Posted on 06/18/2022 2:38:23 PM PDT by Borges
On June 16, 1904, a nondescript middle-class householder stepped out of his house to wander through the streets and alleys of Dublin, and like you and me, kept thinking all the while about the numerous issues that bothered him — this ranged from the choice of soap he had to buy, to more serious matters like the death of his son and the suspected infidelity of his wife. The innocuous happenings of this single day became the stuff of a modern-day prose epic, turning the central character Leopold Bloom into a modern Ulysses with the banalities of his middle-class existence being transformed into the singular experiences of an epic hero on his quest.
Ulysses by James Joyce was deservedly lauded as the epic of our times when it was published in 1922, although Bloom’s “adventures” as he walked up and down Dublin could not have been more remote from the adventures encountered by the valorous hero of the Greek epic. This gargantuan book was to radically alter the literary topography of the West through its focus on the extraordinariness of the ordinary and its revolutionary stream-of-consciousness narrative technique that depicted the thought processes of its central characters without the mediation of the author-narrator. The result, admittedly, was rather confusing, as most readers were bewildered by the sudden unexplained jumps in thought in the rambling narrative that extended to hundreds of pages. The most noteworthy of all these mental rambles was the monologue of Bloom’s wife Molly. This largely unpunctuated “river run” of thoughts gave an insight into Molly’s mind as she guiltlessly thinks about her various extra-marital affairs; understandably, the words she uses in the intimate privacy of her mind are not what can be publicly expressed in “decent” society. Although many feminists later hailed Molly Bloom’s monologue as a rebellion against the patriarchal order of words, this section caused outrage through what was perceived to be a scandalous and unapologetic espousal of a married woman’s adultery. It also added fuel to the allegations of obscenity that the novel faced.
All these aspects of the novel are worthy of celebration, but in this centenary year of its publication, it must also be celebrated for rewriting the legal concept of obscenity in literature. The novel, before its publication in entirety, had been published serially in the American magazine Little Review from 1918 onwards when it began to face allegations of obscenity. The issues which carried the chapters of “Lestrygonians”, “Scylla and Charybdis” and “Cyclops” were confiscated and burned by the US Post Office. The mid-1920 issue which had the “Nausicaa” chapter had to face a worse problem when the New York branch of the Society for the Suppression of Vice lodged a formal complaint against it in court. The Special Sessions Court, despite the testimonies of novelists like John Cowper Powys, declared the novel to be obscene and convicted the editors of Little Review. This effectively precluded the possibility of the novel being printed in the US.
Ulysses was rescued from premature death by Sylvia Beach, the owner of the well-known bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris. What is now celebrated as the launch of a historic book was a low-key Parisian event that coincided with Joyce’s birthday on February 2, 1922. Although strict censorship laws prevented the possibility of Ulysses reaching Anglo-American shores, the ban in the US managed to transform what would have been a highbrow work that daunted the faint-hearted into a controversial book that was sought out for its forbidden content.
Taking advantage of the fact that Joyce did not have legal copyright over the novel in the US, some magazines began to publish excerpts that highlighted the sleaze rather than literary merit. It soon became a “bootleg classic” and continued to be so, till Random House publishers decided to test the waters by publishing the entire novel in 1930.
As expected, the novel was confiscated on the grounds that it was obscene. The ensuing court trial became a landmark in censorship cases worldwide, for its perspective on obscenity in literature, and how a book should be evaluated in terms of its effect on readers.
The prosecution contended that the novel was obscene as well as blasphemous; Joyce, it was pointed out, was not a believer and wrote with a distinctly anti-Catholic viewpoint. The defence lawyer Morris Ernst rightly pointed out that the concept of obscenity was variable, depending on the time and context. The perception of obscenity could change from one person to the other, and it was difficult to arrive at a comprehensive definition of the concept. However, what was to become a pivotal clause not just in this case but for later obscenity trials as well, was his argument that a literary work had to be judged as a whole and not on the basis of excerpts when it came to judging issues of obscenity. Judging the entire novel to be obscene merely on the basis of one chapter was being unfair to the novel and novelist.
Judge Woolsey’s decision was that the novel was not obscene; despite the presence of words popularly perceived as dirty, it did not contain “dirt for dirt’s sake”. He felt that the novel was a “somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women”.
This decision radically altered the legal landscape for books accused of obscenity and led. years later, to the liberation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, another iconoclastic work by a maverick genius. It was also invoked in India to dismiss the charge of obscenity made against The God of Small Things in 1997.
The four-letter words that were thought of as obscenity in those days have lost their shock value and are quite liberally used not just in literary works but also in the more popular media of films and television serials today. So, when Leopold Bloom stepped out of his house on June 16th, the English novel too was stepping out of the confines of stuffy Victorian morality to breathe the pure air of freedom.
I’ve made several serious attempts to read Ulysses during the course of my life. Each time I’ve given up, repeatedly being driven to the same conclusion: Ulysses is drivel.
LOL! Same conclusion I came to. And I read a LOT of it but after a while I realized Joyce must have been drunk most of the time he wrote it. If you ever heard the story, he was dictating to someone while writing parts of it and the person made a mistake and Joyce said “leave in in”
Likewise with Finnegan's Wake.
I just don't like it.
Dickens, Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Bronte, et al - I could read them all day long.
Joyce? Just a bore.
It’s too bad we don’t have Courts enforcing standards of decency anymore. The total hollywood and societal degeneracy run amok is why we’re in the mess we’re in.
If you enjoy symbolism, it is a fascinating book. However you’re also correct.
I relied on interpretations by scholars whose lectures were often more interesting than the book and highly debatable. I also listened to cassette tapes along with a book of an annotated compilation of historical references and meaning.
It was a lot of work but also an insight to another way of thinking about the world.
But I sometimes had the feeling I was having my leg yanked.
I feel like “Ulysses” is one of those pieces of art that snobs feel they have to pretend to have read, understood, and loved but that nobody reads, understands, or loves in real life.
He deconstructed the novel into a POS.
LOL! Love your tagline!
“Your people I do not understand,
So to you I shall put an end
And you’ll never hear surf music again”
Bob Dylan said he tried to read it and he “couldn’t make heads or tails of it”
The only book I could not finish? Moby Dick by Melville.
I’ve spent hours on it. 20 or 30 hours or more. Didn’t even get halfway through.
The book was released in Feb 1922 (as this article notes).
June 16, 1904 is when the story is set — chosen by Joyce because it is the day went on his first date with his wife, although that is not the story. He just loved his wife so much he used that date.
Finnegan’s Wake is on my bucket list. I get through a few pages every year or so.
“...All the counselors hate the waiters
And the lake has alligators
And the head coach wants no sissies
So he reads to us from something called ‘Ulysses’...”
I am wavering on whether to order the new Cambridge Centenary Ulysses book with the 1922 text, essays and notes, and read the book for the first time:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/131651594X/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1
I will be checking this post to get more input from freepers.
This will not be the first time I’ve had to defend Ulysses on FR. It is one of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read. I read it first when I was twenty and became hooked. I’ve read it again about every decade since, and still see more in it each time. Only Joseph Conrad novels do that for me besides Ulysses. I honestly can’t understand if one fails to see the depth and humor in the novel. There are phrases and thoughts from Ulysses which come to me every day. One of the characters looks up at a threatening sky during Paddy Dingham’s funeral procession, and remarks that it’s as uncertain as a baby’s bottom, and I guess taste in literature is the same.
You can count me in that group. If there is a more boring novel than Ulysses in existence it must be another with the character providing us with his totally incomprehensible “stream of consciousness”.
Do you think this is difficult to understand or boring?
—
The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one of the jarvies with the request:
—You don’t happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?
The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was passed from hand to hand.
—Thank you, the sailor said. He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow stammers, proceeded:
—We come up this morning eleven o’clock. The threemaster Rosevean from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon. There’s my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.
In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.
—You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked, leaning on the counter.
—Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I’ve circumnavigated a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage. I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea, the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. Gospodi pomilyou. That’s how the Russians prays.
—You seen queer sights, don’t be talking, put in a jarvey.
—Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor same as I chew that quid.
He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his teeth, bit ferociously:
—Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.
He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.
All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.
—Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can’t bear no more children. See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse’s liver raw.
His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for several minutes if not more.
—Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.
Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying:
—Glass. That boggles ’em. Glass.
Read post 18 and tell us what you think.
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