Ulysses 1922-2022

In terms of public taste, James Joyce’s Ulysses ‘Calypso's’ gutsy, urine filled pages were (and still are) a great displeasure to some, to Ezra Pound certainly, to the United States of America absolutely. To the readers of the Little Review, though, the objected and censored parts Pound decided to censor as a foreign editor, detailed in Paul Vanderham’s ““Ezra Pound’s Censorship of ‘Ulysses.’” James Joyce Quarterly (cultish Joycian magazine). Calypso’s famous opening remains untouched, as Joyce had intended (Vanderham, 584) to deliver it

MR. LEOPOLD BLOOM ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver-slices fried with crust-crumbs, fried cods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. (Joyce, 45)

Pound, as well with the USA, who were seizing and denying the publication of Ulysses, make Calypso the perfect example of why. Urine, feces, “shitty” magazine, kidneys, infidelity, Joyce painting bodies as bodies. Pound does not like that, and Pound is ruining the Little Reviews little mission statement by disallowing the public to discern their own taste by slapping in his own, labelling it “bad art” (Vanderham, 586). He replaces “cunt” from the passage about the dead sea with “belly” rendering it unable for reader’s imagination to react or form ideas from what Joyce intended. ‘Calypso’ is also the only subject to removal of so-called obscenities. But it’s also part of the important discussion of sexuality and the body; the meaning of belly does not hold the weight of cunt. If a reader tries to situate themselves in a plot that is being criticized before it reaches the page in front of them and being adjusted to someone else’s definition of “art”. The division between chapters, to the division between parts of a chapter and to the division of derived meaning and intention is wholly disorientating. How would the public have reacted to the dead, sunken cunt of the world? The Little Review’s choice of editor did not let the reader have the chance, and so it is like the vulgarity of sex is removed, the eroticness is dumbed down and as Vanderham puts it, “reduces the image's power to precipitate Bloom's (and the reader's) moment of desolation.” (Vanderham, 587). The effect is ruined for reader’s monthly issues, never reading it the way Joyce read it. If anything certain, to remember what happened in last month’s issue, holding on to defecation and obscenity wrapping up in Judaism        (dead sea) would be a lot more memorable than trying to pick apart a consciousness and redefine the art of it. The relationship between Joyce and reader is vulgar and with current times, jdugement of his craft and the way it was published could be disorienting.