The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses | Hacker News Reader

The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

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> 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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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”.

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.

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.

Yeah it’s almost like magic. I remember feeling pretty confused and then suddenly there’s a chapter with an adenoid walking around and it’s like wtf?! But because the prose was so good and there were enough nuggets tugging you along I stool with it. And then right as it feels the entire endeavor is pointless it comes into focus and you get a grip on it.

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.

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.

I felt that by page 180 or so it really starts to hone in on Slothrop’s journey and it stabilizes. You can page back to revisit a character you faintly recall. It was around then I felt I had a grip on it.

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).

People cut it in half. It’s a thing!

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."

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.

And to be fair, Pynchon reiterates that quite a bit throughout the novel. And it is a fascinating thought every time. Terrifying really.

That's not effect preceding cause, that's just sound moving slower than something else! The sonic boom didn't blow up the tenements, the faster than sound missile did.

I'm definitely category 1 there: couldn't tell where it was going or why (was a blind pickup because little said it was important) and Wikipedia'd a synopsis to see if I was missing out on anything. Didn't seem like it.

I think this is a good summary of the themes explored throughout the book:

https://americanaejournal.hu/vol6no2/lacey

Reading a synopsis of the story sort of misses the point of the book. The plot is pretty limited.

I think Gravity's Rainbow is significantly harder than Infinite Jest

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.

I think it’s because Infinite Jest is clearly influenced by Gravity’s Rainbow.

<edit> misread your comment.

I think it’s because yes it’s long but it uses a complex narrative structure and has a lot of uncommon words. The annotations add a bit to it.

I agree it’s very enjoyable literature.

I disagree. I felt like Wallace used many more $10 words and the annotations were often long enough I would lose track.

Gravity’s Rainbow had easier text to read but I’d agree the narrative is probably more difficult to follow. I also think Gravity’s Rainbow is the better book in many ways especially as it rebates to “them” co-opting everything useful.

The chapter detailing Pokler’s history is probably the finest literature I’ve read.

I'm not convinced you can compare Ulysses to Gravity Rainbow and Infinite Jest. Ulysses is not a postmodern book. Apart from their length, there are few things bringing these books together.

Gravity Rainbow has Pynchon's inimitable prose, constant segue between language register and mingling between the trivial and the profound. Infinite Jest is rambling and convoluted but it is extremely funny from the get go. Both can be a joy to read even if you don't finish them.

Ulysses on the other hand asks more from its readers. You can pretty much ignore the references in Gravity's Rainbow and still get (or not get) the point. Meanwhile, Ulysses is full of oblique metaphors and layered references which make it impossible to understand without knowledge of the referenced material.

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!

You may have inspired me to try harder next time.

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

A commercial unabridged version has just been released. The excerpts I heard sounded very skillfully done: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/james-joyc...

I just want to say the title of the book is "Finnegans Wake", not "Finnegan's Wake".

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).

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...

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

Wow--I wasen't expecting that.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

I am certainly not saying it’s actually obscene or indecent! My point was that the scandalous bit was really quite prominent at the time of publication and not buried in an 800-page novel.

Is this okay to open at work?

Very. I skimmed about halfway through and I guess the closest thing to eroticism that far in was a bit of blushing and some racy ankle descriptions.

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

Hormones do that all on their own.

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.

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.)

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.

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

> an episode is dedicated to just one sentence

> he died before completing

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.

Thank you for posting this.

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

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

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

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

Blasphemers are still executed, it's just politically incorrect to criticize the countries it happens in.

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.

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?

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

There's a vast difference between acceptable behavior for guests and making something illegal.

HN is a forum where we are the guests of pg, dang, et al. They have rules for behavior -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not abiding by these rules can get you banned. Are you going to complain about that? Are your rights being trampled on?

edit: p.s., it's "banned", not "band"

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

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

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.

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

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

Not literal swords but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice

The Supreme Court have swords?

> 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

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.

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.

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

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

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