ABFFE Pick! June 2014
​

THE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK:

The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Kevin Birmingham

Penguin Press, June 2014, $29.95, 978-1-59420-336-7

                                                                         

Q & A with Kevin Birmingham
​

 

ABFFE: What made you select Ulysses as the subject of your first book?

Birmingham: I’ve always found Ulysses fascinating. I read it twice during my first two years of college, and I became interested in the history of literary censorship in graduate school, so the fraught publication history of Ulysses was the perfect story for me. I just dove right into the project.

ABFFE: Why was Ulysses such a “dangerous” book?

Birmingham: It’s dangerous for a few reasons. The sexuality, obviously, was troublesome to people, and it seemed especially dangerous because the most “indecent” people in Ulysses are women—Gerty MacDowell, who displays her undergarments to Leopold Bloom as he watches her from a distance on the beach, and Molly Bloom, whose nighttime thoughts include memories of the extramarital tryst she had earlier that day. It bothered people that Joyce could present women who might be models of behavior for other women—transgressive women are supposed to be punished in fiction, but that doesn’t happen in Ulysses.

Beyond that, its experimentation seemed dangerous. So many of those early reviewers read Ulysses and thought Joyce was trying to demolish the entire history of British literature and the traditions that kept the British Empire intact. The fact that it was published only a few years after World War I, when people were keenly aware of how fragile civilization seemed to be, intensified the threat. Reviewers kept referring to Joyce as an “anarchist,” and they did not use the word lightly—it really meant something at the time. And they weren’t too far off, for Joyce declared himself an anarchist in 1907. He wasn’t a bomb-throwing anarchist—he hated violence—but he was opposed to the abstractions of church and state that justifying tyrannical power over individuals. Censorship—and the protection of the supposedly pure, uncorrupted readers—was a part of that tyranny. To write Ulysses was to challenge that tyranny as directly as possible.

ABFFE: Why was Judge Woolsey’s decision so important?

Birmingham: We think of Woolsey as changing our definition of “obscenity” in the law, but it’s more accurate to say that he changed our understanding of art. It used to be that a filthy word or scene was a solid, immutable thing. No matter how it was used or what purpose it served, filth was filth. Woolsey changed all of that. He insisted that, in the hands of an artist, filth could be transformed into art. Dirty words and scenes could be pieces of a much larger mosaic that would be both beautiful and truthful. This makes perfect sense to us, but it’s not at all the way judges typically thought about books at the time.

ABFFE: Have there been other books that rival Ulysses in their impact?

Birmingham: Well, sure. Ulysses is just one of many immortal works. Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, Crime and Punishment—I hate to even start naming books since the inevitable omissions become more and more glaring. I’ll say, though, that there are very few books that play as crucial a role in establishing our literary freedoms as Ulysses. Some other contenders are Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Fanny Hill and Tropic of Cancer, all of which were the focus of important obscenity trials in the US and the UK. I think it’s safe to say that none of those books casts as large a shadow over writers even today. T.S. Eliot may have said it best: Ulysses is “a book to which we are all indebted and from which none of us can escape.”

Community Search