Showing papers in "James Joyce Quarterly in 2000"

Sifting through censorship: the British Home Office "Ulysses" files (1922-1936)

Abstract: In May 1998, the British press had special coverage of the "Open Government" initiative taken by the Labour Government to allow access to the secret files of the Home Office (H.O.) recording the circumstances of and reasons for banning Ulysses in the United Kingdom. This decision was quite welcome, since, under the British one-hundred-year rule, these state files were due to be kept secret until 2034. Writers in magazines and daily newspapers expressed amazement on learning how and why the decision to ban Ulysses was made and maintained in Britain. Among other things, reporters emphasized the fact that only forty of the seven-hundred-and-thirty two pages of the novel were read by the Director of Public Prosecution (D. of P. P.) responsible for the decision; these pages cor respond to the eight unpunctuated sentences of the monologue of Molly Bloom in the last episode of the novel.1 The classified Ulysses files at the H.O. in the U.K. include all the documents and official materials related to the case of Ulysses in the U.K. between 1922 and 1936. During these fourteen years, the book was banned as obscene in the U.K., and a decision was made to seize any copy imported into the country. One of the files at the end of the collection of these documents indicates at the top in printed capital letters: "Unlikely to go to P.R.O [the U.K. Public Record Office in London]." Fortunately, in spite of this notation, the files are now in the P.R.O., where they are classified with the reference number 144/20071/57006. In addition, most of the documents have a specific identification code assigned by the H.O.: a fraction with the number 186.428 as numerator to indicate the main subject, the Ulysses file, and another number as denominator for each particular topic dealt with by that document. The complete files on Ulysses, as they appear in the P.R.O. in London, are comprised of the following documents:

Arguing about law: cyclopean language

Abstract: "Cyclops," the premises of Barney Kiernan, is close to where Dublin's legal business is conducted and to the area of the courts, and people working for those courts were known to frequent the actual pub in its time. A plaque in the yard of the Green Street Courthouse (Li 12.64-65, 271) until fairly recently told visitors of executions that had taken place at that location, so there is a good local reason for having the "Cyclops" execution scene staged nearby for an "assembled multi tude," which, however, could hardly have been larger than a few hundred people (Li 12.533). The sheriff's office is not too distant. The cast of the episode is comprised of a lawyer, a clerk from the subsher iff's office, and at least one assiduous litigant, Denis Breen, who is sent around Dublin in pursuit of legal advice for a ridiculous libel suit; it is ironic that the people who send him on his rounds "for a lark" are law officers themselves (U 12.269). Practically everybody freely pronounces judgments to pass the time of day. Bloom, once involved with the Royal Hungarian Lottery, seems to have escaped trouble, "only he had a friend in court" (U 12.776), but at the moment he is enlisted on behalf of the Dignam family, who are in legal diffi culty about their insurance, and Bloom's supposed experience and cunning are assumed to be an asset. Cases, actions, suits are being dis cussed freely. Lawsuits are mentioned, playacted, interpolated, paro died. Exaggerated legal metaphors abound; to throw a fellow like Bloom in the "bloody sea," for instance, would be "justifiable homi cide" (U 12.1662). The main consciousness, the only narrator in Ulysses who is a nar rator, has a job, likely to be a temporary one, as a collector of doubt ful debts; he is working for the law, if not very energetically, in which capacity he has just invoked the help of a former officer, "old Troy of the D. M. P.," which, for the non-Irish, has to be glossed as "Dublin Metropolitan Police" (Li 12.01). For all his contempt of practically everything within his range, the narrator maintains an amazingly servile respect for authority. The episode begins and ends with legal

The corruption of Gerty Macdowell

Abstract: In February 1918, Ezra Pound sent a typescript of the first three episodes of Ulysses to Margaret Anderson, coeditor of the Little Review, in New York City. Anderson's response, as she recalled twelve years later, was enthusiastic: "This is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have," she said to her friend and collaborator, Jane Heap; "We'll print it if it's the last effort of our lives."1 Serialization began in the Spring 1918 issue and ran irregularly for two years, coming to an abrupt halt with the Fall (September-December) issue of 1920. In all, the Little Review published thirteen episodes of Ulysses and part of the fourteenth, a little more than half the novel. The difficulties of the final installment, "Episode XIV" ("Oxen of the Sun"), might well have stopped readers in their tracks. But the death blow had already been dealt by "Episode XIII" ("Nausicaa"), which the Little Review published in its April, May-June, and July August issues. On 4 October 1920, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice charged Anderson, Heap, and the Washington Square Bookshop (above which the two women lived) with distribut ing "obscenity." According to Anderson, the Society had dispatched a young woman?"somebody's daughter," Anderson sniffed?to the Bookshop for the Little Review's July-August issue, containing the last third of "Nausicaa" (219). WTien it was sold to her, the police moved in, because "somebody's daughter" was just the sort of person whom obscenity laws had been written to protect. At that time, American obscenity laws derived from Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn's ruling in an 1868 English case, Regina v. Hicklin; reversing a lower-court decision on an anti-Catholic screed called The Confessional Unmasked, Cockburn propounded a "test" that would guide censors for generations: "I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."2 The Little Review did not "fall" into the hands of the young woman who had been dispatched to buy it, nor, I suspect, was she allowed to read the supposedly corrupting matter that it con tained. But because she was a young woman, her mind was by defin

Privacy and piracy in the Joyce trade: James Joyce and "Le droit moral"

Abstract: According to Stephen James Joyce, the conduct of certain Joyce scholars has, in recent years, violated some of "Western civi lization's basic, fundamental values . . . human decency and what the French call le droit moral"?the moral right.1 In the same newspaper article, Stephen Joyce set himself up as the champion of the civilization that these scholars are supposedly destroying: "I will continue to defend the Joyce family interests and privacy to the best of [my] ability. We will devote the time, effort and means necessary to carry out this task without flagging and whatever the difficulties may be" (G2). Since these challenges to Joyce scholarship have been made in the name of a judicial concept that is foreign to our ways of think ing about intellectual life in its relationship to the law, it is important that we understand what we face when this concept is invoked, and I am going to take as my starting point Joyce's own understanding of the concept of le droit moral as it was expressed in a short speech given before the XV Congress of the International P.E.N. Club in Paris in 1937. What we know of Joyce's own response to the occasion of his speech?one of the few formal addresses he ever delivered in his life?comes to us primarily through a letter that Nancy Cunard wrote to Richard Ellmann in 1957, almost twenty years after the fact (JJII 704, 809). As Ellmann tells the story, Joyce delivered his talk and remained exceedingly resentful of its reception: "The speech was respectfully heard, the chairman politely ordered Joyce's remarks included in the minutes, but there, to Joyce's annoyance, the matter was dropped" (JJII 703-04). Cunard, who had not been at the Congress, was unwittingly pulled into the fray when, several days after, she sent Joyce a questionnaire concerning his views on the Spanish Civil War:

James Joyce, mastersinger: echoes and resonances of Richard Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" in "A portrait of the artist as a young man"

Abstract: The word "Mastersinger" must have greatly appealed to Joyce both literally as well as figuratively. He certainly considered himself a masterly singer, and was confident enough, in 1909, to sing in a Trieste concert performance of the famous quintet from Die Meistersinger;2 and he must have appreciated the implication of being a masterly poet that the word additionally carried. After all, Joyce was reported saying in 1919 about the "Sirens" episode that a "quintet occurs in it, too, as in the Meistersinger, my favorite Wagner opera."3 As Timothy Martin has convincingly shown in his ground breaking studies of Joyce's relationship with Richard Wagner, Joyce's preference for Meistersinger is borne out by all his explicit comments except one and appears to have been constant throughout his career.4 Still, allusions to Meistersinger in Joyce's works, such as the alleged quintet structure in "Sirens," tend to be "elusive," as Martin notes, and direct references are "relatively infrequent" ("Wagnerism" 108). This is all the more surprising since, given Joyce's interest in Wagner's Siegfried as a model for his "artist-hero" Stephen Dedalus ("Wagnerism" 113-16), one would assume that Walther von Stolzing, the young artist character in Meistersinger, would have served Joyce's purposes at least as well, if not better, particularly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In several important respects, Walther's position in sixteenth-cen tury Nuremberg is comparable to Stephen's in early twentieth-centu ry Dublin. As an artist, Walther represents the type of the young poet ic genius who challenges the rigid conventions of established art and

The English players incident: what really happened?

Abstract: Joyce has been accused of being litigious, a word that is always a criticism implying either ruthlessness or bad faith. Richard Ellmann, for example, reaches the conclusion that Joyce was over ly involved in legalities based largely on the English Players' litiga tion (JJII 426-28, 440-41, 452, 465-66). I will examine these cases both as a judge and a lawyer to see if Ellmann's opinion is warranted. Were the claims that Joyce made concerning Henry Carr and others in the controversy valid? I reach the conclusion that the cases were valid and that the charges of litigiousness are unwarranted based on the English Players inci dent. Along the way, I examine a conflict between the official records and eyewitness accounts of a libel trial. In this, I will introduce a new source on what happened: a description of the trial by Joyce's friend Claude Sykes.1 Finally, I will briefly look at Joyce's claim of a "hidden hand" in terms of the power of the English government and describe how such a belief prevented the judgment in the second case from ending the conflict and how Joyce went on to write an end to the case in the "Circe" episode in Ulysses. I begin by recounting the story. Joyce and Sykes formed a theatri cal company in Zurich in 1918 called the English Players. Sykes was Joyce's friend and his typist, and by the time the company was formed, he had typed the first three parts of Ulysses. Joyce was thirty six years old and was working on Ulysses with "Circe" yet to be writ ten. Interested always in theater, he felt an English theatrical group would do well in Zurich. The first play performed by the new enter prise was The Importance of Being Earnest. Cast from persons then res ident in Zurich, it included amateur and professional actors, the ama teurs to work for free (or nominal amounts) and the professionals to be paid from the income generated by the company Joyce was the business manager and Sykes the artistic manager. Sykes had difficul ty casting the role of Algernon Moncrieff, the lead in the play, because

The mime against "Fecondité": Joyce encodes the "Code de la famille"

Abstract: The observations of Emile Zola's fictional Doctor Boutan notwithstanding, legislative measures to prevent depopulation have been taken in France and indeed throughout the world since the relationship between copulation and population has been understood. Shortly after James Joyce returned to Paris in 1920, how ever, the urge to police conjugal behavior became acute: "the French Legislative Assembly, a body of men who had undoubtedly fathered fewer legitimate children than any other contemporary group of politicians, passed an act which endowed France with the most oppressive laws in Europe against contraception and abortion."1 In July of 1939, two months after Finnegans Wake was published, between the German occupation of Prague and the invasion of Poland, and five months before the Joyces left Paris for good, that same assembly of men passed the Code de la Famille, "a package of reforms introduced by decree-law which . . . improved the provision of family allowances, modified adoption laws, and tightened anti abortion laws."2 The new Code retained the strictures against contra ception. Between these two acts of populationist legislation in France, Ireland's 1929 Censorship of Publications Act criminalized the print ing, publishing, selling, or distribution of "any book or periodical which advocated or might be supposed to advocate the unnatural prevention of conception."3 Thus, the years of Joyce's residence in Paris were bounded by pronatalist legislation that would have im pressed him all the more because of its echoes in his home country. I have argued elsewhere that the relentless debates about population