To get the full effect of the opening of Ulysses you need to know that Mulligan is mocking the Catholic mass. "Introibo ad altare dei" - "I shall go up to the Altar of God" aren't just any latin words from the bible, they are the fist words uttered by the priest. To which the altar boy would have answered (the latin phrase meaning) "The …
To get the full effect of the opening of Ulysses you need to know that Mulligan is mocking the Catholic mass. "Introibo ad altare dei" - "I shall go up to the Altar of God" aren't just any latin words from the bible, they are the fist words uttered by the priest. To which the altar boy would have answered (the latin phrase meaning) "The God who gives joy to my youth." This isn't common knowledge anymore but would have been familiar to many if not most of Joyce's readers. (As it was to me, since I had been an altar boy back when dinosaurs walked the earth and the mass was still said in Latin.) Mulligan isn't just mocking the mass with his ersatz rituals, he's also mocking Stephen, whom he considers too serious. And finally, Joyce is implicitly tell his readers that reading this book is going to be a sacred experience, like going to mass. No doubt many readers were scandalized and put the book down immediately.
I know very little about that, but I suspect it varies from place to place & context to context. By which I mean that, for example, in the USA it was both banned by the Catholic Church and declared obscene under U.S. law. This article in the current issue of he New York Review of Books is about "The LIttle Magazine," which published Ulysses in installments in the US — and was sued by the federal government for doing so. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/19/insouciant-pagan-journal-the-little-review/
Oh. Just a feeling. I don't know that for a fact. I have the version of the book that recreates the original The Little Magazine publication which is fun, but I'm not yet at the point where I know what the differences are.
To get the full effect of the opening of Ulysses you need to know that Mulligan is mocking the Catholic mass. "Introibo ad altare dei" - "I shall go up to the Altar of God" aren't just any latin words from the bible, they are the fist words uttered by the priest. To which the altar boy would have answered (the latin phrase meaning) "The God who gives joy to my youth." This isn't common knowledge anymore but would have been familiar to many if not most of Joyce's readers. (As it was to me, since I had been an altar boy back when dinosaurs walked the earth and the mass was still said in Latin.) Mulligan isn't just mocking the mass with his ersatz rituals, he's also mocking Stephen, whom he considers too serious. And finally, Joyce is implicitly tell his readers that reading this book is going to be a sacred experience, like going to mass. No doubt many readers were scandalized and put the book down immediately.
The justification for banning it seemed always phrased in terms of sex, but I suspect it was more about being religiously offended.
I know very little about that, but I suspect it varies from place to place & context to context. By which I mean that, for example, in the USA it was both banned by the Catholic Church and declared obscene under U.S. law. This article in the current issue of he New York Review of Books is about "The LIttle Magazine," which published Ulysses in installments in the US — and was sued by the federal government for doing so. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/19/insouciant-pagan-journal-the-little-review/
Oh. Just a feeling. I don't know that for a fact. I have the version of the book that recreates the original The Little Magazine publication which is fun, but I'm not yet at the point where I know what the differences are.