‘Ulysses’ on Trial

NYT ^ | 9/2019 | Michael Chabon

[Borges]

“It is,” the editor of the London Sunday Express had written nine years earlier, sounding like H.P. Lovecraft describing Necronomicon:

the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature….All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.

[Borges]

“blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.”

Put that on the dust jacket today and you’d have a best seller.

[C19fan]

Isn’t Ulysses the most famous book nobody reads?

[Borges]

So they say.

[Larry Lucido]

Good song.

[proxy_user]

Actually, it’s Finnegans Wake that is unbelievably filthy. Strangely, no one has ever complained about it, and copies are freely available to impressionable teenagers.

[Borges]

FW would be incomprehensible to “impressionable teenagers”.

[Billthedrill]

I keep a copy to slide into a plate carrier if I ever get into a gunfight. It’s impenetrable.

[Sans-Culotte]

Tried to read Joyce, never found him compelling. I know just enough about him to answer Jeopardy questions. Same with Proust.

[dp0622]

American Psycho is the SICKEST book I’ve ever read.

The things this guy does to women in the book would make ISIS proud.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Bkmrk.

[PapaBear3625]

You want nasty? A much nastier book was written over two centuries ago:

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade relates the story of four wealthy men who enslave 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually torture them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes. The book was written while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille and the manuscript was lost during the storming of the Bastille.

[circlecity]

"Tried to read Joyce, never found him compelling."

Agreed. Same with Faulkner. I think people mostly say they like them to appear smart and sophisticated. I much more appreciate authors who can write a compelling narrative as the top layer but then when you dig you find layer upon layer of deeper meaning underneath. Moby Dick is an example.

[Wilhelm Tell]

Hopefully someone with good sense burned the manuscript so it can never be found.

[CaptainK]

Ulysses was the first modern novel of indisputable literary intent to explicitly depict its characters engaging in the universal bodily routines of human beings—shitting, fucking, farting, jerking off, etc.—and, perhaps even more shockingly, the first to affirm, often in the coarsest terms, that when they were not engaged in those activities, they spent a good deal of their time thinking about engaging in them.

The Canterbury Tales makes many references to bodily functions. Centuries earlier.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Wasn’t “Necronomicon” based on Islam?

[fruser1]

[KosmicKitty]

copies are freely available to impressionable teenagers.

Not to worry, They don't read it. They don't read. Period.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I take it this is about the book written by James Joyce and not HOMER’s Odyssey.

[ifinnegan]

What parts of finnegans wake are you referring to?