Life & Wisdom Quote by Orson Scott Card

Card’s jab lands because it treats reverence as a sucker’s game. By calling James Joyce’s Ulysses “obviously” an elaborate prank, he’s not really litigating the book’s merits so much as attacking the social machinery that keeps certain works aloft. The word “obviously” is the tell: it’s a dare, a provocation meant to make defenders scramble into the very posture he’s mocking.

The real target is the “supposed intellectual elite,” a phrase that collapses expertise into cosplay. Card implies that canon-building isn’t about insight; it’s about status maintenance, an inside joke that requires public solemnity. In that frame, difficulty isn’t an artistic choice but a gatekeeping tactic, and “getting it” becomes less about reading than about performing belonging. Labeling the masterpiece a prank reframes the typical power dynamic: instead of readers fearing they’re not smart enough, the elites are cast as credulous, trapped in an endless emperor’s-new-clothes ritual.

Context matters, too. Ulysses has long functioned as shorthand for modernism’s high altar: formally radical, famously challenging, historically prosecuted, and endlessly annotated. That makes it perfect for a culture-war skirmish over who gets to decide what counts as “great.” Coming from Card, a popular genre novelist with a complicated public profile, the shot also carries an outsider’s resentment: a refusal to accept that literary authority is neutral. It’s a joke with teeth, because it knows the easiest way to puncture prestige is to accuse it of being naive.