There's so much hatred around. Free hatred, one could bloody well say. Not that much - just a minute - even not half as much, free love around in our society. And free sex? Goodness is gracious! What the hell are you talking about? Don't you know absolute freedom corrupts absolutely? And won't you ever learn that freedom is a dirty word? How dirty? Relentlessly, can I whisper the truth about 'freedom '? The truth is, well, the less said the better! So, let's be reticent. Or should I say, discreetly muted! I know you're hesitant. You'd rather write or say ' silent ' and feel politically precise and proper. But the query remains: how far are we free? And where, at what point, the curtain necessarily comes down to say, this far and no further?
Let's start with one deadly example of the point you can't stride across: you can't buy the printed editions of love letters of a rather famous literary couple in this country! Letters between James Joyce and his wife, Nora. Simply because they got immense pleasure and sexual excitement and an innocuous but ever to remember climaxing, out of uttering scatology. Infinitely obscene.
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You won't get to see these letters in India. Letters between a man and his wife. The simple reason for not getting your hands on them is that these naughty letters between Joyce and his wife Nora, are banned in India.
Released in Europe in 1975, Selected Letters of James Joyce unveiled his unedited, intimate correspondence with Nora Barnacle. /File Image
How indecent, offensive, vulgar, and even pornographic can these letters get? Here is a mild example. James Joyce writes to his wife, Nora Barnacle, who was the primary blueprint for the fierce heroine of Joyce's masterpiece Ulysses: Molly Bloom. Joyce addresses Nora as his Dear Little Bird. And then goes on to write a series of intensely private, burningly explicit sexual correspondence in the literary history during a few months in 1909.
The full unedited erotic texts of Joyce's letters to Nora were finally released in Europe in 1975, under the name Selected Letters of James Joyce. This book has remained banned in India. And the tragic irony is, if you haven't ever got under the spell of the honest and sublime filth of Joyce's letters to Nora, you'd be hard put to get along with his Molly Bloom. And if you were nowhere with Molly, you won't be anywhere with Ulysses, whose heroine is she. Yet those who teach Ulysses and are supposed to be Joyce experts in this country never, for instance, discuss any of Joyce's love letters, which throw a lot of light on Molly Bloom. But for Nora in Joyce's life, there won't be any Molly in Ulysses.
James Joyce/Pinterest
Joyce writes to Nora: My Strange Eyed Woman, you always led the way to get me into a fever - fit of animal desire. It was you, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you were longing to be caressed by me. Yet I suppose the wild filth and obscenity of my reply went beyond all bounds of modesty.
We need to understand this ambivalence to get anywhere with Ulysses. But no one here mentions Joyce's love letters. They remain padlocked away on moral grounds.
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Here is an incident that did happen on June 16, 1904, the date on which Joyce would later set his novel, Ulysses. But the Joyce pundits in their discussion of the masterpiece hardly ever mention what happened on this day between Joyce and Nora.
Nora Barnacle /Wikipedia
This is what happened: Joyce took Nora east, past the docks, to a deserted area in Dublin known as Ringswald. There, to his utterly grateful surprise, Nora, seeing no one around, slipped her hand down Joyce's trousers, pulled his shirt softly aside, and touched him slowly with her long, tickling fingers and made him a man.
And here is quintessential Joyce: Nora gazed at my erection with 'saintlike eyes'.
And here is a bit of jealous James Joyce. This unusual glimpse will go a long way to help us understand the hero of Ulysses: Leopold Bloom.
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After this incident, spurred by sudden but intense jealousy, Joyce wrote to Nora:
Tell me, Nora, truth for truth, honesty for honesty.
When you were with the young boy in the dark at night, did your finger never unbutton his trousers and slip inside like mice? Did you ever frig him, dear? Tell me truly, or anyone else?
If these letters remain forbidden in this country, how on earth can we get into the core of Joyce's Ulysses? A novel so close to the author's carnal yearning and subterranean longings!
