Call him difficult, call him challenging, call him innovative or ground-breaking or even overrated if you must, but sexy? C'mon guys. C'mon.
At least, so I assumed until my most recent re-reading of Ulysses. I had already read it 3 times before--or should I say it had already defeated me 3 times before, as it is a work of such monumental complexity that so much of it flies over the head of even the most erudite reader (let alone me). Now, life is short and art is long, so I hadn't planned to return to it anytime soon; but as I researched for my comps portfolio, I realized that no single novel looms larger over either the Irish canon or the Modernist canon than Ulysses, so I decided it was high time for me to scale this mountain once more.
Now, I don't know what's changed between now and the last time I read it 4 years ago--whether my PhD course work really has succeeded in making me a sharper reader, or if my mind simply isn't as innocent as it used to be, or what--but for whatever reason, this time around, it became exceedingly obvious that, boy howdy doody, no wonder this book was banned in 1922! It is obscene.
I don't just mean it was obscene by the standards of the era (remembering that it would be another 18 years before Gone With The Wind would scandalize the nation with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a ----"); nor am I referring solely to the novel's hinted-at adultery (because Leopold Bloom, this modern Ulysses, instead of trying to get home to a faithful wife, is ironically trying to avoid going home to an unfaithful wife, get it? Get it?!). No, I mean that once you wade far enough and deep enough into the Leopold Bloom sections, you learn that this introverted, mousy character has some seriously troubling proclivities. For example, hidden within the satirical-sentimentality of the "Nausicaä" episode lies voyeurism, exhibitionism, and an onanistic act you need a graduate degree to parse that that's just what happened. The "Circe" episode much more explicitly foregrounds Bloom's repressed sado-masochistic, transgender, and cuckold fantasies. In the wild, rambling, closing "Penelope" episode, Molly Bloom, half-awake and mind-racing at 1am, briefly fantasizes about fellatio with Stephen Dedalus, recalls how well-endowed her adulterous fling Blazes Boylan was (albeit she determines that "Poldy has more spunk"--ouch!), notes Leopold's disgusting cropology fetish, yet also remembers holding his head to her breasts on the day he proposed to her in Gibraltar as she answered with "yes I said yes I will Yes."
All in all, embedded within this text's labyrinthine allusions to classical history, mythology, music, literature, local slang, and Irish Nationalism, lies a surprisingly extensive catalog of sexual deviancies that even a 21st-century porn addict might be embarrassed to admit to. And these references all sailed right over my head the first few times I read the novel. Frankly, I'm impressed that the censors back in 1922 were able to read this book rigorously enough to find the stuff worth banning (book-burners ain't exactly known for their close-reading skills).
But this is not to claim that Ulysses should have been or still be banned--or that its obscenity should be considered pornographic. As Judge Woolsey wrote in his 1933 decision to lift the U.S. ban on the novel, "I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist." And he's right. Pornography, as I understand it, does not generally require this much work to access. More broadly, Bloom's fantasies of repression and punishment fit in with the novel's larger themes of impotence, paralysis, powerlessness, and guilt that were endemic not only to the pre-independent Irish state, but to Modern Man generally; this is sexiness not as escapist fantasy, but one that forces you to realize just how pathetic and sad your sexual fantasies really are.
But that still doesn't distract from the fact that Ulysses is still surprisingly sexy--and the thing about sex is that even when it's ironic and satirical and undercuts itself, it's still there. Sex is intrinsically arousing, even when it's trying not to be. Now, Ulysses may be the last book you would ever use to get your lover in the mood, yet still there is something disconcertingly sexual about Ulysses, something that challenges you to not only admit but just own that sordid part of your inner-self. Now, openly admitting it can be the first step towards mastering it...but it can also be the first step towards sliding even further into self-indulgence, submission, paralysis, and thus remaining one of the "gratefully oppressed" (to quote Dubliners). The censors were right to consider this book dangerous--but not just to their own puritanical mores, but dangerous generally.
But then, it's good for a book to be genuinely dangerous; that makes it feel like a book can actually matter, like it's some sort of radioactive energy that needs to be carefully grappled with and harnessed lest it destroy us, and not just as another obscure, esoteric artifact to keep the academics busy another thousand years. And despite the danger, there is also still something transcending and life-affirming about that closing "yes I said yes I will Yes", a promise (albeit a precarious one) that we not only have been ("yes I said"), but still can be ("yes I will"), better than whatever it is we are right now.
Though it's still dumb to call Joyce "The World's Sexiest Writer". C'mon guys. C'mon.
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