June 16th marks the hundred-and-second anniversary of Bloomsday, the date on which the events in James Joyce's "Ulysses" take place. There will be the customary commemorative celebrations surrounding Leopold Bloom's famous walk through Dublin: public readings and festivals in cities around the world, including Dublin, New York, Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Melbourne. In Budapest, two hundred or so academics will convene a Joyce symposium -- the twentieth to be held on Bloomsday.
There is a chance that Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, will go to Budapest. He lives in the French town of La Flotte, on the Île de Ré, off the Atlantic Coast. He loves the island, which is the Martha's Vineyard of France, but he has sometimes been willing to leave it when academics have invited him to attend Joyce commemorations and symposia. The scholars' courtesy is, in part, tactical: Stephen is Joyce's only living descendant, and since the mid-nineteen-eighties he has effectively controlled the Joyce estate. Scholars must ask his permission to quote sizable passages or to reproduce manuscript pages from those works of Joyce's that remain under copyright -- including "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" -- as well as from more than three thousand letters and several dozen unpublished manuscript fragments....
In 1988, Carol Shloss began investigating the story of Lucia Joyce. Shloss didn't see Lucia as schizophrenic; rather, she saw her as a frustrated genius. James Joyce might well have supported this notion, for he had never accepted that his daughter was mentally ill. "Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and has kindled a fire in her brain," he said in 1935....
In 1998, Congress passed the bill extending copyright protection to seventy years after a creator's death. James Joyce's unpublished writing was now under Stephen's control until 2012. Nevertheless, Shloss finished her manuscript and sold it to Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2000. Shortly afterward, Stephen sent her a letter, warning her that he would not give her permission to quote from any document that was under his control. When an attorney for the publisher wrote Stephen to say that the book would limit its quotations to seven thousand words, following the provisions of "fair use," Stephen responded that "this sounds like a bad joke." Copyright, he wrote, was meant "to protect the author's rights as well as those who inherited them, which is my case with respect to James Joyce." He noted, "You should be aware of the fact that over the past decade the James Joyce Estate's 'record,' in legal terms, is crystal clear and we have proven on a number of occasions that we are prepared to put our money where our mouth is." ...
A person with knowledge of the Joyce estate's finances said that it generates three to four hundred thousand dollars annually. Stephen therefore has money at his disposal for a protracted legal fight. He does not have a bad case, either: over the decades, judges have consistently confirmed the right of estates to exercise a firm hand. F. Scott Kieff, an intellectual-property specialist at Washington University in St. Louis, said, "It would be really bad if Shloss won. If all I need to do to get access to your property is to say that the restrictions that you are using are unfair -- and by unfair I only mean unpopular -- then anyone who is unpopular loses their property rights."
| • | The Injustice Collector
Is James Joyce’s grandson suppressing scholarship? The New Yorker, Monday, June 19, 2006 Byline: D.T. Max |
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