Would Ulysses be as cool if it had never been banned? Probably. Still, there’s no denying the utility of the censorship ban to its legend, whiff of the forbidden and all that. I’m not clear on when we started wanting our artists misunderstood and marginalized, but certainly Ulysses took its lumps at a time when censorship meant real hardship, and not just a publicist’s stunt to keep a musician in the glossies. So its period of infamy cost it readership and recognition at a time when its author needed it most, and left it prey to unscrupulous publishers who distributed it in brown paper wrappers in order to enhance its reputation as a salacious read rather than dispel that notion.
A lot of the chatter surrounding Banned Books Week necessarily traffics in the notion that banned books are good books because they are missives of the avant garde set upon by establishment squares threatened by the truths revealed in such works. I’m not so sure. It seems to me Ulysses still suffers as a “banned book”, if only because it shares the distinction of a great book unfairly persecuted for its content, like Tropic of Cancer, with books that should never be read by anyone, like Story of the Eye. Point being that there’s quite a lot more going on in Calypso when Bloom defecates over a period of ten pages than mere poop jokes. But unfortunately the literary equivalent of shock jocks have been able to grab for themselves instant artistic credibility by making inaccurate comparisons of their work to Joyce.
Which makes Judge Woolsey’s opinion all the more remarkable. Spend some time with it and appreciate the level of attention to detail that went into his decision. Folks like to refer to the case as a watershed moment in the weakening of artistic censorship, and they’re right. But not because he just threw up his hands and said all censorship is bad. Rather, Judge Woolsey obviously spent an enormous amount of time with the book, trying his best to analyze it objectively not from the perspective that obscenity doesn’t exist, but rather that anything that expounded so elegantly on the infrastructure of life and what it means to be human is valuable, even if it needs to brush up against the obscene in the course of its telling:
I hold that Ulysses is a sincere and honest book, and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed by its rationale . . . The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxonwords known to almost all men, and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe, by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring . . .
A great synopsis of the litigation can be read here. The full text of the opinion can be found here.
of course we had an Irish solution to the ‘dirty book’ – it was never actually put on the banned list, they made it an issue for customs & excise and just never allowed it in to the country!
I’ve always like Woolsey’s take on the book, we could do with more judges like him today!
Helen — it’s like Deasy says (mistakenly) about the Jews: “because we never let them in!”
One interesting thing about Ulysses getting banned in the United States–it happened because of Episode 13, the “Nausicaa” episode. Joyce hadn’t even finished writing the book. Some scholars think that one of Joyce’s reactions to the obscenity trial was to make the final chapters of the book even smuttier, on the theory of if you’re going to get in trouble, you might as well go big with it. Bloom & Gerty’s touching scene on the beach is tame compared to what goes on in “Circe.” “Penelope” gets pretty raunchy too.
The US obscenity trial totally overturned Joyce’s plans for publishing Ulysses. He thought an American firm was going to publish it, but all those plans went out the window… which turned out to be a kind of blessing, both for the sales-driving notoriety of the book, but it also opened the door for Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier to publish it through Shakespeare & Co.
One of Ezra Pound’s ideas for salvaging an American version was to have the publisher leave the contentious parts blank, or blacked out, in the book. He (Pound) would then publish the naughty bits separately, and instruct people to cut n’ paste them into the book. This idea didn’t get very far.
the stuff about pound sending the naughty bits on little scraps of paper is funny enough, but did anyone else notice that Mike describes chapter 13 as “Bloom and Gerty’s touching scene”?
-Rob