James Joyce

Original recording 1929; Audio Arts cassette 1974

from Audio Arts Volume 1, Number 3

Transcript

The emerging policy of Audio Arts extended to the inclusion of important archival recordings that were unavailable elsewhere. These included James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Marcel Duchamp, Futurist Noise Machines and Wyndham Lewis, who, with characteristic Vorticist energy and pace read extracts from his poetry in a recording made at Harvard University in 1939. A sense of time and period is also evoked in the recordings, and this is integral to their authenticity

The record sleeve of this rare recording made in 1929 by C.K. Ogden of The Orthological Institute in Cambridge, James Joyce clearly uses language for its phonetic and ‘musical’ dimensions beyond literal meaning and narrative. Joyce now reads part of the ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ extract from Finnegans Wake.