Today is Bloomsday, the annual celebration in which James Joyce’s Ulysses breaks out of the classroom and hits the streets. Joyce set his novel on June 16, 1904, to commemorate his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, a date that ended with a hand job. The detail matters because it reminds us that, for all its high-culture credentials, the greatest novel of the last century is also a monument to perhaps the lowliest of sex acts—one not even deserving of its own Latinate nickname, like coitus or fellatio. A hand job is vulgar, sloppy, and juvenile, much like the book it inspired is at its best.

Bloomsday at its best honors the bawdy and boisterous nature of Ulysses. The celebration that came closest to the spirit of the novel might have been the very first one, in Dublin in 1954, when four of the city’s literary notables attempted to trace the novel’s steps around the city, only to crap out halfway through, too drunk to go on. Nowadays, tens of thousands of Dubliners and tourists take part in two weeks of events, ranging from lectures, readings, and walking tours to pub crawls, costume contests in which participants dress like their favorite characters, and an interactive screening (think Rocky Horror) of the 1967 film adaptation of Ulysses. Bloomsday has spread well beyond Dublin, to more than 200 cities and counting, including places like Wilmington, North Carolina, which is hosting a marionette version of the novel this year, and Auckland,New Zealand, where two of the stars of Xena: Warrior Princess will reunite for a cabaret performance.

It would be nice to think that swelling readership of Ulysses drives the Bloomsday boom, but it’s more likely that Bloomsday provides an opportunity for cultural validation that’s about as substantial as sharing an author quote on Instagram. Reading Ulysses is a slow, immersive, and ultimately private experience; Bloomsday is a social-media-ready event, where like-minded people convene to celebrate their own taste.

And yet, the silliness might not have bothered Joyce so much. If anything, the aspect of Bloomsday that would have bothered him is its holiness.

Bloomsday celebrations treat Joyce too much like a saint and his book too much like a gospel to be revered first and read later, if at all. By placing Ulysses on a pedestal, we lose sight of both its vulgar origins and its power to tell us deep truths about our world and ourselves precisely by keeping the earthy and obscene aspects of ourselves in view.

Joyce saw all that was wrong with literary canonization long before it happened to him. In 1907, living in Trieste and desperate for money, he recycled a lecture he had given five years earlier in Dublin about the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. In the 1902 version, he blasted his countrymen’s inability to recognize genius when it walked among them. Five years later, he suggested that being lionized after death might be even worse than being celebrated during your life. “In such cases,” Joyce explained, “the preferred act of munificence is the statue, because it honors the dead while flattering the living, and has the further supreme advantage of finality, since, to tell the truth, it is the most efficient and courteous way yet discovered of ensuring a lasting oblivion of the deceased.” In 1990, Joyce got his own statue in Dublin, commissioned by shopkeepers who clearly never read the Mangan lecture.

Luckily, a new book by the literary scholar Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, can help us recall Ulysses for what it was and should still be, a shocking novel that tore at decency and tradition as it clawed its way into existence rather than a “classic” that sits happily on an educated person’s bookshelf for eternity, never to be pulled down. Birmingham tells the story of how Ulysses became the greatest novel of the 20th century, if not all centuries, because it was dangerous. Birmingham recounts this story with a richness of detail and dramatic verve unexpected of literary history, making one almost nostalgic for the bad old days, when a book could be still be dangerous.

The trouble began early, less than a year after the radical, West Village–based magazine The Little Review began serializing Joyce’s novel, in March 1918. A censor at the U.S. Postal Service read the following passage from the January 1919 issue and banned it from being sent in the mail.

Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun’s veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Two more issues of the magazine were banned from the mail before the magazine came to the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV), a private organization with a state charter empowering it to pursue obscenity. John Sumner, head of the NYSSV, was asked to investigate The Little Review, after a businessman found it among his daughter’s belongings. The dad’s timing could not have been worse for The Little Review.

The issue in question included the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom masturbates at the beach while a young girl exposes her undergarments to him. The editors of the magazine—a pair of lesbian feminists committed to art over everything else—were convicted and fined, providing some of the basis for banning the sale of the novel in the U.S., which lasted until 1933.

The temptation of reading a book like Birmingham’s is self-congratulation as we tsk-tsk the moralism of the past, but that would be a mistake. By taking us deep into the world that spawned Ulysses, The Most Dangerous Book explains why people found the novel so offensive and so vital. Yes, Joyce’s commitment to writing about the body and all its comedies, horrors, and glories alarmed conservatives, but so did his decision to serialize it in a medium—the little magazine—that brought together anarchists, poets, advocates of alternative sexuality, and artists. He was guilty, in part, by association.

You can peruse back issues of The Little Review on the Modernist Journals Project Web site. The experience is like jumping into a time machine, allowing you to see 20th-century radical culture as it is being made. Next year, the site and Yale University Press will publish a version of Ulysses that reproduces the novel as it appeared in The Little Review, giving readers unfiltered access to this crucial moment long before Ulysses the living thing became Ulysses the museum piece.

The big question Birmingham’s book raises without precisely answering is whether Ulysses remains dangerous, now that the sexual mores and political anxieties of the 20s and 30s have vanished. When I put the question to him directly, he suggested that the novel is still dangerous—but only to those who take the time to read it. Birmingham compared reading Ulysses to taking a slow-acting drug that gradually reshapes our understanding of ourselves, working its way into our consciousness as we read it, unsettling who we are.

Bloomsday and its rushed public readings, pub crawls, and pantomimes have nothing to do with these slow-acting powers of Ulysses, but they may amount to a kind of gateway drug, recruiting new generations of readers. For that reason, we should only ever be half against Bloomsday. Joyce’s reputation might be entirely tamed, now that his face can be found on Euro coins and his books in high-school classrooms, but reading Ulysses will always be a life-affirming act of savagery.

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