the idea of spiritual resurrection in the machine-run and modern world is ironized by the assistance of technology, here a gramophone that plays 'light favorites' and an air from Gounod's Faust" (Lewis 190). Despite the three prostitutes covering their ears, the gramophone “drowns” the sound of Elijah with a sharp “Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh” (Joyce 397). The gramophone’s religious sound and continues to assert its own presence in society even given the increase of consumerism representing “the very symbol of capitalism's incursion into art and culture,” an ironic sentiment because gramophones came to exist as the result of advances of technology (Wicke 238). Virginia Woolf “described the work of the modernists (specifically, Joyce’s Ulysses) as a return to the “spiritual” in response to the “materialism” of their Edwardian predecessors.” Even in the midst of the spiritual chaos resulting from modernity (even calling upon the end of the world), the gramophone offers a spiritual grounding in religion.
Works Cited
Butler, Christopher. “Joyce the modernist.” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 67–86.
Derrida, Jacques. “Deconstruction.” A Companion to James Joyce's: Ulysses, edited by Margot Norris, Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998, pp. 69–90.
Lewis, Pericles. Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edited by Hans Walter. Gabler, Garland, 1986.
Wicke, Jennifer. “Joyce and consumer culture.” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, edited by Derek Attridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 234–253.
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