[HN Gopher] The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
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The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
Author : okfine
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-06-24 16:51 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (crimereads.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (crimereads.com)
| okfine wrote:
| 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._
| jandrese wrote:
| > 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?
| nicklecompte wrote:
| 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.
| Jun8 wrote:
| 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).
| jandrese wrote:
| Maybe its like how people called marijuana a "gateway
| drug", because after all of the breathless hype about how
| great it is and how it will immediately ruin you life, the
| people who tried it were mostly disappointed. If the
| authorities were so wrong about marijuana then heroin can't
| be that bad.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| It is so funny that anyone could believe a book could turn
| youths into sex maniacs.
|
| Hormones do that all on their own.
| leephillips wrote:
| 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".
| xsmasher wrote:
| 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...
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| 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).
| jhedwards wrote:
| 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!
| QuinnWilton wrote:
| Finnegan's Wake absolutely exists to be read, or even sung,
| out loud. If you've never gotten the appeal, just try
| listening to the start of an audiobook version. There's a
| Youtube series that covers the first few chapters that I
| adore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HgCjtd2iPU
| leephillips wrote:
| You may have inspired me to try harder next time.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| It seems like after 100-200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow one
| of two things can happen:
|
| 1. The reader can't figure out what the hell is going on
| anymore or who anybody is. They give up and stop reading.
|
| 2. The reader can't figure out what the hell is going on
| anymore or who anybody is. They stop trying to make sense
| of the book and just read the words.
|
| "Sure this guy has a toilet stuck to his foot now, and can
| prevent bombs from landing on him by magic or something.
| That's great, oh I think somewhere in that sentence it
| became 20 years earlier in a different part of town and
| there are two entirely different characters I don't know
| talking about something else. That's neat."
| asimpletune wrote:
| The literary device in the novel is effect preceding
| cause. Like, very early in the book the hypersonic v2 -
| and how series it is for things to blow up and _then_ you
| hear it - is introduced, but if you miss it then that
| then you miss all the other times we see the same
| concept.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I thought Gravity's Rainbow got more confusing as time went
| on, if you just flow through it yeah its not too bad. But
| to fully understand the 100s of characters disappearing,
| reappearing with new names, etc. I definitely found myself
| consulting notes in the later pages to remember what role
| someone had played 400 pages earlier. The earlier chapters
| you can just absorb with no thought for how it contributes
| to the whole, by the end it is a lot of threads to try and
| keep in order.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Try Sartre's "Le Sursis". The novel follows several
| groups of young people as the news that the Germans
| invaded Prague and war is probably weeks if not days
| ahead. But it switches focus between groups mid-paragraph
| and sometimes mid-sentence. Sartre's not known for
| experimental fiction, but whew.
| leephillips wrote:
| Your advice is spot on. For me it was 100 pages. It was
| decades ago, but I still remember being puzzled, feeling
| like I didn't know what was happening, but being pulled
| along by the unique quality of the prose. 100 pages in, the
| lightbulb went on. It's as if the book teaches you how to
| read it.
| voldacar wrote:
| I think Gravity's Rainbow is significantly harder than
| Infinite Jest
| asimpletune wrote:
| Yeah I never understood the association with infinite
| jest and being hard other than it's long. The book is
| super funny and enjoyable to read.
| prionassembly wrote:
| The problem I have with Infinite Jest (I have a paperback
| edition; USD/my currency is expensive and I'm not made of
| money) is that the tome is too big for its binding and will
| seemingly fall apart at any time; and too heavy to hold in
| your hands in a reading chair (as opposed to propped on a
| table).
| cge wrote:
| Wikipedia's article on that trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/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.
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| > The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book!
|
| Or Joyce is just that impenetrable. Have you _seen_ Finnegans
| Wake?
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| prionassembly wrote:
| In jazz, this is the album "The world of Cecil Taylor".
| Previously he's doing Coltrane-class stuff; there's even an
| album that's alternatively credited to Coltrane or him
| depending on pressing. Afterwards who knows what the hell
| is going on. But "Lazy Afternoon" with Archie Shepp on the
| sax, man... that's my speed.
| jandrese wrote:
| Sometimes I have to stop myself and ask "Is this genius, or
| just badly written?"
| mywacaday wrote:
| If you really want to be corrupted read his letter to his wife,
| https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nor...
| nodesocket wrote:
| lol. Who knew Joyce liked farts.
| williesleg wrote:
| I love book bannings! Like facebook fact checks and twitter
| shadow bans! Bring 'em on, log and track me, shadow ban me and
| save everything.
| hereforphone wrote:
| We don't ban books anymore. We ban tweets, or Facebook posts, or
| other social media contributions. The drive to censor remains.
| avereveard wrote:
| we do worse than that nowadays, instead of censoring the
| offending text we censor the person whole
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| 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.
| fogof wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the
| sword.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _an episode is dedicated to just one sentence_
|
| > _he died before completing_
| dpwm wrote:
| 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.
| dpwm wrote:
| Thank you for posting this.
|
| I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368
| episodes, spread over almost seven years.
| leephillips wrote:
| This is a great story. I laughed out loud twice. It's probably
| more entertaining than you suspect.
| rcgorton wrote:
| I had to read some of his works in high school. It was 'stream of
| consciousness' DRIVEL. At best. "Horse-Piss and Rotted Straw"
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