First Reactions to Ulysses James Joyce's works come out of copyright this week. "Bloom the liberator" is an edited version of Declan Kiherd's introduction to the new Penguin edition of Ulysses, published yesterday in Twentieth Century Classics with Dubliners (introduced by Terence Brown), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (introduced by Seamus Deane, general editor of the new Penguin edition) and Poems and Exiles (introduced by J. C. C. Mays).
Such relentless democratization of literature proved too much for the two great revolutionary societies of the modern world. The authorities in the United States banned the book; and Karl Radek told the Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934: "Ulysses is a spider's web of allegories and mythological reminiscences . . . it is a dung-heap swarming with worms, photographed by a moviecamera through a microscope." Radek might have been on firmer ground if he had outlawed the book on the grounds that few of its characters do a full day's work. His response usefully summarizes a widespread bafflement at Joyce's experimental methods. so clearly at odds with the Girl-Meets-Tractor dogmas of socialist realism propounded by 1930s Marxists. Ulysses's reputation for obscenity was, among certain radical groups. compounded by the charge of "elitist" obscurity .
The Irish responded with sarcasm and invective, but they never banned the book. Perhaps no outraged citizen felt qualified to file the necessary critique with the censorship board, which was only set up some years after publication. By then the panel may have judged it beyond the intell,ectual scope of corruptible readers. The former Provost of the then pro-English Trinity College. J. P. Mahaffy, seized the occasion to attack the rival University College Dublin: Ulysses proved 'it was a mistake to establish a separate university for the aborigines of this island. for the cornerboys who spit into the Liffey". The pro-Catholic Dublin Review spoke for nationalist Ireland in avowing that "the Irish literary movement is not going to find its stifling climax in a French sink", and it paused only to lament that "a great Jesuit-trained intellect has gone over malignantly and mockingly to the powers of evil". If all such readers were ashamed. of whom or what were they reminded? Once again, a great book had shown that not all people could cope with an image of their own condition. They thought that they were reading Ulysses, whereas the book had been "reading" them, exposing their blind spots and their sensitive areas.
In due time. the United States rescinded its ban and the Soviet writers' union began to translate Ulysses into their own languages. In Dublin today. statues of Joyce abound. It was, and still is, in England that Joyce found it hardest to secure a hearing. Even before the book saw the printing presses, an official of the British Embassy in Paris burnt part of the manuscript on discovering it being typed by his wife. D. H. Lawrence complained of the "journalistic dirtymindedness" of its author, who had degraded the novel into a crude instrument for measuring twinges in the toes of unremarkable men. Arnold Bennett, though impressed by the Nighttown sequence and by Molly Bloom's monologue, voiced a common British suspicion that anyone could have written of "the dailiest day possible", given "sufficient time, paper, childish caprice and obstinacy". He contended that the author had failed to extend to the public the common courtesies of literature, as a result of which one finished it "with the sensation of a general who has just put down an insurrection". He thus linked it. at least subliminally. with the recent uprisings in Ireland. So did Virginia Woolf, who explained it as the work of a frustrated man who feels that, in order to breathe, he must break all the windows, and denounced Ulysses as the work of a bootboy at Claridge's scratching his pimples.
In retrospect, it is clear that Leopold Bloom intended by his creator to speak as an ordinary man outraged by the injustice of the world - had outraged the world by his very ordinariness. In all likelihood, the stay-at-home English had cannily sensed that Joyce, despite his castigations of Irish nationalism, was even more scathing of the "brutish empire", which emerges from the book as a compendium of "beer, beef. business, bibles, bulldogs. battleships, buggery and bishops". It is even more probable that, in their zeal to defend the great novelistic tradition of Austen, Dickens and Eliot. they were as baffled as many other readers by a "plotless" book which had become synonymous with modern chaos and disorder.
Copyright: From Declan Kiberd, Bloom the liberator: The androgynous anti-hero of Ulysses as the embodiment of Joyce's utopian hopes, Times Literary Supplement, 3 January 1992, 2-6.
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Creada: 22/02/2000 Última Actualización: 07/03/2000