{"id":6679,"date":"2007-06-06T13:56:41","date_gmt":"2007-06-06T17:56:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6679"},"modified":"2022-10-12T22:14:24","modified_gmt":"2022-10-13T02:14:24","slug":"joyce-geekery-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6679","title":{"rendered":"Joyce Geekery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who follows Joyce knows the copyright issues (byzantine, tangled, at times psychotic) – and also it is well-known the issues that pretty much every Joycean scholar has had with Joyce’s grandson who holds the estate. There was a great article in The New Yorker last year <\/a>which details Stephen Joyce’s aggressive defense of the works of his grandfather (sometimes justified, other times completely insane, Type A bullshit that makes life difficult for Joyce lovers and scholars) – so aggressive that he’s made enemies all over the place. It’s almost like Joyce scholars need support groups and therapy sessions, to swap war stories about dealing with this dude.<\/p>\n

This is a similar situation (until very recently) to any biographer who wanted to write about Sylvia Plath. Ted Hughes held the estate to her works – and that estate was watched over zealously (and, some would say, pathologically) by Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister – who never liked Sylvia. It was an antagonistic estate … and yet it took on personal<\/i> overtones that drove Plath scholars mad. They didn’t just want to control the use of Plath’s words – they wanted to control the interpretation of Plath that was allowed (examples of this are legion.) Biographers had to submit manuscripts to the Hughes’ (which is par for the course) – but when the edits would come back, that’s when things would start to get really complicated. It was not about “please don’t quote that poem in its entirety” … it was “please do not ever suggest that Plath was bisexual – remove that paragraph”. (Actual example.) There are many interesting issues to discuss here – what is a biography? What is objectivity?<\/p>\n

Janet Malcolm, journalist (love her) – wrote an entire book (The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes<\/a>\"\"<\/i>) about the difficulty of writing a book about Sylvia Plath – due to, first of all, the myths around her, and the fact that many of the folks who knew her when she was alive are emotionally invested in making sure that THEIR version of the myth (she was a bitch! She was a victim! She was a lover! She was a fighter! – whatever) is the one that sticks. So there’s THAT. But Olwyn Hughes’ managing of the Plath estate was the other difficult aspect. She was a Sphinx. A Cerberus. A fire-breathing dragon standing in front of the cave of Plathian goodies. Choose your metaphor. She was revered and feared – and any book that was published had to go through Olwyn – and she had to okay it. (Janet Malcolm’s book goes into all of this – each writer’s experience, the specific edits Olwyn asked to make – the boundaries set) … In a way, the Hughes estate made it nearly impossible to write a biography with a point of view. All biographies have a point of view. (This is another of Janet Malcolm’s pet themes, if you look at the rest of her books. To pretend that you are “objective” means you’re a liar and you’re probably not a good writer. Be up front about your point of view, be up front about your ambivalence – do not misrepresent yourself – that was her main issue with Joe McGinniss, which touched off a war of words in op-ed columns throughout the US – and became the subject of another one of Malcolm’s books: The Journalist and the Murderer<\/a>\"\"<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Back to Joyce. Stephen Joyce is the bogeyman to Joyce scholars – and things have come to a head yet again over the recent book about Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s mentally ill daughter. (I wrote – perhaps I should say bitched – about that book here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The LA Times has a full rundown of what is going on now<\/a>, and all of the complicated copyright issues. Stephen Joyce often claims ownership over things the Joyce estate actually does not<\/i> own.<\/p>\n

From the New Yorker article:<\/p>\n

In 2004, the centenary of Bloomsday, Stephen threatened the Irish government with a lawsuit if it staged any Bloomsday readings; the readings were cancelled. He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds play \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdExiles,\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorized a portion of \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdFinnegans Wake\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely \u00ef\u00bf\u00bdalready infringed\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd on the estate\u00ef\u00bf\u00bds copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Way to totally antagonize the fanatics about your grandfather’s work, bro. As a committed Bloomsday participant through the years (just one example<\/a>), I can only think:<\/p>\n

What the HELL is your problem? Going after Bloomsday?<\/p>\n

I’m surprised he hasn’t come after me, seeing as I go insane <\/a>every June 16, and am looking forward to this year – especially since it’s a Saturday so I can spend the entire DAY in the company of drunk Joyceans, all of us shouting “YES I SAID YES I WILL YES<\/a>” through the summery air. He would prefer to STOP that gathering and to stop us from shouting out lines from his grandfather;s novel that we love<\/i> and that we have memorized<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And the fight goes on. The fight over James Joyce goes on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who follows Joyce knows the copyright issues (byzantine, tangled, at times psychotic) – and also it is well-known the issues that pretty much every Joycean scholar has had with Joyce’s grandson who holds the estate. There was a great … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[28],"tags":[35,88,607],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6679"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6679"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180836,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6679\/revisions\/180836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}