SOURCE: Latham, Sean. “A Portrait of the Snob: James Joyce and the Anxieties of Cultural Capital.” Modern Fiction Studies 47, no. 4 (2001): 774-99.

In the following essay, Latham contemplates the “inveterate snobbery” of Ulysses, contending that the book “no longer holds the powerful allure it once did.”

From the very moment of its publication, Ulysses has been a source of scandal. The novel's blunt treatment of sexuality, its formal affront to the conventions of realism, and its minute recording of bodily functions all evoked an outrage that won for Joyce the succès d'exécration (prize of revulsion) the nineteenth-century dandies so ardently desired.¹ Interwoven through this now famous history of obscenity, sexuality, slander, and self-abuse, however, has been a scandal rarely—if ever—commented upon: its inveterate snobbery. As dirty a secret as anything implied by Molly Bloom's “yes,” it has long remained concealed behind a dazzling display of...