The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [47]
Even to quote these phrases indicates how far we have come in accepting the aphrodisiac (and the emetic) as a commonplace effect of reading modern literature—and also how far we have come since the time when such felicitous phrases, generated on behalf of a book the judge had read and admired, would give evidence of an admirable literary style. By contrast, when the U.S. Court of Appeals reviewed Judge Woolsey’s decision, they decided in advance, since they wanted to avoid publicity, that the opinion should, if possible, contain “not a single quotable line.”19 In a foreword to the Random House edition of Ulysses, Morris Ernst, the cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that Judge Woolsey had “written an opinion which raises him to the level of former Supreme Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as a master of juridical prose.” But we might also want to add that he had mastered the art of the literary review and of literary criticism.
In writing “Ulysses” [Judge Woolsey’s opinion declared], Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre … 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 unconscious … What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema screen … Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique is absurd.20
Woolsey found Ulysses “an amazing tour de force,” describing it as “brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns.” Joyce, he thought, was “a real artist.”21 The question of law on which the judge was asked to rule was whether the book was written with pornographic “intent”—“that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.” This he emphatically denied. Ulysses was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.”22 It was not obscene under the law.
By comparison, we might note that one of the judges in an earlier 1920 New York court case about the publication of the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses refused to allow passages to be read aloud in the courtroom because there were women present—including, as it happened, some of the editors of the book.23
The standard in the Ulysses case in the U.S. in 1933 was whether or not the work was written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity. In the U.K. in 1960, the decision about Lady Chatterley’s Lover rested, according to the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, on whether the work in question had literary merit. A group of recognized literary experts—Helen Gardner, E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, and Raymond Williams—were called to testify. The chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked the members of the jury whether it was the kind of book “you would even wish your wife or servants to read.”
Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?24
This class breakdown doubtless contributed to the ridicule of