Part 4

The only really effective form of swearing that I know is this: Suppose you quarrel violently with a fellow-traveller in a crowded railway-carriage, perhaps about opening windows or the disposition of luggage. You get worsted. “Very well”, you say, with a sigh, “have it your own way.” “By the way”, you add, with a peculiar intensity, “I happen to know that in three weeks’ time you will have a dangerous illness.” If the quarrel has been very violent, you may even sentence your adversary to death.

You have not used obscene or threatening language, or expressed a wish that your adversary should suffer. You have not used God’s name. If you had done any of these things you would not only be putting yourself in danger of prosecution and alienating the sympathy of the other travellers, but you would further be weakening the effect of your curse. “God damn you,” says Jones to Brown. Brown says to himself: “Good; Jones is thoroughly annoyed with me, and afraid to do anything but curse.” And Brown considers himself on good terms with God, and cannot imagine the latter being influenced by any angry petitions of Jones. But “You will have a dangerous illness in three weeks’ time” is a different matter. For all the traveller knows, you may be a specialist, giving a free diagnosis of his condition. Pride will keep him from asking you on what grounds you said what you did. If he does ask, he cannot force a reply from you without assault. Keep silence for the rest of the journey, and watch his nerves gradually go. He is pinned in that corner-seat with you opposite him: he has no refuge from your curse because he does not understand it. The more often he tells himself that he should pay no attention to you, the more irritating will be the superstitious reactions. When eventually you part, he takes the curse home with him――not your curse, but his own. For this is an individualistic age: the community has little power over the individual, and, if you would curse effectively, it must not be done in the name of the community or the formula of the community. You must put it into your adversary’s mind to curse himself with his own fears. “Injuries only come from the heart” quoth my uncle Toby.

A final word and a most important one. No critic of this essay will be satisfied unless fuller mention is made of James Joyce’s _Ulysses_ than has here been given. But they must remain unsatisfied. Though _Ulysses_ could be studied as a complete manual of contemporary obscenity, such a study will get no encouragement here. It is true that _Ulysses_ is forbidden publication in England as indecent and that it contains more words classified by law as indecent than any other work published this century; but on the other hand it also contains more obscure poetic and religious references than any other work published this century and the choice of language in the blameless passages is as scholarly as Mr. Saintsbury’s and as English as Charles Doughty’s. So far from being a work of merely pornographic intention or even a serious work given the pornographic sugar-coating that Rabelais gave his politico-philosophic pills, it is a deadly serious work in which obscenity is anatomized as it has never been anatomized before. To call Joyce obscene, is like calling the Shakespeare of the _Sonnets_ lustful: true, both have had the intimate experiences that their writing implies, but Joyce has brought himself as far beyond obscenity as Shakespeare got beyond the lust of which he makes frank confession. Bloom, gross obscenity incarnate, is presented in _Ulysses_ directly without the prejudice of tenderness or harshness. Stephen Daedalus whose early history had been given (semi-autobiographically) in “A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is presented as a type of the over-sophisticated intellectual, a poet who has failed as a poet because he is unable to find any strong enough reality to make foundation for his poetry. In the contemporary religious and literary scene, though a man of strong natural religious feelings and great literary capacity, he finds only emptiness. Irish nationalist politics are no better. The only life that has any appearance of reality to him is the obscene life as lived by Bloom the middle-aged married commercial traveller and by Mulligan a forceful young medical student who lodges with Daedalus. Daedalus, who makes his living by schoolmastering in an old-fashioned school, is philosophically inclined to the obscene life because Bloom and Mulligan, who live it seriously, are in this respect at least superior to the priests, the schoolmasters and the little Celtic-Twilight poets (Joyce himself began as one) whose lives have no such absorption in a ruling idea. Yet as a sensitive person Daedalus is utterly repelled by the badness and rankness which obscenity exudes; and in the spiritual conflict between an artist’s love of reality and an artist’s hatred of obscenity the plot of the book lies. The only character in the book with whom Daedalus has a strong natural sympathy is his father, the only one man who is able to harmonize religion, politics, and obscenity into something like an artistic reality. Old Daedalus swears admirably. Though most of his oaths are on the censored list there is no disgust stirred by them:

A tall black-bearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner of Elvery’s elephant-house showed them a curved hand on his spine.

“In all his pristine beauty,” Mr. Power said. Mr. Daedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:

“The devil break the hasp of your back!”

But Stephen has a bitter quarrel with his father since his mother’s death, and anyhow finds no sympathy in him for the intellectual sophistication which is one of the chief causes of unrest. The book rises to a scream of dreadful pain when we come on Stephen drunk in Mabbot Street in company with Bloom, a bawd-mistress and several harlots, two English private soldiers, and a whole fantastic crowd of the imaginary characters of Stephen’s brain: dying away in a monstrously droned account of the trivialities of lust and obscenity to which early middle-age has brought Bloom and his wife.

It is quite right that _Ulysses_ should be censored since its chief public in England could at the best of times be only an obscene one: and it is not an obscene book, but on the contrary perhaps the least obscene book ever published: that is why it is censored. And there is every reason why Shakespeare’s sonnets should be censored at the same time, and more strictly, because the public even blinds its eyes to the painful history that the sequence gives and makes it ‘extravagant flattery of a patron’ or an ‘academic exercise.’ Joyce is read as obscene instead of successfully past obscenity: Shakespeare instead of being read as past lust is not even read as lusting.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.