Ulysses unbound: why does a book so bad it "defecates on your bed" still have so many admirers?

Reason, July, 2004 by Tim Cavanaugh

On the other hand, people may just like dressing up in costumes and acting out funny scenes from a comical book--an attraction even scholars admit to in their less guarded moments. "Nobody ever talks about this," says Latham, "but one of the fixtures at Joyce conferences is where people gather around the piano and sing songs from Ulysses. There's also a tradition of playing Ulysses charades and acting out scenes from the book." Wake Forest's Klein concurs: "Some of the people at these conferences you'd say look more like Gilbert and Sullivan fans than Joyce scholars."

While it's pretty much impossible to plan fun, an appeal to the book's more entertaining aspects is a shrewd promotional move. Walsh gave his film a title that specifically avoids the book's literary pedigree because, he said, "if you say [Ulysses], people will think they need a degree in English to watch this film." One of the least noted aspects of Ulysses is that it contains jokes on nearly every page. The climactic "Nighttown" chapter puts poor Bloom through a hallucinatory ordeal in Dublin's red-light district, including a mock trial for assorted sexual peccadilloes, a mayoral coronation, and an elaborate incident in which he is humiliated and sex-changed by a mustachioed madam. While this stuff has been studied by Freudians, gender theorists, and others, it's also pretty damned funny.

At the moment, the role of lead Ulysses killjoy is being played by Joyce's last living heir, the issueless, irritable grandson Stephen James Joyce. Thanks to European Union copyright extensions, Stephen Joyce regained control of the author's published works in the mid-1990s. Since then, he has alienated most of his grandfather's fans by charging exorbitant rates to anthologists and artists, putting the kibosh on a host of adaptations he considered inappropriate (including Groden's "Digital Ulysses" annotation project), and reportedly stating that Ulysses is meant to be read, not performed or adapted to other media. (The copyright situation is considerably more nebulous in the U.S. While Random House operates on the premise that Ulysses remains under American copyright, attorney Spoo argues that because of its tangled publishing history, which includes having been banned as obscene in every English-speaking country for its first 12 years in print, the book is now in the public domain. The public domain reprint house Dover Publications has come out with a facsimile version of the original 1922 Paris edition--the most enjoyable edition in terms of layout and design.)

The Joyce estate's protectionist approach shows little understanding of how contingent literary reputation can be. John Donne and Dante were both at various times forgotten by literary history and only came back thanks to various champions. Fifty or even 20 years ago it would have seemed crazy to predict that Jane Austen would one day loom larger than the Romantic poets who were her contemporaries--or that Colin Firth's hunky turn as Mr. D'Arcy in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice would play at least some part in that reversal. To believe that even a great work of literature can survive through only one distribution channel is nutty. "Ulysses was a gamble that Joyce could bridge high and low culture," says Latham. "It's a gamble that initially failed, but you'd have to say these Bloomsday fans are the return.... These people who develop such a passion for the book are what we should all hope for as scholars, even if they're channeling their passion in ways that wouldn't fit with scholarly decorum"