The action of James Joyce's Ulysses occurs on June 16, 1904, which is marked by Joyceans as "Bloomsday" in honor of the main character, Leopold Bloom, a Jewish ad canvasser who spends the day walking around Dublin, plying his trade and attending a funeral and eventually just avoiding going home, where he knows his wife, Molly, has a late-afternoon assignation with her newest lover, Blazes Boylan. Though according to many arbiters (such as the Modern Library's Top 100 English-language novels of the twentieth century, which it sits atop) Ulysses is one of the last century's greatest artistic achievements, it could at first not find a reputable publisher. The alleged problem was obscenity. It's amusing to speculate on the disappointment that must have been suffered by those who, taking notice of an intriguing indictment, got hold of a copy and discovered--it's hard to say exactly what, but surely not anything that tends to arouse prurient interest.
And relying on that definition of obscenity--that it arouses prurient interest--Judge John Woolsey ruled, in December of 1933, eleven years after its first publication in Europe (in an edition of 1000, by the bookstore owner Sylvia Beach), that Ulysses was not obscene and therefore could be published in the United States of America. In a way, it seems an odd definition. Supposing you set out to arouse a reader's prurient interest. In that case, whether your work product would be deemed obscene or not would depend upon your skill: if you were any good, you'd be a pornographer, while less able toilers in the vineyard would at least not be guilty of any crime. The former would not be able to find a publisher. The latter would not be able to find readers.
Judge Woolsey's opinion, which serves as a preface to my Modern Library edition of the novel, is in a couple of places simultaneously astute and humorous. He says he read the book through without detecting obscenity. Nevertheless, doubting his qualifications, he asked a couple "friends," men whose opinions he respected, what they thought, and:
I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading Ulysses in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.
So, on the lookout for obscenity, these men found only a "very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women." How disappointing! Happy Bloomsday!
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