![]() Here three young men are living together: Stephen Dedalus. Ulysses opens early on a summer morning (June 16, 1904) on an old tower outside Dublin. ![]() At that, however, the main outlines of the story are plain. Lacking the sleuth-nose, the slot-trained paws of scholarship, even an intelligent reader will miss much the first time over the ground. 5, 1931), the plain reader can now literally find out what Ulysses is all about. But thanks to the exploratory works of critics, and notably such an exegetical commentary as Stuard Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses (TIME, Jan. Arrogant Author Joyce gives them no help, lets them sink or swim. What is it all about? Trusting readers who plunge in hopefully to a smooth beginning soon find themselves floundering in troubled waters. ![]() But Ulysses is far from being “just another dirty book.” Judge Woolsey decided that its purpler passages are “emetic,” rather than “aphrodisiac” that the net effect of its 768 big pages is “a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.” But even granting Ulysses a bill of moral health an intelligent adult may well smite his brow and cry: With the exception of medical books and out & out pornography, the only book of modern times that can compare with it for outspokenness in barnyard and backhouse terms is the late D. Is it dirty? To answer the man in the street in his own language, Yes.
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