ABSTRACT
This chapter will analyse the 1922 trial of The Little Review for the offence of publishing the Nausicaa episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Key to this trial is the fantasmatic investment in the figure of the Young-Girl. The Young-Girl is posited by the prosecution as a site of innocence who must be protected from the forms of jouissance embodied by Joyce’s text. This chapter will explore the legal context of 1920s America and the intersection of obscenity laws and anti-contraception laws and how this affected John Quinn’s defence of the publishers. Obscenity law is theorized as an act of love towards the Young-Girl, which, in turn, allows access to a specifically masculine form of enjoyment in the act of protection. The fantasy of the Young-Girl and the necessary forms of repression both psychic and political that it takes to maintain the fantasy are also analysed. Accused of the corruption of a fantasized Young-Girl were two women. This fact necessitated forms of repression and fetishistic disavowal that would allow for their femininity to be delegitimated in the name of the fantasy of the innocent Young-Girl. As such, the fantasy of the sexual relation is figured in this chapter as under threat from the literary text, the depiction of femininity within the text itself and the defendants themselves. Building on the work of Lacan and Zizek, this chapter argues that Quinn’s attempts to contest the trial on the fantasmatic ground of the prosecution were doomed to failure due to his inability to recognize the mass lIbidinal investment within of the figure of the Young-Girl.
