How long until the face of a loved one fades from the memory? The sound of their voice, or the color of eyes? Humanity has forever tangled with the questions of remembrance. Bloom considers as such: “how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice” (6.962). Traditionally, it was done through oral stories or painted portraits, but as Bloom points out: “Well, the voice, yes: gramophone” (6.962-963). A new Technology, the gramophone preserved sound by etching the vibrational waves into shellac discs that could be replayed. Further, Bloom muses, “Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face” (6.966-967). Along with photography and recorded sound, people could now play back exact recordings of the past. No longer did we need to create subject recreations of the past.
Yet Bloom mocks this idea of using technology for remembrance. Thus arises the contemporary concern with how new media changes our relationship with memory: the recorded word replacing the written (which in turn replaced the spoken), the camera replacing the painting. He imagines putting on a recording of “greatgrandfather” after Sunday dinner, only to hear garbled speech: “Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth” (6.965-966). In doing so, Joyce playfully critiques the inadequacies of these early technologies while also pushing the boundaries of the novel itself. His use of made-up homophones is not only active and concise communication, but also funny. Inferior ways to write the passage would describe the distortion of the speech, rather than show it.
Interestingly, this section was not in the original publishing of Ulysses. Perhaps The Little Review didn’t appreciate “kraahraark” being printed in a magazine “making no compromise with the public taste.” Maybe Joyce was just ahead of his time. Even today, these techniques aren’t commonly seen. In Ulysses, words do not always need to be clear or coherent. Nonsense, fragmentation, and mechanical speech all serve as legitimate forms of narrative expression.