Is Ulysses relevant today?

In 1920, Ulysses was considered highly objectionable, vulgar and obscene, even dangerous

In the 1960s in Karachi, there used to be a place called Zelin’s Coffee House. It was frequented by communists, Trotskyites, existentialists, atheists, anarchists and government spies. Occasionally a member of the literati who had lost his way would turn up and talk about English literature. That’s how I once got involved in a discussion of the relevance of Ulysses in a city which hadn’t yet become totally philistine.

I had bought a copy of James Joyce’s classic more out of curiosity than anything else, and didn’t attempt to read it until many years later. It has been described by some as the greatest and most imaginative novel ever written and by others as the most boring and tedious bit of literary twaddle. Whatever the view, it was certainly the most controversial novel in the English-speaking world. The first time I picked it up I couldn’t get past the first 15 pages. But on my second attempt two years ago, I savoured the flavour of the language, the collection of contradictory styles, approaches and applications. For me, it was a revolutionary book. As Charles McGrath so charmingly put it — where else could one find so much parody, burlesque, platitude, banality, profundity, high and low poetry, all in one volume?



Judging by today’s standards of what is and what isn’t decent, Ulysses is as tame as Lorna Doone. So what was the fuss all about? In 1920, it was considered highly objectionable, vulgar and obscene, even dangerous. Publishers wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. One wonders how they would have reacted to Fear of Flying or Lolita, which made Gloria Steinem want to take a bath. Apparently it wasn’t Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy that gave the censors convulsions. Nor was it the oblique suggestion of sodomy in a particular scene, or the gesture of partial self-gratification, which came remarkably close to an onanistic act.

It was probably the belief that if you start publishing anything which has even the slightest bit of smut or eroticism, you would be tearing the very fabric of civilisation. But a brave woman named Sylvia Beach went ahead and published the manuscript in February 1922 in Paris. Subsequently, it was regarded as one of the most important works of fiction in the English language and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire literary movement”. One critic stated that before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so powerfully prefaced the process of thinking. However, even proponents of Ulysses, such as Anthony Burgess who have described the book as inimitable, added it was also possibly mad. Ulysses chronicles the life of a lovable Irish Jew called Leo Bloom on a single day — June 16, 1904, his many encounters, some cordial some not.

The book was banned in England but was freely available in Paris, the centre of European culture, where Victorian erotica found a home in the Olympia Press. Another novel which couldn’t get past the censors in England was Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence. But after the landmark decision by Judge Woolsey that Ulysses was a serious work of literature and was not obscene, Lawrence commented, “Poor Connie Chatterley has been hugger-muggered by the policemen of the mind, while Molly Bloom is allowed to rake her unpunctuative consciousness in the most fescennine passage in English literature.” Ulysses is my kind of book, like Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen and The Ginger Man by J P Donleavy. If you haven’t got the time to go through Joyce’s classic, see the film by Joseph Strick. It’s available on YouTube. It isn’t as good as the book. But then they never are.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 11^th, 2015.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.