Joyce, Nussbaum, and the Value of Disgust

Abstract: James Joyce's Ulysses is a famously obscene novel. What is the purpose and emotional effect of the novel's obscenity? In court, Morris Ernst defended Ulysses as an emotionally static work of high art that was only to be accessed intellectually. After the legal battle had been won, critics became more forthright about the novel's broader emotional appeal. Martha Nussbaum ends Upheavals of Thought (2001) celebrating Ulysses as the apotheosis of an aesthetic tradition progressing toward the frank acknowledgment of all our everyday emotions—all except for disgust. A central tenet of Nussbaum's theory of the emotions is that disgust is per se morally suspect. Joyce, however, admitted that he had disgusted himself writing Ulysses , a novel that demonstrates the hidden value of our most irrational emotion.