United States V. One Book Called Ulysses - Significance

Significance

Together, the trial and appellate decisions established that a court applying obscenity standards should consider (1) the work as a whole, not just selected excerpts; (2) the effect on an average, rather than overly sensitive person; and (3) contemporary community standards. These principles, filtered through a long line of later cases, ultimately influenced the U.S. Supreme Court's case law on obscenity standards.

But the significance of the case goes beyond its immediate and ultimate precedential effect. While the Second Circuit's decision set the precedent, Judge Woosley's trial court opinion has been reproduced in all Random House printings of the novel, and is said to be the most widely distributed judicial opinion in history. The opinion has been recognized as a perceptive analysis of Joyce's work.

Richard Ellmann stated that Judge Woolsey’s decision "said much more than it had to", and another Joyce biographer and critic, Harry Levin, called the decision a "distinguished critical essay". The opinion discusses some of the same characteristics that Joyce scholars have discerned in the work.

Judge Woolsey mentioned the "emetic" effect of some of the passages alleged to be obscene; Stuart Gilbert, Joyce’s friend and author of an early critical study of the novel, stated that those passages "are, in fact, cathartic and calculated to allay rather than to excite the sexual instincts". And Harry Levin noted that the judge described the book’s "effect in terms of catharsis, the purge of the emotion through pity and terror" that is ascribed to tragedy, a theme that Levin found in prior works of Joyce.

The judge had also stated that portrayal of the coarser inner thoughts of the characters was necessary to show how their minds operate, an authorial judgment that treats those characters as not mere fictional creations, but as authentic personalities. Gilbert said that the "personages of Ulysses’ are not fictitious", but that "these people are as they must be; they act, we see, according to some lex eterna, an ineluctable condition of their very existence". Through these characters Joyce "achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life", or in the words of Judge Woolsey, a "true picture" of lower-middle class life, drawn by a "great artist in words" who has devised a "new literary method for the observation and description of mankind".