As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writ­ing and speech—as myth­ic invo­ca­tion, as seduc­tion, chat­ter, and rhetoric, ful­some and emp­ty. Words—two-faced, like open books—carry with them at least two sens­es, the mean­ing of their present utter­ance, and the ver­so shades of his­to­ry. This is at least part­ly the import of Joyce’s myth­i­cal method, as it is that of all expos­i­tors of ancient texts, from preach­ers and the­olo­gians to lit­er­ary crit­ics. It seems par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant, then, that the pas­sage Joyce chose for the one and only record­ing of a read­ing from Ulysses comes from the “Aoelus” episode, which par­o­dies Odysseus and his com­pan­ions’ encounter with the god of wind.

Joyce sets the scene in the news­pa­per offices of the Freeman’s Jour­nal, epit­o­me of writ­ing in the present tense, where reporters and edi­tors give puffed-up speech­es punc­tu­at­ed by reduc­tive, pithy head­lines. Amidst this busi­ness, eru­dite pro­fes­sor MacHugh and Stephen Dedalus wax lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal, mak­ing con­nec­tions. MacHugh recites “the finest dis­play of ora­to­ry” he ever heard—a defense of the revival of the Irish lan­guage that com­pares the Irish peo­ple to Moses and the ancient Hebrews spurn­ing the seduc­tions of an oppres­sive empire in the per­son of an Egypt­ian high­priest: Vagrants and day­labour­ers are you called: the world trem­bles at our name.

Joyce record­ed the pas­sage in 1924 at the urg­ing of Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny founder Sylvia Beach, who per­suad­ed the HMV gramo­phone stu­dio in Paris to make the record, under the pro­vi­sion that she would finance it and that the studio’s name would appear nowhere on the prod­uct. Ulysses, recall, was in many places under a ban for obscen­i­ty (not lift­ed in the U.S. until 1933 by Judge John Woolsey). The record­ing ses­sion was painful for Joyce, who need­ed two attempts on two sep­a­rate days to com­plete it, plagued as he was by his fail­ing eyes. And yet Joyce, Beach wrote in her notes, “was anx­ious to have the record­ing made… He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only read­ing from Ulysses… it is more, one feels, than mere ora­to­ry.” You can read the speech here while lis­ten­ing to Joyce read above. Beach called Joyce’s read­ing a “won­der­ful per­for­mance.” “I nev­er hear it,” she wrote, “with­out being deeply moved.”

While Beach may have been sat­is­fied with the record­ing, her friend, lin­guist C.K. Ogden pro­nounced it “very bad,” mean­ing, writes Beach, “it was not a suc­cess tech­ni­cal­ly” (though it was not, in any case, “at all a com­mer­cial ven­ture”). You will notice this imme­di­ate­ly as you strug­gle to hear Joyce’s mut­ed read­ing. Anx­ious to pre­serve his voice in a clear­er doc­u­ment, Ogden cap­tured Joyce read­ing from Finnegans Wake five years lat­er at the stu­dio of the Ornitho­log­i­cal Soci­ety in Cam­bridge (he boast­ed of own­ing “the two biggest record­ing machines in the world”). By this time, Joyce’s eye­sight had almost com­plete­ly dimmed. Ogden pho­tographed the text and enlarged it so that the let­ters were a half-inch tall, yet Joyce still could bare­ly make them out and “sup­pos­ed­ly need­ed some­one to whis­per along” (Beach, who was not present, imag­ined he must have known the pas­sage by heart).

Joyce chose to read from the “Anna Livia Plura­belle” sec­tion of the exper­i­men­tal text—a pas­sage “over­flow­ing,” writes Men­tal Floss, with “allu­sions to the world’s rivers.” He reads in the voice of an old wash­er­woman, and begins with a most suc­cinct state­ment of the tem­po­ral dimen­sions of lan­guage: “I told you every telling has a tail­ing.” Where Ulysses fore­grounds lit­er­ary his­to­ry, Finnegans Wake dives deep into geo­log­ic time, and priv­i­leges the oral over the writ­ten. These are the only two record­ings Joyce ever made, and they sure­ly mark what were for him cen­tral loca­tions in both books, though he also chose them for their ease of read­ing aloud (and, per­haps, mem­o­riz­ing). The Mod­ern Word col­lects infor­ma­tion on the var­i­ous com­mer­cial releas­es of the Joyce record­ings, many of which include read­ings of Joyce poems and sto­ries by Frank McCourt, Colm Meany, Stephen Rea, and oth­ers. And while many of those read­ings are very good, none of them can match the thrill of hear­ing Joyce him­self speak from the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Dublin Cap­tured in Vin­tage Pho­tos from 1897 to 1904

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

Find works by James Joyce in our  Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Sure­ly most ardent read­ers of Jack Ker­ouac’s nov­el On the Road have tried to map Sal Par­adise and Dean Mori­ar­ty’s Amer­i­can jour­ney. Above, par­tial­ly alle­vi­at­ing your own need to take the pains of sketch­ing out that great Beat jour­ney your­self, we have a map drawn by the author him­self. Pulled from Ker­ouac’s diary, it traces the route of a hitch­hik­ing trip of July through Octo­ber 1948, which no doubt fueled the still-potent lit­er­ary impact of his best-known book, which would see pub­li­ca­tion almost a decade lat­er in 1957. Each stop has a label, from the icon­ic Amer­i­can metrop­o­lis­es of New York City, Chica­go, San Fran­cis­co, Los Ange­les, and Wash­ing­ton, D.C. to the less-known but no less evoca­tive small­er towns like Des Moines, North Plat­te, Laramie, and Sel­ma.

For a rep­re­sen­ta­tion more strict­ly reflect­ing the fic­tion, see Michael J. Hess’ map of Par­adise and Mori­ar­ty’s route across the coun­try. It offers pas­sages straight from Ker­ouac’s text about all the places they stopped briefly, stayed a while, or only men­tioned, like Salt Lake City, “a city of sprin­klers” at dawn; Flagstaff, whose “every bump, rise, and stretch mys­ti­fied my long­ing”; Oma­ha, home to “the first cow­boy I saw”; and the Indi­anapo­lis Par­adise enters on a bus which has just “roared through Indi­ana corn­fields.” Writer Den­nis Mansker, on his own site, has cre­at­ed four sep­a­rate inter­ac­tive maps, each cov­er­ing one of the nov­el­’s parts. He also includes a run­down of the road sto­ry’s four major vehi­cles, includ­ing the 1949 Hud­son seen just above. “This is the car in which they blast off to New Orleans and the West Coast, Jan­u­ary 1949,” Mansker notes. “Like all of Dean’s cars, this one real­ly took a beat­ing.” But Dean’s cars just had to take it, since, as the band Guid­ed by Voic­es once sang, “Ker­ouac Nev­er Drove, So He Nev­er Drove Alone.”

You can find lec­tures (1 + 2) on Ker­ouac’s writ­ing in Yale’s course, The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945, which appears in our col­lec­tion of 825 Free Cours­es Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beat­nik Film Stars Jack Ker­ouac and Allen Gins­berg

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Kerouac’s Naval Reserve Enlist­ment Mugshot, 1943

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.