This is a great story. I laughed out loud twice. It’s probably more entertaining than you suspect.
The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
11–20 of 74 posts
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#12> 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…
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.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#13> 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…
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.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mu…
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.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mu…
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).
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mu…
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 who…
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.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#18We don't ban books anymore. We ban tweets, or Facebook posts, or other social media contributions. The drive to censor remains.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#19There's an excellent book about this by Kevin Birmingham, "The Most Dangerous Book"
https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#20We 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