Title: Ulysses Author: James Joyce Creation Date: 1922 Location: Paris, France Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses, a novel that maps a single day in Dublin — Thursday, 16 June 1904 — onto the structure of Homer's Odyssey. Three people move through eighteen episodes, each written in a different literary technique: Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising canvasser who plays Odysseus; Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher and failed artist who plays Telemachus; and Molly Bloom, Leopold's wife, who closes the book with a forty-five-page unpunctuated interior monologue. The novel was serialised in the American journal The Little Review from 1918 until the US Post Office seized and burned three issues under the Comstock Act. No American or British publisher would touch the complete manuscript. Sylvia Beach's Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company published it on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, and it was immediately banned in both the United States and the United Kingdom on obscenity grounds.
Beneath the formal ambition — each episode possesses its own organ, art, colour, and literary technique; the "Oxen of the Sun" episode recapitulates the entire history of English prose style; the "Circe" episode explodes into a two-hundred-page expressionist play — is a surprisingly warm human story. A man who has lost a son, a marriage drifting into estrangement, a young man who has not yet found what he needs, and an afternoon in which all three move slightly closer to something they cannot name. The 1933 Woolsey decision ruled it a work of literary merit and reshaped American obscenity law permanently. The novel has never been out of print since the Random House edition and is widely regarded as the most important English-language novel of the twentieth century.
The Banning
The suppression began before the novel existed as a book. Joyce published it serially in The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, and the US Post Office, acting under the Comstock Act of 1873, seized and burned three issues containing episodes of the work. The crisis arrived with the "Nausicaa" episode in April 1920, in which Bloom masturbates while watching a young woman on a beach. John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice filed a formal complaint. Anderson and Heap were arrested and brought to trial in February 1921. The court rejected expert literary testimony, declared the work "like the product of a disorganised mind," and — in a detail of unimprovable precision — refused to allow passages read aloud because women were present in the courtroom. The only women present were the publishers themselves. Anderson and Heap were fined fifty dollars each, fingerprinted, and ordered to cease serialisation.
No American publisher would risk the complete novel. Joyce turned to Sylvia Beach in Paris. Five hundred copies of the British Egoist Press edition were seized and burned by customs upon arrival in England. In 1932, Bennett Cerf and lawyer Morris Ernst of Random House devised a deliberate strategy: import a copy, allow seizure, challenge in court. Judge John Woolsey read the entire novel and ruled on 6 December 1933 that it was "a sincere and honest book" with no pornographic intent. Random House began typesetting within minutes of the verdict. The UK ban was lifted in 1936.
The Fallout
The Woolsey decision was a watershed in the history of literary freedom. It dismantled the prevailing Hicklin test — which defined obscenity as anything tending to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences" — and replaced it with a standard that considered the work as a whole and measured its effect on the average adult reader rather than on the most susceptible child. This shift, later formalised in Roth v. United States (1957) and Miller v. California (1973), opened the door to every other suppressed literary work of the twentieth century. Lady Chatterley's Lover, the Tropic novels, Naked Lunch — all were made publishable by the legal precedent Ulysses established.
For Joyce, the practical consequences were mixed. The American edition sold well, but he had spent eleven years unable to have his most important work legally available in the two largest English-language markets. In Ireland, the Censorship Board never formally banned the novel — an omission that was itself revealing — but customs restrictions prevented importation, and the book was not freely available there until the 1960s. Joyce had left Ireland at twenty-two and never returned; the country whose literary culture his novel would come to define kept it out for decades. The broader cultural fallout was the normalisation of bodily life in literature. Before this novel, the conventions of the English-language novel excluded defecation, menstruation, masturbation, and wandering sexual thought from representation. After the Woolsey decision, these exclusions could no longer be maintained as law. The novel did not merely win its court case; it enlarged the territory available to every novel that followed it.
Why It Was Feared
The specific danger was not the sexual content, though that was what prosecutors identified. The novel contains explicit sexual thought — Bloom's masturbation on the beach, Molly's frank monologue with its memories of lovers — but these passages are embedded in a work of such formal complexity and human warmth that they resist isolation. What made the book genuinely dangerous to the literary and moral order was its insistence that the body and the mind are not separate domains. The most elevated art can encompass defecation, flatulence, sexual fantasy, the physical reality of menstruation, the taste of a cheese sandwich. Joyce demolished the hierarchy governing Western literature since the Renaissance: thought above sensation, spirit above flesh, the heroic above the mundane. Bloom is simultaneously Odysseus and a man eating a kidney for breakfast, a cuckolded husband and a figure of mythic stature, and the novel insists these are the same category of experience.
The Comstock Act assumed that literary decency required the suppression of bodily reality. Ulysses proposed the opposite: that such suppression was itself a form of corruption, that a literature excluding the body was fundamentally dishonest. When Woolsey wrote that the book was "sincere and honest" and its depiction of characters was "truthful, relevant to the subject, and executed with real art," he was not merely freeing a novel from a legal prohibition. He was endorsing the principle that literature's honesty about the human body is not obscenity but a form of truth-telling that the law has no business suppressing. The censors' deepest objection was to this honesty itself — the refusal to separate consciousness from the flesh it inhabits.
The Reading
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Eight o'clock in the morning, the sixteenth of June, 1904, and below the Martello tower at Sandycove the water lay flat as a looking glass: the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea. Three men were living in the tower that week. Mulligan, a medical student with a voice built for pulpits. An Englishman called Haines, down from Oxford, collecting Irish sayings in a notebook. And Stephen Dedalus, twenty-two, a schoolteacher who had meant to be an artist and had not yet made anything worth the name.
Mulligan shaved at the parapet and blasphemed at the morning air and called Stephen Kinch, the knifeblade, and told him he had behaved badly: his mother dying, asking him to kneel and pray at the bed, and he standing there refusing. The aunt thinks you killed your mother, Mulligan said, and went down to the fire and the fried eggs. Haines had woken the house in the night raving about shooting a black panther. Where is his guncase? Stephen asked, and got no answer worth having. When they went down to bathe, Mulligan took the key of the tower and twopence for a pint. Usurper, Stephen thought, and walked off along the road.
She was dead a year. He had refused her at the bed, and the refusal stayed in him and gnawed — agenbite of inwit, the old phrase for it, the again-biting of conscience — and it went with him through every street he walked that day. Her wasted face. The smell of wetted ashes and rosewood. Her glazing eyes looking up out of the sheets and asking him for the one thing she had ever asked, and his pride bigger than her dying.
He taught the morning's history at Mr Deasy's school in Dalkey. Pyrrhus at Asculum, another such victory and we are undone. A pier, sir. A disappointed bridge. A boy named Sargent stayed behind over his sums, ugly and futile, and Stephen thought that somebody had loved him once, had carried him and kept him from being trampled underfoot. Afterwards the headmaster paid his salary in sovereigns and shillings, lectured him on saving, gave him a letter about foot-and-mouth disease to place with the newspapers, and offered without being asked that England is in the hands of the jews, and that Ireland had never persecuted them because she never let them in. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Before noon he was walking on Sandymount Strand with the tide going out. Ineluctable modality of the visible: shut your eyes and see. He shut them and heard his boots crush crackling wrack and shells and thought, if I open them again and it is all still there, then the world does not need me to hold it up. He opened them. There it was. Seaspawn and seawrack, a dog nosing at a carcass, two women coming down the steps with a midwife's bag, and the tide going out over the flats.
At that same hour, on the north side, in the house at 7 Eccles Street, Leopold Bloom set the kettle on the coals and thought about breakfast. Thirty-eight years old, an advertisement canvasser for the Freeman's Journal, a Jewish man in a Catholic city, baptised twice and belonging nowhere in particular. The cat came round his legs. Mkgnao! she said — not miaow, which is what cats had been given to say for four hundred years, but the actual noise the actual animal made in the actual kitchen. He poured her milk. Cruel her tongue, he thought. Wonder is it true if you clip them they can't mouse.
He walked up to Dlugacz the pork butcher's in Dorset Street for a kidney, reading the shopgirl's hips ahead of him in the queue and losing her at the corner. Home. Two letters on the hall floor and a card. One for him from Milly, fifteen, gone to Mullingar to learn the photography trade. The other addressed to Mrs Marion Bloom in a bold hand, which he carried up to the bedroom without a word about it, and Molly put it under the pillow. Boylan. Blazes Boylan, arranging her concert programme, coming at four to go through it with her.
She asked him what metempsychosis meant, out of a book she was reading. The transmigration of souls, he said, and then said it again in plainer words for her. Downstairs the kidney was burning. He ate it with a fine tang of faintly scented urine on his palate and read Milly's letter twice and thought about her growing up and about the fifteen years since, and about the eleven days.
That was Rudy. Born and dead in eleven days, and the boy would have been eleven years old this year, and after him there had been no more, nothing between him and Molly in that way in ten years and more. It sat under everything, the way the current sits under the surface of a river and moves all the water above it without ever showing.
The day took him about the city. A letter collected under the name Henry Flower from a woman named Martha Clifford, whom he had never met and did not intend to meet. A cake of lemon soap in his hip pocket. At eleven he rode out to Glasnevin in the funeral carriage for Paddy Dignam, dead of drink, leaving a widow and children and no money, and the carriage held Martin Cunningham and Jack Power and Simon Dedalus, who sang beautifully and drank ruinously and had spent every advantage he ever had. They passed Boylan on the street and the others saluted him and Bloom looked at his fingernails. In the cemetery he stood a little apart. Nice soft tumble I'd like that. Then the gravediggers, and the rat sliding under the plinth, and his father in Ennis with the prussic acid and the note for him, and the small coffin of eleven days, and the two griefs lying alongside each other in him the way the dead lay alongside each other under the ground.
Afternoon. A young man from the Y.M.C.A. put a throwaway into his hand on the street — Elijah is coming. Bloom read it, folded it, dropped it over the parapet of O'Connell Bridge and watched the gulls come down after it. It rode on the tide, past the Customhouse, past the ferry slips, a crumpled skiff on the Liffey going down towards the sea, and it would still be riding an hour later while half the city crossed its path without looking.
He was hungry and could not stomach the Burton, men eating with their hats shoved back, swallowing gobfuls. Out. Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He had a glass of burgundy and a gorgonzola sandwich with mustard, and the wine ran warm through him and he thought of the day on Howth with Molly among the rhododendrons, seedcake warm and chewed from her mouth to his. Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
At two, in the National Library, Stephen was expounding Hamlet to the librarians and the literary men — that the ghost on the battlements is the man who wrote him, that the wound behind the play is a wife's betrayal and a brother's, that a man may father himself out of his own dishonour. Mulligan arrived and jeered. Nobody was convinced, and Stephen had not convinced himself. On the way out the two of them stepped aside to let a courteous, dark-clothed man pass between them at the door. Neither spoke to him. He was hunting an old copy of the Kilkenny People for an advertisement.
At three the city ran all at once. Father Conmee walking north with his breviary and his smooth watch. A onelegged sailor growling for coppers in Eccles Street and a bare arm flinging him a coin out of an upper window. Boylan at Thornton's choosing a basket of fruit and a bottle to be sent ahead, taking a red carnation for his teeth. Stephen's sisters at home boiling shirts in a kitchen with nothing in it. Dilly buying a French primer with a penny of the money their father would want back. Nineteen small windows opened one after another and shut, and the viceregal cavalcade rode through the last of them, saluted and unsaluted, from Parkgate down to the Mirus bazaar; and somewhere in the middle of it the crumpled throwaway went on down the river, past the Customhouse, past the timber yards, Elijah is coming, nobody's business, still afloat.
At four the Ormond bar was bronze and gold — two barmaids at the window watching the cavalcade go by — and the language of the room came apart into sound before it came together into sentences. Simon Dedalus sang M'appari out of Martha and the beauty of it filled the bar, and Bloom sat over his liver and bacon in the dining room next door listening, hearing a ruined man make that sound. Jingle. That was Boylan's car going up Bachelor's Walk to Eccles Street, and the clock over the bar going four, and Bloom sitting still. He wrote a reply to Martha Clifford under the name Henry and thought about the tuning fork the blind piano tuner had left behind, and, walking out past a whore in a doorway, he read Robert Emmet's last words in a print-shop window and timed his own wind to a passing tram.
At five he was outside Barney Kiernan's public house, waiting on Martin Cunningham. There was a life policy of Dignam's, signed over against a loan, and something might yet be got out of it for the widow and the children if the right man saw the right solicitor. Inside, a nationalist known only as the citizen sat with a mangy dog at his feet and held forth on Ireland and the Irish and the strangers in the house. The drink went round. Bloom did not buy one, and word had got about that he had backed Throwaway for the Gold Cup at twenty to one — he had not, he had never laid a penny on it, a man had simply misheard him that morning — and now he was a moneylender who had won on a horse and would not stand a round. They came at him about his religion and his nation and his manhood.
What is your nation, says the citizen.
Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
And then, standing there with the whole bar against him:
Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
Love, he said, when they asked him what he meant. I mean the opposite of hatred. And he told them their God had been a jew, that Christ was a jew like himself, and went out to the car with Cunningham, and the citizen came roaring after him and flung an empty biscuit tin down the street, which missed; and the telling of it swelled the tin into a comet crossing the sky and levelled the four courts to rubble, because nothing smaller would do for the size of the row.
At eight he was down on the strand at Sandymount again, tired, watching three girls minding babies on the rocks in the last of the light. One of them, Gerty MacDowell, sat apart and let herself be looked at, and leaned back further and further to follow the Mirus bazaar fireworks going up over the trees, and a Roman candle burst, and O! and O! and it was all over. Then she got up and walked away, and she was lame, and he had not seen it. Poor girl. He wrote three letters in the sand with a stick — I. AM. A. — and rubbed them out and let the tide have the rest. A bat went by. The cuckoo clock in the priest's house called out the hour to nobody.
At ten he went to the maternity hospital in Holles Street to ask after Mrs Purefoy, three days in labour, and found Stephen there drinking with the medical students in the common room, and the talk going from Latin to alliterative English to Bunyan to Pepys to Sterne to Dickens to gutter slang, generation by generation, while overhead a boy was born. The students decamped to a pub and then to Nighttown, and Bloom, sober and uneasy, went after Stephen the way a man goes after something he has been left to mind.
Nighttown came up out of the ground. Bloom on trial for indecency before witnesses real and invented, ladies in furs giving evidence against him; Bloom crowned Lord Mayor of Dublin and hailed by multitudes; Bloom made a woman, made a servant, made to grovel by Bella Cohen the brothel keeper, who was Bello now, riding him. And Stephen at the piano saw his mother rise up through the floor in her grave clothes with her breath of wetted ashes, begging him to repent, and he cried Non serviam! and swung the ashplant into the chandelier and ran out into the street, where Private Carr, who had heard something about the King that Stephen had not said, knocked him flat.
Bloom talked the soldiers away and the crowd away and stood over him in the dark. Then he saw, standing on the pavement, a boy of eleven in an Eton suit with a lamb in his pocket, reading a book from right to left, smiling, saying nothing. Rudy. The image lasted no longer than a held breath.
He got Stephen up and walked him to the cabman's shelter near Butt Bridge for coffee and a bun, and the talk between them ran on and on the way talk runs at one in the morning, tired, secondhand, full of a sailor's lies about Peru and knife-throwing, neither man saying any of the things that might have mattered. Then home. The key was in his other trousers. He climbed the area railings and dropped down and let himself in by the scullery and opened the front door from the inside, and made cocoa for the two of them and gave Stephen the better cup.
They talked about music and languages and Ireland and the Jews, and their ages were compared, and the water in the tap was traced back to the reservoir at Roundwood, and neither of them said the one thing offered and the one thing declined: stay. Stephen would not stay. They went out into the garden to piss under the stars, and what did they see, and the answer given: The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. The bells of Saint George's rang. Stephen walked off into the dark and was not seen again.
Bloom went in, barked his head on the walnut sideboard which had been moved during the day, put out the light, and got into bed. There were crumbs in the sheets and the imprint of a body not his own. He listed to himself every man who had ever wanted her and might have had her, and felt envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity. Then he kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, and lay down the wrong way about with his head at the foot of the bed, and told her a shortened account of his day, and slept.
And she lay awake in the dark and thought. Him and his four o'clock and the state of the sheets. The milkman, the doctor, the price of eggs, whether there was a God and if there was whether he was a man, the way men are and the way women have to be. Gibraltar and the sun on the wall and Lieutenant Mulvey kissing her under the Moorish wall when she was a girl. Her husband, whose faults she knew the whole length of, who explained things nobody had asked him to explain, who had cold feet in the bed and had brought her her breakfast this morning and was the only one who had ever known what a woman is.
And the thinking went round and came back to Howth, and the day among the rhododendrons and the sun on the sea, and the seedcake she gave him warm out of her own mouth, and she thought well as well him as another, and asked him with her eyes to ask again, and yes she put her arms around him yes and drew him down to her so he could feel her breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes she said yes I will Yes.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the Banned, Burned & Dangerous canon — works that frightened states and survived them.
Recommended Editions
Gabler Edition (Vintage Books) The authoritative scholarly text. Hans Walter Gabler's 1984–86 critical edition corrected some 5,000 errors accumulated across decades of reprinting — omitted words, punctuation, entire phrases — and remains the text all serious study of the novel now uses. Pair it with Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated for a complete reading experience. Buy on Amazon
Penguin Modern Classics
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