This being Banned Books Week, it is only appropriate that I am reading Ulysses by James Joyce. Prior to the book being published, it was serialized beginning in 1922 in The Little Review, a Chicago-based literary magazine. All was going well until the Nausicaa episode (chapter 13) was published. It contains a masturbation scene.

In 1933, Random House owned the rights to publish the entire book in the United States and arranged to import a French edition which would be seized by U.S. Custom officials when it arrived. It was not immediately seized but eventually it was. The Assistant U.S. Attorney took seven months to decide to prosecute for obscenity. The case, United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” can be read online as well as the appeal. The judge in the case decided the the book was neither pornographic nor obscene and the decision was upheld in appeal.

It would have been really awesome if I had the Nausicaa episode to talk about today. I would have if I had managed to finish episode 12 last week. But sometimes life encroaches on reading time and there is no help for it.

So this week is episode 12, “Cyclops.” It was not well-served to have had to break it up over two weekends, but it was still a good chapter. The narrator of the episode is unnamed as is another character we know simply as “the Citizen.” Recall in the Odyssey that Odysseus told the cyclops, Polyphemus, that his name was “Noman.” So when Odysseus blinded the cyclops and the other cyclopses (cyclopi?) called out what’s the matter, Polyphemus yelled that he’d been ruined by “Noman” and none of the others came to his aid. There is no cyclops or blinding in the chapter but the Citizen, a staunch Fenian and anti-Semite, is blinded by prejudice. The Citizen is goaded by Bloom at the end as Bloom leaves the pub and reminds him that the Citizen’s Savior was Jewish. The Citizen throws a biscuit at Bloom’s head and misses.

What is the most interesting thing about this chapter is that it has 33 passages interrupting the narrative. These passages are all parody, written in the style of medieval romance, Irish legend, newspaper accounts, legal documents, etc. Sometimes a passage will comment on the section that came immediately before it. Sometimes it restates it. And sometimes is continues the narrative.

As an example, our group of men are sitting round their table, drinking their pints and the Citizen is reading out the births and deaths from the newspaper. In comes Little Alf Bergan, Bob Doran in his bath slippers, and Doran’s wife, “an unfortunate wretched woman trotting like a poodle.” Here is the parody of their entrance in the style of 19th century translations of Irish myth and legend:

And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth, and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law, and with him his lady wife, a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race.

As you can imagine, the parodies are frequently quite funny and I liberally scrawled “ha!” in the margins of the book.

The parodies made a chapter in which nothing really happens other then men sitting around drinking and arguing, into good entertainment. Breaking it over two weeks caused me to lose the thread in the middle and have to backtrack a bit, which made me grumpy, but it ended on a good note. Next week, we’ll see just how “obscene” the Nausicaa chapter really is.