“I think this is the most damnable slush and filth that ever polluted paper in print,” read the letter to Margaret Anderson, editor of the monthly literary magazine The Little Review. “There are no words I know to describe, even vaguely, how disgusted I am; not with the mire of his effusion but with all those whose minds are so putrid that they dare allow such muck and sewage of the human mind to besmirch the world by repeating it—and in print, through which medium it may reach young people. Oh my God, the horror of it.” The writer had just finished reading an excerpt from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which had reached America by being serialized in the New York-based Little Review, and he was one of many incensed at the four-letter words and sexual material in Joyce’s story of one day in the life of two Dublin friends. Similar reactions got the novel banned in 1921, sending it on a dozen-years-long legal journey befitting its epic structural template, Homer’s Odyssey. The journey culminated in a New York courtroom on December 6, 1933, 72 years ago [yesterday].

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:51 AM  |