Jay Kuten: Book ban lift the right thing

In restoring the free publication right to the novel Into the River by Ted Dawes, the Film and Literature Review Board also restored a modicum of common sense to these shores.

Contrary to the obsessive counting of "C-words" by Bob McCoskrie or the delicate sensibility of its president, Don Mathiesen, who prefers "interim restriction" to the emotive "banning", the board found that the book's artistic merit outweighed picayune objections. The board thus confirmed that context and intention matter, that the whole of a work's content and artistic merit must be considered before it can be condemned.

Into the River is unquestionably a meritorious depiction of growing up in New Zealand as a young Maori lad. Its recent ban puts it in rather august company - Catcher in the Rye and its forerunner in setting the standard against banning, James Joyce's Ulysses.

Kevin Birmingham, an instructor of writing at Harvard has written an engaging story of the travails occasioned by publication of Ulysses, entitled The Most Dangerous Book.

It's a beautifully written and thoroughly researched telling of how the novel came to be.

Birmingham tells the history of its persecution and literal burning in England and the US, under a regime of repression of ideas and language executed by the moral bullies of self-appointed vice societies empowered by cowardly elected representatives to determine what is fit for ordinary people to see or read.

For many years Ulysses was banned as obscene in the US and the UK.

Its one original publication was undertaken by 26-year-old Sylvia Beach through her bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare & Co.

Those seeking to find out for themselves the source of complaint and controversy had to risk imprisonment if they chose to flout the law by hiding the undeclared book from the watchful eyes of customs officials of New York and London.

Eventual readers were rewarded with a dense, seemingly plotless narrative of a middle-aged Leopold Bloom making his way across Dublin while his wife, Molly, waits for an afternoon assignation with her lover, Blazes Boylan, the whole having reference to the ancient Homeric Odyssey.

Along the way was language rich in metaphor and allusion, language unfettered with conventional grammatical form, and a generous sprinkling of scatological language, lyrically descriptive of structure and function of human anatomy.

It's the latter which gave offence to those with sensibilities to become offended. Especially the last 38 pages of Ulysses, which represent the soliloquy of Molly Bloom as she awaits her lover. Joyce succeeded at an attempt to reproduce what an actual human thought, uncensored, unalloyed, freed of all restraint.

Ulysses - now a recognised masterpiece of the English language - was, in the general and legal opinion of the day, an obscene and banned book until 1933.

That was when Judge John M Woolsey of the US Federal District Court of New York found that Ulysses was not obscene. Before that date, courts generally, including the US Supreme Court, found that books could be banned if any part conformed to the British standard definition of obscenity - the Hicklin Rule.

Hicklin held that any material tending "to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" was obscene, regardless of its artistic or literary merit. Judge Woolsey specifically cited artistic merit as grounds for his decision and, importantly, held that judgment of the work's value needs take into account both the intent of the author and the work in its entirety.

The Woolsey decision vindicated not only Joyce but it opened the literary world to the freedom of modernism which Ulysses heralds. While today we tend to take for granted many of the free speech rights that freeing Ulysses ensured, the preservation of those freedoms in the right to dissent, artistically or politically, can only come about through willingness to fight any incursion, no matter how seemingly well-intentioned. Such attacks on freedom of thought are usually rationalised by the fatal words of the hypocritical moralist bullies - the preservation of public order and decency. Or national security.