9 ms·

The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

94 points by okfine 5y ago

okfine 5y 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.
jandrese 5y 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 5y ago
  > The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book! Or Joyce is just that impenetrable. Have you seen Finnegans Wake?
  - dang 5y 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.
    - prionassembly 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    Sometimes I have to stop myself and ask "Is this genius, or just badly written?"
- leephillips 5y 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”.
  - nemo44x 5y 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.
    - leephillips 5y ago
      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.
      - nemo44x 5y ago
        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.
    - ericmcer 5y ago
      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.
- mywacaday 5y ago
  If you really want to be corrupted read his letter to his wife, https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nora-barnacle https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nor...
  - nodesocket 5y ago
    lol. Who knew Joyce liked farts.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    Wow--I wasen't expecting that.
- cge 5y ago
  Wikipedia's article on that trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_The_Little_Review 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.
- nicklecompte 5y 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.
  - jandrese 5y 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 5y ago
    Judge for yourself: Here's "Nausicaa" : http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Episode-XIII-Nausicaa.pdf 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 5y ago
      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.
    - nicklecompte 5y ago
      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.
    - totetsu 5y ago
      Is this okay to open at work?
- cortesoft 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.)
williesleg 5y ago
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.
leephillips 5y ago
This is a great story. I laughed out loud twice. It’s probably more entertaining than you suspect.
hereforphone 5y ago
We don't ban books anymore. We ban tweets, or Facebook posts, or other social media contributions. The drive to censor remains.
- avereveard 5y ago
  we do worse than that nowadays, instead of censoring the offending text we censor the person whole
  - rataata_jr 5y 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?
    - hereforphone 5y ago
      Blasphemers are still executed, it's just politically incorrect to criticize the countries it happens in.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y 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.
- pstuart 5y 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?
  - hereforphone 5y ago
    Pushing the "limits of tolerable behavior" are why the books were band as well.
NoImmatureAdHom 5y 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/0143127543 https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...
damontal 5y 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 https://feeds.feedburner.com/libsyn/sQtR
- Koshkin 5y ago
  > an episode is dedicated to just one sentence > he died before completing
  - dpwm 5y 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.
- dpwm 5y ago
  Thank you for posting this. I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368 episodes, spread over almost seven years.
rcgorton 5y ago
I had to read some of his works in high school. It was 'stream of consciousness' DRIVEL. At best. "Horse-Piss and Rotted Straw"
fogof 5y 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.
- leephillips 5y ago
  And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    Lol, I don't think U.S. Supreme Court justices use swords. I'd love to be proven wrong, though =)
    - krapp 5y ago
      Not literal swords but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice
  - dools 5y ago
    The Supreme Court have swords?
syrrim 5y ago
I was interested in what made the book obscene. This article discusses it: https://somanybooksblog.com/2011/10/03/ulysses-update-episode-13-the-obscene-chapter/ https://somanybooksblog.com/2011/10/03/ulysses-update-episod... In short, it contains a description of a man masturbating in public, though heavily clouded by innuendo. By the logic of an obscenity law, and assuming one could actually understand what was going on, I can see how it would be banned.
logifail 5y 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 https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
- dragonwriter 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

94 points by okfine 5y 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.

jandrese 5y 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 5y ago
> The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book! Or Joyce is just that impenetrable. Have you seen Finnegans Wake?
- dang 5y 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.
  - prionassembly 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  Sometimes I have to stop myself and ask "Is this genius, or just badly written?"
leephillips 5y 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”.
- nemo44x 5y 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.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    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.
    - nemo44x 5y ago
      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.
  - ericmcer 5y ago
    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.
mywacaday 5y ago
If you really want to be corrupted read his letter to his wife, https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nora-barnacle https://allthatsinteresting.com/james-joyce-love-letters-nor...
- nodesocket 5y ago
  lol. Who knew Joyce liked farts.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Wow--I wasen't expecting that.
cge 5y ago
Wikipedia's article on that trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_The_Little_Review 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.
nicklecompte 5y 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.
- jandrese 5y 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 5y ago
  Judge for yourself: Here's "Nausicaa" : http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Episode-XIII-Nausicaa.pdf 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 5y ago
    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.
  - nicklecompte 5y ago
    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.
  - totetsu 5y ago
    Is this okay to open at work?
cortesoft 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.)

williesleg 5y ago

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.

leephillips 5y ago

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

hereforphone 5y ago

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

avereveard 5y ago
we do worse than that nowadays, instead of censoring the offending text we censor the person whole
- rataata_jr 5y 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?
  - hereforphone 5y ago
    Blasphemers are still executed, it's just politically incorrect to criticize the countries it happens in.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y 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.
pstuart 5y 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?
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Pushing the "limits of tolerable behavior" are why the books were band as well.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y 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/0143127543 https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...

damontal 5y 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 https://feeds.feedburner.com/libsyn/sQtR

Koshkin 5y ago
> an episode is dedicated to just one sentence > he died before completing
- dpwm 5y 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.
dpwm 5y ago
Thank you for posting this. I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368 episodes, spread over almost seven years.

rcgorton 5y ago

I had to read some of his works in high school. It was 'stream of consciousness' DRIVEL. At best. "Horse-Piss and Rotted Straw"

fogof 5y 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.

leephillips 5y ago
And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  Lol, I don't think U.S. Supreme Court justices use swords. I'd love to be proven wrong, though =)
  - krapp 5y ago
    Not literal swords but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice
- dools 5y ago
  The Supreme Court have swords?

syrrim 5y ago

I was interested in what made the book obscene. This article discusses it: https://somanybooksblog.com/2011/10/03/ulysses-update-episode-13-the-obscene-chapter/ https://somanybooksblog.com/2011/10/03/ulysses-update-episod... In short, it contains a description of a man masturbating in public, though heavily clouded by innuendo. By the logic of an obscenity law, and assuming one could actually understand what was going on, I can see how it would be banned.

logifail 5y 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 https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

dragonwriter 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.