Spontaneous Musings

Warmer day today...yet still cold. Work not as hectic, calmer.

The Most Dangerous Book: Battle over James Joyce's Ulysses - continues to enthrall me on my commute to and from work, even on occasion, I fall asleep. But not this morning -- even though I may have needed the doze, considering I dozed while reading an Request for Proposal and Technical Statement of Work that I was editing.

While on its face "The Most Dangerous Book" appears to be just about Ulysses or publishing Ulysses, it isn't. If anything it is a snapshot of the time period and a discourse on how publishing Ulysses and this book changed things, by depicting what happened before and during. It's a story with a vast cast of characters and themes told in a somewhat humorous and jaunty style, by a writer who clearly knows his subject matter. And how to tell it in a manner that is accessible to readers outside of academia. Which makes sense, considering we are talking about James Joyce - who pretty much thumbed his nose at the formalistic style of academic and literary realist writing. Most modernists did.

The latest? Or a brief summary of what I read today?

Is the struggle to publish it --- in serialized form, while Joyce was still writing it. And he wasn't rushing. It took him months, sometimes years to write a chapter. ("Sirens" he had been working on for five years. He skipped around and didn't necessarily work on one chapter at a time.) Ulysses wasn't published altogether as one unit or just after it was completed. That's not how they did things, also they couldn't afford to do that way - what they hoped to do was send it out or rather sneak it past the Postal service in segments or episodes as he wrote it, in the hopes of acquiring interest and enough backers to actually publish it as a complete novel. Back then, they tended to publish books as they were being written in magazines. There's a whole chapter on magazines and the cost of magazines at the time. Periodicals and magazines, particularly literary mags were quite the rage in 1917. Oh, and believe it or not? Postage was 25 cents during WWI, it went down to 3 cents later.

But convincing a printer to do it - was still a problem. Harriet Weaver went to Virgina Woolf (yes that Virgina Woolf - the one who wrote Mrs. Dalloway) and her husband Leonard - who operated their own printing press - Hogarth's Press. Woolfe was from a literary family and unlike Joyce had money. Her favorite writer of the time was Charlotte Bronte - who she believed was a brave and courageous voice. She didn't think much of HG Wells though (Wells was another big supporter of James Joyce). [This all explains why I'm not a huge fan of Woolfe. Since I rather enjoy HG Wells whose works play with my head, but found Bronte to be a bit on the melodramatic end of the spectrum, although I admittedly enjoyed Jane Eyre quite a bit. Let's face it I'm not a literary realist - which Woolf tended to be.] Woolf considers Weaver's plea, reads the manuscript which is episode one or two of the book, and the literary critic McGarthy, one of her houseguests, finds it hilarious. Woolfe declines to print it - for three reasons: 1) it was a huge risk - under the UK censorship laws, if she printed the book, her press could be confiscated and she could be fined and serve up to two years in prison, 2) the most she'd printed were two short stories at 30 pages, and it was hard to do, she had to set each letter herself, and 2) she didn't like Ulysses. But she couldn't stop thinking about it either - it played with her mind. Her friend TS Eliot (much like today, famous novelists appear to hang out together) was raving about it. And later she writes in her diary that whatever Joyce is doing, he's doing it better than she is. And she's starting to wonder what she's doing.

Her friend Katherine Mansfield, wrote to a friend: "I can't get over the feeling of wet linoleum and unemptied pails and far worse horrors in the house of his mind (meaning Joyce). But there's something in this: a scene that should figure I suppose in the history of literature."

The other problem was Quinn who was the financier behind the Little Review, edited by Ezra Pound, Harriet Weaver and feminist Margaret Anderson - which was serializing Joyce's work. While Quinn loved Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, he did not like Ulysses. He found the words ugly and unnerving. [He was ill with colon cancer and found the phrase "the scrotumtightening sea" more than he could deal with.] Ezra Pound actually was the first to censor the book - and took out many sentences. For instance, there's a chapter where Leopold Bloom is described as unzipping his pants and the loosing of his bowls. Pound deletes the unzipping of the pants and bowls. But he apparently didn't go far enough - because it still got confiscated and Quinn was still upset by it.

Then of course, Joyce's episodes or chapters were...well different. Keep in mind this is before post-modernism, before such writers as Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Pychon, Gaddis, Burroughs, David Wallace, Joyce Carol Oats, etc - all of whom were directly influenced by Joyce. No one had written a book like this before. There was a specific style they were used to. As Virgina Woolf writes in a literary review - Joyce took off all "the handrails for readers to grasp hold of". This was also during the War, so the Postal Service was actively looking for treasonous works. They decided after attempting to decipher one of Joyce's latest chapters that he must be writing in a complex code.

And even if you weren't of Virigina Woolf's somewhat discerning taste, you'd be forgiven for having troubles with Joyce's Ulysses. For one thing - Joyce refused to label his chapters, the chapters were provided out of order of the Homeric journey of Ulysses. And all the detailed references to the journey threaded throughout them were rather obscure and hidden - a treasure hunt for pedants. Joyce also was writing about the body - and focused on all its functions. He wrote the first two pages of one chapter, Sirens, as a fugue poem or overature, where the words were meant to represent sounds, the reader was to let go of the need for meaning and hear the sounds the words made. It was a song that the barmaids (sirens) were singing to Leopold Bloom. The reader was not meant to hunt meaning in the words themselves but to hear the sounds they made as they brushed against each other.

This is what Birmingham states about what Joyce intended:

The overture requires the readers to read in bewilderment as the meanings of the words dissolve into their sounds. It requires readers to abandon, for a moment, their expectations of what words are supposed to do. They would have meaning in retrospect.

[Which is why I sometimes think you have to be a bit of a poet to enjoy Joyce or at the very least have the mind of one. I tend to naturally think like that...so Ulysses worked for me, while a lot of other books - which lack that rhythm of sound, don't work as well.]

And here - in regards to quotation marks and the chapter "Wandering Rocks", where the focus is on subsidiary characters:

Joyce's tendency to shift seamlessly from one perspective to another began with his long-standing objection to quotation marks. He thought they were unnatural - "perverted commas" - because they barricaded voices from narrative text, and he wanted words to flow through and around characters like water. Ulysses was becoming a river of voices.

So, in between descriptions of the expanded powers of the US Post Service, not to mention their abuse, and censorship laws, we get also get an explanation of what Joyce was doing with Ulysses, how he wrote it, and why. I was told last night that if you haven't read Ulysses or liked it, you wouldn't find this book the least bit interesting. I doubt that. There's so much else here.

For example? I discovered that the first censorship laws in the US were signed by Abraham Lincoln, and the Comstock Law by President Ulysses S. Grant (hee, ironic that). The laws did not discriminate between pornography such as "Lord K and his rapes and seductions" and contraceptive materials and pamphlets. Anything describing how to use a condom, induce an abortion, or birth control was illegal under these laws. And the punishment was far more severe for possession or distribution of these works than going to a brothel. It was that insane. They felt it was okay, since, hey,
literary classics aren't included because no one is reading them.

Wow. Considering I had a discussion last week regarding how France was more "restrictive" in their censorship laws than the US and the UK historically, I've since learned, nope, really not. The US and UK were far more stringent - they just used the obscenity laws to get the job done.