20 - James Joyce

Summary

On Sunday 11 March 2001 a huge crowd gathered to watch the first arrival into Dublin harbour of a new car ferry, reputedly the largest in the world. It was not the ferry's size that mattered to the crowd, however, but its name - the Ulysses. At the ferry's naming ceremony ten days later, the then Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Aherne, announced, 'Of course, it took a Dubliner - James Joyce - to see that Ulysses was not in fact Greek, but was in fact Irish!!' The ferry Ulysses met with a much warmer reception in Dublin than the novel. In 1920 Joyce wrote that a great movement against the publication of Ulysses was being prepared by puritans, English imperialists, Irish republicans, and Catholics: 'What an alliance! Good grief, I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize!' Four instalments of Ulysses, serially published in The Little Review, were seized by the United States Post Office between 1919 and 1920, and the Review's editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were fined and fingerprinted for their crime. In 1922, five hundred copies of the Egoist Press edition of Ulysses were seized by Post Office authorities in New York, and a further consignment of 499 copies was destroyed by British Customs at Folkestone. Banned in Britain, Australia, Canada, and the United States, Ulysses escaped official censorship in Ireland because it had been published abroad, but only under-the-counter copies were available until the early 1970s. In 1967 Joseph Strick's film version was banned outright by the Irish censors, and it was not until 2001 that the movie was released in Ireland, when it was granted a '15' certificate - a measure of the distance travelled in thirty years by what Brian Moore once called 'a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction'.