Joycean Secrets

Families of famous authors will do what they can to protect the ancestor's reputation, and the descendants of James Joyce are battling against an American scholar. Makes you want to dig out your copy of Ulysses and pore over the pages. Well, perhaps not.

Ms. Carol Shloss is a professor of English at Stanford University, so you know she's bright. And she's a Joycean scholar, an expert on all things James Joyce-ish. Recently, she's put out a new book that attempted to link Lucia Joyce, the man's mentally ill daughter, to his blockbuster novel Finnegan's Wake . According to Ms. Shloss, Lucia was the "muse", and the professor used Lucia's medical records, some archives that had information on Lucia's life, and some of James' papers to flesh out her theory.

As fate would have it, there was some criticism, some claims that the Shloss theory was a bit thin on the proof, and Ms. Shloss wanted to lend credence to her views through her website. That's where the problem started.

Joyce's estate, which would be represented by the grandson, Stephen James Joyce and trustee Sean Sweeney, has been accused of destroying papers and keeping a lid on copyrighted material because they won't let Carol use the stuff on her website. The estate says the electronic use of their documents and images infringes on their rights of ownership, while Carol is suing because she feels that the estate is stepping beyond the bounds of copyright law.

According to the Irish Times:

"On multiple occasions defendants have denied permission to quote from James Joyce's writings, or stated that they intended to deny such permission, in retaliation for or as punishment for matters unrelated to protection of copyright in James Joyce's writings," Prof Shloss said in the suit.

Now, the woman's been at it for fifteen years to produce this book, and her publisher went and sliced out some choice bits of supporting material, because the suits at Farrar, Straus & Giroux were afraid of getting sued. How's a professor to support a theory without material to back it up?

For whatever reason, the descendants of James Joyce don't want her using that very material that the lawyers excised. Carol Shloss is suing to be allowed to reproduce it on her website, to make her case with the literati.

I've never read Finnegan's Wake, so I don't know what sort of portrait it paints, or if it makes James Joyce look like a complete horse's ass in regard to his treatment of his mentally ill daughter. Oddly enough, though, it has given me the urge to pick up the book when next I'm at the local library. Until I read it, I'll reserve judgment, and feel sorry for the judge in the San Francisco court who may have to slog through James Joyce's verbiage before reaching a decision.

But there's no way in hell that I'm going to read Ulysses.