Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.

com)
James Joyces Untamable Power
James Longenbach | June 3, 2014
Exclude left body block
Image
Sylvia Beach and James Joyce at Beachs bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in 1922
In 1946, a precocious student at the University of Toronto wanted to read the librarys copy of
James Joyces Ulysses. He was informed that he needed rst to submit two letters, one from a
clergyman and the other from a doctor. The Canadian ban on Ulysses would not be lifted until
1949, so the young man headed south, to Yale University, where after some wrangling he was
permitted to write his PhD dissertation on Joyce, and in 1956 it was published as Dublins
Joyce, one of the rst large-scale examinations of Joyces career. Even then, twenty-three years
after the US ban against Ulysses had been lifted, Joyces book was more often talked about than
readit was dirty, immoral, impossible. Today, Ulysses is still more often talked about than
read. Whats the most overrated book youve never nished? Joyces Ulysses, says the
novelist Richard Ford in the pages of The New York Times Book Review. Hands down.
The author of Dublins Joyce was the inimitable Hugh Kenner, who had no patience for such
literary chatter. When I heard him lecture on Joyce in the mid-1980s, he spoke without a
prepared text, producing sentences that were small syntactical dramas, as suspenseful as they
were incisive. Every century produces its signature epic, Kenner began. The seventeenth
century had Miltons Paradise Lost, the eighteenth century had Gibbons The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the nineteenth century haddramatic pausethe
Oxford English Dictionary. The OEDs entry on the word and is longer than Paradise Lost,
said Kenner. Who would read it? The great epic of the twentieth century was of course Ulysses,
and Kenners point was that this modernist epic is as riven with mythic extravagance as
Paradise Lost, as devoted to historical event as the Decline and Fall, as encyclopedic in its
devotion to our language as the OED.
Any satisfying account of Ulysses must refuse the glamour of mastery, allowing us to recognize
that the novel is always other than what we say it is, especially when what we say is accurate. In
this regard the book resembles all great works of art, but few works of art make us so
self-consciously aware of how any particular description carries the danger of occluding other
necessary descriptions. How can a book scrupulously devoted to historical fact be
simultaneously a book dominated by the most arcane ights of fancy? How can a book that
James Joyces Untamable Power http://www.thenation.com/print/article/180110/james-joyces-...
1 of 6 7/15/14 5:58 PM
contains this sentenceMr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowlsalso contain this sentence: Universally that persons acumen is esteemed very little
perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held most protably by mortals with
sapience endowed. Or this sentence: Come on you winezzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling
existences! Or this sentence: lick my shit.
Early readers of Ulysses understandably groped for mastery. Most famously, T.S. Eliot
capitalized upon the fact that Joyce based the books eighteen chapters (or episodes, as Joyce
called them) on eighteen episodes from Homers Odyssey. This mythical method, said Eliot,
organized the books apparent chaos by providing a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity. But around the time that Eliot published this remark in 1923,
Ezra Pound maintained in a less celebrated but equally inuential essay that the books mythic
underpinnings were chiey Joyces affair and need not detain the reader of Ulysses at all. Had
Joyce not titled the book with the Latin name for Homers hero, Kenner would later speculate,
readers might never have noticed its mythic structure; they would have been liberated to
experience the books linguistic extravagance as a pleasure, rather than feeling they held a key
that threatened to turn Ulysses into a lock.
* * *
To say that neither Pound nor Eliot was completely right is not to diminish the power of their
insights but to emphasize the untamable power of Joyce. Ulysses the realist novel, devoted to
fact, narrates the events of a single day, June 16, 1904, in the lives of several people living in
Dublin. A young man named Stephen Dedalus, haunted by the ghost of his dead mother, wakes
up, teaches a history class, shows off egregiously to his friends and superiors at the National
Library, feels ridiculous, gets drunk, meets a man named Leopold Bloom and, rather than falling
back on the largesse of family, friends or Mr. Bloom, renders himself homeless and walks off
into the night.
On this same day, the indefatigably generous Mr. Bloom, haunted by the death of his infant son,
wakes up, makes breakfast for his wife, assumesperhaps mistakenly; we dont yet know for
surethat his wife has arranged a tryst that afternoon with the aptly named Blazes Boylan,
wanders the streets and bars of Dublin, is subjected to an anti-Semitic tirade, meets Stephen,
tries to care for him and, in one of the most heartbreaking passages in all of literature, ends his
day communing with the vast emptiness of interstellar space. After Bloom falls asleep, we are
nally given access to the mind of his wife, Molly, who has been a potently absent presence
throughout the book; the longest of the eight unpunctuated sentences of her concluding
monologue is 4,391 words long.
But well before we reach that impossibly extravagant sentence, we have become acutely aware
that this realist novel is made of nothing but words, words that seem to develop a mind of their
own, seducing us as much with their sound as with their sense. To varying degrees, all words do
that; the newspaper headline POPE CALLS FOR AN END TO LONG DIVISION does in miniature
what great works of verbal artistry do at large, and when reading such works, we thrill to the
documentary force of the words at the same time that we thrill to the sound of words, their
rhythms, their patterns, their capacity for nonsense and non sequitur. This double thrill animates
Hamlet as much as it animates Ulysses, but in Joyces work the power of words simultaneously
to enforce and diffuse their documentary sense is impossible ever to ignore. Ulysses the realist
novel is also at the same time Ulysses the mythic phantasmagoria, not simply the love child of
Gibbon and Milton, but at times as relentlessly excessive in its accumulating verbiage as the
James Joyces Untamable Power http://www.thenation.com/print/article/180110/james-joyces-...
2 of 6 7/15/14 5:58 PM
entry on and in the OED.
What matters most about the mythic structure of Ulysses, consequently, is not that Leopold
Bloom corresponds loosely to the wandering Odysseus, in search of the rock of Ithaca, or that
Stephen Dedalus corresponds loosely to the wandering Telemachus, son of Odysseus, in search
of his father; what matters is that these mythic correspondences offered Joyce a logic that
inspired the stylistic experiments that constitute our experience of his book as language
exfoliating on the page. For instance, in the episode that corresponds to Odysseus encounter
with the giant one-eyed Cyclops, the writing itself becomes gigantic, grossly hyperbolic and
shortsighted: The gure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a
broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded
widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairlegged
ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. And in the episode embodying the seduction song of the Sirens,
the writing becomes egregiously musical, sound nearly obliterating sense: Lid Ker Cow De
and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your tschink with tschunk. And in the episode
corresponding to Odysseus encounter with the seductive Nausicaa, the writing becomes oridly
romantic, riddled with the clichs of sentimental ction:
She would have fain cried to him chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to
him to come, to feel his lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girls love, a
little strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has run though the ages. And then
a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and
it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it
a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy
stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!
These sentences describe the orgasm Leopold Bloom achieves while watching the young Gerty
MacDowell lean back to reveal her undergarments to him. Before the sentences appeared in the
rst edition of Ulysses (published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore Shakespeare
and Company in Paris), it appeared in an issue of The Little Review, edited by Margaret
Anderson and Jane Heap with the assistance of Ezra Pound. Somehow, a copy of this obscure
little magazine, edited by lesbian feminists and devoted to modernist experimental writing,
appeared in the mailbox of the teenage daughter of a businessman named Ogden Brower.
Brower wrote a letter of complaint to the New York district attorneys ofce, and the DAs
ofce consulted with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
By the time this happened in 1920, The Little Review had already been suppressed by the US
Post Ofce Department on several occasions, once for publishing a short story by Wyndham
Lewis and three times for publishing other episodes of Ulysses, one in which a boyish
participant in a discussion of Hamlet invokes a less reputable drama (Everyman His Own Wife,
or A Honeymoon in the Hand [a national immorality in three orgasms]), another in which
Bloom recalls his rst sexual encounter with Molly (Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her
lips, her stretched neck beating, womans breasts full in her blouse of nuns veiling), and a
third in which a drunken Dubliner jokes about King Edward VIIs legendary womanizing
(Theres a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo). The editors of The Little Review
knew what they were doing, publishing such sentences in a moral climate fueled on the one
hand by the Great War and its aftermath and by the ght for universal suffrage on the other: in
such a climate, the phrase wildly I lay on her could seem as threatening to national security as
Bolsheviks and birth-controllers. Pound also knew what he was doing, delivering such
sentences to The Little Review: he censored Joyces prose before it was published, cutting out
James Joyces Untamable Power http://www.thenation.com/print/article/180110/james-joyces-...
3 of 6 7/15/14 5:58 PM
some of the naughty bits, but not enough.
* * *
John Quinn, a powerful New York lawyer who was a friend of Pounds and a patron of many
modernist writers and painters, represented the editors at the Jefferson Market Courthouse. No
passage from Ulysses was read into evidence; the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice
argued that it would violate the law to do so, since the book was so obscene, lewd, lascivious,
lthy, indecent and disgusting that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the
Court and improper to be placed upon the records thereof. Cannily, Quinn based his defense on
the Hicklin Rule (formulated by a British judge in 1868 and still current at the time), which
maintained that the test of obscenity was whether or not the language in question would tend
to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral inuences. Language
could not deprave and corrupt, Quinn argued, if nobody read it: You could not take a piece of
literature up in an aeroplane fteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no
spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as lthy, within the
meaning of the law. Quinn was himself an avid reader of Joyces prose, but in court he argued
that Ulysses was like the entry on and in the OED: Who would get through it?
Quinn lost, and the trials of Ulysses, which at this point had not yet been published in its
entirety, were far from over (it would be put on trial again in a US District Court in 1933 and in
a US Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934). But what Quinn was trying to persuade the court to
recognize is that the signature epic of the twentieth century is not simply a racy realist novel,
even though it maintains a powerful relationship to the tradition of the realist novel. Ulysses the
mythic phantasmagoria is hard to readat least as hard as Paradise Lostnot because Joyce
prized difculty, but because ambitious works of literary artistry are by their nature hard to read.
Writing Ulysses, Joyce wanted to produce a work of art in a relatively new genre, the novel, that
would stand shoulder to shoulder with the most challenging and time-honored achievements of
Chaucer, Spenser or Milton. To the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who
was writing in the eighteenth century, the notion that a future centurys signature epic might
take the form of a novel would have seemed as implausible as the notion that a centurys
signature epic might be a dictionary. And even today, when a writer like Joyce might aspire to
be published not by a small bookstore on the Left Bank but by Amazon, the relationship of the
novel to artistic achievement remains in some quarters equivocal: dismissing Ulysses, Richard
Ford is not implying that he prefers to spend his evenings curled up with a copy of The Faerie
Queene.
The legal history of Ulysses has been examined many times, most elegantly by Adam Parkes in
Modernism and the Theatre of Censorship (1996), a book that shows how several modernist
novels may be seen, in retrospect, to diagnose the terms of their own censorship. Kevin
Birminghams The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyces Ulysses casts its nets
more widely, synthesizing enormous amounts of information and describing in detail the
multiple circumstances surrounding the gestation, publication and suppression of Ulysses.
Birmingham is a uid writer, and the more intricate the detail, the more compelling the narrative
he constructs: his account of the rise of American obscenity laws, beginning with Abraham
Lincolns signing of the rst postal obscenity legislation in 1865, is as gripping to read as his
account of the barbaric eye surgeries Joyce endured or his account of the nearly slapstick
manner in which Samuel Roth published a pirated edition of Ulysses in 1929the edition on
which the rst trade edition of Ulysses, published by Random House in 1934, would mistakenly
be based.
James Joyces Untamable Power http://www.thenation.com/print/article/180110/james-joyces-...
4 of 6 7/15/14 5:58 PM
The Most Dangerous Book is a big book, however, and it ags when Birmingham pulls away
from his tight focus; his accounts of Ezra Pounds Imagist movement in poetry or Virginia
Woolfs Bloomsbury feel synthesized from a variety of secondary sources, not built up from the
kind of heartfelt research that fuels this provocative conclusion about the culture of American
censorship during World War I: The censorship troubles of Ulysses began not because
vigilantes were searching for pornography but because government censors in the Post Ofce
were searching for foreign spies, radicals and anarchists, and it made no difference if they were
political or philosophical or if they considered themselves artists.
Ulysses is also a big book, and more disconcerting is the fact that Birmingham reads it in a
strategically selective way, reducing it to a realist novel. Like the judges who declared Ulysses
obscene, Birmingham implies that the most important thing about Ulysses as a revolutionary
work of art is that, among its thousands of sentences, it includes a handful of sentences like
lick my shit. Ulysses was dangerous, Birmingham concludes, because it accepted no
hierarchy between the empirical and the obscene. But isnt that just as true of any pornographic
novel? Birmingham of course recognizes the particular brilliance of Joyces language, but he by
and large treats it as if it were something that gets in the way of the essentially realist novel he
wants to describe. At times, Ulysses reads like a book that wants not to communicate, he
contends, a book that can become a scavenger hunt for pedants.
Anyone might feel frustrated reading Ulysses, just as one might nd it difcult to get to the end
of the rst canto of The Faerie Queene. But to fetishize the novels realism, taking the
documentary force of its language for granted, is to impoverish the power of realism. Its well
known that Joyce based many aspects of Ulysses on his personal experience, and Birmingham
rehearses one especially charged example:
Once, Joyces drinking got him into a one-sided ght in St. Stephens Green. He
approached a woman whom he did not realize was accompanied, and [his friend]
Cosgrave simply walked away while the man beat the would-be writer senseless.
As Joyce lay bleeding in the dirt, a stranger, a reputedly Jewish Dubliner named
Alfred H. Hunter, lifted him up and brushed him off. He steadied Joyce by the
shoulders, asked the young man if he was all right and proceeded to walk him
home just as a father would have done. Joyce never forgot it.
This incident was indeed the inspiration for the meeting of the forlorn Stephen Dedalus with the
paternal Leopold Bloom, but the language of Joyces novel introduces crucial complexities that
the assumption of sheer coincidence between Joyces life and art occludes. While virtually
every character in Ulysses assumes that Bloom is, like Alfred H. Hunter, Jewish, Bloom in fact
is not; nor does he consider himself a Jew. Though Blooms father, Rudolph Virag, was born a
Hungarian Jew, he converted to Protestantism before his son was born. Blooms mother was an
Irish Catholic named Ellen Higgins, and Bloom himself was baptized multiple times, rst as a
Protestant and later as a Catholic, before he married Molly. In a crucial scene in Ulysses, when
hes assaulted by a rabidly anti-Semitic Dubliner, Bloom does retort, Your God was a jew.
Christ was a jew like me. But later in the day, when he recounts this incident, Bloom admits
that he was pretending to be Jewishpretending to be what the nameless Dubliner assumed him
to bein order to stand up personally against the forces of prejudice: So I without deviating
from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family
like me though in reality Im not.
Joyce spreads the evidence regarding Blooms relationship to Judaism far and wide, making it
James Joyces Untamable Power http://www.thenation.com/print/article/180110/james-joyces-...
5 of 6 7/15/14 5:58 PM
difcult to synthesize and allowing his readers to misread Blooms identity, just as the citizens
of Dublin do. But Joyce is not playing games; Joyce is never merely playing games. He didnt
simply write a book about prejudice; he wrote a book that embodies in its language the ways in
which prejudice is perpetuated, carried aloft by language, regardless of the facts. Language
alters reality in Ulysses, conferring an identity on Bloom, an identity that in a moment of
seless nobility Bloom embraces as his own.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! [1]
Ulysses the realist novel can never be separated from Ulysses the mythic phantasmagoria, for
the books highest purpose is to dramatize the ways in which our reality is not given but is
continually made and remade by the words we speak. This, not the fact that Joyce uses shit and
fuck freely, constitutes the books true radicalism, and to acknowledge this radicalism is to
become aware that Joyce is a moralist of Dantean proportionsa writer who wants to entertain
us (no one writes about shit more creatively than Dante), but also a writer who wants in the
process to dramatize the unending conict between good and evil. Joyce abhorred most forms
of nationalism, and one of his many provocations in Ulysses is that Irish nationalism would
perpetuate anti-Semitism even if there were, in reality, no Irish Jews.
Im no Joyce scholar, but because I was lucky enough to have great teachers, Ive been able to
teach Ulysses myself. In my experience, college students are seduced by the challenge of
difculty, and I know how euphoric it feels not simply to read the whole of Ulysses slowly, page
by page, but to share that experience with other people, people whove never read the book and
people who have read it many times. Kevin Birminghams The Most Dangerous Book is, for the
most part, meticulously researched and deftly recited, but if you want to be inspired to read
Joyce, to feel that youre engaged in intimate conversation with someone who loves Ulysses, Id
suggest a little book, also called Ulysses, that was published by Hugh Kenner in 1980. Though
it presumes no prior knowledge of its subject, its challenging to read; every one of its sentences
will give you pleasure.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/180110/james-joyces-untamable-power
Links:
[1] https://subscribe.thenation.com/servlet/OrdersGateway?cds_mag_code=NAN&cds_page_id=122425&
amp;cds_response_key=I12SART1
James Joyces Untamable Power http://www.thenation.com/print/article/180110/james-joyces-...
6 of 6 7/15/14 5:58 PM