Ulysses Unbanned

This piece, posted on The Writer's Almanac tells the tale of obscenity in literature and how James Joyce duped the government. Be sure to read the Quote from Ulysses that was considered pornographic. It's hardly comprehensible. sheesh.


On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce. (books by this author) In 1920, a literary magazine called The Little Review published an episode of Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom, the hero, masturbates while getting a glimpse of a young woman's undergarment, as fireworks go off over a beach. It was not difficult for a person to find real pornography in 1920, but Ulysses stood out to officials for its highbrow aura and the publicity it attracted as the newest, most advanced thing in literature. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought The Little Review to trial under the state's obscenity law. The episode was ruled obscene, and Ulysses was banned in the United States.

The banned book was a hot item on the black market, and Joyce knew he was losing a lot of money to pirate publishers. He wanted an American readership and the royalties that came with it, so his lawyers worked with the executives at Random House to bait the U.S. government into going to trial. In 1933, Random House decided to import a single version of the French edition of Ulysses, and the company had people wait at the New York docks for the book's arrival. It was a hot day and the U.S. Customs inspector didn't want to be bothered with another inspection, but the Random House people made sure that one book was seized.

A second trial, "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses," was held over the fate of that single copy of Ulysses. Judge John Woolsey ruled that the book had no "dirt for dirt's sake" and was not, in fact, pornographic. His ruling changed the standards for literary obscenity. He disregarded the traditional standard for obscenity — whether the work would "deprave and corrupt" a vulnerable young reader — and said that the proper test is whether it would "lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts" in the average adult. Also, no longer could a single line make a whole book obscene. Woolsey pointed out that the book was so difficult to understand, people would be unlikely to read it for titillation. The Court of Appeals agreed and called Ulysses "a sincere portrayal" and "executed with real art." Ulysses was safe to sell in the United States.

In his opinion for the case, Judge Woolsey wrote: "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."

[From the aforementioned undergarment scene] Joyce wrote:"And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and they all saw it and shouted to look, look there it was and she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was flying about through the air, a soft thing to and fro, dark."

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/