James Joyce must be laughing now—as if he ever stopped. Steve Jobs has found a graphic version of Joyce’s Ulysses too hot for iPad, the New York Times reports. The Times doesn’t say so, but it turns out that Ulysses is also too hot for the Gray Lady, because the comics page provided by the Times features the bowdlerized version.
Well, we at Literature R Us feel our readers are ready for tits, even with their morning coffee. So enjoy, and if you want more, go to Ulysses “Seen”, which will give you all the Joyce you can handle, without Steve Jobs to tell you what to look at.
I could go on, at some length, about my own struggles with “Sunny Jim,” as he apparently was once known. I took Joyce way too seriously when I was young—not the first, nor the last, I’m sure, to pitch himself into that honey head of Jesuitical self-pity and wrath. I first tried Ulysses as a teenager—not very smart. I was thrown from the first by the French “quotation marks”—em dashes at the head of every line of dialogue, instead of real quotation marks, as God intended. In college I got serious about Joyce to the point of obsession, actually reading Finnegan’s Wake in its entirety, which I believe to be a complete waste of time.
I definitely admire Joyce this side of idolatry. To my mind, his ever-increasing obsession with translating “sense” into “sound,” turning literature into music—was perfectly wrong-headed, a disastrous blind alley that he ran down all his life. There are sections of Ulysses that I feel are overwritten to the point of unreadability, but the very long “Nighttown” episode (officially “Circe”) still strikes me as absolutely brilliant—probably the greatest chunk of surrealism in English. The twentieth century was awfully tough on novelists (and poets), and the twenty-first isn’t looking much brighter.
