Ulysses, by the standards of the day, was extremely sexually explicit, showing Bloom being fisted in a brothel and his wife Molly musing on the joys of being “fucked” hard by her lover. Ulysses at 100: why Joyce was so obsessed with the perfect blue cover For many legislators, journalists and other readers, the book was pornographic and blasphemous. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, the idea that Joyce’s experimental work had been banned as obscene was absurd. For many readers, as well as Joyce’s literary contemporaries including W.B. The New York decision to ban Ulysses split global opinion. It was only in Paris in 1922 that Ulysses was finally published as a complete novel through the independent publisher Sylvia Beach. Other countries, including the UK, followed suit. The decision meant that US publishers were prohibited from publishing Ulysses. The editors of the Little Review were taken to court and fined for publishing an obscene work. It was this episode, published in 1920, that caught the attention of the daughter of a New York lawyer, who referred it to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The chapter that became known as “ Nausicaa” features the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom, masturbating on a beach while gazing at a 17-year-old girl called Gerty McDowell. Ulysses was initially published in instalments in the US literary magazine The Little Review.
In fact, it was banned as obscene before it was first published as a complete novel, regarded as a work of perversion. However, it was not always as revered as it is now. James Joyce’s Ulysses, which turns 100 this February, is now central to the literary canon and features on university literature courses around the world.
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