satisfied unless fuller mention is made of James Joyce’s _Ulysses_ than
has here been given. But they must remain unsatisfied. Though _Ulysses_
could be studied as a complete manual of contemporary obscenity, such
a study will get no encouragement here. It is true that _Ulysses_ is
forbidden publication in England as indecent and that it contains more
words classified by law as indecent than any other work published this
century; but on the other hand it also contains more obscure poetic and
religious references than any other work published this century and the
choice of language in the blameless passages is as scholarly as Mr.
Saintsbury’s and as English as Charles Doughty’s. So far from being a
work of merely pornographic intention or even a serious work given the
pornographic sugar-coating that Rabelais gave his politico-philosophic
pills, it is a deadly serious work in which obscenity is anatomized as
it has never been anatomized before. To call Joyce obscene, is like
calling the Shakespeare of the _Sonnets_ lustful: true, both have had
the intimate experiences that their writing implies, but Joyce has
brought himself as far beyond obscenity as Shakespeare got beyond
the lust of which he makes frank confession. Bloom, gross obscenity
incarnate, is presented in _Ulysses_ directly without the prejudice
of tenderness or harshness. Stephen Daedalus whose early history had
been given (semi-autobiographically) in “A portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man” is presented as a type of the over-sophisticated
intellectual, a poet who has failed as a poet because he is unable to
find any strong enough reality to make foundation for his poetry. In
the contemporary religious and literary scene, though a man of strong
natural religious feelings and great literary capacity, he finds only
emptiness. Irish nationalist politics are no better. The only life
that has any appearance of reality to him is the obscene life as lived
by Bloom the middle-aged married commercial traveller and by Mulligan
a forceful young medical student who lodges with Daedalus. Daedalus,
who makes his living by schoolmastering in an old-fashioned school,
is philosophically inclined to the obscene life because Bloom and
Mulligan, who live it seriously, are in this respect at least superior
to the priests, the schoolmasters and the little Celtic-Twilight poets
(Joyce himself began as one) whose lives have no such absorption in a
ruling idea. Yet as a sensitive person Daedalus is utterly repelled by
the badness and rankness which obscenity exudes; and in the spiritual
conflict between an artist’s love of reality and an artist’s hatred
of obscenity the plot of the book lies. The only character in the
book with whom Daedalus has a strong natural sympathy is his father,
the only one man who is able to harmonize religion, politics, and
obscenity into something like an artistic reality. Old Daedalus swears
admirably. Though most of his oaths are on the censored list there is
no disgust stirred by them:
A tall black-bearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round
the corner of Elvery’s elephant-house showed them a curved hand
on his spine.
“In all his pristine beauty,” Mr. Power said. Mr. Daedalus
looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:
“The devil break the hasp of your back!”
But Stephen has a bitter quarrel with his father since his mother’s
death, and anyhow finds no sympathy in him for the intellectual
sophistication which is one of the chief causes of unrest. The book
rises to a scream of dreadful pain when we come on Stephen drunk in
Mabbot Street in company with Bloom, a bawd-mistress and several
harlots, two English private soldiers, and a whole fantastic crowd
of the imaginary characters of Stephen’s brain: dying away in a
monstrously droned account of the trivialities of lust and obscenity
to which early middle-age has brought Bloom and his wife.
It is quite right that _Ulysses_ should be censored since its chief
public in England could at the best of times be only an obscene one:
and it is not an obscene book, but on the contrary perhaps the least
obscene book ever published: that is why it is censored. And there is
every reason why Shakespeare’s sonnets should be censored at the same
time, and more strictly, because the public even blinds its eyes to
the painful history that the sequence gives and makes it ‘extravagant
flattery of a patron’ or an ‘academic exercise.’ Joyce is read as
obscene instead of successfully past obscenity: Shakespeare instead of
being read as past lust is not even read as lusting.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
――Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.
――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.