Soliloquy of Samuel Roth: A Paranormal Defense

An act of critical ventriloquism, this piece channels the spirit of Samuel Roth, the publisher who brought out serialized and bound editions of Ulysses in America during the late 1920s without clear authorization from Joyce. Roth here mounts a defense of his undertakings by referring to obscenity and copyright laws that left Joyce’s novel in the U.S. public domain; to Pound’s ambiguous role as Joyce’s stateside agent; to the double standard that permitted modernists famed for their work’s textual appropriation to vilify Roth for similar practices on the distribution end of the publishing chain; and to moments where Joyce, in his own writings, seemed to construct Roth as both enemy and alter ego. Roth proposes that we redraw our picture of modernism accordingly: “To the extent modernism is itself a shadow realm, I, Samuel Roth, may be its central figure—its negative patron, its anti-Pound.”