I want to begin my remarks by steaming, as a philatelist would a coveted stamp, a single word off the envelope of Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't. The word occurs in the introduction, where Gallagher is establishing the boundaries of her subject by offering a sample counterfactual-historical premise: “If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963 and had lived to be a two-term president, the war in Vietnam would have been over by 1968.” The Kennedy premise, Gallagher goes on to say, “is not attempting to call the assassination into question or to imply that we should look into it more deeply; it is simply asserting that but for the assassination, history would likely have taken a different path. Insisting on this definition of ‘historical counterfactual’ at the outset should not only clarify the topic but also emphasize that the works under discussion are hinged onto the actual historical record, usually at a juncture that is widely recognized to have been both crucial and underdetermined.”

Now that phonography is established as the cardinal regime of audio recording, storage, and playback in studies of sonic modernity, a coeval sound-reproduction technology merits attention—the pianola, or player piano. The instrument is a pneumatic reading machine: it scans binary machine code from perforated paper rolls and translates it into acoustic events while prompting song with its scrolling lyrics. Revisiting Derrida's “Ulysses Gramophone” (1984) thirty years on, this essay finds there a proleptic critique of the gramophonocentrism Derrida's piece has helped underwrite in sound studies. The essay then turns to an extended reading of Joyce's novel, one of several modernist works that feature the pianola in their self-conceptualization. Ulysses's pianola at once incarnates the novel's virtuosic recall of its own language and insists on the ineliminable role of exchange and of the gendered and laboring body in any performance of stored data.