“Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be candid for once.”
—ULYSSES
Obscenity is as illegal today as it was in 1873. What changed is the way we define it. The legal transformation began in earnest the moment Judge Woolsey (and the Circuit Court following him) measured vices against virtues, when they shifted from hunting for corruption to weighing corruption against beauty. Once art became a state interest, the scales of justice gradually tilted toward art’s favor so that by the mid-twentieth century the U.S. Supreme Court defined obscenity as “prurient” material deemed “utterly without redeeming social importance”—an ounce of virtue can legalize a pound of vice.
In the world before Ulysses, a filthy word or a salacious episode seemed like a contaminant—no matter how small it was, it could poison the whole. Joyce’s book altered our understanding of obscenity partly by exploring the sustaining qualities of filth, but it also altered obscenity by altering our understanding of ourselves. We are not, according to Ulysses, blank slates corrupted by the world. We are born into patterns and stories thousands of years old, and indecency seems less dangerous when people seem less pristine. After Ulysses, books seemed less likely to “deprave and corrupt” us. If anything, they convinced us that the most dangerous fiction was our innocence.
The dramatic reduction of obscenity as a legal category—the expansion of the types of speech protected by the First Amendment—involves more than the freedom to print dirty words. It confirms the power of all words to hash out the truth. Obscenity rulings presented themselves as sensible bans on worthless speech, as judgments beyond the realm of debate. When Judge Manton refused to quote Ulysses in his dissenting opinion, he was not being bombastic. His decree absolved him from naming the content he wanted to banish—silence is both the way we judge obscenity and the way we solve it. To legalize what was once patently unspeakable, however, is to replace silence with both debate and debatability. It is to invite deep—even systemic—uncertainty. For to change moral standards is to upset what we assumed was natural (nothing serves systems of power more than the conviction that things cannot change), and few modes of expression seem more natural—more instinctive and indisputable, less amenable to logic or academic study—than what we find offensive or obscene. If obscenity can change, anything can change. The advent of Ulysses showed us how arbitrary even the presumably natural categories can be. Edith Wharton called Joyce’s book “a turgid welter of pornography” despite the fact that only a small sliver of the text is offensive to anyone. While many readers see the unprecedented complexity of Joyce’s characters as the book’s hallmark, E. M. Forster saw in Ulysses “a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud . . . a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.”
Younger writers like Hart Crane took it as a revelation. “I feel like shouting EUREKA! . . . Easily the epic of the age.” The truths contained within it were so jarring that he thought “some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses.” Whether or not he wrote in the interests of Hell, Joyce paved the way for authors that followed. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, for example, would not have been possible without Ulysses. “Oh, yes,” Nabokov said, “let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game.” Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer was part of the 1960s legal battles that ended U.S. prosecutions against literary obscenity, compared the end of Ulysses to the end of the Book of Revelation. “And there shall be no more curse!” Miller wrote. “Henceforth no sin, no guilt, no fear, no repression, no longing, no pain of separation. The end is accomplished—man returns to the womb.”
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IN ONLY A FEW DECADES, Ulysses transformed from an insurgency to an institution. The academic Joyce industry boomed in the 1960s and has only increased with time. There are roughly three hundred books and more than three thousand scholarly articles devoted, partly or entirely, to Ulysses, and about fifty of those books have been written in the past ten years. The mountain of research is at turns enlightening and obsessive—in 1989 two Joyceans attempted to reconstruct the contents of a Ulysses manuscript notebook that no one can find. Even the literal content of the published text has been a site of controversy. Joyce’s endless revisions, his idiosyncratic writing and the error-filled 1922 edition have led scholars to fight—with a ferocity only PhDs can muster—over which edition of Ulysses is definitive. Battles over competing editions led to heated debates about prepositions, transposed letters and missing accent marks. In the 1980s the disputes snowballed into accusations of stolen and unacknowledged work followed by aspersions cast about qualifications and broken editorial protocols, all of which culminated in conference panel betrayals and smear campaigns. To this day, Random House publishes two rival editions of Ulysses in an effort to bypass the academic melee. Many Joyceans are dissatisfied with both.
And yet what’s remarkable about Joyce’s novel is that it surpasses all of the disputes and dissections. It is, as Nabokov said, “a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths.” After ninety years in print, Ulysses sells roughly one hundred thousand copies a year. It has been translated into more than twenty languages, including Arabic, Norwegian, Catalan and Malayalam. There are two Chinese translations. Groups of readers gather in houses and pubs to read and discuss Ulysses together, and as unusual as that is for a decades-old book, the life of Ulysses is even more vibrant than that.
Every year, on June 16, people around the world gather to celebrate Bloomsday. They dress like Stephen, Molly and Leopold Boom. They eat kidneys for breakfast and gorgonzola sandwiches with burgundy for lunch. They reenact scenes, sing songs featured in Ulysses (there are hundreds) and carouse in makeshift Nighttowns. Revelers savor Joyce-inspired art, poetry, dance, film and drama—Melbourne held a mock trial of Joyce in 2002. There have been Bloomsday celebrations in Tokyo, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Santa Maria, Brazil, has been celebrating for twenty years straight. Two hundred cities in sixty countries have celebrated Joyce’s novel. There is no other literary event like it. One day each year, fiction creeps into reality as people around the world reenact events that never happened.
One Leopold Bloom, wearing his bowler and black mourning suit, remembers New Yorkers greeting him on the 1 train going uptown. “Yo, Bloom, Happy Bloomsday.” Since 1982, actors have gathered in New York’s Symphony Space to perform readings that can last as long as sixteen hours (the backstage celebration, fueled with beer donated by the city’s oldest Irish pub, lasts just as long). Before Molly takes the stage at roughly eleven at night, an organizer warns the audience listening on public radio stations across the country that they should gird themselves for explicit language. Then a single actress takes the stage and reads the “Penelope” episode until nearly two in the morning as drowsy spectators—cab drivers, travel agents, people who have never read Ulysses and people who have studied it for years—listen to the river of Molly Bloom’s thoughts in the darkened auditorium.
Bloomsday’s Mecca is, of course, Dublin. The first Bloomsday celebration, in 1954, involved five men who assigned themselves roles and planned to track the novel’s events around the city in two horsedrawn carriages. The commemoration was abandoned halfway through when the group somehow ended up in a pub not featured in Ulysses. By the 1970s the crowds of people following Bloom’s footsteps began to stop traffic. In 2004 the James Joyce Centre served breakfast to ten thousand people. Gentlemen in hats and striped blazers, women in frilly collars and ankle-length dresses, crowded onto the stairs winding up to the Sandycove Tower’s parapet so they could hear the early morning exchanges between Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan. One year, celebrants re-created Paddy Dignam’s funeral in the “Hades” episode with a horsedrawn hearse and a corpse played by one of Joyce’s grandnephews. On the way to Glasnevin Cemetery, he popped out of the casket to check their progress and terrified onlooking schoolchildren. Amid the hilarity, the hearse clipped a curb as it rounded the cemetery’s corner and cast everyone out, the living and the dead.
It’s tempting to think of Ulysses as a book about how feeble life has become in the modern era. The warrior King of Ithaca is reduced to a lonely, cuckolded ad salesman, and the defiant genius who penned the novel was reduced to a rueful figure tapping his cane down foreign city streets. Even the censorship of the book demonstrates how an arduous work of art can be scuttled by the cursory glance of a government functionary—the writing takes place over the course of years, and the ban takes place before lunch. Censoring a book is easy. It merely requires increasing the risk of publication enough to make it too much of a gamble for a publisher, and publishing a book is already almost quixotic. One of the paradoxes of the printed word is that whatever strength and durability it has is inseparable from this inherent weakness. Even a book like Ulysses, we consider essential to our cultural heritage book, might never have happened—might have ended in a New York police court or with the outbreak of a world war—if it were not for a handful of awestruck people. Joyce’s novel, with its intricacies and schoolboy adventures, with each measured and careful page, gave them what it gives us: a way to sally forth into the greater world, to walk out into the garden, to see the heaventree of stars as if for the first time and affirm, against the incalculable odds, our own diminutive existence. It is the fragility of our affirmations—no matter how indecorous they may be—that makes them so powerful.
When Joyce was a little boy and dessert time was announced, he would make his way down the staircase, holding his nursemaid’s hand, and call out to his parents with every accomplished step, “Here’s me! Here’s me!”