The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

https://crimereads.com/banned-books-ulysses-joyce-morris-ernst/

by okfine • 5 years ago

94 69 5 years ago

okfine• 5 years ago

This part is fun:

A few days later the book showed up at Random House—it had passed through customs. Furious, Ernst personally marched the package over to the customs office and demanded that it be searched. When the inspector opened it and found Ulysses, he muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay attention to it.” Ernst insisted that he seize it.

jandrese6• 5 years ago

Despite Quinn’s persuasive argument—Ulysses was so dense and convoluted that no one could possibly understand it, much less be debauched by it, he argued—a three-judge panel, using the Hicklin test, concluded that the book had the potential to corrupt youth and was therefore obscene.

LOL. The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book!

The best part is that it is true. If you have enough constitution to be able to get through the prose you aren't going to be turned into a sex maniac by it.

I did appreciate the explanation of how the novel became so infamous so quickly, with lurid portions of the book apparently being excerpted in newsmagazines of the time. It always seemed strange to me that such a dense and nigh-unreadable novel would attract the ire of censors. How would they have even gotten to the objectionable material?

LambdaComplex• 5 years ago

The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book!

Or Joyce is just that impenetrable. Have you seen Finnegans Wake?

dang• 5 years ago

Joyce changed a huge amount and FW is at the end of that. Go back to Dubliners or Portrait and he isn't impenetrable at all. Ulysses is somewhere in between.

jandrese6• 5 years ago

Sometimes I have to stop myself and ask "Is this genius, or just badly written?"

leephillips5• 5 years ago

The difficulty in reading this book is usually greatly exaggerated. It takes a while to come to grips with, but it is not in the least impenetrable. It’s one of my favorite novels. It’s certainly no Finnegan’s Wake, which I pick up and read a page of every few years, only to put it down, saying, “not this time”.

nemo44x8• 5 years ago

Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. I recommend to people to just fight through the first 200 pages and you end up in the flow and things begin to come together.

Gravity’s Rainbow in particular is confusing for a long while but when it begins to come together it’s rewarding.

Agreed - Finnegan's Wake is impossible. Try the audio version and it’s somehow even more difficult. I was tempted to eat a bag of mushrooms and listen to it but alas, perhaps one day far in the future.

jhedwards• 5 years ago

My favorite way to read Finnegan's Wake is to get some friends and perhaps some drinks, have everyone pick a random spot from the book and read it out loud.

The book is a circle so it doesn't really have a proper beginning, and the way the narratives are intermeshed to the point that they are incomprehensible means that the narrative is secondary, so concepts such as beginning and middle don't really matter anyway.

It is the language and wordplay of the book that is the enjoyable part. If you sit there by yourself and read it silently, it's mostly a boring academic exercise. When you read it out loud the playfulness and humor of the book comes through. There is one part that is written such that if you read it aloud you sound like a drunken irishman, and one part which is simultaneously a description of a pantry (or perhaps a grocery) and an erotic scene. The main thing I think people miss about the book is how funny it is!

Mediterraneo10• 5 years ago

Indeed, Ulysses is accessible to anyone with a well-rounded humanities education, even some particularly bookish high-school students. Sure, you might not get every single reference, but the story is plain.

Arguably the most challenging element for readers is not Joyce’s heavy erudition in drawing on the classical canon. Rather, it is some of the Irish politics in the early 20th century that will baffle most readers outside Ireland (and probably most readers inside Ireland, the colonial era being so far away now).

xsmasher• 5 years ago

I'm of average intelligence. Some sections of Ulysses are straightforward and understandable, some are strange, but others are completely impenetrable without some kind of guidebook, and intentionally so.

Example https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/u/ulysses/summary-and...

mywacaday• 5 years ago

If you really want to be corrupted read his letter to his wife, https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nor...

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

Wow--I wasen't expecting that.

cge• 5 years ago

Wikipedia's article on that trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_...) suggests that Quinn both didn't like Ulysses and didn't like his clients, to say the least. The whole trial seems to have had numerous absurd elements: critics being asked to "speak in a language that the court can understand", a judge objecting to the offending passages being read out in front of a young woman—one of the two publishers—and insisting that she couldn't have understood what she published, and Quinn apparently blaming the incomprehensibility of Ulysses on Joyce's poor eyesight.

nicklecompte2• 5 years ago

Keep in mind that the novel itself was originally serialized, and the chapter in question (Nausicaa) is one of the easiest in the novel - further, the “obscene” part is right at the beginning of the chapter.

So this wasn’t a case of censors plumbing an 800-page novel and discovering something, or of a snippet being excerpted in newspapers - a scandalous specific issue of a literary journal started the whole controversy.

jandrese6• 5 years ago

That makes sense. One constant of book censors is that they don't read very much, so normally as long as the juicy bits aren't right at the start of a novel it is safe.

Jun8• 5 years ago

Judge for yourself: Here's "Nausicaa" : http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Episo...

I personally found that calling this indecent is really pushing it. Maybe because it presented some light erotic ideas in an unexpected medium (a young girls stream of consciousness).

cortesoft• 5 years ago

It is so funny that anyone could believe a book could turn youths into sex maniacs.

Hormones do that all on their own.

vidarh• 5 years ago

When I was a teenager, I looked for "banned" (none of them actually banned when I grew up in Norway) books, and excitement turned to disappointment most of the time at how outright boring the supposed obscene parts were. I was mostly shocked at how little it used to take to get people worked up.

CRConrad• 5 years ago

I read Lady Chatterley's Lover at ~15-17, some forty years ago... Really couldn't grok what all the fuss had been about; Felt mostly like "Didn't people back then even know where babies come from?". (Not that there were any babies made in it, AFAICR, but that level of naïveté.)

leephillips5• 5 years ago

This is a great story. I laughed out loud twice. It’s probably more entertaining than you suspect.

hereforphone3• 5 years ago

We don't ban books anymore. We ban tweets, or Facebook posts, or other social media contributions. The drive to censor remains.

avereveard• 5 years ago

we do worse than that nowadays, instead of censoring the offending text we censor the person whole

rataata_jr• 5 years ago

Slightly different. Blasphemers used to be executed back then, now you lose your job, ability to bank, go out in public etc. Slight improvement?

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

It is going to sound sad, but that is because reading books is not a mainstream time sink. Now, FB and Twitter? So many things to get upset about in real time.

pstuart2• 5 years ago

It's at the discretion of the platform. Why don't you test the limits of HN? At a certain point you will be "censored" here.

And if that happens is it because dang hate's your freedom or you've pushed the limits of tolerable behavior?

hereforphone3• 5 years ago

Pushing the "limits of tolerable behavior" are why the books were band as well.

NoImmatureAdHom2• 5 years ago

There's an excellent book about this by Kevin Birmingham, "The Most Dangerous Book"

https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...

damontal• 5 years ago

I highly recommend the podcast Re:Joyce by Frank Delaney if you're at all interested in Ulysses.

He reads Ulysses and discusses it - sometimes an episode is dedicated to just one sentence, sometimes a paragraph.

Tragic that he died before completing it and that his website has gone untended.

https://feeds.feedburner.com/libsyn/sQtR

Koshkin• 5 years ago

an episode is dedicated to just one sentence
he died before completing

dpwm2• 5 years ago

It appears he started on Bloomsday 2010, and in episode 321, from 2016, he remarked in an introduction that he planned to finish it within ten years from then – which Wikipedia cites as evidence of it being "planned" to run to 2026, whilst completely missing the bit where he’s really talking about an there being an extra episode once a month and jocularly remarks that it is to reduce the weekly podcast from 25 remaining years to ten.

I hadn’t heard of this until today. This is amazing.

dpwm2• 5 years ago

Thank you for posting this.

I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368 episodes, spread over almost seven years.

fogof• 5 years ago

My favorite part about this episode in history is the name of the supreme court case "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses". The whole of the United States going up against just one book? That's a fight I would love to see.

leephillips5• 5 years ago

And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.

NoImmatureAdHom2• 5 years ago

Lol, I don't think U.S. Supreme Court justices use swords. I'd love to be proven wrong, though =)

dools• 5 years ago

The Supreme Court have swords?

logifail• 5 years ago

Because Ulysses could not be legally published in the United States, it could not be copyrighted

I'm struggling to understand that particular statement. Can anyone explain?

EDIT: "Copyright exists automatically in an original work of authorship once it is fixed in a tangible medium"[0]

If you write out your original thoughts on a piece of paper, that's fixing them in a tangible medium, right?

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

dragonwriter• 5 years ago

Automatic copyright is a feature of fairly recent copyright law; the law at the time of Ulysses was different. I don’t offhand know if the upthread comment about it be ineligible for US copyright or thr asserted reason is correct, but pointing to a feature of current US copyright law that didn't exist at the time isn't germane to that o e way or the other.

advael• 5 years ago

I've yet to hear a good justification for why there is any accepted legal case for banning any work of fiction for things like "obscenity" in the US given the first amendment, nor other jurisdictions with similar foundational laws. It seems pretty cut and dry

Andy_G11• 5 years ago

Ulysses is literary viagra and should be consumed with care. The government acted responsibly in controlling its availability until its side effects on consumers became apparent. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the strong moral fiber of our society is quite capable of withstanding subversive materials such as this.

The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

Related Stories