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Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Fervid Glop

In her discussion of a book suggesting that James Joyce or his son Giorgio might have engaged in incest with Lucia Joyce, the New York Times reviewer first cites some lines from the book:


"The place where she meets her father is not in consciousness but in some more primitive place before consciousness. They understand each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words and concepts but a language nonetheless. . . . In the room are flows, intensities, unexpressed longings."


She then says:

I quote so much because this sort of fervid glop is served up on many pages. It is a rhetoric that damages the book's credibility, making it read more like an exercise in wish fulfillment than a biography. I lost count of the incidences of "We can imagine" or "It is safe to imagine" or "We can speculate" or "We can picture her" or -- most revealingly -- "I like to imagine": "Among all the letters that were destroyed, there was one, I like to imagine, that expressed Lucia's gratitude to her father for persisting in his belief in her." And then again, perhaps there wasn't.


The reviewer concludes that the book, by Carol Shloss, currently suing Stephen Joyce for copyright misuse, “completely romanticized” Lucia. Another scholar, Luca Crispi, remarks that “Shloss’s project was filled with ‘innuendos’ and was ‘not worthy of its subject.’”



Shloss is sure people would find her book more credible if she’d been allowed to quote from stuff that Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, has kept her from. Stephen Joyce is an ass whose grandiosity has kept many thoughtful Joyceans from doing their work, and one can only welcome legal challenges to him. What a pity, though, that the first significant attack should come from a sensationalizing ideologue. As Daniel Green writes:

I finished this article [about Stephen Joyce, in the New Yorker] feeling some sympathy for his position. When he’s refusing to allow “scholarly” intrusion into the private lives of the Joyce family for gossipy biographies, he’s doing everyone a favor.


Green no doubt has in mind earlier betrayals:

[W]hen the estate registered its desire to keep Joyce’s erotic letters to Nora private, [Richard] Ellmann [Joyce biographer] maneuvered around it. His 1959 biography alluded to the correspondence; his 1966 volume of Joyce’s letters contained expurgated versions of the letters; and his 1975 “Selected Letters” contained every word. In 1909, Joyce had implored Nora to “be careful to keep my letters secret.” Stephen viewed the letters’ publication as a transgression against his family.




The New Yorker quotes a professor at Washington University who specializes in intellectual property: “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.”