One (More) Book Called Ulysses

“But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of “Ulysses” on the reader is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

“Ulysses may, therefore,” The Honorable John M. Woolsey concludes in one of the most lucid and entertaining legal rulings I’ve ever read, “be admitted into the United States.”

Ulysses, James Joyce’s day-in-the-life, stream-of-consciousness novel about the daily activities of several Dubliners on June 4, 1904, is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century—if not the best.

Joyce completed the work in 1921, after seven years of writing, and it was originally published by the celebrated Shakespeare & Company in Paris on his birthday in 1922. It was an immediate, runaway success only in the sense that those who could obtain copies may have been more likely to run away from it than read it. Both the UK and the US promptly banned it on grounds of obscenity. It is dense, arcane, verbose, and, at times, as Judge Woolsey points out, the effect on the reader is emetic. The judge could have added soporific to his legal description and been perfectly within his legal bounds. I inadvertently used it as a nightcap on many evenings.

While it was unofficially suppressed throughout the 1920s, the U.S. Customs Service officially banned it in 1928 and declared they would seize, forfeit, confiscate, and destroy any copies entering the United States. One of the key passages in question is a scene of auto-eroticism on a Dublin beach. There are sections of Ulysses that are shocking to see on paper, especially by the standards of the early 1900s. Descriptions of sex are left unadorned, avoiding the ‘furtive, leering, roundabout manner’ typical of their previous treatment in literature. The thoughts of the characters are candid and unfiltered, even if understanding them is difficult. Joyce committed to an idea—to document in one full day the thoughts and doings of lower middle-class Dubliners in frame-by-frame detail. As Judge Woolsey so eloquently puts it:

“Joyce has attempted–it seems to me with astonishing success–to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.”

As someone who delights in words and in straightforward logic, Woolsey’s legal opinion is a veritable playground, although at times it seems as if he is competing with Joyce for some literary award rather than writing a legal ruling. However, he calmly addresses point by point the major difficulties of the book and the case brought against it by the government:

“…in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, — that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.”

Morris Ernst, the lawyer who agreed to litigate the case, developed a brilliant scheme to bring the case to trial: instead of having Random House print and publish a book considered contraband, he would ship a single copy from Europe to the US by boat, framing the case as ‘a maritime action’ and sparing the American publisher ‘the financial and legal risk of printing a contraband work.’ There’s poetic irony to this strategy, given the storyline for the book is loosely hung on the frame of Homer’s Odyssey, where the original Ulysses (in Greek, Odysseus) sails from misfortune to misfortune in his quest to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The fictional Ulysses eventually makes it home to his wife and child, but a host of troubles await him. Similarly, one book called Ulysses also completed its voyage to be met by a series of troubles.

On May 8, 1933, the illicit cargo arrived, and at first nothing happened.

The customs agents had been notified of its arrival in advance, and upon seeing it are purported to have proclaimed, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in.”

The novel had been de facto banned for over a decade, and officially banned since 1928, but copies had nonetheless streamed into the United States. “The supply was sufficient,” writes David Margolick on the 50th anniversary of the Woolsey decision, “for T.S. Eliot to include it as required reading for a course on modern literature he taught at Harvard in the late 1920s.”

Accounts differ on details but all agree that the customs agents refused to seize the book. Some cite apathy. Others reference the fact that it was the end of the day, and they all wanted to go home. In the most dramatic and comedic retelling—and therefore the one to which I subscribe—they instead forwarded it on to the Random House office in New York City, at which point Ernst returned the unopened package to Customs and demanded it be seized. It was.

The Woolsey decision and admission of “one book called Ulysses” came at a time when America needed a reminder of what it means to live in a free society founded on liberal principles. We were in the midst of several projects related to the legislation of morals, most notably Prohibition, which was repealed one day before the Woolsey ruling on Ulysses. (I can only hope both of these decisions were celebrated in the most appropriate of fashions.) A century on, and it seems we’re in another period where particular interest groups are pressing for their pet morality to be legislated into existence in an effort to silence their dissenters.

In other words, it’s been nearly one hundred years since the Woolsey decision, and we need a new Ulysses.

We’re well past the point in society of being offended by the same standard of ‘obscenity’ that shocked Americans in the 1920s when Joyce’s novel was first serialized. But now we have a problem with other sorts of narrow, subjective definitions that threaten free speech in a democracy. What we need now is a Ulysses updated for the 21st century to rock us onto our heels in disbelief so that we can find firmer footing in the fundamentals of free speech, shaking us from the path we’ve taken onto the precarious, illiberal grounds of censorship by cancel culture and mob mentality and motivated across the political spectrum by the mistaken belief that one has a right not to be offended. Now we label speech with which we disagree ‘hate speech’ or seek to silence differing opinions altogether. No, this new novel must be bold, must be original, and must above all be absolutely offensive to just about nearly everyone.

Instead of Joyce’s choice of an Irish Jew padding around Dublin in 24 hours, this new novel might consist of the story of a mixed-race evangelical, transgender, Christian, Trump-supporting man who travels around the country in 24 days. It should consist of the most troublesome and shocking viewpoints of our time, told through the eyes and minds of everyday Americans in a similar stream of consciousness format, chock full of offensive ideas like religion, gay marriage, Christian Nationalism, witchcraft, identity politics, overt racism, maybe some Neo-Nazism, Drag Queen story hours, misgendering, deadnaming, incorrect use of pronouns, refusal to bake wedding cakes, a happy depiction of the nuclear family, lewd jokes, catcalling, misogyny, misandry, scathing reviews of the Barbie movie*,* and even a few insults directed at Dolly Parton, just to ensure that no one is left out and everyone is thoroughly pissed off.

The novel should, this time, be published in some “shithole” country and then sent by boat to New York City, setting up the makings for another maritime action. It will arrive in New York harbor, no doubt with an angry mob ready to receive it, a mob composed of queer activists and Christians and environmentalists and traditional Catholics and bronco riding cowboys and Trad Wives and black people and white people and Asians and Hispanics all protesting the entry of the book into the United States, united in their common belief that it contains hate speech and should therefore be banned. It would be the trial of the century, the landmark case on Free Speech and the First Amendment. It would be seized properly this time by the U.S. Customs Agency and every detail of the case would be followed by millions on TikTok and Instagram and NBC and CNN. The conservative pundits at Newsmax would inveigh against it while the progressive pundits at Vox and The New York Times would do the same. The people would wonder why the President hadn’t yet made a statement regarding the ‘one book called [blank]’ while both sides would accuse one another of being in favor of it. There would be marches and rallies and burning of effigies and possibly some looting and vandalism for good measure. Pastors would rail against it from their pulpits and celebrities would post tepid tweets about it on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Meanwhile, some tired, dutiful Judge with extensive expertise in maritime affairs would be sitting in his Manhattan Brownstone reading it, trying to determine if it really constituted hate speech, whether it incited any sort of violence and, ultimately, where the line should be drawn. But naturally the death threats and doxxing would get to him, so he would recuse himself from the case to retire to a farm upstate. The book would then be confiscated by the federal government, which ultimately would deem it too dangerous to have in the public eye. It would be locked in some vault somewhere while the people of all colors and ethnicities and genders and ideologies would cheer for a brief moment, knowing that the vile book and its ideas could no longer be accessed, especially by children or by those deemed too fragile by society to be exposed to offensive ideas, and then they would all go back to demonizing ‘the other side’ and accusing one another of hate speech.

All, in other words, would be right with the world.

In a first draft of this essay that I sent to a friend (and excellent writer) for a proofread, that’s where it ended. But she challenged me on it, saying the satirical ending was too easy. The topic deserves more than melancholic, comedic irony. And she’s right.

If we’re to make this republic work, then we have to accept that ideas will exist with which we disagree. Ideas should exist with which we disagree because it brings an acknowledgement that we might be wrong. That sliver of doubt is something we should all hold onto as one of the most important elements of a thriving, liberal society. It’s a heritage of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method, but also goes back millennia to the first humans who began building forms of government founded on dialogue rather than violence. That sliver of doubt may be the most important thing we hold in our lives.

“I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is more than a convenient distillation of the freedom of speech, it’s a recognition of the rights and humanity of the Other. The value of the Other. The lesson of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses is that we don’t have a right to not be offended. Our Constitution, and through it our laws, are in favor of a society that errs on the side of offense rather than sanitized tolerance. In fact, being offended is an overlooked virtue.The real irony is that, on the whole, the more we have focused on tolerance as the premier virtue, the more intolerant we have become.