Savepaperandfollow@newyorkeronTwitter

JUNE 16, 2014

Ulysses and the Moral Right to Pleasure

BY DAN CHIASSON

Today is Bloomsday, the hundred and tenth

anniversary of the events in James Joyces Ulysses.
The weather in Dublin looks good; the sun wont set
tonight until just before ten. If you are a young
tryster who happens to be in Dublin, why not take a
walk through Ringsend Park, the way Joyce and his
girl did that evening? Everybody else can
commemorate the day by buying and reading Kevin
Birminghams terrific new biography of Ulysses,
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James
Joyces Ulysses.
The herothe Ulyssesof James Joyces Ulysses is Leopold Bloom: a man, like
Homers hero, skilled in all manner of contending, a wanderer, a strategist, a man of
polytryposmany twists and turns. For Joyce, Homers hero was the only complete
person in literature. Hamlet was a human being, Joyce said, but he was son only:

Ulysses is son to Laertes, but he is father to Telemachus, husband to Penelope,

lover of Calypso, companion in arms of the Greek warriors around Troy and
King of Ithaca. He was subjected to many trials, but with wisdom and courage
came through them all. Dont forget that he was a war dodger who tried to
evade military service by simulating madness. He might never have taken up
arms and gone to Troy, but the Greek recruiting sergeant was too clever for
him and, while he was ploughing the sands, placed young Telemachus in front
of his plough. But once at the war the conscientious objector became a
jusquauboutist. When the others wanted to abandon the siege he insisted on
staying till Troy should fall.
But Bloom was inadequate in at least one regard: he didnt write Ulysses. Joyce did, and
in doing so he rendered a picture of Dublin so complete, he wrote, that if the city
suddenly disappeared from the earth the reader could reconstruct it from the pages of
Ulysses. Dublin friends and contemporaries of Joyce who were left out of the book
wondered if their very existence had somehow been redacted.
As anybody who has grappled with Ulysses knows, the ultimate contender, conniver,

As anybody who has grappled with Ulysses knows, the ultimate contender, conniver,
and man for every occasion is Joyce himself. He is its hero, and our sense of him is
deepened immeasurably by Birminghams book. Joyces contrivance, the novel in our
hands, ranks among the great human accomplishments, partly because its design
protrudes beyond its covers into a social and political space unready for it, whose only
word for it was obscene.
By setting the novel on the day his first inklings of it formed, Joyce ensured that the book
would always be, whatever else it would be, a book about its own conception and growth.
He had dreamed of writing Ulysses since at least 1904, the year two things happened: a
Dublin Jew named Alfred Hunter dusted him off after a brawl and walked him all the
way home; and a beautiful barmaid, Nora Barnacle, on their first datethe first
Bloomsdayslid her hand down down inside my trousers, as Joyce reminded her, later,
in a letter, and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long
tickling fingers and frigged me slowly till I came off through your fingers.
Each of these courtesies was performed by a stranger for a stranger, though Nora would
become Joyces lifelong companion and eventual wife. Neither one was an act of specific
personal connection or love. Kindness, sexual willingness, patience, forbearance, and
especially equanimitythat beautiful word that so comforts Bloom in the end, and
perhaps the most important word in the novelall exist quite independent of personal
bonds and the private economies of friendship, family, and marriage. That these lovely
traits exist outside of the exchange market of human frailtiesthat they exist at all, in
factwould have been news to Henry James or, for that matter, to Jane Austen; it is
almost hard to conceive of the novel as a genre without the idea that human virtues are
always tactical, and spent with the expectation of handsome returns. It may sound sappy,
but for me Ulysses is chiefly valuable as the most moving tribute in literature to
kindness.
The book is dirtier than people imagine or remember. If you know it only by reputation,
you know, probably, that a guy jerks off on the beach, while, at home, his wife entertains
her lover (the hilariously, humiliatingly named Blazes Boylan) in a bed whose brass
quoits have been loosed by her infinite trysts. But sex, a pleasure more intense than
others but not fundamentally distinct from them, is everything in Ulysses. There has
never been a novel more sympathetic to every weird thing people do to make themselves
happy, from preparing a mutton kidney to eating a gorgonzola sandwich, to singing aloud
Loves Old Sweet Song, to worshiping at that altar where the back changes name, one
of many, many descriptions of backsides and things people do to other people while on
all fours. You could watch porn for weeks and see the same repertoire of actions, the
identical durations, the same outcomes, over and over; once in a while somebody mixes in
a gourd or dresses as a nun, but the basic template is fixed. In Joyce, cheering on your
wife as she fucks her boyfriend is a fantasy, a source of pleasure. ( Joyce wanted Nora to
cheat on him, so that he could feel for himself what a cuckold feels.) The pleasure Bloom
takes in Mollys backside, especially in its messes and smells, finds, in Joyce (like so many

Enter

takes in Mollys backside, especially in its messes and smells, finds, in Joyce (like so many
pleasures of its kind) an exact linguistic embodiment: I do indeed explore the plump
mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump. Language is, of course, the real pleasure, the
fundamental bawdiness.
To align writing with the pleasures in tasting, smelling, chewing, swallowing, smearing,
shitting, and on and on, suggests that the novel operates via an alternate epistemology
that circumvents the feeble equipment of the mind and often is at odds with sight. The
first sustained stream-of-consciousness passage in the novel happens partly when
Stephen Daedalus has closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. A blind stripling drifts in and out of the novel, a reproach, in part, to the finality
and moral guarantees of seeing. The ultimate proof of sights marginality is sex itself,
which, unlike the spectacle of sex, invalidates seeing as a means of transformation. Only
when weve closed our eyes does the real mellow yellow smellow information start to
trickle in. Furthermore, shame in Ulysses is often aligned with being seen, as when, in
the hallucinatory trial Bloom must undergo in the Circe episode, the cheap drawing of a
nymph he hung above his marital bed surprisingly takes the stand:
THE NYMPH: (Covers her face with her hand.) What have I not seen in that
chamber? What must my eyes look down on?
BLOOM: (Apologetically.) I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up
with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea, long ago.
Part of the language play in this exchange happens between seas and sees, a pun Joyce
will suggest in the chapter that follows, when a bloviating old sailor reports, among other
boasts, of his conquests in Gibraltar, Mollys birthplace. (Sea men and semen is another
relevant pun.)
***
Coming to terms with Ulysses inevitably means realizing what Joyce had to overcome
when he brought it into the worldfirst in writing it, then in finding a publisher, and,
finally, in getting it printed. These were very separate endeavors, separate dramas, each
with its hazards and setbacks, and to comprehend the novel fully involves
comprehending the bleak conditions that shaped it, and against which it contended. I
repeat the Homeric word contend advisedly, partly because it is cognate with content:
Ulysses became famous right away for its illicit contents and its alleged
incomprehensibility. You had to pore over the book in order to find the dirty parts. The
obscenity judges had to set aside weeks to read it.
The Most Dangerous Book is the fullest account anybody has made of the publication
history of Ulysses: its life as contraband, as talisman, as symbol, as sensualists bible and
micro-atlas of the modern city. Joyce knew what he was getting himself into; Dubliners,
his first book, went unpublished for nine years, rejected by forty publishers for allegedly

his first book, went unpublished for nine years, rejected by forty publishers for allegedly
unprintable obscenities, especially, unbelievably, the word bloody. Thirteen printers
turned down A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ezra Pound, who by then had
taken up Joyces cause, came up with the idea, which others rejected, of having the printer
leave large blanks where the offending phrases would later be typed in by hand.
Joyce, some have said, was the first censor of Ulysses, skipping objectionable passages
when he read it aloud to ladies. Pound blue-penciled the words bowels and trousers in
one early chapter. Every ally of the book wanted to censor it, often in the noble cause of
getting it into print. This involved significant cloak-and-dagger; in fact, Joyce, who was
living in Trieste during the war, was investigated as a spy. (He had been smuggling love
letters, it turned out, from a young student of his to the daughter of an Italian resistance
fighter, Adolf Mordo.)
Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review, in twenty-three installments, beginning in
1918. The January, 1919 issue was seized owing to the scene in which Bloom, at Davy
Byrnes pub, enjoys a gorgonzola sandwich while remembering how, when Molly and
him first kissed, she softly gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Soon
The Little Review had been found guilty of obscenity under the New York Comstock
Act.
Joyce was writing the novel knowing that to publish it was nearly impossible, and likely
illegal. This made him more determined, as Pound complained, to catalogue every
possible human secretion. He was also suffering from attacks of iritis in both eyes, and
had undergone a painful surgery, without effective anesthesia, whereby his cornea was
sliced and a small piece of iris extracted. (Boldly, and I think totally persuasively,
Birmingham advances the theory that Joyces eye troubles were the chief symptom of
syphilis, which he acquired on one of his many trips, in his early manhood, to Dublins
brothels.) He exhibited, according to Birmingham, a combination of ruthlessness and
vulnerability. When Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare and Company, first met him, slumped
over on a bookcase, he was so shaken by the barking of a dog across the street that he
trembled and whispered, Is it coming in? Is it feerrce? (He had been bitten as a boy, he
claimed, and grew his goatee to cover the scar.) Beach, who later all but lost patience
with Joyce, remarked how he would always wait, when getting out of a taxi, until the
driver had finished what he was saying.
***
In 1933, when Random House brought a test case to overturn the Ulysses ban, they at
first had a hard time convincing the customs officers to confiscate it; everyone brings
that in, one remarked. Victory in the case, The United States v. One Book Called
Ulysses, had to have been a foregone conclusion: a whole nation against one book?
What could be more absurd? The decision by Judge John M. Woolsey, printed in the
front matter to the first American edition, argued, essentially, that since Ulysses was a
great work of art it could not be obscene, however dirty it was. As Birmingham points

great work of art it could not be obscene, however dirty it was. As Birmingham points
out, obscenity is still, to this day, illegal; we just dont use the word to apply to
masterpieces.
There is a scene in Ulysses, one of my favorites, where Bloom, looking for a book to
turn Molly on, rents a steamy bit of trash titled Sweets of Sin, a book, critics have
noted, bought by a cuckold about a cuckold. He carries it with him the rest of the day,
along with a bar of soap and a potato; it is the one piece of contraband in the book that
Bloom cant fit entirely in his pocket or keep sealed up in his mind. Bloom might as well
have been carrying Ulysses, since the book had been so badly denigrated in the public
eye that it had become no different, for the officials in charge, from Sweets of Sin.
Birminghams brilliant study makes you realize how important owning this book, the
physical book, has always been to people, maybe first and foremost because it told other
people who they were. In 1994, in a bookstore in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I saw,
in a case full of treasures, a ponderously bound book labelled Bible. I opened the case
and plucked the book from its stand; inside it was an early edition of Ulysses. Copies of
the book were bound in all manner of disguise; copies were unbound and carried as
single sheets or small booklets. John Quinn, Joyces patron and the organizer of the
Armory Show, hid several copies in a shipment of Picassos.
I wanted to own this book, but I had no money. I begged my friends for a loan. At this
time, I had only scanned the book in high school and, as teenagers had done for decades,
carried it around as a sign of my worldliness. It didnt matter. I had to have it.
I could not have it, and so many years later, when I was planning this piece, I looked for
something like it again. I found a fine copy of the first English edition, published in
Dijon, in 1922, in a run of two thousand copies. Mine is number 1901. Several hundred
were burned in customs, but this copy has bright blue wrappers andin an amazing
ironyuncut pages. The meaning of Ulysses was always bound up with buying it,
owning it, and showing it off, actions that assert the primacy of pleasurethe moral
right to experience itover sanctimony. This is an assertion utterly continuous with
those Joyce made inside its covers. May Birminghams book bring legions of new readers
its way.
Dan Chiassons most recent book is Bicentennial: Poems (Knopf ).
Above: James Joyce in Paris, 1934. Photograph by Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty.

Dan Chiasson has been contributing poems to the magazine since 2000 and reviews since
2007. He teaches at Wellesley College.