On New Year’s Eve, the Twitter feed of UbuWeb, an online archive of the avant garde, posted a link to an article in The Irish Times about the expiry of European copyright on the work of James Joyce. The link was accompanied by a curt message to Joyce’s grandson and sole living descendent: “Fuck you Stephen Joyce. EU copyright on James Joyce’s works ends at midnight.” While the language may have been unusually confrontational, the sentiment it expressed is widespread. The passage into public domain of Joyce’s major works has been talked up in certain quarters as though it were a bookish version of the destruction of the Death Star, with Stephen Joyce cast as a highbrow Darth Vader suddenly no longer in a position to breathe heavily down the necks of rebel Joyceans.
Stephen Joyce has, since the mid-nineteen-eighties, presided over one of the most combative and obstructive of all literary estates (rivaled perhaps only by Louis Zukofsky’s son Paul for the title of Literary World’s Most Hardball Executor). Scholars were charged extortionate permissions fees, and often bluntly refused the right to quote from his grandfather’s work at all. Those looking to produce adaptations of “Ulysses,” “Finnegans Wake,” “Dubliners,” or “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” or to stage public readings from those books, were treated with suspicion and hostility. In a 2006 piece in the magazine, D. T. Max examined the extreme fractiousness of the relationship between Stephen and the Joyceans. Max wrote of how, at a Bloomsday symposium in Venice in 1988, Stephen announced that he had “destroyed all the letters that his aunt [and James Joyce’s troubled daughter] Lucia had written to him and his wife” and that he had “done the same with postcards and a telegram sent to Lucia by Samuel Beckett, with whom she had pursued a relationship in the nineteen-twenties.”
In 2004, a planned series of public readings from “Ulysses” to mark the Bloomsday centenary in Dublin were cancelled, after he threatened the Irish government with litigative shock and awe. Stephen’s appetite for obstruction often seemed absurdly insatiable. As Max writes,
In Dublin, where I live, there is already a palpable sense of transition into a post-Stephen era. Last Friday I went along to Sweny’s, the pharmacy on Lincoln Place made famous by the scene in “Ulysses” where Bloom purchases a bar of soap with a “sweet lemony wax” in advance of a trip to the public baths. Sweny’s ceased trading as a pharmacy in 2009, and is now a museum and bookshop preserved in its turn-of-the-twentieth-century form. A public reading from “The Dead” was due to take place in the tiny shop, but an unexpectedly large crowd and the presence of a film crew forced the event around the corner to the bar of the Montclare Hotel (itself a watering hole much frequented by Joyce in his youth). There, copies of “Dubliners” were handed out to everyone who showed up. The gathering was composed mainly of actual Dubliners, and it was lovely to hear the story being read aloud in the voices of the city it celebrates, on the date on which it is set—January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany. The reading was a reminder of what “public domain” actually means: Joyce’s work now belongs to the people.
Meanwhile, a few minutes’ walk across the city, a play called “Gibraltar”—a selective adaptation of the parts of “Ulysses” that deal with the relationship between Leopold and Molly—was beginning its run at The New Theatre in Temple Bar. Later in the year, the theatre company PanPan will mount a production of “Exiles,” Joyce’s only play, which it plans to take on a world tour. RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, is planning to broadcast regular readings from “Ulysses,” “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Had Stephen Joyce not lately been divested of his powers of obstruction, none of these events would have stood a chance.
Given that professional Joyce scholars have been more directly affected than the general public by the estate’s vulgar displays of power, I wanted to get a sense of the reaction within the academy to the expiry of E.U. copyright. Sam Slote, one of the academics D. T. Max interviewed, now teaches English literature at Trinity College Dublin, and is a prominent figure in Joyce studies. When I spoke to him, he was careful to disabuse me of any impression that the estate might now be out of Joyce scholars’ lives for good. He pointed out that the status of the posthumous publications—the letter and manuscripts, for instance, as well as “Stephen Hero” (an unfinished autobiographical novel which Joyce radically revised as “A Portrait”) and “Giacomo Joyce” (a fragmentary, poetic account of Joyce’s relationship with a female student)—is still unclear.
Until that status is made explicit, he told me, there is going to be a mood of extreme caution among Joyce scholars. He and a number of others have signed a letter to Ireland’s Arts and Heritage Minister looking for clarification of the legal status. It is true, of course, that it’s no longer necessary to ask permission from James Joyce’s representative on earth in order to quote from the work he published in his lifetime, but a significant amount of scholarship draws heavily from the manuscripts and letters, so it is inaccurate to view the recent copyright expiry as marking the beginning of a new era in Joyce Studies.
Sean Latham, a Professor of English at the University of Tulsa who edits the journal James Joyce Quarterly, is of a similar opinion. It’s an important milestone, he told me, but doesn’t signal “any kind of massive renaissance in Joyce studies. We’ve been in a decades-long renaissance already.” The fact that the unpublished work—most significantly, Joyce’s letters—is now coming out of copyright in the U.S. will, however, have a major effect on biography. “I already know there are several projects that are planning to produce editions of the letters. We have three volumes of letters right now. Once these projects are complete, it’s going to increase to something like seven. These are letters that Stephen had adamantly refused to publish, so their publication is going to be really important for Joyce scholarship. We’ll have all kinds of stories that we can finally tell about Joyce and his life that we couldn’t tell before.” When I asked him whether graduate students are now less likely to be deterred from working on Joyce, he seemed doubtful. “I’m of two minds. While I’ve never known of a graduate student to actually abandon their interest in Joyce because of the estate, I know of projects that have had to change because of its intervention. But this is something that, if you want to do this with your life, and you believe passionately in it, you’re going to find a way to do it, even if its not exactly the way you intended.”
The near future will nonetheless see a swell in publication of Joyceana, with a number of new editions, anthologies, and translations lined up. Sean mentions that major new editions of “Finnegans Wake,” “Ulysses,” “A Portrait,” and “Dubliners” are soon to be published, all of them coming out of Europe (in the U.S., “Dubliners” and “A Portrait” have already been out of copyright for some time). A new Italian “Ulysses” is due later in the year, and Sam Slote is preparing a heavily annotated version of the novel for publication, a reprint of a text that came out in Joyce’s lifetime.
There will also inevitably be a fair number of tacky and opportunistic publications taking advantage of the new public domain status of the works. When I dropped into Sam’s office at Trinity, he showed me a particularly hideous collector’s set—a green leatherette flap-topped box housing several small and likewise leatherette volumes of Joyce’s complete published work. The “Ulysses” was in three volumes; in order to keep them equal in size, the publishers had blithely shunted the longest chapter, “Circe,” to a completely different location in the text. The boxed set also contained something called “Great Collection of Short Stories,” which turned out to be “Dubliners” with the stories rearranged, for no good reason, in alphabetical order. Unsurprisingly, Stephen Joyce suppressed this monstrosity, and it has since become something of a coveted rarity among Joyceans. “I know of at least one person,” said Sam, “who bought two of these, one of which he keeps in the wrapper on the assumption that it will go up in value. But we’re going to see a bunch of stuff like this now.”
Sean Latham agrees that there will now be somewhat less quality control on Joyce publications, but sees it as not such a terrible development, pointing out that no one is much concerned about there being too many editions of Dickens or Shakespeare. As with most advocates of Joyce’s work, he thinks anything that might bring it to a wider readership should be welcomed. When I made a joke about the possibility of a first-person-shooter video game of “Finnegans Wake” hitting the stores in 2012, he mentioned that he himself has had pipe dreams about a “Ulysses” game. “I have an undergraduate student,” he said, “and we fantasize about exactly how such a thing might be devised. I know there is a Jane Austen video game being designed, so a ‘Ulysses’ video game can’t be far behind.” If any game developers happen to be reading this, I hope they take note. A simulated ramble around Edwardian Dublin—a sort of Grand Theft Auto without the theft or the autos—could make for a powerfully immersive gaming experience. It would almost be worth doing just to see how Stephen Joyce might react.
Photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.