The ‘nameless shamelessness’ of Ulysses: Libel and the Law of Literature

Abstract

In a now famous 1922 photograph, James Joyce appears seated in Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore at 12 rue de l’Odéon on the bohemian left-bank of the Seine. He is nattily dressed, sporting a bow tie, a neatly trimmed goatee and slicked hair that gives him a distinctly bourgeois air of elegance and sophistication. The large black patch covering his left eye, however, warns us that something is amiss, as does the large poster on the wall behind him — a reproduction of the vibrantly pink Sporting Times of 1 April 1922 proclaiming The Scandal of “Ulysses”’ in large black letters.¹ In the foreground, Joyce and Beach appear to be studiously examining ledger books and order slips for the text, which is denounced in the paper behind them as the production of ‘a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the literature of the latrine’.² The poster hovering behind them becomes an advertisement, attempting to lure cultural tourists as well as the Parisian avant-garde into the store. There they could obtain a very expensive copy of the book that outraged American and British censors were seizing and burning at their borders. In buying a copy of Ulysses, early readers also bought a little bit of that titillating scandal that has only just begun to fade. This photograph of Joyce and Beach, in fact, has become so iconic precisely because we have never really stopped proclaiming the scandal of Ulysses in the classroom, in literary scholarship, and in the popular press.