James Joyce – First banned as obscene – now celebrated as revolutionary.
One of the most well-known and celebrated figures of 20th century English Literature, James Joyce was considered by many to have revolutionized the art of Writing and became one of the key figures in the Modernist Movement in literature.
Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer‘s Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include two books of poetry, a play, correspondence, and occasional journalism.
Joyce finished writing Ulysses near the end of 1921, but had difficulties getting it published. With financial backing from the lawyer John Quinn, Margaret Anderson and her co-editor Jane Heap had begun serially publishing it in The Little Review in March 1918, but in January and May 1919, two instalments were suppressed as obscene and potentially subversive. In September 1920, an unsolicited instalment of the “Nausicaa” episode was sent to the daughter of a New York attorney associated with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, leading to an official complaint. The trial proceedings continued until February 1921, when Anderson and Heap, defended by Quinn, were fined $50 each for publishing obscenity and ordered to cease publishing Ulysses. Huebsch, who had expressed interest in publishing the novel in the United States, decided against it after the trial. Weaver was unable to find an English printer, and the novel was banned for obscenity in the United Kingdom in 1922, where it was blacklisted until 1936.
Almost immediately after Anderson and Heap were ordered to stop printing Ulysses, Beach agreed to publish it through her bookshop. She had books mailed to people in Paris and the United States who had subscribed to get a copy; Weaver sent books from Beach’s plates to subscribers in England. Soon, the postal officials of both countries began confiscating the books. They were then smuggled into both countries. Because the work had no copyright in the United States at this time, “bootleg” versions appeared, including pirate versions from publisher Samuel Roth, who ceased his actions only in 1928, when a court enjoined publication. Ulysses was not legally published in the United States until 1934, when Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that the book is not obscene.
Ulysses can be read as a study of Dublin in 1904, exploring various aspects of the city’s life, dwelling on its squalor and monotony. Joyce claimed that if Dublin was destroyed in some catastrophe, it could be rebuilt using his work as a model. To achieve this sense of detail, he relied on his memory, what he heard other people remember, and his readings, to create a sense of fastidious detail. Joyce regularly used the 1904 edition of Thom’s Directory—a work that listed the owners and tenants of every residential and commercial property in the city—to ensure his descriptions were accurate. This combination of kaleidoscopic writing, reliance on a formal schema to structure the narrative, and exquisite attention to detail represents one of the book’s major contributions to the development of 20th-century modernist literature.
Here is a rare recording of James Joyce reading the “Aeolus” excerpt from Ulysses, made in 1924.
