SHAHID-BEHESHTI UNIVERSITY

Ulysses in The Little Re-

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From Appreciation to Re-appreciation
Phatémée Ramezanie
6/20/2020

Lecturer: Dr. Anani

Reading Journalistic Texts

Overview

The Little Review, as the subtitle of its first issue released on March 1914

suggested, was an American magazine of literature Drama Music Art (Fig.1).

Pioneering the vanguard, it was founded by Margaret Caroline Anderson, a

former editor of The Dial, another avant-garde literary magazine, and later

co-edited by her lover Jane Heap, along with the help of Ezra Pound, who

worked as foreign editor for both The Dial and The Little Review. Over the

course of its thirty-year run, The Little Review published a variety of art and

literary material including poetry, short stories, drama, music, and criticism.

The magazine internationalized art through publishing artworks by Ameri-

can, British, French, German, and Irish contributors. It created a culture of

literary and art celebrity among whom were, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot,

Emma Goldman, James Joyce, Jean de Bosschere, Marcel Duchamp, Francis

Picabia, and Pablo Picasso.

In an editorial article in August 1916 under the title “A Real Magazine”

Anderson, being despondent by the works published in The Little Review said

that: “Well—I wanted Art in The Little Review. There has been a little of it,

just a very little. . . . It is tragic. I tell you” (1). It was in this article that she

declared for the first time her revulsion toward compromise and insisted that

they “shall have Art in this magazine or [they] shall stop publishing it” (2).

subsequently, from its June first 1917 issue, there appeared a change in The

Little review’s cover page and subtitle: A Magazine of Arts; it was from this
issue that the magazine’s famous motto “Making No Compromise With The

Public Taste” (Fig.2) scintillated on the cover page until the editors were

forced to remove it after the obscenity trial of James Joyce’s Ulysses, having

been ordered by the court to publish material which were less inflammatory.

After the trial, Anderson, who was disillusioned by the dim perspective of art

in the United States, traveled to Europe and left the editorship of the maga-

zine to Heap until its publication was terminated in 1929.

Fig. 1. First issue cover page from:

Anderson, Margaret. The Little
Review , 1 Mar. 1914.

Fig. 2. The appearance of the

magazine’s motto Making No
Compromise With The Public Taste
on the cover page from: Anderson,
Margaret. The Little Review , 1 June.
1914.
Focus of Study

The twentieth century saw the apotheosis of modernism with the two par-

agons of the movement, James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste

Land, both under monitoring of Ezra Pound. The impact of these two master-

pieces on modern and post-modern art, and the role they played in redefining

art and reality—and not realism— is nearly impossible to be overlooked. But

here, I am at a loss to say why the role of the media through which they were

made able to go under the scrutiny of critical observation has been unappre-

ciated to a great extent; after all, it is the media which acts as an outlet for the

distribution of art and criticism—as another form of art—and it was Margaret

Anderson who defined and fostered the culture of appreciation of art through

criticism in the announcement of The Little Review’s first issue, which was a

manifestation of the magazine’s core value.

Appreciation has its outlet in art; and art (to complete its circle and the figure) has its

source in—owes its whole current—to appreciation. That is, the tides of art would cease

to ebb and flow were it not for the sun and moon of appreciation.

This function of sun and moon is known as criticism. But criticism as an art has not

flourished in this country, we live too swiftly to have time to be appreciative; and criti-

cism after all, has only one synonym: appreciation. In a world whose high splendor is

our chief preoccupation the quality of our appreciation is the important thing. (1, em-

phasis added)

Focusing on the publication, and the obscenity trial for the publication of

James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the present essay, I have attempted to render an in-
sight into the legacy of The Little Review, which was the Advent of the free

discussion and appreciation of art in the United States.

Fig. 3. First appearance of Ulysses in

The Little Review from: Anderson,
Margaret. The Little Review , 1 Mar.
1918.

In the March first 1918 issue there appeared on the

cover page the word “Ulysses” and under it, the name of

its famous Irish author, James Joyce. The iconoclasm, with which the novel

is marked, manifests itself from the novel’s title, since it recounts the ordi-

nary life of the down-to-earth Leopold Bloom who is everything Homer’s

ancient Greek hero Ulysses is not; the first line of the first episode “Telema-

chus” is: "Non serviam" Latin for “I will not serve” which, ipso facto, Luci-

fer’s disobedience to God in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. “As early as the

fourth episode, ‘Calypso’, the reader goes to the toilet with Leopold Bloom,

and [his] scrupulously detailed and whiffy deviation” (Bradshaw, Ulysses

and obscenity). All the episodes are full of neologisms which at first seemed

to the reader’s eye as punctuation errors on the part of the magazine, but then

it was revealed in a letter written by James Joyce to Ezra Pound on February

11 1918, that the author himself had urged that “The spelling and mechanical

construction used by me are to be followed by the printer even when words

are misspelled and the grammar is at fault” (Joyce 395).

 The Little Review continued the serialization of Ulysses until, after the

publication the “Naussikaa” episode in the March 1920 issue, the editors of

the magazine, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were summoned to the

court for publishing obscene material. The charges were against this episode

in which “Leopold Bloom masturbates while admiring Gerty MacDowell at

the beach” (Nadel 133). The editors were found guilty and paid a $100 fine.

They were then, ordered to bring the publication of Ulysses in The Little re-

view to an end.

After the trial, in the September-December 1922 issue of the magazine,

Jane Heap raised her demur against trying art in a court of law since art is no

physical matter and “laws have been made to preserve physical order”(Heap

5), whereas “Art is the supreme order”(5). It is then ironical to “bring law

against order” (5). She defended Ulysses by contending that the novel is the

simple portrayal of an ordinary man’s thoughts and one need not go far to

observe such thoughts since they are driven by an urge insufflated in every

human being, which is at once simple and unpreventable.

To a mind somewhat used to life Mr. Joyce’s chapter seems to be a rec-

ord of the simplest, most unpreventable, most unfocused sex thoughts

possible in a rightly-constructed, unashamed human being. Mr. Joyce is

not teaching early Egyptian perversions, nor inventing new ones. Girls

lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut

sleeveless gowns, breathless bathing suites; men think thoughts and

have emotions about these things everywhere….. and no one is corrupt-

ed. Can merely reading about the thoughts he thinks corrupt a man when

his thoughts do not? (Heap 6)

 In the following year, an article was published in the January-March issue under the

title “Ulysses in Court” in which Anderson, through using a deriding tone, censured the

ignorance of the judges who saw the testimony of literary experts to help clearing Ulys-

ses of obscenity charges unnecessary. “They [didn’t] care who James Joyce is, or

whether he has written the finest books in the world; their only function is to decide

whether certain passages of Ulysses (incidentally the only passage they can understand)

violate the statute” (Anderson 23).

After the trial the magazine continued its publication in irregular intervals

until Heap brought an end to its publication in 1929. Ulysses was later cleared

of obscenity charges in the United States in 1950 by a judicial decision; “a wa-

tershed event that accorded literary criticism a prominent role in obscenity cas-

es” (Hassett, The Trials of Ulysses). It is no doubt that Anderson and Heap’s

insistence on the free discussion of art in their articles and producing literary

experts in the obscenity trial, played a central role in the development of this

decision. It shall not, after all, be neglected that had it not been for the medium

which serialized Ulysses and the support of its editors to vindicate the novel of

obscenity charges, the decision to try literary works in the presence of literary

critics might not have developed at all.

Conclusion

My attempt in the present essay has been to render an elucidation of the role

The Little Review played in the development of modern and experimental art

and, criticism and in redefining art and literary discussions, through its thirty-
year run in the early decades of the twentieth century, in the United States.

When approaching the study of art and literary works it is of primal importance

to study the media through which the works were made available to public and

critical view, since it renders significant insights to the value of the artwork and

the critical notions about it.

Works Cited

Anderson, Margaret Caroline. “Announcement.” The Little Review, by Margaret Caroline

Anderson, vol. 1, 1914, pp. 1–65.

Anderson, Margaret Caroline. “A Real Magazine.” The Little Review, edited by Margaret
Caroline Anderson, vol. 3, ser. 5, 1916, pp. 1–27. 5.

Anderson, Margaret Caroline. “Ulysses in Court.” The Little Review, edited by Margaret Car-
oline Anderson, vol. 7, ser. 3, 1921, pp. 1–59. 3.

Bradshaw, David. “Ulysses and Obscenity.” British Library, 25 May 2016.

Joyce, James, and Philip R. Yanella. “James Joyce to ‘The Little Review’: Ten Letters.”
Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 1, no. 3, Mar. 1971, pp. 393–398.

Hasset, Joseph M. “The Trials of Ulysses.” Dublin Review Of Books, 2012.

Heap, Jane. “Art and Law.” The Little Review, edited by Margaret Caroline Anderson, vol. 7,
ser. 4, 1920. 4.

Bibliography

Anderson, Margaret Caroline. “Announcement.” The Little Review, by Margaret Caroline

Anderson, vol. 1, 1914, pp. 1–65.

Anderson, Margaret Caroline. “A Real Magazine.” The Little Review, edited by Margaret
Caroline Anderson, vol. 3, ser. 5, 1916, pp. 1–27. 5.
Bradshaw, David. “Ulysses and Obscenity.” British Library, 25 May 2016.

Joyce, James, and Philip R. Yanella. “James Joyce to ‘The Little Review’: Ten Letters.”
Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 1, no. 3, Mar. 1971, pp. 393–398.

Hasset, Joseph M. “The Trials of Ulysses.” Dublin Review Of Books, 2012.

Anderson, Margaret C., et al. The Little Review. Published by Margaret Anderson, 1918.

Anderson, Margaret C., and Ezra Pound. The Little Review. Published by Margaret Anderson,
1918.

Eliot, T. S., and Ezra Pound. The Little Review: a Magazine of the Arts ; Henry James Num-
ber. Margaret Anderson Publisher, 1918.

Sigler, Amanda. “Archival Errors: Ulysses In The Little Review.” Errears and Erroriboose,
2011, pp. 73–87.

Chace, William M. “The Little Review ‘Ulysses.’” Common Knowledge, vol. 22, no. 2, 2016,
pp. 314–315., doi:10.1215/0961754x-3487908.

Joyce, James. Ulysses / James Joyce. Penguin, 1968.

Hannah, Mathew. “Photoplay, Literary Celebrity, and The Little Review.” The Journal of
Modern Periodical Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2015, pp. 222–243.

Anderson, Margaret Caroline. “Ulysses in Court.” The Little Review, edited by Margaret Car-
oline Anderson, vol. 7, ser. 3, 1921, pp. 1–59. 3.

Heap, Jane. “Art and Law.” The Little Review, edited by Margaret Caroline Anderson, vol. 7,
ser. 4, 1920. 4.