Yes, my mistake. I originally wrote that, but then managed to confuse myself and immediately edited the comment to what it is now. Too late to change it now.
Sorry to be a pedant - it's 118 years since the "original" 1904 Bloomsday but it's the 119th Bloomsday, if you include the first one. (1905 was one year after the original but was the second Bloomsday etc).
There are events all over Dublin today to celebrate [1].
Joyce has attempted it seems to me, with astonishing success to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.
I've tried, at least five times to read the book... and failed each time. Then I tried the audiobook. Gave it up. I have to face it, I'm just not up to the task.
I think the desire to understand the meaning of everything immediately defeats a lot of readers.
If you're willing to read it more like a poem - to just experience it and only understand some portion of what's going on then it is quite an immersive book.
Time has increased the obscurity of much of what is said and done. Also it was released at a time when the education of an educated person with respect to literature, the classics and language was at something if a peak in Europe.
I don't want to misjudge you but the question kind of suggests that no answer will truly satisfy. I mean like you could ask did your eyeball rest upon each word? Did your brain decode the meaning of every word? I don't know.
I read it when I was 17 and again at 21. Haven't read it since. I studied literature so I had to read it the second time. It's very far from being a favourite and lots of silly things are said about it but it is readable and evocative and interesting.
> I think the desire to understand the meaning of everything immediately defeats a lot of readers. If you're willing to…just experience it and only understand some portion of what's going on then it is quite an immersive book.
I love this sentiment. So many people have been conditioned to look for the “truth” in everything, when the reality is that not everything has a fundamental truth that’s meant to be universally understood.
There was a thread on one of the design subreddits not long ago about London’s book benches[1]. Some of the commenters were absolutely convinced that the benches are deliberately designed to be hostile to the homeless, because the seat is curved and can’t be easily used for sleeping - never mind that it’s meant to look like an open book.
Sometimes a thing is just a thing; sometimes a book is just a poem.
> Some of the commenters were absolutely convinced that the benches are deliberately designed to be hostile to the homeless, because the seat is curved and can’t be easily used for sleeping
Why can't it be both? Hostile design in public infrastructure is absolutely a thing. I can't prove that the design was "deliberately" hostile but it's clearly hostile for sleeping on.
> never mind that it’s meant to look like an open book
Yet you can sleep on this one and not sleep on the other one. Obviously you can say that one is meant to be a bed and that one is meant to be a bench. But surely you can imagine a bench which is booth looking like an open book and can be slept on?
> Some of the commenters were absolutely convinced that the benches are deliberately designed to be hostile to the homeless, because the seat is curved and can’t be easily used for sleeping - never mind that it’s meant to look like an open book.
This is off-topic, but both things can be true. I would expect any competent organization who wanted to do hostile architecture in an aesthetic way would be able to find a solution like that.
I wouldn't feel bad. I listened to the audiobook five times - a yearly pilgrimage to try and "get it."
I loved the language and the cleverness from the start; and I understood more of the story each time. BUT I no longer feel like the "payoff" was worth the journey. I assumed there was some deep understanding or message that would come through eventually, but I no longer think that's the case.
Robert Anton Wilson described the book as a joke at the expense of English majors (can't find the exact quote) and I tend to agree. Kind of like the obfuscated C contest; try to read it if it entertains you, but stop if it doesn't.
I've decided it's a little too "inside baseball" for me.
This is a fun judgement to read. I wasn’t aware of the backstory, but Ulysses was banned in the US after an excerpt was published, and this judgement is the result of Random House intentionally violating the ban by importing a single copy to force a court to decide on it.
> Although Customs had been told in advance of the anticipated arrival of the book, it was not confiscated on arrival, and instead was forwarded to Random House in New York City. As seizure by Customs was essential to the plan for a test case, Morris Ernst, the attorney for Random House, took the unopened package to Customs, demanded that it be seized, and it was.
Morris Ernst was an ACLU attorney who challenged other high-profile book bans during the period. He found a cooperative publisher and hatched the plan to import a copy of the book from France and have it seized by customs, although the getting it seized was more difficult than anticipated.
> A few days later the book showed up at Random House—it had passed through customs. Furious, Ernst personally marched the package over to the customs office and demanded that it be searched. When the inspector opened it and found Ulysses, he muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay attention to it.” Ernst insisted that he seize it. On May 8, the book was officially seized by customs.
In lieu of the usual fees, he would receive 5% of the book royalties should it be legalized and published (not a bad deal).
Some books were banned in the US and US agents helped get its shipments burned, so censorship continued until a very recent time: ' until now no American publisher has dared re-release the book, which sold over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into seventeen languages. A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman. https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/donald-duck/
> As seizure by Customs was essential to the plan for a test case, Morris Ernst, the attorney for Random House, took the unopened package to Customs, demanded that it be seized, and it was.
I plan to do that for a few causes I have in mind. I didn't realize others had done it too, thats a great example.
I think it is tragic that the only way to challenge a law's constitutionality or force is to break it. I think there need to be several other ways to bring a law before the courts.
Having read this book earlier in the year, after putting it off for decades. The description in the text is spot on.
It helps to know something of Shakespeare, Greek, and Latin. But even with only a modicum of the above it still a remarkable experience.
Read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before Ulysses.
If you gave up on it before: try again. I used to think it was BS for years but I tried again and ended up loving it.
I’d advise skipping student editions or getting hung up on reading tons of notes and criticism while reading it. Just use google translate for latin and know a little bit about Homer and Shakespeare. It’s about mainly about life, death, and reincarnation.
Ulysses is like a slot machine in that it rarely pays out on the first pull. And if anyone loved a good pull it was Joyce.
There's a companion book I enjoyed called Ulysses Unbound by Terence Killeen. It's quite terse: For each of the 18 episodes of Ulysses it gives a few pages of stylistic notes, a few on the Homeric parallels, a dramatis personae of the real people and events alluded to, and a translation of foreign terms.
I liked this style better than inline or footnoted annotations (except, perhaps, for the languages I can't read) as it encourages you to read and digest first, then get a second opinion from the annotator about what's going on.
Ulysses was a challenge project. Joyce tried to make the hardest to understand, most reference-packed book he good. It's the Final Boss of English Literature. I don't see the point of reading it before reading most/all the classic works Joyce built upon.
I tend to love books that require a lot of effort and time on behalf of the reader, Infinite Jest and its never ending footnotes are probably my favorite book, however I really struggled with Ulysses and ended up putting it down as my inquisitive nature had me diving deep into every footnote, maybe I'll pick it up again and try to resist the urge to fully understand each reference
Dubliners is absolutely beautiful. It's a collection of short stories, which helps to make it accessible to casual readers. There's a feeling of real depth and empathy in some of the stories.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also relatively accessible, though I didn't enjoy it as much as Dubliners.
I read Ulysses when I was in my 20s. Parts of it are fantastic, but for significant portions of the book I barely understood what was going on. Maybe I should revisit it.
I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love the humor they find in it, but it requires effort to understand the basic language the Joyce is inventing.
> I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love the humor they find in it, but it requires effort to understand the basic language the Joyce is inventing.
Most people do. I have an english prof who did his dissertation on it because, as he told me, he was pretty sure no one on his committee would be able to challenge anything because no one had actually read it.
the first "chapter" in Finnagan's Wake is the densest, hardest to read part of the book (not that the rest is easy..) so it stops most people in their tracks. One think I discovered is it makes a little more sense when you hear it spoken, because (as was somewhat common at the time) much of the book is phonetic so what is incomprehensible on the page sounds almost like real speach when you hear it.
Its also fun to read the commented version (there is a work for that type of edition that escapes me at themoment.) Basically a version where the text of the book only occupies the center of the page, then outside the text is all sorts of references and footnotes with lines pointing to blocks of text in the body. 90% of all the references go over my head. I remember seeing a phrase highlighted and note pointed out that the same phrase was a play on words (or pun, I forget) in two different languages at the same time.
Not really a book to read, but a fascinating thing to study.
It has a reputation as "that book that most people don't finish." As someone who hasn't read it, I tried to find out why. Here's some reasons I've found:
1) Stream of consciousness. The reader must figure out whose mind they are in, if it's at all possible. Then they must deal with all of these tangent thoughts that would make sense to the character thinking them, but not to anyone else, including the reader, since they they don't flow from the previous context.
2) "References to various 19th century Irish intellectual debates that you could not reasonably be expected to understand unless you have a degree in the intellectual history of Ireland in the 19th Century or a closely related field." "Allusions it makes to obscure literature and Irish politics.
4) "Joyce makes reference to all kinds of works, from Dante and Nietzsche to Walt Whitman; obviously Homer’s Odyssey is important to be familiar with. So be familiar with the important works of British, Irish, and American literature, and with ancient canonical works. Oh, it will also be quite important to be somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and his life in general."
5) Changes writing styles throughout the book.
6) Uses words that many people don't know.
Knowing this, I believe I would be one of those people who stop reading less than half way through. From reading about why it was difficult to finish, I get the feeling that many people read it because it's difficult to finish!
I'm imagining reading over sentences not understanding what's going on or why what's being said is being said, even after looking up hundreds of words in the dictionary that I will never use again. I'm imagining spending many hours confused and lost, for what? To be able to say that I've read Ulysses?
But I could use an annotated companion book! Then I'd be able to understand what's going on, even if it takes twice as long to read. I wouldn't really get to brag about having read it the same way those literature professors can.
In that case, then the real reason for reading it would not be because it's a challenge. It would be out of appreciation for its modernist style and its underlying story. But I'm not really interested any either of those things, based on what I've read.
Its funny because once you read enough of it to properly grok the working of the stream of consciousness style it becomes a joy to read, as easy to comprehend as your own internal monologue.
Reading ulysses once you crack it is like trying on someone elses consciousness. Blooms is a nice consciousness to inhabit, Stephens less so, but both almost unbearably rewarding.
Don't get too caught up in understanding every weird association that pops into and out of either characters head, although there is certainly pleasure to be had in doing a close reading with research, where by you get to fill out a characters own mental map.
A book of untouchable genius
I could not agree with you more, this book was when I learned how to let things slide some times and just push forward. I would just keep reading without conscious interpretation. Once I got into the general feel of the book, the story started falling into line with out me really trying.
Having a “completionist” mindset (wanting to understand every reference and insight, and spending hundreds of hours to achieve it) is not the only way to read it, and draw meaning and enjoyment from it. I think a lot of people do “finish” it, but have barely scratched the surface — nevertheless, they enjoy it.
No harm in not enjoying it, or recognizing you’d be unlikely to, either.
However, there is a tendency among people using your logic (but coming to different conclusions so I’m not lumping you in with them) to end up disparaging almost anyone for reading Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow or even Infinite Jest.
In a way, I do assign a kind of "harm" to books that I don't enjoy. You must invest time into a book and give it a fair chance before you can write it off. What's at risk is potentially hours of wasted leisure time.
> Having a “completionist” mindset (wanting to understand every reference and insight, and spending hundreds of hours to achieve it) is not the only way to read it, and draw meaning and enjoyment from it.
I've actually read more than one account of people saying they just sort of accepted that they don't understand what's going on and just power through it. Personally, that doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy, but apparently some people do, so I won't debate that.
I do think there's something to be said for readability in general. Whenever the reader has to stop because something is confusing (and not because it's thought-provoking or important), this interruption tends to jolt the reader back out of the story and into "ok now I gotta look up this word" or "ok let me re-read this last paragraph because that sentence was very long and full of ambiguous pronouns." To me, this sort of thing is not enjoyable in any book.
I think it’s a bit funny to judge it so forcefully along the axis of “readability”, especially with a huge bias towards “readability for a 2022 non-Irish audience outside the art scene” — you’re assigning “harm” to the book itself, so I no longer think you’re just giving your 2c about your experience. It’s famously and I’d say even canonically one of the most dense and quasi-academic pieces of literary fiction of its era — it’s not for everyone (I haven’t attempted it).
Even then, there are novels for all permutations of “readable (to me)” and not, and “good (to me)” and not. Fair enough though in the sense that I wouldn’t take a “barely readable (to me) but very good (to me)” novel to the beach.
> you’re assigning “harm” to the book itself, so I no longer think you’re just giving your 2c about your experience.
Only to the extent in which I've defined "harm" (in quotations), which was to say that I don't like to invest free time into books that I probably won't finish.
In any case, while I do care about readability, it does look like I've stepped a bit too far over the line. Believe me, I have no desire in forming any sort of literary criticism against a book that many famous writers have said is great, especially having not read it.
Well said, and totally with you until Infinite Jest. Hanging your hat on that should haunt you like mentioning it within the same breath as Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow or even Blood Meridian.
Infinite Jest is the Jared Kushner of literary works. BEFORE the Saudi money for selling the PDB.
They weren’t listed together because I think they’re all great. They each have something “difficult” or “pretentious” about them in the popular imagination, and people get criticized for “putting on airs” when seen reading them in public, people are classified as “oh, one of those guys...” if they have it on their shelf/nightstand.
> In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season spring.
He's saying that the Irish are horn dogs, isn't he?
I'd see it more as a cultural reference to spring as the season of new growth and more frenetic activity. Where in the preceding winter, food would be stored and activity minimized, spring means a comparative abundance of food. (Tangent: I'd love to see whether the decreased use of seasonal metaphors is correlated with the prevalence of refrigeration. Spring is less culturally relevant now, with refrigeration reducing the fear of starving in the winter and increasing availability of seasonal produce.)
For a humorous comparison, see "The Lusty Month of May", from the 1960 musical "Camelot". (Link to a good performance: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t--e0S5kelY ). It's basically an entire song about how great it is that spring is here, because spring is a wonderful time for sex.
> * The chorus is a variation on an old folk/schoolyard rhyme, "Hooray, Hooray, the first of May! Outdoor fucking starts today!" In an April 10, 2007 blog post, JoCo credited John Hodgman with the idea for the song, and mentions that the modern dirty rhyme derives from an older, traditional dirty rhyme. Commenters Mike and Bry tracked the reference down to a poem in Another Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy.
> * The poem which Espy cites, in turn, derives from ancient Pagan customs celebrating fertility on the eve of Beltane, the Celtic name for the month of May.
I think the judge was referring to artistic choices made in Ulysses; that JJ's choice of season was spring and choice of locale was "Celtic", just as "his setting", in Ulysses, was Dublin. "His season was spring" is a shorthand was of saying "his chosen season was spring".
IANAL, but my sense is that Judge Woolsey was not himself inclined to anti-Irish bigotry - but he was willing to make use of such bigotry to buttress his decision. Actual bigots protesting against his ruling might find themselves arguing that the Irish lower classes (note how the ruling calls out their social class a few paragraphs earlier) are too virtuous and pure to entertain carnal thoughts in everyday life...a line of argument which most such bigots might be less than comfortable in making.
I think they meant that you have to know/understand too many outside cultural and linguistic references to understand a lot of Joyce's writing. Judging from the other comments here, this seems like a reasonable position.
It's good to review historical cases like these, as a reminder of how fleeting our contemporary view of free expression in the US is: restricting even the private distribution of literature was broadly popular less than a century ago, and many of the Comstock laws[1] survived well into the 20th century. Distributors of Howl were arrested as late as 1957!
66 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
There are events all over Dublin today to celebrate [1].
[1] - http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/bloomsday-elfsight
Joyce has attempted it seems to me, with astonishing success to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.
I've tried, at least five times to read the book... and failed each time. Then I tried the audiobook. Gave it up. I have to face it, I'm just not up to the task.
If you're willing to read it more like a poem - to just experience it and only understand some portion of what's going on then it is quite an immersive book.
Time has increased the obscurity of much of what is said and done. Also it was released at a time when the education of an educated person with respect to literature, the classics and language was at something if a peak in Europe.
I read it when I was 17 and again at 21. Haven't read it since. I studied literature so I had to read it the second time. It's very far from being a favourite and lots of silly things are said about it but it is readable and evocative and interesting.
I love this sentiment. So many people have been conditioned to look for the “truth” in everything, when the reality is that not everything has a fundamental truth that’s meant to be universally understood.
There was a thread on one of the design subreddits not long ago about London’s book benches[1]. Some of the commenters were absolutely convinced that the benches are deliberately designed to be hostile to the homeless, because the seat is curved and can’t be easily used for sleeping - never mind that it’s meant to look like an open book.
Sometimes a thing is just a thing; sometimes a book is just a poem.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/gallery/2014/sep...
Why can't it be both? Hostile design in public infrastructure is absolutely a thing. I can't prove that the design was "deliberately" hostile but it's clearly hostile for sleeping on.
> never mind that it’s meant to look like an open book
Cool. This bed is also meant to look like an open book: https://bookpatrol.net/ruth-beales-bookbed/book-bed-ruth-bea...
Yet you can sleep on this one and not sleep on the other one. Obviously you can say that one is meant to be a bed and that one is meant to be a bench. But surely you can imagine a bench which is booth looking like an open book and can be slept on?
This is off-topic, but both things can be true. I would expect any competent organization who wanted to do hostile architecture in an aesthetic way would be able to find a solution like that.
I loved the language and the cleverness from the start; and I understood more of the story each time. BUT I no longer feel like the "payoff" was worth the journey. I assumed there was some deep understanding or message that would come through eventually, but I no longer think that's the case.
Robert Anton Wilson described the book as a joke at the expense of English majors (can't find the exact quote) and I tend to agree. Kind of like the obfuscated C contest; try to read it if it entertains you, but stop if it doesn't.
I've decided it's a little too "inside baseball" for me.
Clearly it's not worthless or we wouldn't be talking about it a hundred years later. But when you say it's "better," what is your measure of quality?
https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-...
> Although Customs had been told in advance of the anticipated arrival of the book, it was not confiscated on arrival, and instead was forwarded to Random House in New York City. As seizure by Customs was essential to the plan for a test case, Morris Ernst, the attorney for Random House, took the unopened package to Customs, demanded that it be seized, and it was.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Ca...
> A few days later the book showed up at Random House—it had passed through customs. Furious, Ernst personally marched the package over to the customs office and demanded that it be searched. When the inspector opened it and found Ulysses, he muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay attention to it.” Ernst insisted that he seize it. On May 8, the book was officially seized by customs.
In lieu of the usual fees, he would receive 5% of the book royalties should it be legalized and published (not a bad deal).
More backstory here: https://crimereads.com/banned-books-ulysses-joyce-morris-ern...
I plan to do that for a few causes I have in mind. I didn't realize others had done it too, thats a great example.
I think it is tragic that the only way to challenge a law's constitutionality or force is to break it. I think there need to be several other ways to bring a law before the courts.
It’s great.
Read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before Ulysses.
If you gave up on it before: try again. I used to think it was BS for years but I tried again and ended up loving it.
I’d advise skipping student editions or getting hung up on reading tons of notes and criticism while reading it. Just use google translate for latin and know a little bit about Homer and Shakespeare. It’s about mainly about life, death, and reincarnation.
Ulysses is like a slot machine in that it rarely pays out on the first pull. And if anyone loved a good pull it was Joyce.
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/ir...
Wonder if it’s worth getting, for all of the context. Are there other annotated versions that are recommended?
I liked this style better than inline or footnoted annotations (except, perhaps, for the languages I can't read) as it encourages you to read and digest first, then get a second opinion from the annotator about what's going on.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1065953.Ulysses_Unbound
Tho I did finish and enjoy Infinite Jest which is also considered a difficult book to get through.
BELAY THAT: I can google. Found it. Thanks!
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also relatively accessible, though I didn't enjoy it as much as Dubliners.
I read Ulysses when I was in my 20s. Parts of it are fantastic, but for significant portions of the book I barely understood what was going on. Maybe I should revisit it.
I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love the humor they find in it, but it requires effort to understand the basic language the Joyce is inventing.
Most people do. I have an english prof who did his dissertation on it because, as he told me, he was pretty sure no one on his committee would be able to challenge anything because no one had actually read it.
the first "chapter" in Finnagan's Wake is the densest, hardest to read part of the book (not that the rest is easy..) so it stops most people in their tracks. One think I discovered is it makes a little more sense when you hear it spoken, because (as was somewhat common at the time) much of the book is phonetic so what is incomprehensible on the page sounds almost like real speach when you hear it.
Its also fun to read the commented version (there is a work for that type of edition that escapes me at themoment.) Basically a version where the text of the book only occupies the center of the page, then outside the text is all sorts of references and footnotes with lines pointing to blocks of text in the body. 90% of all the references go over my head. I remember seeing a phrase highlighted and note pointed out that the same phrase was a play on words (or pun, I forget) in two different languages at the same time.
Not really a book to read, but a fascinating thing to study.
Annotated? Companion?
1) Stream of consciousness. The reader must figure out whose mind they are in, if it's at all possible. Then they must deal with all of these tangent thoughts that would make sense to the character thinking them, but not to anyone else, including the reader, since they they don't flow from the previous context.
2) "References to various 19th century Irish intellectual debates that you could not reasonably be expected to understand unless you have a degree in the intellectual history of Ireland in the 19th Century or a closely related field." "Allusions it makes to obscure literature and Irish politics.
4) "Joyce makes reference to all kinds of works, from Dante and Nietzsche to Walt Whitman; obviously Homer’s Odyssey is important to be familiar with. So be familiar with the important works of British, Irish, and American literature, and with ancient canonical works. Oh, it will also be quite important to be somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and his life in general."
5) Changes writing styles throughout the book.
6) Uses words that many people don't know.
Knowing this, I believe I would be one of those people who stop reading less than half way through. From reading about why it was difficult to finish, I get the feeling that many people read it because it's difficult to finish!
I'm imagining reading over sentences not understanding what's going on or why what's being said is being said, even after looking up hundreds of words in the dictionary that I will never use again. I'm imagining spending many hours confused and lost, for what? To be able to say that I've read Ulysses?
But I could use an annotated companion book! Then I'd be able to understand what's going on, even if it takes twice as long to read. I wouldn't really get to brag about having read it the same way those literature professors can.
In that case, then the real reason for reading it would not be because it's a challenge. It would be out of appreciation for its modernist style and its underlying story. But I'm not really interested any either of those things, based on what I've read.
We had one person that had read it in grad school and three guide books to explain stuff. Hard work but totally worth it.
No harm in not enjoying it, or recognizing you’d be unlikely to, either.
However, there is a tendency among people using your logic (but coming to different conclusions so I’m not lumping you in with them) to end up disparaging almost anyone for reading Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow or even Infinite Jest.
In a way, I do assign a kind of "harm" to books that I don't enjoy. You must invest time into a book and give it a fair chance before you can write it off. What's at risk is potentially hours of wasted leisure time.
> Having a “completionist” mindset (wanting to understand every reference and insight, and spending hundreds of hours to achieve it) is not the only way to read it, and draw meaning and enjoyment from it.
I've actually read more than one account of people saying they just sort of accepted that they don't understand what's going on and just power through it. Personally, that doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy, but apparently some people do, so I won't debate that.
I do think there's something to be said for readability in general. Whenever the reader has to stop because something is confusing (and not because it's thought-provoking or important), this interruption tends to jolt the reader back out of the story and into "ok now I gotta look up this word" or "ok let me re-read this last paragraph because that sentence was very long and full of ambiguous pronouns." To me, this sort of thing is not enjoyable in any book.
Even then, there are novels for all permutations of “readable (to me)” and not, and “good (to me)” and not. Fair enough though in the sense that I wouldn’t take a “barely readable (to me) but very good (to me)” novel to the beach.
Only to the extent in which I've defined "harm" (in quotations), which was to say that I don't like to invest free time into books that I probably won't finish.
In any case, while I do care about readability, it does look like I've stepped a bit too far over the line. Believe me, I have no desire in forming any sort of literary criticism against a book that many famous writers have said is great, especially having not read it.
Infinite Jest is the Jared Kushner of literary works. BEFORE the Saudi money for selling the PDB.
He's saying that the Irish are horn dogs, isn't he?
For a humorous comparison, see "The Lusty Month of May", from the 1960 musical "Camelot". (Link to a good performance: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t--e0S5kelY ). It's basically an entire song about how great it is that spring is here, because spring is a wonderful time for sex.
The song reminded me of a much more recent one, Jonathan Coulton's "First of May", which I decided to look up the inspiration of.
From https://wiki.jonathancoulton.com/First_of_May:
> * The chorus is a variation on an old folk/schoolyard rhyme, "Hooray, Hooray, the first of May! Outdoor fucking starts today!" In an April 10, 2007 blog post, JoCo credited John Hodgman with the idea for the song, and mentions that the modern dirty rhyme derives from an older, traditional dirty rhyme. Commenters Mike and Bry tracked the reference down to a poem in Another Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy.
> * The poem which Espy cites, in turn, derives from ancient Pagan customs celebrating fertility on the eve of Beltane, the Celtic name for the month of May.
So, there's the exact cultural reference? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane
Incidentally, May is also International Masturbation Month for entirely unrelated reasons.
IANAL, but my sense is that Judge Woolsey was not himself inclined to anti-Irish bigotry - but he was willing to make use of such bigotry to buttress his decision. Actual bigots protesting against his ruling might find themselves arguing that the Irish lower classes (note how the ruling calls out their social class a few paragraphs earlier) are too virtuous and pure to entertain carnal thoughts in everyday life...a line of argument which most such bigots might be less than comfortable in making.
Large parts of the book don't make sense if you don't have the right cultural information "installed."
Times have changed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/series/32198-ulysses/