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 started — and finished — with The Crying of Lot 49. I really tried, getting through about two-thirds of the novel before deciding that (a) I got it, I saw what he was about and where he was going, and (b) it was mostly BS, with what little wasn't BS being obvious and trivial insights into American society.
Like Pink Floyd, I think Pynchon is technically excellent but only that. He has nothing to say about the great themes that hasn't been said countless times before, and better.
I've personally known only two people who touted Pynchon as a great writer, and both were people to whom it was very important to be seen as being smart, as deep thinkers. I can see how Pynchon appeals to people of that type. I've read as much as I could find about Pynchon on line, and from what I can tell he is himself a person "of that type," so he appeals to people like himself.
Like so many artists, he thinks that his technical skills make his little hang-ups, injuries and paranoias worth being preserved for the ages. I don't agree, but that's just me.
Never could read it.
Joyce, like Faulkner and Hemingway, overrated.
I agree, it is a good quote and gives me pause.
I also agree that one has to plow through a lot of dreck to get to it, which I didn’t have the patience to do.
I thank ifinnegan for providing it.
Agreed. I think Ulysses is a metaphor for The Progressive Woke.
Though I can not guess as to Joyce’s motivation for writing Ulysses, the modernism he invents strikes me as an observation of the secularism replacing the traditional Christianity at the time. So if secularism is a form of non-sense then his portrayal was nonetheless accurate.
Neither of them is on the same level as Jimmy Page, or Larry Carlton.
Some works of art and literature require careful introduction and sound instruction to appreciate. Joyce for me has been a mixed bag from artful sense to raw consternation.
My first purchase upon joining a book club in 1979 was Ulysses. I can honestly say it did not meet the level of its acclaimed status at the time. What I did not/do not fathom of Joyce, however, I would rather attribute to ignorance on my part than malice on his part, playful or otherwise.
Thanks for the post. As a slow and careful reader I relish English literature and discussions about it, despite myself.
Ulysses is a comic novel - an epic on the head of a pin. It’s meant to be funny.
Yes, and he's laughing at his readers. As I said in #11 (above).
For gratuitous verbiage of the inventive kind there is always Gertrude Stein.
Joyce was meant to be read aloud—with an Irish accent.
Reading it as text is like a blind person looking at a painting—there is no there there.
I heard the best way to get through Finnegan’s Wake is to read it out loud, never hesitating to figure out the meaning, and just listening to the music of the words.
There were parts that were more like an instruction guide on how to catch, slaughter, and process whales.
Other parts were creepy in a "Hello sailor!" sort of way if you get my drift.
She can be thanked for putting these three words together and repeating them often: "Interesting if true."
The work itself is funny. It’s filled with in-jokes, literary allusions and puns. It works great when read aloud. Also if you’ve ever read Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist, you’ll know that he could write very clearly and beautifully when he wanted to. The Dead might be the best short story ever written in English.
OK, thanks, I’ll look at it.
It’s great. MD is the closest the 19th century came to something like Paradise Lost. The whaling chapters are metaphors and are filled with jokes.
Also a big fan of "The Wasteland" by Eliot that I'm sure is not a fan favorite on FR.
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